‘What does he want?’ shouted Sarpedon. ‘If his plan is already fated to succeed, then at least tell me that. For what purpose has he enslaved us?’
‘For the galaxy’s good,’ came the reply from above. Iktinos stepped into view atop the fallen fighter craft, standing just above the cockpit. ‘What is it that you have railed against for so long? The galaxy’s cruelty? The Imperium’s tyranny? Daenyathos saw it six thousand years before it ever occurred to you. He is not just going to batter his Chapter to pieces fighting against it. He is going to cure it.’
Sarpedon began to climb towards Iktinos, up the near-vertical curve of the fighter’s hull. ‘And how?’ he demanded.
‘What other cure is there for all mankind’s ills?’ said Iktinos. ‘Blood and death. Pain and fear. Only through this can the path of the human race be made straight.’
Sarpedon was level with Iktinos now, the two Soul Drinkers facing one another on top of the fallen fighter craft. From here Sarpedon could see the dozens of such craft ranged along the deck, the cylindrical fuel tanks and racks of missiles standing between them. ‘There is too much suffering,’ said Sarpedon. ‘There will be no more.’
‘Not for you,’ said Iktinos.
This time Sarpedon struck first, the Axe of Mercaeno flickering out too quickly for Iktinos to parry. A good blow from the Soulspear would slice the axe in two and make it useless, but Sarpedon was a fraction of a heartbeat too fast. The axe carved not into the ceramite of Iktinos’s armour, but into the hull of the fighter beneath his feet. The hull’s outer skin came apart under the axe’s blade and Iktinos’s foot was trapped. The chaplain fell backwards, unable to arrest his fall. Sarpedon ripped the axe out of the hull and brought it down, but Iktinos forced his head out of the way just before Sarpedon bisected it. The axe was buried again in the hull, the whole head embedded in the metal.
Sarpedon pinned Iktinos’s arm with one of his legs before the chaplain could raise the Soulspear. He bent down and grabbed Iktinos by both shoulder guards, hauled him up into the air, and hurled him down off the fighter’s hull with every scrap of strength he could gather.
Iktinos slammed down into the fuel tank standing beside the fighter. His impact half-flattened the cylinder of the tank and ruptured it. Thick reddish fuel spurted onto the deck.
Sudden pain flared in the leg with which Sarpedon had pinned Iktinos’s arm. He looked down to see the stump of the leg, sliced so cleanly through, a scalpel could have left no neater a wound. The leg itself was sliding slowly down the curve of the fighter’s hull. Iktinos had got off one last strike as he fell.
‘Close, my brother,’ called down Sarpedon. ‘But I can live without that leg. I still have five, and that’s more than I need.’
Sarpedon sprang down from the hull to the deck, just as Iktinos was extricating himself from the wreckage of the fuel tank. Fuel glistened all over him. ‘Your fate is decided,’ he said. ‘What happens here means nothing. Nothing.’
‘You betrayed us and you will die for it,’ replied Sarpedon. ‘That means enough for me.’
Sarpedon raised the Axe of Mercaeno and ran its blade along one of the stubby control surfaces of the fighter. The razor-sharp metal drew sparks, which fell white-hot into the rivulets of fuel creeping towards him from the ruptured fuel tank. The fuel caught light and flame rushed towards Iktinos.
The fuel tank bloomed in a tremendous billowing of blue-white flame. Sarpedon ducked behind the fighter to shield himself from the blast of heat. He caught a glimpse of Iktinos disappearing in the flame, the chaplain’s form seeming to dissolve in the heart of the fire.
The sound was a terrible roar, and the fighter shifted on the deck, pushing against Sarpedon as he crouched. The wave of heat hit and Sarpedon felt the chitin of his remaining legs blistering in it, the paint of his armour bubbling, the side of his unprotected face scalding.
The noise died down, replaced with the guttering of flame. Haphazard shadows were cast against the walls and ceiling of the hangar deck by the fire as it continued to burn. Sarpedon limped out from behind the fighter, his balance uncertain as he adjusted to moving with one fewer leg.
Iktinos, on fire from head to toe, dived out of the flaming wreckage. He crashed into Sarpedon who was unprepared, and fell to the deck under Iktinos’s weight. Flames licked at his face as he stared for a moment into the skull-mask of the chaplain’s helm, like the face of one of the Imperial Creed’s many damned, leering up from a lake of fire.
