By the same author

SPACE MARINE BATTLES: MALODRAX

SEVENTH RETRIBUTION

Space Marine Battles

HUNT FOR VOLDORIUS

THE PURGING OF KADILLUS

BATTLE OF THE FANG

THE GILDAR RIFT

LEGION OF THE DAMNED

ARCHITECT OF FATE

WRATH OF IRON

THE SIEGE OF CASTELLAX

THE DEATH OF ANTAGONIS

ARMAGEDDON

DAMNOS

DEATH OF INTEGRITY

Audio Dramas

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THE STROMARK MASSACRE

THE ASCENSION OF BALTHASAR

BLOOD IN THE MACHINE

VEIL OF DARKNESS

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It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

Let the fire burn low.

The time for feasting is done. You have all had your fill. Yes, even you Blood Claws, you young and violent pups who revel as hard as you fight! Even you. By day I am a mere thrall, my task to fix your wargear, maintain the Fang, labour in your forges and armouries, and do the drudge work that lets the Space Wolves focus entirely on war. But now, as the suns of Fenris drift us into twilight, as the shadows of the Great Hall gather like palls of night sky above us, now I am the voice that all must heed. Did not Leman Russ himself tell tales such as these, of the Emperor and the Great Crusade? Did he not command to heed the tellers of stories, be they mighty Wolf Lord or humble serf? So stoke not the fire until I am done, and let words take flight in the glow of its embers.

My tale this night is of Arjac Rockfist.

Yes, well might you cheer. Arjac, the mightiest of us all! A giant even among the Space Marines, the Anvil and the Hammer of Fenris! Many kegs of ale have been drained in toast to him. Even you Long Fangs, you who grumble and shake your heads at the antics of the Blood Claws, even you Grey Hunters who call yourself the backbone of our Chapter, even you will celebrate his name. Yes, Arjac Rockfist, Grimnar’s Champion! Many are the foes of the Allfather who curse his name in hel.

But this is not a tale of the crushing of the unrighteous at the far ends of the galaxy. No, this tale takes place here, on Fenris, the cold and heartless mother that gave birth to us all, home to the tribes which whelped each one of you. It unfolds in this very place, at the Fang, throne of Leman Russ, fortress of the Space Wolves. My words will take us even to this spot, the Great Hall.

Who will pour me a mug? I have much to say and my throat becomes dry. Thank you, Brother Hef. Now, let me see.

Yes, Arjac! Arjac was strong before he ever became a Space Wolf, before the Wolf Priests ever singled him out for elevation to your number. He was a child of prodigious strength and size, and the fathers of his people told him he would be a warrior. And indeed he was a terror on the battlefield. But truly his home was not there, but in the forge. There his great strength could bend the shafts of fangtree wood into yokes for the Fenrisian drakes that pulled his chieftain’s chariot.

His hammer blows could tame blades of titansteel into shape, and only with his sternness and strength of arm could the steeds of the mountain valleys be shoed for the cavalry of his people. Though many enemies fell to his hand in his youth, it was by his labour in the forges that his people were victorious and thrived.

Barely had Arjac returned from his Blooding when the Iron Priests near demanded he be apprenticed to them, to work hammer and anvil in the Forge Hills that form the lower slopes of the Fang.

His master then was Hengis Blackhand, High Iron Priest, and Arjac learned quickly. While his fellow Blood Claws, like all you raucous whelps, feasted and tested their strength, and the Wolf Priests were pressed to keep them from putting one another in the apothecarion, Arjac read the treatises on weapon-craft he hoped would make him worthy of the greatest relics in the Chapter armoury. He spent his time on Mars, that world of forges, as all who aspire to forge and repair the machines of war must do. Even among their strange rituals and inhuman Magi he was a prodigy of the anvil!

The Magi of the Red World claimed he had in him the potential to himself be High Iron Priest one day, though that would be centuries of labour and learning in the future. Many are the tales I could tell of his time at Mars, but for now I will speak of a time after he returned, apprentice to the High Iron Priest.

Everyone will be tested. This is the lesson that Fenris teaches us. We are tested first when we are born squealing and naked into her clutches, when she challenges us merely to survive. As we approach manhood we must pass her thousand tests of resolve and strength, of valour, intelligence, temperance and fury.

A Space Wolf is tested in another thousand trials, the greatest of which is the Blooding. You passed that test – I did not, as is evidenced by the limp with which I walk and the humble trappings of a thrall I wear instead of the carapace and armour of a Space Marine. And so it was that Arjac was tested, too. Hengis Blackhand summoned Arjac to the Heart Forge, that lava-fed pit of fire, the only place where Fenris’s fury can be kindled sufficient to forge the hardest and sharpest frost blade. Arjac attended his master there above the lava pit, ringed as it still is by its hundred anvils, on the lower slope of the Fang.

‘Arjac,’ said Lord Hengis. ‘Long have you laboured here, remaking the torn armour and broken blades of our Chapter. Your work is fine and long-serving. Your blades are honed sharp, and folded strong. But this is work for thralls. You may do the work of twenty men at the forge, but a Space Marine is worth a hundred men in battle. It is no great shame for a Space Wolf to labour at the anvil – indeed, each Iron Priest must do so for a year and a day before he is granted his servo-harness – but you, Arjac, are wasted on mundane wargear when the forge thralls could do that work.’

‘I value the service I can do to my Chapter,’ said Arjac, ‘and the honour that is done to me when my battle-brothers trust in the arms I have worked. But if you command that I withdraw from the forges and join my brothers in their revelry and brawling, then I shall, though I will miss the heat of the fires and the ringing of the anvil.’

‘No, Arjac, I do not ask that of you.’

Some of you knew High Iron Priest Hengis, those older among you. He was broad of girth and full of beard, which was red-brown and worn in braids. His face was ruddy and his voice as deep as the mountain’s own rumble. He clapped Arjac on the back heartily, as was his way. ‘I ask that you take on the task of remaking the ancient relics of the Chapter, those that have lain broken for centuries now. Though we yearn to return such relics to the battlefield, the reverence in which we hold them bids us to leave them be and not disturb their spirits with an imperfect remaking. But you, Arjac, have such a fineness of touch, such an understanding of steel, that perhaps you might be the first of us to take on this task. But to be sure, you must be tested.’

‘I will submit to any test, and may the Allfather guide me and the wolves of the night sky look with favour on it,’ said Arjac, for he was humble and would not say that he relished such a task or the opportunity to prove himself. How many of you, when given such a task, would celebrate that you had been chosen, or would cry out with words unsoft that no man might perform it better than you, or that the obstacle before you is as nothing? Most of you, I have no doubt. Not Arjac.

Hengis bade the forge thralls forth, carrying between them a suit of armour. It was Terminator armour, such as is granted to the most honoured of Wolf Guard.

Blessed are you who have earned the right to wear it! You are champions among champions. The armour was ancient, its grey ceramite plates inlaid with the most intricate knot work in brass and silver. Wolves hunted their prey through the spiralling pattern, battleships did war upon Fenris’s oceans, and the stars in the sky formed the constellations under which we were all born. Such was the workmanship of the armour presented to Arjac Rockfist.

‘This is the armour of Wolf Lord Torjek Granitebrow,’ said Hengis. ‘He was lost in the assault on Brehan IV, and though his body was recovered his armour never functioned again. See, how the servos are charred and useless! Alas, none have been able to repair them, for their riddles elude us. And these ceramite plates, on the shoulder and the greave. See how they are split and torn! Yet to repair it seamlessly is beyond any of us, for the work is so fine and intricate. To you, Arjac Rockfist, I give this task. Repair the armour of Torjek Granitebrow, and return it to our armouries that it might be granted to a hero of our future. This is the test I set before you.’

Arjac knelt and bowed in thanks, and took the armour and laid it on the anvil beside him. Without a word more he set about his work.

Some of you have heard of Torjek Granitebrow, for I have told his tale before, and much is the drinking and feasting on that occasion for it is a hearty and glorious tale indeed. Quiet, be calm! I shall tell that tale again, fear not, just not now. Now I speak of Arjac.

Arjac was thus presented with a stern test indeed. For many days he contemplated the armour of Torjek Granitebrow, seeking to understand it as much as to examine it. For many more days he performed the rituals learned on Mars to the machine-spirit of that armour, seeking to earn its respect and gain permission to work it. Never did he leave the edge of the Heart Forge, bathed in the heat welling up from Fenris’s very core.

How did he fix the servos? He meditated on them, following the path of every wire and circuit, until he could retrace them all in his mind. And he listened thereby to the wishes of the machine-spirit and followed them, rewiring the circuits with hands dexterous in spite of their size. Through turning his perception inwards, he unravelled that mystery.

And how did he forge the plates of the armour back into shape, without destroying the workmanship of that past age? He used his bare hands. Mighty hands, with a grip stronger than any man born to Fenris before or since, hands themselves forged upon the anvil as sure as any of his blades. With bloody and calloused fingers he forced the ceramite back into shape, and so the wounds were rendered invisible, the repairs seamless. Both meditation and reforging took months, during which time Arjac remained in the Heart Forge fed and watered by the forge thralls who had such great respect for the blacksmith as well as reverence for the warrior.

Thus it was that Arjac returned to the Great Hall of the Fang, where you sit now, where High Iron Priest Blackhand was feasting alongside the Great Wolf Logan Grimnar. They were celebrating battles to come, for at that time the Chapter was about to embark on the Calunian Crusade. Arjac was still smeared with soot, his skin singed from the Heart Forge’s heat, and he placed the armour of Torjek Granitebrow on the feasting table.

For an hour Blackhand examined the armour, a critical eye scouring every rivet and weld.

‘What do you see?’ asked Great Wolf Grimnar, at length.

‘I see the armour of Torjek Granitebrow,’ replied Hengis Blackhand.

Though few words, they were enough. Before, Hengis had seen a wreck, the corpse of mighty wargear inhabited by a miserable machine-spirit encased in ruined and unloving ceramite. But now it was a suit of armour again, a weapon of war, such as it had been before Torjek fell.

Great was the cheer! Gone was the ale! The return of the relic to the Chapter vaults was a good portent for the crusade to come, and so the Space Wolves waxed merry. Arjac Rockfist did not feast with them, though he spilled a mug of ale in honour of the fallen and accepted the plaudits of his battle-brothers with grace. He was a humble man, as I have said.

‘Feast and sing, Brother Arjac,’ said Great Wolf Grimnar. ‘This is a great day, and a great feat of yours that we applaud.’

‘I am glad that I have served my Chapter,’ said Arjac, ‘and truly it is this that makes me happy. But these are the achievements of but one man. It is when we all fight together and win some mighty victory that I truly feel the most joy. When we have won our crusade and many foes of the Allfather are ground beneath our feet, then perhaps I shall sing of our greatness.’

‘Alas, Brother Arjac!’ cried Grimnar. ‘I must bring you news that you will not relish. For you will not join us on our crusade.’

Who can say whether Arjac felt sorrow in that moment? None save Arjac himself, who does not discuss such things, at least not with a lowly thrall such as I. He did not show it, but instead bowed his head in deference to the authority of the Great Wolf. ‘Then how,’ said he, ‘shall I serve instead?’

It was Hengis Blackhand who answered. ‘The armour of Torjek Granitebrow was a test for you, as you have no doubt concluded yourself. But it was a test to decide if you were to be given another very specific task. Tell me, Brother Arjac, what manner of relic, were it wielded today, would bring the greatest dread to our enemies?’

‘There is no relic that causes such fear,’ said Arjac without hesitation. ‘Save that which is wielded by a Space Wolf in battle. The battle-brother who bears it is the true cause of our enemies’ dread. So I will say that which the greatest of us carries, and that is the Axe Morkai borne by our Great Wolf Grimnar.’ At this Arjac bowed his head in deference to Grimnar, who looked on.

‘And so it shall be!’ bellowed Hengis. ‘For great was the sorrow when, upon the Chapter’s last voyage into war, the Axe Morkai was shattered!’

Who among you here has heard that tale? Ah, not a few of you I see. Yes, for my tale takes place shortly after the duel our Great Wolf had with the Mad Butcher of the Gorgavian Maw, that lord of the greenskins who, like all before him and since, thought himself the one to unite the orkish hordes and dominate the galaxy. His quest ended beneath the blade of the Axe Morkai!

Alas, that greenskin warlord was blessed by his savage gods with a skull thicker than the armour of a Rhino tank. The axe shattered even as the ork’s skull was crushed. So the Great Wolf was victorious, but the Axe Morkai, that mighty relic he had carried for centuries, was broken.

‘A weapon for the Great Wolf,’ said Grimnar. ‘For I seek to wield it again. Our foes tremble when they hear the howling of our pack approach, and I would give the keenest edge to their fear when I brandish the Axe Morkai before we charge. From the shards of the axe the relic will rise anew, and its spirit will once more taste the blood of our enemies!’

Who can say what thoughts might run through the mind of a Space Wolf who is given a work of such great import, and yet must withdraw from the sacred battlefield to see it done? Again, only Arjac can say, and again, a thrall such as I has no right to ask. The answer will be found in you, Space Wolves, who so love to fight.

By answer, Arjac said only this: ‘Then I must leave this gathering, and go to the armoury. For the Axe Morkai’s machine-spirit will be eager to see its new birth. With your leave, Great Wolf, and yours, High Iron Priest.’

So Arjac watched the Space Wolves Chapter leaving in their Thunderhawk gunships as he worked in the forges of the Fang’s lower slopes. What a heartening sight, to see the Chapter aloft, heading for the fleet in orbit that they might go to war! But Arjac must have felt such sorrow to see them go without him, and yet taken comfort from the knowledge that he would create a legacy for the whole Chapter in the reforging of the Axe Morkai.

At that time, the Fang was held by a ceremonial guard of a single Grey Hunters squad. This was Squad Fornjot, whose heraldry you can see there among the hundreds hung about the Great Hall. There, above the fireplace. The skeletal paw over the three mountains, on a field of yellow and red. The personal heraldry of the pack leader, Fornjot Halfenhelm. He was sorrowful also, as were the brothers of his pack, for they would be denied their part in the Calunian Crusade. But his orders were from the Great Wolf, and he was obedient as any wolf must be to the alpha of his pack.

‘Whatever you require of my Grey Hunters,’ said Fornjot to Arjac, as he visited the forge slopes, ‘I shall see to it that one of us or the thralls shall provide it to you.’

‘Then I have a task that only one of your pack may fulfil,’ said Arjac. ‘Look upon the shards of the Axe Morkai upon this anvil. Have you heard tell of its origin?’

‘I have,’ said Fornjot. ‘It was once carried by a champion of Chaos, beholden to the Fell Powers. He was defeated by the Great Wolf in his youth, when but a young warrior of our Chapter. He took the axe as a trophy and has carried it ever since.’

‘Indeed,’ said Arjac. ‘But that is not all there is to the tale. First the axe had to be tamed, for it was tainted with the sins of he who had carried it before. None can say what innocent blood was shed, or what terrible blasphemies it witnessed. The Great Wolf wrestled with its machine-spirit for a hundred days, they say, before the axe was cleansed and safe for him to carry. And so it must be purified again, and reconsecrated, before it can be remade.’

‘And how can such corruption be held at bay?’ asked Fornjot. He looked at the shattered weapon with eyes anew, for now he understood why the Great Wolf had carried it – to show that even the debasement of the Dark Gods and their followers cannot stay the hand of a Space Wolf.

‘Anointment with the blood of a Space Wolf shall consecrate this blade,’ said Fornjot. ‘But not just any battle-brother. I must do as Lord Grimnar did when he first conquered the weapon’s corrupted spirit, and anoint it with the blood of the Primarch Leman Russ himself! A vial of it lies in the gene-seed vault, and I need it to continue my work.’

‘Then I shall bring it myself,’ said Fornjot. ‘Ha! This at least is some consolation! Still I would rather be fighting, for I love nothing more than to rend unrighteous flesh with my claws and my teeth! But to carry a relic such as Russ’s own blood will be something.’ Fornjot flashed a savage smile. Perhaps he had never truly left the ways of the Blood Claw, aggressive and headstrong, behind him, and perhaps that was why his Wolf Lord had selected him to lead a Grey Hunters pack. While the Grey Hunter should be level-headed and serve as an example to the Blood Claw pups, yet they must also keep that steel and blood-hunger in their souls.

Do you think it an insult that a thrall should tell a hall full of Space Wolves how a Space Wolf should fight? From your growls I suppose that it must be. But I can say these things, and you must hear them. Such is the privilege of the tellers of tales.

So Fornjot brought a vial of Russ’s blood to the Heart Forge, where Arjac worked. The Axe Morkai lay on his anvil as Arjac contemplated it. Though it was shattered, its great crescent blade deeply cracked and its starmetal haft split apart, still it seemed a terrible thing, the killing power of a storm or a volcano’s eruption bound in the shape of a weapon. In the carvings along the trophy halls you can see it, held in the Great Wolf’s paw as he smites legions of greenskins or armies of traitors. This was what Arjac contemplated as he made ready to activate the Axe Morkai’s power field and study its spirit.

Fornjot’s pack was a reliable and sturdy band, not given to riotous feasting or brawling among themselves as some are. Fornjot himself, as I have said, was their spirit of savagery, and they held his predator’s instincts back as much as he led them. Brother Vidfinn carried the pack’s meltagun, for he had once faced an Abyssal Wurm on his Blooding and had not taken one step back from it. Thus it was that they trusted him to stand his ground even as the greatest engines of war approached close enough to use his weapon. Truly there was nothing that elicited more than a raised eyebrow from Brother Vidfinn, be it alien, abomination or act of blasphemy.

Brother Anvakyr was a war-poet and wrote down the pack’s exploits. Fast with words was he, faster even than with his boltgun, though he was a fine enough shot.

Brothers Dvarnn and Brokkyr had been brought to the Fang on the same day, from the same tribe, and some wondered if they were literally brothers. Each one carried a lightning claw which had been forged and wielded as a pair, and when they fought, they did so in concert, with the same certainty that the right hand feels of the left.

Their packmate was Svalin, and if Fornjot was the pack’s savagery, Svalin was their reason. A veteran who had not passed into the ranks of the Long Fangs or been elevated to the Wolf Guard, he wished to live out his days as a Grey Hunter where his wisdom would serve as the pack’s keenest weapon.

This, then, was Pack Fornjot, the only Space Wolves in the Fang save Arjac Rockfist. And we must not forget the Chapter thralls who laboured there also. How easy it is for you to forget them entirely! As if we were invisible spirits that tended to your fortress-monastery, like the nixies and trolls of Fenrisian myth!

Do you think that we blink into existence to clean up the wreckage of your feasting, or polish the trophies of the paw prints you leave on them, or mop the blood from the duelling circles? No! The Fang is our home just as it is yours, though you see us not when we go by. Though many had left with the Chapter on their crusade, still there were countless thralls in the Fang when Pack Fornjot had watch over it.

On the battlements of the Fang stood Brother Anvakyr. His wargear rites and duelling drills completed, he had now the sliver of the day that a Space Marine has to himself, where his own thoughts might hold court.

Anvakyr came here often, to the defences and sally ports that stud the upper slopes of the Fang, where all the majesty of Fenris unfolds for a hundred miles. In the light of the dusk the crevasses of the foothills were edged in the red of the dying sun. The polar lights hung in shimmering curtains, like waterfalls of many-coloured fire that poured over the stars just starting to emerge. Distant glaciers seemed covered in fields of red. And the ocean lapped at the lowest slopes where the forges smouldered, for on one side the Fang is a sheer cliff that looms over the black depths. The air was cold and good, and Anvakyr loved to inhale the tales of Fenris told in the chill air.

‘I shall write of this night,’ said he. ‘How it is that alone, when war is distant and even one’s packmates are at bay, then the truth of the universe can reach us. Just a syllable here, a note there, of what creation we truly inhabit, can reach us if we let it. Crone-Mother Fenris! I was born into cruel arms, your arms. Yet the galaxy is cruel, and so you taught me well. Father Fenris! I was raised a short cast away from death, your death, the death of your storms and your predators. But this galaxy is full of death, and so you taught me well. Brother Fenris! I was born into sorrow, for you watched over many good men and women lost, when I was spared. But this galaxy is full of sorrows, and through it I survived, for I was ordained to serve as a Space Marine. And so, Brother Fenris, you taught me well.’

‘Yes,’ said Brother Anvakyr, ‘I will write that down.’

