The sorcerous flames washed over the Wolf Priest in a chorus of thin, unearthly howls and a crackle of brittle thunder. Two Blood Claws to either side of the priest were thrown to the floor by the blast, but Sigurd was unmoved. The flames curled away from the rosarius that the Wolf Priest held before him, and he called out in a powerful voice, “Traitor! Servant of false gods! I abjure you, warrior of the Thousand Sons! Look upon the sons of the Wolf and despair!”
The Thousand Sons Chaos Space Marine laughed at the Wolf Priest and uttered a stream of vile curses that caused the rebel Guardsmen to fall thrashing to the floor. Baring his teeth, Ragnar gathered his courage and charged at the unholy warrior, snapping off shots with his bolt pistol as he went.
Explosive rounds detonated harmlessly against the champion’s breastplate and helm, leaving scarcely a mark on the ensorcelled armour. Undaunted, Ragnar stepped close and unleashed a storm of deadly blows with his master crafted frost blade, fully intending to chop the Chaos Space Marine to pieces.
Not a single blow found its mark. Whether by sorcery or pure, deadly skill, the champion blocked or evaded Ragnar’s every move. The huge figure moved like quicksilver, seeming to anticipate the young Space Wolfs attacks, and countering them with disdainful ease. At one point Ragnar sensed he’d found an opening in the sorcerer’s guard and nearly found himself impaled on the champion’s unnatural blade.
A shadow flowed into Ragnar’s field of vision to his left. Torin was there, catching the sorcerer’s blade against his chainsword. Sensing an opportunity, Ragnar lunged forward with a slashing cut to the champion’s shoulder, but the Chaos Space Marine fell back, dodging the blow.
Shouts and battle cries echoed in the confined space as the rebel troops reared up from the stone floor like beasts, and threw themselves at the Space Wolves. Dimly, Ragnar heard Sigurd repudiating the traitor Guardsmen in a loud, sonorous voice over the roar of chainblades and the bark of laspistols. Then a mountainous form loomed to the young Space Wolf’s right and unleashed an earth shaking blow upon the Chaos champion. Haegr laughed as the sorcerer leapt backwards out of the path of the falling hammer. “That’s it, traitor! Dance like a maid!” he roared. “You can’t match blows with mighty Haegr!”
The sorcerer’s hateful gaze never wavered, however, as he fell back, step by step, across the chamber. Ragnar counted the steps and gauged their distance to the far wall. He’ll have his back up against the bricks in a few more metres, he thought, pressing his attack, and the bastard’s too good not to know it, too. He’s trading space for time.
A flash of understanding nearly stopped Ragnar in his tracks. “Ambush!” he cried out, just as the air seemed to thicken and tear like rotted parchment, and a host of gibbering horrors appeared in the Space Wolves’ midst.
Something heavy and rank landed wetly behind Ragnar and uttered a piping lunatic cry. Fearful of turning his back on the deadly Chaos Marine, the young Space Wolf pivoted on his back foot and thrust out his pistol at a writhing column of pink and purple flesh. The daemon’s four thorny tentacles wrapped around Ragnar’s arm and chest, and the column of muscle contracted, hauling the young Space Wolf towards the creature’s serrated beak.
Ragnar cried out as the black beak gaped mere centimetres from his skull. Then he felt the lash of another set of tentacles around his neck and waist, and he was jerked to a painful halt. Yet another daemon had trapped him in its talons, and now the two unholy creatures gibbered and squawked at one another as they vied for his flesh.
An entire pack of tentacled horrors filled the octagonal space, snapping and lashing out at everything that moved. As Ragnar struggled, he saw a pair of rebel Guardsmen torn to pieces in a messy spray of blood and entrails. Sigurd reeled within the grasp of a trio of snapping monsters, thick purple ichor smoking from the crackling edges of his crozius. The Blood Claws were beset on every side, but Harald stood in their midst, holding the burning husk of a daemon in his power fist and shouting a rallying cry to his men.
