Ingvar felt a rush of endorphins, like combat-fervour. He leaned forwards in the throne, staring at the speed-blurred edges of the Grand Cruiser.
‘They are not firing,’ he said.
‘By the time they have a fix,’ said Jorundur with some satisfaction, twisting the gunship up for the final thrust, ‘we’ll be inside the shields.’
Vuokho gave a last judder before the engines delivered what was needed. Clean as a thrown spear, the gunship blasted into the shadow of Vindicatus. Callia was as good as her word, and they streaked through the gap in the void shields towards the opening launch bay.
‘Hard landing coming,’ warned Jorundur, suddenly kicking in reverse thrust.
Ingvar was thrown forward against his throne restraints. Terminal-sounding clangs resounded from deep within the Thunderhawk’s tortured frame, and a thin snap echoed out from above the cockpit. He got a blurred impression of bulkheads rushing to meet them, picked out in crimson and bronze, before Vuokho slewed through the gap.
Jorundur aimed the gunship as well as he had ever done. By rights, an entry at that speed, in those conditions, carrying that much damage, should have smeared them across the side of Vindicatus in a thousand glowing shards of adamantium. Somehow, though, he managed to hit the aperture without clipping the edge, fast enough to evade sentry guns tracking them but with just enough room to brake once inside the atmosphere bubble.
‘Skítja,’ Jorundur muttered, physically wrestling with the last responsive sections of the command console.
Vuokho skidded round sharply, nearly tumbling over on its axis before righting drunkenly. Vindicatus’s gravity field clamped down strongly, slamming the gunship’s twisted undercarriage hard against the flight deck. A soaring roof and colonnaded walls enclosed them, all picked out in smog-blackened gold leaf.
The rear wall of the hangar raced towards them, half obscured by the cloud of sparks and smoke kicked out by Vuokho’s driving progress. It looked very, very solid.
‘Brother…’ began Ingvar.
‘I see it,’ snapped Jorundur, activating the air-brakes and diverting all remaining power to the retro-thrusters. Huge gouts of flame surged out, arresting the suicidal momentum. The Thunderhawk’s undercarriage gouged long trails into the hangar floor, though even that only part-slowed the charge.
They hit the wall with a heavy crack of ceramite breaking. Power lines shorted across the roof, sparking like fountains, and the thrones rocked on their mounts.
The main drives whined down, clanking eerily as broken components rattled around in their casings. The entire structure steamed, and smoke rose from the console, coupled with the acrid smell of metal burning.
For a moment, no one said anything. Then Jorundur turned to Ingvar.
‘So I got us in,’ he said. ‘Now what?’
Ingvar reached for his bolter.
‘You and me,’ he said. ‘To the bridge.’
‘Tell me what you see,’ said the Mycelite.
Baldr tried to twist around, to determine where the voice came from.
Nothing happened. He didn’t move. He had no neck left to move, nor a head to swivel. The visual field before him was like nothing he’d ever experienced. He saw a shimmering wall of colour, moving in clots and streaks across a deeper well of luminous cloud. Motes of darkness skated over that tapestry – hard, sharp things that violated the beauty of the spectacle.
He found himself wanting to remove those motes, to restore the vista to unbroken splendour.
‘I do not know,’ he said.
His voice was just an echo. He had no lips to move, no tongue to form the words. They spun in existence like thoughts, and yet they were not just mental figments – they were words, spoken to another intelligence.
‘You do,’ said the Mycelite, his voice echoing in his mind. ‘Use your eyes. Think. Tell me what you see.’
Baldr tried to relax. A feeling of astonishing power coursed through his veins. Except he had no veins – just the vague after-image of a body, like a faint echo still ringing in his consciousness.
He tried to move again, and this time something changed. His gaze altered, adjusting, zooming in a little. The tapestry flexed and bent, though the motes remained in place. There were three of them – three dark little clots of movement. If he had arms, he would have reached out to swipe them clear.
