Prospero Burns

Seven

Jarl Ogvai’s solution to the Quietude’s resistance was as direct as it was effective. Having been granted an unequivocal mandate for theatre control by the commander of the Expedition Fleet, he gathered his iron priests, gave them instruction, and set them to work.

It took them about two days to complete the calculations and the preparation work. By then, the fleet’s massive drop forces had been extracted from the planet’s surface.

At a moment on the third day considered propitious by the jarl’s closest advisors, the iron priests unleashed their handiwork.

A series of colossal controlled explosions tore the graving dock out of its stable orbit. Plumes of shredded, metallic debris streamed out behind it, glittering in the hard sunlight. The dock arced across the vast orange surface of the world, a tiny twin conjoined to it by the ligaments of gravity. They danced together, two encircling objects, like a child’s brightly coloured spinning toy.

It took eighteen full rotations for the murdered orbit to decay to the inevitable, the terminal. The debris plumes had formed fine brown threads around the world by then, like the most delicate of rings around a gas giant. Friction and atmospheric retardation were beginning to burn the graving dock, to ablate its superstructure. It began to glow as it fell, like a metal ingot in a smithy, first dull red, then pink, then white with heat. Its curving descent, the steady unwinding of orbital passage, was tantalisingly slow.

It fell as all bad stars fall. Hawser knew about that. As bad stars went, it was the worst.

It struck the ice field between two of the stupendous towers, the towers that rose at intervals of approximately six hundred and seventy kilometres, and probably had been there for thousands of years. There was, at first, a wink of light, then a rapidly expanding brilliance like a sunburst squirting up through the ice. The brilliance became a dome of blinding radiance that travelled outwards in all directions, vaporising the ice crust and annihilating the towers like trees in a hurricane.

The impact event created a lethal pulse of infrared radiation. Ejecta clogged the air and scarred the atmosphere with a vast darkness of dust and aerosolised sulphuric acid. Incendiary fragments vomited up by the bolide-type impact pelted back down, adding to the firestorm outwash.

Tra had gathered on the embarkation deck of the ship to watch the mortal blow being delivered via pict-feed to several huge repeater screens designed for assault briefings. Thralls and deck crew gathered too. Some still had tools or polishing rags in their hands, or even weapons that they were in the process of repairing or cleaning.

There was general silence as they watched the languid descent, a little muttering, a few murmurs of impatience. When the impact came at last, the Wolves exploded into life. They stamped their armour-shod feet and smashed the hafts of their axes and hammers on the deck; they beat their storm shields with their swords; they threw their heads back and howled.

The noise was numbing. It sent a shockwave through Hawser. All around him, the armoured giants bayed. Exposed throats swelled, mouths opened to what seemed like impossible widths, and spittle flew out between exposed canines and carnassials. The pronounced, ‘snouted’ shape of the Fenrisian physiognomy had never been more obvious to Hawser.

He only truly recognised that later. In the heat of the moment, there on the embarkation deck, all that he was able to register was the shock of the bestial noise. The savagery of the Wolves’ delight assaulted him like a physical trauma. It reached into his chest and squeezed with fingers that were prodigiously clawed. The hooded Fenrisian thralls, and even some of the deck crew, had begun to howl and shout too, shaking their fists. The roaring was tribal and primal.

Just as he began to believe he couldn’t tolerate it for a second more, Hawser tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and began to howl with them.

In the aftermath, a deluge of acid rain began to fall, and the stratosphere began to collapse. Tra’s Stormbirds led the way down into the toxin dust, into the discoloured smoke banks seething with crown-of-thorns lightning.

The dark ships, wings broad, looked to Hawser like their namesakes, circling ravens as black as thunderstorm clouds, as they descended into the broken and exposed heart of the ancient Quietude cities.

He said this to the Wolves, and they asked him what ‘ravens’ were.

The pacification took three weeks, ship time. Time to learn things, Hawser decided. Some of the things would be about himself.

Accounts were already accumulating. Some were brought back from the sub-surface fighting by packs returning for replevin, others relayed by the members of packs waiting in reserve, stories that had filtered up from the planet through the links.

Some were worthy accounts of actions. Others seemed to Hawser to display, already, the hallmarks of the embroidered, the enhanced. Mjod stories, Aeska Brokenlip had called these, accounts exaggerated by the strength of the Fenrisians’ lethal fuel.

Yet it didn’t seem likely they were mjod stories, because Aeska had also made it clear that no self-respecting member of the Rout, and certainly no man of Tra, would ever be boastful. The braggart was one of the lowest forms of life, according to the traditions of the Vlka Fenryka. A warrior’s stories were the measure of him, and the truth of them was the measure of his standing. A battlefield quickly exposed the braggart’s lies: it tested his strength, his courage, his technical prowess.

And, Aeska had added, that was another reason why skjalds existed. They were brokers of truth, neutral mediators who would not let any fluctuations like pride or bias or mjod affect the agreed value of truth.

‘So skjalds tell accounts to keep you entertained, to keep you honest, and to keep the history?’ Hawser asked.

Aeska grinned.

‘Yes, but mostly to keep us entertained.’

‘What entertains the Wolves of Fenris?’ Hawser pressed. ‘What entertains them most?’

Aeska thought about it.

‘We like stories about things that scare us,’ he replied.

Apart from the stories that appeared to be exaggerations, there were others that puzzled Hawser.

According to the general picture, the battle far below was apocalyptic. With the ice-shield gone, the core cities of the Quietude were exposed, like the setts of some animal dug up by trappers. Conditions were hellish. There was acid rain and a pestilential sub-climate that included noxious gas clouds and hail. The irradiated cliffs of the impact crater were continuing to collapse into the continent-sized hole. The cities were mangled, pinned and crushed like passengers in a wrecked vehicle, leaking life and heat, bleeding power.

The forces of the Quietude had nowhere left to run, so they were fighting to the last.

Tra formed the strategic spearhead of the Imperial assault. Imperial Army hosts, now equipped for chemical war and hazard environs, followed their lead.

The accounts that puzzled Hawser were strange fragments reporting almost pernicious brutality. The Wolves seemed eager to record moments that did not portray them as heroic or daring or even lucky; they seemed almost gleeful about scraps that illuminated nothing but atrocity.

They were non-stories, with no point, no beginning, middle and end. They were not cause and effect. They were simply descriptions of murder and dismemberment committed on Quietude combatants.

Hawser wondered if he was supposed to weave some kind of narrative thread around these anecdotes, to sew them into a context that might make them more heroic and dramatic. He wondered if he had misunderstood something, something cultural that even the processes nanotically wired into his brain had not been able to translate.

Then he recalled the assault on the graving dock, and the episode when Bear and Orcir had finally dislodged the crew of robusts who had earlier vaporised Hjad on the underspace slope. He recalled the grisly ritual slaughter that had followed.

