‘You know these things?’ asked the Mycelite, hobbling across the filth-strewn marble towards the closest corpse. ‘Perhaps you recognise their voices? They were speaking to you, Baldr. You recognised the language, even if you could not hear all the words. They have been here for nine thousand years.’ He chuckled mournfully, and pulled the corpse’s chair around. A dust-dry skull wobbled on a bony neck. ‘I am afraid they are all quite mad. It is a long time to be locked in here, never quite being allowed to die.’
Baldr looked on grimly. The bodies all bore the age-faded livery of kaerls. Some of them seemed to have fused with their old machines, locked together in a desiccated embrace of entropy. All wore expressions of terror on their frozen faces.
‘So that is why you must be the one to command the Festerax,’ said the Mycelite, shuffling back over to him. ‘You are on the command throne. The bound souls will only listen to you. This ship will only listen to you. If you learn to hear them, they will tell you why. They will tell you that only a Son of Russ could ever pilot this vessel, and not just any Son of Russ, but one marked out by the bounteous masters of the warp. They will tell you that this is the core, the heart of it all.’
He drew closer, wheezing as he leaned on his staff.
‘They will tell you the ship’s name was never Festerax, but Frostaxe, and that it last plied the void unsullied when the primarchs lived among men.’ The Mycelite shot Baldr a wry smile. ‘Perhaps you now also see the truth of what I was telling you: we are all the same, Baldr Fjolnir. We draw from the same source, we are prey to the same corruptions.’
He laughed – a foul sound, dredged up from a withered throat.
‘You are home,’ he said. ‘The voices will drag you back in, and you will learn to listen. This has always been your home, and it has always been calling you.’
With a wrench of hollow insight, Baldr felt the truth of it then. He had heard the voices. He could still hear them, like after-echoes of a recited saga. They would whisper to him until his mind cracked and he joined them in eternal confinement, buried alive at the core of the plague-raddled Hel-ship.
He would give in. The Mycelite’s deceptions would spin their veils of decay again, and his mind would once more join the choir of those locked forever in the Frostaxe’s tomb-cold soul. It could not be resisted, not forever.
‘Time is short,’ the Mycelite whispered, gazing into Baldr’s eyes with an intense, almost infatuated, look. ‘Soon we will go in again, you and I. You will purge the disease from your glorious, eternal body. After that, you will destroy the last of your brothers. You will not need to emerge. You will never need to emerge.’
His soft eyes glistened in the dark.
‘Then we will be alone again, you and I, and with all the time in creation.’
Ingvar and Jorundur charged straight into a hail of las-fire and bolter-rounds. Callia and her squad of Battle Sisters were on either side of the doorway, hunkered down behind overturned cogitator stands and firing steadily ahead.
The two Wolves joined them. Ingvar crashed down beside Callia, his bolter kicking in his right hand as he added his own barrage to hers.
‘My thanks, Sister,’ he voxed.
‘Bring him down,’ she replied stonily. ‘I need no more than that.’
The Cardinal’s enormous throne was more than sixty metres away. Once clear of the piles of half-demolished cogitator units, the route to it had almost no cover. Though taken by surprise by Callia’s rapid change of allegiance, the rest of the command bridge’s defenders were rallying, laying down disciplined walls of suppressive fire while others advanced through the maze of sensor pits beyond the throne. Ingvar could see Sisters of Nuriyah’s retinue among them, accompanied by more Ecclesiarchy troops. There must have been dozens of them, all told. Once they brought all their guns to bear, there would be few hiding places across the expanse of the bridge.
Ingvar glanced up towards the throne. Delvaux cowered there, his outline blurred by a personal shield-generator. He seemed to be shouting something, and Ingvar caught the familiar outline of his jowly face trembling.
Before he could see any more, though, the view was obscured by the two Penitent Engines striding into range. One was still on the far side of the throne, turning clumsily amid a squeal and roar of gears. The other lurched into range, venting flames from both extended weapon-arms. Circular saws mounted on either fist accelerated into whirls of adamantium, sending sparks spinning through the gouts of crimson.
