Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Ten



Three hours later, with the sun burning high in the sky, Váltyr walked up a tight spiral stairway, his shoulder guards grinding against the stone walls. He emerged onto a small square platform at the summit of one of the Halicon’s many towers. The city and its surroundings flowed away from him in every direction, falling down the long, broken mountain ridges before giving way to kilometres of featureless ochre plains. The distant horizon was hazy, masked by a pale screen of dusty grey.

The arch of Ras Shakeh’s sky was a deep, royal blue. Its earth was dull orange, like rusting iron. Everything shimmered under a beating, constant wall of heat. No breeze stirred the air. No animals called, no birds sang.

He paced over to the battlements running around the edge of the platform. Olgeir was already there, peering over the edge, his huge gauntlets gripping the sides.

‘Planned it out, great one?’ asked Váltyr, coming to join him.

Olgeir didn’t reply immediately. His amber eyes ran across the warrens of streets below. His cracked, pierced lips moved soundlessly, as if he were calculating angles, strengths, numbers.

The Halicon squatted at the summit of the mountain city. Beyond its walls lay the upper city, an orderly collection of red-tiled chapels, memorials, habs and admin blocks. Groves of spear-leaved trees grew in shaded courtyards and the sound of running water could be heard from under their eaves. The sigil of the Wounded Heart was prominent on the larger edifices, hanging limp on unmoving banners. A few landing stages were dotted amid the tight-packed buildings, ringed by defence lasers and servitor bays. Vuokho sat on one of them, still leaking smoke, still looking barely functional.

The upper city was protected at its perimeter by a winding circuit of high, thick walls. Defence towers studded the battlements at fifty metre intervals, each one bristling with lascannon turrets and swivelling missile launchers. Only one gateway broke the enclosure of those walls – the Ighala Gate, a blunt bastion of adamantium and granite that hunkered darkly to the west of the Halicon’s bulk. The Gate was a mini-citadel all on its own, dank, angular and forbidding. Just like the towers on either side of it, weapons clustered all over it. Some of the bigger guns looked like recent additions, cannibalised from overrun installations and bolted into place for the attack they all knew was coming.

Beyond the Ighala Gate was a narrow bridge that stretched out across a plunging, debris-choked gully. The ravine was a natural cleft in the mountain that ran around the upper city, dividing the two halves of the settlement and adding to the effective height of the inner wall. The cleft was too deep for infantry to negotiate unaided and lay tightly under the shadow of the tower guns. Váltyr grunted with approval when he saw that. It was a killing ground, a formidable barrier for any army to cross.

On the far side of the ravine was the lower city, a much larger straggle of far shabbier buildings. That was where the bulk of Hjec Aleja’s population lived their lives, clogged up against one another in close-packed hab-towers. The urban landscape ran down through a series of terraces, each one teeming with jostling, multi-storied estates. Váltyr could see very few major transit arteries; the streets were narrow, winding and overlooked.

Few structures of note existed in the tangled morass of stone beyond the inner walls. Only one caught his eye – the Cathedral of St Alexia, a gothic basilica with three gargoyle-encrusted spires. Its trio of spikes rose up into the clear air, casting long shadows over the houses below.

Much further out, tiny with distance, was the outer perimeter wall. Like the inner barrier it was buttressed with defence towers and studded with fire-points. A second armoured gatehouse stood on the outer rim, as lumpen and gun-covered as the Ighala Gate.

After that, nothing – just desiccated scrubland, dissolving slowly into rust-coloured desert. A lone road wound steadily westwards, its broken rockcrete surface marred by blown dust.

Váltyr looked at it all carefully, taking his time.

‘This is no fortress,’ said Olgeir eventually.

‘No,’ said Váltyr. ‘It isn’t.’

‘You know how many troops they have here?’

‘Tell me.’

‘Thirty thousand regular Guardsmen. A few thousand armed militia. Less than a hundred Battle Sisters. A few dozen tanks and walkers. One crippled Thunderhawk. And us.’

Váltyr nodded, chewing over the figures. All that was left of a planet’s defences after just a few months of war. Not much to boast about.

‘Arm the civilians?’ he suggested.

‘They have been armed,’ said Olgeir, in a voice that gave away how useful he thought that would be. He leaned over the parapet, hawked and spat. The spittle flew a long way down before hitting anything. ‘I’ve seen better defended asteroids,’ he concluded.