They are chasing out the maleficarum, Ogvai had said. They are casting it out. They are hurting it so badly it will know not to come back. They are punishing it, and explaining pain to it, so it will not be eager to return and bother us.

These accounts, Hawser decided, were the same thing, marks of aversion in word form. They were designed to scare the maleficarum.

So what scares the Wolves, he wondered?

‘You look discomforted,’ remarked Ulvurul Heoroth. Heoroth, called Longfang, was Tra’s rune priest, a man far older than Ohthere Wyrdmake. Like Ogvai and many of Tra, he had a skin like ice, but it did not glow with inner light like a glacier, the way that Ogvai’s flesh did. It was glassy and dark, like the half-translucent plate of ice on a midwinter lake.

His skin was not the only evidence that he was old. He was lean and bony, and his long hair was thin and white. He appeared hunched and sclerotic in his runic armour. Age had not afflicted him the way it had altered other senior Wolves. It had bleached him and wizened him, and grown out his canines into the teeth that had given him his war-name. Some said there would be other longfangs one day, if any of the Rout lived long enough. Wyrd alone had kept Heoroth Longfang’s thread uncut. He was as old as it was possible for a Wolf to be, the oldest of the last few Sixth Legion Astartes who had been created on Terra and shipped to Fenris as the foundation of the Wolf King’s retinue.

The warship’s massive embarkation deck, a long gallery with Stormbirds racked laterally from overhead rails ready for launch, was quieter than it had been at the moment of impact. The priest was kneeling, like a crusader knight of Old Terra at a Cruxian shrine, looking up at the repeater screens. The two packs he was about to lead surfacewards in support of Ogvai were preparing nearby. Hawser could hear the shrill buzz of fitter drills screwing armour into place. He could hear the hiss of hydraulics and the whirr of lifter gear. Fifty metres away from him, along the main plain of the deck, a circle of Wolves gathered to kneel around their squad leader and take their pledge, the signifier known to other Legions Astartes as the oath of moment.

‘What are you doing?’ Hawser asked the rune priest. It was a blunt question, but he asked it anyway. Though he had spent more time with Tra than with any other portion of the Sixth Legion Astartes, he had exchanged almost nothing with the saturnine priest. Longfang had never given him a story to keep safe, nor offered comment on any account Hawser had delivered in his capacity as skjald. Longfang was also far less approachable than Wyrdmake, though even Wyrdmake was a chilling prospect.

Seeing Longfang alone for a moment, Hawser had taken his chance. Longfang had not needed to look around to know Hawser was behind him or, it seemed, what expression was on Hawser’s face.

The repeater screen showed the Quietude home world from high above: the hard clarity of space, the brilliance of direct sunlight. The world looked like an orange that had had a red-hot poker rammed into its upper hemisphere.

No, it looked like a radapple, one of the late crop, fat and russet pink, but marred with a huge, rusty blemish of rot.

Longfang continued to stare at the screen.

‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘To?’

‘The snapping of threads. The shaping of wyrd.’

‘You’re not watching, then?’

‘Only the reflection of your face in the screen,’ said Longfang.

Hawser snorted a small laugh at his own foolishness. The Wolves liked to wrap themselves in a cloak of mystery and solemn, supernatural power, but such nonsense was the superstitious talk of barbarians, inherited from the Fenrisians they drew their strength from. The truly abnormal thing about the Wolves was the sharpness of their perception. They had taught themselves to notice everything about their surroundings, and to use every scrap of information at their disposal. Their reputation helped. No one expected brutes who looked like ritual-obsessed, bestial clansmen to be underpinned by peerless combat intelligence.

It was what made them such efficient weapons.

‘So why is there unhappiness in your visage?’ Longfang asked.

‘I am still uncertain of my place among you. Of my purpose.’

Longfang tutted.

‘First, it is every man’s lot to wonder at his own nature. That is life. To wonder at your own wyrd, that is the eternal state of contemplation for most men. You’re not alone.’

‘And second?’ asked Hawser.

‘It puzzles me, Kasper-Ansbach-Hawser-who-is-Ahmad-Ibn-Rustah-who-is-skjald-of-Tra, that you do not know yourself when, quite plainly, there are so many of you to know. It puzzles me that you chose to come to the Allwinter World, yet cannot account for that choice. Why did you come to Fenris?’

‘I’d spent my whole life learning,’ said Hawser. ‘Gathering data, collecting it, preserving it. Always my motive had been the betterment of mankind. I reached a place where I felt that my life of effort was being… squandered. Passed over as insignificant.’

‘Your pride was wounded?’

‘No! No, nothing like that. It wasn’t personal. The things I had cared enough about to conserve were just being forgotten. They weren’t being put to use.’

Heoroth Longfang made a small movement deep inside his etched, bead-draped carapace that may or may not have been a shrug.

‘Whatever the truth of that, it still does not explain Fenris.’

‘When my life’s work seemed to be stagnated,’ said Hawser, ‘I felt I should make one last voyage, broader and bolder than any I had made before, and close with some truth, some reality, greater than any I experienced in my career. Instead of probing mysteries of the distant past, I fancied to investigate curiosities of a more modern vintage. The Legions Astartes. Each one bound up in its own coat of mysteries, each one wrapped in its own trappings of ritual and lore. Mankind trusts his future to the diligent service of the Legions, yet does not know them. I thought I would choose a Legion, and go to them, and learn of them.’

‘An ambitious thought.’

‘Perhaps,’ Hawser admitted.

‘A dangerous one. No Legion makes its stronghold a welcoming place.’

‘True.’

‘So there was an element of bravado? Of risk taking? You would end your career with one last, bold flourish that would seal your reputation as an academic and repair your damaged pride?’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Hawser sourly.

‘No?’

‘No.’

Longfang fixed his eyes on Hawser. The vox-feed built into the helmet seal of his collar warbled and chittered. Longfang ignored it.

‘I see anger in your face, though,’ the priest said. ‘I think I’ve come closer to the truth than you have so far. You still haven’t really answered. Why Fenris? Why not another Legion-world? Why not a safer one?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t you?’

Hawser couldn’t answer, but he had a nagging feeling he should have been able to.

He said, ‘I was told it was good to face your fears. I have always been afraid of wolves. Always. Since childhood.’

‘But there are no wolves on Fenris,’ Longfang replied.

The priest moved to rise from his kneeling position. He seemed to struggle, like a weary, arthritic old man. Forgetting himself, Hawser stuck out his hand to offer support.

Longfang looked at the proffered hand as if it was a stick that had been used to scrape a midden hole. Hawser feared the priest might lunge forwards and snap it off with a single, furious bite, but he was too frozen to withdraw the offer.

