Hammer and Bolter 19

by Christian Dunn

  ‘We cannot slay them all.’ Afger’s voice was tinny and cracked with static as it came through on the comm-bead in Skeln’s ear.

  ‘Agreed,’ he replied. ‘Mount up and break through.’ Afger cut the link when Skeln had finally caught up to Thorgard. ‘It seems your lure was too effective, brother.’

  Some of the other Space Wolf’s eagerness had diminished.

  ‘I had hoped for larger prey,’ he confessed.

  Skeln howled and Fenrir bounded to his side, after finishing a zombie with a savage twist of its jaws.

  ‘We’re done here,’ he told Thorgard as he climbed atop the monstrous thunderwolf’s back. They’d cleared a bloody gap in the horde but had only seconds until the next wave of plague creatures were upon them.

  Thorgard nodded reluctantly. He was summoning Magnin when Afger’s voice crashed in on the comm-bead.

  ‘There!’ he cried, ‘There, I see the beast! Hagni is abroad and in my sight!’

  Afger was pointing, even as he slung himself across Skoll’s shoulders and urged the thunderwolf to charge.

  Skeln and Thorgard followed his outstretched finger to a dark silhouette crouched on the horizon line. Though distant, the Wolf Guard made out hulking shoulders and a broad back, hirsute with fur. Skeln thought he caught a shimmer from a pauldron hanging loosely off the beast’s shoulder.

  There could be no doubt. It was Hagni; now more beast than man.

  Howling a battle-cry, Afger hammered past the other two Space Wolves, intent on his prey. Skoll used its muscled bulk to heave zombies out of its way, crushing bodies beneath it as drove inexorably forwards.

  By the time Skeln and Thorgard had spurred their mounts, Afger was well ahead of them. They too battered their way through the plague mob, cutting a bloody path to the open ground ahead. Soon, the horde was floundering behind them and an arctic waste beckoned where the chase was on for Hagni.

  ‘Damn you, Afger,’ hissed Skeln, eyes locked onto his brother, now even farther in front of them.

  Hagni’s silhouette had not yet moved. It merely watched its brothers’ approach. At this rate, Afger would reach it well before Skeln and Thorgard. He seemed hell-bent on facing the wulfen alone. And despite the fact he rode Skoll, Skeln recalled all too well the butchered remains of Barek and his thunderwolf. Alone, Afger faced a very uncertain victory.

  A sudden cracking arrested Skeln’s thoughts, and a chill entered his spine.

  ‘Skeln!’ said Thorgard. He was looking downward, already slowing, ‘the ice!’

  The snowy tundra they traversed was not solid ground at all. It was a lake, frozen stiff by the cold weather, but now breaking up with the heavy footfalls of the thunderwolves. Skeln saw the ground webbing beneath Fenrir’s massive paws. An ominous cracking sound followed it.

  ‘Hold!’ he roared, reining the monstrous beast in and stalling the pursuit. Opening up a channel, he shouted into the comm-bead.

  ‘Afger! Slow down, the ice is cracking.’

  ‘I have him. The beast won’t escape again.’

  ‘Afger–’

  –wasn’t listening. He severed the link and rode on harder.

  ‘I’m sorry Skeln,’ he muttered, ‘Barek must be avenged.’ He peered down the end of his bolter, bringing Hagni into his sights–

  ‘You are mine, wulfen…’

  –when the beast slipped away and was gone.

  ‘No!’

  That was when the ground fell away and icy water rose up around them. Weighed down by armour and augmetics, man and beast were dragged into stygian gloom.

  Darkness surrounded him, together with a sense of lightness that Afger had not felt for some time. The rage, the grief at Barek’s death, the burning desire for vengeance, all of it seemed muted by the cold. And for a moment, just the briefest of moments, Afger almost gave in.

  Something strong and vice-like seized his wrist. He was travelling upwards again. He saw the vague suggestion of light. Air rushed his lungs and raucous noise clamoured into being as Afger breached the freezing surface of the water.

  ‘Hold on,’ snarled the voice of Skeln, beard dripping icy wet from when he’d plunged in to grab him.

  ‘Thorgard, I have him,’ he growled, and the other Wolf Guard came into view. He’d removed his wolf claw gauntlets – they lay on the ice nearby – and leaned over to grasp Afger’s power generator.

