Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Eleven



Baldr didn’t know where he was. Away was the best approximation, and that was good enough for him. The pain in his temples, hammering away since the engagement on the plague-ship, had become a problem.

Lack of sleep had exacerbated it. A Space Marine could go for days without sleep, using his catalepsean node to prolong that even further. That didn’t mean that it was comfortable. Given enough time the symptoms of sleep deprivation kicked in just as they did with mortals. Fuzziness, heaviness in the limbs, slower reaction times, poor judgement.

He needed to rest. Escape from the warp hadn’t helped as he’d hoped it would. It might do, in time, but Ras Shakeh’s hot, dry air didn’t make it easy. The sunlight was harsh, reflecting painfully from the deep-coloured landscape and flashing from glass and metal.

So he’d gone down, right into the bowels of the Halicon. Below the ostentatious entrance halls, the citadel’s chambers became cooler and darker. The lumens were set low and many had been turned off, pooling shadows in the corners of the corridors. To begin with there had been plenty of people around – robed officials, Battle Sisters hurrying from one duty to another, Guardsmen. Now, deep in the basement, the numbers had thinned out.

He was alone again. It felt good.

That fact surprised him. For as long as he could remember, Baldr had revelled in the close fraternity of Járnhamar. They had welcomed him when he’d joined, Ingvar in particular. He’d slotted in well. He couldn’t match Váltyr for sword-play or Gunnlaugur for brute force, but his aim with a bolter was the best of them. There had been times on the battlefield where it had felt like he’d known where each enemy would be before they did. On his day, Baldr’s shells found their marks with uncanny, unerring precision. It was all so easy, all so effortless.

So his torpor, his lack of self-command, that concerned him. For a brief time, during the fighting on the plague-ship, he’d been able to forget the pain throbbing behind his eyes. Only on the descent to the city, with the Thunderhawk shaking and rattling around him, had the pain returned.

Contemplating such weakness angered him. He would have to learn to master it. He was a Son of Russ; pain should be easily overcome.

He kept on walking, descending dusty stone stairs, striding down long, bare corridors, passing by empty doorways leading into empty rooms.

Motion helped. Coolness helped. Being alone helped.

He heard the whimpering late. If he’d been in his right mind, he would have detected it far earlier. As it was, his senses blunted by the angry throb in his skull, he nearly missed it entirely.

He stopped, listening carefully. It came from further down. At the end of the corridor a tight spiral staircase descended through a circular well-shaft of stone. The tiles on the walls around it had come loose; several had shattered across the floor. Dust lay heavily on the remains, a thick, undisturbed layer. No one had walked that way for some time.

He heard it again. A faint, breathy exhalation, ripe with pain.

He tensed. Something about the noise made the hairs on his body stand up. He drew his bolter silently and moved towards the stairs. Getting down them silently was impossible – the metal railing snagged against his armour. Before he’d reached the bottom, he heard something scuttling away from him.

The dark closed in. His eyes compensated immediately. He moved away from the stairs and walked further into the shadows.

He was in some kind of basement vault. The arched roof was low, barely high enough for him to walk without stooping. The floor was bare earth, old and loamy. He guessed he’d reached the foundations of the citadel. A familiar stench – sweet, cloying – hung in the dusty air.

He moved his head carefully, sweeping the space ahead of him. The earth was disturbed, as if an animal had suddenly stirred and raced off into the dark. The nearside wall was clear, but the opposite end of the basement was piled with old metal crates, most of them broken and gaping.

Baldr paused, listening, sniffing.

It was behind the crates. It didn’t make much noise, but it had to breathe. He heard its lungs straining, pulling hard on dank air.

He guided his bolter muzzle over to where the sound came from, and fired.

The explosion of the shell’s release broke the silence. At the same time, the crates burst apart, hurled away from the walls as something broke from cover. Baldr’s round detonated harmlessly into the wall, blowing a crater in the stone.

He had a brief glimpse of something running at him, scampering across the floor like a giant, bloated insect. It moved incredibly fast.

Baldr fired again, hitting it this time. It flew back away from him, its limbs splaying, a thin shriek echoing around the vaults.

He went after it, stowing his bolter as he moved. It twisted around and leapt back up at him. He saw a grey, gaunt face leer up out of the dark, snapping at his own with black jaws.

His fist shot out, seizing it by a scrawny, stringy neck and pinning it to the floor. He felt sinews break and bones snap under his grip.

