War of the Fang - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  The swords clashed, and the clang of the metal edges resounded from the walls.

  Wyrmblade moved as if he were a Blood Claw in the prime of conditioning, twisting his blade in tight, sharp arcs, crying aloud with every strike. The weariness of the long battle fell away from him, freeing his limbs to move with their old crushing, dazzling speed.

  In all his hundreds of years of service, he had never fought more finely, had never perfected the channeling of kill-urge more completely. Wyrmblade whirled, ducked and thrust with sublime energy, driven by an anger and loss that consumed him utterly; a burning, terrible grief that, for a few moments, lifted his artistry beyond even that of the Wolves of Fenris and into the category of legends.

  Magnus parried him with an unconscious ease, moving just as smoothly, deploying his blade with all the remorseless skill of his heritage. It was almost as if he were allowing the Wolf Priest his last moment of perfection, gifting him a final flourish of martial sublimity before the end had to come.

  But it couldn’t last. Wyrmblade, for all his furious energy and control, was to a primarch what a mortal was to a Space Marine. As even his age-hardened muscles tired of their furious assault, the dragon-blade dipped for an instant, leaving an opening. It only took one stroke from Magnus’s sword, just a single thrust aimed directly at Wyrmblade’s chest. The primarch’s eldritch blade passed through the armour smoothly.

  Impaled on the metal, Wyrmblade spasmed. He struggled for a little longer, desperately trying to pull himself from the bite of the sword. His own blade fell from his fingers, its energy field still fizzing angrily.

  The Wolf Priest coughed up blood, hot and black, and it sprayed across the inside of his helm.

  For a final time, his vision came to him. Space Wolves, as numerous as the stars, bringing war to the darkest reaches of the galaxy, shaping the Imperium in the image of the Wolf King and making it as vital and powerful as Russ had been.

  ‘It was... done... for Russ,’ he gasped, feeling the cold clutch of death steal upon him.

  Then he went limp, slumping heavily on his enemy’s sword.

  Grimly, Magnus withdrew the blade, letting Wyrmblade’s body crumple to the floor.

  ‘If that is so, then you failed him,’ remarked the primarch, looking down at the ravaged corpse impassively. ‘This struggle is over.’

  ‘Not while you live, betrayer!’

  Magnus snapped his gaze up. Amazingly, there were warriors charging towards him. A Terminator-clad giant, his wolfclaws blazing with angry lightning. A Rune Priest, flanked by two bodyguards, his staff crackling with forks of aether-born power. And behind them, moving more slowly, something massive and ponderous. Something he recognised from long, long ago.

  The Russvangum hurtled into the orbital engagement zone, its lances blazing. The escorts flew hard in its wake, opening fire with every weapon they possessed. The arrival of the Wolves’ battle fleet was devastating, wrapped in fire and fury.

  The Thousand Sons fleet did not engage them, but began to pull away from Fenris in a move that had clearly been planned for. The Herumon, the only vessel in the armada capable of taking on Ironhelm’s flagship, powered out of harm’s way smoothly, turning on its axis and heading directly for the jump-points.

  Space Wolves frigates and destroyers headed straight into the heart of the enemy, throwing broadsides against the flanks of the ponderous troop-ships as they screamed past them. The golden vessels began to burn, their shields buckling under the fury of the assault.

  But an orbital war was not what Ironhelm had come for. He could see the dark circle of destruction about the Fang even from the realspace viewers. Kilometres-wide, it stained the pristine reflective expanse of Asaheim like a wound in pale flesh.

  As he looked at it, his mind was taken back to the ranks of Wolf Brothers, howling in mockery and anguish even as they were cut down. The air of the Gangava pyramid had been noxious, infused with madness and horror. Breaking free of that battle had been the hardest decision he’d ever made. Lost in a world of rage, he’d barely recognised Kjarlskar when the Wolf Lord had fought his way to his side. Even then, even after he’d heard what had happened on Fenris, a part of him had resisted the call to come back.

  The depth of his folly had been revealed in an instant. It would have been less painful to have kept on fighting, to have lost himself in the kill-urge, to have gloried in the righteous drive to purge the tainted from existence.

  He still saw the faces of those he’d killed. Tortured faces. Faces that masked a dreadful awareness. Somewhere deep down, the Wolf Brothers knew what they’d been twisted into.

