Váltyr wrenched it clear just as the pus-dripping cleaver hammered down. He spun out of the encounter, feeling the metal’s edge hiss past his shoulder guards. Then he was back in tight, dancing through more heavy blows, probing for some way to do damage.
‘So can you hold me here until your brothers arrive?’ mused Thorslax, his voice a moist drawl. His single eye glanced up at the distant bridge, then back down. ‘And even then, would it help you?’
Váltyr redoubled the flurry of strikes. As fast as he worked, Thorslax’s defence responded. Though his individual movements were slow, the Blighted seemed able to anticipate what he was going to do, as if part of his soul somehow existed fractionally ahead of time.
Despite that he almost connected with a blistering sideways swipe, a blow that would have surely sliced Thorslax’s chest-cabling away, but the bloody cleaver jammed down, clashing with holdbítr in a shower of sparks.
‘Fast,’ Thorslax observed appreciatively. ‘You’re really very good. Were I younger I would toy with you for longer.’
Váltyr charged back in, hauling his blade around two-handed, hacking at the creature’s implacable defence. His blade bounced from Thorslax’s hide, barely scratching the corrupted flesh-plates. The impact rocked him, though; it pushed the creature back down the slope, forcing him to use his weapons in defence.
‘But I am not younger,’ Thorslax remarked. ‘I am so old. And you have become boring.’
Suddenly, his movements changed. His fists flew out, far faster than before. Váltyr saw the change and adjusted, bringing his blade into guard. The metal connected with a radial shudder, sending Váltyr rocking backwards. The green light bleeding from Thorslax’s eye-socket flared. He seemed to grow even larger, swelling and bursting with grotesque, bulging growths. The swarm of flies reared up over him like a wind-whipped cloak.
Váltyr didn’t flinch. He corrected his stance and brought his blade round for the parry, twisting the metal before him in a tight, glittering curve. Thorslax bore down, loosing a torrent of cleaver-strikes in quick succession. Váltyr parried the first few but the rain continued, flying in with deadening force. The impact was incredible – jarring, dense blows that cracked the ground beneath them and sent the rubble skittering.
Thorslax grunted. He sounded surprised.
‘Very good,’ he murmured, pressing the attack. ‘Really very good.’
But then one got through – a cleaver thunked into Váltyr’s breastplate, biting through the armour-plate and deep into the flesh beneath. Váltyr twisted away, ignoring the pain and keeping holdbítr moving.
The wound unbalanced him, though. His left shoulder fell, opening up a gap. Thorslax pounced, hurling the pus-drenched blade in hard. It connected with Váltyr’s neck, cutting deep and severing the shielding under his helm.
Váltyr’s vision went black. He pressed forwards, feeling his hands go numb but still seeking the elusive way through. Blood ran down his breastplate, cascading across the runes graven across his chest and sinking into the channels.
Thorslax had stopped talking by then. He was fighting hard, wheezing through his rusty vox-grille, concentrating furiously. His cleavers, now both dripping with Váltyr’s own blood, flew up and down, hacking and chopping. Both fighters landed blows, and for the first time Váltyr’s strokes seemed to hurt. Each of them piled on the pain, locked together in a brutal close-range dance of hew and counter-hew.
‘Enough!’ Thorslax cried, raising both fists up and slamming them down on Váltyr’s reeling defence.
Váltyr got his sword up just in time, bracing the blade against the impact, but his strength was gone. Holdbítr broke asunder with a hard clap like thunder, its rune-strength broken. Thorslax’s cleavers plunged down, burying themselves deep into Váltyr’s chest and puncturing both hearts. The monster then ripped them out, dragging trails of blood and flesh with them.
Váltyr stayed on his feet for a few moments more, his chest torn open, his arms limp. His vision was gone. The pain had left him, replaced by a cold nimbus that raced up his limbs towards his brain.
Thorslax withdrew without saying another word, already turning to face new enemies. Dimly, as if from a long way off, Váltyr could hear the battle-cries of Gunnlaugur closing in, as familiar to him as his own voice. He’d heard that cry across the war-torn continents of a hundred worlds. He could hear Olgeir’s cries as well, and Jorundur’s. The pack had arrived.
