Ragnar twisted his head to see who had seized him. He found himself staring down at a giant of a man, straight from the most ancient tapestries of the Great Wolf’s Hall at the Fang. The warrior was tall and lean, cased in ornate armour wrought during the glory days of the Great Crusade. His pauldrons were edged in gold and finely carved with scenes of battle, and the pelt of the largest wolf Ragnar had ever seen was stretched across the man’s broad shoulders. Trophies from a hundred campaigns decorated the warrior’s breastplate or hung from his wide belt: fearsome skulls and cloven helms, medallions of gold and silver, polished scales and plaques of raw iron. In his left hand the warrior gripped the haft of a fearsome axe, wrought from a metal blacker than the night. Runes glittered like frost across its surface, and it exuded a cold nimbus of dread that chilled Ragnar’s very soul. Unlike his kin, the warrior’s head was bald, and his blond beard was close-shaven. Fierce blue eyes glittered like chips of polar ice beneath a grim, forbidding brow.
“Leman gave us the blessings of the wolf so that we would never be defeated by our foes,” he said, “but his gifts come with a price. As we are born to battle, so are we called to prove our worth time and again, through strength, courage and guile. War within. War without. War unending. That is how we live, little brother. That is who we are.” The warrior shook Ragnar once more, as if to emphasise his point. “I am Bulveye, axe man of the Russ and lord of this warband,” he said. “Do you hear what I’ve said to you?”
Ragnar gritted his teeth and drew a deep breath as he summoned the catechisms of self-discipline he’d been taught as an aspirant. By force of will, he dampened the sensations wracking his body and struggled to clear his troubled thoughts. “I… I hear you lord,” he said after a moment. “I hear and obey.”
Bulveye nodded in approval and set Ragnar on his feet. The sheer force of his presence seemed to still the chaos sweeping through the camp. He paid no mind to Gabriella at all, turning his full attention to Haegr and Torin. “What of you, brothers?” he asked, his eyes narrowing in appraisal.
Torin sank to one knee before the giant. His face was wracked with pain, and his eyes had turned yellow-gold, but a brief smile caused his moustache to twitch. “I am no stranger to this fight, my lord,” he said breathlessly. “The wolf may howl, but I am unmoved.”
“And you?” the warrior asked, turning to Haegr.
The burly Wolf puffed out his broad chest. “The mighty Haegr fears no one!” he declared. “Not even Haegr himself!”
Ragnar was cheered by his fellow Wolfblade’s bravado, even as he saw signs of terrible strain around Haegr’s eyes, but then he heard a bestial snarl off to his right, and saw that not everyone had been as fortunate as they.
Harald and his Blood Claws, all of them little more than aspirants, had suffered the worst under the sorcerous onslaught. Their faces were distended, already lengthening to form wolf-like snouts, and their skin was darkening with a fine pelt of fur. They crouched like beasts within a circle of the Thirteenth Company’s Wulfen, snapping and snarling whenever the older beasts drew too close. Many of the warriors had tugged their gauntlets free and slashed at the air with thick, curved talons.
The sight stunned Ragnar, and a prayer to the Allfather came, unbidden to his lips. At that moment, the warrior that had been Harald glanced up and met Ragnar’s eyes. The young Wulfen threw back his head and uttered a single howl of despair.
Bulveye looked upon the cursed warriors and shook his head sadly. “Where are you, young priest?” he called.
Sigurd emerged from the pack of stricken Blood Claws. The Wolf Priest’s face was ashen with grief. His eyes, once dark, were now a deep yellow-gold.
“Here I am, lord,” he said sombrely.
Bulveye nodded. “Tend to your brothers, priest,” he said quietly. “The first hours are always the hardest.”
Sigurd nodded, a bleak look upon his young face. Then he turned, spreading his hands, and began to chant a litany that Ragnar had heard only once in his time with the Chapter. It was the Litany of the Lost, a mournful observance for those who had been taken by the Wulfen.
Another, smaller figure elbowed his way through the snarling mob of wolf-men. Inquisitor Volt looked feverish with shock and fatigue, his eyes wide and his seamed face taut with strain. He caught sight of Ragnar and Lady Gabriella and rushed to their side. “What has happened?” he demanded, falling to his knees beside the stunned Navigator.