  ‘No,’ Afger roared, thrashing. ‘Leave me! Follow Hagni! Avenge Barek!’

  Skeln wasn’t listening. Together, he and Thorgard hauled Afger up and onto the fragile ice bank.

  Skoll had not been so fortunate. The thunderwolf’s sheer bulk, its cybernetic body fashioned by the Iron Priests, had sunk it like an anchor. With nothing to cling to, the great beast had drowned in the black depths of the lake. It was a poor end for such a noble creature.

  Afger’s expression told Skeln that Skoll’s former master thought so too.

  For a short while, they sat on the ice, not daring to move should it crack again and swallow them all this time. The zombie hordes were far enough away not to trouble them.

  Skeln glared at Afger, his gaze murderous. Thorgard tentatively retrieved his gauntlets. Afger merely lay on his back and stared into the sky. Cold and pitiless, it echoed the feeling in his hollow heart.

  Afger had not spoken for over an hour after the incident on the lake. He felt the loss of Skoll keenly, so strong was their bond. A separation of a limb would have been easier to take. When he did finally give voice, now running alongside Skeln on Fenrir’s back, it was clear his mood had not improved.

  ‘You should have let me sink and gone after the wulfen,’ he growled.

  Skeln’s retort was biting.

  ‘You’ve lost your mount, and we are two brothers down already, Afger. I will not lose another in a vain and foolish sacrifice.’

  ‘I would not have drowned,’ Afger snapped.

  Skeln looked down at him.

  ‘No, brother, but you would have given up.’

  Afger’s shadowed expression betrayed his shame.

  Thorgard had found Hagni’s trail again soon after leaving the ice lake, now far behind them, and was leading the Wolf Guard down into the catacombs of Helspire, the urbanisation of the city growing around them suddenly like a virus.

  Here, the city was at its darkest. These were its sinks, its bowels, the very bones of its construction. Streets and avenues became tunnels, towers morphed into the sweating columns of foundation stones and the platinum sky was replaced by the rockcrete underbelly of the roads above. A sewer stink pervaded, sullying the icy crispness of the air. Stagnant heat lingered, emanating from the buried fusion generators that ran the benighted city’s power grid.

  Thorgard sniffed the air, finding the wulfen’s scent. There was something else, too, something he couldn’t place.

  ‘It’s strange…’ he muttered, oblivious to his brothers’ arguing.

  ‘What is?’ asked Skeln.

  ‘Since killing Barek, Hagni has had many days to get ahead of us. I expected to track him to a lair, not to see him out in the open, especially so blatantly. It’s as if he wants to be caught.’

  Afger bristled.

  ‘He begs for death.’

  Skeln’s eyes became cold, hard bergs. His anger made him rasp.

  ‘No Space Wolf would ever desire that. No Space Wolf would ever die without a fight.’

  Chastened, Afger realised he had spoken out of turn.

  ‘Sorry, brother,’ he admitted. ‘I am not myself.’

  Skoll’s death had hit him hard.

  ‘But what other explanation is there?’

  ‘No, it doesn’t feel like that,’ offered Thorgard, challenging Afger’s earlier remark. ‘There is no sport in this. I’ve seen whelpling aspirants harder to track. Hagni allows us to catch up, only to then flee.’ />
  ‘He’s getting careless then, that’s all,’ said Afger, ‘and hungry. There is only dead flesh here, no fresh meat to sate the beast.’

  Skeln was silent and stern. That was when he noticed the sigils daubed on the walls and the rank, pervading stench growing stronger. They were deep into the heart of Helspire now and reaching the end of a long, broad sewer conduit. A chamber loomed ahead, a sickly oval of light announcing it.

  ‘There’s something else here,’ hissed Thorgard suddenly, reining Magnin to a stop and speaking Skeln’s thoughts aloud. ‘Very large, very strong. Its scent mingles with the wulfen’s…’

  Thorgard turned to face his brothers.

  ‘Hagni wasn’t trying to flee or merely running wild–’

  ‘He was leading us,’ said Skeln.

  ‘There may be some of Hagni left after all…’ hissed Afger.

  Skeln ignored him.

  ‘But leading us to what?’

