Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Twenty-One



Ingvar tore through the night, veering between the ruins at full tilt. Since passing under the Ighala Gate and breaking into the lower city he’d only had one destination in mind. It reared above the houses as it always had done, vast and forbidding, striking up into the roiling clouds like a three-pronged claw.

The streets belonged to the enemy now. The serried tides of the damned crawled up through the burning remnants of what had once been Hjec Aleja’s main urban zone. The main body of the enemy host marched relentlessly towards the Ighala Gate, driving in huge columns through the devastation. Fringe detachments peeled off from the main assault, loping through the wavering firelight and looking for defenders still breathing under the rubble.

Ingvar skirted around all of that, hugging the shadows and keeping to the lesser paths, breaking into combat only when he had to. When it came, his fights were quick and brutal – a dozen precision strikes from the spitting edge of dausvjer leaving the burst corpses of the damned lying face-up in the gutter.

Only as he neared the cathedral did the volume of enemy troops increase again. They had swarmed across the supplicants’ courtyards and broken through the main doorway. Most of them were glass-eyed, shabby plague-bearers, still clad in the rags of their old Shakeh uniforms, but some, the ones who had landed from the plague-ships, were more heavily mutated, their outlines now only faintly human.

They didn’t see him coming, occupied as they were with trying to push inside the cathedral to join the slaughter.

Given space in which to work, Ingvar picked up speed, leaping over the smoking remains of a gun emplacement and burning through into the courtyard beyond.

‘Fenrys!’ he roared, and his hoarse voice rang out into the night.

Taken by surprise, the enemy troops scattered before him. Only the most corrupted, those whose minds had been turned into slurry by the long, numbing years under the sway of dark gods, had the will to turn and fight.

It did them no good. Ingvar ripped through them, unleashing the full flood of his fury for the first time since boarding the plague-ship. He whirled around, punching a broad furrow into the midst of the crowds, breaking ribcages, cutting through paunches and snapping scrawny necks. Dausvjer’s energy field blazed, throwing electric-blue sparks dancing across the morass of slack-skinned, pox-gnawed bodies.

He hewed a bloody path towards the gates, his progress barely slowed by the knots of fighters around him. More of them ran, scampering back into the shadows to huddle out of sight of his wrath; those that remained died quickly. As he passed under the shadow of the cathedral’s ornate frontage, Ingvar kicked the last of them aside and crashed headlong through what remained of the doors.

The scene inside the nave was one of rampant desecration. Sacred icons had been ripped down and trampled over. Graven images of primarchs and cardinals had been cast to the floor, shattering against the marble. Smears of vomit and excreta were strewn over the walls, belched up by obscene, obese mutants with tiny piggish eyes and orbicular bellies. Shakeh’s regimental standards had all been shredded and fires had been started all along the aisles, kindled on the flesh and fabric of the slain and catching on the timber of candle-racks and portrait frames.

Mutants ran amok, careening over upturned fonts and altars, shrieking and spitting and laughing in high, gurgling voices. Insects swarmed noisily over the growing pits of filth, scuttling freely across the stone, spilling from the eye-sockets of corpses and bursting from their stomachs.

Only at the high altar was there still a flicker of resistance. The banner of the Wounded Heart had been nailed to the pillar behind the dais, just under the baroque sculpture of the Emperor defeating Horus. It was riddled with bullet-holes and charred around the edges, but the black and red sigil could still be made out. Heaps of bodies, the majority of them mutated or swollen with disease, piled up high on every side, a testament to the tenacity of the defenders’ last stand.

‘For the Allfather!’ Ingvar bellowed. His voice surged up into the vaults, echoing in the dark spaces and resounding down the long aisles.

The mutants turned from their slaughter. When they saw him coming – crackling with the tight burn of his energy weapon, his lenses blazing red like fresh-cut heartsblood, his massive armour plates smeared with the liquid remains of their fallen comrades – they broke into a feral mass of shrieking. They surged towards him in a tumbling, crashing wave, ignited into sudden terror, hatred and bloodlust.

