Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Fifteen



Gunnlaugur broke, flinging himself from the fragile skin of debris that had sheltered him. His hammer lashed round, leaping into his grasp as if alive, and the disruptor field snarled into life.

Váltyr broke from cover beside him and burst down the slope. He went silently, swiftly, uttering no battle-cry.

Gunnlaugur’s momentum carried him down. He leapt and skidded down the long scree incline, swinging the hammer in arcs to build momentum. He felt his blood pump in his temples, swelling the veins with heat and fervour.

The need for secrecy had passed; he could unleash his true self.

‘Fenrys!’ he bellowed, and the sacred, battle-sanctified words echoed from the ravine walls and called back to him in a dozen new, overlapping voices. ‘Fenrys hjolda! Cower and scream, slaves of darkness, for the blades of the Wolves are upon you!’

He heard Olgeir answer him with a slamming volley of heavy bolter-rounds. The explosive shells lanced into the front ranks of Guardsmen, immediately causing havoc around the lead tanker. Dozens of troops went down, clutching at their exploding bodies futilely and tumbling into the dust. Some of them tried to respond, scrabbling for their weapons and looking for something to fire back at.

By then it was too late. By then the pack was among them.

Gunnlaugur crashed into a knot of milling troops, hurling half a dozen of them into the air with a single blistering sweep of skulbrotsjór. Their broken bodies thudded back to earth before they’d even had time to cry out.

‘The Blood of Russ!’ he roared, scything the hammerhead back and throwing more corpses into the night. He swung skulbrotsjór two-handed, leaning into the devastating strokes, whirling on his axis like a typhoon of destruction, carving his way deep into the mass of marching bodies.

The still of the night exploded into a rage of flashing las-light and clattering bolter-fire. Gunnlaugur saw Váltyr turning and leaping, veering past incoming lines of fire effortlessly as he sliced through the meagre defences. He left piles of twitching corpses in his wake, each of them mortally cleaved by a single stroke.

Gunnlaugur grinned. That was astonishing skill. It was arrogant. It was beautiful.

By then the rest of the pack had joined in the carnage. He could hear Hafloí’s echoing cries of rage and frenzy. He could see the Blood Claw’s favoured axe glittering in the moonlight, already flinging blood around it in long splatters. He saw Baldr break from cover and charge, his bolter thundering, screaming ancient death-curses from the Old Ice as he rampaged. His voice was the most terrible of all. It sounded almost demented.

The defenders loosed off rounds into the dark – panicky shots, poorly-aimed and badly timed. Some were already scrabbling up the ravine edges, desperate to escape the sudden, horrific attack of the grey terrors that had exploded into them.

Gunnlaugur turned on his heel, slamming skulbrotsjór hard into the midriff of a wide-eyed plague-carrier. The force of the blow ripped through the mutant, sending remnants of its bisected body tumbling backwards in a cloud of blood and spores. Gunnlaugur switched back savagely, taking the head off another one. They couldn’t get away fast enough – there was no room. The thunder hammer became heavy with strips of gore, the flesh cooking into frazzled slivers on its sparking disruptor. Gunnlaugur waded through them like a reaper of old, slaying in crushing strokes, spinning and crushing and cracking. He towered above them, his heavy power armour making him twice the bulk and heft of even the largest of them. His hammer flew freely, travelling in unstoppable arcs, moving around him in a halo of annihilation like those of the mythic Iron Gods.

Váltyr was the first to gain a foothold on a chem-tanker. He sprang up from the clutching hands of the mutants, kicking out as he rose and breaking the jaw of a reeling cleaver-carrier. He seized on a railing that ran along the swollen flanks of the toxin tank and clutched it fast, his boots searching for purchase.

By then the enemy had begun to respond. They surged towards the invaders, swarming around the beleaguered chem-tankers. Their aim got better, and Gunnlaugur felt the hard jab of las-beams glancing from his breastplate.

He roared with laughter, shrugging them off like rain.

‘That’s better!’ he thundered, crashing through the press of bodies around him, flattening any who came within the ambit of the thunder hammer. Another half-dozen hapless mutants were crushed, smashed or ripped apart, their bloated entrails sent spinning into the night. ‘Try harder! Come on, try harder!’

