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SPACE WOLVES

DARK CITY

Steve Lyons

His opponents had never stood a chance.

Most likely, thought Krom Dragongaze, they were never meant to.

There had been six of them to his one – slobbering ghouls with flat eyeless faces and rows of trembling nostrils. They had come at him in flurries of claws and teeth, blunting both against his armour. The last one had wrapped its mouth around his forearm, clinging to him tenaciously for all its wounds. He tore it free and dashed it to the floor.

Throwing back his fiery mane, he loosed a howl of triumph to the heavens.

Then his victory soured in his throat. The crowd’s roars washed over him, reminding him where he was. He knew what they wanted from him. The last of his enemies was twitching at his feet. They were baying for him to hurt it again. They wanted him to torture it, to eke out its dying agonies.

He spited them by staving in the ghoul’s skull with his maul, though this was an undeserved mercy. The dark eldar’s cheers turned to jeers, their fine features twisted in displeasure. Russ, if only I had my pistol, thought Krom.

He was barrelling towards them before he knew it.

He jumped off the finely balanced, polished bone disc of the stage. He ploughed through knotted coils of razorwire. He vaulted onto the high wall that separated him from the crowd. He came as close as he ever had to getting over it. Then whips enwrapped his arms, his legs, his throat, as they always did. Krom knew it was useless to struggle against his captors, and yet, wreathed in the red mist of rage, he always did.

The whips crackled with profane energy, and his nervous system burned. The slave masters yanked Krom back into the arena and he writhed in the black sand, convulsing helplessly, coughing up foam and flecks of blood.

The sky of Commorragh had a sullen crimson cast. It rested heavily on the tips of the arena’s jagged spires and the brooding ziggurats overlooking it. Shrivelled black suns glared balefully down at him. When Krom had first arrived here, another prisoner – a dishevelled Imperial Guardsman – had told him he would see no other sky for as long as he lived, which would be until he met his match in combat. ‘Then it will be a long life,’ Krom had boasted. He hadn’t seen the Guardsman again.

The crowd had forgotten him already. Other battles were in progress across the various stages, offering them many more opportunities to sate their lust for suffering. A member of the wych cult that ran the arena was carving up a tau fire warrior. Krom wondered if it too had been captured on Dactyla. Beyond them, he saw clawed fiends, a battered-looking Chaos Terminator – and a figure in a filthy pale robe and black power armour.

Krom’s weapon was torn from his nerveless fingers. Six slave masters hauled him away through one of the many dark portals that led to the arena’s bowels. By now, the descent through the foetid passageways, with their pulsing, green-tinted light, was a horribly familiar one. His footsteps rang off the floor, which felt like marble but was black with sickly-looking veins coursing through it.

An iron gate hissed open for him, and Krom was thrown to the floor of one of the gladiatorial cells. Unable to lift his hands to catch himself, he landed like a sack of grain. He found his voice in time to curse his gaolers as they locked the gate behind him.

It was several seconds before he could lift himself into a sitting position, propped against the wall. He hated letting his cellmates see his weakness, even though they were as battered as he was. He snapped at them, telling them to lift their chins and square their shoulders, show that they would never be bowed, and they shuffled to obey him.

‘What did they have you fight?’ asked Jormund Thunderclaw.

‘Some manner of ghoul,’ Krom spat, and he described in detail how he had slain each of them in turn. ‘I almost butchered my audience too. I was close enough to smell their fear, see myself reflected in their eyes. Next time…’

‘Allfather be praised, we still have that,’ Jormund rumbled. ‘Though we may die here, still we can despatch many more of His enemies ahead of us.’ It disturbed Krom to hear him talking like that.

Each of the Space Wolves bore the marks of the slave masters’ lashes, but Jormund’s Terminator armour was in the worst state of them all. He had fought so hard to begin with. The slave masters, however, had wrapped him in chains that, like their whips, crackled with dark energy. They had stripped out his heavy weapons and shattered his servo-motors, until it was all he could do to stand.

The thought that Jormund was learning to accept his fate made Krom rage. He wanted to leap to his feet. He wanted to yell out to his Wolf-brothers. Three of them shared his cell. There were more in the others. He wanted to remind them that they were the Wolves of Fenris. Most of them were members of his own company, the Drakeslayers. He wanted to tell them to rise up, break through their bars and tear out their gaolers’ throats.

‘Brother Dreadhowl,’ he recalled. The young Blood Claw had been taken to the arena some time before him. Krom hadn’t seen him there, but that meant nothing. ‘Did he… Has he returned?’ No one answered his question. No one had to.

Krom had given up trying to count the days he had been here. His auto-senses suggested that a month and a half had passed, but each of his brothers had a different tally. For the first few days, or weeks, he had been sure that the rest of the Drakeslayers would follow him here. No matter that their journey was impossible – for him, for their Wolf Lord, they would find a way to make it.

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