by Various
Throwing back his fiery mane, he loosed a howl of triumph to the heavens.
Then his victory soured in his throat. The crowd’s roars washed over him, reminding him where he was. He knew what they wanted from him. The last of his enemies was twitching at his feet. They were baying for him to hurt it again. They wanted him to torture it, to eke out its dying agonies.
He spited them by staving in the ghoul’s skull with his maul, though this was an undeserved mercy. The dark eldar’s cheers turned to jeers, their fine features twisted in displeasure. Russ, if only I had my pistol, thought Krom.
He was barrelling towards them before he knew it.
He jumped off the finely balanced, polished bone disc of the stage. He ploughed through knotted coils of razorwire. He vaulted onto the high wall that separated him from the crowd. He came as close as he ever had to getting over it. Then whips enwrapped his arms, his legs, his throat, as they always did. Krom knew it was useless to struggle against his captors, and yet, wreathed in the red mist of rage, he always did.
The whips crackled with profane energy, and his nervous system burned. The slave masters yanked Krom back into the arena and he writhed in the black sand, convulsing helplessly, coughing up foam and flecks of blood.
The sky of Commorragh had a sullen crimson cast. It rested heavily on the tips of the arena’s jagged spires and the brooding ziggurats overlooking it. Shrivelled black suns glared balefully down at him. When Krom had first arrived here, another prisoner – a dishevelled Imperial Guardsman – had told him he would see no other sky for as long as he lived, which would be until he met his match in combat. ‘Then it will be a long life,’ Krom had boasted. He hadn’t seen the Guardsman again.
The crowd had forgotten him already. Other battles were in progress across the various stages, offering them many more opportunities to sate their lust for suffering. A member of the wych cult that ran the arena was carving up a tau fire warrior. Krom wondered if it too had been captured on Dactyla. Beyond them, he saw clawed fiends, a battered-looking Chaos Terminator – and a figure in a filthy pale robe and black power armour.
Krom’s weapon was torn from his nerveless fingers. Six slave masters hauled him away through one of the many dark portals that led to the arena’s bowels. By now, the descent through the foetid passageways, with their pulsing, green-tinted light, was a horribly familiar one. His footsteps rang off the floor, which felt like marble but was black with sickly-looking veins coursing through it.
An iron gate hissed open for him, and Krom was thrown to the floor of one of the gladiatorial cells. Unable to lift his hands to catch himself, he landed like a sack of grain. He found his voice in time to curse his gaolers as they locked the gate behind him.
It was several seconds before he could lift himself into a sitting position, propped against the wall. He hated letting his cellmates see his weakness, even though they were as battered as he was. He snapped at them, telling them to lift their chins and square their shoulders, show that they would never be bowed, and they shuffled to obey him.
‘What did they have you fight?’ asked Jormund Thunderclaw.
‘Some manner of ghoul,’ Krom spat, and he described in detail how he had slain each of them in turn. ‘I almost butchered my audience too. I was close enough to smell their fear, see myself reflected in their eyes. Next time…’
‘Allfather be praised, we still have that,’ Jormund rumbled. ‘Though we may die here, still we can despatch many more of His enemies ahead of us.’ It disturbed Krom to hear him talking like that.
Each of the Space Wolves bore the marks of the slave masters’ lashes, but Jormund’s Terminator armour was in the worst state of them all. He had fought so hard to begin with. The slave masters, however, had wrapped him in chains that, like their whips, crackled with dark energy. They had stripped out his heavy weapons and shattered his servo-motors, until it was all he could do to stand.
The thought that Jormund was learning to accept his fate made Krom rage. He wanted to leap to his feet. He wanted to yell out to his Wolf-brothers. Three of them shared his cell. There were more in the others. He wanted to remind them that they were the Wolves of Fenris. Most of them were members of his own company, the Drakeslayers. He wanted to tell them to rise up, break through their bars and tear out their gaolers’ throats.
