Leman Russ: The Great Wolf

by Chris Wraight

  'What did he say?'

  'That it was out of his hands. The astropathic choirs had been mobilised, the fleets were moving. He said he regretted it I could have ripped his withered lungs out, there and then, but then that would only have contributed to the greater problem. They really don't like us.'

  Jorin stopped walking. Ahead of them, Ynniu's dark-red bulk swelled across the vista beyond the glass, marred only by the burning wreckage of the bastion.

  'Then what is this?' he asked. 'We're going to roll over?'

  'Fekke, no,' said Russ. 'We're going to burn that bastard's world around him while his guts spill through his fingers, but we need to be faster, because we now have competition. They've sent in the First Legion, and for two months my younger brother has been sniffing on the same trail as we have. He makes no contact with me - which does not come as much of a surprise, since he thinks of none of us as his equal, and barely considers me part of the same species - and charges through the void to claim the glory of ending the Tyrant's rule for us, something he now sees as his sacred duty.' Russ smiled then - a fang-filled grin of proper amusement. 'So I brought Ogvai along to give us a few more blades, and plan to get there first. But we need the coordinates, my jarl, or this hunt will grind on for another month and we will miss all the fun.'

  'The Lion,' said Jorin, musingly. 'You've fought with him before?'

  'I've barely swapped two words with him, and they were enough.'

  'They say he will have more worlds under his heel than any other, one day.'

  'Probably, him or Guilliman. He's a good tactician. Cold-blooded, stiff-necked, arrogant. It's why he does so well on Terra. Blood of the gods, Jorin, I will not be beaten by him.'

  Jorin paused and looked at his primarch uneasily. 'Has it come to this - racing across the sea of stars for prizes?'

  'Not prizes,' said Russ, fervently. 'Survival. They're building empires, you know that? All of them, my beloved brothers, carving out realms of their own. On Terra, they list them on rolls of gold in the Preceptory. Not us. All we have is destruction. Take that away, and what's left?' The Wolf King's face, ever quick to mirth, clouded over. 'I swore it, Jorin. I swore I'd slay the master of Dulan, and if I fail in it the voices will stop whispering and start talking and there are too many of those even for you to silence.'

  Jorin shrugged. 'I care not what they say in the Palace.'

  'You should. We all should. That's our problem - we don't give a damn.'

  'We do, just not about the same things.'

  Russ chuckled and slapped his gauntlet against Jorin's pauldron. 'We're going after him. I want to have Dulan found, blasted and burning before the Lion gets within a warp-stage. You can do this for me?'

  Jorin looked back at him levelly, as if pondering it, then gave him a wide grin.

  'I'll get you there,' he said. 'And when I do, they'll talk of the fight for a thousand years.'

  The inner sanctum aboard the Aesrumnir was thick with darkness, laced through with the after-stench of burning. Stone altars stood amid the gloom, each one carrying a single weapon - axe, sword, spear - hung above the pitted surface by softly glittering suspensor fields.

  At the centre, where the greatest altar lay amid a stone patterning of black-on-grey, three figures stood. The first was Bulveye; his helm removed to reveal a bearded, grizzled face and long, plaited russet hair. The second. Wolf Priest Ulbrandr, called Crowhame, wore obsidian-black plate, adorned with the bleached white of animal skulls. At his belt hung the crozius arcanum, mark of his ancient office, as well as the Fang of Morkai reductor. His mane was pearl-grey, streaked with black and stiff with the rime of age.

  'I see nothing,' he said.

  The third of the group, Rune Priest Leif Hemligjaga, nodded slowly. 'Nor I.' He was the tallest of them all, clad in totem-encrusted plate A long, forked beard spilled across his breastplate, near-white studded with loops of twisted leather and metal, and his armour was engraved with the deep channels of runic warding.

  Before them, suspended in the darkness, spun a hololith rendering of cells in some kind of plasma, swelling, merging, swimming. Runes blinked in and out of existence, picking out salient features, recording anomalies, totalling haemoglobin counts and hormone levels.

  Bulveye hesitated before speaking. This was not his domain. 'There must be some defect,' he ventured at last.

