Blood of Asaheim

Chapter Twenty-Three



Ingvar sped between burning buildings, pausing only to slay those unwary enough to stray into his path. The air around him was thick, a soup of toxins that lowered visibility to a few metres. Shells of hab-units loomed up out of the murk, their empty innards glowing.

None of the filth that tarried in the remains of the lower city was much of a threat to him – the biggest and most organised contingents of infantry had pushed ahead up the slopes, their eyes fixed on the summit. The scattered warbands that remained behind were sufficient to slow him down, though; they kept his blade busy in a series of bloody encounters. Ingvar had been fighting ever since leaving Bajola in the cathedral – fighting to get out of the despoiled nave, fighting to clear the courtyards, fighting to force a passage through the broken streets and rejoin the pack.

Only now was he making good progress. Something seemed to have rattled the enemy troops – they were scrambling up towards the citadel faster than ever, heedless of anything but the need to get out of the burning terraces of the lower city.

Ingvar ran along in their wake, loping purposively, keeping clear of the bigger detachments. He’d heard Váltyr’s summons but after that the comm had died. A series of dull booms from beyond the Ighala Gate lit up the cloud-heavy sky, indicating something big had gone off, but otherwise he had little idea how matters stood at the inner wall.

He cleared the Cathedral district and started powering up the main route to Ighala when he heard the first scream break out. The noise was a grotesque amalgam of human and unhuman, as if mortal throat-cords had been wound around a core of daemonic madness. More than one voice raised in terror; the plague-damned were shrieking in panic along with… something else.

Ingvar hesitated, listening carefully. He recognised some of the strains within them, and that familiarity chilled him.

Ahead of him ran the thoroughfare that led, after many twists and switchbacks, to the upper city. On either side of him sprawled the maze of alleyways that tangled out across the burning urban zone, all of them sunk into shadow even as the flames licked through the shattered rockcrete around them. The screams came from inside that labyrinth of derelict masonry, fractured and echoing like dancing tomb spectres.

After a moment of indecision, he veered off into the darkness. It didn’t take him long to discover the origin of the terror. A narrow passageway zigzagged into a warren of smaller paths, all of them narrow and tightly overlooked. Those led in turn to an octagonal courtyard surrounded by many-storeyed hab-blocks.

In the centre of the courtyard rose a slender tower of dark stone, ringed with skull-pattern friezes and ribbed with iron bands. The pillared icon of the Adeptus Ministorum adorned the lintel of the main gate, surrounded by tattered scraps of old battle standards. Twin doors hung from their hinges, shattered and gaping. A glimmer of ghoulish green light spilled out from within. Corpses, all of them tortured by plague, littered the courtyard. Their exposed skin was scorched black.

Ingvar kicked his way through the bodies and plunged inside. He was immediately struck by the foul stench – a noisome cocktail of decay, excreta and stale sweat. More bodies lay across the stone floor, each one stinking of charred flesh.

The tower interior was gloomy, unlit except for slit windows that ran around the circular walls. An old altar lay in the centre covered with broken candle-stands, vestment caskets and censers. A spiral stairway hugged the stone wall, snaking up to the floor above. The glimmer came from up there.

Ingvar vaulted up the stairs, keeping dausvjer unsheathed and activated. Its electric-blue light burned brightly in the dark.

Four levels up, past a series of rooms streaked with bloodstains and thick with corpses, a final chamber opened up in front of him. It had once been the private sanctum of the Ministorum adepts and was strewn with their paraphernalia: robes, scrolls, thuribles, ceremonial staves, polished skull-pendants.

Ingvar barely noticed any of that. His eyes were drawn to the stricken figure cowering against the far wall, hunched over as if dry-retching. Flickers of corpse-gas rippled across dull grey armour plates, flickering eerily in the obscurity.

He froze. For a moment, his mind would not let him believe what he was seeing. Only slowly did he reconcile the data given him by his senses with what must have been the case.