‘Brother Dreadhowl,’ he recalled. The young Blood Claw had been taken to the arena some time before him. Krom hadn’t seen him there, but that meant nothing. ‘Did he… Has he returned?’ No one answered his question. No one had to.
Krom had given up trying to count the days he had been here. His auto-senses suggested that a month and a half had passed, but each of his brothers had a different tally. For the first few days, or weeks, he had been sure that the rest of the Drakeslayers would follow him here. No matter that their journey was impossible – for him, for their Wolf Lord, they would find a way to make it.
He knew now that no one was coming. If he was to escape this hellish place, it would be up to him alone. So what if his captors had the upper hand for now? What if the red sky was teeming with dark eldar ships? And beyond that sky, outside of this dark city…
Krom had been brought here unconscious. Some of his brothers had been awake for the journey, however, and they had spoken of the horrors…
They were lost.
The gunship Rolling Thunder had followed a dark eldar skimmer through an energy-charged portal. Now, she was barrelling her way through a realm of…
It was impossible to describe.
Ulrik the Slayer crouched in the troop compartment, peering through a narrow forward viewport. The Stormwolf’s sensors couldn’t process the data they were receiving, so couldn’t be trusted. Other than an occasional fleeting glimpse of their prey, Rogan Bearsbane, their pilot, had only his instincts to guide him.
‘It’s like flying through an ice storm,’ he said. His voice sounded strained over the vox-net.
‘We can’t afford to lose that skimmer,’ said Ulrik, tightly.
He had thought this would be something like flying through the warp. It was worse than he could have imagined. Through the viewport, he too saw snow and ice, but he knew – perhaps thanks to the relic helm he wore – that nothing they were seeing was real – not as humans understood reality. He couldn’t look into the face of the raging storm for long; it made his eyes ache. Even when he screwed them shut, he could feel the unreality’s substance, like static, in his head.
There are brother wolves aboard that craft, the High Priest reminded himself. I did the right thing, going after them – whatever the outcome.
‘They’ve seen us,’ Rogan growled over the vox. ‘They’re weaving, trying to throw us off their tail. They’re smaller than we are, more manoeuvrable. It’s only a matter of time before they make a move we can’t match.’
Ulrik grimaced and pressed his eyes to the viewport again. Rolling Thunder had dropped back onto the skimmer’s tail, but her engines were howling in protest at the abuse they were receiving.
Then a hole gaped open in the heart of the static storm – a deep, black hole – and the skimmer banked and plunged assuredly into it. Rogan tried to follow it, but the storm closed in again and suddenly he was flying towards what looked like a sheer ice face. He unleashed a stream of colourful curses as he pulled up sharply. ‘I don’t see any sign of them. We’ve lost them!’
In the troop compartment, more curses filled the air. The Drakeslayer Beregelt was more stoic; still, he gripped the sides of his seat almost hard enough to crush them. His own fate didn’t concern him, Ulrik knew, rather that of his captured Wolf Lord.
Ulrik slammed his crozius arcanum into the deck plates, so its winged wolf-skull head crackled with sacred energy. ‘Are we so easily beaten?’ Ulrik roared. ‘Should we cower here, whimpering over the slightest setback? We will find our brother Wolves, if we have to wade hip-deep through dark eldar corpses to do it.’
‘Tear this foul realm down around their twisted ear
s!’ cried Thord Icenhelm.
‘For Russ!’ bellowed Ulrik, and the others joined their voices to his. He wished he felt half as confident as he sounded.
It was the High Priest’s duty to maintain his brothers’ morale, even when, privately, he feared their cause was hopeless – that they might be trapped in this godless realm forever.
Two more days passed, maybe three – Krom couldn’t tell – before the slave masters came for him again.
They didn’t have to call his name. Everyone knew whom they wanted. He had counted their footsteps as they approached his cell. Six dark eldar always arrived to fetch him, more than for anyone else. He was already standing, waiting for them, when the gate hissed open.
They beckoned to him, speaking harshly in their obscene language. A handful of the senior gaolers had translating machines, which they used to communicate orders to their prisoners. The rest had other ways of making themselves understood.
