Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Fourteen



The pack left the outer gate as the first moon rose. It cast a fragile silver sheen over the still-warm landscape. They broke into a run as the massive doors clanged closed, loping easily in loose formation. The city quickly fell away behind them, retreating into the north as they sped. The five warriors dropped into a steady rhythm, their limbs working in unison, each casting a deep-black shadow on the dust beneath them.

Gunnlaugur set the pace. He’d strapped skulbrotsjór to his back, lacquered down his straggling hair and beard and donned his helm. Like the others, his battle-plate was still layered with the patina of combat. The rune of destruction, turza, was still visible on his helm’s forehead, cut deep by the Iron Priests and inlaid with iron. In the moonlight it glowed dully, making his snarl-masked visage seem marked with the sign of ancient magick.

He drove the others hard. The physical exertion helped to clarify his mind. He felt his hearts beating in slow unison, fuelling the huge furnace of his body. He drew air into his barrel-chest in long draughts, feeling the gritty dryness of it drag deep into cavernous lungs.

The pack went silently. Olgeir was brooding, still angry at Ingvar’s exclusion. Váltyr was similarly unquiet, though he’d voiced no objection. Hafloí was the only one in high spirits. He’d let out a whoop of battle-joy on leaving the city, but hadn’t repeated it after no one else had joined in.

‘What’s the matter with you all?’ he’d grumbled once they were under way. ‘Lost your voices when your hair went grey?’

That had made Baldr laugh, but it had been a stifled sound. After that they had run without speaking. They might have been predators indeed, grey-clad and draped in strange hides and bones, striding out across the wide emptiness in search of victims.

Gunnlaugur didn’t blame Hafloí for his irritation. Back when he’d been a Blood Claw himself he’d raced into battle with death-oaths thundering from his hoarse throat. He’d laughed as readily as he’d cursed, exuberant at the raw power unleashed within him by the Helix. Hjortur had been the same, and under his leadership Járnhamar had been a raucous, brutish juggernaut of noise and hot blood.

Gunnlaugur didn’t remember when that exuberance had begun to fade. Perhaps it was fatigue – the pack had been on engagement after engagement for nearly a century with only snatched periods away from the front. Even the furious energy of a Sky Warrior had its limits.

Gunnlaugur found himself growling as he ran, his hot breath snagging throatily. It was an animal sound, a primeval note of slow-burning frustration. He had found it hard to endure words of reproach from Olgeir, who was the most generous of them, the one most ready to laugh off tension and still dissent with a cuff or a laugh. It had been hard to endure Baldr’s weary looks and Váltyr’s doubts.

For all that, he couldn’t regret his decision. Ingvar had to learn his place in the hierarchy. It was a matter of precedence, of power. From Járnhamar, to Blackmane’s Great Company, to the Rout, to the Imperium itself: everything depended on hierarchy, on the establishment of command. Without the iron gauntlet of discipline everything fell apart, leaving the defences open to the predations of the enemy.

In time, things would be more like they had been, but only once order had been re-established. Matters had been left to drift. He was vaerangi, the inheritor of an ancient and noble battle-role. Even if he wanted to loosen things a little, to cut the others some slack, he couldn’t.

It wasn’t personal. It wasn’t about self-doubt, jealousy, or the spectres of the past. It was about duty, about leadership.

Above all, it wasn’t about Ingvar. He was certain of that. It wasn’t about Ingvar.

I’d want a blade of his pedigree in the pack. If he challenged me, I’d beat him down.

Arjac’s words came into his mind unbidden, like a waking dream. He remembered the way the Rockfist had spoken to him: like a father to a son. The memory affected him strangely. He couldn’t remember his birth-father at all. It was all so long ago.

If fate brings you and Ingvar back together, the pack will shape itself around both of you, one way or another.

Ah, but there was the rub. Gunnlaugur had to control the pack. He had always needed to control, to fashion, to mould, just as Rockfist moulded soft metal into his killing blades.

Pride makes you strong, stripling.

