Iron Priest

Chris Wraight

Olvar goes watchfully, swallowing down fear, remembering what Aeolf told him about the place and how to stay alive in it. The sea smokes and belches, fire dances on the water. The earth moves like a floe cracking. He crouches, trying to see the way ahead through twisting sheets of smog. His skin runs with sweat. He is shivering, ankle-deep in slush and gravel. Ahead of him a mountain rises, vaster even that his imagination had made it, scowl-dark and crowned with fulguration.

He is burning with fatigue. He carries his axe in his right hand. The knapped head feels like a lead block in his trembling fingers.

Olvar knows he should move. For two winters he prepared for the forge-test and he cannot turn back. He had been unable to look into the eyes of his mother, who has already grieved for the loss of a son, expecting to see him again only in the afterworld.

Then Olvar hears it once more, closer this time. He snaps around, staring out into the dark, clutching the axe-hilt. Waters foam at the shoreline, flecked grey with cooling slag.

At first he sees nothing but low outlines of empty stone, streaked with melting snow, jagged against a bulging sky of thunderheads.

But he does hear something: a purr, a growl, a hair-lifting, skin-puckering snarl. It has been on his heels for two days, padding closer, hugging the shadows. He cannot see it, cannot smell it, only hear it. It stays downwind of him, slinking around columns of obsidian and granite, a ghoul of the boiling seas.

Olvar pauses. He should go on. He should head for higher ground, earth that does not shudder and crack as the sea drags it down and over into the abyss.

He waits, though. He shivers and he watches. In the gloom, under an overhang that scrapes into the sky like a sickle, he sees them for the first time.

Eyes, black-pinned, like golden orbs, shining in the dark.

Ragnvald strides toward the burning hab-block. Its internals are gutted and glowing, ringed by melting skeletal struts. The sky burns green, shimmering from refractive ice particles. The crump of artillery drums out a steady beat, making the earth shake.

Ahead of him a shattered highway snakes through ruins, strewn with the dead and the harrowed. His grey brothers lope ahead, streaking through shadows, heads low, bolters firing. Ragnvald moves more slowly, feeling ember-dry earth part under his boots.

The Rhino is on its side, half-buried, its smoke stacks still vomiting, its broken tracks stilled. Loer’s squad has already abandoned it, charging off towards the enemy, leaving the shell to be salvaged or scuttled.

But the spirit is intact. Ragnvald can sense it, chittering in agony, locked in the coils at the heart of the machine. He stoops and his servo-arm sweeps around, clanking as its jaws unlock. He links to the Rhino’s core, opening a service hatch. Wiring spills out like entrails.

Then he hears it – a purr, a growl, a hair-lifting, skin-puckering snarl.

Ragnvald unlocks his thunder hammer and races out from the shadow of the Rhino, but the enemy is already upon him, powering out of the roiling smoke, red-armoured, screaming in a language that makes no sense. Ragnvald sees a flash of copper-chasing, obscene bronze jaws, a chainaxe whirring in a swarm of noise.

They clash – Ragnvald’s hammer falls, cracking hard and crackling tight before sheering away. The chain-axe slews across him, digging into Ragnvald’s defensive servo-arm. Its blades bite, and he feels pain as if it were his own flesh. He falls back, stumbling as he goes, betrayed by the shifting soils.

The champion’s cracked helm-lenses blaze in triumph. He leaps, and the axe scythes down.

It leaps, coming at Olvar at last. All he sees is a barrelling wall of hair and flesh, dark as twilight.

He scrambles away, heart locking in fear. Its jaws gape wide for him, strung with yellow saliva. It is massive – the height of a man at the shoulder, hunch-limbed, long-pelted, slope-muzzled, ridge-backed. It bounds across the shifting rock, paws skidding on the ice.

Olvar stands his ground. He waits for the last moment, right until he can smell the meat-wash of the creature’s breath.

Then he swings. His axe collides with the beast’s skull, thudding against bone. He ducks and scrambles, evading the mound of muscle as it crashes over him.

He strikes again, cutting deep, working the axe hard. The beast turns on him, roaring. Its jaws sweep in low, going for his leg. He chops down even as he springs away, connecting, severing sinew.

It keeps coming, snapping, trying to pin him down. It is faster, stronger, bigger, fearless. Olvar slips on the slush and it catches him, clamping teeth on his trailing leg.

He cries out – a strangled yell – and hacks down again. Blood, his own and the creature’s, mingles in hot jets. Olvar’s movements are jerky, confined, driven by panic. His axe is slick, his fingers slippery.

Its head is over him now, leering and snarling. Golden eyes bear down on his. Slobber slaps on to his exposed chest.

Olvar screams in fury, and hurls the axe-head.

The chainaxe never connects. The champion is hit by something huge and fast. Ragnvald sees it surge past him – matted fur, metal jaws, glittering augmetics. The beast tumbles over and over with its prey, clamping it by the neck, shaking and ripping. The champion screams for as long as he has vocal cords.

Ragnvald gets to his feet, striding over to the blood-speckled scene of slaughter. He watches the creature – hunch-limbed, long-pelted, slope-muzzled, ridge-backed. Its flanks are studded with metal; one leg is a piston-mount, wrapped in cabling.

‘Enough,’ he voxes, and the beast withdraws from the kill.

Ragnvald stands over the fallen champion, twitching in a pool of black blood. He hefts his thunder hammer and brings it down, shattering the crimson helm and breaking the bronze jaws. The movement ceases.

The beast stands at his side, quivering with hunt-anger, jowls running with blood, pelt clotted with ash and armour-shards.

Ragnvald remembers when he killed it. He remembers dragging the hot, heavy corpse to the iron mountain. He had been called something else then, but that was centuries ago and names of the old ice were no longer important.

He reaches down for the wolf’s nape and tugs his fingers through its thick fur. The creature growls and nuzzles against his armour.

It took a long time to make the beast anew – years at the forges, watched by the masters behind the masks. Now its teeth are iron, its spine adamantium, its eyes red orbs of sensor-bundles.

It is better now – his first creation, his favourite.

‘Come,’ Ragnvald growls, and wolf and master lope into the dark.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novel Scars and the Space Wolves novels Battle of the Fang and Blood of Asaheim. He has also written the Space Marine Battles novel Wrath of Iron, along with Schwarzhelm & Helborg: Swords of the Emperor and Luthor Huss in the Warhammer universe. He’s based in a leafy bit of south-west England, and when not struggling to meet deadlines enjoys running through scenic parts of it.

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Published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

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