Table of Contents

Cover

Stormcaller – Extract

Legal

eBook license

Chapter One

‘He will wake,’ said Ingvar.

Gunnlaugur looked sceptical. ‘How long?’

‘A few days.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Olgeir says the same. Fjolnir dreams again.’

Gunnlaugur looked down at his hands. A thick cloth hung between his fingers, black with cleansing oils. His massive thunder hammer, skulbrotsjór, leant against one knee, its ornate gilding half swabbed. The old detail was coming through again, obscured for too long by blood and filth. Cleaning it away was cathartic – a reminder of old rhythms.

The sun beat down into a narrow courtyard. Dawn had broken less than an hour ago and already the heat was oppressive.

‘If he dreams, he will wake,’ agreed Gunnlaugur, resuming the painstaking cleaning of his weapon.

Ingvar was clad in a grey tunic, and his lean, muscled body glistened in the amber light. Soon his blond-grey hair would be slicked down, ready to take his battle-helm again. His armour would be hoisted and drilled into position, cladding him in the cocoon of murder, and he would take up dausvjer, cleaned and given rites of restoration.

The respite had been hard won, but it had given them time to breathe.

‘What news of Njal?’ Ingvar asked, strolling across the enclosed space like a caged animal, flexing his arms absently.

Gunnlaugur spat on the stone. ‘The star-speakers here are skítna. They scrape at their dreams.’ He shook his close-shaven head. Flecks of red lingering in his dirt-grey hair caught the sunlight. ‘They don’t know.’

‘She wants to wait for him?’ asked Ingvar, leaning against a whitewashed wall.

‘She wants to fight,’ said Gunnlaugur, his voice growling with approval.

Ingvar shared the Wolf Guard’s sentiments. The Battle Sisters who had survived the assault on Hjec Aleja deserved their survival. They had fought hard for the walls, for the Cathedral, for the approaches to the last bridge. Even when the tide of plague-damned had threatened to overwhelm the entire city, they had kept fighting. Their devotions were strange, their manner alien, but in combat they showed their worth.

‘Then everything is ready,’ Ingvar said.

‘Pretty much.’

Gunnlaugur held his weapon up. The sunlight caught the edges of the disruptor, sparkling like gold nuggets on the iron-grey of the hammer-head. He narrowed his eyes, scrutinising for flaws.

‘I wanted to seek your counsel,’ said Ingvar. ‘About Bajola.’

Gunnlaugur didn’t look away from the hammer. ‘It can wait.’

Ingvar made to speak again, but Gunnlaugur held up a warning finger. His amber eyes never left the runes on his weapon. ‘A long time, since I had to restore this myself. Feels good, to push the dirt out with my own fingers.’ He looked up at Ingvar. ‘Stormcaller will be here soon. We’ll break bones before then, you and I. That is all that matters.’ His savage face cracked into what passed with him for a smile. ‘I am not ignoring it. Just not now.’

‘When it is over–’

‘When it is over, we’ll talk. How’s your own blade?’

Ingvar smiled dryly. ‘The rites have been sung. It’ll bite.’

Gunnlaugur ground his cloth into the thunder hammer’s recesses.

‘It’ll need to,’ he said.

De Chatelaine leaned against the balcony, high up in the hall of the Halicon. Her armoured fingers pressed against the limestone surface. She’d felt tense for a long time, and every gesture she made seemed tighter, more cramped.

Hot morning air wafted against her face. Sweat had broken out on her forehead, tiny beads that would only grow.

Below her, the city sprawled away in its unregulated, tangled messiness. The streets had always been crooked. Now they were choked with barricades, locked in a semi-ruined network of tumbled stone and half-dug pits. Smoke hung over the outer walls, distant across the wasteland beyond. The old Cathedral, Bajola’s place, rose up from the debris like a spike of rusted iron, still smouldering long after the fires had exhausted themselves.

Beyond that, beyond the warren of occupied districts, the endless plain burned under a clear sky. The enemy army milled around in the heat-haze, their standards swaying drunkenly, half hidden by the clouds of filmy dust they kicked up. Other clouds roiled lazily amid that natural grime – masking clouds, sensor-defying murks.

