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Leman Russ: The Great Wolf – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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The night was clear of cloud, lit only by a scatter of blue-white stars above the towering flanks of Krakgard. Fenris could be starkly beautiful when the mood took it, perhaps as beautiful as any world in the Imperium.

But Ove-Thost did not know of any other worlds. All he had known from birth was the bone-cracking cold, the sudden fire of the world’s erupting heart, the surge and crash of ice-studded oceans, and until three days ago he had forgotten even that.

Three days ago he had been a beast, his jawline frothy with saliva. He had loped on all fours, slouching amid the grey drifts, howling his agony out into the empty skies. He had fought other beasts in that time – huge, fur-clad monsters of cave and gorge. They had ripped at his back with their claws, and he had torn at their throats with his teeth.

Ove-Thost had only blurred memories of those fights now, but retained the wounds to show for them. Bloodstains lay, speckled and frozen, across his naked muscle-mass. When he looked at those muscles now with his returning human senses, he saw hair, thick-rooted, red-crowned, thrusting out across the backs of his arms, his chest, his legs. He ran his hands, now long-nailed, over the russet mane of his neck and felt the coarse strands fight back against his fingers’ tug.

Now he ran again like a man should run – two-legged, though hunched and panting. He waded in the snow, sinking knee deep, kicking it up in flurries. His breath came in wet gasps, dragged up from lungs swollen with blood, and it felt to him like burning oil.

Ove-Thost half stood. Krakgard’s eastern shoulder loomed up into the night, glowing pale blue under Valdrmani’s light. The mountain edge was spiky with the black outlines of pine woods, each one thick, clinging and home to a thousand more ways to die. He peered ahead into the murk, using eyes that now saw more sharply than he could had dreamed of before taking the draught from the chalice. He sniffed, dragging air up into his nasal cavity, and identified the many separate strands of danger clustering on a raging wind.

Beyond the tree line and the pass’ crown was the greatest peak of all, the Mountain, the place where he had been taken, tested and changed. All he clearly remembered of that place was the Gate, licked by fire, and then the dreams, the ones that had made him scream into the dark, all the while watched by faces, hidden faces, swathed in leather masks, their golden eyes pinning him.

He had to get back there now, out of the eternal cold, back to the fires that burned under the earth. Even in the midst of his bestial madness he had known that.

Get back.

He moved again, ignoring the jabs of pain in his calves, keeping low to the crusted snow. The pass was up above him, a soaring mass of cliffs and defiles, latticed with false trails and crevasses. The fatigue was crushing now, but he kept going, forcing cramp-tight sinews to function.

It took hours to reach the first ridge, after which he picked up speed, pushing the drifts apart with chapped hands. Valdrmani had almost set by the time he reached the apex of the pass and clapped weary eyes on the Mountain itself.

Amid the night-shadows it seemed vaster than before – an engorged outcropping of the planet’s core, thrusting up, higher and higher, cloaked in ever-steepening terraces of dirty snow. The summit glowed, set against the star-flung sky with distant points of red, and the earth beneath shuddered faintly from the deep-bored action of its immense under-engines.

The causeways were below him, driving up from the base of the valleys ahead, straight and wide. At the end of them were the Gates, crowned with stone and barred with weather-blackened iron.

But first he had to get to them. He broke into a run again, sliding and skidding amid the rime and slush. His breath came faster, his heartbeat heavy.

He smelt the pungent note of predator a microsecond too late, hidden by the gale at his face. He veered suddenly, dropping to his knees, but not fast enough, and a living wall of fur and sinew hit him from the side.

Ove-Thost crashed through the snow, tumbling. Claws raked across his back, digging in deep, and he roared with pain. He pushed back, trying to hurl the creature from him, but it was on top now, heavier than him, shaggy with a grey-flecked pelt as stiff as iron.

It went for him, opening jaws as wide as his chest. Ove-Thost caught a glimpse of three rows of teeth, then a blast of foul breath and a splatter of yellow saliva. He jerked his head to one side, heaving with his arms to push the creature off balance.

