Stormcaller

by Chris Wraight

  The gunship slewed violently, tilting away and losing speed. A warning klaxon sounded, and tiny stress-fractures spidered out across the armourglass viewscreens.

  ‘Hull breach below,’ reported Morven calmly. ‘Losing pressurisation.’

  ‘Clamp it down,’ snapped Jorundur, fighting with the controls. Vuokho locked into a steep plummet, driven by blazing engines that no longer responded. The trajectory took them straight at the vast face of the nearest descender vane.

  ‘Control system’s gone,’ growled Terrag, reaching up for a lever and yanking hard. ‘Switching to backup.’ As he pulled down, a hard clank rang out from the gunship’s innards, followed by an explosion of sparks across the cockpit’s right-hand side.

  It did the trick, though – Vuokho immediately responded, pulling high and gaining power again. Projectile rounds followed them, peppering the dorsal armour and making the whole craft spin and buck.

  ‘Leak plugged,’ said Morven. ‘For now.’

  ‘Good,’ snarled Jorundur, still wrestling to keep the racing gunship from tearing itself apart. ‘Keep it that way.’

  A shimmering criss-cross of las-fire streaked out into the void ahead of them. Jorundur hauled on the control columns, pushing Vuokho’s nose up and out of their path, but it wasn’t quick enough. A brace of beams impacted, burning through the multi-layered hull-plates and spearing through the far side. Vuokho reeled again, its lower crew bay carved open and venting freely.

  ‘We can’t stay in this, lord,’ said Beor, quietly.

  Jorundur rounded on him, ready to tell him what to do with his advice, but the words died in his throat. More dire metrics ran across the consoles, heralding a fresh barrage from the hulk. The void was filled with energies, snarling and spearing across the dark in a dense web of destruction.

  ‘You’re right,’ Jorundur snarled, checking Heimdall’s position and calculating whether they could race back to its shadow before destruction overcame them.

  Beor twisted in his seat, as if wanting to be sure. ‘Did you–’

  ‘You heard me,’ Jorundur said, pulling Vuokho’s trajectory away from the incoming storm and back out towards the deep void. ‘We’re getting out of this.’ He glanced back at the retreating hulk-face, feeling the sting of failure.

  ‘You left it too late, brother,’ he breathed, watching the immense slab-side of twisted metal flash and swing in the light of macrocannon discharge. ‘You’re on your own now.’

  ‘Tell me of your childhood.’

  Baldr struggled not to respond. He willed his mouth not to move, to remain clenched shut in defiant silence, but, just as before, the muscles relaxed before he knew it.

  The Mycelite’s power was in his voice. It was soft, almost mournful. The ruined Traitor Marine looked as fragile as a hollowed-out tree-bole, but Baldr could feel his strength burning away, filling the air, heating it and making it thicken.

  Njal could have resisted that voice. Gunnlaugur, too, perhaps. Any of his brothers with greater strength of will would have remembered their vows and stayed quiet.

  Why could he not?

  ‘What do you want to know?’ Baldr replied.

  ‘Your life on Fenris. I have heard many stories of your wild planet. Who in the galaxy has not? I am genuinely curious.’

  The words spilled from Baldr’s lips like blood from a wound. Once he started talking, it became harder and harder to stop.

  ‘I was born on the ice,’ he said. ‘I only remember the later days, just before they took me.’

  ‘They watch your combat, taking the valiant. Is that so? That is what I heard.’

  ‘The Wolf Priests do. They draw the dead from the red ice. They re-knit their bodies and remake their flesh.’

  ‘And you were among the dead.’

  ‘A long time ago.’

  ‘They take you into the Mountain,’ said the Mycelite, his eyes rapt with fascination. As he sat, hunched like some vast toad in his squalor, dull rolls of noise rose up from the depths. Baldr knew those noises meant something, but it had become hard to even conceive of a world outside that dark chamber. ‘They test you there, yes? They make you pure before they give you an axe.’

  Baldr remembered what Njal had told him, back on Heimdall.

  We were looking for a sign – any sign – of aptitude. None was found.

  ‘What does “pure” even mean to you?’ Baldr countered, dredging up some scorn from somewhere.