But as he spoke, yet the instincts of the wolf did not leave him. Taught to him by Fenris, honed by the Wolf Priests and the sleep-taught lessons of our Chapter, they howled in his head.

Anvakyr knew in that moment he was not alone. He did not know what manner of enemy was upon him, be it razorhawk or Peak Render, but he knew it was no Space Wolf or thrall.

‘Show yourself!’ he cried, drawing his chainblade keen. ‘What fool is this, that thinks he can creep up on a Space Wolf? I hear you, the clicking of your claws on stone, or perhaps of a form armoured in scale or bone. I can smell you! Xenos, you are, for this stink is not of Fenris. And soon I will see you, and when that happens I will gut you alive! Show yourself, and at least die in open fight, if your kind has any honour to gain from it!’

No answer came. But the stink was clear. It was not the smell of the ocean or the mountains, or the winter wind. It was nothing that had ever been tracked by a predator across the snowdrifts of Fenris, nor ridden the storms of her skies. It was an alien.

Brother Anvakyr whirled around, seeking to perceive with his eyes what his nose told him was approaching. Upon the battlements he was alone, and he spied nothing living save for the birds of prey circling the peak overhead.

It was from above that it came. The rock of the Fang, caked in ice and streaked in grey and black, shifted and came alive – first like a rockfall, then like a sinuous predator rushing down the sheer rock as swiftly and surely as if it was on level ground.

Anvakyr’s nose told him it was coming. His ears picked out its claws on stone. He did not see it in time. He brought his chainblade up by instinct as it fell upon him.

Would that I could give Anvakyr a good death! Every Space Wolf should die one, a magnificent final stand atop a heap of the enemy dead, or a sacrifice of legend where he gives his life to save his brethren. These are the deaths that are supposed to end the best stories.

But alas, though I tell a tale, yet this tale must have some truth in it, and to give Brother Anvakyr a glorious death would be to deny that truth. You are not children. Though you hiss and snarl at me, you can cope with that truth, and you should hear it.

Brother Anvakyr did not die well. He will stand at the end of time, alongside Leman Russ in the battle where all the incarnations of Chaos will be scattered and driven from the galaxy. But he did not die well. So mourn him.

The thralls who came to the battlements with the dawn, to tend to the defence guns that loomed from their mountainside ports, found Brother Anvakyr’s body. His head was a ruin, frozen into a red bloom, his skull split several ways asunder. Claw gouges on the stone beside him told of the fury and swiftness with which death had come to him. His chainblade was still in his hand, and alas, on its teeth were no shreds of frozen alien flesh. He had died before he could strike any blow of his own. Yes, howl! Remember him with that dread keening! But soon, as is the way of things, let your sorrow become anger, for that was the anger that flooded the Fang.

The body was borne back into the Fang before the predators of the sky could fall on it. Fornjot carried it, for he was the leader of Anvakyr’s pack. Anvakyr was laid out under a shroud in the apothecarion. Fornjot bade all his brothers kneel by the body, and spoke a prayer seeing Anvakyr swiftly to the End Times.

‘And now,’ said Fornjot, ‘comes revenge. What beast did this, I do not know. But I do know that we will hunt it down. Chase it! Corner it! Butcher it and hang its carcass in the trophy hall! Dvarnn and Brokkyr, spread the word among the thralls that a predator has taken a Space Wolf. Whatever they see or hear that is out of place, I must hear of it. Svalin, go to the forge slopes and bring back Arjac Rockfist, for there he works. I would have another wolf in my pack for this hunt. The rest, stay with me, and we will prowl the Fang with our eyes open and our noses keen. Go! To the hunt, go!’

Word spread swiftly. Though you might not pay it any mind, the thralls of the Fang are drilled well in responding to a crisis such as an intruder in the Fang. We have our own leaders, our own patterns of readiness and war. Indeed, I myself was there, although then I was but young, barely recovered from my failed Blooding, and I played no part in what follows.

I remember there was no panic, just determination, just the knowledge that we were without the Chapter and had to act in the defence of the Fang ourselves. We broke open the arms lockers and each thrall took an autogun and a combat blade. Thane Morgharn was my superior and he had our maintenance crew watch the vents and tunnels, the places for pumping of water and waste where a predator might make entrance to the Fang.

We were brave, for one does not come to the notice of the Space Wolves without being among the most valiant of his tribe. But we knew we were not Space Wolves. If a hunter that could kill a Space Wolf fell amongst us, we would probably die. I felt then the fear of death, that final obstacle that can only be overcome when a pup becomes a Space Wolf.

It was known even then that we faced not a mundane intruder, such as some beast wandered in from the ice fields beyond the Fang. Our augurs, maintained and watched by us thralls, had not detected the life signs of any intruder, nor had the sensors scattered through the Fang that should have picked up the pheromones of a xenos. I know now why that was, for the intruder was a thing of cunning and deceit, in form created to fool all but the nose of a Space Wolf. But back then we fancied the Fang had become home to a ghost of Fenris’s past, one of the ancient kings who had clawed his way up from a frozen grave, mad with grief and anger. Would that it had been so! Rather would I have had us prey to a furious spectre than the predator truly among us. But I get ahead of myself.

Arjac had made progress in his work on the Axe Morkai. The shards of the Steel Glacier’s blade had been removed from the haft, rearranged and assembled as Morkai’s new blade, and Arjac had begun the work of forging them into a single arc of deadly steel.

He looked up as Brother Svalin approached through the snows that lay on the forge slopes. Working at the forges outside the Fang, between this great fortress and the ever-churning sea, Arjac had not yet heard of the commotion within.

‘Brother Arjac!’ cried Svalin. ‘One of us is lost. Brother Anvakyr of our pack. A predator has killed him, an alien by the smell of it. We are naught but one pack in the whole Fang. All are needed to hunt it down.’

Arjac was much beloved by the thralls who laboured on the forge slopes. Hundreds of them worked there – I might say lived there – hammering ceramite into shape, forging new components for boltguns. Arjac went to them and told them of what had happened, and that he was needed within the fortress.

‘Let us join you in the hunt!’ said Thane Darskaan, a master among the forge thralls who had assisted the Iron Priests for more than forty years. ‘Every one of us has forged his own weapon as a condition of our apprenticehood, and we would wield them in revenge.’

‘No,’ said Arjac. ‘You will stay here and man the forges, and watch for this enemy. If it flees through the forge slopes, it must not have an easy escape.’

Arjac took as a weapon the hammer with which he had worked on the Axe Morkai – in his youth among the Fenrisian tribes, he had learned there was no distinction between tool and weapon. He carried also a shield which hung above the Heart Forge. It was the masterpiece of a long-dead thrall, who had created it to show the pinnacle of his skills, and it was as strong as it was ornate. No thrall could carry it. In the hands of a Space Wolf it would be heavy and unwieldy, quite unsuitable for battle. But even then Arjac was renowned for his strength, and he hefted it as lightly as if it was made of wood and hide.

‘Brother Svalin,’ said Arjac when he was thus armed. ‘Where lies the quarry?’

And so Pack Fornjot and Arjac Rockfist set about hunting the xenos intruder through the Fang. The thralls held their ground and let the Space Wolves stalk their enemy. The alien was swift and cunning, and certainly deadly enough to slay even a Space Marine as it had showed. But like all aliens, like all unrighteous and unnatural things, it had a weakness from which it could not hide. The stench of the xenos. All you who have faced the alien know it! Let the Ultramarines consult their volumes of lore for how to seek the alien, let the Dark Angels torment answers from all they see and let the Blood Angels write poetry and drink blood. A Space Wolf will have already cornered his prey, for Leman Russ taught us to follow our noses! I know you can scarce imagine that there are Space Marines who cannot trail the foulest xenos by its stench, but it is true that our fellows in other Chapters are blind to everything their noses tell them. That is why they cannot hunt like a Space Wolf, as Pack Fornjot and Arjac hunted their quarry through the Fang.

Arjac and Fornjot both followed the same scent trail, one that wound through the lower levels of the Fang into the cells and workshops of the thralls. The stench may have evaded the pheromone sensors of the Fang, but to the Space Wolves it was clear as the path the shining moon leaves on a calm sea. The thralls waited at every intersection, grim-faced with their guns in their hands, for in that warren they might be attacked from any direction. In the youth of the Fang, when the mountain first grew from the surface of Fenris, those tunnels had been burrowed by lava that forced its way up. Now they were trackless and twisting, an excellent ground for an enemy to flee.

‘What manner of xenos do we face?’ asked Fornjot as he and Arjac followed the trail, though it wound through awkward turns and often leapt through narrow tunnels from one floor to the next where a man could not climb. ‘I have not smelled its like before.’

‘The body of Anvakyr tells us that it is swift and strong,’ said Arjac. ‘But more than that. It lies in ambush like the Rime Spider, which lurks in ice caves to leap upon pack beasts and travellers. It is clever and patient, but springs to the kill when the time is right. Without such qualities it would never have taken Anvakyr as swiftly as it did. It will seek to ambush us, I do not doubt, so we must be ready for it and strike first.’

‘Accursed luck!’ snarled Fornjot. ‘I have lost the trail. This place is like a nest of worms! It could have gone in a dozen directions from here.’

‘I have lost the trail as well,’ said Arjac. ‘Hurry! The longer we flounder here, the more of our blood shall stain the Fang!’

Thus the two, along with the other members of Fornjot’s pack, spread out through the lava warrens, seeking to pick up the scent trail again, always watching for places the unseen foe could spring at them. And a frustration came upon them, for nothing is as grave an insult to the hunter as the foe that gives them the slip.

‘Wait, Brother Fornjot!’ said Arjac, as he and Fornjot ran through the warrens trying to pick up the trail. ‘Let us pause for just a moment, and listen.’

‘I will waste no time!’ retorted Fornjot, but with a simple gesture, a hand on his shoulder pad, Arjac silenced him.

Dimly could be heard the sound of screaming.

Arjac and Fornjot followed the sound now, and with every second it seemed another voice was raised in terror and pain. They heard gunfire, and now, as they got closer, the crunch of bone and wet tearing of flesh. Ahead was an intersection of tunnels and Arjac saw now that the thralls had watched every exit except that which lay directly above them, a narrow passage winding to a level above. It was impossible for a man to climb up, and so they had not watched it as they had the passageways to the front and rear. But it was from there that death had come upon them, and it had been swift indeed.

The two Space Wolves saw blood on the stone walls, a gore that clung in wet clumps. A body had been ripped almost in two, stomach and chest laid open. A head had been torn from another corpse. One thrall still lived, his lower half a ruin, his last moments spent picking with trembling hands at the innards that pulsed from him. They were Chapter thralls, most of them dead before they had fired but a shot.

‘Does it kill to survive,’ said Fornjot as he witnessed this carnage, ‘or because it hungers?’

‘Or,’ said Arjac, ‘because it knows nothing but killing?’

Fornjot wrinkled his nose. ‘Its stench is strong,’ he said. ‘We have missed its escape, but it is close.’

Fornjot went armed with a lightning claw, and with a bolt pistol. Both had once been carried by Daegal Mountainclaw, his pack leader, and by the Wolf Guard Haarald Forkenbeard before him. They were fine wargear and had served the Chapter well before that day.

‘Where are you?’ demanded Fornjot. ‘I owe you a brother’s death, alien! Though I cannot tear my rage from your flesh, yet it will be some consolation to make you suffer a fraction of the pain I feel!’ A tear of rage glittered on Fornjot’s cheek. ‘I will put out your eyes, if you have them! I will cook your meat and tear it with my teeth, and spit it upon the floor!’

Fornjot now turned to Arjac, who had said nothing. ‘Why do you speak not?’ demanded Fornjot. ‘Do you not feel hate for the thing that killed Brother Anvakyr?’

‘I feel hate, my brother,’ said Arjac. ‘But I will not waste it speaking of it to an alien, who does not understand the hate that makes us human.’

‘Whatever it might be, it dies,’ said Fornjot.

How shall I speak of the speed with which it struck? No striking snake or diving sea-eagle was ever so swift. From the mouth of a tunnel overhead it darted, its hide speckled dark like the rock around it. Arjac saw it, but could command no response from his arm before it was upon Brother Fornjot.

In the gloom, Arjac could make out not its shape nor any suggestion of its species, for it was so swift and camouflaged so keenly it seemed to be the surrounding rocks taking shape and leaping upon Fornjot. He had but an impression of size, power, speed, sharpness and savagery of purpose. It struck not like the rampaging sporebear, with its clubbing fists of bony spurs, nor like the frost wolf which clamps home with its jaws and shakes its prey apart. Compared to such predators of Fenris it was a surgeon, with such purity and efficiency of movement and power that Fornjot was impaled on claw or mandible and lifted off his feet before Arjac could take a step forwards or cast his hammer forth.

Fornjot disappeared overhead, dragged up into the lava shaft. There Arjac could not pursue, for this alien predator, whatever it might be, moved as swiftly along a sheer wall or ceiling as along the floor. But Arjac did not despair, for he knew Fornjot and the voice he gave to his defiance.

‘I will suck out your eyeballs!’ yelled Fornjot, even surely as his flesh was rent. ‘And dance on your guts!’

Arjac followed Fornjot’s voice, taking twisting turn and switchback, ever heading upwards. Many were the threats that Fornjot made, most of them foul and base in nature but justified by the obscenity that is an alien on the sacred ground of the Fang.

‘Stand fast! Do not pursue!’ called out Arjac to the thralls he passed by, for he knew that if a Space Wolf could be taken by the creature then a thrall had no hope against it. No, it had to be he, Arjac, who faced it. He hoped Fornjot’s pack-brothers were close behind, but he could not pause for them to catch up.

Fornjot’s words became cries of anger and pain, and threatened to grow distant and quiet as the predator outpaced Arjac. Arjac knew the Fang well, but the alien had the use of the tunnels that looped up and down, beyond the capacity of a Space Marine to traverse. Here and there gunshots rang out as thralls took shots at the beast as it passed, but Arjac knew that none of them would find a fatal mark. The beast had to be his, and his alone, or two battle-brothers would go unavenged.

Arjac burst through into a hall of the Wolf Priests, where the altars to the unkind winds of Fenris stood to be placated with libations and prayer. The image of Leman Russ presided over the chapel, his mighty shoulders the pillars that supported the ceiling, his eyes set with dark glares of obsidian.

Here the wolf packs prayed under the Wolf Priests’ ministrations to the ancient spirits of Fenris, to our home world’s ancestors and our fallen packmates. A priest of the Ecclesiarchy might see this place and think us heathens, for we hold our own rites where they would have us genuflect in rote to an image of the Allfather. But a Space Wolf does not give his faith like a tithe upon demand. He prays because he seeks to commune with the mighty spirits of his Chapter, with the savage soul of his home world! Yes, spit upon the floor at the mention of the Ecclesiarchy dogs, but save the worst of your anger for the alien.

In this chapel Arjac caught up with the alien. It crouched upon the image of Leman Russ. Go there to this day and you will see the marks of its claws, the scars of the acid it belched, disfiguring still the primarch’s image! Though its colours shifted to match its surroundings, Arjac had his first true sight of the alien and saw its four long, wicked claws, as long as a man is tall, and on the lower two impaled the body of Fornjot.

Fornjot was alive. He fought to draw breath, to spit one final hateful oath at the alien, one final promise of a gory and dishonourable death for its trespasses. But the final two claws punched through his body, through his armour as if it was no stronger than skin, and with a single terrible effort of its limbs the alien ripped Fornjot in three.

The eyes set into the alien’s skull, reddish, glinting spheres, many in number, focused on Arjac for a moment, as if issuing a challenge or seeking to mock the death of Brother Fornjot.

Arjac drew back his arm and hurled his hammer. The alien was quick, and the hammer missed. Look again on the image of Leman Russ in the chapel and you will see the chunk missing from his breastplate, where Arjac’s hammer splintered the stone! The alien was upon the ceiling, and Arjac was without a weapon to cast before it slithered up the statue, through a fissure in the rock of the ceiling, and into the trackless strata of the Fang.

Arjac walked across the chapel, unable to meet the obsidian gaze of Leman Russ. He stood over the body of Fornjot and howled in grief and anger, and in shame that he had failed to save the life of his battle-brother.

Howl, as he did! There, see the arms of this brave pack leader, and cleanse your souls of the uncleanness of his death with the purity of his dying rage! But do not give in to your sorrow, for Fornjot did not die as prey, but as a fellow predator struggling for his revenge. He had struck one final blow, even as his body was pierced by the alien’s claws. One of them lodged in his body, and as he was torn apart it snapped off and remained jammed in his ribcage.

Arjac looked upon his dead brother and saw the claw. He knelt and tore it from the body. The thralls who followed the sounds of death found him there, the alien’s claw in hand, tears in his eyes and sorrow on his face, as he bowed his head over the corpse of Brother Fornjot.

The beast had fled, as the xenos is wont to do, like a scurrying animal afraid of the predator. Alas, the Fang is ancient and vast, and though it serves us well as our fortress and our warrior-monastery there are many tunnels and caverns unmapped or forgotten where a creature of base cunning could hide. The thralls sent out parties to locate it, searching for its leavings or a trail of its blood, but they could find it not.

Pack Fornjot carried their leader from the thralls’ warrens, bearing his corpse on their shoulders. Wordlessly they bore him to the Chapter apothecarion, and with Arjac they stood about his corpse. There he was laid out on the slab, among the autosurgeons and the thrall orderlies that could do nothing to help him now.

‘Svalin,’ said Vidfinn at last. ‘You should speak. Were any of us to fall, it would be Fornjot himself who would speak of the fallen’s valour. Should Fornjot be lost, the duty would surely fall to Anvakyr. But both are gone, and you, Svalin, as the oldest, are best to give voice to our sorrow.’

What could Svalin say? He was not a man given to speeches or sagas. No, he was a simple warrior, who aspired to nothing more than a life of righteous war.

‘Fornjot will be mourned,’ said Svalin, ‘for as long as we shall live. And we shall speak of him to our brothers, so he shall live on in word and memory forever, until we meet him again at Russ’s side. More than words will pass on. His wargear will be distributed among the newest Blood Claws, and more than that, his gene-seed, the very flesh of the primarch, will be implanted into a new battle-brother and help turn him from a mere man into a Space Marine. There is no more glorious legacy. That is all there is to say, save for to bid our brother farewell.’

And so, in the absence of a Wolf Priest, the thrall orderlies set to removing the wargear and the gene-seed from Brother Fornjot’s corpse, as they had to Anvakyr but a day before.

‘To think,’ said Svalin to Arjac, ‘that when a Space Wolf imagines death, he sees only death in combat with the foes of mankind, in a hail of bullets or a flurry of claws, atop a mountain of the enemy’s dead. And yet two of our brothers have been lost not in the fires of war but slain by deceit by a faceless foe. We should be the predators, not the prey! We are the hunters, not the quarry! How difficult it is to understand that a Space Wolf might die thus!’

‘Is a man judged,’ said Arjac, ‘by his death alone? Does a death not in battle erase a lifetime’s service? Anvakyr was not just a fine soldier, but a rare soul. I cannot imagine the way a mind must work to spin words such as he did. His death will go unsung of, but does that make his life similarly worthy of forgetting? And Fornjot will never cease to be your pack leader, though he did not die leading you in battle as any pack leader would wish. It is impossible now, when his death is so raw to you, but in time perhaps you will come to remember him in life and not in death.’

‘I hope you speak true,’ said Svalin. ‘And a Space Wolf, any soldier, must learn to accept the deaths of his brothers in battle or succumb himself to despair. But it is easy to speak of such things and not so simple to believe them, when the body still lies before us torn and bloody.’

Then one of the orderlies spoke up. He was, like all of us, a man who goes about the Fang ignored by the Space Wolves, and spoke up now in a voice so quiet even Svalin’s enhanced hearing barely registered him.

‘Brother Svalin,’ said the thrall, whose name none recorded. ‘We are troubled. Please, come and see.’

The thralls led Svalin to the table on which Fornjot’s corpse lay. It was a pitiful sight, a state to which no warrior should ever be reduced. He was torn into three, the claws of the alien having separated his shoulders and head from his torso, and cut his body in two at the height of the navel. His armour had yet to be removed, and the ceramite had been sheared clean through. The thrall indicated the incision the thralls had already opened up in Fornjot’s throat.

‘Where is my brother’s gene-seed?’ demanded Svalin, for he was looking into the part of the throat that served as the seat of that organ.