It still lived. Its hands clawed at him, scraping his armour in a frenzy of useless scratching. It spat at him, sending a stream of thick, lumpy spittle into his face. It thrashed, screamed and writhed under the pressure of his gauntlet.

Baldr looked at it in disgust. Its flesh hung in flaps from its bony frame, withered and wasting. Sores clustered thickly around its lips, tight and pus-filled. It was almost naked, its exposed skin covered in lesions and tumours. Its eyes were sunken deep into an emaciated skeletal face, both dull with cataracts. Its tongue was long gone, chewed away in the wretch’s madness, and its screams were formless and choking.

For all that, it had once been human. Baldr recognised the remnants of a scholiast’s robes hanging around its loins.

He squeezed his fingers together. For a moment longer the thing hung on, its blind eyes popping, its hands clawing.

Then it went limp. Baldr withdrew, wiping the smear of stinking spittle from his face. He could almost taste the corruption in it, like long-rotten fruit.

He drew himself up, gazing down on the crumpled corpse of the scholiast. Its mouth hung slack, exposing inflamed gums and the blackened stump where its tongue had been.

It reeked.

He activated the comm-stud in his armour collar. The link, which he’d severed earlier, sparked back into life.

‘Fjolnir,’ came Gunnlaugur’s voice. He sounded preoccupied and irascible. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Clearing my head,’ said Baldr. ‘Where are you now?’

‘With the canoness. My chambers.’

‘I’ll see you there,’ said Baldr, stooping to scoop up the remains of the diseased cadaver. He turned back to the staircase, his tread heavy. ‘She’ll want to see this too. Warn her that we have a new problem.’

He cut the link. As he climbed, tucking the limp bundle of limbs under one arm, he could already feel his headache getting worse.

Ingvar walked down the narrow streets from the Halicon citadel to the cathedral. To do so he had to pass through the Ighala Gate, jostling with the crowds that milled under its narrow portals.

The experience was uncomfortable. Mortals disliked being in such close proximity to him – they pulled away when they saw him coming, staring with open mouths as he passed – but under the shadow of the enormous arches there was too little space for them to escape.

He ignored their stares, partly for his own comfort. Decades of operating on secret missions with Onyx had desensitised him to unaltered human presence. He had become more comfortable with the select few who, like him, had been elevated into positions of prominence: Inquisitors, Imperial agents, senior Adeptus Mechanicus priests, his fellow warriors of the Adeptus Astartes.

Mortals were different. Whenever he caught their expressions they showed the same thing: fear. They were terrified of him. Children ran away, screaming. Adults worked harder, but he could see the anxiety clearly enough in their staring eyes, their trembling fingers, their sudden, pungent aroma of fight-or-flight.

Ingvar knew Gunnlaugur wouldn’t have worried about that. Perhaps he was right not to. In any case, it was just one more difference that had grown up between them.

He strode down from the gate, over the bridge and into the lower city. The streets there were hotter and closer than those above the Ighala bastion. The buildings were shabbier, though more brightly decorated. Pennants displaying the Hjec Aleja coat of arms hung limply from doorways, their colours fading as the sun beat down on them. The smell of spices – cloves, cumin – rose from the baked earth, as if generations of use had stained it forever. Voices rose and fell from hab-units around him. The conversations sounded brief and subdued. Very little laughter rang out from the narrow windows. An atmosphere of tension, of low-level fear, of weariness, had sunk into the entire place.

People went about their business as they must have done before war had come, but their tight, febrile movements betrayed their anxiety. Ingvar had seen such things often on other worlds and in other battlegrounds. Humans would maintain a familiar rhythm for as long as they possibly could, pottering around, concerning themselves with trivialities while the forces of Hel crouched just over the horizon. The pretence could only ever be half successful – they all knew their world was about to change – but then what else were they supposed to do? Food still needed to be prepared, water needed to be fetched, clothes needed to be laundered.

Eventually the press of crooked streets opened up into a wide square. On the far side of it rose the sheer walls of the cathedral, sweeping up into the sky in a series of ever-narrowing layers of stony gothic ornamentation. Its three spires jutted dramatically, soaring far above the roofline of the houses around, thrust up from the overlapping tumble of slate and stone like an immense iron-tipped trident.

