Battle Of The Fang

by Chris Wraight

  ‘This time, brother,’ he replied, and grinned across blood-soaked teeth. ‘Only this time.’

  Redpelt laughed, a throaty roar of feral enjoyment. The two fighters slammed their right fists together, and the bruised fingers clenched fast.

  Wyrmblade slumped back in his throne, feeling bone-weary. The work was exhausting, even for one with his gene-forged physiology. Days at a time of testing, refining, testing again, splicing, looking for the hidden flaws, rooting out the false positives and bearing down on the secrets wound within the vials and vessels. All around him, the low hubbub of the laboratorium continued – thralls diligently poring over sample trays, cogitators chattering, vials of fluid gently bubbling at precisely controlled temperatures.

  Nine days. Nine days since Ironhelm had left, emptying the Aett of the Great Companies and leaving the corridors sparse and home to whispers. In that time, almost nothing had been achieved, and much had been undone. Every step forwards was accompanied by many more backwards, sideways and down. It would be easy to despair, easy to lose hope.

  Except, of course, that despair was as alien to a son of Russ as peace and stillness.

  The secret eludes me only because I draw closer. Like prey on the ice, it can sense the hunter.

  The analogy helped him. There had been times when intractable problems had been solved through the imagery of the hunt. The kill-urge could be sublimated, turned into a source of pure mental determination. That gave him hope, too. There was so much that he didn’t understand, but so much that he was beginning to see clearly. That the kill-urge had such origins was a positive sign.

  Do I dare too much? Is this forbidden? Perhaps. But then we have never been ones for following the rules. Leave those to Guilliman’s sons.

  He reviewed the evidence again. The pattern he’d been pursuing over the past few weeks was breaking down. Not irretrievably, but with severe consequences for the model he’d placed so much faith in. It would need another week of work to put right, to untangle the snarls. Not for the first time, he found himself in awe of the original architects, the ones who’d put the elements together, who’d forced the river of humanity into its new and lasting course.

  Is this forbidden? he asked himself again, knowing the answer already.

  Of course it was.

  A rune blinked on his armour-collar, alerting him to Sturmhjart’s presence nearby. The Rune Priest, for all his power on the battlefield, was an unsubtle spy. Wyrmblade sighed, stowing the data-slate in the arm-recess of the throne. He gestured to a nearby thrall, and the leather-masked mortal nodded his understanding. The blast-doors deep in the laboratorium complex slid closed, masking the contents of the rooms beyond. Pict-screens of sensitive results cleared, replaced by standard-looking rows of runes.

  Wyrmblade rose from the throne, wearily preparing to meet the scorn and suspicion of his brother.

  He fears much, and guesses much, thought Wyrmblade, pacing through the interconnected tiled chambers in his awkward, age-corroded way. Let him. If he guessed more, he’d fear more. Only Greyloc sees the potential, but his soul is strange.

  Wyrmblade neared the entrance chamber to the laboratorium and saw the hulking figure of the Rune Priest waiting for him, his rich, sigil-encrusted armour an odd counterpoint to the sterile realm of the fleshmakers.

  I just need more time.

  Wyrmblade forced the familiar hooked smile on to his wrinkled features and went to greet his brother with the expected irascible banter.

  A little more time.

  The Thousand Sons flotilla flagship Herumon began to slow, making ready to break the seal between the warp and the materium. All around it, the rest of the fleet matched pace, fifty-four blue-and-gold warships and troop carriers grinding down to translation speed.

  On the bridge of the Herumon, Temekh and Aphael stood side by side, pyrae and corvidae. The other members of the senior command retinue – Ormana, Hett and Czamine – stood around them. All wore full battle-plate over their robes and their helms had been donned. Most of them had spent the long, boredom-filled hours on the Planet of the Sorcerers honing and altering their suits. The helms now bore crests and flutes of gold and bronze, and their greaves were engraved with florid scripts invoking long-forgotten epigrams.

  Temekh regarded them tolerantly. Of his companions, only he seemed to see how far they’d fallen.

  We have lost our taste. We are becoming parodies of ourselves.