‘It is gone,’ said the thrall. ‘It was not there when we searched for it. But there is a wound inside the mouth where something has punched down through the tongue, and something has extracted the gene-seed through there.’

‘Did the xenos do this?’ asked Svalin, his face darkening as he turned to Arjac.

‘I cannot tell,’ said Arjac. ‘His death was swift and the alien camouflaged by some xenos trick. Yet it had mouthparts like an insect, I think, and certainly could have done this.’

Svalin drove a fist into the slab on which his dead brother lay, and the stone cracked. ‘Is it not enough to slay us where we should reign as lords?’ he cried. ‘Is it not enough? Must our dead be stripped of their legacy, too? Must not only one brother die, but the ascension of another be denied? I thought this alien was a beast, an animal that hunted by instinct and not malice, and yet it does to our dead that which is most hateful to us!’

Svalin tore an autosurgeon unit off the ceiling, that device of many limbs and sharp blades which can knit together sundered flesh and organ. He hurled it across the apothecarion, and thralls scattered from him. He knelt on the floor and tore at his hair, and his fingers drew blood. He howled so loud and long that the whole Fang shook with it, and flocks of mountain raptors took flight in alarm.

Vidfinn stood forth. ‘This rage we all feel,’ he said, and true, even this unshockable warrior had flinty tears in his eyes. ‘And it shall find its channel in the pursuit of the hunt. Arm yourself, Brother Svalin, take up bolter and chainsword once more. No corner of the Fang will be left unscoured. The hunt will continue and the prey will be taken.’ His voice was glacial and his fist clenched. He did not cry out or rage as Svalin had done. For Vidfinn, hatred was something silent and steely, and colder than the ocean depths.

Pack Fornjot set about their grim and bloody work, but Arjac Rockfist did not join them, not right away. In their sorrow and anger they did not admonish him for not running alongside them in the hunt. They forgot him, as men are wont to do, for in spite of his size and the fabled strength of his arm Arjac speaks little and shouts less, and in the fires of their wrath the other Space Wolves ignored him. Instead Arjac went to the trophy hall of the Fang.

How many tales have I told that made some reference to that hall? Every great exploit of our Chapter’s heroes put a new exhibit in the trophy hall. How often do I speak of some foe vanquished, and add that you still can see the claw of this ork warlord or the skull of that eldar pirate, hung among the banners and captive arms? A teller of tales such as I must know the trophy hall as well as he knows his own stories, for surely some Blood Claw will find him in passing and say to him, ‘This trophy I saw among the spoils of our conquests, what story lies behind it?’

Indeed, to me the place is not merely a room of captured objects, but a history book telling the tale of our Chapter. The tooth of the Lion, Primarch of the Dark Angels, knocked out of his smirking head by Russ’s own fist? It is in the trophy hall, preserved in the heart of a fat ruby set into a sceptre. The war crown of Salvardis the Silver, cohort of Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, beaten by Wolf Lord Gorri Sunderblade into divulging the darkest secrets of that traitor legion? It is mounted on the wall, surrounded by a blessed cage that keeps its baleful energies locked away. Truly there is not a single shell casing or banner scrap that does not have its own saga behind it. Find me in an accommodating mood, as I wander through that hall, and I could bend your ear for hours with the tales that come to me unbidden.

Arjac, then, went to this hall, and to a corner of it where there stood a skeleton. On one side of this skeleton was hung the wargear of a Venenum Assassin, who infiltrated the Fang to assassinate Wolf Lord Gunnar White-of-Claw and was instead uncovered and killed. On the other side was the skull of the Beast of Karchadan, a xenos of immense cunning whose vast brain was once held within that misshapen globe of bone. But the skeleton that Arjac sought out had none of the history of these relics.

The skeleton stood rather taller than a Space Wolf, and spoke of an alien creature of great strength with its torso armoured in bone and its limbs strong of sinew. It resembled something like a huge lizard that walked on two legs, something like an insect with its exoskeleton, but with a great deal about it that could only be alien. It had great slashing claws, and Arjac examined these very closely.

He had with him the claw that he had taken from the body of Pack Leader Fornjot, the claw broken off from the predator that had invaded the Fang. Even now Pack Fornjot was seeking to track the beast down, but Arjac was pursuing his own hunt here.

The claw was very similar to that of the skeleton in the trophy room. The tip of the skeleton’s claw was broken off, and in cross-section Arjac saw that they were identical. Arjac thought long on this, for it presented a conundrum.

The skeleton in the trophy room was of a tyranid. Who among you has faced the tyranids, the minions of the accursed Kraken whose hive fleets darken the skies of the Imperium? Yes, your faces crease with the anger of those memories, you stare down into your tankards and recall the seething on the horizon as the tyranids swarmed forth. Is there any xenos so hateful?

And yet, this truth was a strange one. For if the intruder in the Fang was a tyranid, it was far from its fellows. Fenris lies far from the invasion routes of the tyranid hive fleets, and though our world has been embattled in its history it was never preyed upon by the Kraken. How could a tyranid come to be on Fenris? No hive fleet could approach without the Chapter having good warning of it, for in Fenris’s solar system hang monitoring stations and planetary defence platforms that ensure we will never be blind to an approaching foe. And moreover the tyranid is a creature that attacks in hordes, great swarms without number to overwhelm the enemy with their untold billions. A single tyranid is a thing unheard-of on the battlefield. Like the vermin they are, they are never found alone.

Brother Vidfinn meanwhile descended into the pits of the Fang, those nameless levels below the generatoria and the ancient tribal tombs, where the refuse of the fortress gathered in the dark. Shoulder-deep in ancient filth, he sought the beast. Brother Svalin clambered the upper slopes, seeking the alien even as raptors circled him as if he were prey. Dvarnn and Brokkyr went among the thralls, leading them in scouring the living places and dusty old halls of the fortress, the titanic armaplas gates and the mighty battlements that no foe had ever breached. But they had been breached now, by a lone killer, and it was holy work to expunge the intruder.

Arjac still did not join them. How, you might say, could he refrain from the hunt when the quarry was still abroad, when there were sons of Fenris to be avenged? Because, my brothers, there is more than one way to hunt.

Indeed, a Blood Claw only knows one, for what is there to him save charging headlong into the enemy and rending it with tooth and claw? And it is good that he knows only this, for it makes him strong in the thick of battle. But he who lives to serve as a Long Fang, or who comes to lead his battle-brothers in the Wolf Guard, knows that the hunt is not always pursued on foot. Sometimes, the quarry must be hunted through the forests of the mind and across the endless glacier of reason.

Yes, scoff if you will. Why would you listen to a thrall, a man maimed in his Blooding and fit only to mop the floor after your feasting? But remember. Leman Russ stood in this very hall, before this very hearth, and decreed that the man who sat before it and span the sagas of Fenris would be heeded whoever he might be. Thus I must be shown the same respect you would show Bjorn the Fell-Handed if he awoke and lumbered in here, with all the thunder and majesty of his ancient Dreadnought form. So jeer and heckle all you will, I know you still must listen.

Arjac went seeking not the beast, for if it could be found Pack Fornjot would surely find it. Instead he went seeking knowledge. Now, there is plenty of knowledge in the Fang. Since the days of the Great Crusade the Iron Priests and Rune-crafters have gathered information on the foes of the Allfather, and written sagas of our history. But we are not scholars! We are not librarians! In the Fang lie countless chambers and vaults where such knowledge was kept, from data-slates to ancient tomes and tablets of granite inscribed with the legends of Fenris. It is no easy task to seek out a particular answer in the Fang, and the Rune Priests who knew best where to find them were away on the Calunian Crusade. But Arjac sought it anyway.

For a day and a night Arjac laboured in the libraries of the Fang. Though it was no onerous task of the body, as working at the anvil might be, nevertheless it was taxing on the mind. Arjac wrought his wargear not just with his hands, though, but with keenness of perception and quickness of wits. Finally, by the light of a guttering candle, he read the name Kryptmann on the spine of a cracked and ancient book bound with xenos scale and blessed iron bands.

As the dawn of Fenris broke, her pale light flowing across the glaciers and breaking against the slopes of the Fang, the hunters gathered here, in this hall. There was no feast laid out for them that day. They were solemn, and still in mourning. Arjac joined them there, and with him he had brought two items. One was covered in a sheet stained with oil and ash, laid out on one of the feasting tables. The other was the book of Kryptmann.

‘Alas,’ said Brother Svalin, who with Fornjot’s death had acted as pack leader in the hunt. ‘The quarry eludes us! Though swift we were, and rageful, there was no foe that would stand before us to be fought. The alien is a creature devoid of honour, even of hatred, and so is frustrating to hunt. Even the savage beast of glacier and valley will turn on you when it is wounded, or cornered. This accursed thing lies silent, waiting for another victim, and will not be brought to battle.’

‘We have not yet finished the hunt,’ retorted Brother Dvarnn. ‘We will pursue it ever more fiercely! Let us be bloody and righteous! Tear the Fang apart, leave it no hiding place!’

‘My brother speaks my own mind,’ said Brokkyr, for the two were always in agreement. ‘We are but a few, and so we must make up our number with the fires of our fury!’

‘No,’ said Arjac, and the other Space Wolves were silent. With just that word he caused all to turn to him, as if an elder of the pack, grey-pelted and massive, had walked in to take over the hunt. ‘This is the book of Kryptmann,’ he said, holding up the tome. ‘He was an inquisitor who made study of the Kraken when the hive fleets first plagued the Imperium.’

‘The Kraken?’ asked Vidfinn. ‘Speak on, Brother Arjac. No tyranid has ever been seen within light centuries of Fenris.’

‘And yet I believe it is a tyranid we face,’ said Arjac. ‘As unlikely as it might be, we can all agree the enemy is no native of Fenris, and in the form and composition of its body it resembles a tyranid more than anything. But the tyranid is not so simple a foe as we imagine. It is not a simple scavenger, aimed at our galaxy by some cosmic accident. No, its presence here is a deliberate act of predation, planned over thousands of years drifting in interstellar space.

‘This was Kryptmann’s theory, as I have read. On the world of Tiamet, explorators encountered aliens resembling the tyranids four millennia before Hive Fleet Behemoth. On Ouroboris, but centuries later, our own Chapter attended to a xenos invasion where they recorded the form of the tyranid, though they did not give it that name.

‘Kryptmann believed the tyranids had sent organisms ahead of the hive fleets to scout our galaxy, and call through the hive mind that we were fit for invasion, and that some such organisms had been present in our galaxy for thousands of years before the hive fleets. Many examples he cited, from Ymgarl to Balthusas. What if Fenris is another on that list? A world visited by a tyranid scout, one that now hunts us?’

Now, this was quite something to be said. It flew in the face of what the Space Marines taught of fighting the Kraken, for Kryptmann was not a man well respected by the Chapter Masters as is often the case with agents of the Inquisition. But the Space Wolves are not so closed-minded as our brother Chapters, and Pack Fornjot did not shout down Arjac’s assertions out of hand as might have happened in another fortress-monastery.

‘If what you say is true,’ said Brother Svalin, ‘and I do not say it is – if what you say is true, how does it help us kill it?’

‘That is the second question I asked myself,’ said Arjac. ‘The first question was, why did it come to the Fang?’

Pack Fornjot thought on this, and none of them could be certain of an answer. Nevertheless, Brother Brokkyr spoke up.

‘The tyranid craves biomass,’ he said. ‘The material of muscle and bone, and of all living things on a world. There are hundreds of thralls in the Fang for it to consume.’

‘Indeed, brother, it is this biomass they want,’ said Arjac. ‘This much I learned from Kryptmann’s book, too. But the alien we hunt is not one of the great harvester-beasts vomited from the bellies of the hive fleets to strip a world of its life. No, it more closely resembles the creature named the lictor by the inquisitors of the Ordo Xenos, a scout and assassin that takes no part in the digestion of a planet. And there are places on Fenris far more tempting for a hungering tyranid. Why not the tundra where thunder million-head herds of storm elk? Or the places where the fathom whales come to spawn, thousands of them teeming upon the polar shores? There are no Space Wolves there to defend its quarry. And yet, here it is. It wants something that can only be found in the Fang, something craved by the tyranid hive fleets of which this creature is the herald.’

‘Then what?’ asked Brokkyr and Dvarnn as one.

‘The blood of the Allfather,’ said Arjac. ‘The flesh of the primarch. The gene-seed.’

I see hands touch your throats. Yes, the gene-seed, that organ grown from the genetic template of Leman Russ who was, in turn, made after the Emperor. Each gene-seed organ is a relic of the primarch and of the Allfather, as sacred as the bones of the most famous of saints. And it is a weapon as potent as any you might carry into battle, for it is what makes your transformation into a Space Wolf possible. That feeling you have now, that sense of the blasphemous when the flesh of Russ is threatened by the predations of the alien, that is perhaps the closest a Space Marine can come to feeling fear.

Though the institutions of the Imperium have long sought to test and probe it, our store of gene-seed has remained sacrosanct, for the use only of our Wolf Priests. The Inquisition has demanded entry to the Fang’s gene-seed vault and the Ecclesiarchy declaimed our jealousy of it, but none have laid hand or eye on it except the Space Wolves.

Those of you who have seen the vault know of its antiquity and majesty, as sacred as the most honoured temple, a monument to the primarch and the Emperor. Those who have not, know that it is reached through the apothecarion, down a processional lined with the armour of great Space Wolves who asked that their wargear guard over our most precious resource.

The vault itself is within the heart of the mountain, carved into the metal that runs down the spine of the Fang, an alloy of fantastic strength forged in some volcanic event an aeon ago. And within, past the great circular stone which only a Dreadnought can roll aside, is the vault kept chill and clung with frozen mist where the gene-seed waits in a thousand glass vessels for the next Space Wolf to be selected from the sons of Fenris.

‘Think,’ said Arjac, ‘of what we know. An organism such as this hunter is a vanguard and a herald. It seeks out worlds and, when it has found one suitable, it sends out a mental signal to the hive mind of its parent fleet, to summon the tyranids in their numberless hordes. Perhaps on a more populous world, or one covered in living jungle or otherwise teeming with life, it would seek out the greatest concentration of life. But on Fenris the tyranid looks not for quantity of biomass, but quality. The purest genetic matter with the greatest potential, that can be used even in the smallest amounts to create ever greater warriors for the hive fleets. On Fenris, there is only one thing the tyranid could seek. It wants the gene-seed of the Space Marines. That is why it tore the gene-seed out of Brother Fornjot. That is why it came to the Fang in the first place.’

Brother Svalin it was who stood forwards now. ‘You did not answer my brother here,’ he said. ‘How do we kill it?’

‘We lure it to the gene-seed vault,’ said Arjac. ‘There we know it will be. There we can fight it as one, on our terms, in ambush. There we can avenge our brothers.’

‘Lead it to the vault?’ said Vidfinn, and though it was a rare thing to be seen his face was flushed with anger. ‘Bring it to such sacred ground and give it the very thing it craves? Can we risk the Chapter’s very existence, the creation of future Space Wolves, with such recklessness?’

Arjac did not anger as Vidfinn did, but remained calm. ‘Can we allow it to roam at will, to kill us one by one, until there is none to oppose it? And then let it find the vault on its own? How long will that take? And can the thralls stop it from getting in? Only we can kill it, my brothers, and only together. This is the only way.’

Would that the Great Wolf was there, and his Wolf Lords and all the mighty war-packs of the Chapter! But Arjac and Pack Fornjot were alone save the thralls who, valiant though they were, could not hope to stand against a hunter that had made the Space Marines its prey. And Vidfinn cast his eyes down, like the packmate who has challenged the alpha and found the alpha not willing to back down. There were no words spoken and no triumph on Arjac’s face. The pack knew he was correct. There was only one way – lure the hunter to the vault, and there kill it, before it killed all of them.

‘And we do not fight with empty hands, my brothers,’ said Arjac. The second object that Arjac had brought with him lay under the sheet. Now he took the sheet away to reveal there the Axe Morkai.

The Axe Morkai had been remade, and yet was not the lesser for it. The weapon that Arjac Rockfist now carried was the equal of any seen in the Fang within the memory of the living. The Axe Morkai had a two-headed blade, each a brutal hard-edged shape that spoke of nothing but death. Into its blade was etched the wolf rampant that was the Great Wolf’s heraldry, and a square-cut emerald the size of a fist was set between the blade’s halves. It was too large for any to wield without the enhanced strength of Terminator armour – save for Arjac himself.

Arjac led Pack Fornjot to the head of the processional leading to the gene-seed vault, where glowered the images of past Great Wolves as if judging all who walked by. ‘It is good that you are armed for once,’ said Svalin. ‘I had envisioned you engaging this beast with fists and teeth.’

‘And so I shall, if needs be,’ replied Arjac, though Svalin’s words had been meant in grim jest.

From the apothecarion came Dvarnn and Brokkyr, each one bearing a lightning claw that together formed the matched pair. ‘The path is clear to the vault,’ Brokkyr said. ‘The blast doors are open from here to the Great Hall. All that remains is to open the vault itself.’

Arjac walked to the door of the vault. It was not a door in truth, but a circular slab of rock that lay in front of the vault entrance. The names of long-dead Wolf Priests were carved into the slab, along with their hundreds of heraldries.

Arjac leaned the Axe Morkai against the wall, at the feet of one of the suits of armour. He placed his shoulder against the edge of the slab and pushed.

None but a Dreadnought had ever shifted that door. But against the might of Arjac, it shifted. The brothers of Pack Fornjot ran to help him, when they saw the stone first move. Together, Arjac’s strength the greater part of their effort, they rolled the stone aside and opened the door to the gene-seed vault.

Now arrived Vidfinn, who had been organising the thralls to guard the approaches down which the beast might flee, and so Pack Fornjot’s survivors were assembled. Vidfinn normally carried the meltagun, but that is a weapon most fell against the tanks and armoured vehicles of the enemy. This beast was no such thing, and so from the armouries he had brought a boltgun with many examples of the artificer’s art, rapid firing and loaded with shells each containing a reservoir of vicious acid. Such Hellfire shells are praised by those who fight primarily against the alien, the spawn of the Kraken in particular.

‘Brothers of Fornjot,’ said Svalin, ‘pray now to the souls of our Chapter’s fallen. Pray now to the ancestor-souls of Fenris, to Leman Russ and the warriors of the Great Crusade, to the Crone Fenris herself, the Allfather who gave us purpose, to every battle-brother who has passed from our sight and to Brother Fornjot. We have no time to spill blood in sacrifice or to feast and toast their honour. Instead, let your prayers suffice. Let those honoured dead speak to us of their ways of war, whisper to us the weaknesses of the enemy and the strengths of our own arm. Let them lend us strength. Let them witness our vengeance, and salute our victory when we join them at the end of time!’

Each brother made his own prayer, letting his thoughts turn for a moment inwards to the memories of Fenris’s ancestors. But the majority of his mind was set like a hunter’s trap, assembled as they were in the processional where surely their enemy would approach.

‘There,’ hissed Brother Vidfinn. ‘I see it. I smell it. It approaches.’

The alien was disguised, and had evolved the shifting colours of its skin to match the stone of the Fang perfectly. But a Space Wolf could smell it out, and the faintest hint of movement was all the confirmation a Space Wolf needed. The xenos was scurrying along the ribbed and vaulted ceiling, slinking with speed and darting grace over every contour.

Vidfinn dropped to one knee and opened fire. Bark, bolter! Cry out like the scream of the raptor, like the shriek of the snow-blind geist and the wendigore that hunt upon the glacier! Vidfinn’s aim was true and the alien was struck, the wet thump of each shot accompanied by a spray of the alien’s iridescent blood.

But it did not die. No, it drove on, even as chunks of chitin and flesh fell from it. Dvarnn leapt forwards, for the alien’s speed was such that Vidfinn could not fire another volley before the alien was upon them. Dvarnn’s claw, upon his left hand, sliced up to meet the alien as it dropped towards him.

In its shape it reflected the tyranid creatures that you may have fought against, but with a form all of its own. The forms of the lizard and the insect, such as is common to the many varieties of tyranid, were present, but also something of the ocean predator, of the eyeless things that on occasion will rise up from the depths to prey on the longships of our peoples. The Space Wolves had a glimpse of a long and fleshy abdomen, that undulated like the fronds of a sea creature or the swaying of an ice cobra to power it forwards. But its foreparts were all claws and blades, and they struck as fast as Dvarnn’s claw.