The courtyard at its base was shaded and thronged with people, all of whom were waiting patiently in long, huddled queues. At the head of those queues stood priests of the Ecclesiarchy in earth-brown robes. One by one the people received a blessing from them and were sent away. Ingvar watched them bow before the clerics, their heads bobbing low over the ground. They had the sign of the aquila waved over them and a few words of High Gothic muttered. Then they went away, a look of quiet satisfaction on their otherwise haunted faces. They slipped back into the shadows of the narrow streets, quickly disappearing.

Ingvar watched the process repeat itself. The mortals paid him little attention here. Their attention was fixed on what they were doing; if they caught sight of him watching them, they didn’t show it.

‘Do not despise them,’ came a woman’s voice.

Palatine Bajola drew alongside him. She wore her ceremonial robes – ivory cotton, trimmed with red and gold. Her ebony skin stood in stark contrast.

‘Why do you think I would?’ he replied.

‘You are superhuman,’ she said. ‘They are human. They suffer fear. I am told you do not.’

Ingvar watched the queues shuffle. Just as at the gate, he could smell the undercurrent of uneasiness.

‘How often does this happen?’ he asked.

‘Priests are here every day between dawn and dusk. They are kept busy the whole time.’

‘And it does some good?’

Bajola paused before replying.

‘If you mean that those people sleep a little at night and are able to go about their business without falling prey to waking nightmares, then yes, it does. It you mean that the Emperor will spare them from the coming horror and allow them to live their lives in peace, then no, it does not.’

Ingvar turned to face her. ‘Do you receive the blessing?’ he asked.

Bajola smiled. ‘They wouldn’t dare. They assume I have all the faith I need.’ She gestured towards the cathedral. ‘You are here to see me, I take it. We should go inside.’

‘And do you?’ asked Ingvar, staying where he was.

‘Do I?’

‘Have all the faith you need?’

Bajola hesitated.

‘We will find out, I guess,’ she said.

The interior of the cathedral was cool even while the streets outside sweltered. Its vast nave ran north-south, lined with dark rows of basalt columns. Sunlight angled in through narrow stained-glass panes depicting stylised images of saints and warriors, throwing intense coloured swatches on the chequerboard marble floor. The high altar was simple – an obsidian block of stone over which hung war-banners of the Wounded Heart and the Shakeh Guard regiments. An imposing cast-iron representation of the Emperor Manifest on Earth smiting the Great Serpent Horus had been mounted above that, glinting wetly in the gloom.

Few people moved around in the dusty shadows: scholiasts, a priest, an old penitent crawling towards the altar on his knees. The faint sounds they made were amplified amid the soaring spaces. Aromas of incense and human sweat rose from the stone.

Ingvar took it all in. He could appreciate Bajola’s pride in the place. It was a serious building, a place of devotion, unlike the grotesque pile of the Halicon that the canoness occupied.

She led him through a side door and up into her private chambers. The room they ended up in was high on the south-facing front, lined with crystal-paned windows that gazed out over the city below. Several chairs stood waiting, all of which she ignored. That was considerate; Ingvar guessed his armour-clad weight would have cracked most of them.

‘They call you the Gyrfalkon,’ she said, leaning against the far wall and smiling at him. ‘What is that? No one has been able to tell me.’

‘You cannot guess?’

‘A bird, I would have said.’

‘You would have said right. One of the few that can dwell on Fenris. It has grey plumage, thick against the cold. They are good hunters. Then again, everything on Fenris is a good hunter. If it is not, then it dies.’

Bajola looked amused. ‘So why you?’ she asked. ‘Because you are a good hunter? Or is it some dark secret of your Chapter?’

Ingvar shrugged. ‘My brothers are not overly imaginative,’ he said. ‘My eyes are grey. I had a reputation for speed with the blade, once. They liked the sound of it. I don’t know.’

Bajola nodded, as if he had confirmed some suspicion she had of him.

‘You are not quite like your brothers, I think,’ she said.

‘They might agree with you,’ he said. ‘Why do you say so?’

Bajola evaded the question.

‘Tell me about yourself, Gyrfalkon,’ she said.

‘What purpose would that serve?’

‘The canoness asked me to get to know you,’ she said. ‘You have been asked to get to know me. If you like, we could dance around one another for days, trying to gather information by stealth. Or we could put aside those games and talk. Enough, at least, to keep our superiors happy.’

Bajola had a polished, worldly air that Ingvar had not seen from the other Battle Sisters. She and de Chatelaine, it was obvious, were cut from very different cloth.

