Battle Of The Fang

by Chris Wraight

  The soul of Fenris. It shares our fury.

  The Wolves tore onwards, wreathed in Sturmhjart’s wyrdlight, bellowing defiance, landing blow after blow, each one of which would have ended another fight but in this case merely prolonged it.

  But their strength, for all its extravagant majesty, was fixed by clear limits. Magnus was a child of the Emperor, one of the peerless twenty who had lit the fires of the Great Crusade, and his poise could only be disrupted for a short time. The onslaught had been horrendous, the worst he had endured in a thousand years, but his strength was near-infinite and his guile scarcely less so. He straightened, towering over his assailants, and remembered what power lay within his gauntlet-grasp.

  One of the Wolf Guard let his defences slip for a fraction of a second, and that was enough. Magnus’s fist crashed into his face, hurling him out of contact and sending him flying metres through the air. The Wolf Guard crunched heavily to the ground, his helm smashed in, and didn’t get up.

  Sturmhjart was next, caught by a devastating blast of witchfire from Magnus’s outstretched hands. The Rune Priest bent double, clutched by sudden, agonising pain.

  ‘Hjolda!’ he cried, writhing in apoplexy, blood spraying from his armour-joints.

  Magnus clenched his fist, and the ceramite shell exploded, throwing a storm of flesh and bone across the hangar floor. Then the primarch whirled back to face Greyloc and the surviving Wolf Guard. The equanimity had been wiped from his face, and his wine-red hair hung in straggling clumps around him. He was bleeding, and limped from a deep wound to his leg. Only once before had his physical form sustained such wounds, and the remembrance of that pain enraged him.

  ‘You have angered me, Dog,’ Magnus snarled, back-handing the Wolf Guard viciously out of contention, breaking his back with a messy snap. Then he lowered a crackling fist at Greyloc.

  He never loosed the witchfire. A spinning ball of plasma hit Magnus directly in the torso, throwing him across the hangar. Another impacted, and another, knocking him further back. Limbs flailing, doused in supernova-hot bolt-residue, Magnus slammed into the carcass of the downed Thunderhawk. He smashed it apart as he crashed into it, his golden fists plunging through the crushed adamantium superstructure like a raging child trapped in a dollshouse.

  You know nothing of anger, Traitor, boomed Bjorn, lumbering from the wreckage of the hangar wall and punching another flurry of plasma bolts from his arm-cannon. This is anger. This is hate.

  The bolts impacted, one after the other, each aimed with exact precision. Magnus was enveloped in a furious, screaming inferno, a stream of starbursts that bludgeoned him back further, smashing him deep into the wreckage of the gunship.

  He still stood. He fought back. For a moment, it looked as though the primarch would rip the Thunderhawk’s structure apart completely.

  Then the promethium tanks ignited.

  The explosion was titanic, rocking the entire hangar and sending a blast-wave sweeping across the apron. Magnus was engulfed by a bulging sphere of white-hot destruction, an orb of flame that raced out, surging up to the hangar roof and running along the stone like quicksilver. Greyloc was hurled to the ground. Cracks raced across the apron, deep and gaping. The wind howled, dragging flares of flame through the tortured air.

  Only Bjorn endured. He kept firing, over and over, pouring more plasma into the raging torrent of destruction.

  When Magnus finally emerged from the heart of it, his face was contorted with murder. Skin hung from the bone, smouldering and blistering. His golden mantle was black, his bronze armour scorched. His mane of hair was gone, replaced by a flesh-tattered skull. His lone eye was star-red, burning like metal on the blacksmith’s forge. Huge gashes had opened in his flesh, revealing a lattice of shifting, luminous colour beneath. The physical cloak he’d draped over his daemonic essence had been ripped open, snatched away by the furnace.

  Magnus leapt from the inferno, straight at Greyloc, streams of fire trailing him like an angel’s wings. Bjorn swept his plasma cannon round, but too slowly. The wounded primarch crashed into the Wolf Lord as he struggled to regain his feet. Magnus felled him with a hammer-blow from his clenched fist, still flaring with raging promethium. Greyloc’s head cracked against the stone, and for a moment his guard was down.

  Magnus plunged with both hands, tearing up the Jarl’s breastplate with grasping fingers. Silver-gold warp-energy blazed out, dissolving the ceramite in hissing clouds. Magnus delved deep, seizing both Greyloc’s hearts in his crackling fists.