Instead, grinning, Longfang closed his massive, plasteel gauntlet around Hawser’s hand and accepted the support. He rose. Hawser meshed his teeth and let out a little squeak of effort as he fought not to collapse beneath the weight the huge rune priest leant on him.

Upright, Longfang towered over him. He let go of the skjald’s hand and looked down at him.

‘I’m grateful. My joints are old, and my bones are as cold as dead fish trapped in lake ice.’

He shuffled away towards the waiting packs, his wild, thin hair catching the light of the deck lamps like thistledown. Hawser rubbed his numb hand.

‘You’re leading a drop now?’ Hawser called out after him. ‘To the surface? A combat drop?’

‘Yes. You should come.’

Hawser blinked.

‘I’m allowed to come?’

‘Go where you like,’ said Longfang.

‘Three weeks I’ve been on this ship, getting accounts of this war second-hand,’ said Hawser, trying not to sound peevish. ‘I thought I had to ask permission. I thought I had to wait until I was permitted or invited.’

‘No, go where you like,’ said Longfang. ‘You’re a skjald. That’s the one great privilege and right of being what you are. No one in the Rout can bar you, or keep you at bay, or stop you from sticking your nose in.’

‘I thought I had to be protected.’

‘We’ll protect you.’

‘I thought I’d get in the way,’ said Hawser.

‘We’ll worry about that.’

‘So I can go anywhere? I can choose what I see?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘Why did no one think to tell me that?’ Hawser asked.

‘Did you think to ask?’ replied the priest.

‘This is the logic of the Vlka Fenryka?’ Hawser said.

‘Yes. Catches in your flesh like a fish-hook, doesn’t it?’ replied the priest.

The packs Longfang was leading down were not familiar to Hawser. He knew just a few of the warriors by name and reputation.

Their blood was up, but they seemed subdued. There had been a tone of this in the air for days. As the Stormbirds made their long, silent dive from the strike ship, Hawser strapped in beside Longfang.

‘You said I looked discomforted, but there is a grim look in these eyes,’ Hawser said.

‘All of Tra wants to be away from here,’ said Longfang. ‘The glory’s gone from this war.’

‘Gone to Ullanor,’ said a Wolf strapped into the row of arrestor cradles facing them. Svessl. Hawser attached a name.

‘What’s Ullanor?’ Hawser asked.

‘Where, you mean,’ replied another Wolf, Emrah.

‘Where is it?’

‘A mighty victory,’ said Svessl. ‘Ten months ago, but word has just reached us. The Allfather made a mighty slaughter of the greenskins, laid them out on the red ground. Then he sank his sword tip into the soil and announced he was done.’

‘Done?’ asked Hawser. ‘What do you mean? Are you talking about the Emperor?’

‘He’s done with the Crusade,’ said Emrah. ‘He’s returning to Terra. He’s left His anointed successor to continue the war in His absence.’

Longfang turned to look at Hawser. His eyes were hooded and dark, like lightless pools.

‘Horus is chosen as Warmaster. We enter a new age. Perhaps the Crusade is nearing an end, and we will be put aside to let our teeth grow blunt.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Hawser.

‘Ullanor was a great war,’ said Longfang. ‘The greatest of all, the culmination of decades of campaigning against the greenskins. The Rout had heard of it, and hoped that we would be able to stand with the Allfather when the culmination of the struggle came. But we were denied that honour. The Wolves of Fenris were too busy on other errands, fighting dirty fights no one else wanted to fight in other corners of the galaxy.’

‘Fights like this one?’ asked Hawser.

The Wolves nodded. There were several growls.

‘No thanks we’ll get for this,’ said Longfang.

The bitter truth had emerged later, after Ogvai had been granted theatre command, after the commander of the Expedition had agreed to let the iron priests blast the graving dock out of orbit, after it had impacted. The Instrument cradled within the graving dock’s girderwork embrace was not the kill vehicle feared by the expedition’s threat assessors.

After Tra had seized the facility, the Mechanicum had begun to examine it, especially the control centre area so scrupulously spared by Fultag’s assault. The implications of that examination only became clear once the graving dock, at the Expedition commander’s pleasure, had been used as a giant wrecking ball.

The Instrument was a data conveyor. The Olamic Quietude had been in the process of loading it with the sum total of its thinking, its artistry, its knowledge and its secrets. The intention was presumably to launch it, either as a bottle upon the ocean in the hope of some salvation, or towards some distant, unknown and unknowable outpost of the Quietude network.

Knowing what had been lost and, perhaps, understanding how that would reflect upon him in the eyes of men even more senior than himself, the commander of the Expedition Fleet flew into a recriminatory rage. He blamed poor intelligence. He blamed the slow function of the Mechanicum. He blamed factionalism in the Imperial Army. Most of all, he blamed the Astartes.

Ogvai was on the surface by that time, leading things, at the bloody end of the matter. When he heard of the commander’s wrath, he transmitted a brief vox-statement, reminding the commander and the senior fleet officers that they had insisted he solve their problem and break the deadlock, and had approved his use of all resources. They had given him theatre command. As was ever the case, the Astartes had not made a mistake. They had simply done what was asked of them.

Once the message was transmitted, Ogvai vented the spirit of his real responses on the warriors of the Quietude.

The Stormbird fell as a bad star falls.

Hawser had dropped to the surface with Tra before, but this time it was the suicidal plunge of a combat run. Inertially locked straps and an arrestor cage kept him stuck to the seating rig. The graduated compression provided by the tight bodyglove he was wearing as a base for his lightweight environment armour kept the lymphatic and venous systems of his limbs functioning. His heart banged like an x-ray star. His teeth chattered.

‘What story will you tell about this?’ Svessl asked, seeing his fear and enjoying it.

‘Not many hearth stories to tell about soiling yourself,’ said Emrah. Wolves laughed.

‘What angered you the most?’ Hawser asked, as loudly as he could, to any who would listen.

‘What?’ asked Emrah. Others turned to look his way. Full helms and knotwork leather masks glared at him.

‘I said what pissed you off the most, Wolves of Tra?’ Hawser asked, raising his voice above the howl of the engines and the judder of the airframe. ‘Was it that you missed the fight at Ullanor? The glory? Or was it that our Allfather chose Horus as Warmaster, not the Wolf King?’

They may kill me, thought Hawser, but at least the process will take my mind off this hellish descent. Besides, what better time to ask a pack of Wolves an awkward question than when they are all lashed into arrestor cages?

‘Neither,’ said Emrah.

‘Neither,’ agreed another Wolf, a red-haired monster called Horune.

‘We would have liked a taste of the glory,’ said Svessl, ‘to stand up in a great war and be counted.’

‘Ullanor was no greater than a hundred campaigns of the last decade,’ Longfang reminded the warrior.