‘We should strike out,’ said Váltyr, running his eyes along the horizon. ‘Blood them before they get here.’

Olgeir grunted in agreement.

‘Gunnlaugur’s already planning it. The canoness is unhappy. She wants everyone behind the walls, waiting for them to get there.’

Váltyr looked down at the inner ring of defences.

‘We could hold this upper level, perhaps,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘The bridge is a choke point, and those walls look solid. But the outer rim… I don’t know.’

Olgeir nodded. ‘There’s no way we can hold the perimeter. Too long, too low. But she wants to, all the same. They won’t let the cathedral fall without a fight.’

Váltyr couldn’t blame them for that. It was their cathedral.

‘We’re going to need to clear some space, then,’ he said. ‘We can’t move anything through those streets.’

‘Aye,’ said Olgeir. ‘I’ve been planning it. They’ve got earthmovers and plenty of manpower. We need trenches, ones we can get burning. The one thing they’ll do is keep on coming. We could soak up thousands if we organise it right.’

Váltyr didn’t say what he thought.

It won’t be enough.

‘Do they have flyers?’ he asked.

‘Apparently not.’

‘That’s something.’

The two of them fell into silence again. Váltyr felt himself sweating under the relentless glare of the sun. He could have put his helm on and let it regulate his temperature, but that felt like an acknowledgement of weakness. De Chatelaine had said that most of the fighting on Ras Shakeh had taken place at night, and he could see why. Even the damned would struggle to march under that unbroken heat.

‘I tell you, Heavy-hand,’ he said at last. ‘I already hate this place.’

Olgeir chuckled. ‘That bad?’

Váltyr thought for a moment.

‘Actually, it is,’ he said, letting his irritation get the better of him. ‘I mean, what in Hel is this? This is a backwater, a rock. If we’re going to die here, I want to know why. We won’t get a saga for this. Not a decent one. Why would anyone fight for this?’

Olgeir shrugged. ‘Can’t answer that, brother,’ he said. ‘But you can see it as well as I can. This isn’t just a raid – they’re here to take this world. Others, too. This is organised. There’s method in it.’

‘What can be here that they would possibly want?’

‘Something worth sending a fleet for. Seems to me this is about occupation.’

Váltyr shook his head. Olgeir’s judgement was normally good, but that felt wrong.

‘The Sisters,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘They sent distress calls?’

‘For weeks, they say,’ said Olgeir. ‘They don’t know if any got through. We’re months away from anywhere with an army.’ He chuckled darkly. ‘Face it, we’re on our own.’

Váltyr pushed back from the railing and stretched his arms out, feeling the muscles flex.

‘Then I need to get out of here and find something to kill. I’d just started to find my rhythm.’

Olgeir nodded appreciatively. ‘You and me both,’ he said.

Váltyr looked into the distance, and the empty land gazed back at him. To the west, the horizon’s haze had taken on a faint greenish tinge, like mould spreading across water.

‘That’s where they’ll come from,’ he said.

Olgeir nodded. ‘I can smell them already.’

Váltyr felt an itch run across the palm of his sword-hand then. It missed the weight of holdbítr.

‘Soon, then,’ he said softly, clenching his fist tight and gazing intently at the pall of sickness on the world’s edge. ‘Very soon.’

Gunnlaugur sat alone. The chamber he’d been given by the canoness was the finest in the citadel: the walls had been hung with silks and the floor had been covered in a series of finely woven deep-pile rugs. He’d had them strip all that away, exposing the stone and plaster. Only two chairs remained; the rest had gone.

He struggled to shake his black, surly mood. He’d arrived at Ras Shakeh expecting no greater enemy than tedium. Though he would only have grudgingly admitted it, even to himself, a little tedium would have been welcome. It would have given time for the pack to bed in, for Ingvar and Hafloí to find their places, for everything to settle into the old rhythm.

Instead they had been plunged into a world on the edge of ruin. The Undrider, with its thousands of loyal souls on board, had been lost. Those that had made it to the saviour pods had crashed down onto a planet enveloped in a nightmare. None of them had made contact since Vuokho had landed at Hjec Aleja. That disaster alone wore away at his conscience. In the scant moments he’d had to himself since making planetfall, he had run the events of the brief orbital battle over and over in his mind. Perhaps he could have handled it better. Perhaps his desire to get into combat may have overruled tactical sense.