It was just enough, and the jaws snapped closed over his shoulder, not his neck. Blood fountained, gushing over both of them, drenching Ove-Thost’s cheeks and mouth.

The copper stink wakened the animal rage within him again, the one that had kept him alive in the deep waste, and he roared with fury. He shoved harder, pushing the creature away and into a roll. He pushed with his cramped legs, straightening them and hauling himself over on top of the hunter.

His hands were still locked in the clawed grasp of the beast’s, his body sunk into its furs, so all he had were his teeth, longer and sharper since taking the draught.

He bit down, ripping through flesh and hair, shaking his head from side to side, bathing in the hot black rivers of blood. The thing beneath him howled, arched its back and tried to pull clear, but Ove-Thost was no longer the hunted.

The kill was made. He pulled himself up from the carcass, threw his bloody head back and howled into the night. He threw out his triumph, arms back, chest shaking from exertion, his naked flesh streaked with long lines of steaming liquid.

For a moment, he almost lost himself. Visions flashed across his fevered mind – he saw himself loping back into the woods, hunting more of the creatures that lurked there. He could join the chase forever, running under moonlight-barred snow, letting the amber-eyed presence now locked in his breast go free.

Then his kill-howl guttered out, and he toppled, dizzy from blood loss. On his knees now, he felt the animal retreat and the man return. His shoulder was a raw mass of chewed tissue – a wound he would have died from before his body had been changed, and which even now threatened to end him.

He reached out, back into the hot maw of the dead beast, and wrenched out two of its fangs, each as long as his hand, slender and wickedly curved. Grunting, he pushed them both through the lips of his wound, pinning the edges closer.

Then he stood and staggered away, leaving pooling footprints behind. His vision was edged with blurs now, shaking even as he moved. He shuddered from the cold, enduring the come-down from his animal frenzy, impelled only by the mantra he had repeated over and over in the bleak hours.

Get back.

As more hours passed, he lost the ability to guide himself. His feet dragged, his head hung low. At some point the thick carpet of snow began to feel firmer underfoot, as if stone lay beneath it, but he did not stop to check.

He fell to his knees again, shivering, and crawled. It felt like he was going up, climbing steeply, pulling himself into the heavens themselves, where the stars wheeled and the Allfather welcomed the best fighters to His halls.

He only stopped when the night melted away before him, broken by a thin line of pearl-grey in the east, and the blue shadows shrank back. The wind fell, and the hard light of Fenris’ sun bled like water into an empty sky.

He looked up and saw the Mountain before him, rising into the frigid air, immense beyond reckoning. The Gate stood just a few hundred metres distant, itself vast, many-storeyed, flanked by columns of hewn rock and surmounted by a mighty stone wolf’s-head that snarled out across the causeway’s approaches. Tiny-looking figures clustered at its base, each clad in battle-armour and wearing metal masks.

Ove-Thost crawled towards them, his left leg now numb and dragging, his shoulder leaking blood. They made no move to come to his aid, but watched as the distance closed. As they neared, Ove-Thost saw their pitiless faces gaze at him, their metal hands resting on the hilts of great swords and axes. Some were clad in blue-grey, others the dull sheen of bare iron, some in blackest pitch.

Each exertion was more painful than the last. The blurring of his vision grew more severe, and soon all he saw was a fog of grey. When he reached the threshold, his fingers closed over it, weakly gripping at wind-scoured stone. Only then did the giants move, reaching down to drag him to his feet, to pour hot liquid down his throat, to rip the fangs from his wound, preparing to throw them back into the wilderness.

‘No,’ blurted Ove-Thost, reaching out for the teeth of the beast he had slain.

He heard laughter, coarse, deeper than a man’s. One of the figures, black-armoured, his eyes glowing a dull red like heart’s-blood, took the two fangs back and pressed them into Ove-Thost’s calloused palms.

‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘You earned them.’

That was the beginning.