‘But it’s the one where the Allfather laid down His sword and said His Crusade was done,’ Svessl replied. ‘It’s the one that will be remembered.’

And that’s what counts to you, thought Hawser.

‘And the Wolf King would never have been named Warmaster,’ said Emrah.

‘Why?’ asked Hawser.

‘Because that was never his wyrd,’ said Longfang. ‘The Wolf King was not made to be Warmaster. It’s not a slight. He hasn’t been passed over. The Allfather has not played favourite with Horus Lupercal.’

‘Explain,’ said Hawser.

‘When the Allfather sired His pups,’ said the priest, ‘He gave each one of them a different wyrd. Each one has a different life to make. One to be the heir to the Emperor’s throne. One to fortify the defences of the Imperium. One to guard the hearth. One to watch the distant perimeter. One to command the armies. One to control intelligences. You see, skjald? You see how simple it is?’

Hawser tried to make his nodded reply obvious through the vibration shaking him.

‘So what is the Wolf King’s wyrd, Heoroth Longfang?’ he asked. ‘What life did the Allfather choose for him?’

‘Executioner,’ replied the old Wolf.

The Wolves were quiet for a moment. The Stormbird continued to shiver with intense violence. The engines had reached a strangled pitch that Hawser hadn’t believed possible.

‘What pisses us off,’ said Emrah suddenly, ‘is that we weren’t present at the Great Triumph.’

‘They say it was a fine sight,’ said Horune, ‘a whole world laid bare to salute Horus’s ascendancy.’

‘We would have liked to gather there,’ said Longfang, ‘shoulder to shoulder with brother Astartes, in numbers not seen since the start of the Crusade.’

‘Shoulder to shoulder with Wolf companies we haven’t seen for decades,’ added Svessl.

‘We would have liked to raise our voices and join the roar,’ said Emrah. ‘We would have liked to shake our fists at the sky, and show our proud allegiance to the new Warmaster.’

‘That’s what’s pissing us off,’ said Svessl.

‘That, and you reminding us about it,’ said Horune.

The Stormbirds punched through the dense impact pall, poisonous vapour slipstreaming off their sleek wings and spiralling in the thunderclaps of their wakes like ink in fast water. Under the clouds, a nightmare rim of firestorms burned around the titanic entry wound. It was a kill-shot that had taken out a planet. The depth of the wound was astonishing. It did not look geological to Hawser. It looked as anatomical as the analogies filling his imagination. An exposed, surgical void of pulverised organs, muscles and bones, all tinted orange, all partially blackened as if blown out by a penetrating incendiary round.

Slower-moving Imperial Army dropships, vessels of much mightier draughts, were descending into the scalding pit. The Stormbirds streaked past them, and outpaced their Thunderhawk and gun-cutter escorts. The Astartes craft, in tight formation, passed below the level of the pit’s burning lip and knifed into the sub-glacial void, down through smoke, through burning air, through the shattered ruins of the Quietude cities.

The cities ran deep. Hawser was astonished to glimpse the complex, interlocking layers of them, rising up like cyclopean towers from profound geological foundations. He was also stunned by the degree of destruction. Upper levels had all been vaporised, and below that, the municipal stages and sections had been crushed down into one another. Tower structures had collapsed and pancaked into themselves, held in place only by the remaining mantle of super-thick ice that acted like a setting resin around the delicate, shattered wreckage. Hawser was reminded of the way Rector Uwe had always folded almonds and pecan nuts in a white napkin after supper, before striking the parcel with the back of a spoon. The debris would have flown everywhere but for that enveloping medium.

The ship’s thrusters were suddenly making an entirely different type of anguished scream.

‘Ten more seconds!’ Longfang yelled. The Wolves began to beat their swords and axes against their storm shields.

A savage change of momentum hammered Hawser’s innards. The bird had just used the bottom of its powerdive and ferocious upturn to dump colossal amounts of speed. Before he could adjust, the most violent impact of all occurred. They just fell. They fell hard into something with a noise like the steel gates of the Imperial Palace falling off their hinges.

They’d landed. They had landed, hadn’t they? Hawser couldn’t be sure. They looked to be moving still, but that could simply have been his head and his bewildered senses. There was a shrieking noise from outside, metal-on-metal. The Wolves were slamming aside their arrestor cages and leaping up.

‘On! On!’ Longfang yelled. Hawser realised they’d all been speaking Wurgen for the last ten minutes.

The boarding ramp was opening. Light flooded into the green twilight gloom of the drop cabin. Heat came with it, roasting, fireball heat that Hawser could feel sucking into his lungs down the chimney of his throat like a backdraught, despite his armoured breather mask.

‘Great Terra!’ he coughed.

The metal-on-metal squealing from outside was getting louder. They were moving. They were juddering and moving backwards.

The whole Stormbird was sliding.

Fleeting, jerking silhouettes loomed across the fire-bright gap of the open ramp in front of him. The Wolves, deploying. He could hear them howling.

No, it wasn’t howling. It was the wet leopard-growl, amplified: the resonating, deep-chest purr of a megafauna predator. It was a paralysing, infrasonic panther-snarl throbbing and then surging up from the specially adapted larynxes of apex carnivores.

He followed them out into the light and the searing heat. Some of them brushed against him as they charged out down the ramp, knocking him aside, spinning him. He had no idea what he should be doing. A giant plasteel hand grabbed him by the scruff of his suit and his feet dangled off the ramp for a second.

‘Stay with me!’ Longfang growled in Wurgen.

Hawser followed the old priest as he lumbered forwards. He focussed in on the details of Longfang’s armour, as he had done when instructed to follow Bear. Bear’s armour had been simple compared to Longfang’s, but then Bear was an ill-tempered youngster beside the veteran priest. His grey armour had been more modestly adorned and decorated.

Longfang’s case of armour was old, a work of art that owed its richness to both the armourer and the etcher. It was covered in runic symbols, some of which had been picked out in brass, or gold leaf, or glossy red enamel. Apotropaic eyes had been scratched, emphatically, into the shoulder guards. Besides the huge, gossamer-white pelt, Longfang was draped with skeins of beads, strings of charms, small trophies, and clattering amulets.

They came out from under the Stormbird’s shadow into the glare of a chemical firestorm. The Stormbirds had set down on a series of ornate platforms extending from monumental, fluted towers half encased in the surrounding ice-mantle. Great portions of the towers and their more massive neighbouring structures were ablaze. The wall of heat was oppressive. Light-rich flames boiled and tumbled up the ice chasm towards the top of the pit, drawn as if up a flue. Frequently oxygenated by sources Hawser couldn’t identify, the firestorms swelled and flared, rushing white-hot and spitting out clouds of molten sparks and incendiary cinders that blizzarded into the depths below. Hawser realised some of the vertical firestorms were bigger than cities he had spent whole chunks of his life living in. His mind could barely cope with the scale. He found himself focussing on single sparks, drifting silently in the air in front of him, as large close up as the firestorms were far away. To hold focus on a single, drifting spark was to hold on to a precious moment of sane tranquillity.

