He glared at the door. The lock mechanism could be crushed from the outside, sealing Baldr in. He hesitated, torn between duty and desire.
He looked back at Baldr. The fallen warrior’s cheeks still bore a greenish hue. It seemed to be intensifying, as if whatever filth had been shoved into his system were breeding away within him.
That was an uncomfortable thought.
Ingvar went back over to the slab, studying Baldr’s pale face. Flecks of foam had collected at the corners of his mouth, speckled with blood. They shivered as his shallow breaths came and went.
Ingvar sniffed. Just as before, the tang of the warp was clearly detectable. That, though, could have been down to the residue of the sorcerer’s art, clinging to the armour like bloodstains on a corpse. In itself, it was no proof.
If Baldr had been mortal, Ingvar would have killed him without another thought.
But he wasn’t mortal. He was one of them.
As Ingvar stood there, his mind racing, more muffled booms rang out from far away, making the floor shudder. They seemed closer than the last ones.
‘Forgive me, brother,’ said Ingvar, straightening. ‘But could you stay here, knowing the battle had come at last? I will return for you.’
He started to move away, then hesitated, looking over his shoulder. For a moment, just as he’d turned his head, he thought he’d seen a flicker of movement in Baldr’s eyes – a momentary tremor of peeled-back lids.
He stared for a little while longer, scrutinising Baldr’s prone outline.
Nothing. Baldr lay as still as graven image in the halls of the Jarlheim. The algal tinge around his cheeks and jawline remained as unsettlingly deep as before.
Then Ingvar grasped his helm from his belt.
‘Forgive me,’ he said again, backing towards the exit as he donned the red-lensed, snarling facemask. ‘If Gunnlaugur wanted one of us to sit this out, he should have chosen the whelp.’
I need to know that you will follow an order.
He paused at the doorway, his fingers resting on the stone frame.
‘I will return,’ he said.
Then he pushed the door open, and headed out into the dark.
The volume of incoming fire steadily cranked up. It became intermittently dangerous, then solid, then devastating. As fast as the enemy artillery was knocked out by the defenders, more guns were hauled into place. Brass cannon-pieces, their barrels carved into snarling devil maws, bludgeoned the walls remorselessly, hammering away with incendiary bombs, shrapnel-bursts and tumbling vials of toxic sludge. The last were the worst – when they exploded amid the defenders their contents ate through armour with terrifying ease, melting flesh and popping eyes.
The parapets were aflame, burning in all quarters where the torrid mix of accelerants and chemicals ignited. The air shimmered with heat and noise and fear. Gouges had been blown out of the upper levels by the artillery barrages, cracking open the reinforced rockcrete and sending blocks of it crashing into the city beyond. Teams of enemy sappers, covered by ferocious quantities of las-fire and spore-grenades, had already gained the base of the walls and were pitilessly hacking away at the foundations. Several siege towers had reached their targets, cranking open drawbridges and spilling hordes of masked horrors onto the battlements. Each sally so far had been repelled, but more towers kept on coming, emerging out of the poisonous smog with remorseless frequency.
Jorundur stood on the battlements, firing his bolter two-handed. He worked stoically, almost in silence, fully absorbed in what he was doing. The mortals working alongside him continued to fight even as the defences crumbled around them. They all knew the cost of surrendering the walls and clung on to them tenaciously, firing in disciplined barrages while their comrades were cut down by the rain of chem-bombs and shrapnel bursts.
Hafloí was different. He marched up and down the parapet, firing his bolt pistol with abandon and brandishing his axe flamboyantly.
‘That all you’ve got?’ he roared, spreading his arms and taunting the enemy. ‘Skítja, you disgust me! Come up here and test your arms on me!’
Jorundur had seen the mortals break into laughter as Hafloí had strutted past them, despite the unfolding horrors around them. His relentless rain of insults, challenges and expletives was having an effect on them. They saw his brazen lack of fear, and some of it rubbed off on them.