It was Baldr. Or rather, it was the thing that had once been Baldr.

His armour had darkened, as if a shadow had been draped across it and had somehow fixed to the ceramite. Glints of pale light, insubstantial and wavering, leaked out of every joint and opening. Liquid dribbles of it ran across the curved plate like globules of mercury, slowly fading to black and withering away. The illumination was piercing but somehow unhealthy, as poisonous as gall.

Ingvar stayed still. He kept his blade in position; its dull hum was the only sound aside from Baldr’s desperate gasping.

Baldr never looked up. His flaming eyes remained fixed on the floor in front of him. His sore-edged mouth looked twisted in pain.

When Ingvar finally spoke, as softly as he could, it felt like he was breaking some kind of sanctity.

‘Brother,’ he said, taking a single step towards him. ‘Fjolnir.’

Baldr’s head snapped up. His empty eyes stared directly at Ingvar. For a split second his face betrayed a childlike confusion, the innocent agony of a soul adrift and in pain.

Then it twisted into fury. Baldr’s fists clenched and silver-black lightning kindled quickly on the gauntlets.

Ingvar interposed his blade, backing away.

‘Do not do this, brother,’ he warned. ‘You are not yourself.’

Then Baldr screamed. At close range, the sound was even more horrifying than it had been before – a keening, pining, unearthly screech of fused souls grappling within a single body.

Baldr raised his fist and clenched it tight. Forks of vivid lightning shot out, slamming into dausvjer with the force of a storm-front hitting and sending stark white streaks of light wheeling across the walls.

Ingvar skidded backwards, expending all his strength just to keep his blade in the way. The rune-sword absorbed the inflow of ether-twisted matter, but keeping it in place was crushingly hard. Ingvar felt sweat burst out across his body, his legs bracing, his arms burning.

‘Baldr!’ he cried, sliding back against the far wall. ‘Do you not know me?’

Baldr uncurled himself and straightened up, all the while pouring more fell energy into his lances of dark-edged lightning. The chamber filled with the stench of ozone and the hot crackle of warp-discharge.

Ingvar felt his arms buckle. He set his jaw and pushed back, watching the blade before him shiver under the stress. He was forced down to his knees, his arms locked rigid, his whole body trembling with effort.

Baldr took a shaky step towards him, then another. His eyes spilled silver fire, and the residue ran down his blotchy cheeks like tears. He stared out crazily, drooling from an open mouth.

Ingvar felt his strength begin to fail. His hands struggled for grip on dausvjer’s hilt. Baldr staggered up to him, standing barely two metres away, his gauntlets still blazing. Lines of virulent force snapped and licked across the entire chamber, fizzing against the stone and leaving snaking weals.

Ingvar sank down further, his backpack pressed against stone. He could feel dausvjer’s grip worming free of his fingers, pushed towards him by the deadening force of the incoming barrage.

‘Brother,’ he hissed again, his teeth clenched. Baldr’s face showed no recognition. It was unrecognisable from the cool, amiable face that he’d been so pleased to see again when he’d returned to Fenris.

We have always been shield-brothers, you and I. We shall be again.

Ingvar suddenly saw the exchange in the drekkar chamber, flashing across his mind’s eye like a vid-pict.

It has a wyrd on it. It has protected me, and a part of me lives in it.

He took one hand from the sword hilt and grabbed at the soul-ward. Just as he lost control of the blade, he wrenched the totem out in front of him, thrusting the crow’s skull in front of Baldr’s tortured face.

The effect was immediate. The stream of warp-lightning suddenly snuffed out, plunging the room back into darkness. The stink of ozone subsided. Ingvar’s blade fell from his hand, clattering emptily against the stone, blackened and burned out.

Ingvar held the sálskjoldur aloft, dangling it before Baldr’s eyes. Baldr watched it spin, his face locked in something like recognition.

‘This, at least, you know,’ said Ingvar, breathing heavily.