‘We do this quick, or not at all,’ said Ingvar, gauging the distance to the throne. A rapid sprint would bring him into strike-range of Delvaux’s throat within seconds, but he’d have to survive a punishing amount of fire.
Callia nodded. ‘We’ll break left, laying down covering fire. You can do the rest?’
Ingvar glanced over at Jorundur, who was hunched behind the broken remains of a sensor-unit and firing two-handed. The Old Dog nodded towards him. ‘Say the word.’
‘Then now,’ Ingvar ordered.
Callia and the rest of the Battle Sisters leapt clear of their cover and advanced over towards the left flank of the battlefield, running hard and firing all the while. One Sister was hit while out in the open, going down in a whirl of smashed armour and blood-spray, but the rest made it to the doubtful security of a comm-station – a semicircular array of battered machinery rising from the bridge’s polished floor. As the Battle Sisters ran, they drew whole swathes of tracer fire towards their position.
A few seconds later, Ingvar and Jorundur burst out, heading straight out into the open. Ingvar fired one-handed, laying down a withering rain of bolt-shells. Jorundur stayed on his shoulder, adding to the hail of rounds. Exposed Ecclesiarchy troops were blown away, lost in the tumbling haze of blasted marble and exploding rockcrete.
Ingvar sprinted low and fast, relying as before on hunt-sense rather than armour-sensors. He swerved unconsciously around an incoming blast from a heavy projectile weapon and powered onwards, never breaking stride.
‘I’ll take the Engine,’ voxed Jorundur, racing towards the first lumbering war machine.
Ingvar nodded, and raced directly for the throne. He veered away from the worst of the incoming fire, but a shell ricocheted off his shoulder-guard, nearly sending him sprawling. He fired back, suppressing the worst of the barrage, and then the throne loomed up ahead, half screened by the whirl of blown dust and debris.
To his right, he was dimly aware of Jorundur taking on the Penitent Engine – he could hear the roars of fury and the sharp clash of metal on metal. He sensed the incoming presence of Nuriyah and the main body of Delvaux’s defenders. In a few more heartbeats they’d be on him, and then things would get difficult.
He pounced away from a line of solid-round projectiles and leapt up at the throne’s dais. Clouds of dust ripped away, and for an instant he saw Delvaux’s fat face glaring down at him in terror. Shielding still glittered between them, but that would never be enough to keep the Gyrfalkon from his prey.
Ingvar bounded up the steps, firing at the shield cover to rip it clear while activating dausvjer with his free hand. The blade-edge flared with energy, sensing an imminent kill.
Then, just as he was about to leap, hidden compartments on the throne’s base swivelled open, revealing twin lines of autogun-barrels.
Too late, Ingvar tried to arrest his ascent and dive away. The guns opened up with an echoing volley, blasting him from the dais and sending him skidding across the pocked marble floor. He spun around, his vision blurry and flecked with red, before returning fire, strafing the throne’s base and silencing the concealed batteries.
By then, though, time had run out. He felt a shadow fall across him, and looked up, twisting to avoid the hammer of incoming fire.
The second Penitent Engine towered over him, its flamers active and its saws whirling. There was no escape, and no room to move – before he could so mu
ch as raise his blade the war machine had extended its arms, raising them like some savage champion of pagan worlds, before plunging them down.
Gunnlaugur ran from the enemy.
He wanted to turn. Every fibre of his being yearned to stop the headlong race to the assault rams, swivel on his heel and bring his hammer to bear again. It had felt good, to be unleashed once more. He had remembered what it was like to command again – free of doubt, free of dissension.
And now he was haring through the endless gloom as if fear meant something to him.
He could have laughed, though the sound would have been bitter.
We race for the landing stages like whipped curs.
Every second that passed brought the thermal charges closer to ignition. The amount of destructive potential now laid in the churning heart of the hulk was chilling to contemplate – those charges would crack the enginarium’s shell as easily as Gunnlaugur’s fists might crack a skull.