Or perhaps not. The choices, and the time to make them, had been limited. It was always easy to second-guess decisions made in the heat of battle.

So why am I so troubled by this one?

He knew the answer.

A soft chime sounded at the door.

‘Come,’ he growled.

Ingvar entered. The warrior’s expression was hard to read. Not contrite, exactly; not spoiling for a fight. He must have known what was coming, but he made no concessions to it.

He came to stand before Gunnlaugur. His face was a mask of calmness.

That alone pricked at Gunnlaugur’s pride.

You are a Son of Russ! Show some mettle!

‘So why did you do it?’ Gunnlaugur asked, looking up at Ingvar from under heavy lids.

‘I tried to warn you,’ said Ingvar. ‘It was the right thing to–’

‘It was not your call.’ Gunnlaugur’s voice remained low, animated by a low, snarling threat-note.

Ingvar took a breath. ‘I saw Jorundur approaching,’ he said. ‘It was the right thing to–’

‘Blood of Russ, don’t treat me like a fool!’ Gunnlaugur swept up out of the chair. They stood facing one another, barely a hand’s width apart. Gunnlaugur’s face was hot with anger; Ingvar’s remained still.

‘What has changed in you, brother?’ Gunnlaugur growled. ‘You spoke against me on the bridge. You didn’t want to attack that ship.’ As he spoke, as he remembered it, the whole thing became harder to understand. ‘We had a chance – one chance – for the kill. Why would you not take it? Why would you ever not take it?’

Ingvar’s grey eyes didn’t flinch.

‘I didn’t speak against you,’ he said. ‘We had to consider alternatives. The tactical options had not closed down.’

That was not language Gunnlaugur had heard from Ingvar before. It was not language he had heard from any Sky Warrior.

‘Speak plainly,’ he muttered.

‘We could have withdrawn. We were faster. They had seen us before we saw them, and so had the advantage. Given space, we could have used our speed to more effect. An alternative to boarding might have presented itself.’

‘You’re saying I was wrong.’

Ingvar shook his head. ‘No. You are vaerangi. But it was my duty to point out alternatives.’

Gunnlaugur looked at him with furrowed brows. The language Ingvar was using, the tone of it, it was all unsettling.

He wouldn’t raise his voice. He wouldn’t fight him.

‘You’ve changed,’ he said again.

‘You say it like it’s something to be feared.’

Gunnlaugur looked away, spat on the floor, then rubbed his hands through his matted mane. Something like sickness churned within him.

‘I fear nothing.’ He flexed his fingers, as if to clutch at his weapon. Fighting was easy, straightforward. That was what he knew how to do. ‘Do you remember Boreal V? Do you remember how we ravaged that world, you and I? That was fighting. That was how I remembered you, when you were gone.’

As he spoke, Gunnlaugur let the memories revive within him. He saw Ingvar and he alone amid a sea of howling, tearing blood-cultists. His hammer had whirled with abandon that night, hewing at the damned in droves. Ingvar’s sword had never moved faster, never slain with more deadly accuracy. They had stood back to back, isolated in a sea of death-lust as the sky burned above them, fighting in the purest way possible – two battle-brothers, their lives in each other’s hands.

Gunnlaugur had expected to die then. He had not been sad about it: a death on Boreal would have been a fitting end. Sagas would have been sung of two Sky Warriors, elbow-deep in the blood of the fallen, their sacred duty discharged and their honour unstained.

When Hjortur had eventually fought his way to their side, raging and flailing with the others in tow, it had almost been a disappointment.

‘I remember all our fights, brother,’ said Ingvar. For the first time, his voice had something like emotion in it.

‘Then act like it,’ said Gunnlaugur, whirling back to glare at him. ‘Act like you’re back amongst your own kind, like you belong here.’

Ingvar’s grey eyes were unmoving. ‘I would die for Járnhamar,’ he said, his voice intense. ‘I always would have. You know this.’ He took a step towards Gunnlaugur, his own fists twitching as if he wanted to clench them.

Your anger is stirring. Good.

‘But I learned so much,’ Ingvar said. His eyes flickered strangely, as if his attention were elsewhere. ‘I thought that I would learn nothing, but I was wrong. We think of ourselves as the bravest, the fastest, the strongest. We laugh at the others. We’re wrong. We blunt our own weapons. There are other ways. Some are better.’

