The worst of the grime removed, he gestured to his retinue and the doors were flung open. Alajos entered what had once been the topmost chamber of the captured citadel. Its slender windows had been blown out during the first mortar strikes and glass was strewn across the floor in glittering heaps. Under the empty stone lintels he could see out towards the east, far across the lowlands and over to the greater mass of the Crimson Fortress. Waves of smoke churned up thickly from its lower levels to its summit, fuelled by burst promethium tanks and the flammable remains of the bastion's armouries.
The Lion stood next to the remnants of an ornate desk of some description, heavy-columned and topped with pearl-coloured stone. Dulanian corpses, both armoured and in civilian robes, lay across the floor, disfigured by bolter-shell exit wounds. More legionaries stood at the chamber's edges, standing vigil over the empty windows.
The Lion looked up as Alajos approached.
'Tidings from Gahael,' the primarch announced.
Alajos made his salute, ensuring that none of his weariness was evident in the gesture. 'The battle for the citadel had been conducted at speed, but much of the fighting had still been vicious.'
'He is victorious, then,' said Alajos.
'The shield generators are taken,' said the Lion, sounding satisfied. 'Come, you will wish to see this.'
The two of them walked over to the chamber's eastern wall, from where the carnage beyond could be witnessed through the gaping window frames. First Legion Stormbirds circled the occupied citadel heights, hunting for the last pockets of resistance. Out across the plains, tank-groups were forcing their way east and south, closing off approach routes and setting up barriers to any possible counter-attack.
The night had reached its nadir. No stars shone under the heavy layers of cloud, and the spreading fires painted the landscape a deeper red, like hot, rusted metal. The outline of the Crimson Fortress piled up against the eastern horizon, mountainous, its flanks set dark against the movement of flames. Until that moment, the summit of that fortress had been sheathed in the translucent screens of void shields, making the only access to the upper reaches through the many terraced levels below. Now, even as Alajos and his primarch watched, the air above the fortress flexed, guttered and then snapped into darkness, its protective shroud extinguished like a snuffed candle-flame.
'Gahael has excelled,' Alajos said, with feeling. He knew just how well defended the generator zones had been, and how hard Gahael must have fought to take them.
'Indeed so,' said the Lion. 'But this is not yet over.'
The primarch summoned a tactical hololith, spread wide over the entire combat zone. Dozens of runes marked the main deployments, showing the Ninth Order's current disposition within the captured citadel, and Gahael's movements far to the north. In the extreme east, past the Crimson Fortress and far out into the wastes beyond, Moriaen's detachments were indicated. They had remained static, hemmed in to their dropsites and unable to break out just as we planned for,' said the Lion, grimly. 'They are massing there already, looking to relieve the fortress from the east.'
'Moriaen will hold them.'
'Perhaps. It would be better if he didn't have to.' The primarch called out to one of his aides, Orfeo, a robed and ancient mortal weighed down with data-slates and communications devices. 'How does my brother progress?'
Orfeo double checked his sensor-readings. 'The Wolves are stalled, my lord. No movement. Indications are that they reached the penultimate level, then stopped.'
Alajos digested that. The fortress' most formidable defences had looked to be on the perimeter, and those had been broken. It was rare for the Wolves to pause in their onslaught. At least, that was what their reputation had always suggested.
The Lion gazed back out through the empty window, and his dark helm reflected the firelight. 'We could end this now,' he said, thoughtfully. 'The shields are down - we could teleport into the sanctum, cut off the head. The whole thing could be brought to a close.'
'True,' said Alajos, carefully. 'But it is the Wolf King's prize.'
The Lion laughed. 'Is this then some game, for the sport of children? The longer it lasts, the more pressed Moriaen will be.'
The primarch glanced back at the tactical read-outs. The position was poised - the early gains had been massive, but loss of momentum could yet turn the assault into a quagmire. An entire planet's resources had been mobilised and were racing back towards the fortress, millions of men, all with a single objective.
And there was an efficient way out, a clean kill on offer. They knew where the Tyrant was, and they had stripped the last of his defences from him.
