Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Twenty-Two



The lower city was gone, lost to the enemy, now little more than a haunt of unrestrained slaughter and madness. The last of the trenches had been breached and the hordes of mutants, cultists and pestilence-ridden foot soldiers tramped up from the depths, their cold eyes fixed on the summit. The Halicon citadel reared up above all of them, still inviolate despite the bruise-purple pall that swirled above it, its flanks lit a dull crimson by the wavering light of a thousand fires. Down from the citadel’s extravagant battlements stood the precarious ring of the inner walls, still held by the city’s defenders. The battered Ighala Gate endured at the centre of that defensive line, bursting with anti-infantry weaponry that flashed and burned into the spore-heavy night.

If the advance had been quicker the gate might already have fallen. As it was the hosts of plague-damned still moved slowly, trudging up through smouldering ruins with their stumbling, ill-directed gaits. Hundreds of them had drifted into the shadows, distracted by isolated pockets of survivors and the prospect of feasting on fresh flesh. Others had succumbed to the virulent contagion that coursed through their veins, collapsing to the ground as their stomachs burst asunder or their hearts gave out. The gifts of the Plaguefather were capricious things, as likely to curse as they were to bless.

So it was that in answering Váltyr’s call, Gunnlaugur was able to outpace the closing circle of invaders and sprint clear of the advancing battlefront. Olgeir, fresh from a hard-fought victory over the third Plague Marine down by the outer perimeter, joined him in the chase. His armour had taken heavy damage during the encounter and he’d discarded his heavy bolter.

‘Tough kill?’ asked Gunnlaugur, running heavily.

‘They always are,’ spat Olgeir, working hard to keep up. ‘Pox-ridden bastards.’

Jorundur joined up with them as they neared the cleared wasteland before the Ighala crossing.

‘So what is this?’ the Old Dog demanded, his strained voice betraying a rare tightness. ‘Did he say?’

Gunnlaugur said nothing but ran hard, his hearts thumping viciously.

One got past you, Skullhewer.

Váltyr’s voice had been almost resigned over the comm; whatever it was that had broken ranks and pushed ahead to the bridge had knocked the kill-relish out of him. That was almost certainly bad.

‘I see it!’ roared Olgeir, his voice suddenly thick with kill-urge.

The landscape of ruins gave way before them, opening out into the charred and desolate wasteland just within sight of the bridge. Directly ahead of them, out on the trawled mounds of debris, was the object of Váltyr’s summons – a vast and engorged champion in a distended mockery of Terminator plate. He must have teleported ahead of the rest of his sluggish minions, aiming to break the defence at the gates before the defenders had time to rally behind them.

An arrogant decision, one that spoke of misplaced confidence.

‘Fenrys Hjolda!’ thundered Gunnlaugur, swinging skulbrotsjór wildly around him as he tore up the slope.

Olgeir and Jorundur joined in the chorus, hurling battle-challenges out like berserks of the Old Ice. They could all see Váltyr being hammered backwards, his armour taking heavy damage from repeated cleaver impacts.

For all their speed, for all their blistering rage, they arrived too late. As Gunnlaugur sped into contact, he could only watch as Váltyr’s blade was broken and the sverdhjera’s chest was ripped open.

An explosion of grief surged up from his breast. Black fury blazed out of him, kindled in the furnace of his pumping hearts and emerging as a strangled roar of revulsion. Gunnlaugur charged towards the monster like a Rhino careering along at full tilt, lost in a maelstrom of horror and loosed ferocity.

Thorslax turned slowly to face him, his body moving with ponderous clumsiness. His single glowing eye stared down at them, spearing through the murk of the seamy night.

‘More of you,’ he murmured.

The three Wolves hit him almost in unison, crashing into combat with the force of a hurricane, limbs tearing, blades flashing. All four warriors clashed under the lightning-laced storm clouds: one enormous and reeking with millennial corruption, three as vital and vivid as sun-dazzled snow. They ripped into a spinning, crashing cacophony of fearsome blows, each strike landing with the power to crush bone, to dent armour, to pulverise flesh.

Gunnlaugur was ahead of the others by a hair’s breadth, his hammer scything imperiously. Olgeir was next, his short blade spiralling, clasped tight in both burly hands. Jorundur brought up the rear, adding his axe-head to the driving wall of steel.

Thorslax was hurled backwards in the face of that coordinated mass. His arms pumped like the pistons of a great war engine, parrying the furious rate of incoming strikes and hitting back with punching cleaver-blows of his own.