  Thorgard ignited his wolf claws. Their electrical glow framed his face in an eerie light.

  ‘Brothers…’

  Misshapen forms were shuffling into the dirty oval of light. In the chamber beyond, Skeln knew in his core they would find Hagni, and whatever it was he had been leading them to.

  Skeln had drawn his weapons, Afger too.

  ‘Thunderwolves!’ he roared, glaring at the approaching zombies, ‘For Fenris and Leman Russ!’

  Howling, the Space Wolves charged down the tunnel, making for the opening and whatever waited for them beyond it.

  Skeln’s uppercut smashed a plague creature aside, tearing open its torso and spilling diseased innards. He hung down along Fenrir’s flank like a trick-rider from the old clan gatherings of his former life, when he was still human. Another was flung into the tunnel wall, its bones shattered by the force of Fenrir’s swipe. Afger raked three more with controlled bursts from his bolter. The explosive rounds turned the creatures into little more than a visceral mist. Thorgard cut down the rest; by the end of it, his scything wolf claws with slick and red.

  ‘A vanguard, nothing more,’ he breathed. The actinic glare from his blades pooled deep shadows around his wild eyes. He was ready for more.

  Skeln snarled at the miasma of pestilence coming from the chamber entrance.

  Howling, and the deep bellowing of something large and unnatural, emanated from it. It was a wolf fighting a monster.

  ‘Steel yourselves, brothers,’ Skeln growled, and passed through the dirty oval of light riding Fenrir.

  The chamber was a confluence of sewer pipes. Rusted openings in the walls disgorged filth. It pooled in a deep basin in the middle of the room. Wallowing in the dark morass was a pustulant giant.

  Sloth-like and disgusting, burgeoning rolls of putrescent-yellow flab ruptured the creature’s armour. The fragments of ceramite that still clung to its grotesque bulk were adhered by rivulets of puss, bursting from the boils and sores infesting its blubbery flesh. Horrid and distended, the beast’s mouth was a gaping maw. Several tongues lolled from one encrusted corner. They licked and probed at the sores lasciviously, tendril-like and sentient. Filled with ranks of needle-like teeth, its mouth was like that of a bloated shark.

  Skeln saw the potential in those fangs to inflict the wounds that had killed Barek Thunderborn and hope flared that Hagni could still be saved. He wrinkled his nose at the noisome stench emanating from the thing’s corpulent body. Fat flies buzzed around it in a swarm.

  Facing it across a river of pestilence was Hagni.

  He was not as Skeln remembered him. Hagni’s armour hung off his body in scraps. His lupine form, now covered in thick fur, had simply outgrown it. Fangs were like daggers in his long mouth, stitched around a slightly protruding snout. Sinew throbbed like cords of steel across a brawny body stretched and made more muscular by the changes wrought by the wulfen curse. Horrific as it was, it was as nothing compared to the other monster in the room.

  It was one of the Scions of Pestilence, now swelled by plague and decay, favoured by its dark lord and mutated into a hideous plague-spawn, unrecognisable from the traitors the Space Wolves had hunted previously. Even now, before their eyes, it seemed to be growing, absorbing the filth from the tainted sewer pipes. It had not always been this size, and explained how the creature had managed to kill Barek Thunderborn and slip away undetected… almost undetected. The Space Wolves had somehow missed it, but Hagni, turned to wulfen and his preternatural senses enhanced, had not. He could not defeat it alone; there was enough of the Space Wolf remaining to realise this, or perhaps it was merely instinct that had compelled Hagni to seek out allies and draw them to this fight. Skeln hoped for the former.

  Skeln processed this in a half-second, before baring his fangs and howling–

  ‘Slay it!’

  A ripple of explosive fire stitched the plague-spawn’s bloated body and a burble of what might have been pain bubbled from its swollen lips. A stream of corruption belched from the creature’s maw by way of riposte, but Fenrir was already moving. An acid-hiss erupted behind Skeln, head down, as his thunderwolf bounded away from the deadly spray. Afger stormed forwards at the same time, working his way through the mire to the plague-spawn’s left.

  Zombies stirred in the wretched muck, corpses surfacing like gruesome buoys, animated by the plague-spawn’s presence. Afger shot them down as he moved, shredding them to pieces as he kept an eye on Hagni.