'Can the Wolves not make the same move?' asked Alajos, uncertain.
Orfeo sniffed. 'It is rumoured that they dislike teleportation.'
The Lion shook his head. 'They would do it if they needed to, but they are locked down. Something holds them back. Can we open a channel to my brother?'
Orfeo looked doubtful. 'The fortress is in static, some interference. I doubt their comms are functioning well either.'
The Lion let out an irritated breath. 'And all the while we have the chance, there, waiting.' His fingers played along the hilt of his sword, still in its scabbard.
Alajos didn't like the sound of that. He'd seen the way the Wolf King had been in the council on the Invincible Reason - burning with a scarce-contained zeal for completion, obsessive about the goal in a way that no son of Caliban could ever be It was not pride, but necessity. Those few hours had told Alajos everything he needed to know about the two primarchs and their essential differences. The Lion was a monarch, a tamer of beasts, a master of cities. Russ was a weapon, a controlled explosion, a bringer of frenzy.
So it would matter, if the prey were taken from him. It would matter a great deal.
'If you ask for my counsel, lord,' Alajos said, 'we should contact them. Inform Russ that the way is clear, let him take the chance. We have fighting enough here, and Moriaen must be reinforced.'
The Lion did not respond at once. Alajos had seen him like this on other occasions - an opening had presented itself, just as in a duel when the opposing swordsman suddenly dropped his guard. The genius for exploiting any opportunity was what had made him the master of Caliban, and still marked his rapid rise through the ranks of the Great Crusade's most renowned generals, perhaps one day even to rival Horus and Guilliman. The Lion cared about that reputation, and about the tally of victories marked by the Crusader Host on Terra.
Eventually, the Lion turned away from the fortress, back to Orfeo and his strategos, but his hand never left his sword-hilt.
'Try to reach him,' the primarch told Orfeo. 'Inform him the summit is open to attack by warp-transportation, if he is not yet aware.' He let slip a wry laugh. 'And, if you fancy your luck, tell him we stand ready to assist.'
Alajos relaxed, though only by a fraction. 'And if he cannot be reached?'
The Lion shrugged. His gaze seemed to be drawn back towards the east, over to the Crimson Fortress, as if pulled there by some irresistible force of gravity.
'We wait,' he said. 'For now.'
The further east they pushed, the heavier the fighting got. The fortress' Scarabines remained resolute, leaving no barricade unmanned and contesting every intersection. Jorin, Bulveye and the three hunting packs went as swiftly as they were able, no longer attempting to destroy all before them but simply to reach their destination in time. The Faash troops, once they realised the VI Legion's heavy armour was still moving north towards the summit, closed in on them, launching attack after attack from the cover of their bomb-ravaged buildings.
Still running, Jorin veered past the explosions as they went off, using every scrap of the battle-sense he'd been born with. Each passing moment made his decision seem more of a betrayal, a dereliction of the oaths he'd sworn a mortal generation ago. There could be no justification for leaving the battlefront when ordered to push on. If he'd told his liege lord the truth, perhaps that would have been different, b
ut the layers of secrecy had grown, overlapping over one another until the dark core at the heart of his company had swelled to drive all other considerations out The fear, the one that had nagged at him since Haraal's discovery, had never left. They had all experienced the trial of the beast, out in the wilds with the searing pain of the Canis Helix burning through their blood. He remembered it more clearly than most, having been older and closer to death. For all of them there had been that single, terrible point where the paths of life had bisected, stretching on one hand back into the world of humanity, and on the other into the oblivion of the feral. It had seemed then as if the choice would never be faced again - they had stared it in the eye and beaten it, and emerged on the other side.
But now that had changed. The possibility loomed that they would never be free of the trials, and that at any moment the pain might return, dragging them back into themselves and destroying the veneer of humanity that kept the beast at bay. For the wolf brothers, for Dekk-Tra, the ones who had undergone the trials late, that chance seemed the most perilous of all. Jorin had never regretted his decision before, and nor had Bulveye, nor any of the others who had dared it. Death with honour or immortality in glory, that had seemed like the choice, and one they had all made with their eyes open and their soul laughing.