The air was full of sparks. There was also a strange smell, more than decay and burning. It was the smell of some synthetic substance that should never have been exposed to heat.

Portions of the pit’s upright city were collapsing into the yawning gulf below. Wars were happening on different levels. Hawser could see Imperial Army troops drop-landing on platforms above him, lit up by enemy fire as they swung in towards leaf-shaped platforms. To the west of his position, and slightly below, a tide of Expedition drop-troops assaulted across the spans of three or four intact inter-tower bridges, as gun-cutters and blitz ships swept in over them and raked the facades of the ancient citadels.

Longfang’s packs were driving in across the ornate platforms towards imposing, sullen mansions. The polished, orange material tiling the mansions and the platform surface was pitted and scorched. Everything was orange. The world was orange. It was partly the firestorm, and partly the ubiquitous material that the Quietude constructed everything from.

Again, for a split-second pang, Hawser was reminded of Vasiliy. To think she was a world and a life ago now was not even ironic.

Debris, including chunks of fallen masonry of considerable size, landscaped the platform. What had this place once been, Hawser wondered as he ran forwards through the murderous heat and the winnowing sparks. The landing stage of a parliament hall? The platform of a defence station? The private jetty of an aristocratic residence? Did the residents once look out over the platform and admire the view of the glowing ice caves beneath, or was it just a functional cavity to them? Had there been beauty here, before Ogvai’s kill-shot? Deliberate beauty, or just the accidental marvel of the nature that only human eyes recognised? Did the beings of the Quietude have souls?

He fancied perhaps they did. The platforms had ornate decorations worked into them, especially on their undersides, where they fanned out like ribbed lilies or acanthus leaves. Similarly, around the high, wide door spaces and side columns of the mansions they were attacking, there were simple lines of relief that suggested an aesthetic.

Enemy fire licked at them, most of it gravity rifle shot that pulverised the platform surfaces into dust where it hit. He heard the unmistakable sound of bolters firing and saw Horune and the others ahead, bounding away across the tumbled slabs and crushed stonework. He made a mental note to improve his next story; he had no idea an Astartes could move so fast.

The metal-on-metal shriek came again. He turned.

The Stormbird that had brought them in was sliding backwards. Unlike the other Stormbirds in Longfang’s flight, which had touched down securely on other landing levels and were already cycling back up for take-off, this craft had been forced to use the lip of its target platform by an overhead collapse. That it had landed at all was a testament to the devotion of the flight crew.

The weakened platform was shredding. The rear half of the Stormbird’s bulk was tipping off. The metal-on-metal shriek was the sound of the Stormbird’s landing claws as they tried to dig in and anchor on. The skids tore squealing gashes as they slipped backwards. The pilot was trying to fire mooring lines from under the nose. Each grapple rebounded from the polished orange tiles.

A Stormbird was a large transatmospheric craft with a broad, threatening profile designed to menace. It was considerably more substantial in both mass and sheer craftsmanship than the bulk-produced landers like the Thunderhawk and the dropfalcon models that had been churned out of constructor factories as short-term, utilitarian solutions to the Crusade’s material demands. A Thunderhawk wasn’t designed to last: it was just a cheap, functional, template-pressed disposable.

The Stormbirds were legacies of the Unification Wars on Terra, superb machines that were far more costly and time consuming to manufacture. Armadas of them were assembled for the Expansion, and only when the true scale of the Great Crusade became apparent was it realised that a cheap bulk supplement would be needed. They were not the sort of things that should look vulnerable or ungainly. They were lords of the air, soaring creatures that could dive from orbit straight down into the fires of hell, and survive.

Yet this one was stricken. It was doomed. Its backwards slide was accelerating. Its nose was tipping up, and the angle of that inclination was increasing. Metal shrieked on metal until the landing claws began to tear free, lifted too high by the dipping tail. Hawser could clearly see the frantic, chalk-white faces of the flight crew through the tinted cockpit canopy as they fought to stabilise their situation. The engines suddenly started racing, and hurricanes of loose debris and grit swirled into the intakes as someone tried to throttle up and… what? Push the ship back onto the platform? Relaunch?

The Stormbird tipped. Hawser saw it pass the point of no return. The boarding ramp was still down, and it looked for all the world like an open beak, like the ship was a fledgling bird, too damaged to fly, squawking in terror as it pitched from a nest.

With a sudden, jarring lurch, it was gone, and the shredded lip of the platform was gone too. Hawser felt the deck quiver as the Stormbird let go.

He mumbled something, something obscene and incoherent, unwilling to accept what he’d just seen. Part of his mind told him that the Stormbird would surely restart its engines as it fell and fly back up to them, magnificent and phoenix-like. Another part told him what a fool that made him.

He realised Longfang was shouting at him. There was a far more immediate issue.

The weight of the Stormbird, and the violent way it had quit its perch, had entirely undermined the integrity of the damaged platform.

Everything they were standing on was giving way.

He had once witnessed the explosive demolition of a stratified favela in Sud Merica. The slum hive, cleared of inhabitants and protesters by the Unification authority, was a towering ziggurat, a landfill mountain that had cast its shadow across a river basin for sixty generations. Hydroelectric projects would replace it and, during that work, Hawser and Murza would be granted access to explore the impossibly ancient foundations for relics of the Proto-Cruxian faith that was said to have persisted there like an isotope in the water table.

The demolition had brought the vast structure down like an avalanche, folding level into level, collapsing storey into storey like riffle-shuffled playing cards. He had been astonished by the seismic violence of the destruction, and by the overwhelming noise. Most of all, he had been staggered by the quantity of dust exhaled by such annihilation.

The platform went the same way. It disintegrated, letting the rubble and massive fragments fallen from the city above slide off into the gulf. Noise was vibration and vibration noise, and there was no division between them, and both of them were a visual blur. Orange tiles and support beams exploded and shattered in clouds of dust like flour.

Hawser ran towards the mansions. His future fell away behind him in the pit in a raging landslip. The ground steepened in front of him, and he realised he was running uphill. An elephantine block of stone, part of some city structure demolished far above, slithered towards him. Its impact had undoubtedly contributed to the platform’s fundamental weakness.

As it rushed down at him, he leapt up the face of it, hurling himself before it could turn him into a long red smear. He landed on the top of it, a hard, awkward landing that badly bruised his hip and ankle, but held on, his hands wrapped around the stub of a shattered finial.