These six had their whips readied in case of trouble. Had Krom tried to fight them, he knew they would have flayed him gleefully – before dumping him, half-insensate, in front of his assigned opponent anyway. He had barely survived the experience last time.
They took him through the green-veined passageways again. They passed rows of sealed gates, from behind which he heard the occasional muffled howl of pain, anguish or rage. He could hear the roars of the arena crowd growing louder.
Two more Wolves were waiting, each with his own escort, in the cramped muster area. On the closest stage in the arena, a pair of fleshless monsters with clawed tendrils were tearing into each other, urged on by the lashes of their beastmasters.
‘Did you hear about Brother Silverpelt?’ Beoric Whitefang asked him, bleakly. ‘They put him up against a monstrous spider with blades on its legs.’
When Krom had first been delivered to his cell, he had been dismayed to learn that Beoric too had been caught, although he was secretly comforted by his Wolf Guard commander’s stoic presence. He suspected that Beoric had allowed himself to be captured, so as to remain at his lord’s side.
Krom nodded. ‘I hear he removed all eight before the spider’s poison killed him.’ It was important that such stories, and the names attached to them, were remembered. Beoric knew nothing of Brother Dreadhowl, however, when Krom asked him. It seemed that no one had witnessed his fate, so his story would remain untold.
An appreciative roar swelled from the arena crowd. Another contest had ended, on one of the further stages. A minute later, its victor was brought inside, walking upright and proud, and Lars Thorgil was marched out to replace him.
Krom had seen the black-armoured figure before, but never close up. Now he could see quite clearly the winged sword emblem on his robe and the skull-shaped faceplate beneath his hood – the stranger was a Dark Angels chaplain. Krom’s lip curled involuntarily. Krom hated the Dark Angels and their mysterious ways. His experience of them had left him with an impression of secrecy and superiority. He couldn’t trust them because they only trusted themselves – and as rumour would have it, they couldn’t even trust some of the brothers in their own ranks. It was true that an age before there had been tension between Leman Russ and the Lion. It was also true that while the primarchs forgave each other, there were many in their legions – and the Chapters that followed – who could not forgive.
In the arena, the beast fight had reached its bloody conclusion. The victorious creature was being driven away by its master, while shackled human slaves hosed the loser’s remains from the stage.
Then it was Krom’s turn to fight.
He was taken by the arms again and marched out beneath the sullen sky. His appearance was greeted by an audible thrill of anticipation. His stomach turned at the thought of his audience being so pleased to see him. They knew he would give them a good show.
Something was different this time.
He was taken to a stage at the farthest edge of the arena. In the midst of the tiered seating, an expansive podium overlooked him. Squatting upon its lip was an ostentatious ebony throne that, tonight, was occupied. The arena’s ruler was in attendance, surrounded by obsequious servants and sycophantic cronies.
Krom was struck by the creature’s beauty, but was instantly disgusted with himself. It is an evil beauty, he thought, a glamour to disguise a monstrous soul.
The queen was as much a warrior as her followers, clad in barbed leather armour that left her thighs and stomach exposed. She wore a sword belt hung with fetishes, and an elaborate leather headdress.
She saw him looking and returned his gaze coolly, with a twinkle of amusement in her eyes. She had had him brought before her, he realised suddenly. He was fighting at the queen’s pleasure, for her entertainment, tonight.
Krom looked for a weapon. There were plenty strewn across the stage and around it, though few of any quality. He chose an axe with a serrated metal head, because nothing better was available. It was a poor replacement for his own. Wyrmclaw had been prised from his fingers while he lay unconscious. It lay somewhere in the arena, too large and heavy for most to wield it – Ragnek Halfhand had seen it.
His opponent made her entrance to the arena. She was a gladiatrix, a female arena fighter. She wore similar leathers to her queen, although her outfit was less elaborate. As she strode into the arena, Krom’s lips curled back from his fangs. Until now, he had only been pitted against other prisoners. To finally face one of his captors… He had longed for such an opportunity.