Ingvar thundered into them, his blade whipping around him in wide sweeps. His body arched and swayed as he moved, thrown into a whirl of power and poise. Dausvjer ceased to be a weapon and became a part of him, an extension of the killing potential he’d unleashed. It rose and fell, danced and flickered, tearing up rotten flesh and carving through atrophied bones. He crunched, stabbed, crushed and shattered, throwing the tattered remains of the slain away before piling into the wavering throngs that remained.

The gangs of mutants and cultists held firm while their numbers remained, but as he sliced through their ranks their green eyes began to waver. Fear shuddered through them like a wave, and the weakest began to peel away and slink back down the long nave.

‘Flee while you can!’ cried Ingvar, cutting more down with every two-handed swipe of his rune-sword. ‘Death has come among you!’

The rump of the horde broke then, finally giving up on the prize of the altar and scampering away from the unleashed kill-machine in their midst. Ingvar pursued the greatest of them, a needle-toothed monster with oyster-grey skin and flapping, barbed hands, plunging dausvjer into its neck and ripping it out in a grisly flourish. He spun round, primed for more slaying, only to see the rest racing away from him.

He switched weapons, pulling his bolter from its holster and firing one-handed. Shells sprayed across the nave, exploding and splintering against pillars and thudding wetly into the backs of the retreating horrors. Dozens fell under that ear-splitting barrage, adding to the heaps of mouldering bodies already staining the floor.

The barrage only stopped when the last of them had fallen. Ingvar released the trigger and the cathedral slowly fell silent. The results of his epic butchery stretched away from him – rank upon rank of twitching limbs, carpeting the marble in a melange of sagging, clotting meat.

By then he was close to the altar. He strode slowly towards it, scanning the corpses at his feet for any yet living. He saw the bloodied uniforms of Shakeh Guardsmen mingled among the sore-raddled limbs of the damned, locked together in death as they had been in combat. It looked like they had held their positions until their ammunition had run out, resorting at the last to their knives, their lasgun-butts, their fists.

The bodies of five Battle Sisters were slumped amongst the slain, each one lying a little further up the steps of the dais. They had fallen back as far as they could, their empty flamers and bolters discarded on the way. Each of them was surrounded by a knot of corpses. They had killed dozens upon dozens; an honourable tally, one that reflected credit to their order.

Ingvar waded grimly onwards, seeking the one he knew would be there, whose fate it had been to defend her domain to the last. When he saw her at last, half buried under the grey hands of a fly-masked mutant, he thought she was dead. Her helm was gone and her dark skin was a mess of lacerations.

Ingvar crouched down, lifting the weight of her dead assailant from her and pushing it away. It was then that she drew in a faint breath. Her eyes flickered open, bleary at first but then clarifying.

Bajola looked up at him. She smiled.

‘Your fate,’ she croaked. ‘To be here.’

Ingvar nodded, clearing more space around them, assessing the damage. Her breastplate had been punctured in three places. A jagged shard of iron protruded from a gash under her ribcage. Blood still oozed from the wound, pooling on the stone in thick dark slops. She didn’t have long.

‘As it was yours,’ he replied, but his voice was bleak.

Hafloí descended into the bowels of the Halicon, his limbs throbbing. The pain still radiating across his body was an embarrassment, a constant reminder of the dark power that had shut him down so contemptuously. Even after his return to combat he knew he was not yet himself again. The weight of the witch’s magick still plagued him, needling away at him like the memory of failure.

As he passed through the long trains of tunnels and twisting corridors, the ceiling-mounted lumens flickering as the big wall guns boomed, he was struck by the almost complete emptiness inside the citadel. The few remaining civilians too old or young to fight huddled inside bunkers dotted around the upper city. Everyone else manned the inner walls or the snaking battlements of the citadel. He’d walked past teenagers tottering under the weight of bolt-round cases, old women working in gangs to carry the bodies of the wounded to the field hospitals set up in chapels.