  Ulbrandr, the master of this business, used a brass dial on the altar's top to expand and zoom in on the blood-cast The lurid hololith scrolled in deeper, flashing up markers over points of interest The Wolf Priest's eyes narrowed, as he drank in the tomes of data contained in every snapshot.

  Eventually, he closed the feed and the ghostly image snapped out.

  'I have taken the body apart,' Ulbrandr said, sourly. 'Drained every drop of blood from it, carved the muscles from the bone. I looked into its dead eyes.' He drew in a long, bitter breath through his nostrils. 'And I have nothing to give you.'

  Hemligjaga shifted towards the altar's far end and took up some artefacts retrieved from Haraal's corpse - a curved dagger, a skull-amulet, a torc of linked blackmane fangs. One by one, he turned them in his fingers. 'If it were maleficarum, I would smell it,' he said, softly. 'All I smell is… the warrior.'

  Bulveye wearily ran a hand through his beard, then rubbed his eyes. The many days of combat had taken their toll, and there would be no true rest for some time yet Jorin had already voxed the orders from Russ for immediate war-muster, and that meant getting the battered fleet into some kind of readiness.

  'We looked at the pict-records,' Bulveye said, racking his mind for something - anything. 'They behave just as the others do. They fight just as the others do, until the moment.'

  Ulbrandr fixed his amber eyes on Bulveye. 'And that moment - what does it bring?'

  Bulveye shrugged. 'I did not see it until it was too late Hook-knife was first - screaming out, more than battle cries. Then Haraal. They ran ahead of the others. We were already running, and swiftly, but they were like devils. Their movements sped up. I could not even see them.' He remembered the sight, and how it had chilled him. 'They fight like baresarks, only ten times as hot, and it destroys them. They tear their armour free, and then we see the worst of it - the wolf, in their eyes, in their jaws, everywhere.'

  'That is why they take the test of the Helix,' said Ulbrandr, sceptical. 'They pass it. They overcome it.'

  'Not all, clearly,' said Hemligjaga, still studying the items in his palm.

  'Combat provokes it,' said Bulveye. 'Every time. They do not change when at rest, only when the lust of war is on them.'

  'And when the change comes,' said Hemligjaga, 'it makes them stronger.'

  Ulbrandr spat onto the floor. 'Not stronger. Wilder. They cannot control it, and that is no use to anyone.'

  'They heed no orders,' agreed Bulveye, uneasily. 'If we were fighting with others, this would fulfill every fear they have of us. If it got out—'

  'Who knows?' asked Hemligjaga.

  'Bloodhowl, said Bulveye. 'Those of my company, much of the rest who serve under the jarl. This was not the first time.'

  'Outside the Great Company?'

  'None. Not the Wolf King, not the Einherjar.'

  'As far as you know,' said Hemligjaga, wryly. 'He's no fool, nor are his servants.'

  'And nor is the Allfather, and nor are His servants.' Bulveye curled his fist, then punched it against the altar's edge in frustration. 'Enough. Bloodhowl has made his ruling. We cure it, or we keep it hidden.'

  Hemligjaga laughed. 'We cure it No great task, then.'

  'If indeed it is sickness,' said Ulbrandr. 'There is so much we do not know about what was brought to Fenris with the Allfather. There is so much we do not know about ourselves. We cannot tear our own fangs out, and yet remain of the Rout. Perhaps this is the same.'

  Bulveye hesitated before replying. 'It was never intended, this sickness. Are we, Dekk-Tra, the only ones who suffer?'

  Neither priest could give an answer. At l
ength, Ulbrandr spoke. 'If others in the Legion were afflicted, would we know? All we have are our own eyes, our own ears. And this is not the first time.'

  Hemligjaga let the totems - the last of Haraal's warrior trinkets - fall to the stone. 'It will come out. Sooner or later, you know it will.'

  Bulveye looked at each of them in turn. 'Then we wait. We work. If others have the sickness, we will have lore to give them. If they do not, we have not damned ourselves early.'

  'And this is Bloodhowl's counsel?' asked Ulbrandr.

  Bulveye nodded. 'It is.'

  'So where is he?' the Wolf Priest asked.