Mountain Eater
Andy Smillie
The beast emerged into the light and screamed. It was an ugly thing, a creature meant for dark places, for the deep earth, not the radiance of the sun. It screwed its eyes shut, smothering them with malformed claws and fracturing a bone in its left cheek in a vain attempt to kill the pain. Still the world was too bright. Cowed, it stumbled back into the caves where it had spent its miserable life. The soothing darkness returned and it uncovered its face. Crouching, it watched the wind whip icy wash past the threshold of the cave. The baleful sun reflected off the white landscape.
The beast turned its back on the outside and looked down at the mangled ogre carcasses strewn around the cavern. Licking its lips, it remembered raking open their bloated bellies, exposing the juicy innards within. It ripped a piece of cloth off the leg of the nearest corpse and tied the blood-soaked rag tightly around its head. In utter darkness the beast settled.
With the absence of pain, the flesh hunger returned. Its heart beat faster as the beast remembered the carnage, its flesh sickly wet, rimed in the ogre’s blood, the sour tang of gnoblar flesh wedged between its teeth. Its mouth twisted into a horrible parody of a smile. The worthless creature was little more than a morsel. Biting through its tiny ribcage was easy. Its head had cracked like an egg in the beast’s mouth, hot juices flooding its palate.
The wind growled into the cave, disturbing the beast’s remembrance. It carried the same message, the one it had whispered to the gorger for days. Somewhere, up in the mountain where the ice was thick, there was more meat, more blood.
It needed only to climb.
Darhur cupped a hand over his brow, squinting as he tried to see the cave mouth. Fierce crosswinds blustered around him, tossing a deluge of gritty snow into his face. He snarled. The hunter could just make out an entrance, a dark spot at the foot of the mountain. Darhur gauged the distance. It was maybe a few hundred paces away.
‘Snikkit…’ Darhur growled at an ageing gnoblar struggling through the snow in the hunter’s wake. The diminutive creature immediately shrank further into the bear pelt heaped around his tiny shoulders. The ogre snarled. ‘Take a look.’
Snikkit opened his mouth to protest, when a muscled feline beast idled up beside him and silently bared its massive incisors.
For a sabretusk, Golg’s persuasive powers were surprisingly restrained.
‘Yes boss, right away boss.’ Snikkit held up his hands in a vain effort to ward off Darhur’s beast, a mixture of cold and fear turning his green skin grey.
‘And take those other two with you,’ Darhur gestured to Brija and Najkit. He hadn’t survived his years in exile by being reckless. Gnoblars were little good if you couldn’t use them as bait. Watching the three ease their way towards the cavern, Darhur ran his leathern hand through Golg’s coat. ‘Don’t you worry. You can eat ’em later.’
Najkit kept his distance from the other gnoblars. If there was a gorger in the cave, he wasn’t getting eaten by it. Well, at least not before that idiot Brija. Najkit shook his head as Brija shuffled past him, mumbling gibberish as he tried to lick the snow off his knife.
Snikkit dug his hands into his pockets. Shiny things were hidden within that not even Darhur knew about. They were secrets, precious loot for Snikkit, and Snikkit alone. A pity they couldn’t carry a fire or a broth-filled cauldron. His stomach rumbled, reminding him he was hungry. Then he shivered. It was freezing too. He hated the mountains, and had been perfectly happy hunting idiot humans in the lowlands.
Darhur must have angered the Great Maw when he killed Skarg Backbreaker and earned banishment from the tribe. Tyrant Grut Face Eater favoured his Ironguts above all, save his own bloated gut. Famously, the Tyrant had proclaimed that he would only eat one of his precious bodyguard if the cooking pots were empty and all else had been consumed. Snikkit cursed his luck, regretting the decision to throw in his lot with the hunter. A butcher’s pot would have been preferable to this slow freezing death. It irked him to be punished for Darhur’s pride. The wind rumbled around in the cave mouth and coughed back out, arresting Snikkit’s wallowing. Fishing his best shrapnel from his pocket, he loaded his favourite sling and approached the entrance. He shuffled inside, flanked by Brija and Najkit, eyes struggling to adjust after the glaring white of the outside.
‘Watcha sees?’ Najkit whispered.
‘Nuffin yet.’ Snikkit kept his eyes fixed on the gloom in front of him. Slowly, the features of the cave resolved through the darkness. Stalagmites colonised the ceiling, several larger ones protruding like talons above his head. The cavern walls were pitted and irregular, as though hewn from the rock of the mountain by giant fists. Snikkit trembled as he thought about the mighty storm giants that once roamed these benighted crags. He took a cautious few steps forwards… the gnoblar let out a grunt of pain as his head struck the ground.