Once Hafloí might have felt contempt for that effort, but no longer. The mortals were making as much of a fight of it as they could. He’d seen the respect that Olgeir had for them and that had rubbed off on him a little. Perhaps he was growing up at last.

He kept moving, removing his helm as he went. Only then did he notice the damage done to his comms array. It looked burned out, eaten away by some stray gobbet of acid.

Hafloí smiled. Having some time to himself would be no hardship. Given what he intended to do, he might have been tempted to shut down the incoming feed in any case.

He looked down the long passage leading towards the apothecarion where he knew Baldr and Ingvar waited for him. The lumens along there were very dim, as if some localised power drain had taken the area grid down. He listened carefully.

No sounds at all; just the dim, ever-present roar of the battle taking place outside the walls.

He hesitated for a moment, doubting himself right at the last.

It would be easier to do what he’d been ordered to do. He certainly owed it to Baldr, not least for saving his life in the ravines, and Gunnlaugur’s orders had been clear enough. The Gyrfalkon’s blade was second only to Váltyr’s in deadliness – it was needed on the walls.

So he almost did it. Hafloí nearly went on down to the medicae bays to take up his place watching over the stricken Fjolnir. Only at the last moment did he exhale his defiance, shake his head and ruffle his slicked-down hair, restoring its rust-orange spikiness.

He had never been good at following orders. The day would come when that rebelliousness was curbed, but it had not arrived yet. Battle called, and he intended to be a part of it.

Working hard to suppress a mischievous smirk, Hafloí turned on his heel and strode off in the opposite direction.

‘So close,’ he muttered to himself, disbelieving, now looking forward to more of the action that made his blood burn and his hearts pump. ‘Really. I nearly did what they told me to. Blood of Russ, what am I turning into?’

Váltyr moved with all the perfection of his long training. His body flowed like water, propelled further by his armour, darting and wheeling with a velocity that belied his ceramite-heavy bulk. Holdbítr snaked around him, flashing in the firelight, the blade blurring with speed.

His opponent was not fast. Thorslax moved like his arms were weighed down by lead chains. His body swung around cumbersomely, sloughed in the bloody mud that sucked at his hooves. His twin cleavers were hurled about, seemingly at random, with careless, ill-aimed strokes. The stinking cloud of spores and insects spiralled around him, drifting in the wake of the blades.

For all that, Váltyr’s rune-wound blade made little impact on the monster’s hide. Thorslax barely tried to evade the strokes. He angled his huge body into the path of them, gurgling with delight whenever Váltyr managed to slant a cut in.

‘Well done,’ he would chortle. ‘Very quick. Very nice.’

Váltyr kept his head. He worked methodically, avoiding the trajectories of the cleavers, staying close to his enemy and seeking the vulnerable spot. Despite unbroken hours of combat he felt alert and poised.

His foe’s almost cheerful boredom was something he had encountered before. The Death Guard had learned to revel in their degradation. If some small part of them retained a sense of horror at what physical depths their primarch’s treachery had forced on them, then it was deeply buried under layers of superficial contentment. They had ceased to suffer under the onslaught of the diseases that ravaged and wasted their sinews; they had become those diseases.

That no longer appalled him. It didn’t enrage him. Váltyr was not a hot-blood like his brothers; he sought a way to use it, to lever the know-ledge against the creature he faced. There would be a weakness; there was always a weakness.

Thorslax took a heavy stride forwards, his whole body shuddering as the hoof landed. His swollen arms flailed as he hurled the bloody cleaver in at Váltyr’s shoulder. Váltyr ducked away, leaning out of danger before plunging in again, aiming his blade at Thorslax’s gut-spilling stomach. The point punched deep, sliding between nests of polyps, doing no damage that he could see.

Váltyr wrenched it clear just as the pus-dripping cleaver hammered down. He spun out of the encounter, feeling the metal’s edge hiss past his shoulder guards. Then he was back in tight, dancing through more heavy blows, probing for some way to do damage.