More fallen troops had joined them since their first attempt to storm the inner walls. Augur readings indicated thousands more tramping across the deserts to swell their numbers. The entire world was wallowing in corruption, and the enemy had whole cities of ruin to draw on. If any other bastions of purity had endured, they had long since stopped transmitting signals. The planet was infected now, and only Hjec Aleja remained, a lone outpost of Imperial rule surrounded by seething shores of disease.

The canoness preceptor lifted her severe chin, scanning the ruins below her vantage. The Ighala Gate stood, just as it had throughout the entire siege. She could see the cloaks of her Sisters as they strode across the parapet below her, tiny with distance. Alongside them were the hunchbacked outlines of the big lascannon emplacements and rotary guns, most still in operation despite repeated assaults from the enemy.

Her people remained crammed inside the defences like rats trapped against rising water, pressed together and jostling in the shadow of the citadel. Food was not yet a problem, but water would become one soon. The wells were running dry. One of them now foamed green, like bubbling bile. They had somehow got to it, injecting toxins from the tankers that prowled the wasteland edges. Those who’d drunk unwarily died in excruciation, their innards turned into a fizzing slurry before the end. She’d seen the bodies afterwards, locked in contortions, drenched from the bloody voiding of every orifice. The poisons had not been designed simply to kill, but to inspire terror.

She would have hated the enemy enough without that – they didn’t need to give her fresh reasons.

De Chatelaine heard a faint noise behind her then – a shuffle of silk on stone. Ermili Repoda, her Master of Astropaths, was waiting. His glassy eyes gazed unerringly at her, as if they were as sighted as hers.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

Repoda came to stand beside her. ‘He’s close. The Stormcaller. Njal. That’s his name – the aether’s alive with it.’

‘You do not know when, though.’

‘The art does not work in that way, canoness.’

‘Do they try to speak to us?’

‘They do not know whom to speak to. Perhaps they think we’re already dead.’

‘How many come with him?’

‘More than one squad,’ said Repoda. ‘Maybe more than two.’

‘We are honoured.’

Repoda smiled thinly, and his lined, pale face looked desiccated in the sunlight. ‘You seem relaxed about his coming.’

‘Should I not?’

‘This is an Ecclesiarchy world.’ Repoda inclined his head a fraction, perhaps in equivocation, perhaps in apology. ‘The people look to you. They fear the Wolves almost as much as–’

‘Then they’re fools,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘They know. They know what waits for them out there.’ She turned on him. ‘We’ve worked so hard, the Wolf Guard and I, to clamp down on these fears. I won’t have them intruding, not now.’

Repoda bowed. ‘I merely report.’

De Chatelaine breathed in deep, tasting the smoke that hung over the entire city. It felt as if the lower reaches had been turned into a sacrificial offering, as charred and useless as a carcass on pagan flames. The stench was an accusation: This is your failure. This is your defeat.

‘When the Stormcaller gets here, I will bow the knee. You will bow, all my people will bow. We don’t get to choose our deliverers.’

De Chatelaine brushed her hair back from her face. The enemy never left her thoughts, even when out of eyesight. Now, thronged on the far horizon, seamy and massive, it dominated all else.

‘We hold out,’ she said. ‘That is our only task. When the Stormcaller comes, he will find at least this: we did not submit.’

The servitors were crawling all over it like lice on a corpse, their grey flesh pulling at its innards and hauling them out onto the ground.

Jorundur watched them, wincing with every tug and wrench. Vuokho stood on the landing pad, half gutted, its flanks as black as Undrider’s had been, covered in scorch-marks and las-trails. Its huge engines loomed up into the sky, burned out, their systems fused. The armourglass on the cockpit was cracked, the undercarriage bent and twisted. Now that the gunship was hoisted on giant service racks designed for big cargo lifters, the full extent of the damage was visible.

He was rapt, lost in the detail of the work, though, like all his warrior kin, never fully off-guard.

‘I can smell you, Sister,’ Jorundur said out loud, sensing Callia’s presence before she became visible.

The Battle Sister, de Chatelaine’s deputy, emerged from the shadows. Her armour was as battle-worn as ever, and her face carried fresh scars – long raking lines down a smooth left cheek.