The pack remained close on his heels. He could hear their strained, throaty breathing even through their armour. They were near the end of their strength, driven to extremity by the long, punishing, non-stop combat.
‘Faster!’ he thundered, giving them no quarter.
And they responded. They squeezed a morsel more energy from burning muscles, and their ragged breaths grew even more strained. They did not run because they feared what was on their heels. They did it because he had ordered it, and because their pride was now to live up to his demands.
I am vaerengi again, thought Gunnlaugur, and, despite everything, that kindled a spark of pride within him.
More corridors wound away ahead, cloaked deep in eternal night, twisting like entrails through the unimaginable vastness. Already he could sense fresh filth scurrying to cut them off – to clog the narrow ways with their own dead, to claw at them and lock them within the ship that would soon be their death-byre.
He checked the chrono. It ticked down mercilessly. He could no longer detect Njal. He did not know if Ingvar and Jorundur still lived. He did not know whether Olgeir had made it to Kefa, and if anything had been salvaged from that world. All he knew for certain was what he could smell – frantic hatred from the ship around him, grim determination from his brothers behind him.
From somewhere, from some place lodged deep within his warrior’s soul, he dredged up a sliver of additional energy. His strides lengthened by a fraction, his hammer swung further, his wounds cried at him more intensely.
‘For the oathbreaker!’ he bellowed. ‘We will live, if for no other cause than to rip his faithless heart out!’
And amid the dark, running hard to keep up with the Wolf Guard’s furious progress, his brothers roared the same vow, using it to fuel them, to drive them onwards in hatred.
For the oathbreaker.
The pain was phenomenal. It did not merely strike at his body – it raked across his soul, chilling it, scraping it into near-oblivion. Each time Njal delved into the source, the frigid grasp of agony became more acute, as if he were being shoved beneath pack-ice and held down there. Actinic fire rippled across him, caught and twisted by the elemental power unleashed within. He was racing, hurtling up through the heart of darkness, propelled by will alone in defiance of the law of the universe.
There was no possibility of withdrawal. There was no time left to use his mortal body as the others did. He had been forced to haul on the deepest fragments of runecraft, to turn his very body into an instrument, to send it soaring just as Nightwing did.
The raven cawed and circled around him, pushing higher, spiralling up through the myriad levels that constituted the Festerax’s upper reaches.
Njal followed it. He was already far above the enginarium and still climbing fast. Lightning flared and snapped, buoying him like a rising flood. He streaked upwards, tearing along vertical shafts gouged through the vessel’s core, and the rune-storm boomed in his wake, roiling with soul-summoned thunder.
Decks passed by like dreams, lost in shadows. He caught only glimpses of their interiors. There were colossal arches leading to unknowable regions of utter darkness, unimaginably vast pillars holding up grotesque halls of plague-devices, pulsing energy fields throwing lurid green light across the gaping chasms. Some of those chambers might have lain undisturbed for millennia. Secrets might have been set down in those foetid halls, secrets that could change the course of the war, or summon back a golden age for humanity, or expose the forbidden secrets of the ten-thousand-year Imperium.
Or there might be nothing – nothing but ruin and disease, festering forever amid shadows that never lifted and air that never stirred.
Njal surged up through it all, his totems clattering against his armour, his staff-skulls rippling in the headwind. He was drawing near to the source. He could feel it, lodged like a canker in his mind.
I have faced this thing before.
Even amid his pain, the thought intrigued him. No mortal had ever set foot in this hulk and lived. There was no enemy within it that he could have met in combat before.
And yet. Something about the spears of warp-power that had eviscerated his warriors had borne the tang of dreadful familiarity. He swooped past a lattice of intersecting buttresses, ascending more rapidly now as momentum built. The air became less furiously hot. He saw moisture glistening on the surfaces of the iron and stone around him. Growths, shaggy like beards of moss, hung from every spar and brace-beam.