He collapsed to his knees, watching his lifeblood drain from him. His shattered sword, the weapon he had carried for over a century and whose soul he had come to know better than any living man’s, lay before him in the gravel.
None shall wield it but me, he thought with a final, grim satisfaction, seeing how irreparably the sword had been destroyed.
They had died together. That, at least, was fitting.
Then, his consciousness draining away into darkness, Váltyr toppled forwards, crashing atop the shards of his beloved holdbítr, and moved no more.
Ingvar held Bajola’s broken body carefully. She felt impossibly fragile. He could feel her heart beating, shallow and fluttering like that of a trapped bird.
Her skin was grey. The ebony richness of it had faded and it looked matt and grainy in the gloom.
‘They will come back soon,’ she warned.
‘When they do, I will kill them.’
Bajola nodded wearily. ‘That is what you excel at.’
‘Of course. Someone has to.’
Bajola’s eyes momentarily lost focus and her head lolled. She recovered, but the spirit was draining out of her quickly.
‘You said you’d tell me what your name meant,’ she said.
‘Now?’
Bajola nodded.
‘Gunnlaugur gave it to me,’ Ingvar said, speaking softly, feeling like he was wasting precious time. ‘He called me that on the eve of my departure from the home world. He decreed it would be my pack name, since I had no other.’
Ingvar remembered the way Gunnlaugur had been then: wounded by his decision to leave even though he’d striven to hide it. A strange look had lit up Gunnlaugur’s eyes in those last days. Unhappiness, certainly, but something else. Envy, perhaps.
‘And by that he wished to bind you to him,’ said Bajola.
Ingvar paused, surprised that she knew so much of their ways.
‘The gyrfalkon always comes back,’ he said. ‘It ranges far but always returns. That was what he was telling me: that I had to return.’
Bajola looked at him with an indulgent smile on her dying face.
‘Oh, Ingvar,’ she said. ‘You did return, and it has not given you what you hoped for.’ She swallowed painfully. ‘But at least you killed with honour here. That is why you were bred. Or do you choose?’
‘Choose?’
She swallowed again. Blood collected on her lips.
‘To be what you are, or to be mortal.’
It was so long ago. He had been selected when near death, pulled from the ice by the Priest with the wolf-mask. After that, all he remembered was pain, and instruction, and fear.
‘I do not think so,’ he said.
Bajola’s lids looked heavy.
‘I chose,’ she said. ‘I could have been anything. A scholar. A diplomat. I excelled at it all. But I chose the Sisterhood. Why was that? At times I think I wasted myself. Or maybe I didn’t choose at all. Maybe it was my… What do you call it? Wyrd.’
Ingvar felt her heartbeat grow weaker as he held her. Time was running out.
‘Why did you destroy the archives?’ he asked.
By then Bajola was too weak to bother hiding the truth.
‘Secrets,’ she said.
‘Of your Order?’
‘No, not this one.’ She tried to lift her head. Ingvar lowered his. He could smell the copper of blood on her neck and face. ‘Pointless, no? We were
always destined to die here. But old habits. They made us thorough. Completeness.’
Her voice got fainter with every breath. Ingvar had to crane his neck to hear the words over the distant crackle of flames.
‘Hjortur’s name was stored in there. On a list. A kill-list. A list of those to be killed.’
She was beginning to ramble.
‘Hjortur was killed by greenskins,’ said Ingvar gently.
‘No,’ said Bajola, smiling again. ‘No, he wasn’t. He was killed by the Fulcrum.’
‘The what?’
Bajola’s face creased into a mask of concentration. She was slipping away. Every breath she took added to the trickle of blood that ran down her chin.
‘Look up,’ she rasped.
Ingvar did so. The golden mask of the Emperor stared back down at him. Its face was cherubic, surrounded by a spiked halo. The expression on the mask was oddly mournful.