Though outnumbered and off guard, his huge bulk gave him a telling advantage. His strength, like all of his kind, was virtually infinite. He absorbed a whole barrage of blows, any one of which would have ended a lesser warrior. Skulbrotsjór crashed into his leathery armour plates, driving in the warped ceramite but not breaking it. The Wolves’ blades bit deep but did not draw blood. Thorslax was pummelled, battered, beaten back – but not wounded.

As the shock of the first assault was absorbed, Thorslax began to reassert himself. His cleavers cycled with greater intent – not just in defence, but into the attack. He towered above his assailants, and began to use his greater heft and reach. Jorundur was the first to be thrown out of the attack, his right shoulder guard gouged open.

‘Fara tíl Hel, svikari!’ bellowed Gunnlaugur, rolling onwards, hauling skulbrotsjór in monstrous arcs. The air seemed to ignite in the wake of the blazing hammerhead. His massive body was a blur of wanton movement. He swung heavily before piling in deep, every gesture loaded with lethal intent. He and Olgeir pressed on, each working seamlessly around the other.

Thorslax uttered no words. He laboured hard at the heart of the breaking storm, striving not be overcome by it. Gunnlaugur landed a searing crack on his turning spine, causing him to roar out loud. Olgeir leapt into a rare gap in his defence, chopping down deep into his thigh, finally producing a jet of oil-black blood from the wound. Jorundur regained his feet and staggered back into range, his axe held ready.

For all their skill, though, for all their strength, Váltyr’s judgement had been right: Thorslax was a foe beyond them. His body had been ruined and changed by the slow arts of the Eye, fused with his living armour and shot through with the undiluted virulence of the Plaguefather. His hearts beat with the slow, grinding rhythm of millennia and his blood coursed with the slurry of infinite mutation. No mortal weapon, no matter how skillfully wielded, could break through the aegis of foulness that swept around him, knitting together his rotten thews and animating his disease-riddled organs.

He was an avatar of the plague, suffused with all its poisons and its delights, as indomitable as mortality, as invincible as the dragging entropy that wearied all living things.

He was despair. He was fatigue. He was the essence of mortality in all its putrid, failing imperfection.

Thorslax punched out, throwing Olgeir clear, sending the huge warrior grinding into the rubble on his back. Then the cleavers whirled, beating Jorundur a second time. The Old Dog fell to his knees, clutching at his mangled shoulder.

For a little while longer Gunnlaugur and Thorslax fought on alone, hammer and cleaver battering away at one another, splintering armour and denting metal. The Wolf Guard fought with all the bull-hearted resolve of his conditioning, giving no quarter, powering on after his prey with both speed and power. When skulbrotsjór made contact, the sharp crack of the energy field discharging was like the snap of lightning forking down from the heavens; when Thorslax’s cleavers connected, the dull boom was like Arjac’s hammerhead striking the iron anvil. The two of them like gods duelling at the fire-wreathed end of the universe, outstripping all other powers in their extravagant, unrestrained wrath.

As they hacked and hewed at one another, unnoticed by any of them, the city’s ruins behind them slowly filled with green points of light. Mutants limped out of the gloom, their gas masks bulging and deflating as they drew in the airborne miasma. They hung back amid the cover of the shattered rockcrete, unwilling to break cover entirely. With every passing second, though, more of them gathered in the shadows. The vanguard of the enemy host had caught up with its standard bearer.

Olgeir scrambled to his knees, cursing. Jorundur rose more slowly, his armour covered in blood. They started to limp back into range, both moving stiffly.

Neither of them was unable to prevent the strike that floored Gunnlaugur. Thorslax lashed round with uncharacteristic speed, catching the Wolf Guard in the throat with the blunt edge of his blood-cleaver. Gunnlaugur, off balance and moving too late, was hurled clear of the bulbous mutant, sailing through the air in a bloody swathe, his limbs splayed. Thorslax lumbered after him, striding across the scorched earth like a vengeful Titan.

‘And so it ends,’ he slurred.

The pack had thrown everything it had at him, and had still come up short. Thorslax was barely wounded; all three Wolves were prone, exhausted and bleeding. The champion of Mortarion stalked across to Gunnlaugur for the kill, his throaty voice wheezing from exertion.

He raised his cleavers, holding them both high, but then the guttural noises died in his calloused throat. Ahead of them all, dim at first under the walls of the besieged upper city, something had broken across the tortured landscape, lighting up the earth beneath it with a sick smear of witchlight. A new fire burned brightly in the night, though its flames were lurid rather than vivid.