And with less time than it took to think, less time that it took for the instincts of the predator to take hold of a Space Wolf’s mind, Brother Dvarnn was dead. Twin blades unfolded from the side of the alien’s head – not the talons it bore on its forelimbs, which Dvarnn could parry and bat aside, but another pair of razored mandibles that closed around Dvarnn’s neck. Dvarnn’s head flew from his shoulders, and before it had even hit the floor the alien had scrabbled away and rushed up one wall, smearing its foul ichor across the armour of a long-dead hero.

Imagine the cry that Brokkyr let out! They were brothers, not just in battle but by blood. Svalin grabbed Brokkyr by the edge of the shoulder guard, for he knew that Brokkyr would give his life just to die in the same moment as his oldest friend. Brokkyr fought him off and rushed the alien, the power field around his own claw flashing with the weapon’s caged power.

Brokkyr survived the first exchanges, the fury of his charge knocking the alien off the wall. It squirmed and thrashed on the floor, spraying gore and lashing blades from every direction. Arjac waded in, swinging the Axe Morkai in a great arc. Bladed limbs were severed. Brokkyr dived onto the alien and plunged his blade into the centre of the alien’s mass. The power field discharged with a flash like the lightning that spans the mountain peaks.

But the speed! The unnatural speed, as if the xenos did not exist wholly in our world, but partly in the realm of the unhallowed dead where mortal hands could not reach it! The ever-shifting camouflage of its scaly hide kept it shifting out of sight, a trick of the light that fooled even a Space Marine’s keen eye. Brokkyr’s claw impacted against the stony floor and blasted a crater there at his feet, as the alien slithered faster than the wink of an eye out of his reach.

And thus Brother Brokkyr died. His wish was granted, for he would not live on without his battle-brother Dvarnn. A tentacle lashed around his neck and wrenched his head back. From the alien’s jaws emerged a segmented tongue tipped with a pincer, striking like a snake at Brokkyr’s throat. Brokkyr’s claw was up in front of his face, fending off the jaws, but one of the alien’s claw-blades lanced through his torso. The edge, as hard as a diamond and honed as a sabrewolf’s fang, cut through the ceramite of Brokkyr’s armour and impaled him straight through. Another blade lashed up and sliced off his other arm at the elbow. Brokkyr cried out, not with pain but with anger.

And on fought Arjac! The Axe Morkai fell down like a pendulum, its head arcing down to cut off the elongated mouthpiece threatening to tear the throat from Brokkyr. The alien leapt onto the wall and brought Brokkyr with it. It gnashed on Brokkyr’s body, cracking open the ceramite that guarded his torso. The wet meat inside was exposed and lanced through by another blade, opening up Brokkyr like a fresh kill to be gutted.

Cover again your fangs, and sheath your claws. This was the death of Brokkyr, and none of it may I omit.

Vidfinn’s bolter hit home and xenos blood spurted. Arjac grabbed a limb and wrenched it free, and it came away in a fountain of such gore. But even the flight of a bullet seemed too long a span to catch out the alien and it ran along the wall, evading Arjac’s axe and flying for the gene-seed vault.

Svalin stood in its way. Svalin, that most blooded of Pack Fornjot, who stood as steadfast as a mountain with chainsword raised! He struck out, and the beast parried him. And then it was gone, trailing tentacles, throwing Svalin into the air. By the time he landed, the alien was at the vault’s threshold.

Arjac gave chase. For all his size, his strength gave him speed, and he was on the alien’s heels. As it raised its foul head, drooling mandibles parted to gobble down the first of the vault’s gene-seed, Arjac reached it and plunged a hand into the writhing flesh of its spine. He hefted it in the air, all its weight, and slammed it down!

Thus, as I cast down my cup, so did the alien predator hit the stony floor! Bones broke! Carapace cracked and foul blood flowed! And to hear the beast scream, you would have thought that all the damned of Fenris’s dead had returned from the blizzard-bound north of their banishment!

The beast reared up. Arjac was ready. The Axe Morkai now was held in both his hands, and he drew it back as does a woodsman about to fell a mighty tree.

The beast roared, and became in colouration the same as its surroundings, blending into the freezing mist and grey stone. It was too fast for a normal man to follow, but to Arjac’s eye surely it happened so slowly he had time for a thousand thoughts to form.

From a dozen foul orifices along its abdomen, the alien sprayed a fog of mind-befuddling pheromones. Gasping with the effort of pursuit, Arjac gulped down a lungful of the alien poison. The room shivered and shuddered, and in that moment all distance and speed became impossible to judge.

Arjac struck, and struck well. But the blade of the Axe Morkai was aimed at the place the alien had been a half-second before, and where now it was not. Reactions slowed, Arjac could not drive his blow home and the blade shrieked past the alien’s body.

With no body to impact, the axe swung wild. Its blade impacted against the stone which Arjac had rolled aside from the entrance to the vault. And, driven by the great strength of Arjac Rockfist, the axe blade shattered.

What a sound! Like the crack of a lightning bolt. The stone split, sundered as if by the hand of a giant. Splinters of the shattered axe rained down.

Arjac let out a great roar of anger and grief. The weapon lost, the beast alive, his dead battle-brothers unavenged.

Shards of the axe were embedded in the beast. Weakened and knowing it faced a great warrior, it took flight, scurrying along the ceiling of the processional, chased by Vidfinn’s gunfire. Arjac ran after it, armed now with nothing but his hands and his teeth, as if to wrestle the beast into submission. But it outpaced him and disappeared through the apothecarion, using some vent or narrow passageway to make its escape.

Arjac looked for a moment on the face of Brother Fornjot who lay there on the slab in the apothecarion, still with the empty wound in his throat where the beast had taken his gene-seed. With hot tears in his eyes he returned to the vault entrance, where Brokkyr and Dvarnn also lay dead.

What can I speak of the grief of Arjac Rockfist and the two survivors of Pack Fornjot? You have all lost battle-brothers. You have all seen those who to you were dear, shot or cut down on the battlefield. Think now to the Space Wolf you most admired, whose strength gave you strength, and who was lost. Think how you howled long into the night! Think of the mead you have spilled upon the floor of this hall in their memory. We all deal with such sorrow in our own way. Some will tear at their hair and inflict scars upon themselves in memory of the wounds that felled their brother. Some will pen sagas of their bravery. Some remain quiet, and do not speak of their grief. Such is the domain of each man over himself, a place where none can intrude. This was the grief that Arjac and his battle-brothers felt.

Arjac, Svalin and Vidfinn took the gene-seed from Brokkyr and Dvarnn that very hour. At least, the alien had not had time to take the organ from them. Then they took their four fallen brothers to the basalt vaults, far in the igneous depths of the Fang beneath the lava vents and rockworm warrens. In that time Space Wolves who lost their lives on Fenris, and those aspirants lost in the Blooding, were so interred, and there you may see them now, their bones buried beneath cairns of black volcanic glass and their armaments lain on top. There you might also see the offerings of wolf’s tooth necklaces and prayers to their ancestor-souls, for whenever I tell this story there are some who go to that deep, dark place to pay them homage. At the end of time, they will be there to thank you.

As they finished this sorrowful work, there came to them a lowly thrall much like myself.

‘My lords,’ he said, ‘I have news. The Great Company of Hengis Blackhand returns! His fleet has just passed through the outer reaches of our system, as marked by the monitoring station that watches over deep space. He sends tidings of victory over pirates that sought to waylay them, but also of anger that a warp storm has prevented a part of the Chapter’s fleet from joining the crusade. Thus he returns to Fenris.’

‘My thanks, thrall,’ said Arjac, dismissing him.

‘You speak thanks, but I think you do not feel it,’ said Svalin. ‘For Hengis it was who bade you forge the Axe Morkai, which lies shattered. His anger will be great to know it has been lost.’

‘What was lost,’ said Arjac, ‘has been lost. Without the shards of the blade that are embedded in the beast, the axe cannot be remade. Yes, I am shamed that I will not present the Axe Morkai to the Great Wolf. But this is nothing compared to the shame that brothers were lost where I might have protected them.’

‘I saw the beast,’ said Svalin, ‘and mighty it was. None of us could have bested it, not all of us together.’

‘I am mighty,’ replied Arjac most grimly. ‘Do they not say so? I bore the weapon once carried by our Great Wolf. It was I who devised the plan to kill the beast. And yet I could not finish it.’

‘You cannot carry on your shoulders every ill that befalls the Space Wolves,’ said Svalin.

‘They fall on the shoulders of us all,’ said Arjac, ‘and I am among us. It is not by choice I feel their weight. And now the Axe Morkai is lost, and there will be nothing that greets our returning battle-brothers but sorrow.’

And so Hengis Blackhand returned to the Fang. Hengis rode the Savage Steed, the gunship he had himself fitted out as he rose through the ranks of the Iron Priests. The Steed descended through the clouds that gathered about the peak of the Fang, and landed on the landing pad among the aerie of the raptors where the air was thin and a man’s breath was but icy vapours. There are among us thralls whose duties are the ritual greeting of the returning warrior, and though they were at their post, when Lord Hengis Blackhand descended from the belly of the Savage Steed he was greeted by but two Space Wolves, brothers Svalin and Vidfinn of Pack Fornjot.

Imagine now the slight that Hengis felt. For one, he had left Fenris seeking battle, but had been foiled in his hopes by the vagaries of the warp. Already his temper was short, and while he was a man of heartiness and joy when all was right the foulness of his temper could more than equal his rough good humour. Indeed, he spat on the ground as he disembarked, and only then did he see the paucity of the welcome that awaited him.

‘You!’ he barked at Brother Svalin, the more senior of rank. ‘Where is Brother Fornjot? And where is Arjac Rockfist, with the Axe Morkai for my inspection? The Great Wolf’s Company, and the rest of my men, are close behind me, and I would have the weapon pass before my exacting eye before Lord Grimnar sees it.’

‘Brother Fornjot lies dead and cold,’ said Svalin. ‘And the rest of our pack also. We laid them beneath the lava vaults. The Axe Morkai is shattered. Dread news we must bring you, Lord Hengis. The Fang is no more inviolate against our enemies and the honour of the Chapter has been made filthy by the predations of the alien.’

Lord Hengis, when he heard this, strode forward and struck Brother Svalin a mighty blow. And well he might! For the Fang was sacred ground, the impenetrable heart of Mother Fenris where, for all the violence and cruelty of our world, no evil could be permitted to enter. The Axe Morkai was a relic beyond value, and the loss of four battle-brothers while within the walls of the Fang was an insult as much as it was a tragedy. Svalin was thrown to the ground of the aerie, and the raptors, who had not stirred from their roosts even at the roar of the gunship’s engines, took flight in alarm at the bellow of Lord Hengis’s anger! The thralls quailed, and we thralls are not cowards. Brother Vidfinn, though he had never shown aught but scorn for the enemy in battle, could not meet the High Iron Priest’s eye.

‘For all this I will demand answers of you,’ spat Lord Hengis, ‘and afterwards so will the Great Wolf. But for now I ask you again. Where is Arjac Rockfist?’

And Brother Svalin could not answer. Nor could Vidfinn or the thralls gathered there, for they did not know.

Arjac was a man who rarely spoke when it was not needed, and those of you who know him will say that indeed he is the same to this day. He had spoken nothing since the laying to rest of Fornjot and his packmates, and so Svalin had assumed that Arjac would join him to acknowledge the arrival of Hengis. But Arjac had not done so, for to him there were more pressing matters than this issue of protocol. He had rolled the stone back to seal the gene-seed vault and so the Chapter’s genetic future was not imperilled by the tyranid predator, and indeed the beast had been chased into the Fang’s depths, so he had made right the threat to the gene-seed that had been necessary to bring the beast to battle. Yet, he did not think the matter settled. He had, instead, set off on his own to hunt the alien.

Arjac did this alone, and who am I to say why? No one, it is true, but I will try none the less. Perhaps he felt such responsibility for the death of his brothers and of the Axe Morkai that he went about a kind of penance, to hunt the prey that a whole pack could not bring down. Perhaps he believed that, like many a stealthy predator, he could only take his quarry alone. In any case, Arjac descended to the lower levels of the Fang, beneath the halls walked by you Space Wolves but above the ancient subterranean layers where the dead and their relics lie. He went to those places you might never have seen, where many thralls live and work, and where are stored the mundane supplies that keep the Fang functioning as fortress and a city in miniature.

He had seen the many transformations of body the beast had achieved in its battle with Arjac and his fellow Space Wolves, and it had caused him to think. I know this because all was reported shortly after to the Great Wolf, but that happens later in my tale and I am running ahead of myself.

Arjac thought that to achieve the strange mutations and remakings of its form, the alien needed raw materials, in the form of the biomass the alien tyranids crave so much. When they descend on a world they strip it of all the biomass there is, the material that makes up the plants and animals found thereon. Thus is the tyranid a parasite, for it must spend biomass to win more, and thus is locked in an endless cycle of predation like the locust.

The predator in the Fang had found biomass for the battle by taking the bodies of thralls it had killed, but it had expended much and so Arjac knew it would go hunting for more. Its animal cunning suggested it would realise the upper levels of the Fang would have lean pickings for it, and so he sought it among the places where only thralls might be found.

Now, there are thralls among us who have never seen a Space Wolf save the Wolf Priest who sent them on their Blooding. Wounded or exhausted by their trial, they lose consciousness and wake in those parts of the Fang where Space Wolves do not go, their duty to the Chapter now not as a warrior but working in the generatoria or the workshops, trading with the people of Fenris or seeing to the many needs of a Chapter that you, of course, care nothing about. And so many were the excited whispers that met Arjac’s ears as he wandered the dormitories and chapels, the assembly halls, the kitchens and the armament shops, stalking for any sign of the predator.

There is in the Fang an apothecarion where the sick and wounded thralls are cared for. Quite different are its needs than the apothecarion that you might visit, for our physiologies are of mere men and not of a superhuman Space Marine. No need is there in the thralls’ hospital for the cracking open of a breastplate of bone, or for a surgeon to operate on two hearts at once. Had they succeeded in their Blooding the healers who plied their art there might have become Wolf Priests one day, but as it was they spent their lives seeing to the injuries and sicknesses of the other thralls, for the Fang is not as safe a place for us as it is for you and oft does one of us need the healer’s art.

There was at that time a single doctor in this apothecarion, named Thelrid of the Ice Bear people. Some of you hail from that same people, who hunt through the chill caverns of the Frozen Sky glacier. This Thelrid was tending to a thrall whose arm had been crushed in the gears of a generator, and when Arjac entered the hospital this Thelrid held up a hand to silence the newcomer while he finished setting the thrall’s broken bones.

It was only when his work was done that Thelrid saw he had silenced a Space Marine, and he all but fell to his knees. ‘My apologies, Lord Space Wolf,’ he said, ‘I was engrossed in healing this man.’

‘Think not of it,’ said Arjac Rockfist. ‘We all have our duties. I, like you, am here to see my duty done.’

‘Then speak of what you would have of me.’

‘I hunt a predator,’ said Arjac. ‘A killer, and it is hungry. Tell me, for you would know better than any in the Fang, have there been found this last day any dead, violently slain, for which a cause has not been found?’

Thelrid’s face turned grim and he nodded, and walked to the back of the thrall’s hospital where lay the beds on which the long-term sick and injured lay. Most slept. Behind a curtain lay more beds, separated from the rest, and to these Thelrid walked. Thelrid was an elderly man and walked with a limp, but still the old red and black tattoos and the tangled braids in his beard spoke of his youth among the hunters of the Ice Bear people.

‘Here,’ he said, drawing back the sheet from one bed. ‘He was found but eight hours ago. We have yet to give a name to him. A tally must be taken of all the thralls, and the only name left unclaimed will surely be this man. As you can see, it is the only way we will know who he was.’

Thelrid spoke truth, for the man’s face was gravely ruined. The lower half was torn open, the wound running from the jaw to the upper chest.

‘I had believed,’ said Thelrid, ‘that this man had befallen some accident among the machinery of the generators, for he was found wedged in a vent that draws hot air from the turbine hall. But your being here, Lord Space Wolf, tells me that it is not by accident that he died.’

‘I believe not,’ said Arjac. ‘His throat has been torn open.’

‘Either at the moment of his death,’ said Thelrid, ‘or in the moments immediately thereafter. A wolf might go for the throat, but I have seen many bodies of those killed by wolves on their Blooding and these are not the marks of a wolf’s fang. No, the killing blow was dealt by an instrument far longer and keener. I had thought it the violence of another man that did this, for while murder among thralls is rare it has not been unknown in our history. But is this the mark of the predator you seek?’

‘These other wounds, this gash in the torso as if from the sweep of a great curved blade, and the crushing of this arm as if in the coils of a snake. These are the marks it leaves. Yes, healer of thralls, the predator has been here, and I think it is here still. I pray you, if any more are found like this, send word to me, and let your messenger use the name of Arjac Rockfist if he is challenged. I would know where the predator hunts, and if it hunts still.’

‘I shall, Lord Arjac,’ said Thelrid.

So much for Thelrid. He does not appear further in my tale. He was a fine man, though. I knew him before he died at the end of a long life in service to the Chapter. But who among you has heard his name, or seen the thrall’s hospital where he gave so many years to you? Think on him when next you take to battle, for without him, and men like him, your Chapter would be stuck wandering the snows of Fenris with neither fortress nor fleet.

Arjac Rockfist returned to the halls of the Fang many hours later, for he had found nothing of the alien intruder save the corpse it had left in its wake. The Space Wolf packs led by High Iron Priest Hengis Blackhand had all returned to the Fang by that time, and were feasting to commiserate their lack of battle or were making offerings in the shrines to the ancestor-spirits of the Chapter.

A pack of Wolf Guard were duelling in the armament halls, for it was bad luck to go to war and yet not shed blood and this ill fate might be staved off by striking one another in a duel. Hengis himself was the highest ranking Space Wolf among those who had returned and he held court here in the Great Hall. His temper at that time was foul indeed.

Arjac entered the hall, and Hengis rose in anger from his seat at the head of the table. Neither mead nor meat nor song had eased his temper. ‘Arjac Rockfist!’ he bellowed. ‘I have heard of the failings that fell upon the custodians of the Fang in our absence, but not from you! I have heard how the gene-seed stock was put at risk, how battle-brothers and thralls have lost their lives, and yet it is only now that you stand before me! And I hear also that the Axe Morkai is shattered, and the task which I left you, in good faith that you were the best man to complete it, has been undone. Explain yourself, Space Wolf!’

‘I see Svalin and Vidfinn have told you all that happened,’ replied Arjac. ‘Their explanation sounds thorough, and it will have to do for now. I say this not to slight you, High Iron Priest, but because the danger is not yet done. The alien is loose in the Fang – this much you know, and no doubt you have seen to it that the Space Wolves you bring back hunt it as we speak. But there is more, and far worse.’

Lord Hengis kept his calm for just a moment longer, enough for him to gesture to Arjac to continue.

‘The alien is a tyranid,’ said Arjac. ‘But it has about it a cunning not common to the tyranid warrior-beast. It seeks our gene-seed even now, it hungers for it. It has slain thralls in the lower levels and torn open their throats, seeking the organ.’

‘Then you have been among the lowly thralls instead of explaining your failings to your betters,’ said Hengis, his voice smouldering and his face grown dark.

‘I believe,’ said Arjac, ‘that this tyranid is seeking to gauge the presence of gene-seed at the Fang, and ascertain whether it should summon more of its kind to harvest it. This is the way of the tyranid – first for its vanguard creatures to locate a source of biomass, and then to summon the fleets and armies of the hive mind. Many worlds have been lost in this way. Perhaps Fenris does not seem a tempting target for the tyranids, for she is chill and great swathes of her are devoid of life. But this tyranid came to the Fang because it had detected the gene-seed kept here, and now it has confirmed the presence of such valuable biomass it will surely seek to bring more of its kind here. I have read the work of Inquisitor Kryptmann, and he described creatures resembling our intruder and the function they served in the hive fleets. I am certain I speak true of its purpose, and of the danger that falls upon the Fang.’

‘There has never been a tyranid sighted within light years of Fenris,’ retorted Hengis. ‘And yet you would have a great hive fleet fall from the sky upon us?’

‘I believe, Lord Hengis,’ said Arjac, ‘that this creature did not come from the sky.’

‘I will hear no more,’ said Hengis Blackhand. ‘You seek to shift the blame for the deaths of your brothers with this talk of alien fleets invading us from nowhere. You are withdrawn from duty until the Great Wolf and his company arrive, when he will hear the trial to decide what punishment should fall on you for your failings.’

