Blood of Asaheim

by Chris Wraight

  Lack of sleep had exacerbated it. A Space Marine could go for days without sleep, using his catalepsean node to prolong that even further. That didn’t mean that it was comfortable. Given enough time the symptoms of sleep deprivation kicked in just as they did with mortals. Fuzziness, heaviness in the limbs, slower reaction times, poor judgement.

  He needed to rest. Escape from the warp hadn’t helped as he’d hoped it would. It might do, in time, but Ras Shakeh’s hot, dry air didn’t make it easy. The sunlight was harsh, reflecting painfully from the deep-coloured landscape and flashing from glass and metal.

  So he’d gone down, right into the bowels of the Halicon. Below the ostentatious entrance halls, the citadel’s chambers became cooler and darker. The lumens were set low and many had been turned off, pooling shadows in the corners of the corridors. To begin with there had been plenty of people around – robed officials, Battle Sisters hurrying from one duty to another, Guardsmen. Now, deep in the basement, the numbers had thinned out.

  He was alone again. It felt good.

  That fact surprised him. For as long as he could remember, Baldr had revelled in the close fraternity of Járnhamar. They had welcomed him when he’d joined, Ingvar in particular. He’d slotted in well. He couldn’t match Váltyr for sword-play or Gunnlaugur for brute force, but his aim with a bolter was the best of them. There had been times on the battlefield where it had felt like he’d known where each enemy would be before they did. On his day, Baldr’s shells found their marks with uncanny, unerring precision. It was all so easy, all so effortless.

  So his torpor, his lack of self-command, that concerned him. For a brief time, during the fighting on the plague-ship, he’d been able to forget the pain throbbing behind his eyes. Only on the descent to the city, with the Thunderhawk shaking and rattling around him, had the pain returned.

  Contemplating such weakness angered him. He would have to learn to master it. He was a Son of Russ; pain should be easily overcome.

  He kept on walking, descending dusty stone stairs, striding down long, bare corridors, passing by empty doorways leading into empty rooms.

  Motion helped. Coolness helped. Being alone helped.

  He heard the whimpering late. If he’d been in his right mind, he would have detected it far earlier. As it was, his senses blunted by the angry throb in his skull, he nearly missed it entirely.

  He stopped, listening carefully. It came from further down. At the end of the corridor a tight spiral staircase descended through a circular well-shaft of stone. The tiles on the walls around it had come loose; several had shattered across the floor. Dust lay heavily on the remains, a thick, undisturbed layer. No one had walked that way for some time.

  He heard it again. A faint, breathy exhalation, ripe with pain.

  He tensed. Something about the noise made the hairs on his body stand up. He drew his bolter silently and moved towards the stairs. Getting down them silently was impossible – the metal railing snagged against his armour. Before he’d reached the bottom, he heard something scuttling away from him.

  The dark closed in. His eyes compensated immediately. He moved away from the stairs and walked further into the shadows.

  He was in some kind of basement vault. The arched roof was low, barely high enough for him to walk without stooping. The floor was bare earth, old and loamy. He guessed he’d reached the foundations of the citadel. A familiar stench – sweet, cloying – hung in the dusty air.

  He moved his head carefully, sweeping the space ahead of him. The earth was disturbed, as if an animal had suddenly stirred and raced off into the dark. The nearside wall was clear, but the opposite end of the basement was piled with old metal crates, most of them broken and gaping.

  Baldr paused, listening, sniffing.

  It was behind the crates. It didn’t make much noise, but it had to breathe. He heard its lungs straining, pulling hard on dank air.

  He guided his bolter muzzle over to where the sound came from, and fired.

  The explosion of the shell’s release broke the silence. At the same time, the crates burst apart, hurled away from the walls as something broke from cover. Baldr’s round detonated harmlessly into the wall, blowing a crater in the stone.

  He had a brief glimpse of something running at him, scampering across the floor like a giant, bloated insect. It moved incredibly fast.

  Baldr fired again, hitting it this time. It flew back away from him, its limbs splaying, a thin shriek echoing around the vaults.

