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Bloodhowl – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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BLOODHOWL

By Chris Forrester

Bolts bracketed the Spartan’s frontal glacis.

Jorin Bloodhowl hammered his restraint release, stretching blood into his muscles. His armour groaned, its damaged fibre-bundles vomiting sparks, his freedom of movement hindered by sections of temporary reinforcement. He checked his bolt pistol, its ammunition counter flickering live on his retinal feed, and drew his power axe. Actinic tendrils of blue-white power crackled along the smiling edge of the Fenrisian steel.

Jorin’s iron-hard features twisted into a toothy smile.

Around him, twenty-four veterans in storm-grey ceramite, edged with silver and gold, readied their weapons. Iron torcs banded their arms; tattered oath-scrolls and honours earned when Leman ruled only the Russ were affixed to their armour. They locked black wolf-skull helms into place, each one the mirror of Jorin’s own blood-streaked death mask.

They were his Varagyr, the finest warriors of Dekk-Tra.

‘Two minutes.’ The vox-plate clotted the warning with static.

Jorin blink-clicked a rune on his retinal display, creating a data-bridge with the tank’s gun-picters. Dekk-Tra’s armoured spearhead closed on a narrow defile, its grass-spare slopes marked by stump, stone and scattered earth. Uprooted trees formed a palisade. Beyond it, huts of mud and straw squatted on a flat berm beside green and gold fields that waved in the gentle breeze. Beasts native to Bloodfall grazed there, fatted and ready for slaughter.

Figures fought outside the village, clad in midnight blue and storm grey.

‘Has Gunnar responded to our hails?’ Thorald asked, loading a fresh magazine into his boltgun. Jorin felt the shade of Morkai, the Deathwolf, stir in his hearts at the mention of his former axe-brother. ‘Or have the gothi led us into another Alpha Legion trap?’

‘Is anything certain in this war?’ Jorin countered.

‘We should be at our king’s side,’ Hjalmar Stormfist growled, flexing the scuffed fingers of his power fist. Amber eyes gleamed through slits in his leather mask, its surface cut to echo flayed facial muscles. ‘Not wasting time chasing rumours of errant brothers far from the real war. We are Dekk-Tra, the Old Guard of Russ, not a pack of witless kaerls.’

‘It is no waste,’ Leif snapped.

Jorin scowled, again questioning his decision to appoint Leif as his new lieutenant. Bulveye and Gunnar, once his axe-brothers amongst Russ’ first Einherjar, had served as his lieutenants during the Great Crusade, their martial skills matched by an easy charisma that Leif simply lacked. They had disappeared after Prospero, and seven long years of attrition had left him few good candidates to replace them. He needed a reliable husjarl now more than ever. Their recent defeats had shown him that.

‘We need every blade to break Horus’ armies, and succeed where our effort at Trisolian failed,’ Leif continued.

‘We do not mention that place,’ Hjalmar said. Several Wolves hissed. ‘It carries a bad wyrd, one that plagues even the Wolf King since he chose to tempt its wrath.’

Jorin suppressed a shiver. The memory of his last audience with Russ was a siren’s song that played at the edge of his mind, drawing him into its embrace.

The Wolf King was alone in his hall, food cold and mouldering in trencher and lanx. Scrolls detailing Morkai’s tithe at Trisolian surrounded him. Ash streaked his cheeks, broken by dried tear trails. He watched Jorin approach through eyes sunken into the grey hollows of their sockets, a draugr given solidity by the Allfather’s will. He had been the same for weeks. Doubt festered in his soul, questions over his role as a lord and the Allfather’s executioner.

It tore at Jorin’s soul to see his lord so conflicted.

‘I hear the gothi may have found Gunnar and his Hunt.’ Russ’ voice was a cracked echo of its former strength. ‘I hear that you wish to take ship and return them to the Legion.’

‘I do, my king.’ Jorin’s lips moved in time with his memory. ‘They have been too long without your guidance, and we need their strength to break the Warmaster’s armies.’

‘What if they prove unwilling to return?’ Russ asked.

‘Those unwilling will be slain as traitors,’ Jorin said. ‘That is what they are.’

Russ shook his head and smiled ruefully.

‘No, my son. Offer them their chance, but do not command it of them.’ Russ silenced his surprise with a raised hand. ‘They chose their own path in my father’s service, and while they continue to serve Him, they are no traitors.’ He laughed. ‘I envy them their freedom, for they alone govern their actions and fate, as all my jarls, and their companies, soon must.’

‘Thirty seconds.’ The vox-plate dragged Jorin from his reverie.

‘The runes have been cast, the course set.’ Jorin hammered his axe-throat against his plastron, fingers tightening around its sealskin haft. Morkai’s shade was boiling oil in his veins, his red howl washing Jorin’s fears for Russ away in waves of stinging excitement at the promise of bloodshed. ‘Gather your axes, warriors of Russ. The bludhaer comes.’

Jorin hammered his breastplate again. His Wolves echoed it, falling into a rhythm that steadily rose towards crescendo. The clamour filled the cramped compartment.

‘Once more, Dekk-Tra weaves the murder-make at our king’s command, to punish the craven sons of Nostramo, and restore kin lost to us after Prospero.’ Shame flushed his cheeks. Recasting his order as Russ’ own was a dishonourable act, one that would stain his soul until the Uppland called, but such was the cost of Horus’ war. No warrior could be spared to pursue foolish, self-appointed crusades.

‘Ten seconds!’

‘Cut every thread you find,’ Jorin bellowed. ‘If wyrd determines this day be your last, greet the end with courage. Ere that, let the soil run red with the tale of their lives ending.’