A soul-ward, a fragment, a remnant, something to cling on to against the coming of Morkai.

‘It was a part of you,’ he said. ‘It protected you, warding you against maleficarum. Your soul cleaves to it.’

The rune sforja, cut deep into the bone totem, flickered in the dim light. Its empty eye sockets rotated, catching the dull red glow of the fires raging outside the tower.

Baldr watched, transfixed. His arms slumped to his sides. His head hung lower. The silver flames on his body died out, guttering and flickering across his pockmarked skin.

What remained was grotesque. His skin, once tight and glare-tanned, had sagged. Deep bags hung under his red-rimmed eyes. Clusters of lesions and open boils nestled in every fold of flesh. His breath, which came in shallow gusts, was foul.

He tried to say something. His rheumy eyes flickered up to meet Ingvar’s, then back down to the soul-ward. The blind fury was replaced by something else: confusion, recollection, pain.

‘Bad… dreams,’ he rasped, his voice dry.

Then he teetered, losing balance, toppling to his knees. Ingvar caught him and held him up.

Baldr looked up at him, his expression pathetically grateful. His face, criss-crossed with lines of blood, pus and drool, bore little resemblance to the clean visage of the past. It was still his, but only just.

‘I had terrible dreams,’ he slurred again.

Then his eyes fluttered closed and his body went limp. Ingvar, supporting his weight, lowered him onto his back, watching him carefully all the while. Then he pulled clear and retrieved his sword. Dausvjer’s blade was coated in a layer of sooty carbon, obscuring the protective runes engraved along the flat.

He sagged back against the wall, utterly drained. As he looked down on his brother’s ravaged face he felt sick. He lifted his sword again, holding it in position. A quick down-stroke would do it – between chin and gorget, cutting the jugular and biting down into the spinal column beneath.

He held it there for a long time, his mind working hard. He was exhausted, weary of the slaughter, weary of not knowing what to do.

Eventually he put the blade down again. Baldr lay unconscious before him, his sallow cheeks hanging loose as he breathed.

‘Not dreams, brother,’ he breathed, taking the soul-ward and fixing it around Baldr’s neck. As the crow’s head clinked against Baldr’s armour, a faint smile flickered across his diseased face. ‘I wish they had been.’

Ingvar stood up again. He felt nauseous, and went over to one of the narrow windows. The glass in it had long since been shattered. He leaned against the frame, letting his head rest against the stone.

He could see across a broad sweep of the lower city. Fires still burned in all directions, but the sounds of battle sounded closer than they had been. As he watched, he saw plague-bearers and mutants running down the streets below him. They were no longer advancing; they were fleeing.

He narrowed his eyes, peering up towards the Ighala Gate. Even his senses failed to make much headway through the rolling clouds of muck.

He could hear enough, though. He could hear the roar of flamers and the battle-cries of the Celestians. He could hear the shouts of Guardsmen trying to keep their spirits in the face of the horrors around them. Loudest of all, cutting through the shifting walls of sound, he could hear the curses of his brothers. He heard Olgeir’s deep-chested bellows, Hafloí’s whooping, Jorundur’s strident fury, Gunnlaugur’s ferocious war-cries. Only Váltyr’s voice was absent, but then he was always quiet in combat.

Hearing the sounds of the pack back on the hunt triggered mixed emotions in him. On the one hand, it meant that the enemy was falling back – a fine achievement for Gunnlaugur’s command. On the other, he had played little part in that victory, forced into the margins by his vaerangi and distracted by hunts of a different kind.

Worst of all, the reckoning for Baldr would come quickly now. His condition could no longer remain hidden. Death surely awaited him; perhaps worse.

Ingvar glanced over at his motionless body. Baldr’s breathing was regular again, deeper than it had been before. The green tinge around his eyes and mouth had lessened. Whatever force had possessed him had been banished, at least for the present.