Years passed, and his body underwent further changes. The draught he had taken out on the eternal ice, the Canis Helix, proved to be the first of many trials. Each one that came afterwards brought fresh agony as his limbs flexed and his blood thickened, but it also made him stronger, faster, deadlier. He learned to fight in new ways, and with new weapons. Before, he might have been proud to boast of killing a man; now, he was being taught to kill hundreds, thousands, whole worlds.

He was no longer Ove-Thost, but Haldor Twinfang, and he took to the name as he took to everything in that place. He was a Blooded Claw, the rawest of the Rout, and he trained and sparred with others like him, all pulled from the tribes of the frozen seas and wrought into gods.

He saw no difference between himself and the others. He laughed with them and brawled with them, and learned which of the great weapons – axe, blade, boltgun, claws – would be his favoured. His pack formed up around him as more survived the trials: Valgarn, Eiryk, Yellowtooth, Sventr and others, all young, their skin smooth and their eyes shining. They looked up into the storm-wracked skies of the death world and saw the ships power from the landing stages at the Mountain’s summit; they knew that they would be on those ships when all was done, and they yearned for it.

Brannak was Wolf Priest of Brokenlip’s Great Company, and drove them all hard. At every test, at every hurdle, he was watching, arms folded, his long-handled axe, Frost, balanced under the weight of his wrists. It was he who had given Haldor the fangs back, and they now hung on cured leather strips from the Blooded Claw’s neck, jangling against the smooth grey of his armour’s breastplate.

Haldor believed that Brannak paid him special attention. In times of fatigue, when he had been driven almost beyond endurance, he resented that. In other times, it fuelled a deep-set confidence, bordering on arrogance. That brought retribution from his pack-mates, who fought as hard among one another as they did with any sent against them. After the long spars, their flesh bloody, their bones cracked, they would slump around the firepits, hair lank with sweat, and forget what had started it.

‘He watches everyone,’ said Eiryk, grinning through a bruised mouth.

‘Me more than you,’ Haldor muttered. ‘Me more than anyone.’

So the days passed, a procession of ice and fire, out under the sky, down in the caverns, and they grew, and they earned their scars, and the bond of the pack formed tighter.

Sventr was the first to die. Three others followed him, destroyed by the agonies of implantation failure or death in trial-combat. When the final day came, the pack was nine strong, all with the carapace in place and the link with power armour established. They were complete then, in body if not yet fully in mind. They donned helms and saw the world dissolve into runic overlays of electronic targets. They were taken to the forges of the Iron Priests and given their blades – chainswords, mostly.

When Haldor stood to receive his, Brannak handed him an axe, shorter of haft than Frost, twin-bladed and forged from a dark metal. It had no runes on the face, but two austere lines of tracery cut along the outer edges.

Haldor hefted it, finding the weight unfamiliar but agreeable. He would use it, he thought, to carve the galaxy apart.

‘You know what this is named?’ Brannak asked him.

Haldor looked up at him. ‘Should I?’

Brannak cuffed him across the jawline, the hard crack of a warrior’s fist, and Haldor’s neck snapped back. ‘Learn it.’

Then he moved down the line. Haldor rubbed his already-swelling cheek and looked down at the metal. It had no name that he knew of. Perhaps he would have to steal one for it.

He snatched a look at Eiryk, who was already studying his chainsword with relish.

‘What now?’ Haldor whispered.

Eiryk did not look at him, but ran a finger, clattering, over the honed teeth. ‘We are Sky Warriors, brother,’ he replied absently. ‘We do what they do. We drink.’

The hall rang with voices. Some were human, though those voices were pale and thin beside the guttural roars of the transhumans, the Ascended, the demigods. Braziers glowed with coals, flaring up into blazes as the alcohol-rich mjod was flung across them. The air was rich, a stink of sweat and cooked meats and trodden straw.

