The Space Wolf Omnibus - William King

by Warhammer 40K

  He stepped into one of the most ancient shrines of his brotherhood. It was a vast chamber with a vaulted ceiling and odd crystalline slits in the ceiling through which lights descended in mighty beams. The way to the sarcophagus of Garm was worn smooth by the feet of all the Wolves who had approached this sacred site over the preceding centuries. The enormous coffin was also a shrine. It dominated the northern part of the sanctum. The rest of the vault was plain and undecorated save for the tiled floor which depicted a scene of the heads of four mighty, fearsome wolves, opening their mouths to swallow a gigantic moon.

  The sacred flame leapt almost ten times the height of a man above him, and it glowed with a chill blue light that illumined the fane. He stood before a sarcophagus carved from the tusk of a gigantic, long extinct sea monster, the notorious dragon whale of Garm which it was said Russ had slain with a single cast of the Spear.

  A sculptor of genius had turned the tusk into an amazing work of art. Its entire surface was carved with an incredible level of detail. Ragnar looked closely and saw scene after scene of battle and conflict in which thousands upon thousands of Space Wolves in the antique style of armour favoured during the Great Crusade fought with hordes of monsters, aliens and daemons. Ragnar knew from his studies that each and every warrior who had still been alive when Russ had strode this world was represented here. Every suit of armour bore its own individual markings. Every visible face was different. If you looked closely you could see character and emotion expressed on their miniscule features.

  Here was a Wolf Lord, his mouth open in a bellow of rage as he slew the mutated worshippers of Chaos. There was a sergeant smiting the monstrous tyranids. There was Russ himself, larger than any mortal, wrestling with Magnus the Red, the wicked cyclopean primarch of the Thousand Sons. The intricate sculpture made it obvious how little some things had changed in ten thousand years.

  Here were Rhino armoured personnel carriers, looking exactly the same as the ones stationed outside the shrine now. There were Thunderhawk gunships that might have been the craft that Ragnar himself had ridden in recently. The products of the great templates of the ancients represented a peak of engineering perfection that had never been surpassed, and most likely never would.

  The top of the sarcophagus was a representation of Garm as he had been in life. His image lay like an ivory giant atop the casket that held his bones. Its open hands were held on its breast in such a way to be obviously clasping something. Ragnar knew without being told that they had held the Spear of Russ.

  Standing on this spot, Ragnar could feel its holiness. Russ himself was said to have had some part in the creation of the sarcophagus, imbuing it with a portion of his power, granting his blessing to the master sculptor Corianis. A flickering flame of light burned in the air above the shrine, illuminating it, and by the casting of shadows lending the battle scenes an illusion of life, making the figure on it seem almost alive.

  But there was definitely something missing. This was the place where the Spear of Russ had rested. If something could make you aware of itself merely by its absence, it was the Spear. This whole shrine was meant to be its resting place, and with the sacred weapon gone, it seemed somehow meaningless. No, that was not true. It just did not feel whole. Even Ragnar, who had never been here before, could tell something was missing, and could have done so even if he had not known the significance of the place.

  Ragnar reached out and touched the shrine. He thought he felt a faint tingling pass through the tips of his gauntlet. It was amazing to think he was touching something that Russ himself had touched, that he was in the presence of something the primarch had created. He closed his eyes and felt renewed. Energy flowed into him from the shrine. The ache of his wounds dulled. He had no doubt whatsoever that he was in the presence of holiness.

  He closed his eyes and breathed in the cool air of the shrine. The flame gave no warmth, merely light. The tingling in his fingertips increased and he made to draw his hand away but could not. Strangely, he felt no sense of panic. The warmth continued to flow from the tomb. He tried to open his eyes, but they felt as if the lids had been glued shut.

  Strange patterns flickered across his darkened field of vision. The silence intensified till his own heartbeat felt like a drum. The smell of ambergris from the censers drowned out all of the scents around him. Perhaps he was having some sort of delayed reaction to his wounds. Perhaps he should try and break away and seek help. He dismissed the thought. He did not feel as if anything were wrong. In fact, he felt a growing sense of wellness, of rightness, of benison.

