by Ben Counter
The symbols on the blade glowed deep red now, drinking the fury in the air without Ulli having to will it. The weapon hungered in the hand of the wolf, coming alive with every spray of blood across its runes. Ulli rode the wave of it, and let the axe swing as if it were leading his hand and not the other way around.
He shouldered an ork against the fallen bike, and gloried in the breaking of its ribs. He kneed another in the jaw and whooped with joy as its fangs were driven up into the base of its brain.
The tide hammered home, body after body, corpse after corpse. Ulli lost sight of his packmates in the throng. There was nothing but the stink of torn bodies and the din of dying greenskins.
Ulli felt space open around him. He drew in a panting breath. His body finally told him how far he had pushed it. His throat was bubbling with blood from his torn lung, and the fires of pain ran up and down the channel punched through his chest. Every joint was wrenched and every muscle was pulled. The pain combined into a red veil that hung over his body, dulled by his augmentations and painkillers, heavy as stone.
The greenskins had stopped pressing forward. Their dead were waist-high around Ulli, and bodies tumbled off one another as he kicked himself free of them. He was slick with blood from head to toe.
The barricade and the wreck of the first ork’s bike were buried in bodies. Blood was sprayed up the walls and dripped from the ceiling. Ulli looked around to see the passageway choked with greenskin corpses in both directions. A few groans and dying whimpers came from the bodies.
He could not see his battle-brothers. He called out their names, and his own voice was dull in his ears. There was no reply.
Ulli hauled greenskin bodies away, digging in the places he had seen his fellow Space Wolves last. He spotted a chainblade sticking up from the mass and hauled corpses aside to reveal Fejor Redblade, lying face down. Ulli turned him over and saw his breastplate had been carved open by an orkish cleaver or power claw, and the red ruin within had been torn by teeth and claws. Fejor’s jaw was still clenched and set, for he had died denying the pain, fighting on without showing the enemy they had hurt him. His eyes were open. Ulli lifted Fejor off the ground and propped the body against the wall.
A sudden desperation seized Ulli. He dived into the bodies where Tanngjost had fought, where they were piled high and sliced apart by his twin blades. The wounds on the orkish bodies were still smouldering with the power of the runes Ulli had etched on Tanngjost’s knives. Ulli’s body complained as he dug in a frenzy, like a starving animal clawing through frozen earth.
Ulli’s hand closed on ceramite – a gauntlet. He grabbed and pulled, and Tanngjost’s body came free, heaved up through the broken limbs and sundered bodies. It was slick and dripping with ork blood.
Unlike Fejor, Tanngjost had died with his fury written across his face. His lips were drawn back, showing the elongated canines grown by every ageing Space Wolf. It could have been any one of a score of wounds that had finally killed him – cleaver wounds into his chest, one leg shattered and bent unnaturally, a deep cut to his scalp, punctures through his back and abdomen. Dried blood beaded, jewel-like, where he had bled and fought on.
Ulli held Tanngjost’s body and shuddered. All the pain caught up to him at once. The red veil dissolved into a million points of pain spreading through his body, pooling in his joints and the wound in his chest, sparking through the back of his mind. For a moment it was overwhelming and Ulli felt he would pitch over into the mass of bodies, his augmented organs finally failing and his mind shutting down, and that he would die alongside his brothers there in Sacred Mountain.
But the Fenrisian cold would not melt away. It demanded Ulli rise and stay alive, just as it had done during his Blooding, just as when his heart had refused to stop beating when he was executed with the rest of the Vulture Tribe. Ulli did not die but threw back his head and howled, and the sound echoed down to the heart of Sacred Mountain and back again.
The sound of mourning scoured away the red veil. When Ulli opened his eyes the pain was gone, replaced with a deep chill that filled him. His skin prickled with sensitivity and his throat was raw with the cold air.
He laid Tanngjost Seven Fingers alongside Fejor Redblade. The gene-seed organs of both Space Wolves were still intact. Ulli let himself take solace in that. Whatever happened, the flesh of Russ would be taken from their throats and implanted into a new Space Wolf. Their spirits would never truly die.