  The Mycelite smiled wryly. ‘Something different to your Priests, I admit.’ He stirred himself, extending the staff and making its skull-tip loom closer. ‘Let me tell you something. You won’t believe me, but I will tell you anyway.’

  He pushed his battered body from its seat and got to his feet. The effort made his breath scrape and whine.

  ‘You are remarkable, you Sons of Russ,’ he said. ‘Every other Legion has faced the truth. One by one, they have all acknowledged the way of the universe. They have accepted that the warp runs through them, boiling in their blood, turning them into the thing that they hate. They can ring it with wards, they can bind it with rituals, but still it is there, the reminder of their failure. Every time a Librarian closes his eyes, it’s grinning back at him.’

  He lost his smile. ‘The warp,’ he croaked, as if the word pained him. ‘We must perforce use the tools of our own damnation. The irony was not lost on your Imperium’s architects. They tried to excise the whole charade, once, but by then greater forces were already in play, and Nikaea was always doomed.’

  The Mycelite shook his head in wry wonder. ‘After that, we all had to swallow the bitter taste of truth, sooner or later, but you – the attack dogs of Fenris – never did. You told yourself stories about your home world, and its storms, and the magick of the runes, and convinced yourself that you, and only you among the Eighteen, had no need to use witches on the battlefield.’ He laughed hoarsely. ‘Ha! Such story-weavers. The best in the galaxy, even if you told your tales only to yourselves.’

  Baldr listened, unable not to. Some of what the creature said made no sense to him. The events he referred to were thousands of years ago and lost in the fog of legend. ‘I have seen runecraft,’ he said, maintaining at least the veneer of resistance. ‘It draws from the world-soul. What you do is… different.’

  The Mycelite nodded wearily. ‘No doubt you truly believe that.’ He shuffled closer to Baldr, and extended a withered hand. The gauntlet that had enclosed it had long gone, revealing atrophied flesh stretched over a network of bone. ‘You see this? It was once as firm as your skin, and just as strong.’ He turned his hand in the gloomy half-light, watching the lines and wrinkles move. ‘You would hardly know we were forged from the same gene-coding, yet we have your Corpse-Emperor’s trickery embedded within us both. That’s the thing, Baldr Fjolnir: we look different, but that’s all on the surface.’

  He withdrew the hand, moving stiffly, as if, despite himself, some part of him was still capable of registering shame.

  ‘Runecraft looks different. It sounds different. You can tell yourself as many stories as you like about how it is different. I admire you for doing so. But, deep down, even your Stormcaller knows it’s all lies. He knows that he drags his power up from the same place we all do. He can call himself a Priest if he wants – I’ve heard worse titles for our kind.’ He shuffled close again, lifting his reptilian face up to Baldr’s. ‘Our kind. You, me, him. We are all locked in the same prison. Some of us are a little more honest about where the walls are.’

  Baldr stared down at the creature before him. ‘You have made this place a living Hel,’ he said, quietly, fixing the Mycelite with a mask of contempt. ‘We are nothing like each other. The Fenryka chose to keep our oaths.’

  The Mycelite snorted. ‘Chose? Chose? What did you choose, young hunter? You were not even allowed to die on your own.’ He spat on the floor. ‘This is the only time you h
ave truly had a choice to make in your life, and I am the one to give it to you.’

  Baldr watched him carefully. ‘You can give me nothing.’

  ‘So sure, for one so merely on the cusp of knowledge.’ The Mycelite reached up with his staff, resting the tip of it on Baldr’s breastplate. The skull clinked against the ceramite. ‘I sense the collar you wear,’ he said. ‘Your mentor knows his art. To remove it would kill you. Possibly me, as well. While it remains in place, I can only show you a fraction of what I had hoped to.’

  Baldr tensed, feeling heat building up before him.

  ‘As I said, you cannot–’

  ‘Hush,’ whispered the Mycelite, closing his eyes. ‘No more words.’

  Baldr tried to speak again, to defy the order, but the two empty eye-sockets before him suddenly flared into green-edged life. He felt a huge pressure bearing down on him, as if he’d been plunged deep underwater, and the dim light around him snuffed out. For an instant, it was as if the entire universe had been erased, replaced by a black, muffled wall of infinite weight and density, but then the crushing mass ripped away.