  'With the Iron Priest,' said Bulveye, turning away from the altar and starting to walk away. 'Ripping apart datacores. I think he's in a hurry to get back in the warp.'

  On the high-orbit Nidhoggur, buried deep in the interior of the warship, Jarl Helmschrot gave honour to his primarch. The greatest of the many feast-chambers had been decked in the war-banners of the Legion, each one reverently kept after the battles they commemorated. The standards, some little more than burned scraps lashed to iron spear shafts, others intact and elaborately made hung in the alcoves of long stone galleries, facing inwards at the mighty firepit cut from the flags below. The coals shimmered with heat-haze, seeming to float over soft beds of angry crimson.

  Wooden benches, each one hewn from a single trunk of Fenrisian ironpine, ringed the pit all crammed with the warriors of Tra. Just as in the halls of the Fang they were served meat on boards, glistening with fats and running with barely cooked juices. The Rout liked their sustenance close to raw, the better to savour the textures of the kill.

  The jarl sat at the high table, flanked by his own guard - a Rune Priest named Heoroth and a warrior named Aeska Broken-lip, among others. Russ had taken the place of honour in the centre. On his left was Blackblood, and at his feet were the hulking outlines of Freki and Geri, both tearing at bones the length of a man's entire leg their muzzles stained glossy red.

  'So what did you make of him?' asked Ogvai, attacking a long strand of gristle.

  Russ leaned forwards on the table and took a long swig from an iron bowl. 'Just as ever. You?'

  'He'd been set on fire. That might have changed his mood.'

  Russ barked a laugh and reached for another hunk of pale pink meat. 'I didn't see it, Ogvai.'

  The jarl of Tra was a pure-bred Fenrisian, with the distended jaw-line, the thick hair, the amber eyes to act as his markers. He had been among the first of the youths to take the terrible draught out in the wilds of Asaheim, but not the first of the Legion. Terrans had been in the ranks for decades, and after that had come the primarch's own followers, the retainers of the Hall of King Leman Russ. Now those last were the greybeards, called the 'Wolf Brothers', all members of the Thirteenth Great Company, dwindling in number with every year as the rigours of endless war took their toll.

  There were those of the Mechanicum and of the Administratum who said that it should never have been done, that only a child could survive the implantation of the organs, and that fate would be cruel to those who tampered with the Allfather's sanctioned template But none of them could countermand a primarch in his realm, and would never have dared it openly, for the wolf brothers were his retainers, his shield-brothers, his war-kin.

  'You two were always too close,' said Ogvai.

  Russ looked amused, though there was an edge of danger to it. 'Tell me then. What am I missing?'

  Ogvai reached for more meat, ripping the flesh from a wobble of fats. He gnawed on it thoughtfully.

  'They have always gone their own way,' he said at last. 'We only knew you as the Wolf King, son of the Allfather. They knew you as Thengir's vassal. That changes things.'

  'You're telling me they don't respect me?'

  'All respect you. But Jorin believed you mortal, once. He cannot forget it.'

  Russ thought on that. Unlike some of his brothers, he had always suffered his jarls to speak openly with him. Some had ended up with broken jaws for their trouble, though the wounds healed as quickly as the bad blood drained.

  'We fought alongside one another for years,' he said. 'He grew older, I did not. What did he make of that? I don't know. He'd seen old Thengir die. He knew how I'd been found - lost among wolves, heralded by every bloody portent known to the rune-rattlers. Perhaps I should have asked him. Too busy, though - too busy killing to stay alive.'

  Ogvai wiped his chin. 'I don't doubt his bravery.'

  'No, you're not a fool.'

  'I don't even doubt his loyalty. It's just…'

  The words trailed off. Russ waited.

  'We are one,' said Ogvai at last. 'Terran, Fenrisian, we are all the same, made by the Helix. We passed through the fire as infants and became warriors under the Fang's shadow.' He reached for his own bowl, brim-full with steaming liquid. 'But them. They've known another world. They were men before they were legionaries.'

  Ogvai drunk deep, his piece said. Russ toyed with strands of bloody sinew, pulling at them with greasy fingers. Out across the chamber, the warriors ate and drank, laughing, taunting, remembering.