He’d slipped on something.
‘You alive?’ Not waiting for a reply, Najkit threw his knife in Snikkit’s direction.
‘Wotch it!’ The grubby blade missed Snikkit’s scalp by inches and clattered next to him. ‘Sumthin’ on the floor.’ He sat up, rubbing his head and a small cut above his eye, which had already frozen closed. Snikkit ran his palm over the ground where he’d lost his footing. Peering through the darkness, he saw why. He followed the glint of the blood-ice to a pile of mangled bodies. He was already getting to his feet, backing away from the slaughter.
Ogres. Dead ogres. Lots of them.
‘We shud get da boss.’ Snikkit turned to Brija. He had no desire to be back out in the wind and urged the idiot to go instead. ‘I keep watch.’
Brija though, took no notice, engrossed in trying to prise a knife off his tongue.
Snikkit hoped he’d cut it off, at least then they’d have something to eat.
‘I go.’ Najkit was a particularly selfish creature, not given to helping anything or anyone but himself. Survival dictated leaving the warmth of the cave, one that a gorger had only recently made into its lair. Even if the monster was gone, there was bound to be more of them lurking somewhere nearby drawn to the smell of blood, and Najkit wasn’t about to be next on the menu.
The torch flickered in the darkness, casting strange shadows on the walls. Monstrous shapes appeared in the half light: the mastodon of Kruk’s Peak, Gutslaab the slave giant and the winged fiend of Harrowing Crags. Darhur had killed them all and devoured their strength. He held the torch aloft, relishing the warmth of its flames as he followed Najkit further into the cavern.
‘Hurry up,’ Darhur snarled, kicking Najkit in the back to make his point, ‘or it’s somethin’ sharper than my boot next time.’
Najkit muttered a curse under his breath, thinking about all the soft places he could stab Darhur with his knife when next the ogre hunter slept, and headed to where he’d left Snikkit and Brija. Unless, he thought, the gorger had returned and…
Najkit smiled. If the beast was feasting, Darhur could sneak up and kill it. He could rummage through what was left, the sinew and the grease, for Snikkit’s lovely coat. Just imagining this grim turn of events made Najkit feel warmer. But then again, what if…
Picking up the pace, the gnoblar drew his knife and prayed the others were already food.
‘Boss, boss. Over ’ere,’ Snikkit waved Darhur over and let out a sigh of relief. The ogre was a welcome sight. Snikkit was mostly sure that whatever dangers lurked in the mountains, Darhur would kill them before they could eat him.
Darhur ignored the creature and swung the torch low over three ogre corpses. The bodies were dumped one on top of the other, the way Darhur discarded the legs of cave pheasant when he’d picked clean the meat. They’d been dead a good while but the cold had slowed decomposition. A deep incision to their abdomens had killed them. Darhur bared his teeth in anger. The beast had savaged then bled them – they had all died in pain. The bodies were top heavy, their guts and thighs devoid of meat while the tougher gristle around their shoulders and arms had been left almost untouched. A blood trail ran further back into the cavern. There was no spatter on the walls and none of the damage to the stalagmites above that he’d have expected from a fight. The ogres hadn’t died here.
The hunter turned over the remains with his foot, stopping when he saw a cracked gut plate. It was badly mangled and studded with claw and teeth marks but the glyph was unmistakable – Wallcrusher Tribe. Darhur shivered, though not from cold, only too aware that he’d suffer the same fate should he fail to slay the beast. Grut Face Eater had no sympathy for weaklings who let a dirty gorger eat them. He’d sent Darhur after the gorger because it’d eaten something else, something that did matter. Darhur sifted more carefully through the viscera and was rewarded with a small fragment of green rock. It belonged to Grut’s personal gnoblar, Sneejit. The tyrant thought it turned Sneejit into some sort of lucky charm. Darhur thought it made the irritating little creature more so. He was almost sorry he was going to have to kill this beast.
‘Golg.’ Darhur bent down and picked up a handful of ragged cloth, holding it out for the sabretusk.
Golg padded over to the hunter. Burying its snout in the bloodied rags, it took a long sniff, filling its nostrils with the stench of sweat, piss and blood. Its heart quickened at the familiar scents. Sneering as it caught the faintest tang of unwashed gnoblar, Golg turned to Snikkit and growled.
‘Eh, boss…’ Panicked, Snikkit hid behind Brija. The idiot gnoblar was blissfully unaware of the drooling sabretusk, fretting at his flayed tongue. Excising the knife had cost him at least one layer of flesh.