Yes, that was so. It had always been so. It had been the cause of his rise from the mass of other warriors, the thing that had first caught Hjortur’s eye. His pride did more than make him strong. It made him unbreakable.

We only live for the pack: that is what makes us deadly, what makes us eternal. Nothing else matters.

And that was also true. Gunnlaugur had always known it. He had always lived it. What had Ingvar done for Járnhamar, compared to him? It was Gunnlaugur who had held the pack together after Hjortur’s death, making it stronger, tempering it and keeping a grip on the raging spirits within. Could Ingvar have stood up to Tínd when the black temper came on him? Would Ingvar have kept Jorundur’s bitterness in check, or managed Váltyr’s need for validation at every turn?

But this wasn’t about Ingvar.

Ahead of him, the plains stretched away into darkness. Gunnlaugur checked the locator readings on his lens-display, blink-clicking to cross-reference with the coordinates de Chatelaine had given him. On the southern horizon the land began to pucker up like scar tissue, breaking into a mass of higher ground riven by snaking gorges. The wind from that place had a taint of foulness.

Gunnlaugur checked proximity readings. Just on the edge of sensor-range, he saw the cluster of runes he’d been hoping for. They glowed red against the filtered darkness of the desert around him.

He adjusted course and picked up speed. The pack swung automatically along with him. He could hear their low breathing, the dull thud of their boots against hard-packed dust.

‘That one,’ he said, pointing over to the mouth of a wide defile that opened out onto the flat land. It was thick with shadow, unlit by the low moon.

They would come through there. They would come incautiously, believing the land cleared of defenders. They would stride proudly out, waddling from plague-distended torsos, wheezing from corruption, living only to spread the infection that fizzed and coursed through their swollen veins. They would bring their engines of war with them, each one laden with long-forbidden biological weaponry and marked with the ruinous symbols of dark gods.

Gunnlaugur kept running. His breathing picked up, not from fatigue but from expectation.

Skulbrotsjór felt light across his back; it would feel lighter in his hands.

Ingvar walked through the empty streets, his mood as black as the sky above him. The boom and clang of construction still echoed into the night as more guns were hoisted into position and more streets were cleared of clutter for supply-lines. Few mortals left their hab-units after dark; those that did so wore the tabards of the Shakeh Guard or the battle-plate of the Wounded Heart.

Ingvar ignored them. He went quickly, descending from the Ighala Gate and down into the lower city. The stars were vivid, masked only by drifting smoke from the pyres. He could still hear noises of combat from all over the city, distant and unremitting. The Guards’ las-weapons were silent, but the sporadic reports of the bolters and flamers used by the Sisters broke the tense blanket of fear like hammer-blows.

Hjec Aleja was gripped by foreboding. The smell of death was everywhere. Civilians, Guardsmen and Ecclesiarchy officials all suspected one another, hurrying to report every observed flesh-sore, overheard cough or suspected rash. It made for a wild, drum-tight air of interlocking suspicion.

Ingvar cared for none of that. The canoness could worry about the city; he had other concerns.

The cathedral reared above him into the night. The lights around it had been doused, making it ghoulishly forbidding. The courtyard where pilgrims had queued for blessing was empty, the stone flags carved up by the tracks of crawlers. Heavy bolters had been mounted up on the spires, jutting out from the stonework like huge snout-nosed gargoyles. Sandbag walls had been heaped around the doorways, all of which were braced with bands of steel and ringed with hastily thrown-up defensive barricades. Shakeh Guardsmen manned all those entrances, huddling around tripod-mounted lascannons and squat-throated mortars.

They shrank back as Ingvar approached the main gates, not daring to challenge him. They could see the grim look in his eyes as he emerged from the cloying darkness.

He pushed the doors open and walked into the echoing nave. It was deserted. His footfalls echoed down the long space. He could smell mouldering incense, left unburned in caskets or strewn across the stone. Ahead of him, hung in darkness, was the statue of the Emperor.