  The Wolf Lord screamed, his limbs going rigid with agony. With a sickening wrench, Magnus ripped the beating organs free, hauling them from Greyloc’s still-living chest, snapping the clutching trails of gore, and hurled them aside.

  For a moment, the Wolf Lord retained consciousness, somehow managing to hold the gaze of his killer.

  Beneath his helm, his white face was harrowed but defiant. His eyes reflected, for the final time, a fleeting vision of a snow-smooth plain, of prey moving under the harsh sun, of the icy wind against his naked arms.

  My pure state.

  Then the arms went limp, and the blood-glare from his lenses died.

  Jarl! roared Bjorn, his voice distorted by loathing.

  Still firing a stream of plasma bolts, the Dreadnought strode right into the primarch, his lightning claw blazing with angry disruption. The two giants came together in a crash of warp-energy, promethium, and steel on steel.

  As Magnus and the Fell-Handed fell into terrible, devastating combat, the storm around them whined to a new pitch of vitriol. The ground beneath their feet cracked open further, tearing chasms in the plascrete floor. The ancient Dreadnought, fuelled by the greater rage, forced the distracted primarch on to the defensive again, gouging at Magnus with his talons and blasting him from close range. At such proximity, the terrible plasma backdraft affected Bjorn nearly as badly as his enemy, but he maintained the barrage nonetheless.

  Step by step, shrouded in smoke and trails of fluid energy, the two fighters staggered towards the open hangar bay in a grotesque, swaying embrace, each trading hammer-blows of crushing, heart-stopping force. There was no shielding left over the portal. Beyond the plascrete edge of the apron, the bare rock carried on for a few metres before plunging down sheer. They reached the precipice, blazing away at each other with strikes of such brutality that the rock-edges crumbled under them.

  Magnus had been hurt. He’d been hurt more profoundly than any mortal had hurt him before. His shock at that translated into his movements, which had become strangely halting and erratic. All his easy grace had left him, and he fought like a bar-room brawler, clubbing at the heavy armour of the Dreadnought even as Bjorn thundered back.

  They got closer to the edge. More rocks broke away, streaming down the steel-hard flanks of the mountain in tumbling trails. The drop was near-vertical. They were thousands of metres above the causeways, duelling in the high heavens like the gods of Fenrisian myth, surrounded by the lancing tongues of lightning and the death-cry of the gales.

  Far below them, there was fire and slaughter. The Wolves had landed in their hundreds, and now ran amok across the stone, cutting threads at will. Columns of them were streaming towards the broken shells of the gates, entering their own citadel again with the deadly light of pursuit in their eyes. The skies were studded with the outlines of drop-ships and the dark trails of Thunderhawks. Far above that, surrounded by leaping bursts of chain lightning, heavier ships were slowly descending through the upper atmosphere.

  They both saw it. Even as he fought, Bjorn let slip a triumphant snarl.

  Ironhelm is here, witch, he taunted, plunging his claw hard into the bronze armour and twisting the blades. This is death for you.

  Magnus seemed beyond speech. The flesh around his mouth was ragged, burnt ebony by the clinging promethium and torn into a gash by the Dreadnought’s slashing strikes. He grabbed the barrel of Bjorn’s plasma cannon, clamping claw-like fingers over the red-hot muzzle.

  Bjo
rn fired it again, engulfing Magnus’s wrist in a searing holocaust of energy. The primarch clung on, absorbing the terrible heat, twisting and crushing the blunt barrel-end into a blocked mess. His gun rendered useless, Bjorn switched to his claws, driving them again at the primarch’s ravaged face. The talons connected, tearing more of the flesh from the daemonic essence beneath.

  Stone pillars broke and crumbled from the cliff-edge, and a filigree of cracks ran under Bjorn’s mighty feet. Both titans teetered on the very lip of the chasm, exchanging blows even as the icy abyss beckoned them down. The harsh wind of Asaheim clutched at them, dragging them closer to oblivion.

  It was then that Magnus, weary, wounded and burned as he was, seemed to remember his dread authority at last. He let fly with a broken hand, and fluorescent warp-energy spat from his outstretched fingers. Bjorn’s claw crumpled, withering amid a storm of varicoloured madness. The talons flexed wildly, then cracked apart.