  The glow increased. The warmth deepened and flowed through him. He knew that in some strange way he was reaching out and touching the spirit of Russ, that all of the years intervening between the Primarch’s time and his own meant nothing. In some timeless time and spaceless space, a spirit still hovered and looked out on his followers. He knew that he was touching the divine directly, and the feeling awed him. The ground on which he stood, and the shrine which he touched, were both holy. He knew that for as long as he lived he would not forget this moment.

  His eyes opened. His grip was freed. He turned to depart the sacred place, renewed. They would find the Spear, he knew. They had to.

  FIFTEEN

  ‘Why are you looking so bloody happy, Ragnar?’ asked Sven. He waited only a moment for a reply and returned to squeezing the tube of field rations into his mouth.

  Ragnar leaned on the fortified parapet of the outer wall and looked out into the distance. He was troubled and Sven knew it. He just did not quite know how to express himself.

  Bluish snow, tainted by alchemical pigments, fell in chill cold flakes. Ragnar stuck out his tongue and tasted one. It tingled in his mouth as he swallowed. He studied their surroundings. Enormous buildings disappeared into the monstrous, low-hanging purple and black clouds that filled the sky, roofing the city. In the distance he could hear the crackle of a firefight.

  Ragnar felt strangely reluctant to answer his friend’s question. There had been something personal and sacred about his experience at the shrine and he did not want to share it with anyone else at the moment. He wanted time to think about what had happened.

  Ragnar glanced around. The rest of the Blood Claws were huddled along the wall, staring into the distance. Aenar raised brass field magnoculars to his eyes and looked out for a moment, before handing the viewing instruments to Torvald. It was obvious they were looking for some sign of the battle going on out there. Strybjorn held his weapon at the ready, looking relaxed yet alert. The rest of the pack lay sprawled along the wall, taking their rest while they could. It was a trick they had learned from the Grey Hunters – sleep when you can.

  Behind them the previously empty space around the shrine was filled with the massive bulk of Imperial spacecraft, each disgorging its cargo of men and machines. Now the Wolves had established a safe beachhead, General Trask, the Imperial field commander, was prepared to reinforce it. Tens of thousands of Imperial Guard, hundreds of massive battle tanks and dozens of heavy artillery pieces were being deployed on the plain around the shrine. Not nearly as many as were holding the spaceport twenty kilometres away, but enough to make the shrine all but impregnable.

  From up here Ragnar could make out the standards of the 12th Maravian Guard regiment, the twin-headed eagle holding a solar disk in its claws. The Maravians themselves lined the emplacements in the walls nearby. Tall, broad shouldered men in light blue winter combat uniforms, they held their lasrifles as if they knew how to use them. A veteran regiment according to camp rumour, they held themselves apart from the Space Wolves, seemingly a little in awe of them.

  One of them, obviously a green recruit, had actually asked Ragnar whether the Wolves really had cleared the shrine in the teeth of ten times their number. Ragnar had told them it was only five times, but that had been enough to silence the lad. Lad! Ragnar smiled. The man was probably older than he was.

  Another glance showed Imperial Guard officers in braided uniforms
and commissars in thick, black coats moving among along the battlements, come to inspect the position for themselves. The officers smiled and talked, at least until they got close to the Wolves; the commissars looked stern and forbidding. One of them caught Ragnar’s glance and gave him a tight-lipped smile. Ragnar grinned, showing his fangs, and the commissar looked away. He was not sure whether it was because the man was intimidated, or he thought Ragnar might be some sort of mutant to be cleansed. Ragnar would not have bet against it being the latter. Not all servants of the Imperium regarded the Space Marine Chapters with awe, or even liking.

  Not that it mattered under the circumstances. Ragnar felt sure that if it came to fighting, the Wolves could take out this entire regiment, no matter how badly they were outnumbered. He pushed the thought from his mind. Everyone was on the same side here. Out beyond the walls were hordes of heretics and daemon-worshippers. There were enemies enough to go around without looking for any closer to hand.