Gunnlaugur listened with disbelief. ‘Better? That it? Better than the savages from the ice-world who bred you?’

‘You’re not listening,’ Ingvar snarled. Another spark of anger flickered across his face. ‘Your mind is closed. It has always been closed.’

Gunnlaugur swept in close, fangs bared, his whole body bristling.

‘Do not dare to lecture me,’ he warned darkly, his hot breath on Ingvar’s face. ‘We are not equals, Gyrfalkon, ready to brawl in the straw to settle this. This is my pack. You will accept that, or by the blood of the ancients I will break you.’

They stood, face to face, both of them tensed for the first move. Gunnlaugur felt his blood pumping around his system, ready to flood into primed muscles. He could see the fury in Ingvar’s expression, the desire to lash out, the pungent spike of kill-urge.

Heartbeats passed, thudding heavily in rib-fused chests.

Then, slowly, Ingvar backed down. His eyes lowered. His gauntlets uncurled.

‘You are right,’ he said quietly. ‘You are right. I recognise my failing. I will be sure to correct it.’

Gunnlaugur watched him pull back from the confrontation. For a moment, he couldn’t believe it. He had been ready to fight, poised for the explosion of movement. It was a struggle to come down from that. His blood still thundered in his arteries, thick and vital.

I was ready to humiliate him. I was ready to prove myself.

With effort, he forced himself to relax.

Would I have won?

It was hard to find the right words. For a moment longer, they faced one another in silence.

‘Listen, brother,’ said Gunnlaugur at last, making his voice ebb, pushing it to lose its edge of violence. ‘We can fight together like we used to. I want this. But it cannot be the same. I need to know that you will follow an order. I need to know that you will follow me.’

Ingvar nodded. He looked suddenly withdrawn, unsure of himself, as if he’d got close to blurting something out and had only hauled it back at the last minute.

‘You are vaerangi,’ he said again. ‘I never challenged you for that.’

Gunnlaugur suddenly felt like he’d missed something, like he’d mistaken Ingvar’s meaning somehow.

But it was too late to argue back. He’d stamped his authority, just as Hjortur would have done. That was the important thing.

‘Then we are clear,’ he said. ‘We understand one another.’

‘We do.’

Gunnlaugur took a deep breath. In another age he might have reached out then, clapping Ingvar on the shoulder with his gauntlet, behaving like the battle-brother he’d once been. Now, though, the gesture felt strangely inappropriate. He kept his distance.

The air hung heavily between them, tense and febrile. It pressed against his temples. Nothing would clear it; not anger, not remorse.

‘We need to work with the Sisters,’ Gunnlaugur said, moving awkwardly on to strategic matters, hoping that would salve the nagging unease in his mind. ‘They’ve been working hard on the defences here, but there are too few of them. They don’t understand what’s coming here.’

Ingvar listened carefully, saying nothing more. He looked chastened, but with an edge of defiance still in his bearing.

‘There are things we can do, ways we can strike back,’ Gunnlaugur went on. ‘But the canoness has her own priorities. The cathedral is one. It’s madness to try to hold it, but they won’t pull back. I want you to go there, see how defensible it is, assess how viable a stand would be.’

Ingvar nodded. ‘By your will,’ he said. ‘But that isn’t all, is it?’

‘The Sister Palatine. That’s her domain. You saw her observing us at the council, thinking we didn’t notice. She’s the liaison the canoness has chosen. If they want to observe us, then we can do the same.’

Gunnlaugur looked at Ingvar seriously.

‘It won’t be easy, working with them,’ he said. ‘We both have a hundred reasons to distrust one another. So get close to the Palatine, learn how they operate. By the time the enemy get here I want us to be working like hand and gauntlet. You understand?’

Ingvar bowed. ‘It will be done,’ he said.

Gunnlaugur nodded. ‘Good. And after that we’ll fight together, you and I. That will cleanse all this bad blood. It will be like Boreal V again – pure, uncomplicated, as it ought to be.’

He could hear himself sounding forced, trying to erase the memory of his anger. It didn’t convince him; he doubted it would convince Ingvar.

To his surprise, though, the Gyrfalkon looked at him almost gratefully, as if he’d been handed a way back. That was something to seize on.

‘I would like that, vaerangi,’ he said. ‘Like Boreal again, you and I.’