The orks had stopped. Though the three Space Wolves had killed many indeed, it was just a fraction of the army that had remained after the avalanche. But they had stopped, and it was not at all like the greenskin to hold off in their assault when an enemy still lived. They should still be pouring in to defile the bodies of the Space Wolves, and charge on into Sacred Mountain to loot and destroy.
The dullness of Ulli’s senses was gone, and his ears pricked when he heard a familiar sound. It was the roar of engines, the engines of a Stormwolf gunship that could carry a squad of Space Wolves into the heart of battle.
He heard bolter fire and the howling of Fenrisian wolves loosed at the prey. He heard a hunting horn sounded.
Ulli clambered free of the bodies and ran for the entrance to Sacred Mountain. The air was heavy with the stench of newly shed blood, and the rankness of greenskin flesh. The floor was slick with blood and frost. The bodies ran right up to the entrance where Fejor and Tanngjost had begun the fight before falling back. Framed against the stark blue sky, Ulli saw another drop pod falling towards the mountain slope, in the grey livery of the Space Wolves, with its landing jets firing.
The pod bore the markings of Ragnar Blackmane, the Wolf Lord of his Great Company. Reinforcements from below had arrived, in force, eager for revenge.
Ulli reached the entrance, and below him unfolded the whole scene.
The Space Wolves had landed scattered around the lower slopes, their drop pods deployed from a modified Thunderhawk gunship that circled above. They were fighting as they unbuckled their grav-harnesses and leapt from the pods. Grey Hunters formed firing lines mowing down the orks that had broken off their attack on the mountain to storm down the slopes towards the new threat. Blood Claws, with bright red and yellow markings on their armour, shrieked battle-cries and ran with chainswords drawn at the closest orks. A Dreadnought stomped free of its clamps and levelled its assault cannon at the greenskins.
Ulli spotted Lord Ragnar Blackmane himself leaping free of his grav-restraints and drawing his frost blade, which flashed like a bolt of lightning. Blackmane was accompanied by Ulrik, the eldest of the Wolf Priests, his face hidden by his wolf’s skull helm, and a squad of Wolf Guard in Terminator armour hung with trophies and honours. Ulli’s heart should have leapt to see his Wolf Lord come to bring destruction to the greenskins, but the deaths of his battle-brothers were too raw in his mind to let in any joy.
He heard a familiar howl, one that echoed around the peak even above the gunfire and war-cries from below. On the promontory stood Aesor Dragon’s Head, his own frost blade raised, not in salute to Blackmane but in challenge. In the greenskin throng Ulli saw the ork leader stop in its charge forward and return the challenge, raising its cleaver high and bellowing a wordless response.
Aesor wanted his duel with the greenskin. He would die here fighting it, or defeat it and live on forever sustained by the corruption inside him. He could not lose.
Ulli knew the path the future would take if Aesor won. The Space Wolves would run to him and embrace him as a victorious brother, and they would all be exposed to that corruption – all those sons of Fenris who did not have the protection of a Rune Priest’s psychic discipline. How many would fall to the corruption entering their minds through their greatest flaw? It would return to the Chapter, that corruption, perhaps to the Fang itself. And if the greenskin won the duel it would continue its campaign on Alaric Prime, escape the mountainside in the confusion of battle and take its machine-curse to the Imperial Knights fighting below.
Whoever won
that duel, the Space Wolves and this world would suffer for it. Both Aesor and the greenskin had to lose.
They both had to die.
Ulli could not fight them himself. He was a poor opponent for Aesor or the ork at the best of times and now he was exhausted and wounded. His fellow Space Wolves were too far away to intervene, and even if they could, would they kill Aesor before they were exposed? Ulli had seen what Aesor had become. Blackmane and the rest of the Great Company had not. No Space Wolf would stay his hand when the kill was necessary – except if the kill were of one of his own. Even Ragnar Blackmane might hesitate.
Ulli had to do it himself, and this time his rune axe would not help him. He leaned against the rock, almost robbed of all his strength by the weight of what he had to do.
The ork bounded up to the promontory and bellowed a war-cry. Aesor howled in reply. The ork vaulted onto the rocky spur and slashed at Aesor, who parried and stepped aside. The duel had begun. There was no more time.