‘So can you hold me here until your brothers arrive?’ mused Thorslax, his voice a moist drawl. His single eye glanced up at the distant bridge, then back down. ‘And even then, would it help you?’

Váltyr redoubled the flurry of strikes. As fast as he worked, Thorslax’s defence responded. Though his individual movements were slow, the Blighted seemed able to anticipate what he was going to do, as if part of his soul somehow existed fractionally ahead of time.

Despite that he almost connected with a blistering sideways swipe, a blow that would have surely sliced Thorslax’s chest-cabling away, but the bloody cleaver jammed down, clashing with holdbítr in a shower of sparks.

‘Fast,’ Thorslax observed appreciatively. ‘You’re really very good. Were I younger I would toy with you for longer.’

Váltyr charged back in, hauling his blade around two-handed, hacking at the creature’s implacable defence. His blade bounced from Thorslax’s hide, barely scratching the corrupted flesh-plates. The impact rocked him, though; it pushed the creature back down the slope, forcing him to use his weapons in defence.

‘But I am not younger,’ Thorslax remarked. ‘I am so old. And you have become boring.’

Suddenly, his movements changed. His fists flew out, far faster than before. Váltyr saw the change and adjusted, bringing his blade into guard. The metal connected with a radial shudder, sending Váltyr rocking backwards. The green light bleeding from Thorslax’s eye-socket flared. He seemed to grow even larger, swelling and bursting with grotesque, bulging growths. The swarm of flies reared up over him like a wind-whipped cloak.

Váltyr didn’t flinch. He corrected his stance and brought his blade round for the parry, twisting the metal before him in a tight, glittering curve. Thorslax bore down, loosing a torrent of cleaver-strikes in quick succession. Váltyr parried the first few but the rain continued, flying in with deadening force. The impact was incredible – jarring, dense blows that cracked the ground beneath them and sent the rubble skittering.

Thorslax grunted. He sounded surprised.

‘Very good,’ he murmured, pressing the attack. ‘Really very good.’

But then one got through – a cleaver thunked into Váltyr’s breastplate, biting through the armour-plate and deep into the flesh beneath. Váltyr twisted away, ignoring the pain and keeping holdbítr moving.

The wound unbalanced him, though. His left shoulder fell, opening up a gap. Thorslax pounced, hurling the pus-drenched blade in hard. It connected with Váltyr’s neck, cutting deep and severing the shielding under his helm.

Váltyr’s vision went black. He pressed forwards, feeling his hands go numb but still seeking the elusive way through. Blood ran down his breastplate, cascading across the runes graven across his chest and sinking into the channels.

Thorslax had stopped talking by then. He was fighting hard, wheezing through his rusty vox-grille, concentrating furiously. His cleavers, now both dripping with Váltyr’s own blood, flew up and down, hacking and chopping. Both fighters landed blows, and for the first time Váltyr’s strokes seemed to hurt. Each of them piled on the pain, locked together in a brutal close-range dance of hew and counter-hew.

‘Enough!’ Thorslax cried, raising both fists up and slamming them down on Váltyr’s reeling defence.

Váltyr got his sword up just in time, bracing the blade against the impact, but his strength was gone. Holdbítr broke asunder with a hard clap like thunder, its rune-strength broken. Thorslax’s cleavers plunged down, burying themselves deep into Váltyr’s chest and puncturing both hearts. The monster then ripped them out, dragging trails of blood and flesh with them.

Váltyr stayed on his feet for a few moments more, his chest torn open, his arms limp. His vision was gone. The pain had left him, replaced by a cold nimbus that raced up his limbs towards his brain.

Thorslax withdrew without saying another word, already turning to face new enemies. Dimly, as if from a long way off, Váltyr could hear the battle-cries of Gunnlaugur closing in, as familiar to him as his own voice. He’d heard that cry across the war-torn continents of a hundred worlds. He could hear Olgeir’s cries as well, and Jorundur’s. The pack had arrived.