The block kept sliding. Righting himself, he leapt again, clearing the slab and coming down on the other side, on the slope of the expiring platform. He scrabbled up, loose rocks pinging off his shoulders and his face mask. One hit so hard it crazed the left-hand eyepiece, and stunned him.

The noise of the tumult reached a peak. Blind, scrambling, he ran into something and found it was a wall.

‘Sit down. Sit down!’ a voice snarled in Wurgen. ‘You’re safe there, skjald.’

He could barely see. Most of the platform had gone, leaving a jagged strand of rockcrete stuck through with severed rib beams and shorting power lines. The destruction had exhaled so much dust into the air that there was a strange, farinaceous haze.

Hawser was hunkered right up against the foot of one of the mansion walls, spared from the fathomless drop by a ragged shelf of surviving platform no more than two metres broad at its most generous. Wolves were crouched with him, their pelts and armour dusted with yellow powder.

‘Are you alive?’ the Wolf beside him asked. Hawser didn’t know his name. The Wolf had eschewed his full plate helm for a knotwork leather protector that had entwined furrows in the shape of Fenrisian sea-orms forming the nasal guard and the heavy brows.

‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

‘You sure?’ asked Serpent-mask. ‘I see fear in that wrong eye of yours, and we don’t want fear tripping us up.’

‘I’m sure,’ Hawser snapped. ‘What’s your name? I want to make certain my account of this day records your concern for me.’

Serpent-mask shrugged.

‘Jormungndr,’ he said. ‘Called the Two-bladed Serpent. You insult me, skjald, that you haven’t heard of the famous Two-blade.’

‘I have,’ Hawser lied quickly. ‘But I have been shaken by that tangle with death, and I was slow to recognise the trait marks on your face guard.’

Jormungndr Two-blade nodded, as if this was acceptable.

‘Follow,’ he said.

Svessl had blown a way into the nearest of the structures Hawser thought of as mansions.

They passed through a gatehouse into a courtyard beyond. In amongst the debris of rubble, he saw the first of the enemy dead: graciles and robusts, and also other smaller forms new to him. The pale yellow dust, sifting in the air, stuck to the spattered pools of purple Quietude blood.

The Wolves were surging into the courtyard and splitting in all directions. Cloisters and inner entrances beckoned. Hawser, uncertain which way to go, heard enemy fire, and then answering blasts of bolter shot. The gunning bolters, often one at first and then joined by an emphatic chorus as multiple weapons were brought to bear on an identified target, had a distinctive metallic grinding note behind their deep shot-boom, like a bitter aftertaste.

He could hear other sounds, deeper, bigger sounds. They were the vast, echoing, booming noises of the unstable cities, creaking and swaying, uttering their slow and monumental death knell out across the immense gulf of the impact pit.

Hawser found himself walking slowly through the mansion zone, crossing from courtyard into cloister and back again. He felt immune to the battle that rang around him, incidental, close by, but not near enough to trouble him. Sparks sailed like stars through the dusty air. He stepped from the shadows of the covered walkways into the bright orange glare of the open courts, where the light of firestorms cast shadows of him, long and lean across the tiled ground.

He looked at his shadow, so distorted and extended, so longshanked and shifting in the flamelight. The pelt Bitur Bercaw had given him on the night he awakened in the Aett was still around his shoulders. He wore it at all times. The grey wolf pelt lent his spectral shadow a strangely hunched neck and shaggy back.

Much of the mansion complex’s infrastructure had been ripped out. He saw walls and ceilings where flush, polished panels had been torn out, revealing curiously organic layers of machinery. The purpose of the sub-layer systems was not apparent. They seemed to be complex arrangements, patterns that were both circuits and organic valves, power cables and blood vessels intertwined. Smouldering energy fumes wept out of torn and dangling tubes. Unidentifiable fluids dribbled from ruptured ducts.

He looked around. He looked up. The spavined city rose above him as if it was trying to claw its way out of its icy grave. Tracers of weapons fire, like bright lattices, criss-crossed the smoke-streaked air. Heavy weapon beams scored destructive lines several kilometres long across the darkness of the pit, projected by assault craft on attack runs. Where they touched, the city structures dissolved in walls of light and threw out arches of burning gas like solar flares. Flurries of missiles, visible from their exhaust flares alone, raced like schools of comets, spat out by gunships too dark to be seen in the smoke. At roof-level, to his left, two distant Warlord Titans were leading the Army in towards a bastion gate across a horizon formed by an inter-tower bridge. Clouds of tiny munition impacts billowed around their inexorable figures like fireflies at dusk.

He heard the deep, booming, background instability of the cities again. It sounded like a bell tolling in the core of the planet.

A sharper sound made him start. Concussion slapped him. Directly overhead, a formation of bulk landers was attempting to deliver platoons of Outremars onto upper platforms that jutted out like theatre balconies. One had been hit by ground fire. It had exploded in a staggering welter of flame and whizzing debris. The landers in formation with it attempted to steer out of the blast wash. One clipped another and they both had to pull off the drop target hard, engines protesting. A third was struck soundly along its flank by projectile debris from the lost unit. It shivered, mortally wounded. Black smoke began to gout from its port-side engines. It tried to get nose-up. It tried to get close enough to the platform to drop its ramp and let its cargo of soldiers deploy.

It hit the platform instead. The planing impact tore the underside away, peeling it off like the lid of a tin can. As the main hull began to disintegrate and the four engines exploded in a quick, fiery series, it began to rain bodies.

The Outremar troopers spilled by the wreck fell on the mansion complex, helpless, tumbling, flailing. Some were already dead. Some were still screaming when they made impact. They hit roofs, terraces, the canopies of cloisters, the open tiles of the courtyards. They glanced off sloping walls and made multiple further impacts before rolling to a halt. Burning debris rained down with them. Some of the bodies were on fire, or partially dismembered. Some struck with such force, blood spatter went five or six metres up the face of walls. Others landed whole and lay as if asleep.

Staring up, mesmerised by the human hail, it took Hawser a moment to register that there was every possibility he might be struck by some of the falling bodies. One came rushing down at him and he flinched to his left. It hit the tiled courtyard ground with a noise like smashing eggs and snapping celery. He looked down at the anatomically impossible position it had chosen to rest in for the remainder of eternity.

Another body impacted a few metres to his right like a bag of blood bursting. Hawser backed away. He looked up again in time to see a whirling piece of burning machine debris dropping towards him, end over end.

He ran. He made it to the cover of the nearest cloistered area as the wreckage struck. Then a human body smacked into the awning roof above him, splitting as it shattered orange tiles and produced a vile trickle of blood that pattered down onto the ground. He ran again, and sought greater sanctuary in the more substantial archway of the mansion proper.

He cowered briefly. The terrible downpour of bodies subsided. He looked up and took a step out of the shadowed archway.