‘You’ve been busy, Space Wolf,’ she said, looking up at the gutted internals.

Jorundur sniffed. ‘It’ll fly again. That bastard didn’t destroy everything on it. Just nearly everything.’

Callia’s gaze ran across the blunt angles of the gunship. It was a huge machine up close – big enough for the void, and carrying weaponry enough to gut a small army.

As it had done, of course.

‘When can you get it airborne again?’ Callia asked.

Jorundur snorted. ‘Days. Many days. If I am called to murder, then longer.’

Callia looked disappointed. ‘We could use it.’

‘You said that to me before. We all could.’

Jorundur liked Callia. She’d been there since the start, marshalling the long retreat, keeping her flamers raised the whole time. He’d seen her in action right at the end, when the enemy finally stormed the gates. Jorundur had been first into the vanguard, but she hadn’t been far behind.

‘They tell me more of your kind are coming,’ Callia said.

‘Don’t trust star-speakers. They pipe all kinds of skítna.’

‘They tell me a whole fleet’s inbound.’

‘Fekke. You thought Undrider was a whole fleet.’

‘It was enough,’ said Callia.

Jorundur shook his head sourly. ‘You trust too much,’ he muttered. ‘It sticks in the craw.’

‘Ah, but you believe in something.’

‘My blade. My brothers.’

‘You just give it a different name.’

‘You name a thing, you control a thing. The Priests taught me that, at least.’

‘So many priests,’ mused Callia, her eyes bright with jibing, ‘and so little faith.’

‘Ever met a Rune Priest?’

Callia shook her head.

‘You will do,’ Jorundur said.

‘Stormcaller is a Rune Priest, then.’

‘It is one of his names.’

Callia shot him a curious, half-guilty look. ‘I’ve seen psykers at work. I could sense the divine will in them. I could feel it. It must be the same. The same source, even with your war-shamans.’

Jorundur croaked out a harsh laugh. ‘The source? Skítja, I don’t care.’ He grinned at her – an ugly, hooked grin that made the metal studs in his face clink. ‘I saw a Priest rip a gunship in two, just like this one, and burn everything inside it like paper. They’ve slaughtered armies, they’ve scraped worlds clean. God-marked.’ He looked up at the Thunderhawk again, knowing he needed to get back to the work of restoration. His fingers moved, itching to get among the entrails of the machine. ‘They’re just like the rest of us – butchers. That’s all you need to know.’

The smoke rolled ahead of them, drifting and breaking across derelict buildings. Ahead, the street twisted away, heavy with dust, streaked with long-dried stains on what had once been white walls.

Hafloí applied pressure with his fingers, gently, smoothly. The mortal neck enclosed within them flexed, then burst. Hafloí’s other hand remained clamped over the mutant’s face, stifling its screams. Its legs stopped kicking, its swollen hands stopped trying to clutch at his armour. For a moment longer its body twitched, locked in muscle-rigidness. Then it flopped into torpor, leaking a mix of blood and infected fluids over his gauntlets.

‘Quiet,’ observed Olgeir, crouching beside the two of them. ‘Nicely quiet.’

Hafloí relaxed, letting the corpse slide to the ground. He shook his hands free. ‘They shouldn’t be this strong.’

‘Plague. Gets into the muscle.’

The big Wolf’s armour was covered in blood, some of it ritual markings, some of it evidence of recent kills. His beloved bolter, sigrún, had been left up in the citadel – this work required silence – so he carried a long-handled, twin-bladed axe with knotwork wyrms’ heads engraved on the metal faces.

Hafloí kicked the corpse away from him, and drew his short blade – a leaf-shaped dagger with the rune hata etched on the blade. Then he looked ahead, down the street, to where it ended in a high stone wall.

Olgeir’s helm lenses whirred faintly as he ran a scan. ‘Fifty metres. Stay close.’

He set off, keeping his body low. For such a giant, Olgeir could move both fast and quietly, barely stirring the grime beneath his boots. Power armour made its own distinctive grinding noise, but there were ways to dampen it.