Vuokho stood on the landing platform, its shell blackened from re-entry. The length of its blocky hull was scored with damage taken on the approach to the plague-infested destroyer. Even while their warship had been dying around them, the enemy gunners had maintained a thick defensive barrage, one that had sorely tested Jorundur’s skills in evasion.

He cast an expert eye over the damage, and his face wrinkled in disgust.

‘How do they do it?’ he asked, talking to himself. ‘They can hardly see, hardly breathe, their hands are tentacles. How can they pull a trigger, let alone hit things?’

After the void-battle, the descent into Ras Shakeh’s atmosphere had been difficult. One system had blown after another, gradually knocking out all of the gunship’s flight aids and turning it into little more than a wedge of gliding wreckage. By the time he’d finally got it down, Vuokho was more dead than alive.

‘So will it fly?’

Jorundur turned to see Hafloí walking towards him. The Blood Claw’s face was a mass of scabs and inflamed flesh. Even his enhanced body had struggled to cope with the poisonous wound he’d taken, and his short trip into the vacuum hadn’t helped.

But he was healing well. Gunnlaugur had been right – the whelp was tough.

‘No, it will not,’ said Jorundur, turning back to the pitiful heap of wreckage before him. ‘I’ve seen the tech-servitors here and what they can do. We may as well start building a new gunship from scratch.’

Hafloí joined him and gazed along the Thunderhawk’s long flanks.

‘Doesn’t look too bad,’ he said.

Jorundur laughed in his dark, throttled way. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘You try to fly it.’

Hafloí bristled. ‘I might,’ he said, his scabby chin jutting.

Jorundur snorted, a grim sound that cut out abruptly.

‘Listen to me,’ he said, jabbing his fist at Hafloí’s chest. ‘You do not touch it. You do not go near it. You do not even think about going near it. Gunnlaugur himself wouldn’t take it without checking with me.’

Hafloí looked shocked for a moment, then laughed in turn.

‘You’re serious?’ he asked. ‘You think I want to fight you for this heap of junk?’

Jorundur scowled. ‘It’s not at its best,’ he said. ‘It was never ready.’

Hafloí turned back to face it. ‘We could still use it,’ he said, musingly. ‘Get this in the air, and we’d murder them. You know the enemy doesn’t have flyers?’

Jorundur rolled his eyes. ‘I see. Perhaps, then, you’ll tell me where we can locate a replacement drive chain, and thruster housings, and retros?’

Hafloí didn’t rise to the bait.

‘I’ve seen these things fixed on a battlefield. This city has workshops.’

‘Crewed by morons.’

‘How do you know? You just got here.’

Jorundur shook his head. Hafloí’s persistence annoyed him. The whelp was young, full of the confidence and optimism that youth brought. He hadn’t been part of the pack five minutes and already he was offering his counsel.

Had he been like that himself, once? It was centuries ago. Hard to recall.

‘Why are you so interested, anyway?’ Jorundur asked irritably, walking up to the frontal wings and running his hand along the chipped metal. ‘You’ll be on the front line with the others, shrieking and hollering like you did on that destroyer.’

Hafloí grinned. ‘Maybe,’ he said, following Jorundur. ‘Or maybe I’ll be right here with you, in the cockpit, running the battle cannon.’

Jorundur snorted. ‘You could handle that?’

‘I’ve been trained.’

Jorundur looked at him scornfully.

‘Training’s one thing. If you can keep your aim while the gunship’s being shot to shards and the air’s burning and your dying crew’s screaming in your ear and you’ve got blood running down your chest and arms, then I’ll be impressed.’

He patted Vuokho’s chassis.

‘This thing has taken down Titans,’ he said proudly. ‘Titans. Don’t tell me how to look after it. I’ll work on it, even if I have to rewire those servitors myself.’

Hafloí nodded. ‘Then I’ll fly it,’ he said.

Despite himself, despite trying hard not to, Jorundur laughed out loud.

‘Skítja, lad, no you won’t.’

He looked up at the cockpit. The metal around the armourglass panes was cracked. He knew that most of the instruments inside were burned out and that the machine-spirit had been reduced to a barely perceptible flicker haunting the automatic motive system.

‘It’ll be a miracle if we get it ready in time,’ he said. ‘A miracle. And, believe me, despite all the saints and angels haunting this place, I’m far too old to believe in miracles.’

Hafloí smiled.

‘You might be,’ he said, his voice full of arrogance and confidence and challenge, just as it should be. ‘I’m not.’