‘I understand,’ said Arjac, and he was not unbowed. ‘May I ask leave to withdraw to the forges, where I might continue my work?’

‘Do so,’ said Hengis. ‘Better that you remain not in the Fang, but on the forge slopes where the brothers will not have to hear of your excuses.’

You might think that I am being unkind to High Iron Priest Hengis Blackhand. He was, after all, a hero of our Chapter. In battle he was a boon to his allies and a bane to his enemies. But a man can be both a hero, and yet also a man quick to anger and short of sight whose hotness of temper, such a potent weapon in war, could be a liability in peace. And he was confronted here by what appeared to be a terrible catastrophe and failing among the battle-brothers he had trusted to act as stewards to the Fang while the Chapter was away. Indeed, to him it must have seemed that Arjac was shirking his duties in failing to acknowledge Hengis’s return, was avoiding the taking of responsibility for the deaths in the Fang, and was seeking to protect himself from the worst of the Iron Priest’s ire. I do not judge him too harshly, and indeed he is a greater man than I could ever imagine being, though I put in his mouth words born of the anger that overtakes reason.

Thus did Arjac Rockfist, barred from seeking the alien predator any further, indeed withdraw to the forges of the lower slopes. He brought with him the fragments that remained of the Axe Morkai, though the blade was incomplete. A shard of it was still, as far as he knew, embedded in the alien. But still he went to work dismantling the parts of the broken Axe Morkai, and undoing that puzzle of workmanship he had so diligently put together.

And what of the alien? Lord Hengis did not shirk his duty in hunting it down. Indeed, he tasked each one of the Wolf Guard with assembling a hunt, choosing men from the Great Company to follow him into the endless warrens of the Fang. Some went to the dark igneous caves beneath the lava vents, where the cairns of the dead lie still. Some scoured the upper peak, fending off the raptors and braving the winds of icy razors. Three of them roamed the foothills, those deep crevasses and unkind expanses where you all underwent your Blooding. There they found glacier wurms and rot spectres, but no tyranid. Nor did those battle-brothers who went hunting in all other corners of the Fang, delving into cells and chapels not used for centuries, places where old bones mouldered and the deeds of wars now forgotten were etched upon the walls.

Down on the forge slopes, Arjac laboured. In the ruddy glow of the Heart Forge he salvaged what he could of the Axe Morkai, always whispering prayers to beg forgiveness from the weapon’s great machine-spirit. He worked upon the Voidstone Anvil, which had been carved from a meteor by Fenris’s mighty ancestor-lords in an age long since passed, and in the heat of the molten fire that bubbled up from Fenris’s own furious heart.

The snow fell heavy on that morning, when Arjac spent his third day of ceaseless labour. It seemed to all who knew of it that Arjac sought a kind of penance, pouring all his sorrow and guilt into the remaking of the Axe Morkai. And, of course, it was a fruitless task, for the blade was incomplete and the weapon could never be remade. It was a punishment Arjac Rockfist inflicted on himself, to forge what should have been a great weapon for the armouries of the Fang and yet never to see it completed.

Through the snow walked Thane Darskaan, the master of the thralls who worked in the Forge Hills. He was wrapped heavily in furs against the chill, though Arjac himself had stripped off his armour and wore only his novice’s habit, and the sweat glistened on his chest.

‘Lord Arjac,’ he said. ‘I see you work once more. Though we would all have the circumstances changed, it is good that you are among us again.’

‘No good can come of my failings,’ said Arjac.

‘There are those among the thralls, and I dare say among your own battle-brothers, who believe Lord Hengis is wrong,’ said Darskaan. ‘And that he should heed your wisdom in the hunting of the beast. You have faced it, after all. You puzzled out when and where it would strike, and you were right.’

Arjac stood up from the Voidstone Anvil then, and laid down the hammer with which he had been beating the imperfect blade of the Axe Morkai. ‘Thane Darskaan,’ he said. ‘I hear your words and I am grateful for them. You have ever been my friend, and glad I am that our Chapter is served by such as you. But I cannot accept such sentiment as you offer me. Lord Hengis is my master, and his word is as the snarl of the pack’s alpha wolf. If he wills that I return to the Heart Forge and join not the hunt, then that is what I must do, and thoughts and words to the contrary are for nought.’

‘And is every alpha right?’ asked Darskaan. ‘Though my words are dangerous, still I must speak them. A wolf might deny the leader of his pack, and triumph, and win the right to go his own way. Have not the Space Wolves themselves clashed often with the organisations of the Imperium, who stand according to Imperial law above the Chapter?’

‘You would have me defy Lord Hengis?’ asked Arjac.

‘If it is the right thing to do,’ said Darskaan, ‘then yes. But then, I am just a thrall. What can I know?’

Arjac made to answer. No doubt it was to say something that exemplified his wisdom and humility, for such was his way of speech. But he was given to pause, and turn his face to the sky, and hold out a hand for silence.

‘What do you hear?’ asked Darskaan, for he could hear nothing save the chill wind and the distant roar of the Heart Forge’s fires from below.

‘It is not what I hear,’ said Arjac. ‘It is what I smell.’

‘Then what?’

Arjac’s brow creased in concentration. ‘The ocean,’ he said. ‘The salt and the spray, whipped from the cresting waves by the wind. And the decay of its very depths, those lightless places where a thousand years of shipwrecks might be found, where eyeless things squirm through the bones of Fenrisians that lie centuries drowned. I can smell the salt tears in the brine, shed over the cruelty of Fenris’s sea. And the stench of the unknown life that teems there, that will sometimes rise to drag down a hundred screaming sailors with tentacle and fang. That is what I smell, all the chill and forgotten evil that sinks to the depths of our heartless world, and it rises.’

Arjac cast down his tools and turned to his armour, which he had stacked up beside the great anvil. ‘Darskaan,’ he said, ‘bring the forge thralls together. Arm them, and ensure you have taken the name of each man so none is left unaccounted for. I must go to the Fang, but soon I shall return.’

Arjac donned his armour, and took down the hammer which he had used as a weapon before he wielded the Axe Morkai. He stood on the lip of the Heart Forge’s great pit, and he glanced across the forge slopes that stretched down towards the sea.

You may have been on the Forge Hills yourself, perhaps in apprenticeship to the Iron Priests or to see to the making of your arms and armour. If you walked down to the lowest of the hills, where great heaps of spoil from the kilns and forges lie darkening the fields of snow, and if the day was clear, you might have seen the ocean. There lie the terrible black rocks, sharp and jagged as a glacier wurm’s teeth, that form the first defence of the Fang. In ages past, when the Fang was the seat of the kings of this region, invading fleets were wrecked there, and traitors were chained there to be dashed to pieces upon the rising tide. One whole side of the Fang is guarded by those vicious rocks. And for a moment the snows parted, and Arjac could see clear across the Forge Hills to that unkind shore.

The sea was grey slate, tormented by the winds that shrieked down from the heights of the Fang. The rocks were slick and obsidian black, sharp as broken glass. And from those depths reached the first tendrils of the Kraken.

From the depths it rose. A jointed limb, like that of a great insect, that ended in a pair of pincers. Behind it emerged the hulking carapace of its body, encrusted with eyes made huge and pale by the lightlessness of the depths.

Upon a far battlefield you may have seen its like, you who have fought the minions of the Kraken, and you would recognise the lumbering strength of the carnifex, the screamer-killer, living war engines of the hive mind. But this had about it something of the sea, beyond the encrustations of barnacles and coral that clung to its hide. Fronds of glowing flesh hung from its joints, the means by which it might illuminate its prey on the ocean floor. Its eyes were on stalks like those of a crab. Anemones and smaller parasites clung all over it, eager to feed from the scraps it cast about itself. And the stench of it had welled up from the very chasms of the deep.

Another rose, its brother in form but different as brothers are, this one a fiddler with one huge claw dragging across the rocks beneath it. More shapes were breaking the surface of the waves.

Smaller creatures were teeming around the Kraken as they rose. You have seen the hordes without number of the tyranids, either in the illuminations of battle histories or in the flesh as you did battle with them. These lesser things were no less deadly for their size was compensated for by their number. Six-legged and swift, they carried weapons grown from organisms slaved into their primitive minds that fired grubs or shards of bone.

In dozens, then hundreds, they chittered and seethed from the surf. Some of the Kraken spawn had bodies studded with human skulls, gathered from the debris to make their carapaces, as if in mockery of Fenris herself and the fury of her storms. Here and there an ingot of gold or a gemstone winked, detritus from a treasure-laden ship that carried some ancient king’s wealth to the bottom of the sea.

The Kraken were huge, and festooned with natural weaponry. Their spawn were legion, squirming or scuttling over the rocks in their thousands. More and more of them emerged, as great an army as had ever besieged the Fang since the Plague of Unbelief, and nought but Arjac Rockfist and the five hundred thralls of the Forge Hills stood before them.

‘I will return!’ called Arjac to Thane Darskaan. ‘This I swear!’ And Arjac ran towards the Fang, striding through the snow even as the chittering and shrieking of the Kraken spawn army reached his ears.

When Arjac reached the Fang, already the Space Wolves were on the walls. The thrall sentries had alerted the battle-brothers and they were massing to witness the spring tide of foulness suddenly rising from the sea.

Arjac reached the battlements and sought out Hengis Blackhand, who by virtue of being the highest ranking Space Wolf there was its commander now that it was at war.

‘Arjac,’ snarled Hengis. ‘Take your position among the battle-brothers. You are returned to duty to fight.’

‘I hear,’ said Arjac. ‘What is our plan of defence?’

‘The Forge Hills are abandoned,’ said Hengis. ‘There the enemy shall find few pickings among the thralls. When they reach our walls, we will hold them, and the xenos shall be dashed to pieces against our fury.’

‘Then I plead,’ said Arjac, ‘do not abandon the men out there. Though thralls they be, they are brave. Each one would stand as a battle-brother to us were it not for a single slip during the Blooding. And there is not one among them who has not excelled himself with a lifetime of service to the Chapter, to the Allfather and to the ancestors of Fenris.’

‘If I open the doors to the Fang, the enemy will seek to enter thereby,’ replied Hengis, unmoved. ‘See, the horde moves swiftly! They will be upon us before the thralls have been evacuated. No, I will not put the lives of Space Wolves in peril for the sake of the Forge Hills thralls, valiant men as they may be.’

Arjac Rockfist thought upon this, and for a moment too long for the liking of Hengis Blackhand. ‘Do you have ought to say to me, Arjac, about my orders?’ Hengis demanded.

‘No, my lord,’ said Arjac, eyes cast down in humility. ‘I ask only leave to go to the armouries and seek out a weapon. I have only this hammer, which I use in my work upon the Voidstone Anvil. It has earned my trust, but it is not a weapon, certainly not for the defending of our fortress.’

‘Go,’ said Hengis, ‘but be back on the walls shortly.’

And so Hengis oversaw the manning of the Fang’s battlements. He had twenty Wolf Guard resplendent in their Terminator armour, each man a fortification in his own right. Eighty more Space Wolves, Grey Hunters and Blood Claws, took their places. The Grey Hunters were arranged for mass volley fire from their bolters, with Hengis’s drill masters walking up and down their line to see that their fields of fire overlapped such that no living thing might make it through them.

The Wolf Priest Gunnar Skyfire, who still preaches the tales of Russ’s exploits in the chapels of the Fang, had the task of keeping the Blood Claws in check so they might not charge down from the Fang’s battlements too early into the approaching horde. Well do you all know those days, either because you left them behind you or you live them still, when a steady old hand was needed to hold you back, lest your headstrong fury take you too quickly into the thick of battle!

Also on the walls were Svalin and Vidfinn, their helms cast aside and their faces painted for battle, for they sought now not glory but revenge for their lost packmates. Thralls manned the defence guns, waiting for the command to fire, which Hengis would give the moment the horde passed within range.

But the horde was vast. Still the ocean disgorged its forgotten army. Hulking things with swollen, fleshy bodies bigger than a Land Raider tank clambered onto the rocks and disgorged tall plumes of poisonous spores, turning the sky black. Dense clouds of such corrosive poison were caught on the wind off the ocean, and the venom raked at the side of the Fang like a great caustic claw. Sacs of bilious acid were flung from beasts evolved into slithering war machines, burning great holes in the emplacements and rendering mighty rockcrete battlements as unto heaps of sand. Many were the thralls caught in the open before the orders were given to take cover. Many were the tales of sorrow written in those first few moments.

The Space Wolves held fast. Ceramite armour of ancient design, created in the depths of the Imperium’s forge-worlds, was proof against the first volley from the horde. And so Hengis gave no order for the battle-brothers to withdraw, and instead bade them sight at the horde down the barrels of their boltguns and missile launchers, ready for the moment when the enemy slithered and crawled into range.

But then, as Hengis cast his eyes down at the battlefield, he saw something that gave flame to his already well-stoked anger. For one of the blast doors at the base of the walls was opening.

‘Who is this that sallies forth from our fortress?’ bellowed Lord Hengis. ‘Who has defied my order, and, seeks instead of doing his duty upon the walls of the Fang, walks out to face the horde? Who is it that throws his life away, hoping to receive some fleeting glory in return? It is no hero that walks out alone. No, it is a fool, a wastrel – a traitor say I, for he has abandoned his duty to his Chapter!’

The Space Wolves gathered at the battlements’ edge to see. And in shock, they saw that the Space Wolf who was the object of Hengis’s anger was Arjac Rockfist.

‘He seeks death,’ cried out one Space Wolf, ‘to atone for the loss of the Axe Morkai!’

‘No,’ said another, ‘it is in guilt at the deaths of Pack Fornjot that he invites the xenos to butcher him on the field of battle!’

Another, older and wiser, called out, ‘Nay! He wishes to fight and die alongside the thralls of the Forge Hills. For Arjac was never one of us, never quick to laugh and to feast. No, he was scornful of the mighty warrior the Chapter made of him, and he dressed up such scorn in the guise of humility. See how he walks towards the forges, where stand the thralls with whom he spent so much more time than with his battle-brothers! See his eyes downcast! He knows he was never truly a Space Wolf. Thus our doubts of him, that have been unspoken yet shared by many, are proven well-founded!’

And many others echoed these words. For in part, it was true. Was Arjac like a Space Wolf? Was he like any of you? He boasted not of his victories, and yet even Leman Russ himself spoke greatly of his might and triumphs, and even in the face of the Allfather proclaimed his strength and ferocity. All the heroes of our Chapter have shown neither shame nor restraint in boasting of whatever heroic deed has earned them their plaudits last – all save, it seems, Arjac Rockfist. And how many of you have clashed fists with your battle-brothers in arguing who has fought the hardest or taken the most prestigious trophy in battle, and felt the hand of the Wolf Priest on them hauling them out of the brawl before one of them is sent to the apothecarion? Every one of you here has at one time beaten his chest and proclaimed, ‘I am the greatest among us here, and I will fight any who says I am not!’ But Arjac never had. And so it was some darkness in him, some doubt unbecoming of a Space Marine, that many of our Chapter saw in Arjac as he walked out that day in defiance of Lord Hengis’s orders.

And still, the horde grew. Who among you has fought the hated tyranid, face to face, smelled its corruption and tasted the blasphemy of it on the air? Ah, many of you here. Then you think you know what Arjac might have seen gushing up from the ocean, crawling across the rocks in an obscene tide of reeking, oozing flesh. But those who have seen more than one campaign against the tyranid know that never does the tyranid appear on two battlefields in the same form. It is ever changing, wearing the deceit of the alien in the mutability of its flesh.

Many are the Imperial Guard warmasters and writers of battle-tomes who have sought to categorise the tyranid into genus and species, taking note of its form and behaviour and describing each organism as if to force it to fit into a neat definition. Comforting it would be if a soldier could open a book, and count the tentacles and orifices of the beast before him, and say, ‘Ah! I face this beast, and not this beast or that, and now I know its capabilities and what must be done to destroy it!’ But the tyranid gives us no such comfort. For it always changes.

The organisms of one hive fleet are different from the next, and one fleet’s warriors and war-beasts will be different the next battle they fight. When the field is chill, they swathe their bulk in fat and hide to keep the steaming heat of their bodies from being drawn away by the cold. When it is hot, they are lean, bleeding off excess heat on long vanes of bone or trailing fronds of skin. Where the environment is caustic, their hides are scaled as if with stone. Where ground is scarce, they evolve wings and take to the air. Where it is plentiful and porous, they grow shovel-like jaws and great earth-moving claws to burrow through the earth. And the beasts that assailed the Fang had evolved to survive in the most hostile place that Mother Fenris ever conceived – the lightless depths of her oceans, where the Kraken and leviathan dwell.

Arjac Rockfist reached the first of the forges, where Thane Darskaan was leading the thralls who stood therein, anticipating the enemy’s approach. The thane and his men wore now protective hoods and coveralls, which were more frequently donned when dangerous chemicals or radiation leaked from the generators and fuel stores. Now it served to give them some protection against the clouds of corrosive venom issuing from the gullets of the alien horde, and yet Arjac saw draped among the anvils and quenching troughs the bodies of those who had been caught in the open by that first bilious assault. Dissolved to the bone they were, their flesh and organs a bubbling soup of foulness. How grisly and ill-starred a death for such valiant sons of Fenris!

‘I am glad that you return to us,’ said Thane Darskaan. ‘And yet I fear that for your abandoning of the walls, Lord Hengis will become as sure an enemy to you as any alien fiend.’

‘You may be right,’ said Arjac. ‘But if I should survive to see his ire, it means the battle has been won, and I would then welcome his wrath.’

Arjac joined the men holding that forge, which was used for the fashioning of ceramite plates for the armour of the Chapter’s vehicles. They were armed with autoguns and shotguns, and with the tools of their forges. They were strong and brave men, muscles honed working the anvils of their tribes, many of them formidable warriors in the most ferocious tribes of Fenris. Truly, they were men who would not flee or flinch, nor give in to despair. And yet, when they saw the magnitude of the enemy that approached, was there something in their hearts, hidden and shamed, that quailed at the sight?

I myself was a young man there and, all the ancestors be praised, I stood not in the forges that day but among the thralls loading the shells into the defence cannons on the cliffs of the Fang. And even so I felt fear. Yes, fear, though I am ashamed of it. The sound of the horde, the stench of it, sent recoiling within me everything that made me human. And yet the thralls of the forge slopes stood shoulder to shoulder with Arjac Rockfist.

‘From whence did the enemy come to the Fang?’ asked Thane Darskaan, awe and disgust alike in his voice. ‘There is no predator ever sighted on Fenris’s oceans that matches such a thing. Sea serpents and leviathan whales I have heard of, seen even from a distance. But not this.’

‘It is in the depths that they evolved,’ said Arjac. ‘Who knows when the tyranid vanguard creatures first came to Fenris? Perhaps a few decades ago, perhaps in the unknown past before the Dark Age when man had never set foot on Fenris. But their orders from the hive mind were clear. Wait and grow, until such time as Fenris becomes a worthy source of biomass for the hive fleets to harvest.

‘One hunter this horde sent forth, to seek out such biomass, and it found its goal in the gene-seed vaults. It could not capture the gene-seed alone, for I and my brothers fought it to a standstill, and found not what it desired among the thralls. So it broadcast a psychic signal to its fellow creatures in the depths, summoning them to take by numbers and force what the organism could not take alone by cunning and stealth.

‘And what better place to breed an army of predators than Fenris’s ocean depths? We have seen but a fraction of the monsters that live down there. To survive – nay, to thrive in those lightless waters, against the wrath of Fenris’s native predators, that has honed these alien intruders into killers of a quality that even Fenris has rarely bred.’

‘The Crone Fenris’s fury turned against us,’ said Darskaan. ‘Corrupted by the alien, her ferocity turned to filth. Bless this alien for giving us so much to hate about him! Fear is a distant and pathetic thing compared to that hate. But tell me, Brother Arjac, what orders should I give to my fellow thralls?’

Arjac thought upon this, for a moment. Indeed, it is the mark of a leader in war that he does not despair, that he does not look at the battle that cannot be won and give no order. For even in the bedlam of defeat, there is something to be eked out by discipline and steadfastness, even if it be but fitting deaths for the doomed. ‘Have them hold their ground,’ he said. ‘The enemy will seek to close and to kill us with fang and claw. Do not charge in, no matter how glorious a death you seek. But do not fall back when overwhelmed. Let the fires of your forges be a weapon, and stoke their flames to immolate the enemy when they overrun you.’