  We keep the danger close.

  ‘To the pods,’ he growled, stomping from the bridge and down to the launch bays. On every ship of the fleet, Jarls of the Great Companies did the same. Hundreds of drop-pods were already primed for planetfall, each one carrying a full payload. Thunderhawk engines thrummed into life in the hangars, waiting for the all-clear to burst out into the troposphere and into cannon-range.

  The entire Chapter had achieved orbit, sweeping away resistance with the same contemptuous ease as the Thousand Sons had, so many days ago. The massed landings were only moments away.

  Ironhelm boarded his pod impatiently, leaned back against the adamantium walls and felt the restraint cage slam into place. The shell-doors hissed closed, and launch klaxons began to blare.

  ‘Land me on the summit,’ he snarled over the comm.

  That would be dangerous, with no margin for error – the bulk of the pods were being sent down to the causeways. The operators of the bays knew better than to argue, though, and the coordinates were duly set.

  ‘Clear to launch, lord,’ came a voice over the comm.

  ‘Do it,’ ordered Ironhelm, bracing for the release of the clamps, and then the dizzying, whistling descent towards the surface. It could not come soon enough.

  I am coming for you.

  The launch-tube doors flew open, and the pods began to fall. In every direction, Wolves vessels powered into battle, tearing apart any enemy ships too slow to evade their guns.

  He knew what the enemy would be thinking now. He knew that, all along the causeways, entrenched Spireguard battalions would be looking up, realising that their fleet was deserting them and that they were being left to fend for themselves. It was then, as they watched the skies darken, that the same terrible thought would enter every one of their terrified minds. He took a cold pleasure in that.

  This is the planet of the Wolves. And they have come to take it back.

  Sturmhjart spread his arms wide, kindling a rage of storm-energy. Fists of lightning raced out, engulfing Magnus in a nimbus of coruscating brilliance. The sigils on the Rune Priest’s armour exploded into life, burning heartblood-red.

  Greyloc and his two Wolf Guard leapt into action, snarling with pent-up rage. They went for Magnus like a pack taking down a konungur – one at the throat, one at the breast, one at the legs. Their armour shimmered from Sturmhjart’s protective aegis as they charged into combat.

  Greyloc was fastest. He got his talons fast up into the primarch’s face, raking and tearing. Magnus fell back, rocked by the speed of the assault. Though he stood over a metre taller than the Terminator Marines, the pace and ferocity of the attacks pushed him on to his heels, and he stumbled.

  Magnus the Red, son of the immortal Emperor, primarch of the Thousand Sons, stumbled.

  ‘For the Allfather!’ roared Greyloc in triumph, his whole being consumed by the awesome, feral power of the hunt. Like Wyrmblade before him, the absolute hatred engendered by Magnus lent him, for a time, truly astonishing power. ‘For Russ!’

  Greyloc bludgeoned the primarch back another pace, howling his hatred in scarcely intelligible frenzy. Magnus got his sword in place, but it was cracked aside by a savage swipe of wolfclaws.

  A Wolf Guard made contact, plunging his talons into Magnus’s leg. Sturmhjart bellowed with kill-pleasure at that, and his wyrdfire roared with even greater intensity.
The other Wolf Guard crunched his claw into the primarch’s chest. The Wolves had the scent of blood in their nostrils, and it made them awesome.

  Magnus staggered again, crashing into the wall behind him, breaking it open, demolishing it as he passed through. Greyloc leapt after him, closely followed by the others. Sturmhjart kept on their heels, consumed with an inferno of raging wyrd-flame. The four Wolves harried, stabbed and hammered at the retreating daemon-primarch, their fists flying and blades biting. There was no let-up, no respite, just a flurry of horrifying blows, each one sent hurtling into contact with a visceral, remorseless passion.

  They drove the daemon-primarch back further, tearing through another wall, laying waste to everything around them. The noise of roaring and slavering was deafening, a hideous cacophony of hate-filled defiance that rose, booming, into the narrow space of the fleshmaker halls.

  ‘Death to the witch!’ bellowed Greyloc, utterly possessed by kill-urge, his whole body pumping with furious energy.