Jorundur smiled wryly. That was good. He swept his bolter muzzle around, looking for targets in the murk. Down on ground level he saw a huge, slack-bellied monster lurching towards the walls, its yellow skin hanging in bags from an obscenely stretched skeleton and what looked like a massive limpet mine cradled in its arms. Claw-fisted infantry shambled along in its wake.
He took aim carefully, adjusting the bolter a fraction as the walls shook beneath him, and fired. The creature’s head exploded in a burst of bone and jellied matter. The mine crashed to the floor at its feet and went off, sending a shuddering boom radiating out through the troops around it.
Even as that assault crumbled into disarray Jorundur searched for the next one. His concentration was distracted, however, by a horribly familiar surge and crackle from behind him. He immediately pushed back, leaving the battlements and moving to the inner edge of the walkway. The stink of discharged ether filtered up from the city below, mingling with the myriad other stinks polluting the smoggy air.
Hafloí had heard it too and broke away from his posturing. He seemed to be moving freely again.
‘You sense that?’ he asked, his voice tightening. ‘I thou–’
‘Hush,’ snapped Jorundur, listening carefully.
He didn’t have to wait long. From below, down at street level in the lower city, a chorus of screaming started up, punctuated by the wet rattle of bolter-fire.
‘They’ve teleported behind us,’ said Jorundur grimly, slamming a fresh magazine into his bolter and preparing to jump. ‘Stay here and hold the walls.’
But Hafloí had already leapt, throwing himself clear of the parapet and plummeting down to the ground below.
‘Damn him,’ muttered Jorundur, following him down. He hit the earth hard and staggered from the impact. His armour servos whined as they compensated, pushing him back upright.
The scene on the ground was fluid. Ahead of him, twenty metres away, rose the nearest buildings. In between them and the walls was the wide area cleared by the engineers, clogged with barricades, ammo-crates, spare weaponry and reserve defence squads. Men were running back from the line of buildings, turning to fire sporadically. Something was in the maze of alleys beyond – Jorundur could hear the noise of walls collapsing, mortals crying out in terror, gunfire rattling.
Hafloí sprinted towards the source of the noises, his axe already whirling. Jorundur struggled to keep pace with him.
‘Wait!’ he roared, knowing it would be pointless but fearing what the Blood Claw would do. Hafloí was hungry to make up for his failure, and his blood was up. That was a dangerous combination.
Hafloí disappeared into the shadows of the streets. Jorundur raced after him. By the time he caught up, Hafloí was already in combat.
Jorundur burst into a steep-sided courtyard overlooked by burning habs. The floor of it was a cracked mess of rubble and bodies, strewn with torn limbs and crushed weapon barrels. In the midst of it stood a lone Plague Marine, his armour still swimming with shimmering ether-residue, his power claws nearly black with boiling viscera. Two pale green lenses glowed in the murk as he swung round to face the raging Blood Claw.
Jorundur aimed his bolter but Hafloí blundered into the way. Jorundur circled round to the left, closing in to try to get a clear shot.
He never had the chance to fire. As he watched, stunned into inaction by what he was seeing, Hafloí took the Plague Marine apart.
Hafloí’s speed, his fury, his power – it was phenomenal. He fired with the pistol at clos
e range, chipping and cracking the monster’s crusted power armour, all the while hacking with the twin blades of his hand-axe. The Traitor was strong, just as all his kind were, but he had no answer to the sheer pace of the attack. Hafloí’s movements became a blur of velocity, a whirlwind of hammer-blows and axe-bites.
The Plague Marine tried to respond, hauling his bloody claws in broad sweeps, but Hafloí never gave him a chance to bring his greater strength to bear. He ducked under the lunging claws, thrusting up and twisting his axe round in a tight arc. Then his body spun around, propelling the blade across in a glittering line. It severed the Plague Marine’s neck just above the gorget. The strike was perfect – angled between the hard armour plates and dragged through the flesh beneath with staggering power.
The Traitor crashed to the earth, his lopped neck oozing a thick mixture of pus and heartsblood. Hafloí stood in triumph over it, his boot crunched onto the enemy’s swollen breastplate, his axe raised high.