Hafloí followed, keeping a careful watch. The lower city had been a haunt of horror ever since the first attacks. The main enemy army had withdrawn beyond the walls, but the old suburban zone was still occupied by mutants too addled or stubborn to leave. The residuals stumbled through the ruins, hunting for flesh that was now scarce, cradling bulbous stomachs and weeping scabrous tears.

Hafloí paused at an intersection, looking down a long alley running transverse before ghosting across it. The lower city was quiet, darkening slowly as the short dusk gathered pace. Brown-blue shadows crept across the dust, running up the sides of the tight-packed hab-shells.

It smelt foul. Corpses rotted in the heat, buzzing with flies. Icons had been daubed on the standing walls – three circles, picked out in dirty green. Some lettering lingered here and there: Terminus Est, scrawled across any heap of stones big enough to accommodate it.

The hunt had been meagre – stabs from the gloom, neck-twists, gut-kicks. Quiet killings, just enough to clear the path, to get them where they needed to be.

Olgeir reached his destination – a tower, half demolished, its metal skeleton visible where the render had come down. Hafloí caught up with him, slipping under the cover of the blown-open doorway.

‘Really?’ he voxed. ‘Nothing better?’

‘It will do,’ replied Olgeir, pushing ahead.

They entered a narrow corridor built for mortals. The ceiling was low, barely above their helms. It sagged in places, stained brown, and watery gurgles came from above them. They reached a stairwell, running in zigzags up the floors. It was as dirty as everything else and strewn with the detritus of war – bloodmarks, bolt-shells in the rockcrete, scattered possessions dropped in the hurry to get out.

Hafloí sniffed for targets as he climbed. The proximity markers in his helm were of limited use – the walking dead would not show up on them until they were actually moving – so hunt-sense was superior.

They reached the top level, and the damaged floor creaked under them. Hafloí tensed as he left the stairwell, sensing something up ahead. Olgeir responded immediately, moving silently down the corridor towards a locked door at the end. Hafloí went with him, blade in hand. He reached the door first – a single push broke the lock, sending the metal panel swinging open.

Hafloí slipped inside, blade ready. The room beyond was unlit and clogged with rubbish. Fabric sacks piled high, bursting with rotting foodstuffs. Insects scuttled over every surface, bloated and glossy.

A single figure faced him, scrabbling back across the floor, eyes wide. He was emaciated and sore-ridden. It looked like he had been gnawing on something from one of the sacks, and dark fluid dribbled down his chicken-scrawn jowls.

Hafloí strode over to him, keeping his blade raised.

‘Angels!’ blurted the man, wedging himself up against the far wall and looking up at him, terrified. ‘At last.’

Hafloí paused.

The man got to his knees, his face trembling with fear and emotion. ‘Is it over?’ he shuddered. ‘Throne, say it’s over. Get me out of here. Please, for the love of the Emperor, get me out.’

Hafloí glanced at the sacks. He kicked the nearest, and it spilt open. Joints of meat, crusted green with putrescence, tumbled out. He recognised a thigh, a calf, a hand – five-fingered and curled tight into a desperate claw.

The man panicked. ‘I had to! You have no–’

Hafloí’s blade punched through his neck, killing him instantly.

Olgeir walked past, heading for the doorway into a connecting chamber beyond. ‘You hesitated,’ he said. ‘Don’t hope. They’re all long gone.’

Hafloí gazed down at the man’s body. Sores had clustered around his mouth. Some of them were moving, as if tiny creatures writhed under the tight-stretched skin.

‘Long gone,’ he muttered.

He followed Olgeir. The chamber beyond must have once been the man’s dorm-unit. A single bunk stood against the far wall, its grey sheets soiled. The walls were smeared with what looked and smelled like excrement.

Olgeir moved to a floor-to-ceiling window on the west-facing wall. The glass was cracked and daubed with grease, but still intact. He pulled a catch, released the lock and hauled the window open on to a balcony outside.

The two of them took up position behind the outer railing. Ahead of them, less than a hundred metres distant and on a level with their position, stood the upper edge of the city’s walls, semi-ruined and tumbled into piles of rubble.

Hafloí’s helm lenses switched to magnocular vision, scrolling out over the rim of the walls and filtering the fading light beyond. Green wireframes flickered over the terrain, indicating troop formations, buildings, vehicles, all standing within a kilometre of the shattered perimeter.