  Weaponless, the venerable Dreadnought powered in close, attempting to grapple with the primarch and bear him over the edge. Magnus evaded the manoeuvre, punching out with his other hand. Though bereft of a blade, the daemonic flesh was still potent enough to crack Bjorn’s sarcophagus open, rending a jagged tear in the long face-plate. Bone icons shattered, and runes were cloven asunder.

  Bjorn reeled then, finally exposed to the full power of the primarch’s wrath. Magnus cocked a flaming fist, aiming for the eye-slit. Bjorn could do nothing. The blow came in hard, tearing up the reinforced plate, rocking him back on his central axis, forcing him closer to the edge. Magnus swung round, positioning himself on surer ground, pushing the Dreadnought half-over the drop and holding him in place one-handed. The ground supporting Bjorn’s clawed feet gave way, dissolving in a mini-avalanche of rubble and ice-blades.

  ‘You were on Prospero,’ hissed the primarch, his voice a horrific echo of what it had once been. ‘I recognise your soul-pattern.’

  Bjorn tried to reply, but his vox-generators had been destroyed. He could feel systems failing all over his artificial body. At last, the hellish existence he’d been forced to endure for so long looked like coming to an end. He couldn’t be too sorry about that.

  ‘Did you really think you could kill me?’ Magnus rasped, sounding both incredulous and furious. His free hand kindled with fresh witchfire. ‘If my brother could not, what hope have you?’

  It was then that Bjorn saw the shape careering down the slope above. A huge, armour-clad warrior, loping down the sheer ice-face toward them. Far above that was the profile of a drop-pod embedded near the very summit of the Valgard.

  Within his cracked shell, what remained of Bjorn’s ancient mouth smiled.

  Ironhelm pounced, leaping through the air, hurtling fast, arms outstretched. He crashed into the locked figures with a force of a Land Raider at full acceleration. There was a hard clang as armour smashed into armour. The ledge shattered, and all three of them wheeled over the broken edge of the precipice, rolling down the steep slopes in a cloud of broken stone and flying ice.

  Ironhelm’s head snapped back as he hit something at speed, then his arm crashed through a rock outcrop, smashing it open. He slid and tumbled, falling over and over, destroying the flanks of the mountain in his fall. He had the vague impression of Bjorn crashing straight through an ice-field before the Dreadnought’s huge body passed out of view. Showers of snow were everywhere, blinding him. He heard Magnus crying aloud and caught snatches of daemonic flesh flashing close to him before being torn away by the descent.

  He fell, and fell, and fell. There was nothing to break the whistling plummet except loose snow and fire-blacked stone. Ironhelm slammed into a fresh outcrop and felt it shatter before he corkscrewed away. Everything was in motion, disorientating and whirling in a white-out of sensory deprivation.

  Then, with a sickening crash, he hit something bigger. Even cocooned in his Terminator plate, the impact was staggering. Ironhelm blacked out, his body bouncing like a whip-crack before grinding painfully to a halt.

  It was a ledge, one of the thousands of steps in the jagged upper reaches of the Fang, a hundred metres wide and high up the dizzying cliffs of the ultimate peak.

  Ironhelm felt awareness return almost immediately, and knew then how much he’d been damaged. Pain surged through his body like a roaring fire, blazing across his tortured joints and spliced bones. He could feel the steel plate in his skull rattle loose. That meant his cranium was fractured, a prognosis consistent with the sun-hot agony that buzzed behind his eyes.

  He snarled with anger, and thrust himself to a half-sitting position. Magnus was there too. The two of them had come down together, kicking and flailing. There was no sign of Bjorn, though there was a long gouge running down the rock behind the primarch, torn out of the stone like a plough’s furrow. Snow and pack-ice still fell in clouds, laced with biting slivers of rock.

  The primarch was on his feet. All semblance of his old form was gone. There was no golden mantle, no bronze plate, no beautifully inscribed greaves with images of the zodiac glinting in the sunlight.

  What remained was a being of energy, a vaguely man-shaped network of pulsating warp-matter, vivid and unsettling. The only fixed point within the skin of shifting aether-essence was a single eye, garnet-red and blazing like a circle of fire.