A Quietude super-robust lunged at him. The towering beast had two heads and three surviving upper limbs. Something akin to a plasma beam had blown the other one off. The face-plates of its heads displayed hologram masks of psychopathic rage. It was wielding two large, hook-bladed weapons like tulwars with its upper limbs. It sliced at Hawser.

Hawser wasn’t sure how he moved out of its path. He threw himself away from it and hit the tiled ground of the courtyard several metres back from the archway, landing in a clumsy and painful tumble. The super-robust came after him, slicing with one blade, then the next. The tip of one hooked blade struck sparks off the tiles. It reached out with its third limb to seize him so it could pin him and butcher him.

He evaded again, this time more aware of what he was doing, of how superhumanly fast his reactions were, how ridiculously instinctive. The wolf priests, geneweavers and fleshmakers of the Vlka Fenryka, had done so much more than repair his wounds and shave years off his life. They had given him so much more than the enhanced vision of a wolf.

They had accelerated him, his senses, his speed, his strength, his muscle power, his bone density. Even without any combat training, he had snapped the limbs of the G9K malcontents who had outnumbered him.

Nevertheless, a super-robust of the Olamic Quietude, spiking on battle-stimms, would kill him easily.

He ducked a lateral sweep, and then rolled to avoid a downward slash. The super-robust kept coming, kept swinging. Hawser slipped in a pool of Outremar blood, and lost his footing.

Longfang slammed into the super-robust from behind. The priest had appeared without warning, moving like a phantom. There was no hint of infirmity about him, no creak of age. His eyes were bright and wild, and his long white hair flew out like a mane. This was not a man who needed the hand of another to help him get up off his knees.

Longfang expertly hooked his arms around the super-robust from behind in a grip that resembled a wrestling hold. He lifted the enemy warrior away from Hawser while keeping its limbs locked so it could not strike with either tulwar. Longtooth grunted with the effort. Having turned it aside, he sent the super-robust staggering forwards with a serious kick to the arse to create some safety distance, and drew his sword, a huge broad blade that slept in a knotwork scabbard across his back. It had a two-handed grip, and a runic blade that glowed like frost. As soon as it was drawn, it began to keen, a weird song only wights or the soulless could sing. Power crackled and hissed through its fierce edge.

The super-robust turned around and strode back to face and kill the interloper who had interrupted its attack. It seemed undaunted by the searing glimmer of the glacial blade that was whispering a death-lament for it. It flung itself forwards with its powerful upper limbs raised, raining alternating downstrokes with its tulwars. Longfang grunted, reacted, let his long blade and the armour of his left forearm soak up the multiple impacts. The super-robust was as strong as a template construction press. Hawser saw that the old priest had to plant one foot back to brace against the assault.

With a growl-bark, Longfang put a full body spin and the weight of his shoulders into the answering stroke. The blow sliced the third limb clean off the Quietude warrior’s torso. It staggered back, but it felt no pain. It resumed its drive at Longfang, chopping down alternating blows again. This time it had effect. The hybrid alloy of one of the tulwars smote through the forearm guard of the rune priest’s intricate armour. Leather bindings split, and snake-stones, bezoars, sea-shells and beads made of nacre scattered across the courtyard tiles. Blood gushed out, down to the cuff, dripping off the ridges of the huge gauntlet.

Longfang let out a wet leopard-growl that palpitated Hawser’s guts. He hacked at the super-robust with his frostblade, driving it backwards across the blood-stained, fire-lit yard. The last blow in the savage series cracked the top fifteen centimetres off the left hand tulwar and stove a deep crack across the super-robust’s barrel chest.

At that point, two more super-robusts bounded into the courtyard. The first, armed with an accelerator hammer, went immediately to reinforce the unit fighting Longfang. The second, its hologrammatic face expressing first curiosity and then undisguised antipathy, turned for Hawser.

Heoroth Longfang had no intention of breaking the skjald-bond. He had told Hawser to go where he liked because he would be protected by Tra, and that was a compact he intended to honour, or forfeit with his life. A long and, for the most part, secret heritage of genetic engineering had culminated in the ability of Imperial Terra to manufacture hyper-organisms like him. He leapt with all the agility and power that heritage had provided him with, not as a man leaps to jump an obstacle, but as an animal pounces to bring down its prey. He left his immediate adversaries standing, almost awkwardly, suddenly devoid of a combat opponent.

He landed behind the super-robust rushing Hawser, and saved the skjald’s life for the second time in ninety seconds. The hissing frostblade went up over his white-haired head in a two-handed grip, and then came down in a single, splitting blow of extraordinary force that sheared the super-robust’s torso medially. The sectioned halves parted in an explosive cloud of purple bio-fluid liberated by the rupture, and fell heavily in opposite directions.

There were beads of glittering purple blood in Longfang’s fine white hair. He looked at Hawser with his tired gold and black-pinned eyes. He knew what was coming.

‘Find cover,’ he said.

Shock took him away. There was a bang like a sonic boom. Heoroth Longfang was simply removed, sideways, from Hawser’s field of vision.

Hawser reeled from the concussive blow, stunned, dazed, his breather mask cracking, his nose filling with blood from vessels burst by the over-pressure. The super-robust’s accelerator hammer had buried itself in Longfang’s left side and hurled him clean across the courtyard. The priest hit a wall, cracking the tiles, and landed on the ground.

Both super-robusts hastened to finish him as he tried to rise. Blood was leaking out of Longfang, from his lips, from the waist-joint and hip seals of his runic armour.

As the Quietude brutes closed in, Longfang raised his hand, as if he could fend them off with force of will alone, as if he could unleash magic, or even maleficarum, under such a miserable duress. For a moment, Hawser almost believed he could. He almost believed the wights of the Underverse might come howling down like an ice storm in response to Longfang’s furious will.

Nothing happened. No magic, no ice storm, no maleficarum. No wights from the Underverse wailing with rapturous glee.

Hawser snatched up a blood-flecked Outremar lasrifle, yanking the weapon’s strap free of its previous owner’s broken arm. The rifle had fallen out of the sky, but its mechanism was intact. He opened fire, raking the two super-robusts. His shots struck their backs and shoulders, denting the plasticated finish of their armour, scoring little holes and blemishes. The super-robust with the accelerator hammer even took a shot in the back of the head, causing its neck to whiplash slightly.

Both stopped, and turned slowly, smoke wisping from the superficial damage.

‘Tra! Tra! Help here! Help here!’ Hawser yelled, in Wurgen. He started firing again, unloading the entire energy clip at the super-robusts. They paced towards him, and the paces became faster and turned into running strides. The hammer and the tulwars were lifted up to strike. Hawser backed away, blasting, yelling.