  Sven had had enough of being ignored. ‘Are you just going to stand there with your mouth open and wait for a Thunderhawk to fly in or are you going to answer my bloody question?’

  ‘I was thinking about what to say.’

  ‘Are you ill? You don’t usually take so long to answer.’

  Ragnar looked back at Sven for a moment, and wondered whether he should tell him. He looked significantly at the Moravians for a moment and Sven nodded, and gave them time to pass way off along the parapet, then slowly, in halting stumbling words, Ragnar tried to explain what he had felt in the shrine the previous evening. Sven belched loudly but said nothing. When Ragnar finished speaking, he looked up at him searchingly.

  ‘I’ve heard that others have had the same experience. Some of the Wolf Lords, some of the Long Fangs, one or two Grey Hunters. Never heard of it happening to a Blood Claw. Maybe you should talk about it with Ranek or one of the Rune Priests. Maybe it means you’ll be the one to find the Spear.’

  Sven’s tone suggested that for once he was not joking. Ragnar considered this for a minute. Sven was only echoing what he himself had thought in the minutes after he had left the shrine. Then he had felt like running to find Ranek and tell him what had happened. Some instinct had stopped him, and he had gone to sleep instead.

  ‘The priests are all in the sanctum with the Great Wolf and his retinue, working divinations, trying to find out where the Spear is. Who knows when that will be done?’

  ‘When you get the chance, talk to them,’ said Sven.

  ‘I will,’ said Ragnar.

  ‘Maybe I should go and look at the old pile of bones,’ said Sven stifling a yawn. ‘Maybe Russ will appear and promote me to Grey Hunter.’

  Ragnar shook his head. Sven did not seem capable of taking anything seriously for more than a few minutes. No, Ragnar corrected himself, maybe he just hid what he took seriously behind a screen of levity.

  ‘Think they will find the Spear?’ Sven asked eventually.

  ‘They have to.’

  Slowly a thought seemed to work its way from Sven’s brain to his tongue. He looked almost embarrassed to voice it. ‘Would it not be terrible if we were the ones, our generation, this Chapter, I mean, who lost the Spear of Russ.’

  So, despite appearances, some things did weigh heavily on Sven’s soul.

  ‘We will find it, and when we do, the ones who took it will pay.’

  ‘Why did they take it, do you think?’

  ‘Because it’s ancient and sacred.’

  ‘To us. To the folk of Garm, yes. But to heretics?’

  Apparently, thoughts also found their way into Sven’s head sometimes.

  ‘Maybe they will use it as a rallying point. Claim that they are the ones blessed by Russ. Chaos worshippers have done such things before. Their holy one, Sergius, is claiming that the Emperor has forsaken Garm and that only Chaos can save the world.’

  ‘He’s probably praying for Chaos to save him, now that I am here.’ Ragnar could almost see the thought return to trouble Sven’s mind.

  ‘Wasn’t the Spear supposed to be magical? Garm did wound Magnus with it, after all, and Russ used it to kill a heap of monsters. Could it not protect itself? And why couldn’t old Leman Russ leave it at the Fang like any sensible Space Wolf would have done?’

  ‘I am not Leman Russ, Sven, I can’t answer that. Maybe he left it here for some purpose. Was it not as a mark of his respect for Garm?’

  ‘I mean, the locals did not exactly make a good job of protecting it, did they?’

  ‘They did for ten thousand years.’

  ‘Aye, I suppose so.’

  Silence fell again. Ragnar considered Sven’s words. What could the heretics be doing with the Spear? Ragnar had at first thought they had taken it merely to spite the Wolves, but Sven did have a point. If the Spear was a mystic weapon in some way, then what other things could they be up to? He shook his head. He was neither a mystic nor a scholar. It was not for him to answer such questions.

  Ragnar returned to studying the distant cityscape. The buildings were huge, larger even than many of those he had seen on Aerius. They also looked much older, as if they had been hewn from enormous chunks of granite eroded over the millennia. Their exteriors were soot blackened and scarred by acid rain. The ancient gargoyles clinging to their sides were mere blank outlines. Everywhere black clouds puffed from enormous high chimneys. Even though war raged all around, the forges of Garm continued to work.