Growling angrily, Ragnar squeezed the trigger and the bolt pistol bucked in his hand, blowing a smoking hole in the daemon standing before him. Shrieking, the monster recoiled, drawing its tentacles still tighter. The daemon behind Ragnar pulled back just as fiercely, and the young Space Wolf felt the bones in his neck creak from the strain. With a savage curse, he lashed out with his free hand, and the frost blade slashed through two of the tentacles that bound him. Ichor gushed over Ragnar’s armour as the daemon in front of him unwrapped its remaining tentacles and tried to slither away. Immediately, the young Space Wolf was hauled backwards towards his second assailant, but Ragnar levelled his bolt pistol and fired twice more at the wounded daemon, blasting its head apart in a shower of dissolving flesh. Then he spun in mid-air, levelling his frost blade and impaling the daemon that had been so hungry to draw him into its embrace. The rune-marked chainsword tore through the daemon’s abominable form, causing it to discorporate into a cloud of foul, clinging mist.
Ragnar twisted as he fell, landing hard on his back and skidding across the stone floor. His bolt pistol came up, seeking targets. The entire chamber was filled with a riot of struggling, slashing bodies, and the crash of battle roared surf-like in his ears. The light inside the chamber seemed to pulse and shift. Shadows flitted at the corners of the young Space Wolfs eyes, but he muttered a prayer to Russ under his breath and focused on the battle at hand.
He caught sight of a Blood Claw grappling with a snapping, strangling daemon a few metres away and put a bolt-round through the monster’s nominal head. Another warrior went down beneath the thrashing tentacles of a pair of purple horrors. Ragnar pumped shell after shell into the daemons’ muscular bodies until the Space Wolf managed to tear his sword-arm free and hack one of the monsters in half.
A severed head bounced across the floor. The face was masked with blood, but Ragnar knew from the scent that it was one of Harald’s battle-brothers. Some distance away, the young Space Wolf saw Haegr pull a lashing, snapping daemon from his chest with one broad hand and smash it against the wall beside him. Another monster darted in, bloodstained beak clashing hungrily, but the Wolfblade crushed it with a downward sweep of his massive hammer.
Another daemon erupted in a gout of purple ichor. Harald raised his dripping power fist in triumph, his fangs glinting in the faint light. Then Ragnar saw the monster rising like a snake behind the pack leader, its tentacles rearing back to strike.
Ragnar drew a bead on the daemon, and a dark shadow fell over him. He heard the rasp of ancient armour and the hungry sweep of the Chaos champion’s blade as it drew back for the killing blow.
In a split-second, the young Space Wolf made his choice. Commending his soul to the Allfather, he fired an explosive round past the pack leader’s head and into the daemon’s gaping beak.
Shadows danced above his head. Metal crashed against metal, and Ragnar heard a rumbling liquid growl.
Blood pounding in his temples, Ragnar faced his attacker, only to find the sorcerer grappling with a huge Space Wolf in scarred, gunmetal-grey armour. The warrior fought the champion bare-handed, one powerful hand gripping the sorcerer’s sword wrist, while the other closed inexorably around the Chaos Marine’s throat.
There was wiry grey fur matted along the back of the Space Wolfs hands. Ragnar caught a glimpse of curved, black talons, and then he noticed the shaggy mane and the strange shape of the warrior’s head.
The Space Wolf sensed Ragnar’s eyes upon him. He glanced back at Ragnar, furred snout wrinkling as his lips pulled back in a bestial snarl.
Cursing wildly, Ragnar hurled himself to the right, rolling away from the struggling figures. In moments, he clambered unsteadily to his feet and whirled around, weapons raised, but the struggling warriors were gone. They had simply vanished, as though they’d never existed.
Bolt pistols hammered, the shots echoing from the walls. Chainswords sang their harsh battle song tearing through unnatural flesh, and then, abruptly, the only sound was the panting of ex
hausted men and the pained breaths of the wounded.
The stone floor seemed to sway beneath Ragnar’s feet. Numb with shock, he surveyed the blood spattered chamber. Harald and half a dozen Blood Claws were still on their feet, their eyes wide and their armour splashed with gore. Three others knelt or lay among the bodies on the floor, wounded grievously but still alive. Two battle-brothers would not rise again, their bodies ripped apart by tentacles and snapping, serrated beaks.
Haegr knelt by Torin’s prone form a few metres to Ragnar’s left. The older Wolfblade was struggling to rise with Haegr’s help, despite a deep wound in his hip.
A feeling of dread settled in Ragnar’s stomach as he began to inspect the dead. Every one of the rebel officers had been torn apart by daemons or melted by sorcerous flames.