They did. They screamed at him, hurled their corroded blades at his face, clutched at his ankles as he trod them into the blood-clotted dust, grabbed at his arms as the hammer-blows blurred past, loosed thick barrages of las-fire to try to bring him down.

The task was hopeless. Olgeir’s withering torrent of heavy ordnance blew apart any nascent defensive positions. Hafloí’s assault cut deep into their reeling ranks, preventing any rally further back. Váltyr’s terrifying efficiency was just unanswerable.

But the one that really scared them was Baldr. Gunnlaugur, busy with his own slaughter, only caught snatches of what was going on, but it sounded like Baldr had gone completely berserk. He heard him shrieking like a banshee of legend, and the sound of it chilled his blood. He wondered what it was doing to the enemy.

‘What in Hel’s wrong with Fjolnir?’ voxed Váltyr breathlessly, working his way along the tanker’s toxin-cylinder, swatting down the defenders that crawled all over it and beginning to climb higher.

‘He’s certainly having fun,’ replied Gunnlaugur, kicking through the stomach of an obese waddler and vaulting over the corpse. The chem-tanker’s tractor unit loomed through the dust-flurried murk, its cab-lights glowing like a cluster of insectoid eyes. ‘Concentrate: let’s bring this down.’

He lashed out with the hammer, clearing a two-metre circle around him. Three mutants were sent spinning under the tracks of the tanker. They had plenty of time to scream as the treads slowly ground them to a pulp.

Gunnlaugur leaped, pulling clear of the crowds and landed on a coolant duct on the tanker’s muzzle. It was riddled with oxidisation, and whole chunks of it came free in his grip as he climbed up to the cab. Gunnlaugur whipped his hammer round and mag-locked it to his back, hauling himself up the front of the titanic vehicle.

Some of the enemy tried to follow him up, but most were picked off by Olgeir’s ever-present curtain of supporting fire.

‘My thanks, Heavy-hand,’ voxed Gunnlaugur as he reached the cloudy armourglass of the cab windows. He was enjoying himself.

‘Bring them pain,’ replied the great one cheerfully.

Gunnlaugur reached up with his fist and smashed the closest pane. A bloom of thick, green smoke tumbled out, streaming down the front of the tractor unit like spilled sick.

He grabbed the frame and hauled himself up. Inside, the chem-tanker’s crew were hard-wired into fleshy command thrones. Eight of them sat in a cramped space stuffed with throbbing, pulsing mountains of semi-tissue and pseudo-machinery. Tentacles ran from rheumy glands, interfacing with thickets of dirty metal cables. Fluids gurgled in translucent sacs, filtered through pinned-open bodies and sent churning down long tubes into the innards of the vast machine.

The crew turned to face him as he clawed his way inside, letting fly with screaming wails of impotent hatred.

‘Right, then,’ he snarled as he pushed himself through the shattered windscreens and thudded to the cab’s floor. He drew the thunder hammer. ‘Who’s first?’

They screamed at him in unison. With a shrug he started to swing, crushing what remained of their mortal skulls and punching through their etiolated innards. They shrieked as they died, locked into position, forced to watch as Gunnlaugur worked his way down the line. As each one died the whole chem-tanker shuddered. The growl of its engines became a stuttering whine, and the clouds of smoke billowed ever higher. As he neared the end of the line Gunnlaugur felt the chem-tanker change direction, reeling on its axis and starting to crush its way aimlessly across the ravine floor.

‘Time to leave, vaerangi,’ came Váltyr’s voice over the comm.

‘Already?’ said Gunnlaugur, breaking the neck of the last shrieking crew member and pushing his way to the far side of the cab. ‘Hel, you work fast.’

He glanced back at the carnage left in his wake. Fluids, pink with blood and blotched with inky lubricants, swilled across the metal-mesh floor. Eight raw carcasses slumped amid a tangled mess of fizzing cabling and shattered ironwork. The last of the pale marsh-gas drifted loosely away, no longer fed by its belching feeder valves.