‘You are not quite like your sisters, I think,’ he said.

Bajola laughed. It was deep, spontaneous laugh, almost like a man’s.

‘That much is true,’ she said. ‘But tell me of the Wolves. If we are to die here together, I’d like to know who I’m dying with.’

Ingvar looked away from her, past her shoulder, out through one of the windows. Ras Shakeh’s deep blue sky shone with heat and light. A world more removed from Fenris would have been hard to find.

‘We are Járnhamar,’ he said slowly, as if to help himself remember. ‘That is the pack-name. A pack may last for many generations, and we have fought together for a long time. Gunnlaugur, Olgeir, Váltyr, Jorundur and myself are the surviving founders. Baldr came later. Hafloí, the pup, barely yesterday. That forges a bond. It is not easily broken, though it can be strained.’

‘I noticed,’ said Bajola. ‘You and your leader, you see things differently.’

Ingvar shook his head.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Not about the essentials.’

He snapped his head towards her suddenly, baring his fangs, snarling. He was pleased to see that, for all her poise, she started.

‘We are both of the blood of Asaheim, Sister,’ he said, smiling at her hungrily. ‘Neither of us is tame.’

‘I never thought you were,’ said Bajola, recovering herself and looking irritated.

‘Gunnlaugur has led the pack for fifty-seven years,’ Ingvar went on. ‘Longer than the lives of most of your Guard captains. He knows what he’s doing. I would trust my life to him. I have done, many times.’

‘Still. You see things differently.’

Ingvar’s eyes narrowed. Bajola was bold. He couldn’t decide whether to be impressed by that.

‘He’s proud,’ he said. ‘He’s got much to be proud about. But time changes things. It changes perspectives.’

‘What changed yours?’

‘I have been away from the home world. Our old Wolf Guard died while on campaign. I left Fenris before Gunnlaugur took over from him. It was a long time before I came back.’

‘How long?’

Ingvar smiled wryly, calculating. ‘Nine weeks ago.’

Bajola let out a long breath. ‘Holy Ophelia.’

‘We’re adjusting.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ she said. ‘What happened to your old Wolf Guard?’

‘Greenskins,’ Ingvar said, simply.

She didn’t need to know the details – the long assault on the chain-fortresses of Urrghaz, the void-pursuit, the final confrontation with the orks above the gas giant Teliox Epis. She didn’t need to know that Hjortur’s body had never been found – an insult unworthy of the old warrior and a sad loss of gene-seed. At the time, that detail had seemed strange; now it was just a piece of history, embedded in the archives of the Valgard and mourned in the sagas.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

Ingvar shrugged. ‘Don’t be. It was his time. He lived a good life, a warrior’s life.’

Bajola looked thoughtful. ‘You are a fatalistic people,’ she said. ‘I have heard this before, from others who have had dealings with you. Now that I meet you, I believe it.’

‘We live amongst death on Fenris. From birth we are surrounded by it. It comes suddenly, the crack of an ice-sheet, the gush of flame. You cannot defend against such things. You learn to accept it: the way of things, fate. The wyrd.’

‘I could not live like that,’ said Bajola. ‘I have a… problem with fate.’

Ingvar didn’t reply immediately. Bajola watched him all the while, holding his gaze with her brown eyes.

‘I’ve been doing all the talking,’ Ingvar said. ‘This has been an uneven bargain.’

Bajola smiled, and lowered her eyes. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘I could ask you the same things you asked me,’ he said. ‘You sit ill with your comrades. I have never heard one of your kind talk like you do. I wonder what forces created you. I wonder what forces brought you here. You are as unlikely a presence on this world as we are.’

Bajola gave a slight nod of acknowledgement, as if to say Well read.

‘I was trained by the Ordo Famulous,’ she said. ‘I accompanied Hereticus Inquisitors on high-level missions and arbitrated in the disputes of planetary governors. If you’re interested, I speak twenty-nine dialects natively, six hundred more via lex-implants. I learned to read the state of a man’s soul through a single gesture. Once you read a man’s soul, you control him. At least, that was what the Inquisition taught me.’

She sounded almost wistful as she reeled off her accomplishments.

‘I assume, though,’ she said, ‘that you think little of the Inquisition.’

‘It is always dangerous to assume,’ said Ingvar. ‘Your story is half-told. The Order of the Wounded Heart is militant, not ceremonial.’