  That was another part of their current problem. Garm was a major centre of weapons production, and had been since the time of Russ. As long as those factories kept working they would churn out an endless supply of munitions that would keep the war going, perhaps even allow it to be taken to other worlds. There was no shortage of armaments here. No shortage of men to use them either, judging from what he had seen. Then his mind returned to the question of the Spear.

  Rumour had it that interrogation of the surviving heretics revealed they were little more than bandits, a horde made up from the local militias who had been driven from their destroyed factory keep. There had been tens of thousands of them in the initial attack, spurred on by this Father Sergius, who had since vanished along with his acolytes and the holy relic. All that Ragnar could gather was that Sergius had once been an Imperial priest, high in the temple hierarchy. He had been a well-respected scholar too. It just went to show, anybody who was not a Wolf could be a heretic. You just never knew.

  Looking through the magnoculars, Ragnar could see the evil sign of the Eye of Horus blazoned across the sides of one of those cloud-piercing keeps. Just the sight of it made him feel sick with hatred and anger.

  Focusing on the building showed him the fighting that was under way. Shots blazed from the slit-like windows at the tiny figures advancing across the cratered concrete plain below. Heavy weapons lashed out at Predator tanks. It was hard to judge whether those men there were loyalist or rebel. The banners told no story. They bore a white bear on a blue background. From the briefing he had received before they made the drop, Ragnar knew that these were supposed to be a faction loyal to the Imperium, but that meant nothing. The situation here on the ground was fluid.

  Another complication was that every factory keep was an independent kingdom ruled by its own Merchant House, in theory owing allegiance to the Imperial governor, in practice contributing only tithes and conscripts to the planetary levies. Each Merchant House had its own private army, its own weapons, and its own legacy of grudges and hatreds with rival Houses. It seemed that the assassination of the governor and the breakdown of planetary order had given everyone the excuse they needed to start paying off those grudges. This was civil war on a scale that almost defied comprehension. Alliances shifted daily.

  From reports they had received it seemed that it mattered less whether a House was loyal or rebel than whether it was prepared to help you smash your hereditary enemies. Treachery was the rule; savagery the law. So far the fighting had been contained on the western continent, and even here there we
re still large pockets of stability, but as the fighting wore on, it was spreading across the map like a stain of spilled blood. Soon, the whole world would burn, if steps were not taken to prevent it.

  ‘Looks like they’ve got themselves a nice little fight going on over there,’ said Sven. ‘Wish the Great Wolf would let us go and join in.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to mention that the next time I see him,’ said Ragnar. ‘I’m sure he will give you leave to go and sort out the Garmites.’

  ‘Bet he won’t,’ said Sven. ‘We’ll need to stay here and play nursemaid to the Guards.’

  Another glance backwards showed him massive cloth-metal pavilions erecting themselves automatically. Mess halls, administrative centres, field temples to the Machine God. Among them he could see inquisitors, spacefarers and soldiers of all ranks.

  It looked like the entire paraphernalia of the Imperial war machine was being dropped onto Garm. Rumour even had it that a Titan legion would join them soon. Ragnar hoped so. He had long wanted to see one of these mighty man-machines from up close.

  Overhead, Thunderhawks flashed across the sky, striking at distant positions. The action seemed more like a vast tiger unsheathing its claws, a swipe in the air to test its strength rather than a considered attack on the enemy. In time the Imperial tiger would roar and strike. At the moment it lay quiescent, surveying its prey.

  ‘I think I have seen enough bloody snow for one day,’ said Sven. ‘I think I’ll go to the shrine and see if Russ will talk to me. Most likely he will, I reckon. He will say: “Sven, you’re a bloody hero. Go out and show this world what Space Wolves are made of.”’

  Ragnar was beginning to wish he had never told his friend of his experience back in the holy of holies. He could see he was going to take a lot of joshing about it.