‘I understand,’ said Darskaan. ‘Truly my suspicions have been confirmed, and Lord Hengis has given the command that we be left out here to die and the doors to the Fang to be held closed.’

‘There is anger in your voice, Darskaan,’ said Arjac Rockfist.

‘The High Iron Priest’s orders are his orders,’ said Darskaan. ‘However the pack’s leader wills it, so it shall be.’

‘Now is not the time for meekness, Thane Darskaan. Now, of all times, you must be free to speak your mind.’

‘In that case,’ said Thane Darskaan, ‘I think that Hengis Blackhand is a witch-begotten swine not fit to lick the fleas from the mangiest alley-cur, and if he were to stride into my forge and proclaim his valour in fighting alongside us I would spit on his boots.’

And I know that is what he said, for Arjac Rockfist told me himself.

At the foot of the Forge Hills, where the rocks of the forge pit walls were pitted with spray from the salt ocean, the Kraken spawn crashed into the first forges like a great wave of corrupted flesh. Thralls bellowed their oaths to the ancestors of Fenris as they took aim and fired every clip of ammunition they had. They could not miss, for there was but one single great target that loomed up foul and terrible. Who can say what tales of heroism were written there, how many men scorned the inevitability of death and hurled curses at it even as they blazed fire into the tyranid organisms swarming forth? None, I fear, for not one man survived those first few seconds who was within reach of a claw or a fang.

The smaller six-legged beasts, called ’gaunts by the Imperial Guard, were cut down by the dozen. Such is the way of the hive mind, to send waves of the creatures it considers disposable in its cold, inhuman reckoning. In the ocean they had evolved without eyes, sensing through fronds of feelers that waved around their needle-toothed jaws. Autogun rounds punched through the barnacled armour that covered their torsos and ripped off their many limbs. The aliens’ blood was pale and bluish, the colour of an overcast sky, and it fell as dense as the rains that come with the spring thaw.

The first of the aliens leapt into the forge pits, and died. Shotguns blasted them apart at a few paces’ range, and the thralls wiped the gore from the faceplates of their protective gear. But with every one that died, it seemed a dozen more sprinted forth from the horde. Jaws snapped and severed men’s limbs even as the aliens died. Some bore long talons in place of front limbs, which cut men in two. Others had twin tentacles that twined around thralls’ throats, and sent them into terrible dying spasms as the venom cells that covered them pierced their coveralls and sent agonising poison into their veins.

One mighty warrior-thrall, his face bescarred from the wounds of his failed Blooding, roared and hauled over his head a great cask of fuel. It was used, a few drops at a time, to make flare the fires that burned in the smouldering hearths of his forge pit. This thrall, whose name was Imrak the Bear, had made it his task to immolate the attackers in the flames of the forge, and even as they surrounded him he made ready to smash the cask into the burning coals and end his own life, and those of a hundred xenos, in the roaring flames.

But through the seething horde leapt another creature, something very different to the attack-beasts that made up the first assault. It was lithe and quick, powered on long muscular limbs, its body long and hunched, twin-bladed limbs reaching from its shoulder and two more forelimbs tipped with talons hurling thralls out of its way. Its eyes were wide and filmy, as if to drink in all the light from the dimness of the ocean depths. In place of mouthparts, it had a nest of tendrils that dripped with corrosive venom. It was a cousin to the predator of the Fang, the lictor xenotype of stealthy assassin-beast.

Imrak drew back his arm to hurl the fuel casket. But even before it could leave his hand, the leaping xenos had transfixed his mighty body with one of its blades. Imrak stood there, spine cut and body unresponsive, as the alien’s taloned hand gripped him by the chin and turned his head this way and that, as if the alien was examining him with the curiosity of a creature first encountering an example of another species. Then, as it turned away, it twisted Imrak’s head off his shoulders with a flick of its wrist. It raised its head, sent out a terrible keening cry that set its maw-tendrils quivering, and the attack-beasts seethed across the forge as the last of its defenders were dragged down.

Woe that Imrak the Bear was denied the death he deserved! I had known of Imrak the Bear when I served in those times, and to us it seemed that he could never die. He was huge of body and of spirit, and often he would mockingly wrestle the other thralls when they got to drinking, always laughing as he pinned his opponents to the ground, always celebrating each bout with a hearty laugh and joke with the man he had defeated. And yet this immortal man was dead, ripped apart by a creature that thought no more of him than you or I might think about the microscopic things that slither across the ground beneath our feet.

Arjac Rockfist witnessed this with the keenness of eye of a Space Marine. He knew that for men to die such deaths bred despair in the hearts of soldiers. Though there were many thralls in the Forge Hills, numbering all those who laboured there, he knew then that the manner of this battle depended on him. The thralls would look to him, a Space Marine, a Space Wolf and a friend to the forge thralls. He could not promise them victory. He could not promise survival. He could promise them only the chance to die like men of Fenris.

‘I must reach the Heart Forge,’ Arjac said to Thane Darskaan. ‘It is much I ask, of you, my friend, and all of you. But I cannot do it alone. When the great war-beasts of the horde are embattled, I must make my way to that great pit where the fires of Fenris’s heart rage, and I ask the cover from your guns to help me do it.’

‘Everything I have, I will give,’ said Thane Darskaan. ‘I can vouch for my brothers here, too.’

And behind the first wave of attack-beasts rose the battle-hulks, grinding through the surf much like the war machines of other races might rumble on wheels or tracks, weighed down by armour and guns. These carnifex beasts resembled crustaceans of appalling size, gnarled and misshapen, their towering bulk surmounted with cannons of muscle and bone.

Each one was unique in its form, covered with scars gained in battle with the countless leviathans of Fenris’s ocean, carapaces home to colonies of barnacle and anemone that dripped streams of noisome ooze. They squatted down on their shovel-like claws and fired huge chunks of coral at the forges, each porous boulder filled with acid. Men dived for cover as the living artillery hit home, shattering the sturdy structures of the forges. The stone blocks that shored up the walls of the pits tumbled, crushing body and limb. Men were struck by shards of coral and impaled, or showered with acid that burned at their skin as keen as the hottest forge flame.

Another beast, far larger, was in form like a gargantuan sea worm with a tentacled maw and pincered tail. Skeletons of drowned sailors were embedded in the coral growths covering the armour plates on its back. It was like the trygon beast of tyranid battle-lore, such as you may have seen burrowing up from the ground to devour man and vehicle in a frenzy. This one disgorged the lesser gaunt-beasts, curled up and writhing as if newly-born, vomiting them over the defences to land among thralls who died to their birth-throes. The trygon reared high above the horde, like a banner of a Great Company might stand above our own battle lines.

One forge exploded, whether through the bedlam of battle or the deliberate efforts of the doomed defenders I cannot say. In the great plume of flame, charred bodies of man and xenos fell. Through the smoke stumbled the few survivors, burned and dragging broken limbs or clutching bloody wounds, hoping to reach the next set of defences behind them. But volleys of acid-drenched artillery fire landed among them, shredding and dissolving their exposed flesh, and none survived to tell of how that first conflagration was triggered.

And now, from the alien mass, rose four towering shapes, the generals of the horde. For the hive mind cedes a portion of its command to the mightiest organisms, who transmit its orders through psychic means. The Imperial Guard fighting the tyranid focus on such creatures, to disrupt the alien armies and force them to act only on their unguided animal instincts. Arjac stood proud of the forge in which he and Darskaan stood, clambering up onto one of the anvils for a better view. Through the poisonous fog the generals loomed, and he knew that their appearance was what he had been waiting for.

One was like a huge, glistening brain held within a cage of bone, supported by the atrophied body of a tyranid beast that had lost its limbs as it evolved. It hovered above the ground by some bestial witchcraft, and from the greyish mass of that brain spat fiery bolts of power that burst among the fleeing thralls. This was the zoanthrope, psychic artillery and conduit of the hive mind’s will, again in form adapted to the oceans with fins and rancid gills. A second was the malefactor, rarely seen in recent centuries but a mainstay of the earliest hive fleet invasions, with a slug-like body armoured in dense bone and a pair of enormous shovel-claws that gouged at the snowy rock to drag itself along. It was a machine of destruction, its claws solid masses of bone with which it demolished the walls of the forges so the lesser beasts could pour through. It, too, directed the xenos around it, for at its psychic command the ’gaunts surged through the breaches it tore.

The third xenos general was a foul thing, a dactylis as the battle-manuals have it, with a bulbous body far larger than a tank. Its rear limbs were vestigial but the front pair were long and many-jointed, ending in dextrous hands unwholesomely similar to those of a human in shape though far larger. With these hands it plucked the eggs from a bubbling mass of fertile flesh on its back, and hurled them to fall like artillery shells. Swarms of immature tyranids burst forth where the eggs landed, filling their short lives with a fury of hunger as they stripped men to the bone in their lust for flesh.

But it was the fourth that Arjac Rockfist knew he had to face. It was the fourth that had given Arjac cause to abandon the battlements and stand with the thralls in the path of the enemy.

In size it rivalled the demi-titans the Adeptus Mechanicus once fielded in whole regiments, now consigned to the defence of a few forge-worlds as their numbers fell. On four massive legs it walked, its body plated in bone armour, its head encased save for the massive jaws that lowered down to scoop up mouthfuls of the ’gaunts that scurried before it. Squealing they disappeared down its gullet to fuel it as it lumbered. A pair of forelimbs plucked other stragglers from the befouled snow to swallow them or cast them aside, tyranids and thralls alike. Indeed, its mass was that of a mighty siege engine – and yet it was not just for the purpose of raw destruction that the hive mind employed this general.

The annals of battle-lore record, in a few sketchy and ill-observed instances, the presence of such beasts on battlefields from long past. They were known as the mistresses of the tyranid hordes, the dominatrices who communed directly with the hive mind and directed the flow of battle. In a throne upon the beast’s back resided a tyranid queen, bloated and unfit for war herself but capable of transmitting the hive mind’s will over great leagues of battlefront.

No such queen was enthroned there now, but in that cradle of muscle and bone instead reigned the lictor, the predator, the same creature that had entered the halls and murdered its fill of Space Wolves. It was unquestionably the same creature, selected by the hive mind to direct the horde as it assaulted the Fang, for it alone had seen the defences up close and scuttled along the halls of our fortress home.

Across the battlefield, did the eyes of Arjac and lictor meet? Was there a mutual recognition there, for each had seen in the other the ultimate foe, the prey at the end of its greatest hunt? Perhaps. But in the alien mind of the predator there was room for no respect, no honour such as the hunter shows to the prey who has evaded him over miles of tundra. No, there was only the desire to consume, for such is the sole purpose of the tyranid.

Arjac vaulted the defences of the forge pit. Thane Darskaan and the other thralls, some two hundred men who had gathered in the forges of the upper slopes, followed in his wake. Arjac held up his hammer, the smith’s tool he had adopted as a weapon, and it was like a banner of the Chapter raised high.

The thralls who looked on from the battlements of the Fang cheered when they saw Arjac taking to the battlefield. Though Lord Hengis looked ill upon them, still they cared not, for they felt keenly the deaths of their fellow thralls doomed by the decision to close the doors of the Fang.

‘If he seeks death,’ bellowed Hengis, ‘then he has it! See the futility of his loss! All that has been given to him, the wargear of ancient mark, the years of training and psycho-doctrination, the very gene-seed of Leman Russ, Arjac Rockfist wastes in his desire to atone!’

The Space Wolves watching did not raise their voices in agreement or scorn. Though many had cast doubts on Arjac, now they watched him charging across the embattled Forge Hills they could find nothing in their hearts that bade them echo Lord Hengis’s words. I know this because I have spoken with the battle-brothers who were there, and heard of their shame that they had mocked their fellow Space Wolf minutes earlier. For each Space Wolf has within him the predator, the wolf-spirit of Fenris the Chapter seeks to nurture and unleash, and there was not one predator heart that did not wish its owner, too, was down there with Arjac, weapon held high, rushing towards the towering lord-beasts of the Kraken spawn horde.

The first of the tyranid lords towered ahead – the dactylis that cast its living artillery all about. Thralls were taking cover but finding scant protection from the assault, for this general was softening up a string of fortified forges ready to send a torrent of ’gaunts in to overrun them.

Arjac sought not cover nor pause as he rushed at it. The thralls dived for safety, slowing themselves down and making of themselves easy targets. But Arjac did not. It was as if the mortars fell not around him, the flame washed not against his armoured body. He reached within a few paces of the beast, and as he passed into its shadow he leapt.

No, he did not strike at its head, for there lay its weapons, its clawed mandibles and the terrible circular maw of its mouth. He hit the edge of its carapace, which was much like bone and much like rock, the edge impacting against his chest. He found handholds in the gnarled mass and dragged himself on top of the creature. A man would have been cut to pieces by the sharp protrusions of shattered coral and barnacle, but Arjac’s armour held firm. A man would have been thrown off by the bucking of the beast beneath him, but Arjac’s grip was strong.

Arjac clambered to the centre of the beast’s back, where the bone formed a ridge around the bubbling, steaming mass of fecundity that birthed its living ammunition. Thousands of embryonic tyranids writhed there, clawing and gnashing their tiny maws, their sole purpose to devour everything around them before their lives were spent.

Truly it is written in the Codex Astartes that every enemy has a weak point, and that a victor must exploit that point. So it was that Arjac Rockfist plunged a fist into the hole he had smashed, down into the boiling mass of ichor and sinew. He ignored the scalding billows of steam and the sudden tilting of the carapace as the beast tried to throw him off. Tyranid spawn hatched and leapt at him, but Arjac swatted away those that threatened to gain purchase on his face and ignored the rest, trusting in his armour to hold firm against the needles of their teeth. Deeper he reached as the foul mass of flesh rose up around him like a tide of alien bodies. His hand found resistance in the murk, something stringy that sought to cling to the beast’s inside, and his fingers closed around it.

Great was Arjac’s strength. Gritted were his teeth. From the crater in the beast’s back, he tore a long slithering section of its spine.

The dactylis screeched, a sound that even from the malformed throat of the alien spoke of fear and pain. It tilted like a longship holed below the waterline, the edge of its carapace grinding into the blood-streaked earth of the Forge Hills. Still it lived, but Arjac had ripped from it the means by which its alien mind commanded its limbs and organs. Its forelimbs lay immobile and useless, the final egg-sac rolling from its fingers. Its many eyes rolled as if in terror. It heaved, trying to force itself up and forwards again, but the greater part of its strength was gone.

‘Finish it!’ yelled Arjac to the thralls who fought alongside Thane Darskaan. ‘Show it how we welcome its kind to Fenris! But take not too long! The Heart Forge is my destination, and I would not go there alone!’

Arjac waded now into the throng. With every swing of his blacksmith’s hammer he shattered the exoskeleton skull of an attack-beast. The ’gaunts tried to swarm him, a dozen of them piling on him and seeking to tear open his armour with their claws, but with a shrug of his mighty shoulders he threw them off and struck all about him. Broken xenos bodies were tossed aside like snowflakes on the winter wind. The snow beneath his feet turned purple-black with their blood. His armour was spattered with it, the grey of his armour clotted black to the elbow. He strode on, crushing bodies under his boots. A leaping hunter-beast, long limbs powering it across the battlefield, hurtled towards Arjac swift as an arrow. But Arjac was quicker and slammed his hammer down, crunching it into the alien’s back as he sidestepped its charge. The alien was driven into the ground and Arjac stamped down on its neck. Vertebrae crunched and the beast fell still, save for the death-spasm of its claws.

The thralls lent their fire to Arjac, autoguns picking off attack-beasts as they rushed to fill the breach Arjac left. Thane Darskaan took to the lead himself, carrying a twin-barrelled autogun that he himself had pieced together from the finest components. Its stock was inscribed with scenes of Fenris’s savagery, the hunting wolf and the diving raptor. Such was the weapon with which he led the thralls even as he stood in the open, heedless of danger, scorning the enemy with his valour.

So it was that Arjac Rockfist reached the Heart Forge. Alas, the thralls that had defended it lay dead, overcome by a great blast of bilious acid and the survivors slain by the waves of attack-beasts. Arjac vaulted into the pit and bellowed in anger to see the thralls who had worked at his side mangled and eaten away. He grabbed one beast by the throat and hurled it into the pit of molten stone from where the Heart Forge drew its fires. He laid another one onto the Voidstone Anvil and battered it with his hammer, as if it was iron upon which he worked.

Over the Heart Forge rose the second of the alien lords, the zoanthrope with its pulsating brain. A legion of ’gaunts scuttled beneath it, bodyguards and mind-slaves to it, and its glistening eyes focused on Arjac as it made ready to unleash a bolt of the hive mind’s own wrath.

I have spoken before of the shield that hung above the Voidstone Anvil. Arjac leapt onto the anvil now and snatched down the shield. He crouched behind it as a glistening arrow of the foulest witchcraft arced from the malformed brain of the beast. A man would have been thrown off his feet by its impact, tossed into the forge’s very fires like an ember on the hot air. But Arjac was more than a man! He held fast, and that beautiful shield held too – such was its workmanship. The zoanthrope, surely in its hateful mind expecting this obstacle to have been cleared from its path, perhaps failed to notice that Arjac yet stood in its way. Something like surprise caused its jaw to hang open and its eyes to roll as Arjac ran through the front rank of its ’gaunts and jumped at it.

The zoanthrope’s body was withered and without limbs, but it had a tail that hung down to steady itself or to fend off attackers with the bony blade on its tip. This Arjac grabbed in one hand, letting the shield fall beneath him. He clambered up the zoanthrope as a man might climb a sheer cliff. The beast was protected by a field of psychic energy which caused the bullets and las-blasts from the thralls to glance off it, but it could do nothing against an assailant within the field with a hammer and a strong grip to do his work! Nor could the ’gaunts shoot Arjac down with bone shards or ravenous grubs, though they tried, seeing the fire from the fleshy guns spark against the field and strike not.

Arjac splintered the bony cage around the zoanthrope’s brain. How the alien cried out, its psychic scream echoing to the very peak of the Fang! I can hear it even now, just as I heard it then, a terrible howl inside my head. Sometimes it comes to me when I am halfway between sleep and waking, and the shriek of fear I know will never leave me.

Such was the violence that Arjac did to the zoanthrope’s brain that clods of the pink-grey stuff rained down across the Heart Forge. Clouds of blood-steam rose where they fell into the flames. The hive mind’s signal, which had until then driven the tyranid horde on, was splintered and confused now, and the ’gaunts around the zoanthrope ran this way and that without reason or plan. The zoanthrope drifted down towards the ground and Arjac leapt down, again taking hold of the alien’s tail.

What better fate for the hateful xenos than to be purified in the flame? I can think of none, and neither could Arjac. He dragged the alien by the tail to the edge of the Heart Forge’s pit of flame, that shaft of molten rock that lead all the way to the wrathful heart of Fenris. With a cry of anger he hefted the beast above his head! With a roar of effort he hurled it down into the fire!

Arjac Rockfist had taken back the Heart Forge. From the walls of the Fang rose a cheer, led by the thralls who saw their fellow men of Fenris bringing the battle back into the teeth of the Kraken spawn. And yet the alien tide was but set back a few steps, and surely would flow forth and drown Arjac in a tide of xenos flesh.

Arjac was not there simply to win a symbolic victory, to write a last saga of defiance before death overtook him. No, every step he had taken since he opened the doors of the Fang had been to this end. He found his place of work, where were stored all the many tools he had used to forge the ill-fated Axe Morkai. Here were fittings he had examined and discarded, there were the caches of precious metals and gemstones with which he had hoped to make the Great Wolf’s weapon magnificent. But among them was the most vital tool of all, without which he would have been loath to handle the once-tainted weapon let alone hope to reforge it.

Arjac had now in his hand the vial of Leman Russ’s blood, sacred relic of the primarch, the greatness of our Chapter distilled into a few drops of liquid. With this he had purified the Axe Morkai before its remaking.

‘See!’ cried the battle-brothers on the walls. ‘Brother Arjac seeks to recover a great relic from the jaws of the Kraken! Though he will surely fail, for the alien horde surrounds him once more even now, yet we must applaud his valour to keep xenos claws off the very flesh of the primarch!’

‘Yet futile is this gesture,’ growled High Iron Priest Hengis, who in spite of his scorn of Arjac was compelled to look on also. ‘The relic is lost, and Arjac with it. Better we had lost the relic than lost both, but thanks to Arjac’s recklessness and conceit it is both we have lost.’