  'Everything you say is true of me too,' the primarch said. He pushed his board aside. 'I knew the danger, but denying them the chalice would have been cruelty. I watched those that died, all of them, and in their agony they thanked me They knew what they wanted, and I could not deny it to them, for I was their jarl, their hearth-master and their war-leader.'

  Ogvai listened carefully. At his side, Aeska pretended to eat, though the words reached him too.

  'Before you were born, Ogvai, out on some stinking sea-ship or in some filthy cave, I was marching with my first Einherjar. None of them could match me, not after Thengir died and I became full-grown, and yet they did not serve out of fear, but because we were brothers. If that makes you envious, then I cannot care. I cannot change it I did not ask for this, and nor do I regret that it happened, but I will not lose the last links to that age.'

  'You will, someday,' said Ogvai.

  'Then not yet.' Russ scowled. 'Hel, you are goading me this night. What is in your meat?'

  Ogvai laughed, took his bowl and drained the contents, then called for more. 'I only tell you what you already know. You did not bring me with you because you need more blades - Bloodhowl has enough already. You sense some fault in them, don't you?' Russ did not reply at once. He ripped another slab and tore at it with his fangs. Bloody juices ran down his chin, dripping onto the golden rim of his gorget.

  'There's fault in all of us,' he said, chewing.

  Sensor-servitors had been shackled together down in the Aesrumnir's forge-levels, chained to analytical engines and employed to brute-force interpret the Faash military ciphers. Astropaths, strategos and Mechanicum loremasters were drafted in to assist, together with their data-tearing algorithms and look-up tables. A hundred scribes, all of them Terrans taken from the fleet's expeditionary liaison crews, pored over lists of possible hits, slowly eliminating them, then erasing the scrolls and the data-slate terminals.

  Beyond them, the Iron Priest's army of thralls had been pulled from the anvils and the machine shops, freed for the moment from their grinding existence of smelting, refining and hammering. They hauled fresh data-units, many greater in size than a troop transport, up on chain-lifters, then took them apart, opening them up with turbodrills and arc welders. The atmosphere, always humid and painfully hot, ramped up to punishing levels.

  Jorin stood above it all, watching from a high walkway as the horde of data-miners hacked into the deeper levels of the captured cores. With him stood Iron Priest Kloja, master of the company's engines of war. The echoing boom1 and dang of industrial processes made the gantry beneath them rock.

  'There cannot be much more of it,' said Jorin, working to keep the impatience from his voice.

  Kloja shrugged. 'Maybe. Maybe not. They keep their secrets tight.'

  'But you can break them, yes?'

  'I said maybe. I said maybe not.'

  Jor
in turned away, exasperated. The whole reason they had laid the ambush was to capture the hunter-killer, to interrogate the crew, to get some hard and certain knowledge of their destination, Haraal had destroyed that by slaughtering them all.

  'And the fleet?' he asked. 'Ready to fight again?'

  'Aye; jarl. Fighting's no problem.'

  No, that was right That was what they had been made for.

  'So tell me,' said Jorin, 'ever fought beside the First Legion?'

  'No. Not the Dark Angels. I'd like to. Good colours.'

  Jorin turned to him. 'Seriously?

  'Black plate Very nice They look like killers.'

  Jorin didn't say anything for a while then turned away. 'You are strange priest.' Below them both, the machines churned and whirred, cycling thousands of combinations every second. 'They learn their craft by killing beasts, I was told.'

  'So do we. You have a problem with that?'

  'We may find out.'

  Just then, from down on the forge-level floor, a cry came from one of the thralls. Others hastened over to where he stood, manning a brass-grilled cogitator unit. Results began to avalanche down the screens.

  'So there it goes,' said Kloja dryly. 'The cipher's broken.'

  Jorin seized the gantry rail, leaning far over the edge.

  'A path!' he roared, addressing the dozens of Mechanicum adepts that now swarmed around the cogitator unit, their robes rustling. 'Get me a path!'

  One of the tech-priests, a cowled magister with a long segmented proboscis, looked back up at him and nodded.

  Jorin felt a fierce surge of anticipation. Already he could see the warp-stage numbers filter through to his helm-display, one after the other. The hunter-killer had been making for the home world, its engines already keyed.