‘I should never have left you,’ said Ingvar, speaking softly, just as he had done in the apothecarion. ‘I achieved nothing and learned little.’

The noises of fighting grew louder and closer. He felt the familiar nagging urge to participate, to race down the winding stairs and throw himself into the heart of it.

He resisted. If he had remained with Baldr in the Halicon as ordered, perhaps the madness would never have reached such terrifying depths.

Ingvar moved away from the window and crouched down beside his battle-brother. Baldr was locked in the Red Dream. The coma seemed somehow healthier than it had done before: deeper, and with none of the stench of corruption about it. His skin looked to be healing even as Ingvar watched it, its genhanced mechanisms slowly combating the toxins lodged beneath.

Or perhaps that was wish-fulfilment. Some corruptions were impossible to expunge.

‘I will remain,’ he said. ‘I owe you that much.’

As he watched and waited, though, his thoughts turned to Gunnlaugur.

And what will Skullhewer do when he hears of this? he thought. What will he decide?

There was no rout, no disorderly scramble, no massacre. The enemy, bereft of its champions and having taken heavy losses at the Ighala Gate, pulled back steadily, retaining its cohesion. De Chatelaine’s spearhead pursued them down from the inner walls and back into the smouldering morass of the lower city.

The fighting remained furious and bloody. Clouds of toxins still hung low over the rooftops, blotting the sky like water-spiralled ink. The bands of mutants still retained their powers of fear and infection, and many units of Guard were lost in sudden counter-attacks or ambushes. After the first push down from the gates the advance soon clogged into resistance again.

For all that, the upper city had been secured. The attacking army had lost its momentum and many of its most dangerous troops. For the time being, the Halicon’s survival had been won.

After hewing a bloody passage down towards the warehouse zone, Gunnlaugur caught sight of the canoness and her command squad moving up to join him. He pulled back and waited for them. They met up on a spear of bare rock that jutted out above the lowest terraces of the city. Far below them the outer walls lay in ruins, surrounded by dug-in units of plague-bearers. Straggling formations marred the desert beyond, studded with isolated siege engines and the smoking carcasses of vehicles.

‘This is as far as we go,’ said de Chatelaine grimly, standing alongside him and looking out across the desolate vista.

Gunnlaugur hoisted his thunder hammer over his shoulder. His arms were weary from swinging it. He knew she was right, but found it hard to admit. In the heat of battle, charging with his brothers amid the rush of flame and blood, he had briefly entertained visions of driving the enemy back out into the dust, of chasing them into the burning sands to shrivel and wither.

Too many still lived for that. They were in disarray but were already recovering. Like the poisonous cells of a recurrent cancer, they were grouping, coalescing, clustering together in the shadows, preparing to hold the ground they had won.

He nodded grudgingly. ‘So now what?’ he asked.

De Chatelaine holstered her bolt pistol and put her hands on her hips. Her bearing was still regal, despite her exhaustion.

‘We have wounded them,’ she said, her voice giving away a fierce pride. ‘They will not breach the inner defences now, not without reinforcements. We should consolidate while we can.’

She gazed out to her left, over to where the dark profile of the cathedral still burned. Its triple spires sent twisting cords of inky smoke up into the foul sky.

‘Perhaps we should have done so earlier.’

Gunnlaugur grunted. That had always been his counsel.

‘What’s done is done,’ he said. ‘Every street was fought for. That satisfies honour.’ He looked over his shoulder, up the steep ranks of terraces leading to the upper city. ‘But you are right. They will not break the citadel now, not as they are. Give the order to your troops. My brothers and I will guard the retreat.’

De Chatelaine bowed. ‘This is your victory, Space Wolf,’ she said. ‘I should have trusted the hand of providence. You were our deliverance.’

Gunnlaugur shook his head. ‘You commanded this.’ He smiled under his belligerent helm. ‘You may yet get the crusade you dreamed of.’

De Chatelaine stood on the outcrop for a little longer, her cloak hanging limply in the thick, unmoving air.