‘Their mark has been here all along,’ said Bajola. Wincing from the pain, she reached down to her weapon belt and withdrew a small golden bauble. She pressed it into Ingvar’s hand. When he looked down at it, he saw a miniature facsimile of the golden mask – a thumb-sized cherub-face ringed with spikes.
‘Do you really want to know this truth, Fenryka?’ she asked, teasingly using Juvykka as if born to it. ‘You will be honour-sworn to avenge him, will you not?’
Ingvar said nothing. The golden-faced cherub smiled stupidly at him, its metallic surface glinting in the firelight.
‘You think you know so much,’ she said, as mockingly as her frailty would allow. ‘You are the thinker among them, the one who has learned to doubt. You, out of all your brutal brothers, might understand that some wars never show themselves.’
Ingvar felt frustration rise within him. He needed her to speak plainly, but in her delirium she was drifting into incoherence.
‘I didn’t want you here,’ she mumbled. ‘I argued against it. The Adulators posed no problem; they were dutiful and unimaginative. But Wolves? On Ras Shakeh?’
Bajola let slip a bitter laugh, and more blood bubbled up between her lips.
‘Once that argument failed, I should have destroyed the archive. I don’t know why I didn’t.’
Ingvar caught the first faint sounds of enemy troops creeping back towards them. It would not be long before they forgot their fear and re-entered the nave.
‘I cannot save you, Sister,’ he said softly. ‘But you can make our meeting on this world worth something. Tell me what you know.’
Bajola looked up at him. Her deep brown eyes moistened. Some resolve returned.
‘More of you will die,’ she said. ‘They are coming for you now, and they will never stop. They will never tire, never forget. You will not even know you are being hunted. Killed by greenskins, lost in the warp, turned to darkness – those are the stories that will find their way back to Fenris. You make too many enemies, Space Wolf.’
An explosion went off within a few hundred metres of their position. The pillars around them shuddered. The dull thud of mutant feet falling echoed out across the nave, still distant but circling closer.
‘Tell me,’ growled Ingvar, feeling her go limp in his hands, growing impatient with the evasion.
Bajola smiled at him, her eyes losing their focus and growing dim.
‘I did tell you,’ she croaked loosely. ‘The Fulcrum, Gyrfalkon. Take the name, take the golden face. Use them.’
She tried to lift her hand and failed. Her breathing slowed to nothing.
‘Against my judgement, I liked you,’ she said, her voice little more than an expiring sigh. ‘I hope you survive.’
Then her body stiffened, going taut. Her spine arched, holding in place for a heartbeat.
She went slack, her mouth falling open.
Ingvar held her for a while longer, staring at her. The rest of the battle became an irrelevance. He felt as if he’d been in the cusp of something, prevented at the last by Bajola’s intransigence, or perhaps just frustrated by time slipping away.
He opened the palm of his gauntlet and looked at the tiny golden face resting there. It gazed back at him, smiling benignly. It looked like any pilgrim’s trinket; nothing special, nothing rare or valuable.
The Fulcrum.
It meant nothing.
Ingvar heard her last words echoing in his mind.
They are coming for you now, and they will never stop.
Who? Why?
You make too many enemies, Space Wolf.
The noise of boots rang down the nave. They had got close by then, edging forwards, hugging the walls.
Ingvar rose, lowering Bajola’s head carefully to the stone. He placed the cherub’s head safely in a clasped capsule at his belt. Only then did he turn, thumbing dausvjer’s energy field into luminosity. Ahead of him, perhaps twenty metres away, a crowd of cowled faces jostled against one another, their pale eyes shining in the dark. For once they looked scared, torn between a desire to kill and the knowledge of what they faced.
Ingvar started to walk towards them, swinging his blade lazily to free up his arm. His mind was still racing, trying to digest what Bajola had told him. The presence of plague-bearers in the cathedral was an irritation he could have done without.
‘A bad time to take me on, filth,’ he snarled, lowering his gaze and picking the first one to die. ‘A very bad time.’