‘Not now.’ Darhur cuffed Golg on the back of the head. Stooping, he pulled a large bone from the half-eaten feast. The hunter turned the femur over in his hand. It had been picked clean, scoured by a tongue so coarse that it had been left unnaturally smooth. Darhur grunted and tossed the bone to Golg. Catching it in his powerful jaws, the sabretusk devoured it, crunching and swallowing without pause.
Darhur snarled. His muscles bunched in anticipation of the fight to come. ‘Find the gorger.’
Weakness was not something Darhur was accustomed too. But this was a foe he could neither crush with a hammer nor skewer with a spear. It was the mountain. It was the earth, and the peaks of endless ice. He braced himself against a large boulder, drawing reassurance from its solidity. This high up, the air was whisker thin. Every breath came quick and shallow, his lungs struggling to feed oxygen to his massive frame. Darhur regarded the mountain. It soared past the limits of his vision, stabbing into the lifeless grey of the sky and disappearing into ugly cloud. He hoped the gorger hadn’t climbed much farther. Darhur had crested Gut Spire, the highest peak roamed by none but the thickest skinned mammoths. Not even the cantankerous mountain carrion circled overhead, their nests confined to lower aeries. Darhur wondered what could have driven the beast onwards into the unknown mists. Even layered in thick hides and pelts, the hunter’s skin was cracked and raw. A dozen times during the ascent, he’d been forced to stop and beat blood back into his aching muscles. He was amazed that the naked gorger, wiry and without a hardy gut, had not simply died from exposure. Truly, it was a resilient beast and worthy of his hammer. Golg growled from up ahead, urging his master to continue.
Darhur summoned the strength to bark at his companion, ‘Take us the right way this time.’
More than once he’d followed the sabretusk to a dead end, the gorger’s trail suddenly swallowed up by the wind and snow. The beast was seemingly a wraith, a figment of Darhur’s fevered imagination given form and allowed
to wander the frozen passes of the desolate upper peaks. Even doubling back, they’d found it almost impossible to get their bearings again, as though the mountain itself was trying to waylay them. Passages that had been open were suddenly closed, crags had become denser and caves disappeared only to re-emerge elsewhere.
Darhur knew such things were impossible. Mountains were like the ogre tribes, permanent and unchanging except in the face of cast-iron might. The hunter crushed his suspicions, disregarding them as inane fantasies of his cold-numbed mind. Pulling the pelt tighter around his shoulders, he pushed his feet onwards through the thickening snow. The wind picked up, its blustering howl joined by the faint rumble of thunder from farther up the mountain. Darhur could barely see the ground beneath him anymore. One wrong step and he’d plummet over the edge into ignominious death and oblivion. A jag of lightning tore across the sky, opening a great wound that speared freezing hail down onto the hunter. Chunks of ice the size of fists battered his weary body.
‘Maw!’ Darhur cried out in defiance. A shard bit into his arm as he tried to shield his face from the sudden storm. Another cut his forehead, but the blood was like ice. It hammered into his broad back. It slashed his cheek and he roared, but the elements could not be silenced by his anger. It was as if the very mountain wanted to deny him his prey.
Numb with fatigue, Darhur’s legs gave out. Crawling on all fours, he eked out a few more feet before grinding to a halt. His resolve broken, the hunter lay in the snow, letting the relentless storm batter him. Slowly, he was swathed in a film of white, invisible against the winter landscape. He should have been angry, furious that he would die in frozen shame, but the fire in his belly had cooled with the long climb. The mountain had defeated him after all.
Pain stabbed through Darhur’s shoulder, stirring him from his sorrow. Then he was moving, jerking over the rough ground. Something was dragging him. The hunter’s instincts kicked in in an instant, his mind conjuring images of the fell beast that sought to haul him to its lair and make a meal of his flesh. Fumbling for his hammer, Darhur struggled to see beyond the snow that cascaded over his face. Straining, he glimpsed Golg. The sabretusk’s jaws were clamped around his shoulder. Wincing, Darhur swung his arm up and slapped an open palm against the sabretusk’s head. Growling, the beast let him go. The hunter got to his feet, swearing that he would wring the upstart feline’s neck. Withdrawing, Golg dropped onto his rear legs and waited until the ogre was almost within arm’s reach before skulking behind a bowed rock that concealed the path ahead. Darhur growled in annoyance, rolled his shoulder loose and strode after the impudent beast.
Hammer and Bolter Year One Page 140