Ulli drew in a breath of the cold mountain air, felt it run like freezing water through his ruined lungs, and ran back into Sacred Mountain.
SEVEN
The datamedium cavern had escaped the bloodshed. The orks had not got that far before Blackmane’s assault drew them away. The Dominus Vult still lay in its pooling blackness. The charred eye sockets of the dead baron watched Ulli as he limped into the chamber. The sounds of battle were little more here than a dull crackle of distant gunfire.
Ulli knelt on the floor and laid his axe beside him. He tried to divine some reaction to his presence, some flicker of recognition against his psychic sense.
‘You tried to take my soul,’ he said quietly. ‘You were nearly successful. That was when you found your way into my mind with perfidy and deceit. Now, I bid you enter.’
He felt nothing. A drop of blackness, like glistening tar, dripped from the Imperial Knight’s faceplate onto the crystal floor.
‘My brother saved me,’ continued Ulli. ‘But he lies dead and I am alone. We both know you can break me. And we both know you cannot turn down a mind like this to ravage. An Imperial psyker, a Rune Priest of Fenris. How many of your kind ever claim a trophy like me?’
There was a response to that. A low whisper, a laugh or a curse, not a sound but a rumbling at the base of Ulli’s skull.
If the machine-curse reached the Chapter, it would enter their minds through their pride – through the sin of every Space Marine. And it was also the sin of the daemon.
The chamber began to melt away. Darkness ran down the walls. The floor shifted under Ulli, deepening into the trash-choked base of a deep ravine. Skulls and long-withered bodies lay in the detritus and Ulli caught the familiar scent of carrion and smoke.
Sacred Mountain was gone, and Ulli was somewhere else.
There was a memory that Ulli kept locked away, using the mental techniques the Rune Priests had taught him. He had not forgotten it entirely, for it was much too important a part of him to abandon. But it was dangerous, and so he had placed it behind a barrier of mental steel, shut away as the keeper of a library might shut away a blasphemous work too valuable to burn.
It was a memory that at all times would create the heresy of doubt in Ulli’s mind, except in those rarest cases when it would give him strength. Knowing the difference was a discipline he had learned in long sessions of meditation and sleep-doctrination, before the vigil of the Rune Priests who trained him.
The memory was one of the cold slab against his back, and the heat of the incinerator nearby. The sound of cracking bones and spitting fat in the flames. The sight, blurry and painful, of a stone ceiling above him, flickering orange.
He heard breathing beside him as the thrall, muscular and tanned deep bronze on his shirtless back, hauled another of the Vulture Clan dead into the incinerator.
Ulli had forced his eyes open all the way, and drawn in a weak, ragged breath in spite of the pain in his side. Bolter shell fragments, he would later learn, had lodged in his chest cavity and would need weeks of surgery to remove.
‘Stop,’ said a voice, deep and commanding. The thrall, one of the thousands who worked maintaining the Fang under the command of the Wolf Lords, halted and looked around uncertainly. ‘My lord?’ he asked.
‘This one lives,’ said the other voice. Ulli forced his head around and saw two Wolf Priests overseeing the disposal of the Vulture Clan bodies. One was the same who had shot him at the Valley of the Burning Stones, whose name he would later learn to be Vortigan Breakbone. The second wore a suit of polished black power armour with a wolf’s-skull helm, the pale bone grinning down at Ulli as the second Wolf Priest regarded him.
Then, this Wolf Priest had been a vision from a nightmare, an otherworldly power sent to judge the dead. Now Ulli knew him to be Ulrik the Slayer, the most senior Wolf Priest of his generation.
‘Damnation,’ spat Vortigan. ‘This one’s stubborn. Be warned, Brother Ulrik, he’s a witch-child.’ Vortigan drew his combat knife, as long as a sword, but a dagger in his hand.
Ulli Vulturekin had not fully understood their words, but he knew well enough their meaning. He also knew that it was no use reasoning with the man who had killed him once already.
He turned to the wolf-skull helm and forced himself to meet its eyes. Lenses of red were set into its sockets, reflecting the furnace fire. ‘Stop,’ Ulli gasped, hoping this Wolf Priest would understand enough of his tribe’s dialect. ‘You do not know what I can do.’