Bajola looked weary. ‘Ah, yes. The Wounded Heart prides itself on its burn-tally.’ She looked down at her hands, pressing her fingers together in a loose cage. ‘Why did I join them? It was not enough, in the end, to spend my days talking. I felt that I was wasting myself. I saw the effects of wars but never participated in them. I was a mouthpiece for others, never speaking for myself.’

She looked back up at him. An edge of defiance danced around the edge of her expression.

‘I was advised against the transfer,’ she said. ‘They told me I wasn’t right for the Militant Orders. But there are ways of getting what you want if you try hard enough, even in the Adepta Sororitas.’

‘So I see,’ said Ingvar. ‘And you never regretted it?’

The defiance in Bajola’s face faded, replaced by a more familiar resignation.

‘I regret plenty,’ she said. ‘I regret that this world is so damn hot, so damn arid. I regret that it will soon be put to the sword, and that so many will die. If I had stayed in the Ordo Famulous my life would have been easier, and probably longer.’

Then she flashed a smile at him again – a knowing smile, one that spoke of a capacity for mirth that had not yet been extinguished.

‘But do I regret standing on my own two feet and learning to fire a bolter?’ she asked. ‘No, not at all. Turns out I’m good at it.’

In that instant, in those few words, Ingvar felt he knew all he needed to know about Uwe Bajola. It was hard not be impressed, given the circumstances.

‘That makes two of us, then,’ he said.

‘Where did you find this?’

Gunnlaugur could hear the low fear in the canoness’s voice. The corpse lay twisted on the pristine floor of her chamber, stinking of rotting fish. Its unseeing eyes glared up at the ceiling, already beginning to decay from the inside. Its neck was swollen, bruised and oozing.

‘In the foundations,’ said Baldr. ‘Right under your feet.’

To Gunnlaugur’s eye, Baldr didn’t look too good either. He seemed tired, distracted. His hair hung lankly around his forehead, which was strange. Of all of them, Baldr was normally the one who looked least like a savage.

First Ingvar, now him, thought Gunnlaugur. What is wrong with them all?

The canoness turned her face away from the corpse, her nose wrinkling.

‘It is – it was – Scholiast Geriod Nerhm,’ she said, drumming her fingers together. ‘He’s been missing for several days. I had assumed… Emperor forgive me. I had assumed that he’d deserted. Some have tried that, knowing the heat will kill them quicker.’

Gunnlaugur studied the heap of suppurating flesh at his feet. The signs of virulence were familiar enough; the scholiast’s body could have been lifted straight from the corrupted heart of that plague-ship.

‘Had Nerhm been exposed to the enemy?’ he asked.

De Chatelaine shook her head. ‘He was an official,’ she said. ‘He never left the citadel.’

‘What of the rest of your troops?’ asked Baldr, running a tired-looking hand across his forehead. ‘The ones you pulled back?’

The canoness looked lost for a moment.

‘I– I suppose so,’ she said. ‘We have regiments extracted from the warzone, brought here to resupply. What was I supposed to do – leave them to be annihilated?’

Gunnlaugur pursed his lips. ‘Have you seen any cases like this?’

De Chatelaine shook her head. Her expression was distraught.

‘None,’ she said, weakly. ‘We didn’t think to–’

‘No, you didn’t,’ said Baldr, his voice accusatory. ‘You’ve been fighting these things for weeks. There should have been quarantine for anyone coming from the front. Do you see what you’ve done?’

‘Enough,’ snapped Gunnlaugur. He had no idea why Baldr was behaving so harshly. Blame was pointless; given the speed and severity of the outbreak of war, it would have been impossible to screen everyone.

De Chatelaine’s face, though, had gone pale.

‘No, he is correct,’ she said, looking haunted. ‘We thought it was the right thing, to pull them back. We thought we were saving them. Oh, Holy Emperor…’

Gunnlaugur shot a furious glance at Baldr.

‘It matters not now,’ he said. ‘We still have time. What medicae complement do you have?’

The canoness struggled to focus.

‘Sisters Hospitaller, a few squads,’ she said. ‘The Sisters have training. We can run checks, set up quarantine for those in the garrisons.’

‘Good,’ said Gunnlaugur. ‘Do those things. Are the gates sealed?’

‘Not yet. We had hoped for reinforcements. The Twelfth Guard battle-group, heading north from the ruins of Bagahz. From reports, they’re two days out.’