Not now. There was a third possibility - regression into something far worse, as wretched as the failures out in the wilds of Asaheim, who were then hunted, or who scraped a life of pain and madness until the poisons of the Helix at last dragged them into oblivion. And so the secret had to be kept, at least until they could be sure what was at work. If a flaw existed, it might be cured given time, given understanding, and in the meantime the signs could be hidden and the knowledge contained, even at the price of ignoring a liege lord's command.
Their destination neared now, and the buildings flitted by in a blur of shadow and flame. He leapt across the landscapes of dereliction, paying no heed to the shooting pains in his combat-fatigued muscles. He fought on, striking down any who came before him, dispatching them with an urgency that had not been present even in those last moments on the hunter-killer.
He had never gone against Russ when they had both believed themselves mortals. Only now, after they had each been elevated to the state of demigods, had the rift slowly grown. Perhaps the bridge could never have been crossed. Perhaps the doubters had been right, and the wolf brothers should have remained as men, dying as they had lived while their master took his place among the Allfather's pantheon.
'I have them,' voxed Bulveye, sprinting hard to John's right. The location marker appeared on Jorin's helm-display - fifty metres ahead, down a level, buried somewhere in the cluster of buildings before them. They were now far from the main assault zones, and in those areas much of the fortress was relatively intact.
'Life signals?' asked Jorin, heading down the last alleyway before the target, keeping his bolter held loose and ready. 'Hel, what's wrong with the comms?'
'Just one signal,' confirmed Bulveye. The huscarl's voice betrayed his tension. 'Faint, but present.'
They reached the end of the alley, and open space stretched out before them. A courtyard, unscathed by mortar damage, running ahead for another ten metres, after which a towering edifice closed off the far end. It had the look of a temple or a cathedral, replete with spires that rose like grasping fingers into the fire-streaked sky.
Other buildings enclosed the left and right flanks of the square; their bombed-out windows empty and flickering.
In front of the cathedral a squad of Dulanian mech-troops waited, opening fire as soon as the Wolves came out into the open. There was no time for subterfuge or diversion - the pack hared straight at the enemy, firing on the run.
The courtyard soon filled with the whoosh and slam of bolt-shells, as well as the eerie crackle of interference guns discharging. A warrior of Bulveye's pack was hit full-on, upended and dragged back across the rockcrete, his armour crackling with released energy. Others stumbled, struck on the leg or the arm and sent crashing to the ground in a skein of blood and tom-up ceramite. Scarabines went down too, their shields overwhelmed with massed bolter-hits. By the time they had powered up for a second volley, the Wolves were among them, lashing out with sword and axe, driving every blow with the desperation of time running out.
Jorin pounded a path through the reeling enemy, slashing throats and breaking cables. He barged a warrior aside, slamming him back against the warehouse wall, before punching hard, once; twice, a third time, driving his helm into the bone beneath. The Faash trooper collapsed, and then Jorin was moving again, firing at the great temple doors and blasting them back on their hinges. He raced inside, tearing down the stairwell beyond, taking the steps three at a time, hitting the ground level, swinging around the corner, charging out into the inner chamber beyond.
The interior was pitch-black, its high windows covered and its lumens doused. For a moment even Jorin's eyesight struggled to compensate, and for a half-second it felt as if he had been hurled into the void.
Then flood-lumens suddenly blazed into life, illuminating an arched nave, covered in the dragon emblems of the Tyrant, its walls as crimson as the outer scarps of the fortress. Twenty metres down the nave stood a proscenium stretching the width of the hall. Above the stepped stage was a scaffold that extended up towards the keystone of the arch, from which hung a huge cage, iron-barred and swaying. Within the cage, slavering and bestial, was the remains of a warrior. He was just as Haraal had been, clawing at the bars his face distorted with drool and blood and matted fur, his armour cast aside as his body had swollen and hunched. His exposed flesh showed signs of torment, and great open welts ran the length of his naked limbs.