This was deep in the Fang, enveloped within its iron-dark innards, lit from within by writhing flame, a place of snaking shadows and blood-red hearth-heat. The entire brotherhood was there, brawling and gorging under the sight of their jarl, Aeska Brokenlip, once warrior of Tra of the VI Legion, now Wolf Lord of the Third Great Company of the Space Wolves Chapter. The galaxy had changed since the breaking of the Siege, even in the halls of Fenris, but much remained the same.

Aeska’s Wolf Guard sat with him at the stone-hewn high table, scrabbling across food boards for fat-rich intestines. They raised gold-chased drinking horns, chucking oily liquid down hoarse throats. They chanted the old songs of the Legion, the ones that had been sung on the ice world since before the Allfather had come, and which would be sung there after the last star was extinguished.

They wore armour, for this was a day of marking, of celebrating the raw strength of what had been dragged out of the galactic cataclysm and which now had borne fresh shoots, green like spear-thorns after the winter. They also wore furs, sticky with spillage, the trophies of the slain taken out in the wilderlands.

Haldor sat with his pack of Blooded Claws, the neophytes of the company, though on this day they had been given the place of honour below the high table. Eiryk was on his left, his face flushed, Valgarn on his right. It might have been any feast on any wood-built jarl’s-hall in the midst of the high summer, with horns raised to honour the slain and goad the living.

Only after many hours did Brokenlip at last rise from his throne, shaking rust-brown hides from his shoulders, and the tide of noise shuddered into silence.

Aeska’s face was scarred down the right-hand side, making the skin pale and puckered. One eye was augmetic, a ring of scratched metal bolted onto his skull; one hand was bionic. There were rumours that he had been taken from Yarant barely alive, his thread a second from being cut clean. He was one of the few, the ones who had stood beside Russ in the Age of Wonder, when all was new and the towers of the Imperium were first raised, and so when he spoke, even the Claws listened.

The Wolf Lord lifted a drinking-horn clutched in a gnarled, ring-studded fist.

‘Heilir, Fenryka,’ he growled, and his voice ran across the stone flags like wildfire kindling. ‘Come in peace to this hearth.’

The greeting was as old as the bones of the world, and all raised their own drinks in response, saluting their warlord.

‘We have come here under stone since Ogvai was jarl,’ Aeska said, ‘to mark victory, to mark defeat, to blood the newcomers, to let our long-fangs beckon death a little closer.’

Coarse chuckles ran around the room.

‘Yet this is the first night of a new age. These Claws who take their step into the Rout are the first to know nothing but new ways. All others here joined a Legion. They join a Chapter. They are our future.’ Brokenlip switched his heavy gaze to Haldor’s table, where it alighted on him above all. ‘Allfather preserve us.’

Haldor held that gaze, not even acknowledging to himself how hard it was to meet the eyes of one who had fought for so long, so hard, against an enemy that even all these years after his final defeat still seemed as present as the dark on a fire’s edge.

Brokenlip drew his blade – a great broadsword with a dragon’s neck snaking along the serrated edge. He angled it towards the Claws, dipping it in salute.

‘The enemy will return,’ he said, his voice a low snarl that snagged like claws across hide. ‘Fight it. Throttle it. Cast it down, just like we made you to do.’

The company clambered to their feet, shoving aside heavy wooden boards and reaching for chainswords, axes, longswords, mauls. All were held aloft, casting shadows of murder across the faces of the new recruits.

‘When you came here, this was my hearth,’ said Aeska, his pitted lips cracking into a fang-bared grimace, or perhaps a smile. ‘Now it is yours. Defend it with your lives.’

They all cried aloud then, a fierce wall of sound that made the stone shiver and the flames shake.

‘Vlka Fenryka!’

Before he knew what he was doing, Haldor had seized his axe. His pack had taken their own weapons, and they slid from battle-worn scabbards in a ripple of dry hisses.

‘Fenrys!’

All of them were shouting now, summoning up spirits of war and rage, fuelled by the punishing quantities of mjod coursing around their genhanced systems. The fires seemed to rear up, swelling within iron cages, pushing back the Mountain’s eternal gloom.