Baldr rolled his eyes. ‘Do you not understand?’ he said wearily. ‘They allow them to survive. Carriers walk among them. You cannot let them in.’

‘They cannot be abandoned.’

Baldr shot her a dark look. ‘There are millions of people in this city, canoness,’ he said. His voice was low but insistent. ‘Some of them will already be infected. If we act now, we might keep it down, but if you let more in, this thing will spread. You will have dozens, hundreds of living corpses within the walls. Is that what you want?’

De Chatelaine looked down at the corpse, her drawn face riven with indecision.

‘Seal the gates,’ insisted Baldr, looking briefly to Gunnlaugur for support. ‘Allow none to pass in or out. Then start the purges. You’ll need flamer teams – everything contaminated must be destroyed.’

Still de Chatelaine hesitated. For the first time, Gunnlaugur noticed the deep lines of fatigue around her eyes. She’d been fighting without pause for too long.

‘He’s right,’ said Gunnlaugur quietly.

Slowly, very slowly, de Chatelaine’s chin lowered.

‘It will be done,’ she said. ‘Leave it to me. We have allowed this into the city, we will purge it.’ She sighed deeply. ‘So they have got what they wanted. We will be cooped up here, unable to strike out, waiting for them like rats in a trap.’

‘No, we will not,’ said Gunnlaugur fiercely. ‘We – the pack – we can still fight. We’ll hit them on the plains, blood them, show them what manner of warrior defends the city. It’ll give you some time.’

De Chatelaine looked unconvinced. ‘I had hoped you would help us here,’ she said.

‘Right now they fear nothing on this world. When we have done with them they will fear plenty.’ He grinned coldly, baring his long hooked fangs. ‘It’s what we’re bred for.’

On another day, perhaps she might have resisted longer. The toll of her workload, though, combined with guilt, seemed to dilute her will.

‘You will do what you judge best,’ she said, her eyes flickering to the corpse lying on the floor before her. ‘But if you go, just make sure you hurt them. Hurt them badly. For the first time since this thing began, I find myself wanting to see them truly suffer.’

She stared at the scholiast’s body stonily. Then she recovered herself, and looked back up to the Wolf Guard.

‘I have much to do,’ she said. Her voice had recovered some of its steel. ‘Purge-teams will be dispatched. We will root this out.’ She shot him a wintry smile. ‘If there’s one thing we know how to do, it’s burn.’

Gunnlaugur nodded. ‘You will not be alone,’ he said. ‘While the sun shines, we fight here. After that, the pack hunts.’

De Chatelaine bowed. ‘So be it,’ she said. ‘While the sun shines.’

Then she turned, pivoting sharply on her heel, and strode out of the chamber. Her boots clinked against the marble, echoing from her heavy tread.

After she’d gone, Baldr made to do the same. Gunnlaugur prevented him, raising a hand before his chest.

‘Brother,’ he said. The tone he used was firm. ‘Speak to me.’

Baldr looked back at him. His complexion was pale, his eyes dull. He did not look sick, exactly. Drained, perhaps.

‘About what?’

‘You are not yourself.’

Baldr’s eyelids twitched. ‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘The warp passage was… difficult. I will recover.’

Gunnlaugur didn’t release him.

‘Ingvar suffers like that,’ he said. ‘I have to worry about you both now?’

Baldr smiled. It was a distracted, snatched gesture. ‘Don’t worry about either of us,’ he said. ‘We’re not children.’

Gunnlaugur’s gaze didn’t waver. ‘I don’t like to see you like this,’ he said. ‘It’s enough that Jorundur is forever in foul temper. You were always the one I could rely on to keep your head. If something is amiss, tell me.’

Baldr hesitated. For a moment, he looked unsure of himself. His dull eyes flickered up to meet Gunnlaugur’s, then away again.

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘Just warp-sickness. It will pass.’ He took a deep breath, and rolled his shoulders. ‘I need to hunt. To hunt properly. Void-war is one thing. It doesn’t match the chase. You feel it too.’

Gunnlaugur nodded. He let his hand fall away. ‘When night falls, brother’ he said.

‘Good.’ Baldr’s eyes alighted on the corpse. ‘For now, though, work to do.’

Gunnlaugur grunted distastefully. ‘Aye,’ he growled, looking at the pile of pustulent matter at his feet. It would be the first to enter the furnace. Many more would follow. ‘Summon the rest of them. Time we got started.’