Ingvar’s eyes lighted on it for a second. The representation was highly stylised. The Allfather’s face was hidden behind a golden mask carved in the likeness of a young man. It was handsome, almost cherubic. That might have been Imperial orthodoxy – the Emperor in the prime of vigorous youth striking down the upstart Warmaster – but Ingvar doubted it had any basis in fact.

Then again, who alive could know what had taken place in those days of fire and loss? Who was to say the Emperor had not worn a mask of gold as he prepared to face Horus the Betrayer for the first and last time?

History had faded into myth, just like the sagas of Fenris told over and over in the firelit halls of the Aett. No one outside the inviolate sanctums of Holy Terra had set eyes on the Emperor for nearly ten thousand years. Perhaps even the fabled Custodians did not see him as he truly was. Perhaps they only saw a shell of what he had been, or a screen of illusion projected by his indomitable will, or rushing visions of glory and redemption streaming from his immortal throne.

In the Cathedral of St Alexia on the shrineworld of Ras Shakeh, though, he would always be just as he was in a million other gloomy temples of the Ecclesiarchy: young, vital, indestructible.

Human.

Ingvar looked away and headed to the stairway leading up to Bajola’s chambers. He could already smell her presence; she had been on the stairs recently. As he neared her rooms, he heard the clamp and drill of armour being put in place.

He pushed the door open and swept inside. Bajola whirled round to face him, shock written across her face. Her attendants, three young women of the Sisterhood in black robes, reached for their weapons.

‘Leave us,’ growled Ingvar, staring at Bajola.

He hadn’t drawn his blade. His hands were empty. Bajola’s attendants trained las-pistols at him; one of them aimed at his head, the other two at his hearts.

Surprise ebbed quickly from Bajola’s face. She clipped the last buckle of a replacement cuirass into place, then placed a calming hand on the nearest of her attendants.

‘You may go,’ she said. Slowly, they lowered their weapons.

Ingvar waited for them to leave. His eyes never left Bajola as they filed past him and into the stairwell beyond.

‘If you wished to resume our conversation, you could have picked a better time,’ said Bajola, reaching for her helm and checking the connector bolts.

‘What do you know of Hjortur Bloodfang?’ asked Ingvar.

This time there was no recognition in Bajola’s features, no brief flicker of guilt. Instead, she shot him a weary look.

‘Not now, Ingvar,’ she said.

‘You recognised the name. It meant something to you. Why was that?’

Bajola shook her head irritably. She reached up and fixed the helm over her head, twisting it in place with a hiss of seals.

‘Not now.’

In her armour, she cut a very different profile to the last time he’d seen her. The battle-plate bulked her out, making her both taller and broader. The plates of ebony ceramite were lined with silver and picked out with blood-red detailing. The power generator at her back let out a grinding hum of electronics, just as his did. She carried a boltgun, just as he did.

Ingvar blocked her passage.

‘Did you serve with him?’

Bajola exhaled in exasperation. ‘I need to leave,’ she hissed. ‘Get out of the way.’

‘You were shocked. I saw fear in your eyes. You’re not the only one trained to recognise deception.’

Bajola blurted out a cynical laugh. ‘Oh really? Who taught you? Some ranting shaman?’

Ingvar didn’t move an inch.

‘The same people who taught you. Don’t test my patience, Sister. It has been a trying night.’

Bajola’s finger strayed to her bolter’s trigger. Ingvar found himself wondering just how fast she was.

‘You are–’ she started, but never finished.

The floor rocked suddenly, and cracks sped across the stonework. A muffled boom broke out from far below, followed by another.

‘Throne, Space Wolf, get out of the way!’ she shouted, looking ready to open fire on him where he stood.

He hesitated for a second longer, but then more explosions went off, all from far below, shivering the walls.

‘We’ll take this up later,’ he said, finally standing aside.

‘Fine,’ she said, pushing past him and heading into the stairwell. ‘For now, make yourself useful.’

Ingvar followed her.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked, breaking into a jog to keep up with her as she raced down the spiral of stone.

She didn’t turn, just kept her eyes fixed ahead. When she replied, her voice was cold.

‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘But whatever it is, it’s in the crypt, and it’s started.’