As Thorslax watched, his interest suddenly piqued, a lone figure swept down from the bridge towards them, his limbs dark against the raging backdrop of illumination.

Thorslax looked dumbstruck. Then, as the strange warrior drew closer, he relaxed, and a moisture-damp laugh finally broke from his cracked lips. The fire-cloaked newcomer slowed down, striding awkwardly across the craters and ruins, swathed in a dirty corona of whipping green flame.

‘Welcome, brother,’ said Thorslax bowing in greeting. ‘I see that our ranks are set to swell again.’

Gunnlaugur twisted round blearily, still reeling from the blow that had felled him. Olgeir and Jorundur did likewise.

Baldr stood before them, panting slurrily. Trails of saliva hung below his sore-mottled chin, trembling as his loose-jawed face stared out sightlessly into the night. Snaking lines of ether-force scurried across his marsh-grey armour. His eyes were pupil-less and blazed with a pale silver light. Swirling skeins of energy obscured his features, though the lesions clustering around his lips and eyes could still be made out. Silver flame spilled from the corners of his mouth, as if he were filled to overspilling with the blinding power of the warp. His clenched fists crackled and twisted with a growling aegis of witchlight.

‘Brother!’ cried Olgeir, his voice thick with surprise and horror. He staggered towards the flaming outline.

Baldr didn’t turn to face him. He extended a fist in Olgeir’s direction and a fork of diseased lightning, black-edged like tarnished steel, cracked into the big warrior’s chest, throwing him back to the ground again. Olgeir landed awkwardly, his back arched in pain, flickers of lightning blistering and dancing across his battle-plate.

Thorslax chuckled. ‘A corrupted Son of Russ,’ he murmured. ‘Quite an achievement.’

He walked towards Baldr, stretching out his massive hand.

‘My bro–’ he began.

He never finished the sentence.

Baldr exploded. His fists swung around and thrust out before him. Blazing arcs of black-edged lightning leapt out, latching on to Thorslax’s neck and twisting into it like an electric current. The Traitor froze, locked in place by columns of witchlight. His limbs went stiff; his cleavers dropped to the earth.

Baldr never said a word. The boiling clouds above him broke open and spears of the world’s lightning, as green-tinged as the clouds of warp-essence around his eyes, licked and flickered against his slime-crusted armour.

Thorslax tried to retreat, to pull away from the shimmering spikes that impaled him, but Baldr hauled him back, sending shards lancing into his enormous body. Dagger-edged flickers snaked under the Traitor’s battle-plate, ripping it up and exposing blubber-pale flesh beneath. Thorslax’s limbs jerked, pierced by glimmering lines of plague-green and warp-

silver, locked down amid a nimbus of blazing energies, just as Baldr had been in the ravines.

The Traitor champion tried to fight it. As flakes fell from his armour, crisping and burning amid the veil of lightning, he tried to break free. He managed a single step, crying out from the effort as his huge, swollen leg swung through the fizzing electrical storm.

Baldr hardly seemed aware of what he was doing. His blazing, monochrome silver eyes glared wildly. His fists stayed extended, feeding on the lashing columns of tainted warp-energy.

Thorslax held on for a moment longer, outstretched fingers trembling. Then, with a sick crack, his helm fell open, briefly exposing a twisted and blood-blotched face locked in a scream of unbearable agony. Pus-filled lesions burst apart, spewing their yellow contents across his blistering armour plates. His skin stripped away, melting and crisping as it was devoured. Cracks shot up his battle-plate, latticing like atrophied bone. Fragments of it burst clear, shattered into dust by the raw ether-matter that coursed across and through it.

The silver fire consumed what was left, burning through raddled skin and metastasised tissue. Organs popped open, shedding greasy gouts of bile and plasma. Thorslax’s screams died away into chokes as his throat was eaten away. His chest caved in, his limbs twisted and snapped, his eyeballs liquidised.

When the storm finally died out, all that remained at its centre were a few thick chunks of burned ceramite. Baldr finally let his hands drop, and the last pieces of Thorslax’s war-plate toppled over, half buried in a heap of smoking, rotten meat-chunks.

For a few moments, no one moved. Baldr rocked back on his heels, his arms hanging limp, his unseeing eyes staring emptily. Olgeir remained on the ground, still transfixed with pain. The crowds of plague-mutants congregating in the shadows held their positions, seemingly uncertain whether to fall at Baldr’s feet or flee from him.

Jorundur moved first, gingerly inching towards Baldr.

‘No,’ hissed Gunnlaugur, ignoring the blaze of pain under his shattered gorget as he moved. ‘Do not approach him.’