  He was fighting at such a pitch of perfection that it made him want to scream aloud. Greyloc could feel himself burning up as he fought on, damaging himself irretrievably through the very action of such unrestrained violence. There was no retreat from this, no possibility of recovery. He was fighting himself to death, using up every gram of potential in his mortal body.

  I am the weapon.

  Nothing less would do. He was contesting a living god, and only his indomitable faith, his unshakeable certainty, his complete commitment, would possibly match up to that awesome task.

  My pure state.

  So he pushed Magnus back again, giving him no time, no space. Another wall crashed into ruins, destroyed by the lightning-crowned rampage of their furious progress.

  They burst through the rubble into a wide, open space. They’d broken out of the laboratorium and into a hangar of some kind, one of the many hundreds that studded the mountain near the summit. There was a single gunship left on the apron, ruined and black from heavy battle-damage. At the far end of the launch bay, a gale roared past. The thundering of the vengeful wind boomed around their ears, fresh from the frigid airs of Asaheim, harsh and howling.

  The soul of Fenris. It shares our fury.

  The Wolves tore onwards, wreathed in Sturmhjart’s wyrdlight, bellowing defiance, landing blow after blow, each one of which would have ended another fight but in this case merely prolonged it.

  But their strength, for all its extravagant majesty, was fixed by clear limits. Magnus was a child of the Emperor, one of the peerless twenty who had lit the fires of the Great Crusade, and his poise could only be disrupted for a short time. The onslaught had been horrendous, the worst he had endured in a thousand years, but his strength was near-infinite and his guile scarcely less so. He straightened, towering over his assailants, and remembered what power lay within his gauntlet-grasp.

  One of the Wolf Guard let his defences slip for a fraction of a second, and that was enough. Magnus’s fist crashed into his face, hurling him out of contact and sending him flying metres through the air. The Wolf Guard crunched heavily to the ground, his helm smashed in, and didn’t get up.

  Sturmhjart was next, caught by a devastating blast of witchfire from Magnus’s outstretched hands. The Rune Priest bent double, clutched by sudden, agonising pain.

  ‘Hjolda!’ he cried, writhing in apoplexy, blood spraying from his armour-joints.

  Magnus clenched his fist, and the ceramite shell exploded, throwing a storm of flesh and bone across the hangar floor. Then the primarch whirled back to face Greyloc and the surviving Wolf Guard. The equanimity had been wiped from his face, and his wine-red hair hung in straggling clumps around him. He was bleeding, and limped from a deep wound to his leg. Only once before had his physical form sustained such wounds, and the remembrance of that pain enraged him.

  ‘You have angered me, Dog,’ Magnus snarled, back-handing the Wolf Guard viciously out of contention, breaking his back with a messy snap. Then he lowered a crackling fist at Greyloc.

  He never loosed the witchfire. A spinning ball of plasma hit Magnus directly in the torso, throwing him across the hangar. Another impacted, and another, knocking him further back. Limbs flailing, doused in supernova-hot bolt-residue, Magnus slammed into the carcass of the downed Thunderhawk. He smashed it apart as he crashed into it, his golden fists plunging through the crushed adamantium superstructure like a raging child trapped in a dollshouse.

  You know nothing of anger, Traitor, boomed Bjorn, lumbering from the wreckage of the hangar wall and punching another flurry of plasma bolts from his arm-cannon. This is anger. This is hate.

  The bolts impacted, one after the other, each aimed with exact precision. Magnus was enveloped in a furious, screaming inferno, a stream of starbursts that bludgeoned him back further, smashing him deep into the wreckage of the gunship.

  He still stood. He fought back. For a moment, it looked as though the primarch would rip the Thunderhawk’s structure apart completely.

  Then the promethium tanks ignited.

  The explosion was titanic, rocking the entire hangar and sending a blast-wave sweeping across the apron. Magnus was engulfed by a bulging sphere of white-hot destruction, an orb of flame that raced out, surging up to the hangar roof and running along the stone like quicksilver. Greyloc was hurled to the ground. Cracks raced across the apron, deep and gaping. The wind howled, dragging flares of flame through the tortured air.

  Only Bjorn endured. He kept firing, over and over, pouring more plasma into the raging torrent of destruction.