Bulveye joined Jorin in the chamber, followed by the rest of the packs, and they spread out across the temple's floor, transfixed by the spectacle above. Just as on the hunter-killer's bridge, they trained bolters on the captive, though the order to fire did not come. The mutated warrior in the cage showed no recognition of its old brothers, but launched itself at the metal, yowling and tearing at its bonds and making the cage swing crazily.
Jorin tightened his finger on his bolter's trigger, feeling a familiar sickness kindle deep in his stomach. All he had to do was give the word, though it froze on his lips, locked in a stasis of repulsion.
Then his comm-bead, which had been seething with static since the assault began, suddenly cleared. Shutters high up in the chamber walls slid back, revealing image generators all trained on the stage. Generators whirred into life, and the dragon emblems over the scaffold suddenly blazed with a lurid back-light.
'Forces of the Faash!' came a vox-recording, played at deafening volume from vox-augmitters all across the proscenium arch. 'Know now the nature of those who lay siege to Dulan! See the true face of your enemy, and pierce his lies! Beware the alien, the mutant, the heretic!'
Images from the vid-capture suddenly burst into Jorin's helm-feed, shoving aside the tactical overlay and filling the viewfinder with close-up images of the warrior's bestial face. He blink-clicked to remove it, but it slid back in place, overlapping and jumbled, crammed with the leering, snarling faces of the beast above.
He opened fire, aiming at the generators and smashing them. His pack did likewise, sending bolt-shells into the vaults and bringing the devices down in a hail of bouncing sparks.
The vox-recording cut out, the images flickered away.
'What was that?' asked Bulveye, sounding stunned.
Before any answer could come, the galleries above them on either side filled with troopers, dozens of them, opening fire on them from the high vantages and sending las-beams drilling into the cathedral floor. More began to rappel down from the heights, and other spilled out of doorways behind the stage.
Jorin withdrew steadily, firing up at the newcomers as his packs' bolters sent responding volleys into the enemy.
'No idea,' he said grimly, picking his targets. 'But we're not leaving. Not without taking that with us.
'
Orfeo snapped his head up, rendered speechless for a moment The visual feed cleared, but what he had just seen was hard to forget. 'I have been in error, lord,' he said, warily. 'The interference over the fortress was not an accident, it was—'
'Say no more,' snapped the Lion. 'Erase those records. Find out how that reached our grid, then fix it.'
Orfeo bowed hurriedly and got to work. Alajos waited for his primarch to respond to the brief vid-burst. Even after decades in the Great Crusade, having witnessed horrors and wonders to last a dozen lifetimes, little compared to what he had just seen.
'Do we have the Wolves' positions on the augurs?' the Lion asked.
'We do,' said Alajos.
'And they are still static?'
'They have not yet advanced.'
'And Moriaen?'
'No change.'
The Lion nodded, weighing up the options. All across the chamber, his guards waited, poised for the command. They had all seen the images of the beast - just a single moment, a flash of a nightmare, swiftly extinguished though impossible to erase. 'I gave him time,' said the Lion eventually, almost reluctantly, but still with that edge of anticipation. 'Something is wrong. Something has always been wrong with them.' He turned to Alajos. 'It has to be ended.'
'By your will,' said Alajos, sending the order to his assembled paladin squad via the closed comm-link.
The two of them left the chamber, heading out and up the spiral stairway to the roof of the hall, where the Legion thralls had been busy. As they emerged into the open, Stormbirds circled above them, holding position amid the underlit storm-clouds. The wind whipped and eddied, driven by the furious heat of the inferno unleashed below, and the air tasted of burned embers. Fifty of the Legion's paladins were waiting for them, and they raised their blades in salute as their primarch emerged.
The exposed vantage was the highest point in the captured citadel, commanding a view of the entire battle-zone. The Crimson Fortress rose up across the eastern horizon, vast and smoke-shrouded, while plumes of smoke roiled up from combat-sites across the entirety of the plains beyond.
Leman Russ: The Great Wolf Page 12