Nightwing called out, now just a few dozen metres above him. The raven had flown unerringly towards the target.
Njal drew deep on the runes, and thundered after it. He raced up a long well of iron, a narrow shaft that closed down nigh to the width of his armour-plate, before bursting out into a vast spherical chamber above.
The sphere was kilometres in diameter, half drowned in abyssal shadows and dank with nebulae of drifting spores. Arcs of green-tinged fulguration cracked and shivered across the cyclopean gulf. Above him, suspended on hundreds of bone-like spars and tendrils, hung a warship. It was part melded to the concave walls around it, lodged like a thrown blade in a wound. Enormous conduits connected the warship’s hull to the greater mass of the Festerax around it, many throbbing with electrical currents or swelling with seething liquids.
Njal immediately recognised the profile. Despite millennia of decay and damage, he saw the gunmetal-grey of the armour plates. He saw the knotwork icons etched above the ventral gunwales, and the vessel’s name picked out in gold-edge runes.
Frostaxe.
Nightwing screamed at the obscenity of it, pinning its wings back and tearing towards the starship’s mottled hull. Njal followed the raven up, and the shadow of the starship’s hull fell across him. He saw many ways in, gaping holes in the once-proud exterior. Even as he did so, he sensed the malign force cradling within it, as old and maleficent as the gods of ruin.
And I am already weakened.
The Dark Wolf growled then, stirred by the enormous discharge of rune-power keeping Njal aloft. The Rune Priest thrust upwards towards the nearest breach, and grasped the shredded adamantium with both hands.
For a moment he hung above the gulf, his muscles flaring with pain. The chrono inside his helm ticked down, marking the shrinking window before the charges ignited. He looked down, seeing his boots suspended over the yawning void.
Enough.
He dragged himself up and into the carcass of the warship. Hauling his bulk onto the ironwork structure, he reached intact decking and stood once again on firm ground. He unlocked his staff and kindled the skull-tip with silver light.
Nightwing had already flown ahead, twisting up through the decks towards its target. Njal saw what it saw, and so the way was marked out like a trail of twine through the labyrinth.
‘So be it,’ snarled Njal, setting off into the shadows. ‘To the core.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Ingvar stared up at
the Penitent Engine. There was no time to do anything but get his sword into the path of the spinning fist-blades, but he knew he would not be able to stop them. He glared up towards the agonised pilot of the machine, determined at least to face death head on.
The machine’s linen-shrouded face gazed down at him, the features hidden but for a static scream marked on the fabric. It was de Chatelaine. The circular saws continued to whirr and the muzzles of the flame-cannons gouted pre-burst smoke.
Then it turned aside.
Ingvar watched the massive Engine sweep its weapons away from him and take a stride towards the throne. He heard Delvaux screaming for it to halt. Bolter-fire sparked and ricocheted from de Chatelaine’s metal exoskeleton, but it was far too sporadic to halt her.
Ingvar leapt to his feet, opening up with his own bolter. Battle Sisters advancing behind the cover of the Penitent Engine were mown down, struck by his shells as they turned their fire on their own war machine.
‘Withdraw!’ shrieked Delvaux, his voice shrill with panic. All his corpulent self-assurance vanished, replaced by a frantic, wide-eyed terror. ‘I command you – withdraw!’
By then de Chatelaine had reached her target. Her flamethrower arms opened up, flooding the throne with crimson immolation. Delvaux cried out in pain, thrashing about on his seat while still trying to clamber out of harm’s way.
But there would be no salvation for him. De Chatelaine plunged both chainfists down on the Cardinal’s flabby form, shredding his body into a whirl of flying gore and flesh-scraps. The screaming only lasted seconds before Delvaux’s torso was torn into strips, spraying the marble and gold-leaf in a curtain of thick, lumpy red.
Ingvar mounted the dais steps again, firing all the while. The bridge’s defenders hesitated, shocked by the death of the Cardinal. The rain of bolter-shells faltered for a moment, and the battle suddenly hung in the balance.
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