  He went after it, stowing his bolter as he moved. It twisted around and leapt back up at him. He saw a grey, gaunt face leer up out of the dark, snapping at his own with black jaws.

  His fist shot out, seizing it by a scrawny, stringy neck and pinning it to the floor. He felt sinews break and bones snap under his grip.

  It still lived. Its hands clawed at him, scraping his armour in a frenzy of useless scratching. It spat at him, sending a stream of thick, lumpy spittle into his face. It thrashed, screamed and writhed under the pressure of his gauntlet.

  Baldr looked at it in disgust. Its flesh hung in flaps from its bony frame, withered and wasting. Sores clustered thickly around its lips, tight and pus-filled. It was almost naked, its exposed skin covered in lesions and tumours. Its eyes were sunken deep into an emaciated skeletal face, both dull with cataracts. Its tongue was long gone, chewed away in the wretch’s madness, and its screams were formless and choking.

  For all that, it had once been human. Baldr recognised the remnants of a scholiast’s robes hanging around its loins.

  He squeezed his fingers together. For a moment longer the thing hung on, its blind eyes popping, its hands clawing.

  Then it went limp. Baldr withdrew, wiping the smear of stinking spittle from his face. He could almost taste the corruption in it, like long-rotten fruit.

  He drew himself up, gazing down on the crumpled corpse of the scholiast. Its mouth hung slack, exposing inflamed gums and the blackened stump where its tongue had been.

  It reeked.

  He activated the comm-stud in his armour collar. The link, which he’d severed earlier, sparked back into life.

  ‘Fjolnir,’ came Gunnlaugur’s voice. He sounded preoccupied and irascible. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Clearing my head,’ said Baldr. ‘Where are you now?’

  ‘With the canoness. My chambers.’

  ‘I’ll see you there,’ said Baldr, stooping to scoop up the remains of the diseased cadaver. He turned back to the staircase, his tread heavy. ‘She’ll want to see this too. Warn her that we have a new problem.’

  He cut the link. As he climbed, tucking the limp bundle of limbs under one arm, he could already feel his headache getting worse.

  Ingvar walked down the narrow streets from the Halicon citadel to the cathedral. To do so he had to pass through the Ighala Gate, jostling with the crowds that milled under its narrow portals.

  The experience was uncomfortable. Mortals disliked being in such close proximity to him – they pulled away when they saw him coming, staring with open mouths as he passed – but under the shadow of the enormous arches there was too little space for them to escape.

  He ignored their stares, partly for his own comfort. Decades of operating on secret missions with Onyx had desensitised him to unaltered human presence. He had become more comfortable with the select few who, like him, had been elevated into positions of prominence: Inquisitors, Imperial agents, senior Adeptus Mechanicus priests, his fellow warriors of the Adeptus Astartes.

  Mortals were different. Whenever he caught their expressions they showed the same thing: fear. They were terrified of him. Children ran away, screaming. Adults worked harder, but he could see the anxiety clearly enough in their staring eyes, their trembling fingers, their sudden, pungent aroma of fight-or-flight.

  Ingvar knew Gunnlaugur wouldn’t have worried about that. Perhaps h
e was right not to. In any case, it was just one more difference that had grown up between them.

  He strode down from the gate, over the bridge and into the lower city. The streets there were hotter and closer than those above the Ighala bastion. The buildings were shabbier, though more brightly decorated. Pennants displaying the Hjec Aleja coat of arms hung limply from doorways, their colours fading as the sun beat down on them. The smell of spices – cloves, cumin – rose from the baked earth, as if generations of use had stained it forever. Voices rose and fell from hab-units around him. The conversations sounded brief and subdued. Very little laughter rang out from the narrow windows. An atmosphere of tension, of low-level fear, of weariness, had sunk into the entire place.

  People went about their business as they must have done before war had come, but their tight, febrile movements betrayed their anxiety. Ingvar had seen such things often on other worlds and in other battlegrounds. Humans would maintain a familiar rhythm for as long as they possibly could, pottering around, concerning themselves with trivialities while the forces of Hel crouched just over the horizon. The pretence could only ever be half successful – they all knew their world was about to change – but then what else were they supposed to do? Food still needed to be prepared, water needed to be fetched, clothes needed to be laundered.