Of Sigurd, there was no sign. The young Space Wolf Priest was gone.
They rode back aboard the Thunderhawks in silence, each warrior lost in his own grim thoughts. Harald had suggested looting the war room of every bit of useful information they could find, and they dragged away makeshift boxes full of maps, data-slates and memory cores. As they loaded up their wounded and dead, however, the Wolves could not help but feel that they had failed.
Ragnar reported to Mikal Sternmark while the raiding party was still in the air, apprising him of what had happened. The loss of Sigurd was an exceptionally hard blow to Sternmark, recalling as it did the ambush at the governor’s palace a few weeks earlier. Ragnar accepted full responsibility for what had happened in the bunker, lauding the courage of Harald and his pack as well as his fellow Wolfblades, but he wasn’t sure Sternmark paid attention to any of it.
The return flight took them low over the southern outskirts of the city, and it was obvious to everyone on board that the forces of the enemy were on the move. Plumes of blue-black petrochem exhaust hung in a poisonous haze over the cratered transit ways leading into the capital, as regiments of infantry and armour moved towards the tenuous Imperial lines. White flashes stuttered and strobed beyond the hills west of the city as rebel gun batteries pounded the eastern rim of the capital. More than once the Thunderhawks and their Valkyrie escorts had to dive behind broken ridges or weathered hilltops to evade rebel anti-aircraft rockets or gun positions, and it was more than an hour after dust-off before the assault ships reached friendly lines and could land at Charys starport.
They disembarked in the middle of another rocket attack, carrying their seriously wounded brothers to the port’s medicae facilities through a storm of fire and shrapnel. Torin wanted no part of the packed and chaotic field hospital, with its exhausted chirurgeons and outdated equipment. He insisted his wound was minor and would heal quicker on its own. “I’d rather lie down in the dark somewhere like a wounded hound than risk getting my limbs cut off by some drunken bone-cutter,” he declared, and his protests grew so vehement that even Haegr shrugged his broad shoulders and relented. Of course, they hadn’t the faintest idea what to do with the older Wolfblade, so finally Ragnar and Haegr turned around and carried him back to the Thunderhawk.
Once they’d settled Torin back in the same suspensor-web he’d lain in on the flight out of the PDF base, Ragnar left Haegr to watch over their battle-brother and headed to the command bunker to report to Athelstane and Sternmark. On the way there he thought to check with Gabriella and ensure that she was safe, but the memory of what he’d done back at the rebel base was still painfully fresh in his mind. I’m as much a danger to her as the enemy is, he thought in despair, wondering what was going to happen to him now.
Every Space Wolf struggled with the wolf inside him. The gifts of the Canis Helix made them into peerless warriors, but such savagery was two-edged. The wolf within was always testing its limits, seeking escape in the fire of battle to rend and tear until its appetite was sated. Once the wolf had got its teeth in a man, there was no turning back, so far as Ragnar knew. Little by little his mind slipped away and his body succumbed to the influence of the helix’s bestial influence. Sometimes there were Wolf Lords who took one of the Wulfen into battle with them, but most often the wolf-bitten were given into the care of the Wolf Priests and taken from the Fang, never to fight for the Chapter again.
Now he understood from whence his dreams had come, and why he had been feeling so strange of late, but the realisation gave him little comfort. He would probably be dismissed from the Wolfblade, he reasoned, and without a Wolf Lord willing to speak for him, this campaign would doubtless be his last.
Ragnar gritted his teeth and pushed such thoughts from his mind. For now, there was a battle to be fought and won.
The young Space Wolf found an open crate of field rations in the command bunker, and forced himself to eat. It had only been a few days since he’d last had a meal, but focusing on his body’s mundane needs kept more troubling thoughts at bay. The ration paste also helped kill the taste of blood that still lingered in his mouth.
“We should have expected this all along after the ambush at the governor’s palace,” Sternmark said bitterly. “What I want to know is how they knew when we were going to strike?”
The Wolf Guard was pacing along the back wall of the bunker’s war room, gauntleted hands clasped tightly behind his back. Sternmark’s face was fierce and brooding his dark eyes darting from Ragnar to Athelstane and back again. The Guard general sat in a nearby camp chair, fixing the situation holo with a dark stare. From the beleaguered look on her face Ragnar suspected that she hadn’t slept in days.