  When Magnus finally emerged from the heart of it, his face was contorted with murder. Skin hung from the bone, smouldering and blistering. His golden mantle was black, his bronze armour scorched. His mane of hair was gone, replaced by a flesh-tattered skull. His lone eye was star-red, burning like metal on the blacksmith’s forge. Huge gashes had opened in his flesh, revealing a lattice of shifting, luminous colour beneath. The physical cloak he’d draped over his daemonic essence had been ripped open, snatched away by the furnace.

  Magnus leapt from the inferno, straight at Greyloc, streams of fire trailing him like an angel’s wings. Bjorn swept his plasma cannon round, but too slowly. The wounded primarch crashed into the Wolf Lord as he struggled to regain his feet. Magnus felled him with a hammer-blow from his clenched fist, still flaring with raging promethium. Greyloc’s head cracked against the stone, and for a moment his guard was down.

  Magnus plunged with both hands, tearing up the Jarl’s breastplate with grasping fingers. Silver-gold warp-energy blazed out, dissolving the ceramite in hissing clouds. Magnus delved deep, seizing both Greyloc’s hearts in his crackling fists.

  The Wolf Lord screamed, his limbs going rigid with agony. With a sickening wrench, Magnus ripped the beating organs free, hauling them from Greyloc’s still-living chest, snapping the clutching trails of gore, and hurled them aside.

  For a moment, the Wolf Lord retained consciousness, somehow managing to hold the gaze of his killer.

  Beneath his helm, his white face was harrowed but defiant. His eyes reflected, for the final time, a fleeting vision of a snow-smooth plain, of prey moving under the harsh sun, of the icy wind against his naked arms.

  My pure state.

  Then the arms went limp, and the blood-glare from his lenses died.

  Jarl! roared Bjorn, his voice distorted by loathing.

  Still firing a stream of plasma bolts, the Dreadnought strode right into the primarch, his lightning claw blazing with angry disruption. The two giants came together in a crash of warp-energy, promethium, and steel on steel.

  As Magnus and the Fell-Handed fell into terrible, devastating combat, the storm around them whined to a new pitch of vitriol. The ground beneath their feet cracked open further, tearing chasms in the plascrete floor. The ancient Dreadnought, fuelled by the greater rage, forced the distracted primarch on to the defensive again, gouging at Magnus with his talons and blasting him from close range. At such proximity, the terr
ible plasma backdraft affected Bjorn nearly as badly as his enemy, but he maintained the barrage nonetheless.

  Step by step, shrouded in smoke and trails of fluid energy, the two fighters staggered towards the open hangar bay in a grotesque, swaying embrace, each trading hammer-blows of crushing, heart-stopping force. There was no shielding left over the portal. Beyond the plascrete edge of the apron, the bare rock carried on for a few metres before plunging down sheer. They reached the precipice, blazing away at each other with strikes of such brutality that the rock-edges crumbled under them.

  Magnus had been hurt. He’d been hurt more profoundly than any mortal had hurt him before. His shock at that translated into his movements, which had become strangely halting and erratic. All his easy grace had left him, and he fought like a bar-room brawler, clubbing at the heavy armour of the Dreadnought even as Bjorn thundered back.

  They got closer to the edge. More rocks broke away, streaming down the steel-hard flanks of the mountain in tumbling trails. The drop was near-vertical. They were thousands of metres above the causeways, duelling in the high heavens like the gods of Fenrisian myth, surrounded by the lancing tongues of lightning and the death-cry of the gales.

  Far below them, there was fire and slaughter. The Wolves had landed in their hundreds, and now ran amok across the stone, cutting threads at will. Columns of them were streaming towards the broken shells of the gates, entering their own citadel again with the deadly light of pursuit in their eyes. The skies were studded with the outlines of drop-ships and the dark trails of Thunderhawks. Far above that, surrounded by leaping bursts of chain lightning, heavier ships were slowly descending through the upper atmosphere.

  They both saw it. Even as he fought, Bjorn let slip a triumphant snarl.

  Ironhelm is here, witch, he taunted, plunging his claw hard into the bronze armour and twisting the blades. This is death for you.

  Magnus seemed beyond speech. The flesh around his mouth was ragged, burnt ebony by the clinging promethium and torn into a gash by the Dreadnought’s slashing strikes. He grabbed the barrel of Bjorn’s plasma cannon, clamping claw-like fingers over the red-hot muzzle.