Gunnlaugur grunted with satisfaction, then smashed through the far end of the cab wall, pummelling a huge, ragged hole in the armour plates. He thrust himself through the gap, hanging clear of the cab-edge. The huge machine was still ploughing onwards, though its progress was now directionless. Dozens of milling defenders were dragged under the tracks as they tried to get out of the way. He could still hear Baldr’s frenzied screams and Hafloí’s battle-cries. The two of them had already destroyed their chem-tanker, which blazed in a mass of lurid chemical flames against the far wall of the ravine.

Gunnlaugur saw Váltyr leap from the tanker’s lurching spine, hurling himself a long way clear and landing expertly amid a swarm of glow-eyed mutants. Gunnlaugur tensed, ready to do the same.

Then the krak grenades went off.

Váltyr had clamped them all along the toxin-tank, just as Gunnlaugur had ordered him. They exploded in sequence, rippling along the bulbous sides of containers, spraying the noxious contents in all directions.

The chem-tanker bucked, shuddered and ignited, hurling Gunnlaugur clear of the cab. He crunched heavily to the ground several metres away, his shoulder guard driving deep into solid rock, his helm cracking against blood-wet rubble.

He picked himself up in time to be doused in a spray of flesh-eating acid from the broken chem-tanks. It cascaded down his armour, instantly dissolving the blood and slime from the surface and eating through the pelts that hung from his shoulders.

The mortal troops around him were not so well protected. They screamed in chorus as their flesh was scoured from the bone, a riot of shrieking, gargling sobs that only ended when the acid ate down to the vocal cords.

When the torrent finally died out the scene around the smoking tanker was horrific – bodies in all directions, skinless, eyeless, with exposed bone and shrivelled flesh. A thick soup of dissolved organic matter, tinged grey with foamy scum, lapped over the rocks of the valley floor, bubbling and babbling as it drained deep into the dry earth.

The chem-tanker itself, driverless and burning, swayed on, finally crashing into the far side of the ravine and bursting into toxin-edged flames, just like its companion further down the gorge.

Gunnlaugur shook the last of the acid from his burly frame before striding out to find Váltyr. As he walked, his boots crunched sickeningly through half-eaten bone. The silence from Olgeir’s heavy bolter told him that Heavy-hand was climbing down to join in the close combat. Four tankers remained before their night’s work was done.

Gunnlaugur was glad of that. He was enjoying himself.

‘Ahead of schedule, bla–’ he started, just as something huge went off over by Baldr’s position. It was an explosion of sorts, but it lit up the ravine edges with corpse-glimmer and sounded like a strangled scream. He tensed immediately, the hairs on his arms raising.

Then Hafloí’s voice came over the comm. It didn’t sound like it normally did – it was urgent, tight, serious.

‘Support,’ Hafloí gasped, his words clipped with pain. ‘Blood of Russ, support now.’

Gunnlaugur took up skulbrotsjór again, his mood switching instantly. Even before Hafloí had finished he was already running.

Ingvar and Bajola stood facing one another in her chambers, just as they had done on their first meeting. The night was old by then, heavy with smoke and the fatigue of a city under siege. Lights could be seen from the vantage of Bajola’s spire-windows, bleeding across the whole expanse of the lower city. They were not wholesome lights – they were pyre-glows, or searchlight beams, or the sudden flashes of las-volleys in the dark. Those lights were accompanied by similarly unwholesome sounds: crackling flesh, the thudding of running feet, screaming in the dark.

Unlike at their first meeting, Bajola did not remain standing for long. She slid into a hard wooden chair, scratching it with her armour as she slouched wearily. She let her unfixed helm fall from her hands, and it rolled across the stone floor.

‘When did you last sleep?’ asked Ingvar.

‘I don’t remember. You?’

‘Four days ago.’

Bajola snorted. ‘Explains your mood.’

Ingvar walked across to the far side of the room, near one of the narrow windows.

‘This place was meant to be a respite.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Garrison work.’

‘You want to sit?’ she asked.

‘I’m fine.’

Bajola gave him a sardonic look.