‘Then tell me,’ replied the wolf’s skull in a version of Fenrisian that Ulli Vulturekin could just understand. ‘But be quick. My brother here has made up his mind about killing you, and I cannot stay him for long.’
Ulli swallowed, a painful movement that reminded him how severe the wounds inside must be. And then he told Ulrik the Slayer just what Ulli Vulturekin was.
Ulli held on to the memory as the new world formed around him. This time it was not taken to a place from his own mind. He was here on the machine-curse’s terms, and it had laid out for him a vision of Hel such as the fieriest Imperial preachers would fear to conjure up.
Crevasses brimming with corpses criss-crossed the blasted landscape, reaching to the foot of the wall that bounded a massive dark city. The bodies writhed and pulsed with decay, bursting like pustules in eruptions of bile and filth, and they screamed in the drizzle of corrosive sludge that fell from a purple-black sky. Faces melted away. Hands reached out, were stripped to bone, and dissolved to nothing.
The city’s towers and cathedrals were vast organs, heaving out over the edge of their confinement like rolls of corpulent belly. Lengths of entrails slithered into the seething death, fanged mouths sucking up the decaying gore. Banners showing the symbols of the carrion insect and the gouged eye hung from the highest spurs of bone, where flocks of enormously bloated flies hung like dark clouds.
Daemons leapt and cackled on the edges of the crevasses, dragging corpses out with hooked spears and throwing them onto the stones like landed fish to be gutted, cut up, and thrown back in. Some choice heads and organs were carried to lords of their kind who sat on palanquins, snatching up the finest and gulping them down. A few were taken by messenger-daemons to the gates of the city, to be passed on for the delectation of its rulers. Each daemon was a vision of decay, a corpse bloated and rotting but animated with a gleeful purpose, and each had a single yellow eye that bled malicious light.
‘This is where you bring me?’ called out Ulli, knowing the corruption could hear him. ‘A world of daemons and decay? I am a Space Marine and a son of Fenris! I know no fear! And I saw worse than this before I left my crib. Do you seek to challenge me or to make me laugh?’
A tide rose through the rotting bodies and they swelled up into the air in a foetid column of flesh. A face formed in the mass, noseless, with three pits for eyes over a wide frog-like mouth. The whole thing was enormous, the size of a tall building.
‘You lie, Ulli Vulturekin,’ it said, though the voice was not truly sound but so
mething conjured in Ulli’s mind. ‘You despair to know your mind will be lost in a place like this.’
‘Not as much,’ retorted Ulli, ‘as I would despair to be a greenskin slave!’
The face creased with rage. The world the corruption had created flickered and shifted, as if in its anger it lost its concentration for a moment.
‘What did it have to offer to bind you into service, daemon?’ yelled Ulli. ‘A million dead? A billion? A world for you to defile? And was it enough to make you kneel before the beast?’
The daemon’s rage rained down as scalding blood. Its eye pits caught fire, flames consuming liquefying flesh. A Space Marine had pride, but the daemon – and the machine-curse was most definitely a daemon in information form – had rage. That was another of its sins, and it was inflamed by Ulli speaking of how the greenskin must have summoned it forth and bound it into service.
The world melted around Ulli. The sky ran down the horizon like wet paint. The walls sagged under their own weight, spilling the rancid offal of the city out onto the plain. Ulli planted his feet and willed stability around him, so he stood as an island in a churning sea.
The mass of corpses fell apart. Limbs rained down and vanished, drops of corruption in the swirl of bile that now made up the world. The noxious mass churned around Ulli and he dropped to one knee, driving the butt of his axe into the ground to steady himself.
‘Now,’ said Ulli through a grimace of concentration, ‘I will show you a place of my own.’
In his mind’s eye he created it, and around him it took shape. It was a place from his youth, the substance of another toxic memory he kept locked away even more closely than the first time he spoke with Ulrik the Slayer. A cave in the Valley of the Burning Stones, cut of sharp obsidian deep into the valley wall, stifling and hot. The heat came from the fire in the centre of the room, guttering with blackened bones.