  His own armour was relatively unmodified Mk III, re-coloured sapphire to reflect Magnus’s orders, but otherwise much as it had been before the Betrayal. He still wore the neatly clipped beard he’d adopted on Prospero, still kept his white hair trimmed close. He found himself wondering whether Amon, Sobek and Hathor Maat had done likewise. Those who had joined Ahriman’s breakaway cabal had always been the most headstrong and those with the most power. The rump that had remained faithful to the primarch were the second-rate, the ones who had not dared to join the casting of the Rubric.

  Not that it had mattered. The counter-sorcery had affected them all anyway, preserving less than a hundred of the Legion’s sorcerers and condemning the rest, the rubricae, to dust. Now the remnants of what had once been the Emperor’s most finely crafted weapons were scattered into petty bands of raiders, vengeance-seekers and knowledge-thieves. This grand fleet, this gathering of disparate forces, was the final gesture, the last echo of a disaster that had taken place over a thousand years ago.

  ‘Lord, we are preparing to make translation.’

  The speaker was a shaven-headed crewman with heavy kohl around his eyes. He wore the robes of a senior watch officer, and must have served in the fleet for many years. Most of the mortal crew were much more recently drafted, the products of a long programme of cult-planting on a hundred Imperial worlds.

  Aphael turned to Temekh.

  ‘And what do you see, prophet?’ he asked, his voice distorted by an elaborate vox-grille.

  Temekh suppressed his irritation at being asked again, and cast his mind’s eye out on to the Great Ocean. The occult relations between warp-space and realspace unfolded before him like the branches of an equation, moving subtly against one another, falling in and out of balance.

  He tracked the location of the fleet and traced it to its destination. The margins were slight. If they maintained their current orientation, they’d be coming in very close to Fenris.

  ‘You’re taking us in hard,’ said Temekh, snapping back into the present. ‘Too hard.’

  Aphael laughed.

  ‘You want to give them time to prepare?’ The pyrae shook his armoured head. ‘Remember how our orbital stations were taken down? In seconds. That’s the way to burn a world. The Ocean has been calmed for us, smoothed apart to let us drop right in on top of their heads.’

  Temekh could sense Aphael’s smiles under his helm, could feel his eagerness for the clash ahead.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry us in the warp, brother,’ Aphael continued. ‘If you looked yourself, you’d see the Dog-fleet is already days away and beyond recall. With speed we will do this thing.’

  ‘Fine. Just don’t hurl us into the heart of the planet.’

  Aphael didn’t laugh at that.

  ‘Time to translation?’ he asked, turning to the officer.

  ‘Imminent, lord.’

  ‘Then activate the screen.’

  Ahead of the command group, a curved mirror rose gracefully from the bronze-plate floor. The glazed surface swam with colour, shifting and breaking like oil on water. Temekh looked at it with distaste. It was a crude representation of the aether, the result of looking at it through machine-spirit eyes.

  ‘Begin,’ ordered Aphael.

  Across the fleet, warp-drives powered down. The fifty-four ships acted in unison, their plasma realspace drives growling into life and their void shields rippling into place.

  The shifting vision on the mirror sheared away, replaced by the void. Ahead of them, terrifyingly close, was a single ball of pearl-white
. It rushed toward the approaching ships, growing larger with every second. The Thousand Sons fleet, guided by its peerless scryers, had emerged from the warp closer and faster than any mortal-guided ship could have managed.

  Temekh felt a low foreboding creep across his stomach. So this was it, the target of Magnus’s long and bitter planning. It looked smaller than he’d hoped for, a dirty ball of howling gales and cracked ice.

  Aphael radiated savage energy. Ahead of the Herumon, other ships of the flotilla were becoming visible through the realspace viewers. Streaks of superheated plasma scored across the heavens as the strike vessels raced to compass the target. In their wake, the vast troop-carriers lumbered into position. There were no mistakes, no botched rematerialisations.

  ‘Fenris,’ Aphael breathed, held rapt by the unfolding spectacle in front of him. Terrible forces spread out across the cosmos in tight formation, the kind of forces not seen together since before the Betrayal.