‘Fenrys hjolda!’ he roared, throwing his head back and howling to the fiery heavens.
Jorundur found himself momentarily lost for words.
‘Blood of Russ,’ he breathed, stalking over to Hafloí and gazing at the damage he’d done. ‘A mighty kill. Where did you learn to do that?’
‘From watching you,’ replied Hafloí, his voice savagely cheerful. ‘You’re a miserable pack, truth be told, but I’ve learned a few tricks.’
Jorundur was about to reply when fresh screaming echoed out into the false night. He looked up, over the roofs of the buildings to where the walls loomed.
Plague-bearers had got onto the parapet at last. He could see them swarming along the battlements and grappling with the Guardsmen, overwhelming them through sheer force of numbers. Further along the walls, gouges had been opened up in the stonework as the big artillery found its range. Flames coursed up the flanks of the beleaguered defence towers, snapping and writhing like nests of serpents. The stink of warp-energy remained strong, indicating that other Plague Marines had been dropped behind the defensive lines. Above it all boiled the clouds of flies and chem-spores, whipped up into a thick airborne pall of madness and disease.
The line was breaking. Once that truth became evident the vox-casters blazed out again, matched by the shouted commands of the surviving unit sergeants.
Fall back! Back to the inner walls! Fall back! Back to the inner walls!
As soon as they heard the order men began to pull away from their posts, trying not to break into a headlong run, firing steadily in retreat at the hordes of bloated, twisted mutants that swarmed through every gap and breach in the burning defences.
Jorundur stowed his bolter and drew his power axe. He thumbed the disruptor field on and its blue-edged crackle snarled into life.
‘Time for blades, I think,’ he said, striding back towards the approaching enemy. ‘Your axe and mine, White-pelt.’
Hafloí laughed harshly, falling in behind.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But you have to think of a better name.’
Chapter Twenty
Gunnlaugur did not leave the gatehouse until it was falling apart around him. The walls on either side were breached and broken, and the ground beneath the arches was teeming with a crush of enemy troops, all hacking at the heavy metal doors and stacking piles of explosives against them. Las-blasts lanced up at the parapets, undeterred by any return fire now that the last of the bolter turrets had been taken out. Grappling hooks were flung up; siege towers clunked heavily against abandoned wall sections and disgorged their contents onto the walkways.
Still Gunnlaugur stayed where he was, his feet planted firmly on the keystone of the gate’s central arch, his hammer swinging around him in bloody curves. He was alone; the mortals who had stood with him had either fled or had died. Mutants, plague-bearers and blight-skinned cultists all rushed at him, lashing with flails and morning stars and meathooks. He cut them down in broken droves, hurling spine-snapped bodies from the battlements and sending them crashing back down into the sea of straining flesh below.
‘For the honour of Russ!’ he roared, crying out each time skulbrotsjór connected. ‘Heidur Rus! The hammer of the Fenryka is among you!’
They were not daunted. Oblivious to the carnage being reaped among them, they kept on coming, crawling on all fours just to get their blades into striking distance. Clouds of pestilence buzzed and droned about their heads, the insects feeding on the gaseous flesh of the dead as eagerly as they sucked on the blood of the living.
Only when the gates were finally broken did Gunnlaugur fall back at last, sweeping the parapets clear with a final, mighty strike of his crackling thunder hammer. He felt the basalt columns beneath him shudder as the gate’s adamantium doors were driven in, and heard the thick crack of stone coming apart amid the rush of explosions.
In a final act of defiance, he stood atop the crumbling archway and brandished skulbrotsjór to the lowering heavens. The sky was as dark as night, broken by green lightning dancing along the underbelly of unnatural thunderheads. The stench of fear hummed in the burning air, but Gunnlaugur Skullhewer stood tall, silhouetted against the raging flames that now whipped along what remained of the walls.
‘I defy you!’ he thundered, swinging skulbrotsjór in ritual sweeps of denunciation. ‘Only death awaits you! I, Gunnlaugur of the Rout of Fenris, will bring it down upon you! For the Allfather! For Fenris!’