He collapsed to his knees, watching his lifeblood drain from him. His shattered sword, the weapon he had carried for over a century and whose soul he had come to know better than any living man’s, lay before him in the gravel.

None shall wield it but me, he thought with a final, grim satisfaction, seeing how irreparably the sword had been destroyed.

They had died together. That, at least, was fitting.

Then, his consciousness draining away into darkness, Váltyr toppled forwards, crashing atop the shards of his beloved holdbítr, and moved no more.

Ingvar held Bajola’s broken body carefully. She felt impossibly fragile. He could feel her heart beating, shallow and fluttering like that of a trapped bird.

Her skin was grey. The ebony richness of it had faded and it looked matt and grainy in the gloom.

‘They will come back soon,’ she warned.

‘When they do, I will kill them.’

Bajola nodded wearily. ‘That is what you excel at.’

‘Of course. Someone has to.’

Bajola’s eyes momentarily lost focus and her head lolled. She recovered, but the spirit was draining out of her quickly.

‘You said you’d tell me what your name meant,’ she said.

‘Now?’

Bajola nodded.

‘Gunnlaugur gave it to me,’ Ingvar said, speaking softly, feeling like he was wasting precious time. ‘He called me that on the eve of my departure from the home world. He decreed it would be my pack name, since I had no other.’

Ingvar remembered the way Gunnlaugur had been then: wounded by his decision to leave even though he’d striven to hide it. A strange look had lit up Gunnlaugur’s eyes in those last days. Unhappiness, certainly, but something else. Envy, perhaps.

‘And by that he wished to bind you to him,’ said Bajola.

Ingvar paused, surprised that she knew so much of their ways.

‘The gyrfalkon always comes back,’ he said. ‘It ranges far but always returns. That was what he was telling me: that I had to return.’

Bajola looked at him with an indulgent smile on her dying face.

‘Oh, Ingvar,’ she said. ‘You did return, and it has not given you what you hoped for.’ She swallowed painfully. ‘But at least you killed with honour here. That is why you were bred. Or do you choose?’

‘Choose?’

She swallowed again. Blood collected on her lips.

‘To be what you are, or to be mortal.’

It was so long ago. He had been selected when near death, pulled from the ice by the Priest with the wolf-mask. After that, all he remembered was pain, and instruction, and fear.

‘I do not think so,’ he said.

Bajola’s lids looked heavy.

‘I chose,’ she said. ‘I could have been anything. A scholar. A diplomat. I excelled at it all. But I chose the Sisterhood. Why was that? At times I think I wasted myself. Or maybe I didn’t choose at all. Maybe it was my… What do you call it? Wyrd.’

Ingvar felt her heartbeat grow weaker as he held her. Time was running out.

‘Why did you destroy the archives?’ he asked.

By then Bajola was too weak to bother hiding the truth.

‘Secrets,’ she said.

‘Of your Order?’

‘No, not this one.’ She tried to lift her head. Ingvar lowered his. He could smell the copper of blood on her neck and face. ‘Pointless, no? We were always destined to die here. But old habits. They made us thorough. Completeness.’

Her voice got fainter with every breath. Ingvar had to crane his neck to hear the words over the distant crackle of flames.

‘Hjortur’s name was stored in there. On a list. A kill-list. A list of those to be killed.’

She was beginning to ramble.

‘Hjortur was killed by greenskins,’ said Ingvar gently.

‘No,’ said Bajola, smiling again. ‘No, he wasn’t. He was killed by the Fulcrum.’

‘The what?’

Bajola’s face creased into a mask of concentration. She was slipping away. Every breath she took added to the trickle of blood that ran down her chin.

‘Look up,’ she rasped.

Ingvar did so. The golden mask of the Emperor stared back down at him. Its face was cherubic, surrounded by a spiked halo. The expression on the mask was oddly mournful.