Jormungndr Two-blade entered the courtyard. He came in over one of the cloister roofs where Outremar bodies had collected like autumn leaves. True to his name, he had a blade in each hand, a matched pair of power swords, shorter and broader than Longfang’s hissing frostblade.

He uttered the loudest roar of all, and landed hard on the tiles in front of the charging super-robusts. The impact made a sound like a dropped anvil, and pavers cracked under him. He met their united attack aggressively, hammering aside the super-robust with the tulwars with his right blade, and then blocking the hammer with his left.

The super-robust with the tulwars re-joined without hesitation, hacking at him. Two-blade blocked and parried with matching speed, allowing neither of the tulwars to slip past his guard. Simultaneously, his left-hand weapon fended away the follow-up swing from the super-robust with the hammer.

Now that one of the tulwars had lost a section in the clash with Longfang, the mis-matched lengths played to the super-robust’s advantage. As his left-hand sword was occupied with the other opponent, Two-blade found it supremely difficult to counter the rain of blows from the twin swords unless he managed to catch both down near the hilt. Twice, the broken tulwar flew past a parry that had blocked the long hook of its partner and gouged Two-blade. Within a few seconds of the struggle beginning, Two-blade was bleeding from a deep injury in his right arm.

He resolved the problem directly. Ducking a vicious but telegraphed swing from the accelerator hammer, he kicked out at the super-robust with the tulwars, catching it in the left kneecap. The huge plasteel boot delivered a torsion injury that twisted the super-robust off balance, and Two-blade put his right-hand sword through one of its faces.

The super-robust tottered backwards with sparks shorting and spitting from its splintered face mask. Purple gore splashed down its chest from under the mask’s rim.

Jormungndr Two-blade did not pause to enjoy the satisfaction of this advantage. He had to jerk his head back hard to avoid the hammer again. The evasion was whisker-close. The hammer-wielder had thrown such bodily force behind the latest blow that the swing had described an almost complete circle. The hammerhead, missing Two-blade on the downward half of the orbit, ended up striking the ground of the yard and creating, with a painful, plosive bang, a radiating crater in the tilework that looked like a bullet hole in a mirror, or the ripple of a stone hitting the surface of still water.

Two-blade struck the super-robust with his left-hand sword. The super-robust deflected the slash with the long haft of its hammer, bringing it up level in front of its face like a stave, before swinging it up higher for another downward, post-setting blow. Two-blade managed to get his swords up and crossed against each other, and caught the neck of the hammer in the V formed by their blades. Even so, the impact drove him down onto one knee.

Straining, Two-blade kept the swords locked. The super-robust with the tulwars was recovering its wits as its secondary head took over its biological operations. It moved in from the side to attack Two-blade while his weapons were occupied.

Two-blade sliced his swords together, uttering a bellow of effort. The swords scissored the neck of the accelerator hammer. The hammer head was not entirely cut off, but the haft just below the head exploded and buckled as the Astartes’ blades sliced through grip, trunking, liner and core.

Two-blade came up off his knees and drove in against the super-robust, head-down, stabbing it repeatedly through the torso with murderous, under-arm punches, first with the right sword, then the left, and then alternating, jabbing blow after vicious blow. He drove it backwards, killing it three or four times over to make sure it was dead. By the end, it was only held upright by his blades.

He let it fall. The other one had reached him. He spun to greet its tulwars, and delivered a rotating lateral slash that knocked it flying. It landed on its face, and tried to rise. Two-blade pounced onto its back, held it face-down with his knee, and drove a sword down through it, pinning it to the ground.

Purple liquid began to creep out from under it.

Hawser crossed the yard to where Longfang lay. Two-blade wrenched his sword out of the super-robust’s corpse and followed. Two-blade’s escalated Astartes metabolism had already kicked in, and his wounds had stopped bleeding.

Heoroth Longfang’s wounds had not stopped bleeding. The priest had propped himself against a wall, his legs out straight in front of him. He was breathing hard. Blood was seeping out of far too many of the seams in his armour.

‘A fine day for sitting on your arse,’ remarked Jormungndr Two-blade.

‘I like the weather here,’ replied Longfang.

‘We’ll do all the work, then,’ said Two-blade. He was silent for a while, staring down at the old rune priest.

‘I’ll send Najot Threader back to you, when I find him.’

‘Not necessary,’ replied Longfang.

‘I won’t let you go without honour,’ said Two-blade. There was a tiny hitch in his voice that surprised Hawser. ‘When I find Najot Threader—’

‘No,’ Longfang replied more emphatically. ‘Eager though you are to see me off, I’m not going anywhere. I just need to rest. Enjoy this nice weather for a while.’

Hawser looked at Two-blade, and saw he was smiling a broad smile under his mask that showed his teeth.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he said.

‘There’s a good boy,’ said Longfang. ‘Now go and kill something. The skjald here can stay and keep me company.’

Two-blade looked at Hawser.

‘Amuse him,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Hawser.

‘I said amuse him,’ replied Two-blade. ‘You’re Tra’s skjald. Amuse him. Take his mind off what’s coming.’

‘Why?’ asked Hawser. ‘What’s coming?’

Two-blade snorted.

‘What do you think?’ he asked.

The big Wolf knelt down quickly, and bowed his head to Longfang.

‘Until next winter,’ he said.

Longfang nodded back. They clasped fists, and then Two-blade stood and walked away without looking back. His massive plasteel boots crunched on the grit coating the courtyard ground. By the time he was on the far side and vanishing from view, he had accelerated into a run.

Hawser glanced back at Longfang.

‘I know it’s an indelicate question, but what is coming?’ he asked.

Longfang laughed and shook his head.

‘You’re dying, aren’t you?’ asked Hawser.

‘Maybe. You don’t know much about Astartes anatomy. We can shrug off a hell of a lot of damage. But sometimes there’s a hell of a lot of pain in that process, and you’re never sure if you’re going to get there.’

‘What should I do?’ Hawser asked.

‘Your job,’ said the priest.

He sat down beside the priest.

Longfang’s skin looked even more translucent than before. He was speckled with blood, both purple and red, both human and foe. Some of it was drying and streaking.

His respiration was laboured. Something was critically wrong with his lungs. Every breath produced a blood mist.

‘So I… I am to amuse you, then?’ asked Hawser. ‘You want me to recite an account?’

‘Why not?’

‘You might want to tell me some of yours,’ said Hawser. ‘You might want to tell me anything that matters to you. In case.’

‘You’d be my confessor, would you?’ said Longfang.

‘That’s not what I meant. Aeska Brokenlip told me that the accounts that entertain the Rout most are the ones that scare them.’

‘True enough.’

‘So what scares you?’

‘You want to know?’

‘I want to know.’

‘What scares us most,’ said Heoroth Longfang, ‘are the things that even we can’t kill.’