Then the gatehouse started to collapse, reeling on its supports even as a straining tide of plague-bearers began to surge through the cracked doors.
Gunnlaugur backed away, retreating to the inner edge of the ruined archway as it yawed and buckled beneath his feet. He flung himself clear, falling hard and crashing into the throngs of mutants that had already broken through, crushing several under his heavy armour and scattering many more.
Then he started to run, slamming aside any laggards who got in his way. Behind him, the archway slowly collapsed in a sighing, slipping landslide of stone and metal, sending up thick plumes of dust and glowing from within as the fires took hold.
A low roar of triumph rose up from the host still on the far side of the walls. They swarmed over the broken and burning masonry, trampling their own just to be in the forefront of those breaking in.
Gunnlaugur never looked back. He had held the line for as long as possible, giving time for the mortals to fall back to the next circle of defence. That was how it had been planned – staged withdrawals, each one extracting as much pain from the attackers as possible.
He ran along the wide thoroughfare that Olgeir had helped excavate, hearing the broken patter of thousands of calloused feet as the horde swept after him. Ahead of him lay the first of the trenches. He could see defenders on the far side of it manning the spewing promethium ducts. They were waiting for him to cross before igniting the blaze.
‘Do it now!’ Gunnlaugur roared, picking up his pace and sprinting towards the defensive cordon. ‘Light it now!’
They complied immediately. Flamers angled down into the trenches and opened up. Jets of fire kindled in a clap of acrid ignition. A swaying wall of flame shot down the length of the trench, swiftly rearing up into a surging barrier. The valves stayed open, pumping promethium into the inferno and feeding the conflagration.
Gunnlaugur felt the enormous heat pressing against him as he neared the trench. He put on a final burst of speed, building up momentum, before leaping through the glowing furnace and bursting clear onto the far side. The few remains of flammable material still draped across his armour exploded into flame.
He ripped them free, letting the final sparks die on the ceramite. He could hear screams of frustration coming from the far side of the barrier as the pursuing horde skidded to a halt, suddenly cut off.
Gunnlaugur turned to the lines of Guardsmen waiting in ordered ranks behind the veil of fire, their weapons poised and ready.
‘Do it
,’ he snarled.
The front line released their volley in perfect unison, sending a wall of las-beams lancing through the sheets of flame. The screams of the damned rose in intensity as shots found their targets. Even when firing blind through the inferno, the press of bodies in the street beyond made it impossible not to hit something.
With the barrier secure for the moment, Gunnlaugur walked away from the lines of Guardsmen, letting them rotate ranks to keep up the pressure. As he moved clear of them he saw Váltyr waiting for him. The blademaster’s armour was blackened from fire.
‘Dramatic,’ Váltyr said.
Gunnlaugur grimaced. It was as close as he was likely to get to a smile.
‘Speak to me,’ he said.
‘Plague Marines are inside the walls. Olgeir sighted one and went after it. The whelp killed another.’
Gunnlaugur started. ‘Hafloí?’
‘He’s bragging about it already.’
Gunnlaugur shook his head wearily. He let his hammerhead lower, barely noticing the disruptor-cooked flesh-slops sliding off it.
‘These won’t hold them long,’ he said, looking over his shoulder at the burning trenches. ‘Are all fronts falling back?’
Váltyr nodded. ‘We need more time. We killed obscene amounts on the walls, but they just keep coming.’
‘Then I’ll stay down here with Olgeir and the Old Dog. We’ll make them pay for the passage of the lower city. Go to the Ighala Gate and put it in readiness. Call Hafloí back too and get him to replace Ingvar on the watch – the Gyrfalkon’s stewed in there enough and we’ll need his sword.’
Gunnlaugur glanced up at the distant Ighala Gate, towering precipitously above the burning city.
‘That’s the key. If we can hold the bridge a while this is not yet over.’
Váltyr gestured towards the cathedral, looming into the smog over to the left of their position. Its triple spires still spat with mounted gunfire. Once the last of the defenders pulled back to the inner walls it would be a lone island in a sea of ruin.
Blood of Asaheim Page 29