He scanned from left to right, gradually extending the range out across the plain. Positioned high up on the very edge of the city, hard under the lip of the sensor-baffling clouds, the detail was better than it had been up in the citadel.

‘Tell me what you’re getting,’ said Olgeir.

Hafloí extended the reach again, letting his armour-mounted auspexes do the work.

‘Infantry formations,’ he said, passing over several big contingents. The soldiers were arranged in loose phalanxes, basking in the heat, mouths slack, ready for the long desert night. Fires had been started, massive ones, adding to the pall of smoke that hung over them. ‘Six… seventeen chem-carriers. Big ones.’

The massive tanker-juggernauts stood in a makeshift compound behind the first of the infantry lines, towering into the murk and underlit by pale green marker lumens. Their engines were running, fuelling the chemical furnaces in the tanks behind.

‘They’ve dug in,’ added Olgeir, marking the trench patterns.

Hafloí ran his augmented gaze along earthworks topped with coils of razor wire. Gun-towers had been built along the ridges, constructed from huge rockcrete blocks and carrying heavy, snub-barrelled cannons on rotating bases. Each tower was protected by dedicated units of gas mask-wearing troops in thick carapace armour. More lights blinked on and off in the gloom, tracing the outline of bigger edifices beyond.

‘Prefabs,’ said Olgeir, indicating points along the defence lines. ‘They landed them, or looted them.’

Hafloí remembered the empty depots they’d seen on the plague destroyer in orbit. He ratcheted up the scale again, and his helm zoomed in further. He swept over lines of infantry, some loosely formed up, some in deep-dug positions overlooked by more earthworks. A few rust-encrusted tanks rumbled between formations, belching smoke. Their hulls had been defaced and covered in corpse-racks, all of which buzzed with insect clouds.

‘Until I saw this world,’ murmured Hafloí, ‘I would not have believed so many flies existed.’

Beyond the tank columns, the land rose. The magnocular range reached its limit, and the images became less defined.

‘That’s it,’ said Hafloí.

More razor wire ran around the base of the incline, arranged in layers. Scaffolds were everywhere, all slung with swaying gibbets. Green marker lights peered fuzzily through the miasma, blinking on and off.

‘Get a loc-reading on that,’ said Olgeir.

Hafloí had already done it, storing the positions of kill-zones, ingress routes, choke-points. ‘They’ve got something big in there.’

‘Wall-breakers. Focus more – you can see them.’

‘We can take it,’ Hafloí said.

‘Perhaps,’ said Olgeir, his voice as deep and calm as ever. ‘With Njal, certainly.’

Hafloí let his vision lapse back into short-range. ‘You fought with him?’

‘I saw him. From a distance.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘What’s he like?’

Olgeir kept up the scan. Hafloí could hear the faint clicks as his helm-gear registered picts. Then, before he could reply, something broke out below them – a crash, a long way down, followed by a series of thumps. The walls of the building shook.

Olgeir clicked his lenses back into focus and took a deep breath. ‘We’ve been detected.’

Hafloí smiled inside his helm. ‘Good.’

Olgeir turned and walked back into the hab-chamber, hefting his wyrm-blade axe loosely. ‘Don’t let your blood get hot. We clear them out, then back to the citadel.’

Hafloí followed Olgeir. He hoped there were lots of them – a whole herd, something worth drawing a blade for.

‘Fine,’ he replied, feeling the first spikes of kill-urge stir. ‘Just leave a few for me.’

Chapter Two

Baldr’s nostrils drew in breath again. His eyes twitched as he dreamed. The ghostly pallor had left his skin, replaced by Fenrisian colouring – pale, like stone under winter sun.

Ingvar looked at him. Baldr lay on a metal slab under bright apothecarion lights, face up, limbs slack. Shackles grasped him at the wrists, ankles, neck and waist.

The door to the apothecarion was criss-crossed with sensors. A second blast-door had been rigged in the room beyond, primed to slam closed if anything disturbed the contents of the inner chamber. Pict-feed lenses dotted the ceiling, flickering intermittently as they shunted their feeds direct to Gunnlaugur’s helm-display.