  Eventually the press of crooked streets opened up into a wide square. On the far side of it rose the sheer walls of the cathedral, sweeping up into the sky in a series of ever-narrowing layers of stony gothic ornamentation. Its three spires jutted dramatically, soaring far above the roofline of the houses around, thrust up from the overlapping tumble of slate and stone like an immense iron-tipped trident.

  The courtyard at its base was shaded and thronged with people, all of whom were waiting patiently in long, huddled queues. At the head of those queues stood priests of the Ecclesiarchy in earth-brown robes. One by one the people received a blessing from them and were sent away. Ingvar watched them bow before the clerics, their heads bobbing low over the ground. They had the sign of the aquila waved over them and a few words of High Gothic muttered. Then they went away, a look of quiet satisfaction on their otherwise haunted faces. They slipped back into the shadows of the narrow streets, quickly disappearing.

  Ingvar watched the process repeat itself. The mortals paid him little attention here. Their attention was fixed on what they were doing; if they caught sight of him watching them, they didn’t show it.

  ‘Do not despise them,’ came a woman’s voice.

  Palatine Bajola drew alongside him. She wore her ceremonial robes – ivory cotton, trimmed with red and gold. Her ebony skin stood in stark contrast.

  ‘Why do you think I would?’ he replied.

  ‘You are superhuman,’ she said. ‘They are human. They suffer fear. I am told you do not.’

  Ingvar watched the queues shuffle. Just as at the gate, he could smell the undercurrent of uneasiness.

  ‘How often does this happen?’ he asked.

  ‘Priests are here every day between dawn and dusk. They are kept busy the whole time.’

  ‘And it does some good?’

  Bajola paused before replying.

  ‘If you mean that those people sleep a little at night and are able to go about their business without falling prey to waking nightmares, then yes, it does. It you mean that the Emperor will spare them from the coming horror and allow them to live their lives in peace, then no, it does not.’

  Ingvar turned to face her. ‘Do you receive the blessing?’ he asked.

  Bajola smiled. ‘They wouldn’t dare. They assume I have all the faith I need.’ She gestured towards the cathedral. ‘You are here to see me, I take it. We should go inside.’

  ‘And do you?’ asked Ingvar, staying where he was.

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Have all the faith you need?’

  Bajola hesitated.

  ‘We will find out, I guess,’ she said.

  The interior of the cathedral was cool even while the streets outside sweltered. Its vast nave ran north-south, lined with dark rows of basalt columns. Sunlight angled in through narrow stained-glass panes depicting stylised images of saints and warriors, throwing intense coloured swatches on the chequerboard marble floor. The high altar was simple – an obsidian block of stone over which hung war-banners of the Wounded Heart and the Shakeh Guard regiments. An imposing cast-iron representation of the Emperor Manifest on Earth smiting the Great Serpent Horus had been mounted above that, glinting wetly in the gloom.

  Few people moved around in the dusty shadows: scholiasts, a priest, an old penitent crawling towards the altar on his knees. The faint sounds they made were amplified amid the soaring spaces. Aromas of incense and human sweat rose from the stone.

  Ingvar took it all in. He could appreciate Bajola’s pride in the place. It was a serious building, a place of devotion, unlike the grotesque pile of the Halicon that the canoness occupied.

  She led him through a side door and up into her private chambers. The room they ended up in was high on the south-facing front, lined with crystal-paned windows that gazed out over the city below. Several chairs stood waiting, all of which she ignored. That was considerate; Ingvar guessed his armour-clad weight would have cracked most of them.

  ‘They call you the Gyrfalkon,’ she said, leaning against the far wall and smiling at him. ‘What is that? No one has been able to tell me.’

  ‘You cannot guess?’

  ‘A bird, I would have said.’

  ‘You would have said right. One of the few that can dwell on Fenris. It has grey plumage, thick against the cold. They are good hunters. Then again, everything on Fenris is a good hunter. If it is not, then it dies.’