  He realised he had closed his own eyes, and carefully opened them.

  ‘Where am I?’ he asked, too lost in surprise to remember any defiance.

  The Mycelite’s voice still rang in his mind – just as soft, just as seductive.

  ‘Everywhere,’ said the creature, chuckling as he spoke. ‘Do you see it? You are everywhere.’

  Ingvar ran.

  He strained with every sinew and burned every muscle, forcing his body into new extremities of raw speed. In the foetid plague-hulk, everything was tight, clogged and enclosed – rammed with screaming, jostling armies of the damned. They emerged in droves from crevices and cracks, shrieking and blind, thirsting only to lay scab-encrusted hands on him and bite into healthy flesh. The only response was to keep ahead of them, to keep his limbs driving and the sword-edge dancing. As the enemy came after him, time and again, the runes on dausvjer’s edge ran black with clots of blood and bile.

  Ingvar sprinted back through the halls of the eldar starship, fighting his way across the bridge and past the stricken outline of the downed wraithknight. He hewed his way across the wraithbone plains, and he fought his way, stride by bloody stride, back into the outer core where the impacted voidcraft lay thickly atop and within one another.

  As he neared the surface levels, weariness began to slow him at last. His genhanced arms burned, his chest spiked with pain. Sweat ran down the inside of his armour, trickling down the back of his neck and pooling around the carapace nodes in his spine. They got closer with every attack, scrabbling at his armour with their talons before he could kick or swipe them away. They launched themselves from hidden roof-vaults, they burst up from compartments in the floor, they spilled out of void-dark culverts and air-cycling tubes. They were like locusts, covering every pressed-metal floor panel and grease-streaked wall section, scuttling and skittering and hissing in the penumbral gloom.

  After a final, blood-drenched push, Ingvar broke out into a high-roofed hall, gothic-arched and encrusted with defiled Imperial iconography. At the far end rose a soaring gateway marked with old rune-identifiers for fighter hangars. It was as good a destination as any – one of the thousands of void-facing apertures that would give him a chance to make contact with Jorundur.

  The mutants knew well enough what he was doing, and came after him with even greater frenzy. Hundreds surged into the hall behind him, all thirsting to pull him down and back within the hulk’s dark embrace. Ingvar felt a clawed hand grab his arm, and wrenched its owner from its feet. Three more dropped down from the vaults above, wailing as they plummeted. Ingvar punched out as they fell, still running, breaking their bones as they thudded and bounced from his armour.

  The impact made him stagger. If he lost his footing now, they would be on him, dozens of them, then more, piling on so fast he’d be buried alive. He forced his limbs to keep pumping, to keeping powering on through the fatigue.

  The hangar entrances rose over him, vast enough to accommodate Valkyrie gunships being lifted on claw-rails. He gained the launch-zones beyond and raced across them, his boots finally striking rockcrete again. Ranked launch bays stretched off on either side, empty of the craft that had once lined them. Up ahead, two hundred metres off, void-entrance gates glittered from the exposed starfield beyond.

  He was close, now – desperately close.

  ‘Jorundur!’ he voxed. ‘Fix to my loc.’

  No reply – the comm-link hissed with static. Ingvar tore onwards, sprinting towards the closest of the void-gates, and the mob followed him like a breaking wave. One clamped a fist around his trailing leg, another nearly speared his shoulder with a heavily thrown blade.

  ‘Jorundur,’ voxed Ingvar again, seeing nothing on his armour’s scanners. ‘Are you getting this?’

  He neared the far edge of the launch bay. There was nowhere else to go.

  With a cold lurch in the pit of his stomach, Ingvar contemplated, for the first time, the possibility that Jorundur had not been equal to the firepower of the hulk’s outer guns. Perhaps even the Old Dog, the finest pilot Ingvar had ever fought alongside, had succumbed to the barrage.

  As the lip of the hangar approached, Ingvar let out an echoing roar of rage, skidded around and faced his pursuers.