  Temekh, seeing the same vista unfold, felt nothing but a weary dread. He’d wept over the destruction of Tizca, but that did nothing to fuel his sense of revenge. By contrast, Aphael’s eagerness felt vulgar and empty.

  We have lost our taste.

  The pyrae was heedless. He walked toward the mirror, watching as the isolated globe filled the screen ahead.

  ‘This will hurt you,’ he murmured. ‘Oh, this will hurt you so much.’

  Adaman Earfeil’s last day alive did not start well. Few of the astropaths manning the communications spire in the Valgard were Fenris-born, which made him one of only a dozen or so off-worlders on the entire planet. His native subordinates were rude, malodorous and given to making foul-mouthed jokes about his witchery. They didn’t like the use of psyker powers, even though their own bone-rattlers leaked enough aether-born power to level a manufactorum. Even after forty years’ service, he still hadn’t thrown off the ways of his homeworld, the hive-planet Anrada. He hated Fenris. He hated the stink, he hated the boredom, and he hated the cold.

  After little more than two hours’ sleep, the chime summoning him to the astrotelepathic gantry was infuriating. The entire choir had been busy enough over the past few days transmitting material for the muster. He emerged from his cell blearily, wiping the sleep from his sightless eyes. In the corridor beyond he felt the press of bodies hurrying back and forth. There was a low, concerned chatter over vox-beads. Something had got the spire roused.

  Once in the Sanctum Telepathica, Earfeil strode confidently through the mass of kaerls and thralls around him, judging where they were from smell and sound alone. The passages from his cell to the transmitter thrones were as well known to him as the outline of his own body. Ever since waking, though, he’d felt a dull pressure mount behind his eyes, dragging at his thoughts and making his work difficult.

  He took his station, feeling terrible. Thick-headed, lethargic and irascible.

  A servitor creaked up to assist him into his transmit-throne, and he winced as he felt the cold steel of the interface implant itself into his wrist input nodes. There was no damn reason for that to be so painful – if the savages on this forsaken world had cared about anything like comfort, they’d have installed new equipment years ago.

  ‘Water,’ he croaked, knowing that it would take the servitor an age to retrieve a cup and bring it back, frigid and with an aftertaste of grit.

  Clumsily, his headache getting worse, he began to decipher the programme of work ahead. All around him, he could hear more chatter as other astropaths began their litanies.

  ‘Blessed Emperor, Protector of Humanity, Lord of the Heavens, guide my thoughts in Your service and clear the landscape of my mind...’

  Earfeil began to recite while adjusting the series of dials and levers on the console in front of him. The machinery felt warmer than usual – normally, his desiccated old flesh would stick to the ice-cold metal.

  As he spoke, the itinerary began to appear in his mind. He couldn’t see the text exactly, but the sending was clear enough as a mental image.

  ‘May my body endure and my soul remain pure, my Inner Eye remain clear and my Outer Eye remain dark as the eternal mark of Your favour...’

  He kept speaking the familiar words as the iron hood, bristling with needle-slender probes, descended over him. He kept speaking as the probes threaded through the steel-ringed holes in his bald skull and came to rest in their allotted places. He kept speaking as the voices of the rest of the choir drifted out of focus.

  My head is killing me.

  There was no sign of the water. Earfeil pulled up the first transmission. Standard inter-world communique, something about convoy escorts on one of the Wolves’ protected systems.

  ‘Maintain the ward of Your protection... dammit, Fror, why is this list so long?’

  There was a crackle of broken static over the channel to the superintendent, a Fenris-born over two hundred years old.

  ‘Fror?’

  Earfeil gave up. Senile old goat. The pain behind his eyes got worse. It felt as if the burned-out nerves had somehow reconnected.

  What in Hel is doing that?

  He considered calling for an apothecary, pulling out of the contact, then changed his mind. They all thought he was weak anyway, a soft-fleshed offworlder with a smattering of unholy magick.

  He opened up his mind.

  The aether rushed in. A single eye stared back at him from the void, ringed with a circuit of crimson.