  The wind skirled around the ravaged primarch, frigid and tearing, trying to snatch him from the mountain-edge and dash him to the ground below. The planet’s soul knew what kind of abomination had been unveiled, and screamed to hurl it back into the warp.

  Magnus took a single, pain-filled step towards Ironhelm’s broken body, and the eye shot a look of distilled venom. He swayed in the wind.

  Ironhelm clambered to his feet, ignoring the blazing agony throughout his mighty frame. He felt blood slosh in his boots, pooling in his armour-joints. The pain kept him conscious, kept him focused. He had travelled across the warp for this encounter with all the speed and fury he could muster. Twice.

  ‘Witch,’ he spat, feeling the blood-rich saliva slap against his face-plate.

  His frostblade had been lost during the crashing descent, but his Terminator armour had other weapons. His right wrist held twin storm bolter muzzles embedded in the curve of the plate, while his left hand was enclosed in a hulking power fist. Trusting in his prowess with both, Ironhelm lumbered into a heavy, rock-fracturing charge towards the wavering form of the primarch. As he powered into the barrelling run, he loosed both bolter barrels. The rounds punched into Magnus’s flesh but didn’t detonate. They seemed to disappear entirely, though the impact clearly hurt the daemon-primarch. Magnus roared with pain and anger, bracing to meet the charge of the Great Wolf with his bare hands.

  Ironhelm felt his legs burn as he thundered into contact. His armour boosted him, propelling tons of dense flesh, bone, ceramite and adamantium into the body of the primarch. As he connected, he swung his power fist in a massive, hammering arc straight at Magnus’s shimmering face.

  Magnus veered from the path of the fist expertly, keeping his body supple, and rammed his own fists into the Great Wolf’s breastplate, slamming him back across the ice. Ironhelm staggered against the slick surface. Magnus swept in for another strike, but Ironhelm managed to get his power fist round in time. It connected on the full, and the blow felt like punching a bag of bones.

  Magnus was hurled away, crashing into the cliff-edge. As his body hit the mountainside it shimmered, like a hololith flickering on low power. The primarch’s expression was a mix of incredulity and anguish.

  He had been diminished. Terribly diminished.

  Ironhelm laughed ferociously, charging again, using his massive bulk to generate momentum. Magnus rose to meet him, his fists blazing with witchlight. The two came together with a sickening crunch. Ironhelm felt his bolter-arm shatter, blasted apart by a discharge of white-hot fire. He also felt his power fist strike home, rocking the daemon-primarch on his flickering heels.

  Ironhelm snarled with the raw pleasure of the fight
. After so long hunting ghosts and being taunted by apparitions, he was in his element at last. With every fresh strike of his tormented arms he felt a little more alive. The pain was immaterial. The only thing that existed for him was the contest, the test of arms, the exercise of his peerless capacity for controlled violence.

  That capacity was stoked by rage, the rage he had cultivated ever since leaving Gangava. The faces of the Wolf Brothers clustered into his mind, still howling their horror and pain. The faces of the slain on Fenris were among them too, growling in accusation. Greyloc had been right. The dead had all been sacrificed on the altar of his hubris, and now they demanded retribution.

  He intended to deliver it. The power fist crunched again into Magnus’s aether-woven flank, slamming the primarch back against the cliff-face. The one-eyed face blazed with pain as Magnus was crushed against the sword-sharp rock. His whole frame juddered, rippling like a flame caught in the wind. The wounds bit deep, sending shockwaves across his patterned flesh. Far above, the storm crashed in furious triumph, hurling void-cold gales around the mountainside. Ironhelm hit him again, and again, pummelling him against the rock-blades of the Fang’s flanks.

  Magnus cried out then, a cry of pain that had not been heard since the Wolf King had destroyed his first body. It echoed from the rock, outmatching the wind, outmatching the thunder of artillery from below as the Wolves tore through into the mortal troops on the causeways. In that cry was the weariness of ages, the despair of a demigod bred to fathom the deep mysteries of the universe and instead locked in grubby conflicts amid the dirty snow of a world of barbarians. It was a cry of loss, and of waste, and of the infinite futility of an endless war that he had never wanted.

  Ironhelm heard that cry, and grinned savagely. He kept going, hammering away at the abomination before him, his limbs working like a mighty engine, lost in a storm of blood-frenzy.