Baldr crouched down low amid the rocks, his head hammering, his palms sweaty, his breath shallow.

The short-lived respite had ended and the pain had returned. Sealed in his armour, he was able to conceal it from his brothers, but the sensations were getting worse; it felt like something was stretching his muscles and pulling them from the bones. At times he had to bite down not to cry out.

He clutched his bolter two-handed, willing something – anything – to happen. He needed to move, to burst into action again, to force his aching limbs to stretch. Bodily exertion helped. Combat was even better. It allowed him to direct the pain away from him, to focus it onto the enemy and turn it into something useful.

He didn’t know why the pain ebbed and flowed, but he could guess, and those guesses made him uneasy. In the warp he had been close to the raw stuff of the ether. In the city it had been strongest while in the presence of the ether-blighted; only when their unholy contagion had been staunched did the agony abate a little.

Now, as the enemy crawled towards them once more, searing needles of fire in his temples were blazing again. The touch of the ether would be heavy on them too. Baldr remembered what Gunnlaugur had said.

Something interesting travels in that column.

Not for the first time he thought of the soul-ward he had given to Ingvar. He’d been fighting with it for so long that he’d still not got used to its absence. The pain had got worse since he’d given it up.

He didn’t regret handing it over; it had been the right thing to do.

Still, the pain had got worse.

He clutched his bolter more tightly, pressing the outline of his gauntlets into his weapon’s grip. He could feel his flesh push up against the inside of the ceramite. His armour’s inner membranes felt hot, even in the coolness of the desert night. His tongue was swollen in his mouth, and his throat was raw.

‘Here they come,’ warned Hafloí over the comm.

Baldr stiffened, peering into the darkness. His hearts were already drumming from the pain. Their rate picked up further, fuelled by hyperadrenaline seeping into his system.

His body knew combat was close; as ever, it worked to make him ready.

Like the others, Baldr was perched up one side of the ravine wall, half covered with rock and rubble. Gunnlaugur and Váltyr were on the far slope, lodged amid piles of chest-sized boulders about ten metres up from the gorge floor. Olgeir was crouched on the same side as Baldr, further back and higher up, the better to get an angle for sigrún’s deadly delivery. Hafloí was at the forefront, his young eyes employed to get advance warning of the approaching column.

All of them were virtually invisible. They had dug in deep, and their matt armour blended with the stone of the ravine sides. Even though Baldr knew where his brothers had concealed themselves he could barely make out their outlines against the stone. Only his helm-display showed their location: glimmering red runes overlaid on the fractured, tumbling terrain.

‘Hold position,’ growled Gunnlaugur. His comm-filtered voice was thick with anticipation. He wanted to move. When he did so, it would be like a dam bursting.

Baldr gritted his teeth. Sweat ran down his cheeks.

Then they came into view.

A few hundred yards to the south of the pack’s position the ravine took a sharp turn to the west. They emerged from around that corner, creeping across the level valley floor like a slowly encroaching swarm of bilge-vermin.

Baldr narrowed his eyes, letting his helm’s lenses zoom in and pick out the detail.

The troops in the front ranks were lightly armed. They were mortal, with poorly-fitted carapace armour pieces bolted over civilian uniforms. Some went helmless, exposing bald, grey-skinned scalps to the atmosphere. Others wore heavy iron gas masks. Pale green illuminations swam behind their visors, glowing in the dark like bobbing corpse-lights. They came in loose bands, walking unguardedly and swinging their weapons. The squads were small – twenty, thirty troops.

More detachments followed. Soon hundreds of them had entered the ravine, some limping, some misshapen, all of them carrying hulking carbines or strange canister-fed gas-guns. They filled the valley floor from side to side, kicking up clouds of dust as they tramped onwards.

Baldr winced as the stench of them assailed his nostrils. His eyes watered, and he felt his gorge rise uncomfortably.

Let me slay them. By Russ, let me slay them all.