  They careered into him, carried into contact by the huge momentum of the crowd. Ingvar ripped into them, hurling bodies clear in all directions. He hewed and blocked with ferocious, blinding speed, carpeting the apron in fresh gore. He lashed out in the baresark way, worked his blade two-handed, blurring the edge with velocity even as they pushed him back towards the edge of the void.

  ‘For Russ!’ he roared, time and again. ‘For the honour of the Wolf King!’

  Not since leaving Fenris for the Deathwatch had he fought like it. There were no Blood Angel strokes in his hammering display, no Dark Angel tricks or Ultramarine restraint. The mutants died in swathes, thrown against the glittering arcs of his vengeful blade and broken asunder by its wrath.

  In the face of such limitless ferocity, even those hordes fell back. They scrambled and clawed to get away from the blue-edged sword.

  The hangar fell silent. Ingvar stood on the very extremity, the open starfield at his back, panting heavily, his armour red from the gore that covered it, his head low.

  There were still hundreds of them. More streamed into the halls with every passing second. Ingvar’s blood still boiled with the war-fury, but it could not last forever. It was only a matter of time before they summoned the courage to rush him again, and this time there would be no victory.

  Gunnlaugur had been right. It had been a foolish effort, one born of overweening pride. He would die on the hulk, alone, with Klaive’s secrets still hidden in the depths of Vindicatus.

  Ingvar smiled wryly under his battered helm. Callimachus would never have approved.

  But I am a true Wolf again, he thought. That, at least, has been proved.

  He angled his blade at the face of the nearest mutant, feeling the energy field spit with relish.

  ‘Who will be first, then?’ he cried, challenging them all. ‘Who will have the honour of this scalp?’

  At that, the spell broke, and the front rank of mutants rushed him again, stumbling in their haste and panic, driven by the swell of the hundreds pushing behind.

  Ingvar bellowed a fresh war-cry, tensing for the almighty impact.

  The row of mutants before him exploded in a sequential line of blasted flesh and armour-shards, blowing up as columns of bolt-rounds thudded into them. A thunder of thrusters filled the hangar space as something huge and furnace-hot broke the atmosphere seal over the hangar’s exit.

  Ingvar looked up to see Vuokho labouring hard to maintain loft. Its entire underside had been ripped to pieces, and it looked like the heavy bolters were about the only
thing that still functioned on its entire chassis. It turned on a thick downdraught, laying into the hordes of plague-damned as it circled about.

  ‘Gyrfalkon,’ came Jorundur’s furious voice over the pack-comm. ‘You have two seconds.’

  Ingvar grinned, and leapt up to grasp the mangled remains of the lower crew bay door.

  ‘What kept you, brother?’ he asked, hauling himself clear of the hangar floor.

  ‘I changed my mind,’ said Jorundur, sounding very angry about it.

  Then Jorundur wheeled the Thunderhawk around and pointed its charred muzzle back towards the void outside. The engines fired, and both gunship and passenger tore free of the Festerax’s interior, back out into the las-beam-crossed storm beyond. Ingvar hung on, clambering up into the crew-bay even as the Thunderhawk powered into the void.

  Behind them, the screams of the damned lingered – furious, rabid, but impotent.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Gunnlaugur felt the blood in his throat. Every time he roared out a fresh battle-cry, the pain flared up. He ignored it, and kept bellowing. His armour made his voice swell out across the entire space, filling the fire-hot hall with the sound of his wrath.

  His brothers did the same, howling raw fury at the enemy. The combined effect was electrifying – it made his hearts surge and his mind sing. Even in the midst of almost infinite ruin, the cries of the Wolves were chilling. Deep in the depths of the plague-hulk, a fragment of immortal Fenris had lodged, and with every stride it worked its way further into the flesh of its prey, ice-cold, steel-hard.

  Gunnlaugur and Hafloí had spearheaded the charge on the right flank of Njal’s advance. With Fellblade’s surviving warriors, they carved a bloody trail out across the pit surface. Bloodhame held the left flank, while Njal pushed up the centre, bolstered by his own retinue and Hauki’s fighters.

  The warband cut a diminished aspect from the numbers that had broken into the hulk on the assault rams, and now fewer than thirty remained. Set beside the forces ranged against them, those numbers were pitiful. Laughable.