  Bajola looked amused. ‘So why you?’ she asked. ‘Because you are a good hunter? Or is it some dark secret of your Chapter?’

  Ingvar shrugged. ‘My brothers are not overly imaginative,’ he said. ‘My eyes are grey. I had a reputation for speed with the blade, once. They liked the sound of it. I don’t know.’

  Bajola nodded, as if he had confirmed some suspicion she had of him.

  ‘You are not quite like your brothers, I think,’ she said.

  ‘They might agree with you,’ he said. ‘Why do you say so?’

  Bajola evaded the question.

  ‘Tell me about yourself, Gyrfalkon,’ she said.

  ‘What purpose would that serve?’

  ‘The canoness asked me to get to know you,’ she said. ‘You have been asked to get to know me. If you like, we could dance around one another for days, trying to gather information by stealth. Or we could put aside those games and talk. Enough, at least, to keep our superiors happy.’

  Bajola had a polished, worldly air that Ingvar had not seen from the other Battle Sisters. She and de Chatelaine, it was obvious, were cut from very different cloth.

  ‘You are not quite like your sisters, I think,’ he said.

  Bajola laughed. It was deep, spontaneous laugh, almost like a man’s.

  ‘That much is true,’ she said. ‘But tell me of the Wolves. If we are to die here together, I’d like to know who I’m dying with.’

  Ingvar looked away from her, past her shoulder, out through one of the windows. Ras Shakeh’s deep blue sky shone with heat and light. A world more removed from Fenris would have been hard to find.

  ‘We are Járnhamar,’ he said slowly, as if to help himself remember. ‘That is the pack-name. A pack may last for many generations, and we have fought together for a long time. Gunnlaugur, Olgeir, Váltyr, Jorundur and myself are the surviving founders. Baldr came later. Hafloí, the pup, barely yesterday. That forges a bond. It is not easily broken, though it can be strained.’

  ‘I noticed,’ said Bajola. ‘You and your leader, you see things differently.’

  Ingvar shook his head.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘
Not about the essentials.’

  He snapped his head towards her suddenly, baring his fangs, snarling. He was pleased to see that, for all her poise, she started.

  ‘We are both of the blood of Asaheim, Sister,’ he said, smiling at her hungrily. ‘Neither of us is tame.’

  ‘I never thought you were,’ said Bajola, recovering herself and looking irritated.

  ‘Gunnlaugur has led the pack for fifty-seven years,’ Ingvar went on. ‘Longer than the lives of most of your Guard captains. He knows what he’s doing. I would trust my life to him. I have done, many times.’

  ‘Still. You see things differently.’

  Ingvar’s eyes narrowed. Bajola was bold. He couldn’t decide whether to be impressed by that.

  ‘He’s proud,’ he said. ‘He’s got much to be proud about. But time changes things. It changes perspectives.’

  ‘What changed yours?’

  ‘I have been away from the home world. Our old Wolf Guard died while on campaign. I left Fenris before Gunnlaugur took over from him. It was a long time before I came back.’

  ‘How long?’

  Ingvar smiled wryly, calculating. ‘Nine weeks ago.’

  Bajola let out a long breath. ‘Holy Ophelia.’

  ‘We’re adjusting.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said. ‘What happened to your old Wolf Guard?’

  ‘Greenskins,’ Ingvar said, simply.

  She didn’t need to know the details – the long assault on the chain-fortresses of Urrghaz, the void-pursuit, the final confrontation with the orks above the gas giant Teliox Epis. She didn’t need to know that Hjortur’s body had never been found – an insult unworthy of the old warrior and a sad loss of gene-seed. At the time, that detail had seemed strange; now it was just a piece of history, embedded in the archives of the Valgard and mourned in the sagas.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Ingvar shrugged. ‘Don’t be. It was his time. He lived a good life, a warrior’s life.’

  Bajola looked thoughtful. ‘You are a fatalistic people,’ she said. ‘I have heard this before, from others who have had dealings with you. Now that I meet you, I believe it.’