‘Always on duty, never at rest,’ she said. ‘You never get tired? You never just want to stand back, for a minute, to look away from it all and forget that you’re the Emperor’s finest and that you’re needed all the time and everywhere because, well, we’re all so much weaker than you?’

Ingvar leaned against the stone wall behind him. In truth, he wasn’t immune to fatigue. If things had been less straitened he would have welcomed the chance to recover himself, to reflect on how to handle Gunnlaugur when he returned, to prepare for the trials ahead. But those things were luxuries.

‘What was that place?’ he asked for a third time.

Bajola’s face fell. ‘The archive room. Not something you’d think much of – just a bunch of data-cores and repository banks, sealed and categorised.’ Her brown eyes went hollow. ‘The history of an obscure shrineworld, its succession documents and transaction records.’

She looked up at him.

‘It was our story here,’ she said. ‘One of the things I was charged with defending. Now all gone, and before the enemy has even arrived at the gates.’

‘Could it not have been moved to the Halicon?’

‘It would have taken a whole convoy of heavy transports, and they had all been assigned other tasks.’ She shook her head resignedly. ‘I made my decision. De Chatelaine will ask the same questions when she hears of it. It will be one more failure in her eyes. She was never convinced of the wisdom of taking me on, this will reinforce that view.’

Ingvar found himself surprised by Bajola’s deflation. When they had first met she had seemed so lively, so defiant. It was strange: in her fragile robes she had been strong; encased in power armour, she was diminished. Perhaps she might have been better off staying in the non-military cadres.

‘They’re only records,’ he said. ‘None of your troops were hurt.’

Bajola let slip an empty laugh.

‘Only records,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you keep any, on Fenris.’

‘We do.’ He tapped the side of his helm. ‘The skjalds recite the sagas. We commit them to memory. We pass them on. Every one of us knows the myths of the past.’

‘Myths.’ Bajola’s tone was scornful.

‘All of us use myths, Sister. Some are stored on data-slates, some come from the mouths of skjalds. Your way has its strengths. Its weaknesses are obvious.’

Bajola smiled wryly. ‘Nice.’

Ingvar clasped his hands before him. The blood on them had blackened from the heat of the archive chamber.

‘You know why I came,’ he said.

Bajola nodded. ‘You think I’m keeping something from you.’

‘You recognised his name.’

Bajola reached up and rubbed her scalp with her gauntlet. Her short, wiry hair was flecked with ash.

‘I did.’ Some of her old defiance glistened in her eyes.

‘How?’

Bajola laughed.

‘You think he kept it secret?’ She shot him a sidelong glance; it was almost flirtatious. ‘You are a boastful people, Space Wolf. You brag about your conquests from one end of the Imperium to the other. Do not be surprised if others hear you.’

‘It had significance,’ said Ingvar. ‘You had heard it before.’

For a second longer, Bajola held his gaze. Her dark skin, the same ebony as her armour and sweaty from exertion, glistened in the low light of the chamber.

Then she lowered her eyes.

‘I have seen many secret things,’ she said softly. ‘Never intended for my eyes, but one does not spend so much time with the powerful and not catch glimpses of their affairs.’

Ingvar listened intently.

‘It is said that Fenris makes enemies easily,’ said Bajola. ‘You do not know the tenth of it. There are inquisitors who would gladly see your world virus-bombed into poisonous slush if they could only find a way to do it. Other Chapter Masters, too. And, yes, the Ecclesiarchy harbours some with no love for your brethren. That is no secret: our forces have clashed before, they may do so again.’

Bajola’s voice was low but firm. She spoke like an agent delivering a report to her superiors, much like she must have done many times while in the Orders Famulous. Ingvar remembered how he’d been required to speak when in Halliafiore’s presence, and how long it had taken for him to knock the rough cadence of Juvykka from his speech. The results had been much the same.

‘There was a document,’ Bajola went on. ‘I only saw it once, but I was in the business of memorizing things then. It had names on it, most of which are irrelevant. Hjortur Bloodfang was among them. I remember thinking the name was absurd, but that was before I had had dealings with others of your kind.’

‘What was it for?’