  The wulfen ignored him and launched itself upon the creature, raking its rancid flanks. Flesh tore away, wretched and thin with decomposition. Black, sap-like blood started to mat Hagni’s fur as he clawed at it. Like a geyser exploding from the earth, the wulfen was struck in the face by a plume of bile. The force of it pitched Hagni off the plague-spawn’s body and sent him careening into the chamber wall.

  Thorgard rode Magnin down the creature’s right flank. Its tongues lashed out like serpents, jabbing at the thunderwolf. The fleshy muscle was laced with barbs and tiny mouths, fang-filled and drooling pus.

  Despite its bulk, Magnin turned and weaved to evade the probing tongues. One nicked Thorgard’s pauldron, leaving an acidic scar, as his thunderwolf jinked to the side. He followed its course as it seized a zombie shambling behind them, ripping the creature of its feet and hauling it forwards with a predatory jerk. Swept up in an eye blink into the plague-spawn’s maw, the zombie’s rotten bones crunched as it was devoured.

  Head down, Thorgard urged Magnin on.

  Skeln ducked another putrid stream from the plague-spawn’s mouth. He had torn out his bolt pistol and the muzzle burned white-hot with the flare of his weapon’s fire. The mass-reactive shells bit deep, sinking, as if in rubber, below the creature’s flesh. Explosions rippled beneath the sickly skin, bulging like tumours but the plague-spawn’s epidermis just stretched to compensate, any damage that had been inflicted regenerated instantly.

  Frenzied bolter fire from Afger’s position suggested Skeln’s battle-brother was similarly frustrated.

  He unsheathed his power axe and fed a ripple of energy across the rune-etched blade. It was time to get in close.

  For Hagni, getting in close was the only way he knew how to fight. Dazed but unbowed, he shook away the wretched bile gumming his fur and drove at the creature again. As wulfen, Hagni was even larger than his Wolf Guard brethren. At over three metres tall, he was a monster. Yet even Hagni was small compared to the plague-spawn, so grotesquely swollen as it was by Nurgle’s taint.

  Leaping onto the creature’s back, Hagni slashed and gored, searching for vital organs amidst the blubbery mass. The wulfen was elbow-deep in putrid blood and viscera, but the folds of flab, like fleshy armour, were too thick for him to inflict any serious harm.

  Below, Thorgard raced along the plague-spawn’s flank, wolf claws spitting lightning. The stink of burning flesh was redolent in the air, but the long grooves he carved in the creature’s side merely ooz
ed and closed up again, a roll of flab melting down over them.

  Skeln was getting dizzy. The vile stench emanating off the creature made the air thick with its contagion. Fat flies buzzed around his face, trying to infest his mouth, ears and nostrils as he sought to get in close. He hacked away a tendril-like tongue and heard a deep yelp of agony from across the chamber. Though his view was occluded by the spawn’s bulk, Skeln recognised the cry of Thorgard’s thunderwolf. Magnin was wounded, possibly even dead.

  ‘Thorgard!’ he bellowed down the comm-feed.

  Crackling static and a half-heard roar of anguish returned to him.

  ‘Brother, answer me!’

  Skeln was pinned by the lashing tongues, oozing fronds attached to the pair that assailed him like the stingers of some rancid cnidaria. He couldn’t get to Thorgard. He couldn’t help his brother.

  Another channel opened up in his ear.

  ‘This isn’t working–’ snarled Afger.

  Bolter fire interrupted him.

  ‘We need to burn it!’

  ‘With what? We have no flamer, no incendiaries, we–’ Skeln had detected something, a distinctive tang in the mire of sewerage. He fended off a probing tongue, the plague-spawn burbling with laughter. A moment’s respite allowed him to cast about the chamber.

  Pipes, everywhere pipes…

  Skeln allowed himself a grim smile as he found what he was looking for.

  A shadow eclipsed him as the plague-spawn leaned down, the shifting of its mass releasing noxious gases trapped within the rolls of flab. Skeln fought not to gag and reined Fenrir back. The tongue tendrils recoiled and Skeln urged his mount away. Fenrir turned and leapt, narrowly avoiding the burst of corruption vomited from the spawn’s distended mouth. It was still drooling acid as its burbled laughter came again.