Baldr seemed not to see either of them. His breathing was heavy and snagging.

Gunnlaugur kept his distance, taking up his thunder hammer carefully, watching Baldr the whole time. Conflicting intuitions ran through him. Part of him, driven by his warrior instincts, urged him to take on the abomination, to end it before it consumed them all. He knew he should have done it when he’d had the chance.

But it was futile. If Baldr – or whatever had taken over Baldr – were capable of ripping through the Traitor champion with such ease then the idea of him taking him down was ludicrous. The raw power coursing through Baldr’s diseased limbs was a force beyond anything he’d seen before, save perhaps in a master of the elements like Njal Stormcaller.

So Gunnlaugur stayed where he was, his weapon held tightly, breathing hard, waiting to see what Baldr would do next.

He did not have to wait long. As the last remains of Thorslax smouldered down into embers, Baldr suddenly looked up. His silver-flamed eyes stared out, past Gunnlaugur, past Olgeir and Jorundur, out into the burning mass of ruins beyond.

Baldr threw his head back. He cried out once – a horrifying, shrieking skirl of inhuman pain – and kicked off again into a limping run. He swooped down the slope, arms hanging loose, reeling madly. Flickers of unholy fire streamed behind him. He looked like a deranged spectre of ice-myths, a fragment of old nightmares conjured up into the world of the living.

The mutants scattered before him, letting him plunge unmolested back into the depths of the lower city. Powerless to prevent him, Gunnlaugur watched him go. A few last scraps of silver witchlight glimmered for a while in the dark, before they too faded into nothing.

With Baldr’s departure, the scene around them returned to one of empty desolation. Olgeir managed to drag himself back to his feet, though his every movement looked shot through with pain. Jorundur had been mauled.

‘What in Hel was that?’ grunted Olgeir, his clipped voice giving away his torment.

Gunnlaugur gazed in the direction Baldr had fled. Only then did he feel how hard his hearts were beating.

‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘And answers will have to wait.’

With the departure of Baldr the enemy had started moving again. They crept out from under the eaves of empty hab-shells and up from the shadows of blast craters, edging into the open along a long, ragged line that stretched across the entire battlefront. First dozens, then hundreds, then thousands became visible, all trudging up the slope towards the Ighala Gate with the same mute determination they’d shown since the opening hours of the siege.

In the face of such numbers the Wolves fell back, crossing the strip of cleared wasteland and backing up towards the bridge. For the first time since the battle had started, Gunnlaugur felt weariness lying heavily on his limbs. Olgeir could barely walk and Jorundur was in poor shape too. They had fought for three days with almost no respite and the battle against the Traitor champion had nearly finished them all. Though he still hefted his hammer, it now felt cripplingly heavy in his hands.

‘A last stand on the bridge?’ suggested Jorundur dryly. ‘Worth a saga, perhaps.’

‘We can hold them there,’ growled Olgeir, optimistic as ever though his heavy breathing gave away his pain. ‘I just need… a few moments.’

Gunnlaugur kept moving, watching the enemy spill out of the ruins and trudge up after them. A broad vanguard of mutants coalesced before him, driving out from the lower city and homing in on the walls. They never hurried, never speeded up, just murmured softly as they came, repeating the same inane whispering mantra they had always done. Gunnlaugur forced himself not to listen to it.

It was only then that he realised something about the situation was wrong. As he came under the shadow of the inner walls, falling back towards the bridge itself, he realised what it was – he shouldn’t have been able to hear them at all.

‘Why are the wall guns silent?’ he asked, looking over his shoulder to the towering bastions of the Ighala gatehouse.

As soon as he looked up, the huge doors on the far side of the bridge began to open to the full, grinding heavily along on metal tracks. Out of the gap, marching in close-packed ranks, issued de Chatelaine’s army.

They were the surviving regiments the canoness had held back for the final siege. Ranks of Guardsmen strode confidently out across the single span, all of them heavily swathed in chem-suits and hefting lasrifles. Among them marched a whole phalanx of Battle Sisters – heavily armoured Celestians with black cloaks and flamers, followed by the remaining Sororitas garrison. More Guardsmen followed in their wake, emerging in ordered ranks from the heart of the upper city.

Thousands had come – de Chatelaine was emptying the bastion. Battle standards swung up into place above them, displaying the Wounded Heart symbol proudly.

‘Blood of Russ,’ murmured Olgeir, watching the mortals draw up in assault formation on the near bank. ‘They’re breaking out.’