Brothers Svalin and Vidfinn looked on also. They did not cheer, or marvel at the valour shown in the battle below. ‘Would that I was down there,’ said Brother Svalin. ‘Though Hengis’s orders are sound in holding the walls instead of engaging the enemy outside, yet still I yearn to fight, to feel blood on my face, to tear at the Kraken with claws and teeth!’

‘And I say, curses on Arjac,’ cried Brother Vidfinn, ‘who took to the battlefield alone, and did not bring us with him! For I would have joined him in a heartbeat.’

‘Blame not Arjac,’ retorted Svalin. ‘Curses upon our own lack of boldness, that bade us not defy Hengis ourselves!’

Arjac stood upon the Voidstone Anvil, where the better part of the Kraken spawn horde could see him, as could the thralls and the Space Wolves on the walls. Did Arjac glance behind him, to the battlements of the Fang where Hengis Blackhand looked on? Perhaps he did. Or perhaps he was looking for the survivors of Pack Fornjot, to show them that he had not forgotten them or their fallen pack-brothers.

Arjac then pulled the stopper from the vial of sacred blood and held it aloft. The genetic signature of the Primarch Leman Russ was carried on the air, and even through the venomous fog and clouds of corrosive spores. That trace of greatness, of strength and fury, of might and battle-wisdom unequalled in all the history of mankind, reached the scent receptors of the xenos, and one among them bellowed when it recognised it. For this was something akin to the signature of the Space Wolves’ own gene-seed but in a form far more concentrated and powerful.

The lictor, riding on the towering fourth general of the alien horde, had sought out the gene-seed of the Fang and sampled its power from the battle-brothers it had slain. It had emerged first from the sea, then brought forth all the Kraken spawn of the ocean, to claim that gene-seed so it might be passed on to the hive fleet. And yet now it was presented with a prize far greater, the essence of a primarch. And of course it could not resist.

Ah, my mug runs dry. Who will fill it? Yes, yes, I hear your displeasure, your hissing and name-calling. But you cannot expect me to do Arjac Rockfist justice with a dry throat, can you? Surely you would not deny this old thrall a taste of the Fang’s finest? Ah, thank you. Brother Myrikk, I see, pack leader and man of great honour and courage! I salute you, and drink to you. As for the rest of you, learn patience! It is not a virtue given enough mind by the Wolf Priests and their teachings, I see.

Now, where was I? Of course! Arjac and the hunter. You knew, of course, that Arjac and the hunter-beast would clash again. It is not the way of the saga to leave such battles unfinished, so when two mortal enemies fight and both walk away, you can be sure the tale will lead them back to face one another again. I can imagine what you must be anticipating. Blood! Fury! Alien limbs hitting the ground in fountains of gore! The hero Space Wolf atop a mound of the dead, streaked in their blood, his axe clotted with their torn meat, roaring at the sky! I have told a lot of stories like that. They are good stories. Half my mind is a library for such sagas, and no doubt tomorrow I will tell one just like I told another yesterday. But today, the tale I tell is not quite the same. It is very similar. It has plenty of death and bloodshed, as Space Wolves are wont to enjoy in their sagas, and true the enemy is the hated alien and the hero is the valiant Space Wolf, but… ah, well, perhaps it is the same. The longer in fang among you might see something the young whelps do not. We shall see.

Now, Arjac was in the centre of the battlefield. The thralls who had followed in his wake were scattered, diving into cover under the assault of the attack-beasts still pulsing forwards like a tide of flesh from the sea. Arjac would surely fall, for he was alone and the xenos could send more and more alien killers at him until he was overwhelmed. If it came to that, they could crush him under the weight of their dead, for the tyranid cares not for the lives of its organisms as it will merely harvest their biomass again once they have won the field.

Arjac knew this, and yet he did not falter, he did not seek cover or head back to the Fang, to be saved by the protection of its stone walls. The lictor, his nemesis that he had sworn and failed to slay, fixed its many eyes on him, and trumpeted its lust for the primarch’s gene-seed as its mount trampled its own kind to get to it. Indeed, it was as powerful a lure for the tyranid as Arjac could have used. The hunter-beast had first come to the Fang following the faintest traces of the gene-seed’s scent and it was so sensitive to the signature that its senses were overwhelmed, all instincts subsumed by the need to acquire this prize.

‘The pain of my brothers,’ cried out Arjac, though he cared not if the lictor could understand him, ‘the shame of my Chapter’s loss, the deceit of a thousand years lying in wait and the blasphemy of your quest to take the blood of Russ’s sons and make it your own! All these things I shall repay!’

The beast as a whole was immense, its mass approaching that of the bio-titans such as those recorded on the fields of Ichar IV. Even against the walls of the Fang it would be a formidable weapon, and keeping it from breaching the fortress was by no means a certainty for the Space Wolves on the battlements. Now it was a hunter, bearing down on a single quarry, but in form it was a living siege weapon, a breaching tower, that could bore through the walls and make way for thousands of attack-beasts. And most surely it would kill Arjac Rockfist, and end the resistance of all on the Forge Hills.

Brother Svalin saw the titanic beast and the lictor riding it bearing down on Arjac and a thought occurred to him, in some ways ridiculous but in others so completely logical and typical of Arjac’s ways that it had to be the case. Svalin left his post, leaving Brother Vidfinn behind, and ran in to the interior of the Fang. Such was the fixation on Arjac’s fate that no Space Wolf saw him go, save for Lord Hengis who noted Svalin’s flight from the battlements with anger. Surely he was minded to deal with Svalin when the battle was done, if indeed it was won and the Fang did not fall to the beast.

‘Everything,’ bellowed Arjac as the beast’s shadow passed over him, ‘I repay!’

The great maw of the general-beast opened wide. The lictor leered down from above, maw-tendrils quivering as perhaps it anticipated the taste of Arjac’s corpse transmitted through the connections that bound it to the general. Arjac did nought but stoppered again the vial of Russ’s blood. Then the beast’s mouth closed over Arjac Rockfist.

Arjac had no chance to fight. He might as well have battled the void of space or the pull of a planet’s gravity. He was simply gone, vanished into the tunnel of the beast’s gullet, where churned an ocean of bilious acid and countless lesser creatures to devour and dissolve him.

The hush on the battlements, a moment before of anticipation, was now the dead silence of grief. Arjac Rockfist was dead.

The fire has gone cold. You may not feel the chill but these old bones do. How the lofty halls of the Fang let in a draught! Ah, but I see, a few embers are glowing still. Pause a moment while I rake them over.

There, that is better. A little warmth now, for I have lost track of time and outside the walls the sun has set and the night birds are wheeling about the aeries, looking for prey.

Thane Darskaan fell, for a tyranid ’gaunt, all talons and swift speed, rushed at him from behind and cut a deep gash across his back. It cut through sinew and lung and he fell to his knees. He hammered fire into the beast at point-blank range, but as it fell he surely knew his wound was a mortal one. He looked up, but the sun was blotted out by the clouds of spores and by the towering form of the beast that had swallowed Arjac whole.

The beast swayed, its mouth lolling open. A torrent of gore and broken bodies spilled forth. A front leg buckled and its head slammed into the snowy earth beside the Heart Forge. Then its body toppled to the side, landing with the force of an avalanche as all strength left it.

Thane Darskaan died then, but with a smile on his face, for a victory had been won and the beast was slain.

Within the Fang, Brother Svalin of Pack Fornjot reached the trophy hall where countless prizes won from the Chapter’s defeated foes were displayed. There he ran to one trophy in particular, one he recalled seeing before and which he knew was close to the tyranid exoskeleton that Arjac had used in his study of the lictor.

The thought that had occurred to him regarded the wargear captured from a spy who had entered the Fang some centuries before to slay the then Great Wolf by stealth and treachery – an Imperial Assassin of the Venenum Temple, a master poisoner who had been caught in his endeavour and rent asunder by the Wolf Lord’s fury. What force of the Imperium had sought to slay the Wolf Lord was never known, but the Assassin’s death and displaying of his wargear was enough, it seems, to have dissuaded further killers from being sent to the Fang.

Svalin found this wargear and looked through it, scattering the synskin suit and the many concealed weapons and instruments of death on the floor in his search. Brother Vidfinn appeared in the doorway of the trophy room, confusion on his face.

‘What are you doing, Svalin?’ he demanded. ‘Have you lost your mind? You are too strong a soul, too old and steadfast, to go mad with grief.’

‘It is not madness that brought me here,’ replied Svalin. ‘No, I have proven that to myself for the poison vial is not here!’

‘The poison vial?’

‘Indeed, brother. The receptacle of poison with which the Assassin, whose gear this is, sought to poison the Great Wolf all those years ago. It was displayed proudly here to show we fear no weapon, even that of subterfuge and treachery, but now it is gone!’

‘Then who took it?’ said Vidfinn. ‘And why does it matter?’

‘Arjac took it,’ said Svalin. ‘And it matters because it is the only way for him to fell the beast.’

The two returned to the battlements and they saw that the general-beast had fallen. And Svalin wept, for he knew now what Arjac had done. He had taken the Venenum Assassin’s poison, and then used the blood of Leman Russ to lure forth the beast and let it swallow him alive. The poison was thereby transferred to the beast, and it had fallen thereby. And now the Kraken spawn were in disarray, allowing the pockets of thrall survivors to regroup and hold the forges.

The lictor was bound to the general-beast, their nervous systems one, so it could direct the monstrosity and transmit through it the hive mind’s will. Through those connections had also coursed the poison. Still clinging to the back of the fallen beast the lictor spasmed out its last moments, its muscles and tendons dissolving, torrents of foul gore spilling from between the joints of its armour. The claws that had killed Anvakyr, Fornjot, Dvarnn and Brokkyr hung limp and useless, and the jaws that had rent their flesh yawed open as the blood dribbled from its mandibles. Thus the hunter died, a weakened and pathetic thing, robbed of the Kraken spawn’s fury. I can only hope it felt whatever in a tyranid passes for despair as its body dissolved from within and it came apart in an upwelling of foulness and gore.

With its death the hive mind was silent and the tyranids heard it not, and no more were directed in their assault but now fell to the behaviour of animals.

In the sky above, bright streaks of fire appeared, burning through the spore clouds. They were the trails of drop pods, falling from Fenris’s orbit.

‘The Great Wolf has arrived!’ one battle-brother cried. ‘Logan Grimnar has reached Fenris!’

‘Iron Priest Hengis Blackhand!’ came a transmission from the Great Wolf himself, who was even at that moment hurtling towards the ground in his pod. ‘What is this I see? A xenos army in disarray, ripe for the killing, and yet you crouch behind the battlements for shelter? For shame, son of Fenris! Bring forth the axe and the fury, bring battle to the foe! For though I am happy to drive them back alone, yet we should fight side by side. So leave the safety of the Fang and join me in the slaughter!’

The whole Great Company of Logan Grimnar descended onto the battlefield, for the Great Wolf, like Lord Hengis, had been foiled by the warp storm and turned back to Fenris. He arrived too late to face the Kraken as they emerged, but made landfall in that moment when the alien horde was at its weakest.

‘Onward, brothers!’ yelled Lord Hengis. ‘Thralls, throw open the doors! Space Wolves, onward! Bring axe and chainblade, bolter and flamer! Bring the pride of Fenris! Bring hatred and rage, brothers! Bring victory!’

Perhaps Lord Hengis’s words rang hollow among the Space Wolves who had witnessed Arjac and the fall of the beast. But they showed it not in their conduct in battle, rushing from the Fang to do bloody work upon the hated tyranid! Logan Grimnar and his men landed in the heart of the throng, their drop pods splitting open and a hundred Space Wolves leaping out.

Only the final lord of the Kraken spawn, the malefactor with its mighty bone claws, gave any cohesion to the horde. About it the attack-beasts formed up and charged in waves, regrouping and charging again. But it was alone, and for once the number of the horde grew thin, for the attack-beasts charged now into the massed guns of two Great Companies’ worth and were withered away.

Logan Grimnar himself charged at the Kraken spawn lord and shattered one of its claws with his frost blade, rolling out from beneath the second claw before it came crashing down on top of him. Indeed, it was glorious to see him bring up his blade and drive it through the beast over and over again until he stood knee-deep in its gore and the last of its life pumped out onto the ground.

Great was the righteous slaughter! Unlovely were the screeches of the alien doomed, foul was the stink of their burned and riven bodies! The sea was black with their blood, the surf a foul purple, the sky overcast with a green-black pall. The fires of the forges leapt high, fed by the heaps of xenos corpses. The survivors of the Forge Hills thralls, who would surely have been slain to a man without Arjac Rockfist, exacted their own bloody vengeance on the alien with bayonet and autogun, executing the squealing remnants of the horde that remained when the Space Wolves had butchered their path through the army’s heart.

The Great Wolf Logan Grimnar sought out Hengis Blackhand. Lord Hengis had fought mightily, but he raged still, finding no happiness in the execution of his enemies which had theretofore brought him such great joy. Scowling he lopped the head off a ’gaunt with his axe, even as Grimnar found him and clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Great is the day!’ said Logan Grimnar. ‘The enemy has been thrown back from our walls, and if a single one of these tentacled heathens lives to writhe back into the sea then they have been fortunate indeed. But tell me, Hengis, where is Arjac Rockfist? Though this frost blade has served me well, yet I long to take the Axe Morkai in my hand once more!’

‘Arjac Rockfist is dead,’ said Hengis Blackhand. ‘And the Axe Morkai is shattered, its blade broken and never to be reforged.’ And Lord Hengis spoke unto Logan Grimnar all the sorry tale of what had happened at the Fang since the Chapter left for the Calunian Crusade, the loss of Pack Fornjot’s battle-brothers, the gambit at the gene-seed vault and the depravity of the alien hunter who had brought the Kraken spawn army from the sea.

The Great Wolf was much stricken with sorrow. Without a word of reply to Hengis’s tale, Grimnar strode across the battlefield to where the immense corpse of the horde’s general lay steaming in the chill. The blood poured out of it was freezing into a great purplish slick and the carrion-birds of the mountain peaks were already descending, tasting its corrupting flesh, and wheeling away in scorn of its foulness.

Grimnar clambered on top of the corpse. The Space Wolves looked on, none willing to disturb the Great Wolf in his obvious grief. Grimnar plunged his frost blade into the corpse and, with a mighty swing of his sword arm, slit open the body. The Great Wolf strode into the wound there opened, sinking first to the knee, then to the waist, in the foul and noisome entrails of that unnatural beast.

For a long while the Great Wolf was gone, somewhere inside the corpse of the beast. The battle-brothers looked on first with reverence, then with concern. But eventually the corpse stirred and the head was hacked open from within, the beast’s mandibles sheared away by blows of the Great Wolf’s frost blade. And from the sundered head strode the Great Wolf, covered in gore and bilious filth, and on his shoulder he carried the body of Arjac Rockfist.

Grimnar laid the body out on the bloodstained snow, and wiped the filth from Arjac’s acid-blistered face. He looked up at the Space Wolves watching around him.

‘Why do you look on?’ he shouted at them. ‘Where is a Wolf Priest? Here lies a brother stricken, and he must be helped!’

The Space Wolves who had seen Arjac swallowed whole knew he was dead. Those who had seen only the aftermath had taken one look at the fallen beast, and known that only by mortal sacrifice could a single man, even a Space Wolf, have laid it low. Perhaps they thought the Great Wolf was showing some weakness for the first time in his service to the Chapter, that in some strange wrench of grief he had lost his mind and saw life where there was none. But they dared not defy an order from the Great Wolf’s own mouth, and so a Wolf Priest ran to Arjac’s side and those battle-brothers versed in the apothecarion’s arts joined him.

‘By the twin suns of Fenris!’ cried one. ‘One heart yet beats!’

‘The eye’s pupil recoils at the light!’ said another.

‘See!’ shouted a third. ‘He draws breath!’

‘Then bring him to the apothecarion!’ ordered the Great Wolf. ‘Why do you gawp and delay? Faugh! I will carry him myself, then. With me, brothers!’

Logan Grimnar, the Great Wolf, bore Arjac Rockfist into the Fang, and to the apothecarion. With disbelief the battle-brothers looked upon the scene as Arjac was hooked up to the monitoring devices, and there indeed leapt a spark of light along with his heartbeat. It was as if they witnessed a miracle to see his chest rise and fall when his bile-scarred armour was unbolted.

Logan Grimnar knew something that the other Space Wolves did not. A mighty warrior he might be, but that alone is not what makes a great man into a legend such as the Great Wolf. It is his wisdom that makes him who he is, that causes every Space Wolf to bow in deference to his command, that makes even kings and mighty lords of the Imperium give pause to vent their arrogance when he is present. What Logan Grimnar knew then, you too can see. Simply turn around.

There, at the back of the hall, in the shadows, beneath the banner of Lykki Clovenhelm. Do you see him? You did not see him when he came in, for it was a particularly bloody and battle-filled part of my tale when you were all rapt waiting for the next gory detail. No, you did not notice him, even though he outstrips many of you by a full head in height, even though in the Terminator armour he earned of late he weighs as much as a fully laden thunderwolf.

There sits Arjac Rockfist, in silent deference to the role of the storyteller. I have no doubt he knew not I was telling his tale, and that he would avoid hearing it if such were possible. But he could not leave during its telling, for to do so would be an insult to the teller of tales, and unlike some of you he respects that ancient Fenrisian office, honoured as it was by Leman Russ in the Chapter’s earliest days. You can see now what Logan Grimnar saw.

You can see the humility of Arjac Rockfist. Did I not tell you he was humble? And did you not forget that detail as soon as it left my tongue, for you care only to hear of strength and rage and battle-prowess? But Logan Grimnar was wiser than you are, and he remembered. He knew that Arjac Rockfist did not trumpet his greatness at every opportunity, that he kept it quiet and was silent when his battle-brothers would crow for hours about the sagas they had carved on the bones of their enemies. Logan Grimnar, unlike perhaps Lord Hengis, remembered the great strength and mighty constitution of Arjac Rockfist. He remembered that Arjac was lost in a terrible blizzard during his Blooding, alone and all but naked, and that he survived the terrible chill when any other would have perished. If any of you had done that you would remind us of it at every turn, but not Arjac. But Logan Grimnar remembered regardless.

Arjac had survived the sting of the psychneuein wasp. He had contracted the Vileheart Pox, concocted by the witches of the Plague God, and had defeated the disease. He had not mentioned ever again such great feats of resilience, but Grimnar remembered. And so when the Great Wolf heard that Arjac had poisoned himself to in turn infect the hunter-beast with the Venenum’s lethal potion, he knew better than to assume, as all others did, that Arjac Rockfist was dead.

That humility you can see in Arjac Rockfist now. Such it is that I am ashamed to bring your attention to him, for though he would never say it I feel he would dearly love for this story to end so he did not have to suffer the hearing of it any more.

There is on Rockfist’s palm a scar, deep and livid, that has never healed. Ask him how he received it and he will tell you it was inflicted during the battle of the Forge Hills, and say no more of it. But the truth of it is that when he was lain out in the apothecarion, and his armour was removed, the apothecaries found that his hand was still clutched around something. They could not loosen his grip so they had to take his gauntlet off segment by segment. When it was done, it was revealed that he was clutching a shard of metal – the missing piece of the Axe Morkai’s blade, the one that had been lost, lodged in the body of the lictor.

Arjac had climbed through the guts of the general and torn it from within the lictor in its bony cradle, before the poison and the forces of the beast’s digestion had rendered him unconscious. He had clutched it so tight that it had cut deep into his palm, and such was its keenness that the wound has never fully closed.

And in his other hand he held the vial of Leman Russ’s blood, intact. The Wolf Priests took it and restored it to the Chapter vaults, where it lies to this day, a great relic of our Chapter’s past. As for his own weapon, the blacksmith’s hammer, that was found in the remains of the beast’s corpse and Arjac wielded it from then on, adapting it himself upon the Voidstone Anvil and using it in place of the relics offered to him from the armoury.

Those of you who have seen the Great Wolf in battle will know well the final detail I have to make right. The Axe Morkai was shattered, but its pieces were now recovered. Arjac Rockfist, when he awoke on the apothecarion slab, asked firstly who had fallen in the battle, and secondly that he be given leave to return to the Heart Forge and help rebuild it so he could once more forge the Axe Morkai. The Axe Morkai is the axe that rarely leaves the hand of Logan Grimnar, and in his employ it is an echo of Leman Russ’s own fury.