Haldor was no different.

‘Fenrys hjolda!’

The massed roars echoed back from the high chamber roof. Long Fang and Blooded Claw, Grey Hunter and Wolf Guard, the old names and the new, all became one voice amid the flames and the war-cries, bonded by the shared howl like the wolf packs of the outer wilds.

And then the thunder broke, replaced by the hard-edged, deep-timbre laughter of warriors. The weapons were stowed, the drinking-horns reached for. Brannak swaggered over to the Claws’ table, his thick voice blurred by mjod, starting to tell the tales that would carry on far into the night. They would recite sagas now, all the grizzled warlords, reciting old records of old wars scattered far across the sea of stars. Every feast ended with this, the skjalds and the jarls remembering, for this was how annals were made on Fenris.

Throughout it all, Aeska kept his eyes fixed on Haldor. Once the last of the war-cries had faded, the Blooded Claw looked away from the high table, suddenly uncomfortable. He pushed his way from the bench, sending boards laden with raw meat thudding to the floor.

Eiryk looked back at him, his face mottled, eyes narrow with mirth. ‘Too rich for you, brother?’ he asked.

Haldor spat on the floor. He was fine. He was more than fine – he was bursting with life, his every muscle burning for the coming test of true combat.

Aeska’s words echoed in his mind, though. They are our future.

‘Listen to the old man’s stories,’ Haldor told him, holding up his empty drinking-horn. ‘I thirst.’

He strode off, hearing Brannak’s voice raised in declamation behind him.

‘And the sky cracked, and the ice broke, and the Allfather came to Fenris, and Russ, war-girt, went to meet Him, and they fought, and the earth was lain waste, and the stars shivered out...’

Haldor shoved through the press of bodies, making his way towards the far gates of the hall. As he neared the great vats of heated mjod, as thick and viscous as unrefined promethium, a chill wind sighed through the open arches. Beyond those arches, empty corridors snaked away into the heart of the Mountain, unlit and cold, burrowing ever deeper. He looked at them, and they looked back at him.

Haldor turned on the threshold and saw his battle-brothers celebrating. Thralls scuttled across the floor, veering around the giants with silent skill, carrying more fuel for the revels.

This was his world now, his hearth to guard.

He slipped out under the nearest arch. The air temperature soon dropped away to the hellish default, and the last of the firelight flickered into nothing.

Haldor pressed himself against frigid stone, rough-cut and slick with ice. He took in a deep breath, enjoying the searing cold in his lungs. The dark pressed around him, just as it had in the forests of Asaheim, blue-black, vengeful.

Then he was moving again, loping like he had done before, deeper down. He did not know all the ways of the Mountain yet. Perhaps no Sky Warrior did, for the fortress was never more than a fraction full. The great bulk of the Chapter was forever at war, coming back to the home world only for feasts or councils, and in any case the place had been intended for a Legion.

He went on, further away, deeper down. The echoes of mortal voices died away entirely, replaced by the almost imperceptible rhythm of the deep earth. Ice cracked endlessly, ticking like a chrono in the dark. Meltwater, formed over buried power lines, trickled across broken stone before freezing again in swirling patterns below. From the great shafts came the half-audible growls of the massive reactors tended by the Iron Priests, and the eternal forges that created the Chapter’s weapons of war, and, so he had heard tell, the forgotten halls where the eldest of all dwelt, their hearts locked in ice and their minds kept in a stasis of dreams.

By then he had no idea where he was going, nor why, only that the shadows were welcome, and for the moment he had no need of fire to warm his hearts nor more flesh to fill his innards. He had been changed, and his body embraced the crippling cold where once it would have killed him, and he welcomed it.

Then he froze, and the hairs on the back of his arms lifted. Soundlessly, swift as a thought, he reached for the haft of the axe bound at his belt.

The corridor ahead was as dark and empty as all the others, rising slightly and curving to the left. Haldor narrowed his gaze, but the shadow lay heavy, and nothing broke the gloom.