‘They will come at us again,’ she said. ‘This is only one army. We know they have others. Plague Marines may yet live. What have we bought here? A few days?’

‘A few days are worth having,’ said Gunnlaugur. ‘The Imperium will answer your calls in time, and our task is to remain alive until then. We have made a start.’

De Chatelaine inclined her head in apology. ‘Forgive me,’ she said. ‘I learned to suppress my optimism. Perhaps I shall have to unlearn that again.’ She laughed. The sound was weary but clear. ‘Learning from a savage. That such things are possible.’

Then, ahead of them, out to the south over the wide dust-flats, the low covering of clouds broke open. The rift was fleeting, just a tattered break in the plague-pall that soon covered over again. But for a moment, sunlight shafted down on the battlefield, thick and golden, sweeping across the rusting, burning debris lining the road to Hjec Aleja.

Both Gunnlaugur and de Chatelaine watched it. Even after it had passed and the scene had resumed its preternatural gloom they said nothing.

It would not be the last such break, though. The clouds were thinning.

‘I had not realised dawn had come,’ de Chatelaine said.

‘Nor I,’ said Gunnlaugur. ‘But it has, and we are alive to see it.’

He looked across the devastation, thinking of Váltyr and Baldr, reflecting on what had been sacrificed.

‘Give the order to fall back,’ he said gruffly, avoiding such thoughts. Much work remained. ‘Let’s finish this.’

As Ras Shakeh’s natural daylight began to wane, the last of the toxin clouds thinned and drifted clear of the Halicon. In the deepening twilight, underlit by residual fires still growling away amid the wreckage of the lower city, the battlefield could at last be seen to its full extent. The outer walls had been half demolished, their smooth curve cracked open. The buildings closest to the perimeter had been hit hardest – huge areas had been reduced to black swathes of ash, gently smoking as the flesh, metal and stone all cooled.

The enemy withdrew beyond the walls, drawing up in sombre ranks out on the dust. Their numbers had been depleted by the assault but still remained formidable. The whispering stopped. They moved slowly, sullenly, like a vast beast withdrawing to lick its wounds. Their stench remained thick on the air, fuelled by the sweet tang of decaying offal left behind inside the walls.

The defenders pulled back to the inner walls, drawing closed the Ighala Gate doors and repopulating the long ramparts. The wall-gun magazines were reloaded, and materiel salvaged from the ruins of the perimeter defences was stowed, ready for use when needed. During the final withdrawal heavy lifting equipment was hauled down from the upper city to drag the wreckage of Vuokho back inside the walls. Hafloí’s haphazard flight had destroyed all of Jorundur’s repair work and caused fresh damage to the fragile hull, but what remained was judged worth retrieving by de Chatelaine’s surviving tech-adepts.

The Wounded Heart standards still hung on either side of the Ighala Gate. Many other battle-flags remained in place, albeit with rents and burns marring the holy icons. The Halicon had escaped largely undamaged, and still reared its baroque profile up against the far horizon. Though marked by missile-fire and stained from airborne filth, much of the upper city was intact, a final island of defiance amid a world of ruins.

Between the defenders’ redoubt and the enemy encampment on the plains stretched a wide swathe of no-man’s-land – a waste-zone of contagion studded with the remains of empty hab-shells and hazy with smoke. That was the buffer between the two forces over which artillery pieces gazed and troopers watched. Like a huge circular scar, it ran down from the gorge and out to the shattered perimeter wall, slowly greying and festering, devoid of all sounds but the hissing breeze.

Gunnlaugur and Olgeir stood on the Ighala ramparts watching over those wastes, their helms removed and their weapons sheathed.

Olgeir’s mood had improved after he’d managed to recover sigrún from a retreating warband of mutants. As they’d died under his fists he’d broken into laughing and hadn’t stopped until he’d withdrawn back to the bridge. Even now his ugly face was twisted by a half-smile.