Now the fire has died completely, but it is of no matter. The night’s chill has retreated, and I feel the rays of dawn must have broken over the mountains. It is thanks to Arjac Rockfist, though he would never admit it, that the sun shines down through ice-clear skies and not dimly through clouds of spore and venom. For the Fang stands, never breached again by the Kraken spawn. They failed at the battle of the Forge Hills and they have never returned, though the lookouts have watched the ocean ever since.

You Space Wolves may not need to sleep as mere men do, but I am a mere man and the long night has put an ache in my bones. I would sleep, after I finish this last mug. I must bid you good night and good day, and retreat to my lodgings down in the humble lower levels where once a terrible predator hunted us thralls.

And pray you, brothers, ask not Arjac Rockfist about the tale I have told. Part of the reason I have told it to you is that you might know the tale of those days and will not have to question Arjac about the acid scars on the seaward wall of the Fang, the memorials to the fallen thralls in the Forge Hills, and the blacksmith’s hammer, much altered and enhanced, he now carries into battle.

There are other reasons I have told you the saga of Arjac Rockfist. You will have to work those out for yourselves. For now, my mug is dry and I would sleep. Feast now, tell your own tales of battle and heroism. But remember, boast not too much of your exploits, for perhaps the greatest hero among you has no need to boast of anything.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ben Counter is one of Black Library’s most popular Warhammer 40,000 authors, with two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles he has written The World Engine and Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris and a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

An extract from War of the Fang

They came before the old sun had risen, flying low across the plains: three Storm Eagle gunships in slate-grey, marked with Harek Ironhelm’s Great Company sigil, the Wolf that Stalks the Stars. The force contained within them, twenty-one battle-brothers, was overkill for such a mission, but then it had been Rune Priest Odain Sturmhjart who had given them this target, and they had learned to treat his warnings with respect.

The city they sped towards had not existed for more than a few months. It rose up from the caked dustpan like a hunched pyramid, a lopsided ziggurat heaped on top of itself, clambering awkwardly in crumbling ranks above the horizon with a lattice of scaffolding still covering its upper levels.

Some purpose had stirred on its forgotten world, rousing an indolent people from their torpor, making them suddenly march and build. That was what the Rune Priest Sturmhjart had sensed in his unquiet dreams – the turning of men’s minds, the inspiration of toxic thoughts. Back on Fenris, Ironhelm had listened intently, ever alert to echoes of his own visions.

‘It is him, then?’ the Great Wolf had asked.

‘It is corruption,’ Sturmhjart had confirmed, glancing at his master uncertainly, knowing that the word would be enough to order the assault.

Now Ironhelm crouched in the Storm Eagle’s crew bay, straining at his restraints, willing the slaughter to start. He could smell the foulness himself now, detectible to his heightened senses over the fuel-burn stink of the gunship. Fires burned on the walls of the city, and the coiling smoke of them barred the sky. Wood was being burned, intermingled with other, more mortal, matter.

‘By your will,’ Ironhelm growled to himself, invoking the primarch. He had donned his heavy Terminator plate, as had the other four warriors of his Wolf Guard. They tensed for the drop, already pushing against their harnesses like leashed hounds.

Ironhelm’s Storm Eagle shot over the city’s half-finished perimeter wall, air-braking hard and dropping sharply. The rear embarkation ramp hissed down on its pistons with the gunship still ten metres up.

‘Fenrys!’ thundered Ironhelm, his voice swelling as he hurled himself from the open bay.

He plummeted, crunching to earth in a bloom of kicked-up dust. A heartbeat later and his frostblade was drawn and snarling, throwing cold blue light across the pre-dawn gloom of the city.

His entourage came down after him and unfurled tools of murder – energy-coiled axes, assault cannons and glittering power swords. Ironhelm ran, ploughing up the soft dust in plumes, heading for a gaping wound in the city’s upper terraces where the walls had not yet been fully raised. He barely noticed the other two gunships disgorge their contents further down – two squads of Grey Hunters, each eight strong, fleeter of foot than the Terminators but scarcely less lethal – and hardly heard the mortal screaming break out once they got to work. It was desperate, horrified and incontinent screaming, the kind of noise an animal makes when shown the slaughterhouse. If he heard the sounds at all, it only meant that killing had started again and that he could lose himself in it – roaring out his strength, breaking the bones and tearing the flesh from them.

The first resistance came at the edge of the gaping chasm where half-built mud walls were still propped by a skeleton of wooden supports. Between their jaws was a void, drenched in shadows that were deeper than they should have been. Guards belatedly swarmed out of it, spilling from the ragged edges like insects from a kicked nest. They wore dirty, cheap robes, dyed red and stained from the dust. Their bare foreheads bore the mark of a single eye, crudely daubed in ochre. These ones did not scream, but ran at the invaders with blades whirling.

Ironhelm crashed into them, taking out four on the charge and laying into four more. He cracked their spines, throwing the broken remnants aside. The scything arc of his brothers’ assault cannon blasted more bodies apart, layering the mud with thrown blood, and in its wake came the snarling blades.

Ironhelm passed the threshold. The hair on his arms spiked. The dark around him was oily, fleeing like spilled liquid from the dull light cast by primitive brands. A high chamber opened up, carved into the heart of the city’s edge and echoing from the dull sounds of combat outside. At the far end of it stood an altar carved from what looked like bone, over ten metres tall with a crowning canopy of interlinked ribs. Pools of fatty oils burned in ceramic bowls, though the flames rippled uneasily, guttered by a wind that had no obvious source. A wooden eye-device hung from lengths of twine, twisting gently over the altar top.

More guards ran to fight him, just as uselessly as those outside the precincts, lasting mere seconds before bolter fire or energy fields tore them apart. Ironhelm was killing absently now, his attention fixed on the altar. There were fifteen figures kneeling before it, holding daggers two-handed in front of them with their backs to the carnage. Before he could get close to them, they moved. Twisting awkwardly, they plunged the blade-tips into their own faces, digging hard, each prising out an eye. None of them so much as whimpered, but held the excised flesh in clenched fists, like trophies. Then they rose and turned, smiling as their faces streamed with blood.

Ironhelm lumbered towards them. He could feel the shake of the air, the wrongness, the twisting of reality. Slivers of luminous energy wormed across the altar’s face and the chamber’s walls seemed to contract, like lungs pulling in before a breath.

The fifteen supplicants dropped their weapons. They broke into a run, heading towards Ironhelm as if greeting a lord of their own. They flung their arms open.

Ironhelm swung his frostblade, severing one at the waist and another at the neck. The others pressed closer, pawing at him, their streaked faces alive with an unsettling fervour.

Ironhelm kept killing them. They died easily, just as all mortals did before a frostblade, slumping down to the mud floor in a widening slick of blood. Not one of them flinched, nor tried to protect themselves, but they did stretch out to touch him, to run withered fingers down his armour. The last one standing even managed to speak before the blade’s edge found his neck.

‘Thank you,’ he whispered hoarsely, tears mingling with the blood on his face. ‘Thank you.’

Ironhelm grunted as he hauled the frostblade across, decapitating his victim and sending the head rolling wetly across the chamber’s floor. Then he stood, surrounded by butchery, his armour spattered and caked with blood. The kills gave him no pleasure. It wasn’t just the weakness of his prey, but the way in which they had died.

‘What did that mean?’ he muttered, looking down at the still-grinning face of his victim as it rocked gently to a halt.

By then the last of the chamber’s guards were dead, cut down without so much as scratching the armour of their sanctuary’s invaders. From outside the chamber came the continuing sounds of one-sided warfare, though even those were falling away now as the city began to burn in earnest.

Ironhelm’s huscarl, the Wolf Guard Trask, lumbered to his side, powering down his energy-blade. ‘Torch it?’ he asked, nodding over towards the bone altar.

Ironhelm was unable to concentrate. ‘What did that mean?’ he asked again.

Trask hesitated, his face hidden behind the heavy faceplate of his Terminator suit. ‘What, lord?’

Ironhelm shook himself, and let the disruptor-halo around his frostblade ripple out. ‘Aye, torch it. Torch it all.’

He strode away from the altar, his boots sucking on the gore underfoot. He’d accomplished the task, and should have been enjoying the rush of completion, shaking the blood from his blade and opening his throat in triumph.

He emerged back into the open. All around him the mud-brick terraces of the ziggurat were burning, making the air bitter with drifting ash. On the far horizon, the sun was rising, throwing long shadows across an empty land beyond the walls.

He drew in a long breath. The infection had been cut out, just as they had done on a thousand other worlds. On other occasions, that had given him satisfaction, but this time, all he could see were the eyeless faces, the smiles, the outstretched hands.

Thank you.

They had been speaking Gothic, on a world that had been sundered from the Imperium for millennia. Why was that?

Thank you.

An hour later, more landers came down from the strike cruiser in orbit. They brought mortal troops to conduct mop-up operations, secure the site, make records and scan for further anomalies. The city was rendered down into a heap of drifting ashes, and the flames sheeted up, metres high, fanned by the dry winds that raced across the plains.

Every guard inside the temple had been slain, for the Wolves had learned from bitter experience that corruption of such a nature ran deep, seeping into every pore of a world, and the only cure, such as it was, was excision.

But there were many settlements on that world, scattered widely across the continental plate. Some were scarce more than cave-swelling in the rocky bluffs; others had the rudimentary shape of towns. Orbital scans had revealed further settlements straggling out along the grimy courses of sediment-heavy river courses. Humanity had scratched out a living across a wide swath of the world, crawling out across its sun-baked flatlands, and most of them would have had no idea what was taking place in the unnatural city that had sprung up so quickly. Many would be entirely innocent. Perhaps all of them would be.

Imperial cartographers had recorded the rock as Rivel 67-4-3456t on an ancient data-scroll dating back to the earliest days of the Crusade, though the taxonomic system they had used had long since passed into obscurity and the numbers meant nothing.

The place had never been visited by the conquering fleets or taken by the forces of the Arch-Heretic. During the long years of the Scouring it had never even been used as a forward base or colonised by Mechanicus re-seeding cartels.

No one knew why humans were even there, though there were countless such backwaters dating from the forbidden eras of stellar exploration. For millennia they had endured, forgotten, degenerate, unremarked.

Only in the year 690 of the 31st millennium had the eyes of outsiders turned towards that world at last, hungrily and with the slow-burn fury of the wronged.

Alone, Ironhelm trudged across the dirt-strand leading back from the city’s broken gates. His limbs felt heavy inside his armour, as if the servos had given out and the full weight of the ceramite now bore down on his genhanced frame.

There had been killing after the temple chamber – a cleansing murder, running down from the city’s height to its foetid base. None of it had made him feel better. Every time he blinked he saw the eyeless face grinning up at him, thanking him for the death that he’d delivered with such casual expertise.

Harek Eireik Eireiksson had been Great Wolf of the Chapter for three centuries, and the number of warriors in the entire Imperium more powerful or more accomplished could probably be measured in low double figures. His battle-name, Ironhelm, was breathed across a hundred worlds with the kind of awe otherwise reserved for names from the Age of Wonder – primarchs, lord commanders, lords of Terra. Of those who dwelt in the halls of the Fang, only the Fell-Handed could claim a greater share of glory, and he slumbered now, awakened only when the need was greatest. Ironhelm had been created for greater conflict than this.

He paused in his march, looking back over his shoulder at the vast pyre his actions had created. The taste of the burning wafted across his face, now freed of his helm’s confines. Under the rising sun, it looked almost beautiful – a red-golden glow under the rush of morning.

‘This was wasted effort, lord,’ came a voice from close by.

Ironhelm whirled around. He had been alone out on the plains without a living creature within a hundred metres.

Before him, curled up on the dry mud, huddled a man, almost as much a part of landscape as the rocks and rubble around him. His robes blended in, as did his skin, which was the sunbaked colour of stained wood. He was old, his face deeply wrinkled in cracked valleys, his hands like claws. His eyes, shrouded under a thin, low hood, were pits of shadow. He looked up at the Space Wolf, fully four times his height, with a kind of amused defiance.

‘Do not think I fear you,’ the man said, and his parched lips spread into a dry smile. ‘I am too old to fear anything now, unless it be a little more life, which has always been hateful here, and so an end to it from you would be a blessing.’

Ironhelm narrowed his eyes, studying the man warily. He should have smelled him – the stench was readily apparent now, a sour mix of sweat and mouldering fabric.

‘Is that why he thanked me?’ he asked, almost without realising.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

Ironhelm wouldn’t even need his fists to finish this one – a stamp from his armoured boots, little more than his usual tread, and the man’s spine would snap like porcelain.

Perhaps that was why he didn’t do it. The toll of severed souls lay heavily on him that day. Now, under the sun, with the age-withered face looking up at him and the rush of combat over, it seemed suddenly and deadeningly futile.

‘There will be camps,’ Ironhelm told him. ‘Tribunals, run by inquisitors. If you have no taint within you, you have nothing to fear.’

‘That is gracious,’ said the man, with little trace of sarcasm. ‘You will not scrape this world of life entirely. Perhaps you have learned your lesson in that – to breed an enemy so perfectly. Tell me, does it haunt you?’

No one spoke to Ironhelm like that, not one of his warriors, certainly not a mortal. The thought of cutting the man down again flickered across his mind, but he pulled back again.

The sun beat down on the Great Wolf’s bared face. The wind moaned around the two of them. The air tasted oddly thick on his fangs, as it had done in the temple.

‘Haunt me?’

The man squinted up at him. ‘I know you dream of him. You don’t even know what he looks like, but you hear him in the deep of the night. The voice is enough.’

‘Guard your words, mortal,’ growled Ironhelm, though the sluggishness didn’t leave.

‘He lives, Son of Russ. He lives. You know it. Everywhere you go, every battle you fight – the eye is there, carved on wood, cut from iron. It will never leave you.’

‘Cease.’

‘Even now he is moving. He has compassed the world Delavia and cast it into flames. Is that place precious to you? It is warded by your Wolves? Well then, no more. It is a broken shell. It is a corpse. It is a–’

Ironhelm’s fist shot out, grabbing the man by his chicken-thin throat. The withered mortal gasped for air between the vice of ceramite fingers.

‘His Legion is dead,’ Ironhelm snarled. ‘He is dead.’

The man struggled to stay conscious. Blood vessels burst across his desiccated skin, trickling across the grey armour-plate in thin lines.

‘You know… that to be a lie,’ he rasped. ‘You know that… he is beyond death.’

Ironhelm felt flesh part under his grasp. Just a fraction more and the neck would be severed. He watched the man choke, and then relaxed.

The man collapsed, sucking in air greedily. Ironhelm watched him suffer. Much as he had fought against them, the words struck at him deeply. The dreams had been going on too long, the imagery was too resonant, for it to be coincidence. There were never coincidences. It was no accident that the man spoke standard Imperial Gothic, just as those in the temple had, or that he had evaded detection, or that he had known of Ironhelm’s dreams.

The man’s hood had fallen, revealing an almost hairless head, mottled with liver-spots across paper-dry skin. On closer inspection, Ironhelm saw his robes were stitched from many cuts of cloth, each one a slightly different shade, a subtly different weave, overlapping in a jumble. With a twinge of disgust, Ironhelm saw that the man only had one eye, a lone bloodshot orb. The other socket was empty, gouged out, by the look of it, long ago.

‘You wish for death, but it will not come by my hand,’ Ironhelm told him, keeping his voice steady. ‘The interrogators will keep you alive for longer than you desire. Speak your poison to them, I will have no part of it.’

The man looked up at him, his eye bloodshot. ‘These are words for you, lord. They have always been for you.’

Ironhelm shot him a mirthless smile. ‘Yes, that is how you would like it.’

He punched down, hard enough to crack the skull, and the man’s body went limp. He righted himself, just as the vox-bead in his gorget blinked into life.

‘Hunt complete, jarl,’ came Trask’s voice over the comm. ‘The city is secure. Lord Marillus has entered orbit. You wish to speak to him?’

Ironhelm had no desire to meet Marillus, no more so than the many other lords of the ordos he had come across during the centuries, but that was the price paid for engaging the scraps and remnants of Heresy – the agents of Terra would never be far behind.

‘I’ll see him on the surface,’ said Ironhelm, grabbing the unconscious man by his collar, turning back towards the burning city and dragging him in tow. ‘Tell him to expect a gift.’

Two days later, Ironhelm held his final meeting with the inquisitor before his strike force was due to break for the void. They stood under the shade of a Chapter lander, its stubby wings casting a long shadow across the blasted plain.

Marillus was young, a slim man in gold-lined battle armour. He spoke softly, and travelled with a modest entourage. Ironhelm suspected Terran aristocracy by the fine-boned face, clear eyes and contained mannerisms. This also explained the rapid ascension through the ranks.

He was hard to like.

‘I will say it again, lord.’ Marillus at least looked him in the eye when he spoke. ‘The destruction is regrettable. I can learn little from ruins.’

‘They deserved their deaths,’ Ironhelm said.

‘No doubt, but I will leave this world with few testimonies. It is better to speak to witches before they lose their heads.’

Ironhelm felt his weapon-hand itch, and closed the gauntlet tight.

‘The rite was near completion,’ he said. ‘We destroyed it. That is what we are charged with.’

Marillus held his gaze, then, with a slight gesture of regret, let it drop. ‘Then we will do what we can. You have my thanks, lord, for what was accomplished. In any case, you also have my earnest commiserations. No doubt you will visit vengeance swiftly for your loss.’

Was that sarcasm, now? Was he being mocked?

‘I do not–’

‘Ah, perhaps you have not yet heard? Then I am sorry to be the bearer of it. Delavia was one of your protectorates, yes?’

At the mention of the world’s name, Ironhelm immediately saw the one-eyed face again, squinting up at him from the mud.

‘What have you heard?’

‘The signals came in an hour ago, carried from a secure source. No doubt your own people will bear you the tidings soon. It is gone, burning just as this world was burned,’ Marillus replied.

‘That is not possible.’

‘No world is–’

‘It was under our watch.’

Marillus looked at him coolly. ‘And is there nothing in the galaxy that can possibly hurt that which the Wolves of Fenris cherish?’

Ironhelm felt hatred spark in him then – for the smooth face before him, for the backwater world that had offered so little glory, for the constant, nagging dream-voice that had plagued him for decades and had now spilled over into the world of waking.

‘I sent you a subject,’ Ironhelm said. ‘A man, one-eyed, found outside the city. What did you get from him?’

‘You sent me no one. I have already complained of it.’

‘You lie!’ Ironhelm rounded on him. ‘I sent him to you – you know the one. I could have wrung the truth out of him myself, but I–’

‘Then why did you not, lord?’

Ironhelm narrowed his eyes, pulling away. The inquisitor remained calm, secure in his station despite his physical frailty.

Was he a part of this? Were they acting together, cultists and the Emperor’s agent? How had Marillus received news of Delavia ahead of his own star-speakers?

‘Leave now,’ Ironhelm growled, feeling the hairs on his neck prick up. Something was wrong, wrong with everything around him.

Marillus stood his ground, looking concerned. ‘Lord, are you–’

‘Leave now. Leave before I forget the vows that ward you from harm.’

Marillus stiffened. ‘You are just as they said you would be. So be it. Hunt well, Lord of Wolves. Perhaps it is best you do so alone.’

The inquisitor turned without waiting for a reply. Ironhelm watched him go, his mind working furiously. Perhaps he should call him back. He should search for the man. He should return to the temple ruins. He should–

‘Jarl,’ came Trask’s voice over the comm. ‘Tidings you should hear.’

‘From Delavia, I know. Make the strike cruiser ready – we break for the warp within the hour.’

‘How did this happen?’

Trask’s voice was outraged, already thickening with battle-fury. Ironhelm didn’t want to hear it. The fighting would come soon enough, but that would not be the end of it. Another voice now echoed in his mind, one that he should have silenced earlier, before it could have planted the seed that would now plague him.

He lives.

‘This is but the start,’ Ironhelm told him, making for the lander’s open doors. ‘Mark now this name. It is prey for us now, just as it was in the age before.’

He reached the ladder and gripped the iron rail, feeling the metal tremble as the atmospheric drives whined into life.

‘Magnus,’ Ironhelm snarled, spitting out the hated name as if it were poison. ‘All else can perish in the fires, but he I shall strike from eternity.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2014.
This eBook edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

Arjac Rockfist © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Arjac Rockfist, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-382-7

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games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

(2) the purchaser of an e-book product from Black Library website (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase an e-book (“e-book”) from Black Library. The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media; and

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.