‘I see the universe,’ he said, not knowing where the words came from.
‘Just so,’ said the Mycelite, ‘and you see the depths beneath it.’
Baldr recognised the truth of that immediately. He saw the relatedness of it all – the swirls of colour and the bluffs and wells of light. It was endlessly moving, turning like water, stretching and changing.
It was infinite. It was compelling.
‘The warp,’ he said, the word catching in his mind.
‘You see it better than I,’ said the Mycelite, delighted. ‘You are something truly new, Baldr Fjolnir. How could your Priests have tested for this taint? It did not exist, not until now. But these are the Times of Accomplishment, and all is changing. Doors are unlocking that have remained shut since before the Corpse-Lord took us into the stars. You are just the start. Thousands will follow. Though will many be as powerful? I doubt it’
Baldr hardly listened. His gaze roved across the tapestry, then alighted on the three motes of darkness. Two of them were much larger than the third. As he watched, the tiny speck made its way towards the largest, and disappeared into it. Without knowing how, he began to realise what he was seeing.
‘Ships,’ he said. ‘I am seeing the void.’
‘They are the ships that besiege the Festerax. Tiny things, are they not?’
‘Where is the hulk?’
‘The hulk?’ came the Mycelite’s voice, amused. ‘A poor name for this magnificent thing. You can guess, I think.’
Baldr’s mind probed further into the tapestry. He saw the outlines of the other ships, blurred as if by heat. They swam amid the glory and the infinitude, fragmentary and insubstantial. It felt as if he could reach out, just extend an arm, and pluck them from the void.
‘I am the hulk,’ he said, once again letting the truth come to him. ‘I am this ship.’
The Mycelite sounded pleased. ‘That is it. You are the ship. Flex your muscles. Use your gift.’
Baldr began to see how things were ordered. His perspective was from the core of the great vessel. He could feel the torpedo tubes as if they were his arteries, the fuel cells as if they were his hearts. The universe surrounded him, cold and vacuous, but also rich and magnificent. He floated on the face of the deep, conscious, immense, eternal.
At the back of his mind, like an old memory, he felt other things stirring. Aside from the Mycelite, he half heard different voices whispering. They were oddly familiar – the words made a kind of sense to him.
God-marked.
‘How are you… doing this?’ Baldr asked, unable to fight back against the sensations flooding through him but not quite overwhelmed by them. ‘I have a–’
‘Yes, your collar. It holds you back. You feel that? If we could break it, then the link would be complete.’
‘It will not break.’
‘Give it time.’
Baldr felt a sudden pang. He was talking to the Mycelite like he might talk to any of his brothers. The fury had gone, the contempt had gone. He knew he ought to feel both those things, but somehow the will to defy had dissipated.
Part of that was sorcery, he knew. He could still taste the stink of it, hanging like vomit at the back of his throat. But only a part. Something else called to him.
He was being shown another way of being. He began to remember the dreams he’d had on Ras Shakeh while his body repaired.
He remembered the Dark Garden. He’d walked among those twilight groves, breathing in the spores and the poisons.
He had wanted to reach out, to press a cooling hand against her brow.
‘You were unlocked by us, Baldr,’ said the Mycelite, as if able to sense what he was thinking. ‘You were fertile soil, but you still needed the seed. We gave it to you.’ Just as before, his voice had an edge of tenderness to it. ‘You are home now.’
Baldr ought to have recoiled at that, just as he had done when the Mycelite had run his diseased hand down his cheek.
But he didn’t.
‘I can control this,’ Baldr said, feeling the thousands upon thousands of interlocking ship-systems unfolding in his mind. ‘I can make it move. I can keep it alive.’
‘Not quite,’ warned the Mycelite. ‘The collar was well made. It holds us back, but you will learn. There is time.’
Baldr felt a tremor of unease then. The Festerax was not as it should be. The vast structure was riddled with infections, but that was its natural state – the contagions made it stronger.
We will be its disease.