Jorundur started to laugh darkly.

‘Excellent,’ he said, buckling his axe to his belt and drawing his bolter. ‘We’ll all die together.’

At the sight of the sortie, Gunnlaugur felt his fatigue suddenly ebb. He strode closer to the bridge, seeking out the canoness.

De Chatelaine, her face masked behind her ebony helm and surrounded by her bodyguard, saw him first.

‘Enough cowering!’ she shouted, marching alongside her sisters. Her voice was tight with determination. ‘Now we end this, one way or another.’

Gunnlaugur raised his hammer in salute.

‘So be it,’ he called. ‘Our blades together.’

He turned back, looking across the wastes to where the enemy was advancing. They far outnumbered the defenders but their progress now looked strangely directionless. They were moving across the wasteland by instinct, driven onwards by their urge to attack the living, but no longer held together by a single intelligence.

With the champion gone, their will looked to be fragile. For all that, their sheer volume remained intact. De Chatelaine’s gamble was a perilous one.

Gunnlaugur gathered himself to his full height, reactivating skulbrotsjór’s disruptor in a sharp fizz of energy.

‘Come, brothers!’ he snarled, feeling kill-urge kindle in him again. ‘One last push.’

Jorundur fell in alongside.

‘We’ll need to hit them hard,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Aye,’ said Olgeir, brandishing his blade and glowering down the slope. He looked like he was missing sigrún. ‘We could really use some firepower now.’

As the words left his mouth, a thunderous, grinding roar suddenly broke out from behind them, briefly drowning the rush and crackle of the fires. The earth shook, rocked by the ignition of something massive far above them. Thousands of faces, defender and Traitor, turned in shock, gazing up to see what dreadful new engine of war had been unleashed on the city. Only the Wolves, as familiar with the sound of a Thunderhawk’s engines as they were with their own voices, knew what had happened.

The gunship swooped down from the Halicon landing stages and flew low over the upper city, held precariously aloft on a dirty smudge of trailing smoke, its engines coughing sclerotically and its fuselage tilted heavily to one side. It lurched over the dividing gorge, barely clearing the inner walls and shedding huge gouts of flame from its labouring thrusters.

‘The little shit!’ breathed Jorundur, his voice heavy with outrage. ‘He’s taken Vuokho!’

Hafloí’s voice crackled over the pack-wide comm.

‘Hjá, flat-feet!’ he crowed, laughing in triumph. ‘Follow me down!’

Then Vuokho’s spine-mounted battle cannon boomed out, hurling a withering barrage of shells deep into the heart of the enemy ranks. As they exploded in a rolling pall of conflagration the gunship’s bolters opened up, bursting earth and splintering flesh. The barrage only lasted seconds, but a Thunderhawk could unleash a frightening amount of ordnance in that time. The entire vanguard of the enemy disappeared under a rolling cloudbank of shattering armour and flying shrapnel.

Then something broke open on Vuokho’s battered undercarriage. The gunship slewed violently to the left, dropping like a stone.

‘He’s killing it!’ shouted Jorundur, furious now. ‘Gods of ice and iron, I’ll murder him!’

Vuokho dived steeply, its guns still hammering, until it crashed right into the heart of the horde, crushing hundreds of fleeing figures beneath its bulk as it ploughed deep into the earth and skidded messily down the slope. Its engines raged away for a few seconds longer, hurling streamers of blue flame into what remained of the plague-bearer vanguard. Even after being grounded its wing-mounted bolters continued to judder away, cutting bloody swathes through the shell-shocked troops reeling away from it.

Gunnlaugur laughed ferociously, lofting his hammer high and roaring his humour to the heavens. It felt like a long time since his lungs had opened up in mirth.

‘The whelp shows the way!’ he thundered. ‘Now charge, faithful of Ras Shakeh! Break them, and do not relent until you consign the last one of them to Hel!’

With a massed cheer the defenders surged down the slope towards the downed Thunderhawk. The mingled army of Guardsmen, Battle Sisters and Wolves swept across the ruinous landscape, on the front foot at last and with the light of vengeance in their eyes. Gunnlaugur and Olgeir burned along at the forefront, their wounds forgotten, their weapons swinging into position again.

For once, though, they were not the fastest. At the head of the army, moving faster than he had done in more than a hundred years of warfare, came Jorundur Kaerlborn, his limbs flailing and his battle-axe whirling around his head.

‘He killed it!’ he roared, his voice as baying and strident as all the unshackled hounds of Morkai. ‘Blood of Russ, I’ll flay him!’