Gabriella reached for the old inquisitor’s arm like a drowning man clutches at a storm-tossed spar. Her pineal eye still burned brightly in her forehead, and her face was as white as chalk. “A wave of psychic force,” she gasped. “So much power, so much hunger, flowing like molten iron through the aether.”
“The ritual,” Volt said. He turned to stare at Harald and his monstrous packmates. “Blessed Emperor,” he whispered, his voice filled with dread. “They’ve completed the ritual. We’re too late.”
The Navigator’s gaze drifted back to Ragnar once again, and a look of horrified realisation drained the last of the colour from her face. “You would have killed me,” she said, her voice leaden with anguish. “Had it not been for Lord Bulveye, you would have torn out my throat!”
Ragnar stared speechlessly at the Navigator, struck dumb by the enormity of what he’d nearly done, but the Wolf Lord spoke.
“Allies we may be, Lady Bellisarius, but we are not tame dogs to sniff at your heels,” Bulveye said sternly.
“Even a loyal wolf bites if provoked. You and your people would do well to remember that.” He fixed the inquisitor with his steely gaze. “The lady I know by the heraldry she wears,” he said. “Who are you?”
Volt rose to his full height and met the Wolf Lord’s eyes. “Inquisitor Cadmus Volt of the Ordo Malleus,” he said coolly.
Bulveye’s craggy brows knitted in consternation. “Inquisitor?” he asked. “Is that anything like a remembrancer?”
The old man was taken aback by the Wolf Lord’s reply. “Certainly not,” he stammered.
“Good. Then I won’t have to feed you to my wolves,” Bulveye replied gruffly. “Now tell me of this ritual.”
The old inquisitor recovered his composure quickly and shook his head. “First, tell me what this is,” he said, pointing to the Wulfen. “At first, I thought your warriors had been twisted by exposure to the warp, but now I wonder if this is something deeper. The Inquisition has long suspected that there were flaws in the Space Wolf gene-seed. Is this true?”
The Wolf Lord’s eyes narrowed coldly. “I was wrong,” he said quietly. His hand drifted to the pistol at his hip. “It appears I’ll have to kill you after all.”
“It’s the curse!” Ragnar snarled, overcome with horror and shame. “I can feel it, like a hot coal buried in my brain. Madox has cast a spell to awaken the Wulfen in all of us.” He stared up at Bulveye. “Even you, my lord! Surely you must feel it as well.”
The Wolf Lord set his jaw stubbornly, but there was a glimmer of doubt deep in his eyes. “How do you know that thrice-cursed fiend, Madox?” he asked.
“There is a blood feud between us,” Ragnar answered. “He has stolen the Spear of Russ, and I have sworn an oath to get it back.”
The news struck the Wolf Lord like a physical blow. “Morkai’s teeth!” he snarled, his eyes widening. He turned, seeking out the hulking form of the Rune Priest. “Torvald! Did you hear—”
“No need to shout,” the Rune Priest said, making his way through the crowd of warriors towards Bulveye and Ragnar. “The pup speaks the truth, lord. I’ve told you for some time that the air here stank of sorcery, and now I know why. I curse myself for a fool for not suspecting it sooner.” The bearded warrior gave Bulveye a meaningful look. “And now these tidings of Madox and the spear. You see? The runes did not lie!”
“They may not have lied, but they tell their truths sidewise,” Bulveye said. He raised his head to the empty sky, and for an instant Ragnar saw an enormous weariness etched into the lines of the Wolf Lord’s fac
e. Then it was gone, so quickly that the young Space Wolf could not be certain he’d seen it at all, and Bulveye surveyed his warband with a commanding gaze.
“Torvald, summon the pack leaders,” the Lord of the Thirteenth Company said. “It’s time we held a council of war.”
For a fleeting instant, Mikal Sternmark was gripped by the jaws of a dragon. Fierce heat and a thunderous concussion buffeted him, and red-hot shrapnel raked at his face and neck. He staggered beneath the blow, but did not fall.
A shower of dirt and stone rained down all around him. Smoke curled from the surface of his Terminator armour, but he was still alive, and Redclaw still pointed defiantly at the sky.