Ragnar stood at parade-rest at the foot of the table opposite the general. He raised his scarred chin and addressed them both. “I don’t believe it was an ambush at all,” he said. “If the rebels wanted to lay a trap for us at the base they could have done it easily enough without putting their generals in the crossfire.”
“At this point I’m starting to have my doubts that they were generals at all,” Athelstane said with a frown. She gestured at the holo with a gloved hand. “Their planned counter-offensive hasn’t skipped a beat. Reconnaissance imagery shows that the traitors have moved another forty thousand men into the city since daybreak, and they’ll be in a position to hit us by tomorrow. The Emperor alone knows how we’re going to stop them.”
Ragnar shook his head. “You didn’t see the looks on their faces when we broke into the vault. Those men were high-ranking officers, all right, and they were desperate to escape,” he said. “They had painted some kind of symbol on the floor. It looked like they were calling for help, honestly.”
“Yet the Chaos champion and his daemons killed those same men during the fight,” Sternmark pointed out. “If the champion killed the army commanders, who then is leading the counter-offensive?”
The young Space Wolf shrugged. “The Thousand Sons themselves, I would think,” he replied. “We know this world is the lynchpin to their entire campaign. I can’t imagine that they would trust a cabal of Guard officers to defend it.” He glanced uncomfortably at Athelstane. “No offence, ma’am.”
Athelstane brushed the remark aside with an impatient wave of her hand. “If the Thousand Sons are commanding the planet’s defence, where are they? They must have a base somewhere on the planet, correct?”
“Not necessarily, I’m afraid.”
Heads turned at the sound of Gabriella’s voice. The Navigator and Inquisitor Volt stood at the edge of the former stage, their arms piled with dusty books. She looked to the Inquisitor, who nodded and addressed the general. His face was pale and grim.
“We think we know where the Thousand Sons are striking from,” he said. “If we are right, we are all in far greater danger than we imagined.”
TEN
Tripwire
“It was Lady Gabriella who provided the key,” Volt said quickly. The inquisitor shuffled up onto the stage and spread his weathered books on the situation table. The holo image above the table warped into a storm of rainbow hued static as Volt covered many of the hololith’s projector eyes.
“What’s all this about?” Athelst
ane asked, unable to conceal a note of irritation in her voice.
The inquisitor didn’t seem to hear the general at all. “As focused as I was on events here on Charys, I failed to pay close attention to reports from the other affected worlds across the subsector,” Volt said, fumbling with his trembling, bandaged hands at the iron lock and hinge securing one of the tomes. The book’s cover was smoke stained and charred along the edges, and one corner of its heavy, cream-coloured pages was spotted with red.
“A… a campaign of this size, with so much preparation, it should have been obvious that there were deeper patterns in play,” Volt said, almost to himself, as he rifled through the thick pages. “The diversionary attacks, yes, and the choice of targets… Ah! Here,” he said, gripping the bottom of the open book with both hands and turning it around so that Athelstane and Sternmark could see. “This is what I’m talking about.”
The general and the huge Space Wolf leaned over the table. Volt had opened the book to a page covered in hand lettered High Gothic script. Spread across the pages was a vast, intricate circle, inscribed with dense patterns of blasphemous runes. Athelstane caught just a glimpse and turned away, making the sign of the aquila and muttering a prayer under her breath. Sternmark raised his eyes and studied the inquisitor carefully.
“This is not the symbol I saw in the governor’s palace,” he said.
“No, not at the palace!” Volt snapped, his grey eyes blazing. He turned and beckoned to Ragnar. “You were at Hyades, were you not? Tell me what you see.”
Frowning bemusedly, Ragnar stepped over to the table. The lines etched in red across the page burned into his mind, calling up a memory of the tense shuttle flight off the beleaguered Imperial world. He glanced from Volt to Gabriella. “It’s the symbol we saw burning over the capital city,” he said.
“Aha!” Volt said, pleased to hear the young Space Wolfs confirmation. “This is what is known as a cornerstone, an anchoring sigil designed to shape the boundaries of a much larger occult symbol,” he said. “In my time, I’ve seen them spread across the hab blocks of a small hive city, even once across the breadth of an entire island.” He traced a finger across the surface of the page. “Only once in history has anyone attempted such a feat on an interstellar scale.”
[Space Wolf 06] - Wolf's Honour Page 14