He couldn’t remember who had said that. He couldn’t even remember why he had ever come to the Festerax. But something wasn’t right. There was a presence at the heart of the vessel, at his heart.
‘There are intruders,’ he said. ‘To be purged.’
The Mycelite agreed. ‘There are,’ he said. ‘Do you know what must be done to purge them?’
Baldr thought on that. He had no idea how to exert his will over the ship. There were huge structures within it – he could feel them. They could be made to move, to crush, to stifle, but only with the correct command.
‘I do not,’ he said, slowly. His mind moved in a fog, as if emerging from sleep. Ahead of him, he could see the glorious void glow and shimmer.
‘But… I can learn.’
Chapter Eighteen
The engine-gates loomed, now less than thirty metres away. The fires set before them roared into new and terrible shapes, throwing lurid light across a battlefield of swinging shadows. The enemy had been driven back, but their numbers remained. There was no end to them – they poured out from hidden arches, the vaults above and the pits beneath, an infinite tide of corrupted humanity.
Njal wasted none of his power on them. Fatigue was beginning to weigh on his arms, driving like lead through his veins. His throat was bloody and raw from the death-oaths he swore, his arms flared with pain from the effort of hurling storm-fire at the endless tides of ruin. He could feel the psychic tsunami of hatred crashing against him, surging against his own will and seeking to hammer it down.
The foul breath of the Dark Wolf lapped across his shoulder, as close as it had ever been. He could sense the purring growls behind him, catching up. Every exercise of runecraft summoned it closer, the avatar of his own destruction.
I sense you, now. You are on my heels.
They could have no understanding of this, those who did not walk the path of the runes. For outsiders, the power he wielded was nothing but dabbling in the shallows of the warp, just like any trickster or fallen sorcerer. Njal had heard the arguments a thousand times, and had read the same in a hundred proscribed manuscripts.
You are no different. You are warp-weavers, just as we are. All rivers meet at the same source, and our damnations are the same.
They were wrong. The whispers were wrong. Njal had seen the world-soul, raging in the heart of darkness. He had heard the low growls in the netherworld, and seen the pairs of eyes glowing in the afterdark. He had felt the power that would consume him in the end, dissipating his soul into the raging tempest that would break at the galaxy’s end.
The power he wielded was of a different order, one tempered and purified by the mystical symmetries of the hunt and the wild. Those who had never known Fenris could disbelieve it all they liked. It changed nothing.
Somewhere deep in the soul of the storm, the Dark Wolf’s fangs bared, as yellow and decayed as the bones of the earth.
‘Fenrys!’ Njal thundered, feeling his own fangs bare in symmetry.
He thrust his staff forward, and wild-edged coruscation surged around him once more, lighting up the eternal night in blood-edged silver. Storm-wind rushed to his aid, swirling about him in accelerating eddies. Flames bloomed out, catching on the backs of the hordes before him and flaring into roaring life. Fork-shaped gouts of fire leapt from his staff tip, lashing into the smog-shrouded vaults above. Great cracks opened at his feet, zigzagging across the pitted deck before spewing torrents of magma. His Terminator plate glowed deep red, thick as blood-clots, and the runes seared the dark like brands.
Fenris was a world of ice, but it was also a world of fire. Through sheer force of will, Njal had dragged the Summer of Flame into the enginarium chamber, and the devastation was as complete there as it was on his violent home world.
Ranks of mutant soldiers were hurled from their feet by the squalls and thrown, aflame, into the pits, where the forge-fires leapt up to welcome them. More were impaled by the sheets of red lightning rippling across the battlefield. The whole chamber swelled with the rip and tear of the racing winds, and fires latched on to the bare metal, making the fevered atmosphere shake.
Njal strode forth, his staff held high and his pelts snapping in the rune-summoned gales. The mortal enemy fell back before him, cowering and scrambling. Even to look on him in such an unleashed state was enough to burst corrupted eyeballs and tear open tainted flesh.