It took several long seconds before Sternmark understood that he’d been spared. He looked around, dazed, and saw the stunned figures of his bodyguards, all of them battered and bloodied, but nevertheless alive. Among them, Sven and his battle-brothers were picking themselves up off the ground and looking off to the east in amazement. The battle cannon shell had landed just a few metres short of its intended target, gouging a deep, smouldering crater in the ground behind the Wolves.
Moments later the first cheer went up from the Imperial lines. A priest who’d been watching the scene from a nearby gun pit clambered atop the trench line and raised his arms to the sky. “The Emperor protects!” he cried, and soon the Guardsmen took up the cry as well.
“The Emperor Protects! The Emperor Protects!” The shout echoed across the killing field, and men took heart again after the bitter retreat from the capital.
One by one, the Wolves turned and walked the last few metres into the Imperial fortifications. Sternmark waited until the last, his sword still gleaming in the sun’s dying light. Then he turned his back on the traitors of Charys and joined his brothers in the trenches.
Sven and the others were waiting for him, surrounded by a ring of awestruck Guardsmen. The Wolves were joking with one another, the raw edge to their laughter betraying the tension of their brush with death. There was something almost feral in their wide eyes and rough-edged voices, raising the hackles on Sternmark’s neck. His scalp prickled, and it felt like a swarm of hungry insects had crawled beneath his skin. “Take half an hour to eat and replenish your ammo,” he snapped, “then return to the line.”
The Wolves were startled by the harsh edge to their leader’s voice, prompting a chorus of deep growls and a narrowing of eyes. For a fleeting instant, the air was charged with tension. Sternmark’s hand tightened on the hilt of his blade, but then a powerful voice broke the deadly spell.
“That was boldly done, my lord,” Morgrim Silvertongue called as he moved through the throng of admiring troops. “When you disappeared earlier in the day we feared you had been lost.”
Sternmark turned to the skald as though in a daze. The red tide was rising once more, threatening to overwhelm the last vestiges of reason he had left. His hands and fingertips ached, and abruptly he felt smothered inside the weight of his Terminator armour.
A sharp challenge rose to the Wolf Guard’s lips, but it was Sven who spoke first. “Another few moments and we might well have been, Silvertongue,” the Grey Hunter said grimly, and then pointed out across the killing ground. “Look.”
Sternmark turned. Something was happening along the rebel lines. The very air seemed to thicken and deepen in hue, and purple lightning flickered above the traitors’ heads. Cries of adulation and terror echoed across the killing ground as shifting, luminescent forms appeared among the rebel Guardsmen.
From the gun pit nearby the regimental priest made the sign of the aquila and began the Litany of Detestation in a harsh, trembling voice. Men clutched their weapons and pressed themselves fearfully against the packed-earth walls of the trench lines as hundreds of daemons howled a chorus of blasphemous curses at the Imperial defenders.
Still worse to Sternmark was the clashing, rhythmic sound of armour, rising and falling like a dirge beneath the cacophonous, otherworldly cries. He stepped to the trench parapet and studied the rebel positions carefully until he spied the first glimmer of blue and gold.
They towered over the cringing traitors in their baroque armour, their boltguns held at port-arms in perfect unison as they marched towards the battle line. Rebel soldiers flinched from the sound of their dreadful tread, parting like smoke before the Thousand Sons’ inexorable advance. The heads of the towering warriors turned neither left nor right. No human curiosity shone from the glowing depths of their ornate helms. Their bodies had been consumed by sorcerous fires thousands of years ago. Nothing remained inside those armoured shells but spirits of pure, immortal hate and murderous skill. Fell sorcerers marched alongside the ghostly Chaos Space Marines, driving the warriors onward with fierce oaths and imprecations to their abominable god.
Sternmark counted almost two hundred of his Chapter’s arch foes. In all his years of campaigning he’d never seen so many of the spectral troops assembled in one place. Even without the howling daemons and rebel battalions at their command, they could crush the starport defenders in an implacable, armoured fist.
Morgrim joined the Wolf Guard at the parapet. “It seems you arrived not a moment too soon,” he said quietly.