‘Their mark has been here all along,’ said Bajola. Wincing from the pain, she reached down to her weapon belt and withdrew a small golden bauble. She pressed it into Ingvar’s hand. When he looked down at it, he saw a miniature facsimile of the golden mask – a thumb-sized cherub-face ringed with spikes.

‘Do you really want to know this truth, Fenryka?’ she asked, teasingly using Juvykka as if born to it. ‘You will be honour-sworn to avenge him, will you not?’

Ingvar said nothing. The golden-faced cherub smiled stupidly at him, its metallic surface glinting in the firelight.

‘You think you know so much,’ she said, as mockingly as her frailty would allow. ‘You are the thinker among them, the one who has learned to doubt. You, out of all your brutal brothers, might understand that some wars never show themselves.’

Ingvar felt frustration rise within him. He needed her to speak plainly, but in her delirium she was drifting into incoherence.

‘I didn’t want you here,’ she mumbled. ‘I argued against it. The Adulators posed no problem; they were dutiful and unimaginative. But Wolves? On Ras Shakeh?’

Bajola let slip a bitter laugh, and more blood bubbled up between her lips.

‘Once that argument failed, I should have destroyed the archive. I don’t know why I didn’t.’

Ingvar caught the first faint sounds of enemy troops creeping back towards them. It would not be long before they forgot their fear and re-entered the nave.

‘I cannot save you, Sister,’ he said softly. ‘But you can make our meeting on this world worth something. Tell me what you know.’

Bajola looked up at him. Her deep brown eyes moistened. Some resolve returned.

‘More of you will die,’ she said. ‘They are coming for you now, and they will never stop. They will never tire, never forget. You will not even know you are being hunted. Killed by greenskins, lost in the warp, turned to darkness – those are the stories that will find their way back to Fenris. You make too many enemies, Space Wolf.’

An explosion went off within a few hundred metres of their position. The pillars around them shuddered. The dull thud of mutant feet falling echoed out across the nave, still distant but circling closer.

‘Tell me,’ growled Ingvar, feeling her go limp in his hands, growing impatient with the evasion.

Bajola smiled at him, her eyes losing their focus and growing dim.

‘I did tell you,’ she croaked loosely. ‘The Fulcrum, Gyrfalkon. Take the name, take the golden face. Use them.’

She tried to lift her hand and failed. Her breathing slowed to nothing.

‘Against my judgement, I liked you,’ she said, her voice little more than an expiring sigh. ‘I hope you survive.’

Then her body stiffened, going taut. Her spine arched, holding in place for a heartbeat.

She went slack, her mouth falling open.

Ingvar held her for a while longer, staring at her. The rest of the battle became an irrelevance. He felt as if he’d been in the cusp of something, prevented at the last by Bajola’s intransigence, or perhaps just frustrated by time slipping away.

He opened the palm of his gauntlet and looked at the tiny golden face resting there. It gazed back at him, smiling benignly. It looked like any pilgrim’s trinket; nothing special, nothing rare or valuable.

The Fulcrum.

It meant nothing.

Ingvar heard her last words echoing in his mind.

They are coming for you now, and they will never stop.

Who? Why?

You make too many enemies, Space Wolf.

The noise of boots rang down the nave. They had got close by then, edging forwards, hugging the walls.

Ingvar rose, lowering Bajola’s head carefully to the stone. He placed the cherub’s head safely in a clasped capsule at his belt. Only then did he turn, thumbing dausvjer’s energy field into luminosity. Ahead of him, perhaps twenty metres away, a crowd of cowled faces jostled against one another, their pale eyes shining in the dark. For once they looked scared, torn between a desire to kill and the knowledge of what they faced.

Ingvar started to walk towards them, swinging his blade lazily to free up his arm. His mind was still racing, trying to digest what Bajola had told him. The presence of plague-bearers in the cathedral was an irritation he could have done without.

‘A bad time to take me on, filth,’ he snarled, lowering his gaze and picking the first one to die. ‘A very bad time.’