Something was there, up ahead, out of visual range but detectable all the same. A pheromone, perhaps, or the ghost of a scent. Haldor dropped low and crept forwards, keeping the haft gripped loose. The tunnels of the Fang were full of dangers, all knew that. He became painfully aware of how noisy his armour was, and how much stealthier he could be without it.

He reached the curve ahead and passed around it. The change in the air told him the corridor had opened out, but the dark was now unbroken. He could hear something out there – breathing, like an animal’s, soft and low – but could not pin it down. He crouched, shifting the weight of the axe, readying to move.

Before he could do anything more, a voice came out of the darkness, deeper than any animal’s, rimed with age.

‘Put the axe down, lad.’

Haldor had obeyed before he even knew it, bound by a gene-heritage that was older than he was. Suddenly, the pall seemed to shift, and a figure loomed up through the Fang’s under-murk. For a moment, all Haldor saw was a figment of old race-nightmares – a daemon of the darkling woods, crowned with branches, eyes as blue as sea-ice and hands like the gnarled roots of trees.

But then he was looking into features he knew as well as his own, despite never having seen them in flesh and blood. The face was smeared with ashes, a daub-pattern of black on pale skin. A heavy mantle of furs hung over hunched shoulders, and a gunmetal-grey gauntlet clutched at the hilt of a heavy, rune-encrusted longsword.

Instantly, without being bidden, Haldor dropped to one knee.

‘Enough of that,’ said his primarch, testily. ‘Why are you here?’

Haldor didn’t know. Aeska’s words had driven him out, and the cold had sucked him in, but that was all he understood. Perhaps it had been the drink, or perhaps the last chance to walk the silent depths before war called, or maybe the tug of fate.

Now he stood, alone, in the presence of the Lord of Winter and War.

‘One of Aeska’s whelps,’ said Leman Russ, drawing closer, his strange eyes shining in the dark. ‘No wonder you left the hall. Bloody sagas. I’ve heard them all.’

Haldor couldn’t tell if he was jesting. ‘They told of the Allfather,’ he said, hesitantly, wary of the danger in the primarch’s every move. Russ was like a blackmane, huge, unpredictable, bleeding with danger. ‘They said you fought Him. The only time you lost.’

Russ barked out a laugh, and the fur mantle shook. ‘Not the only time.’ He shrank back into the shadows then, seeming to diminish a fraction, but the danger remained.

Haldor caught snatched glimpses of his master’s garb. Not the heavy armour plate of the warrior-king, but layers of hard-spun wool, streaked with the charcoal of spent embers. They were the clothes of death rites, of mourning. Some warrior of the Aett, perhaps even the Einherjar, must have been slain, though it was unusual for the Wolf Priests not to have called out the names of the dead through the Chapter.

Russ noticed the weapon Haldor had placed back at his belt, and looked at it strangely. ‘You know what blade that is?’ he asked.

Haldor shook his head, and Russ snorted in disgust.

‘The gaps grow, holes in the ice, greater with every summer-melt,’ the primarch said. ‘You know nothing. They remember nothing.’

Russ trailed off, half turning back towards the dark. Haldor said nothing. His hearts were both beating, a low thud, an instinctive threat-response even when no blades were raised.

‘I know not whether you were sent to mock me or bring me comfort,’ Russ said at last, ‘but sent you were. So listen. Listen and remember.’

Haldor stayed where he was, not daring to move, watching the huge, fur-clad outline under the Mountain’s heart. Russ was speaking like a skjald.

‘I fought the Allfather, that is true, and He bested me, for the gods themselves fear Him, mightiest of men. But that was not the only time.’

The eyes shone, points of sapphire, lost in the grip of ice-shadow.

‘There was another.’

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A Black Library Publication

Published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

Leman Russ: The Great Wolf © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Leman Russ: The Great Wolf, The Horus Heresy Primarchs, 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: 978-1-78496-233-3

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