“I wonder if the rabbit thinks the same thing as he sticks his head into the snare,” Sternmark hissed. He found himself thinking of his fallen lord Berek, and the melta charges laid beneath his bier. The cold demands of duty focused his mind somewhat, helping him ignore the awful sensations wracking his body. He bared his teeth, tasting the strange scents around him. “How many of our brothers remain?” Sternmark asked.
The skald folded his arms thoughtfully. “It’s hard to say,” he answered. “We’ve Gunnar and Thorbjorn’s Long Fangs here at the starport, as well as half of Thorvald’s Grey Hunters.” He paused, his lips pressing into a grim line. “But we’ve lost contact with the rest.”
“Lost contact?” Sternmark gave the skald a hard look. “What does that mean? Are we being jammed planet-wide?”
“There is some jamming yes,” Silvertongue replied, “but some packs have simply stopped responding to our calls. We aren’t sure what’s happened to them.”
“Not sure?” the Wolf Guard snarled. “They’re dead, Silvertongue. What other explanation could there be?” Sternmark brought his fist down on the ferrocrete parapet, sending up a spray of broken fragments. The rage was rising within him once more, and it was getting harder and harder to find a reason to fight it. He looked out across the killing field. “What are they waiting for? Let’s get to the bloody business of the day and be done with it!”
Silvertongue eyed the Wolf Guard warily. “I expect they are still waiting for their heavy artillery,” he said. “We have enough heavy weapons left to make a frontal assault very expensive, and before he left Inquisitor Volt instructed the priests to lay a series of wards that will keep the daemons at bay.” The skald peered closer. “My lord? Your eyes… they’ve changed—”
The Wolf Guard seemed not to hear him. “Wards?” he spat. “Those won’t last long with all those sorcerers out there.”
“Aye, that’s true,” Silvertongue replied carefully, “but we only need a few more hours.”
Sternmark glared at the skald. “What in Morkai’s name are you talking about?” he demanded.
Something in the Wolf Guard’s face took Silvertongue aback. He recoiled slightly from Sternmark, as though suddenly confronted by a snarling Fenrisian wolf. “I… I thought you’d been informed,” he said quickly. “Lady Commander Athelstane has ordered every available ship made ready for launch. She believes that there are enough transports still able to fly to evacuate the entire starport in one go—”
“Evacuate?” Sternmark spat, the word bitter on his tongue. “She would have us abandon our honour and slink away like whipped dogs?”
He staggered, overcome with fury. The red tide surged, angry and wild, and swallowed him up entirely.
Silvertongue shouted something his voice urgent, but the Wolf Guard did not h
ear. He was gone, running like a shadow ahead of the crimson sunset towards the distant command bunker.
Bulveye led Ragnar and his companions into the dimly lit cave, setting his wolves to guard its threshold once more with a quick gesture and a few whispered commands. Beyond the entrance, the cave narrowed quickly into a long tunnel that meandered for several dozen metres into the side of the mountain. To Ragnar’s keen night vision the passageway seemed shrouded in twilight. Veins of dark ore ran in serpentine paths through the rough stone walls, and runes of warding were chiselled at every corner to foil the questing spirits of their foes.
Finally they came around another narrow turn, and Ragnar’s eyes narrowed at a sudden blaze of firelight. The passageway emptied out into a large, high-ceilinged cavern almost twenty metres across, laid with furs and rough stone benches in the style of a lord’s feasting hall. The warriors of the Thirteenth Company had felled some of the strange trees that dotted the foothills at the base of the mountain and had piled the logs in a crude pit at the centre of the cavern. The wood burned without sound or smoke, giving off a fey, otherworldly blue light.
At the far end of the cavern, ailing servos creaked and whined, and a pair of careworn servitors struggled upright at their master’s arrival. Bulveye turned and addressed the newcomers sombrely. “Enter my hall with the blessings of the Allfather,” he said, and beckoned to the servitors.
The Wolf Lord welcomed them according to the ancient tradition, with handclasps, bread and salt. The gesture was both strange and oddly reassuring. Custom and tradition are all they have left, Ragnar mused, as Bulveye bade them sit by the fire, and then strode off to a far corner of the cavern. He returned with guesting gifts: a gold ring for Gabriella and iron daggers for her Wolfblade. The weapons had been forged on Fenris, Ragnar noticed, and beautifully made.
[Space Wolf 06] - Wolf's Honour Page 25