Gunnlaugur, on the other hand, had fallen into brooding. The withdrawal from combat always turned his mood dark.

‘Any news from Old Dog?’ he asked, his eyes fixed on the ruins below.

Olgeir snorted. ‘Not since he dragged the whelp back to the hangars to put right what he did. For a while I thought he’d kill him.’

Gunnlaugur smiled. ‘Hafloí can look after himself.’

‘He can.’ Olgeir looked satisfied. ‘He’s a good fighter. You know who he reminds me of?’

‘I was never so foolish.’

Olgeir chuckled. ‘You were. And as arrogant. When his hair starts to grey he’ll be a formidable Hunter.’

‘If he lives long enough.’

Olgeir’s smile faded. He looked down at his burly hands where they grasped the parapet edge.

‘And Ingvar?’

Gunnlaugur’s chin slumped against his gorget.

‘He lives,’ he said quietly. ‘He says he found Baldr’s body, and will return it.’

Olgeir looked up at Gunnlaugur. His face betrayed his disquiet. ‘Fjolnir was destroyed?’

‘I do not know. Ingvar would not tell me. He told me he’d explain when he was back.’

‘So you two are speaking again.’

‘We will speak,’ said Gunnlaugur, his voice heavy with weariness. ‘I cannot feel anger with him, not now.’

‘He disobeyed you.’

‘He did. But was the order just?’ Gunnlaugur turned to Olgeir. ‘Have I persecuted him, Heavy-hand?’

Olgeir shrugged. ‘I’m no vaerangi. But the bad blood between you: it cannot continue.’

Gunnlaugur nodded, then lowered his head again.

‘I hoped he would be how he used to be, but I see the change in his eyes. I see that damned Onyx skull around his neck and I know he carries his past with him like a ghost at his back. At times I wonder if something’s possessed him.’

Olgeir made the ritual gesture against maleficarum.

‘Do not jest.’

‘Even so.’

Silence fell between them. The first stars appeared above, pricking silver into the veil of dark blue. The smells of cooking fires wafted up from the buildings behind them, the first wholesome aromas that had been detectable since the enemy had arrived. Although battered and surrounded, Hjec Aleja still clung to life.

‘Baldr cannot be suffered to endure,’ said Olgeir at last, his deep voice sombre. ‘You saw what he’d become. He is as much a brother to me as he is to you, but we should have ended him when we had the chance. You know this.’

Gunnlaugur didn’t look at him.

‘If we had done so, then we would all be dead and the Halicon would now be the throne room for that monster,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it was his wyrd to be there. Perhaps he can still be saved.’

As he spoke, a figure emerged from the ruins below and moved across the wasteland. It went haltingly, dragging something along. Only slowly could its shape be made out – a warrior in pearl-grey armour hauling another behind it. The two of them stumbled up out of the desolation and towards the bridge.

Gunnlaugur watched their progress bleakly.

‘You will let him pass?’ asked Olgeir.

Gunnlaugur remained still for a long time. All along the parapets, defence towers locked on to the moving figures, primed to fire on his order.

He remembered Baldr’s own words to the canoness, back when the first of the infected had been discovered.

Do you not understand? They allow them to survive. There are carriers among them. You cannot let them in.

His amber eyes held steady in the failing light as he watched Ingvar struggle under the dead weight of his unconscious brother.

Allow none to pass in or out. Everything contaminated must be destroyed.

‘He is one of us,’ Gunnlaugur murmured. His voice betrayed his doubt, but it brooked no argument. ‘The Gyrfalkon would not have brought him back if he thought Baldr had gone beyond redemption.’

Gunnlaugur took in a deep breath. The air was still foul in his nostrils.

‘I must learn,’ he said. ‘I must change. I must find him a place, now that Váltyr is gone.’

He leaned forwards on the parapet, his brows furrowed.

‘I must learn to trust his judgement, Heavy-hand,’ he said. ‘Open the gates.’