More troops followed the vanguard. Some of those were clad in heavier armour. Banners swung above the host, rocking to the rhythm of the march, each one clanking with necklaces of skulls. Fell symbols had been bleached into the tattered fabric. Baldr made out three leering, bloated death’s heads nailed to an iron frame; three circles, riddled with worms and shedding maggots; the eight-pointed star drawn in dark brown blood.

Those symbols made his head worse, and he looked away.

‘Hold position,’ repeated Gunnlaugur.

The first of the gas mask-wearing troops began to draw level with Hafloí’s position. They marched onwards without pause, not one of them looking up. Baldr started to make out the hurr hurr of their massed phlegmy breathing. Those whose faces were exposed displayed nothing but a blank, semi-blinded torpor. It looked like they were sleepwalking into battle. Insects buzzed around their shoulders. The stink of old vomit rolled around them in a cloud of drifting spores.

Then, back at the turn in the ravine, the first of the chem-tankers crawled into view. Another emerged, following in convoy, then another. Their huge tracked chassis were lit up by marker lights that slowly blinked in the darkness. They churned along at walking pace, their enormous engines throwing up clouds of red-tinged soot from rusting smokestacks. The cylindrical tanks they carried were crusted with corrosion and streaky with leaking lubricant.

Slowly, grindingly slowly, the tankers crawled onwards. More followed, each as bulky and cumbersome as the first. They were vast, towering over the hordes of infantry around them and swaying laboriously atop immense tracks. Steam gushed from bronze valves jutting along their flanks. Tangled masses of piping ran all over every rusting surface, twisting and clogging like a jumble of varicose veins splayed across muscle. They belched fumes and retched smoke, wallowing and grinding as they hauled themselves towards the front line. Their spines were serrated with the bronze-spiked maws of cannons and flail-launchers.

As they drew closer, the earth began to tremble underfoot. Six tankers in total ground their way down the ravine, each one surrounded by hundreds of mutant troops. Baldr saw hideous growths on some of the marching guards – obscene flopping bellies bursting open with disease, lashing tentacles spilling out of the cracks between armour plates, hooked hands dripping with trembling lines of fluid.

Baldr heard Gunnlaugur’s heavy breathing over the comm.

‘When the lead tanker draws level, we break,’ he ordered. ‘Váltyr and I’ll take the first, Hafloí and Baldr the second. Olgeir in support. Then we work down the line, one by one. Understood?’

The confirmations came in order. Baldr barely whispered his response, fearful his tight-clenched jaw would give him away. It felt like his blood was boiling in his arteries.

The first chem-tanker inched its way towards the invisible line Gunnlaugur had drawn across the gorge. Baldr watched it come, willing it to move faster, feeling his innards churn and his temples throb while his body remained static. The glowing lights of its drive-unit swam closer, surging up through the clouds of smoke and spoor, juddering and leaking, trailing acrid tangs of chemical poison. Every riveted panel of it, every piece of armour-plate or looped tubing was raddled with decay and degradation. It was a wonder the thing moved at all. Lurid flickers strobed along its straining bulk, exposing stringy lattices of mucus hanging from each joint and piston-housing.

Finally the leader passed Hafloí’s vantage. Baldr’s breathing got faster. He heard the faint clunk of Olgeir bringing his beloved sigrún into position. He detected movements on the far side of the ravine as both Váltyr and Gunnlaugur adjusted stance, ready for the pounce.

He felt sick. In the final few seconds that remained, he scanned the host marching in the valley below, scouring it for the source of his sickness.

Something interesting travels in that column.

He saw nothing but rank after rank of shuffling plague-bearers, their sore-puckered mouths hanging open, their feet dragging in the dust, their empty eyes fixed ahead. Some of them wore the remnants of Shakeh Guard uniforms.

Then Baldr heard the comm-link crackle open. When he heard the order, the relief was overwhelming.

‘The Hand of Russ be with you, brothers,’ said Gunnlaugur, his savage voice alive again. ‘Slay freely.’