‘A briefing note, prepared for the senior cardinal of my jurisdiction, one of dozens that would pass his desk every night. Such things had many purposes. It might have been in relation to diplomatic embassies – unlikely, in this case – or problems with military liaison, or some clandestine matter that I would not have been aware of.’

Her voice was steady, calm, assured.

‘That’s all?’ Bajola nodded.

‘My guess: it related to communication between Fenris and the Ecclesiarchy that was kept quiet. Such things exist, you know. Perhaps Hjortur was the conduit.’

Ingvar remembered how Hjortur had been – his frothing bravado, his thundering anger – and almost laughed out loud. Subtlety had not been his strong suit.

‘I find that unlikely.’

Bajola looked equivocal. ‘Well, you knew him,’ she said. ‘But at some point his name came to the attention of a cardinal of the Ecclesiarchy, one who wielded considerable power. I have seen stranger things in the galaxy, but not many. If you do not know why that is then I cannot help you.’

Ingvar drew in a long breath, tasting the last of the soot that still clung to his vox-grille. He turned Bajola’s words over in his mind. Silence fell across the chamber, broken only by the sporadic noises of trouble still rumbling across the city outside.

‘There is no lie in your voice,’ he said eventually. ‘But you are not telling me all you know.’

Bajola half smiled – a strange, almost melancholy gesture – and leaned back in her chair.

‘You’re wrong,’ she said. ‘But even if you weren’t, I won’t take lectures from you about that.’

Ingvar raised an eyebrow under his helm. ‘Which means?’

‘You understand me,’ said Bajola. ‘The Imperium we both serve and love is built on secrets. We use them to clothe ourselves, to wall ourselves in, and I swore vows never to disclose the secrets I was given to guard. I swore never to reveal the identity of those who conferred such privilege on me, nor those whom I was charged with protecting. Those vows were not lightly made. The secrecy that binds me is as sacred to me as your sword is to you.’

She looked at him, and her eyes sparkled knowingly.

‘You are no stranger to secrets, Ingvar,’ she said. ‘You did not tell me what took you from Fenris for so many years, though I can guess, and if I am right you could not tell me even if you wished to. No force on this planet could compel you to speak, no matter how much I might desire to share the terrible sights you keep locked in your never-forgetting mind.’

She leaned forwards in her chair. Her face lost its spectre of dry amusement and became earnest again.

‘For all that, I do not doubt that you are a servant of the Emperor and a loyal ally. You could extend the same courtesy to me.’

Ingvar didn’t respond immediately. He watched the way her body moved – the confidence of it, the heaviness of her limbs, the comfort of knowing she was in her own demesne and surrounded by her own kind.

Her chin jutted proudly. She held his gaze, looking up into his death-snarl mask fearlessly.

A rune-signal flickered into life on his retinal display. Jorundur wanted to see him about something. Ingvar dismissed it. The Old Dog would have to hunt alone for a little longer.

He reached up, released the air-seals and twisted his helm free. He mag-locked it to his belt and ran his fingers through sweat-stiff hair. The long tresses flopped over his armour’s gorget.

He pushed himself away from the wall and advanced on Bajola. The disparity in their sizes was almost comical: his bulk, augmented by thicker plate and heavy pelts, dwarfed her slender frame.

He stood over her and lowered his head towards hers.

‘I have no doubt of your loyalty,’ he said. His voice was a low murmur, one that resonated in his chest and echoed from the stone around him. ‘If I had, you would be dead where you sit.’

His eyes bored into hers. For the first time, he saw a flicker of fear in her sleek features.

‘I will fight alongside you, Sister,’ he said. ‘I will serve the cause of this world as if it were the cause of my own, and before the end of this thing you will learn truly why I bear the name I do and what it means.’

His grey eyes went flat.

‘But know this: my brothers are more than blood-kin to me. If I discover your silence has led to harm befalling them, I will come after you. Wherever you are, I will hunt you, and what the Fenryka hunt they find.’

He grimaced, his leathery flesh creasing away from his fangs.

‘You would not like me as much then.’

To her credit, Bajola retained eye-contact. She blinked once, then again, but never looked away. When she replied, her voice wavered but did not fail.

‘Then I thank the Throne I have nothing to hide,’ she said.