The engine-gates drew near, towering over all else and lit by their own vast furnaces. Njal felt the magma-heat thundering away before him, hot as a brand against his skin.
There was little in the enemy host capable of standing before him then, let alone fighting him. In his wake came the Wolves, swift and brutal in vengeance, already reaching for the thermal charges that would be hurled into the depths of the fusion reactors.
But between them stood the last line of defence – the Traitor Marines. Dragged into the combat at last as their minions withered away, the bloated leviathans strode down from their portals, each one carrying scythes or hefting massive organ-guns with carved daemon-head muzzles. Nightwing, circling high above the combat, ran scans on each and filtered the results back to Njal’s armour systems. The Plague Marines were riddled with corrosion, their ancient bodies fused and integrated into a bizarre mix of tumescent organs and semi-bionic components. By rights, none of them should have been able to draw breath, let alone fight, but Njal knew well enough how utterly deadly they were.
The Plague Marines converged on Njal, advancing fearlessly into the inferno even as the flames whipped and curled around them. Njal’s bodyguard raced to intercept them, and the two forces crashed together. The fighting became truly vicious then, with no quarter given on either side – Traitors were hammered into the burning iron floor; Wolves were crushed under cloven boots, their hearts ripped out on the curve of Hel-forged blades.
Three huge scythe-bearers broke the cordon of Njal’s bodyguards, eviscerating the Wolves in their path before lumbering on at him. The warriors’ scythes glowed pale green, bleeding corpse-light into the fervid air. They were fearsome things, forged on some long-damned plague world and tempered with the malice of daemonic metalwrights.
Njal smiled savagely, and opened his fist.
Forks of blood-red lightning leapt out, slamming into their prey and spraying magma like the maw of a volcano. The flaming rune-magic blazed wildly as it came into contact with the fell metals, but it gripped tight, wrapping around the blade-edges in tight snarls.
The scythes exploded, sending circular blast-waves shuddering out. The Plague Marines weathered the rain of magma, reaching for bolters and meltaguns. They opened fire, loosing a volley of bolts and atomised energy straight at him. Njal felt searing heat as the molecular tech gnawed into the ceramite, stripping away the ou
ter layers in a haze of fizzing smoke, followed by the hammering rain of shells exploding across his tortured armour. A second volley impacted hard, smashing him back several paces and ripping into his already battered plate.
Njal spat out a curse, and drew on fresh power. He spun around, whirling hard and driving the fire-winds into a vortex of speed. The Traitor Marines kept firing, but now their shells were sucked into the whirlwind and sprayed out wildly. Still surrounded by the flame-edged gale, Njal advanced again, gripping his staff two-handed and preparing the next blast.
The Plague Marines met the onslaught defiantly. The meltagunner opened fire again. His comrades kept up the barrage of bolter shots, shouldering into the fury of the gales.
Njal angled his staff at the leader, and poured all his battle-fury into a single word.
‘Skemmdarvargur.’
His staff erupted. The space before him disappeared into a furnace of bestial energies, snarling and tearing at the bit like a leashed pack of hunting dogs. Somewhere buried in all the rampaging light and noise, the vague shapes of jaws could be half made out, latching on to the enemy and biting down. Arched backs plunged, powered by spectral, thick-pelted limbs. In a tornado of roars and snarls, the galloping predator-shapes surged ahead, sweeping aside any resistance. The three Plague Marines were swept away, deluged by the roiling fire-tide and slammed back into the pits whence they had come.
Panting with exhaustion, Njal let the furnace burn out. The winds, the flames, the lightning-shards, all of it ripped away and howled off into oblivion.
In front of him, a gorge of pure scorched devastation stretched off towards the gates. The bodies of the Plague Marines had been ripped apart, now little more than scraps of necrotic flesh and burning armour-pieces. Dozens more bodies were twisted and contorted all along the length of the carved-out furrow, still racked by the last sparks and flickers of the lightning that had killed them.
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