‘Heidur Russ!’ his Wolves roared. ‘Heidur Fenrys!’

The assault ramp clanged open.

Jorin sprinted down the ramp, squeezing his bolt pistol’s trigger. Two mass-reactives punched through a Night Lord’s gorget, his head vanishing in a crimson plume. The clunking chatter of the Spartan’s heavy bolters drove daggers of pure agony into Jorin’s skull. Tongues of fire raked the traitor line, the crack-thump of bursting shells accompanied by sprays of blood and aerosolised meat. The air shrieked, kaleidoscopic lances of pure energy spearing a Contemptor’s torso as fifty of Jorin’s Varagyr charged from their transports.

‘Fenrys hjolda!’ Jorin howled.

His brothers took up the chant, firing as they charged.

Jorin vaulted stacked corpses, the putrid stench of rotten meat and faecal matter clogging his throat as his bolts blasted apart another traitor. A stray burst staggered a second legionary, his cracked helm exposing alabaster flesh networked by cyanotic veins. A second salvo blew the traitor’s skull apart. Return fire hammered his plastron, spraying sparks across his vision, filling his mouth with the acrid tang of bolt propellant. Thick fissures cobwebbed the ceramite, and pain crackled along his ribs, blood dripping through the tears. Alert klaxons trilled. Jorin ignored them, cutting another traitor apart with a flurry of mass-reactives.

The VIII were reacting with an alacrity that surprised him.

Raptors bounded forwards on screeching jump packs, hideous avian shrieks drowning the throaty roar of tank engines and the rolling thunder of bolters brought to bear by Tactical and Terror squads. Plasma bursts and volkite beams rained on the Space Wolves like the fiery tears of Syrtyr. One burst in billows of ash, while another was roasted alive in his armour, steam venting through the soft-seals. Bolts punched two Varagyr from their feet and blasted a third apart. A Varagyr at Jorin’s side fell, shredded offal spraying through his cracked armour with the muted crumps of detonating mass-reactives.

‘Our cousins seem displeased.’ Thorald laughed, pain veining his voice as a bolt tore through his side. His biocodes flashed amber on Jorin’s retinal feed, his sensorium locating the Night Lord responsible. Jorin’s bolts split the traitor’s cuirass, shredding his vital organs. ‘These skítnah wretches held poor regard for guest-right already, but this is deplorable.’

‘What were you hoping for, brother?’ Ulbrandr Crowhame asked. His volkite serpenta shrieked, a traitor’s chest vanishing in sprays of steam and fire. ‘Bread and cheese to settle your delicate stomach? Perhaps meat and ale to strengthen your sword-arm?’

‘My sword-arm and stomach need no help, priest,’ Thorald laughed, bolter spitting death in golden flashes. ‘Though a horn of mjød among cousins is not unreasonable.’

Jorin grinned, cutting down a Night Lord with red-stained gauntlets and a tabard of flayed skin marked by Nocturnean brands. It was a fine thing to hear his brothers’ spirits lifted so. Their recent defeat at Trisolian, and a narrow escape from an Alpha Legion ambush at Akanthis, had shrouded them in a strange melancholy. There was no laughter in the mead halls, nor exaggerated boasts in the training cages.

Defeat had stolen something from Dekk-Tra, something they needed.

‘The bear is roused,’ Jorin said, another two biocodes sizzling to grey non-existence. Seven Varagyr slept on the red snows, and two suffered in healing comas, while more carried deep wounds. ‘We must spear the beast quickly, before the tables turn.’ He gunned another traitor down. ‘Unfortunately, we cannot use your jests, they make for terrible iron.’

Guttural laughter sliced through curt snaps of Wurgen as pack-alphas obeyed the battle-cant, folding their warriors into the spear point Jorin aimed at the traitors’ heart. The VIII were cowards by nature, their foes’ weakness and the terror their lords inspired the only crutches for their courage. He searched the traitor battle line for their lord, vowing to see him slain as the Wolves of Fenris tore into the Night Lords, howling in bloody abandon.

Jorin ducked the decapitating sweep of a sergeant’s chainglaive, disembowelling him on the backswing. He emptied his bolt pistol into a traitor’s skullish visor as he tried to draw his chainaxe. A third came at him, his crackling power fist painted red and slick with fresh blood. Jorin avoided clumsy swipes with contemptuous ease, severing the arm at the elbow before disembowelling him. Organs slapped wetly into the mud.

Jorin ground them to paste under his heel.

‘It baffles me that Gunnar believes these cravens worthy prey,’ Leif said, blocking the frenzied strikes of a Raptor’s power claws with his storm shield. His frostblade cleaved the traitor from clavicle to pelvis. ‘They disgrace the Legions with every breath.’

‘He has long sought to punish the Eighth Legion for their crimes during the crusade,’ Ulbrandr said, plunging his Fang of Morkai into a traitor’s eye. He twitched, transfixed on the drill. Jorin slew a Raptor as he slunk into Ulbrandr’s blind spot, chainsword raised and ready to decapitate the Wolf Priest. The warrior cawed strangely as he died. ‘It was his obsession.’

‘What does his reason matter?’ Hjalmar snapped, power fist pulping a Raptor’s visor. Lubricant thickened the blood leaking from his shoulder, fibre-bundles showering sparks from rents torn in his plastron. ‘They deserted the Rout. They are traitors of a lesser shade.’

Jorin hesitated, hearing an echo of his own words to Russ in the Stormfist’s vitriol. Had he sounded so petty before the primarch?

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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