Chapter Twenty-Two
The lower city was gone, lost to the enemy, now little more than a haunt of unrestrained slaughter and madness. The last of the trenches had been breached and the hordes of mutants, cultists and pestilence-ridden foot soldiers tramped up from the depths, their cold eyes fixed on the summit. The Halicon citadel reared up above all of them, still inviolate despite the bruise-purple pall that swirled above it, its flanks lit a dull crimson by the wavering light of a thousand fires. Down from the citadel’s extravagant battlements stood the precarious ring of the inner walls, still held by the city’s defenders. The battered Ighala Gate endured at the centre of that defensive line, bursting with anti-infantry weaponry that flashed and burned into the spore-heavy night.
If the advance had been quicker the gate might already have fallen. As it was the hosts of plague-damned still moved slowly, trudging up through smouldering ruins with their stumbling, ill-directed gaits. Hundreds of them had drifted into the shadows, distracted by isolated pockets of survivors and the prospect of feasting on fresh flesh. Others had succumbed to the virulent contagion that coursed through their veins, collapsing to the ground as their stomachs burst asunder or their hearts gave out. The gifts of the Plaguefather were capricious things, as likely to curse as they were to bless.
So it was that in answering Váltyr’s call, Gunnlaugur was able to outpace the closing circle of invaders and sprint clear of the advancing battlefront. Olgeir, fresh from a hard-fought victory over the third Plague Marine down by the outer perimeter, joined him in the chase. His armour had taken heavy damage during the encounter and he’d discarded his heavy bolter.
‘Tough kill?’ asked Gunnlaugur, running heavily.
‘They always are,’ spat Olgeir, working hard to keep up. ‘Pox-ridden bastards.’
Jorundur joined up with them as they neared the cleared wasteland before the Ighala crossing.
‘So what is this?’ the Old Dog demanded, his strained voice betraying a rare tightness. ‘Did he say?’
Gunnlaugur said nothing but ran hard, his hearts thumping viciously.
One got past you, Skullhewer.
Váltyr’s voice had been almost resigned over the comm; whatever it was that had broken ranks and pushed ahead to the bridge had knocked the kill-relish out of him. That was almost certainly bad.
‘I see it!’ roared Olgeir, his voice suddenly thick with kill-urge.
The landscape of ruins gave way before them, opening out into the
charred and desolate wasteland just within sight of the bridge. Directly ahead of them, out on the trawled mounds of debris, was the object of Váltyr’s summons – a vast and engorged champion in a distended mockery of Terminator plate. He must have teleported ahead of the rest of his sluggish minions, aiming to break the defence at the gates before the defenders had time to rally behind them.
An arrogant decision, one that spoke of misplaced confidence.
‘Fenrys Hjolda!’ thundered Gunnlaugur, swinging skulbrotsjór wildly around him as he tore up the slope.
Olgeir and Jorundur joined in the chorus, hurling battle-challenges out like berserks of the Old Ice. They could all see Váltyr being hammered backwards, his armour taking heavy damage from repeated cleaver impacts.
For all their speed, for all their blistering rage, they arrived too late. As Gunnlaugur sped into contact, he could only watch as Váltyr’s blade was broken and the sverdhjera’s chest was ripped open.
An explosion of grief surged up from his breast. Black fury blazed out of him, kindled in the furnace of his pumping hearts and emerging as a strangled roar of revulsion. Gunnlaugur charged towards the monster like a Rhino careering along at full tilt, lost in a maelstrom of horror and loosed ferocity.
Thorslax turned slowly to face him, his body moving with ponderous clumsiness. His single glowing eye stared down at them, spearing through the murk of the seamy night.
‘More of you,’ he murmured.
The three Wolves hit him almost in unison, crashing into combat with the force of a hurricane, limbs tearing, blades flashing. All four warriors clashed under the lightning-laced storm clouds: one enormous and reeking with millennial corruption, three as vital and vivid as sun-dazzled snow. They ripped into a spinning, crashing cacophony of fearsome blows, each strike landing with the power to crush bone, to dent armour, to pulverise flesh.
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