Ingvar and Bajola descended quickly, bypassing the cathedral’s nave and heading deep into the underground levels below. Bajola led, travelling swiftly and surely through the switchbacks and twists. Her lighter armour was an advantage in the cramped tunnels of stone, and more than once she nearly left Ingvar behind.

The chambers and passageways under the marble floor formed a labyrinth of dank, claustrophobic spaces, thick with old dust and mouldering with the stale air of centuries. Ingvar caught fleeting glimpses of age-withered statues set in arched recesses. He saw leathery purity banners hanging over granite altars, barely moving even as he brushed past them.

‘How in Hel did they get down here?’ he asked, working hard to keep up.

A fresh storm of bolter-fire snapped out ahead of them, fractured and overlapped by the echoing chambers. They were close.

‘Throne only knows,’ said Bajola, her voice tight.

She swerved around a many-columned pillar crumbling from age. A dull red glare of firelight swept over her, turning her black armour the colour of old blood.

Ingvar rounded the pillar after her, drawing dausvjer.

Ahead of them lay carnage. An arched chamber stretched away from where they stood, its vaulted roof lost under a pall of smoke and underpinned by lined ranks of granite pillars. Flames roared furiously from its far end, licking up along blackened walls and rippling across the floor like spilled liquid. Huge, squat objects stood between the pillars, as square and solid as devotional altars. They were all on fire, sparking and raging like igniting melta-bombs. Portions of the roof had fallen in further back, and metal struts dangled precariously amid the roaring blaze. Gouts of thick smog curled up against the arches, raining flakes of soot.

Two Battle Sisters had arrived before them. They were retreating in the face of the inferno.

‘Where are they?’ roared Bajola, grabbing one of them by the shoulder and hauling her round to face her. Her voice was furious.

The Sister nodded towards the fires.

‘Dead already, Palatine,’ she reported grimly, nodding to a scattering of blackened bodies lying on the stone near the edge of the fire.

Bajola edged over to one of the corpses, keeping her bolter raised, raising one hand against the heat. She kicked it over with her boot. A flabby, slack-skinned mutant rolled onto its back, its sightless eyes staring up at the ceiling. One whole side of its body was burned into scarring from the flames. Its eyes were gone, leaving empty orbits. Even in death, its blubbery face retained a brutish expression of fervour.

Ingvar drew alongside Bajola.

‘How did they get in?’ he asked again. He could feel the tremendous press of the flames even inside his armour.

Bajola shook her head. ‘Did you not hear me the first time?’ she said. She squatted down beside the plague-bearer’s corpse and looked more closely into its face. ‘I have no idea.’

More Battle Sisters arrived. Orders for dousing agents were shouted back up the line. The stone roof above them began to crack and blister.

‘We cannot remain here,’ said Ingvar, watching the growing wall of flame lick up across the vaulting.

‘Too late,’ breathed Bajola, no longer listening. Her voice was distant, broken. ‘All destroyed.’

Ingvar stared into the heart of the inferno, letting his helm-lenses adjust to the light and heat. More bodies lay amid the flames, crackling and bursting. Some were little more than slivers of flesh, blown apart by the bombs they’d been carrying. Others, more intact, lay amid the altars like slaughtered cattle. Sparks flew from the boxes as they burned, interspersed with flickering arcs of electrical lightning. The iron sheaths that had encased them were melting, buckling and distorting.

‘What is this place?’ Ingvar asked.

Bajola clambered to her feet, shrugging off his outstretched hand irritably. Her helm-masked face turned to his. Even though her expression was shielded by the black ceramite, he could sense her frustration.

‘If you had not delayed me…’ she started, then trailed off.

More explosions sounded at the far end of the chamber, fuelling the firestorm. Fragments of granite fell from the ceiling nearby, shattering as they slammed into the ground.

Bajola gazed one more time into the inferno.

‘Too late,’ she said, sounding defeated. ‘Damn you, Space Wolf.’

‘What is this place?’ Ingvar pressed.

‘What does it matter now?’ she said, her voice a hoarse whisper.

She turned away from him and started to walk.

‘All destroyed,’ she said. Ingvar watched her go. ‘All destroyed.’