He fixed the gladiatrix with a smouldering glare as she strutted towards him. Her dark eyes met his, unafraid. Her jet-black lips smirked at him. He prickled at the creature’s arrogance. Tightening his grip on his axe, he began thundering towards her before she had even fully mounted the circular stage. He let her see his teeth and feel the full force of his lungs.
The gladiatrix had drawn a pair of swords that had been concealed in her bodice. No scrabbling for weapons in the dirt for her. She sidestepped his charge and slashed at him, cutting into his right vambrace. Krom snarled as he swung his axe again, but the gladiatrix pirouetted away and was suddenly behind him. He whirled to face her as her twin blades stabbed towards his eyes. He barely batted them away before they blinded him.
He lunged beneath the gladiatrix’s swords, trying to tackle her. She back-flipped away from him, landing in a taut crouch across the stage, her black lips taunting him. The crowd that had cheered for the Wolf Lord a minute ago screamed now for his enemy to cut him, to let them taste his dying agonies.
He embraced the white-hot rage that they stoked in his chest, let it energise him but not control him. He had to keep his wits about him.
He hacked, sliced and thrust at his opponent doggedly. She evaded each blow with a grace that made him feel slow and clumsy. Russ, this is like battling the nightfiends! he cursed, remembering the shadowy creatures that had beaten him and brought him here. But there had been many of them, Krom reminded himself, and he had been slowed by wounds and poison when he fought them.
He eased back deliberately, making the gladiatrix come to him. He would show her – and her baying supporters – that he could be quick too. She obliged him, and her blades whirled around his ears like turbines. Krom twirled his axe, gripped the haft with both hands and parried each attack with its chipped head, metal striking sparks off metal.
The gladiatrix overreached herself and his haft caught her wrist, breaking the bone. She dropped a sword, and Krom followed through by shattering her nose with his elbow. Startled, the eldar wheeled away from him and dropped into a defensive crouch again. She wasn’t smirking any longer, but Krom, with the taste of his opponent’s blood on his lips, was leering like a beast of prey.
They circled each other, narrow-eyed and alert for an opening or sign of weakness from the other, each tuning out the crowd’s impatient demands and biding their time.
Krom’s eyes kept flickering over the gladiatrix’s shoulder to the queen on her ornate throne. She was craning forward eagerly, moistening her li
ps with her tongue. Then her gloved hand glided across a rune panel in her armrest, and the throne itself rose into the air and edged over the podium’s lip, straining closer to the spectacle before it.
Krom’s opponent on the stage took advantage of his momentary distraction. The gladiatrix flew at him again in a flurry of razor-edged metal, scoring his armour and forcing him onto his back foot. He defended himself against her, but kept an eye trained on the queen.
In that moment, for the first time in too long a time, he saw a story worth the telling. Krom Dragongaze recognised a deed worth giving his life for.
He went on the offensive, hammering at his opponent with more brute force than precision. As before, his blows came nowhere close to landing – nor were they meant to. He drove the gladiatrix back towards the edge of the stage. Then, as she whirled out of his grasp, he leapt off the stage and, with all his might, he hurled his axe towards the queen’s slender white throat.
To his dismay, she caught the hurtling projectile.
He barely saw her hand move – she just plucked the axe from the air. Krom had lost his weapon and turned his back on an enemy for nothing.
He heard her footsteps running up behind him – too late. The gladiatrix leapt onto his back and slipped her blade behind his gorget, into the side of his neck. If she expected the pain to cripple him, however, clearly she didn’t know the Sons of Russ.
Krom reached over his shoulders, snatched his foe’s head in both hands and wrenched her off him. He slammed her into the stage, breaking her bones, divesting the creature of her second sword and expelling the breath from her lungs. He held her down with one massive gauntlet over her face, almost smothering her.
The crowd roared once again for Krom Dragongaze. They don’t care who wins, he realised, as long as someone suffers – even if it’s one of their own.