  ‘Holy Empe–’ he started, and then the pain really began.

  Something massive entered his consciousness, something vast and ancient, something of such magnitude that Earfeil immediately knew he was a dead man.

  ‘Fror!’ he screamed, maybe out loud, maybe mentally. Dimly, he could hear other noises coming out of the darkness around him. There were heavy footfalls as someone ran across the chamber. Then there were screams. Then all was lost in the pain – the crushing, mind-bending pain.

  He briefly thought about struggling against it. For a moment, a horrifying moment, he was taken back to the soul-binding on Terra. Back then he’d been exposed to sentience of such magnitude that it had burned out his eyes and seared his soul shut.

  This is the same force.

  No, it wasn’t. Not quite the same, though kin to it. Even as he writhed in his bonds, pinned down in his seat by the electrodes running through him, he could make out familiar shapes in the warp signature.

  Close the link!

  It was too late for that. Earfeil could feel his organs popping inside him, slapping open with hot, agonising explosions. Blood was running down his face, dribbling into his open mouth, frozen in a soundless rictus scream. The eye blazed at him, rippling with casual menace. This thing wasn’t even trying hard.

  +What are you?+ he sent, and his message was like shooting a microlumen into a star.

  The eye didn’t waver, but piled on more agony. It was then that Earfeil knew it was doing the same to all the astropaths. That should have been impossible – there were wards against infiltration across the spire, and the psykers were all soul-bound. This thing was tearing them apart as if the protection didn’t exist.

  He juddered in his throne, feeling awareness leave him. His nerves were burned away, giving some release from the pain.

  This will isolate us, he thought as he fell towards death. It wants us mute.

  That was the penultimate thought Adaman Earfeil ever had. The last one came hard on its heels.

  And whatever it is, he realised, his burned body spasming in excruciation, it’s just like the Emperor.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Wolf Scout Haakon Gylfasson, the one they called Blackwing, sat in the command throne of the Nauro and surveyed the scene before him smugly. The landing stages were already far behind and the dark of the sky from the realspace viewers had sunk into star-flecked black. The neon-white curve of Fenris fell away as the starship climbed higher, its engines straining against the powerful pull of the receding planet. It had taken many days of preparation to fit
the Nauro out for an extended system patrol tour, but now the irritating wait was over and he was back where he belonged.

  In the servitor pit below him, a dozen hardwired automata laboured at their stations. On the gantries above, six kaerls were strapped into restraint harnesses until the atmosphere was cleared and gravity generators could compensate properly.

  ‘Master, report when ready,’ ordered Blackwing casually, enjoying the feel of the ship as it thundered into low orbit range. The metal floor shivered slightly under him. The vessel was like a hunting-hound – lean, trembling, taut in the slips.

  ‘You’re pushing her hard,’ came the reply over the comm-link from the engine chambers. The ship’s Master was a veteran of working with Blackwing, and there was no confidence in the mortal’s voice that his warning would be heeded.

  Blackwing enjoyed making him uncomfortable. He enjoyed making everyone uncomfortable. That was the joy of piloting an interceptor with a crew entirely composed of mortals – the absolute power, the knowledge he could drive this thing as hard as he wanted. It was a beautiful ship, a thoroughbred, and there was no fun in keeping the ascent within safety parameters.

  ‘Treat her mean, Master,’ he replied. ‘That’s the way she likes it.’

  There was a muttered expletive from the other end before the link cut out. Blackwing grinned and summoned a hololith from the arm of the throne. The tactical display flickered into life in front of him, a swivelling sphere representing local space.

  ‘We’ll buzz the grid on our way out,’ he shared with the Tacticus, mentally plotting a trajectory that would take them to within a few kilometres of the first orbital gun platform. ‘It’ll take their minds off their tedious lives.’

  ‘I can’t raise them,’ replied the grey-suited Tacticus, seated at a console just below Blackwing’s position.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean I can’t raise them.’

  Blackwing frowned and cut into the channel. There was a hiss of static.

  ‘Are our comms shot?’ he demanded.