Olgeir had inscribed a rune of warding over the medicae-cot, scratching it crudely into the brushed metal of the lumen-housing. A Rune Priest would have done a better job, but it had been a long time since one had accompanied Járnhamar on the hunt. There were fewer of them now, they said. They were overstretched, burnt out, kept busy by Grimnar’s remorseless war-calling.

Ingvar didn’t know the truth of that. He’d seen the condition of other Chapters, though, and knew well enough the trials that faced them all. Every Chapter Master from Terra to the Halo Stars was feeling the strain – they couldn’t train new aspirants quickly enough, the rate of attrition was growing and the weight of ten thousand years of ceaseless combat was catching up.

If there is to be victory, I cannot see it.

But he had vowed not to think such things again. He drew a vial of liquid into a long syringe, watching as the dark red matter foamed. He discarded the vial and flicked the air bubbles from the syringe.

Then he moved close to Baldr. Feeling for the vein, he inserted the needle. He had to push – mortal instruments had trouble penetrating the skin of a Sky Warrior. As he depressed the plunger, he watched the tincture enter Baldr’s system. His eyes flickered a little and his mouth tightened a fraction, then he relaxed.

Ingvar withdrew the needle and discarded it. He was no Apothecary, far less a Wolf Priest. It was one thing to keep a brother warrior alive on the battlefield – every Hunter knew the basics of chirurgy – another to shepherd Baldr through whatever horror had overtaken him.

At least the visible taint of corruption had faded. For a long time Baldr’s saliva had retained a green hue, like algal scum at the edge of summer-hot pools. Lifting his lids had exposed bloodshot eyes, unseeing, the irises shrunk.

The breathing was more regular now. The rancid stench had gone, replaced by the healthier smells of perspiration. The Red Dream still had him, but the other sickness had retreated. Whether it was truly gone or simply dormant he had no way of knowing.

‘Gyrfalkon,’ came Gunnlaugur’s voice over the comm. ‘Anything yet?’

‘No change,’ Ingvar replied.

‘But he will wake soon?’

‘I cannot say.’

Gunnlaugur grunted. ‘Re-seal the chamber, then. The canoness has news.’

‘By your will.’

Ingvar severed the comm-link. He reduced the lumens, keeping the observation lamps over Baldr’s body on full. He ran a final check, activated the locks, then left the chamber. The door clanged closed behind him, followed by the hiss of bolts sliding home. The metal briefly glittered as the detector-field swept over it.

Baldr was sealed again, as secure as one of Ras Shakeh’s ancient gods, locked in the cool under the desert floor and waiting to be stirred once more.

He lay on the slab, breathing shallow, eyelids flickering.

‘This is the moment,’ said de Chatelaine, allowing a little pride to sink into her voice. That felt good – it had been a long time since she had done so. ‘This is the time we have been holding out for.’

She stood in one of the marble-and-gold antechambers running clear of the Halicon’s main hall. The war had hardly intruded there: ivory and ebony statues of the primarchs still stood proudly on lozenges of veined stone. Thick drapes warded the force of the sun outside, though bars of light still angled in, twisting with dust.

Callia stood by her, as did others of her Sororitas command retinue. Five Wolves faced them, making everything else in the chamber look fragile.

Gunnlaugur had scoured the worst of the combat-grime from him, and de Chatelaine had been surprised to see the extent of the glorious fine work around the edges of his armour. He seemed animated by a fierce, almost febrile energy, even when standing. Perhaps he thought he hadn’t performed well enough, hadn’t slaughtered quite as many as he should have. De Chatelaine couldn’t share that view, but then she only had the scantiest of insights into the battle-culture of Fenris, and what counted for satisfaction with a Wolf Guard.

The other one, Ingvar, remained at one side, though some of the separateness she had detected in him at the start had ebbed – he now stood amongst his brothers at greater ease. Olgeir and Hafloí had come to the chamber fresh from their scout mission to the walls. Jorundur, the darkest, had remained alone with his gunship.

‘You have new tidings?’ asked Gunnlaugur, looking at her sceptically.

‘A flotilla, on the cusp of the veil,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘Your brothers.’

‘Fleet markers?’

‘Repoda is in no doubt.’

Gunnlaugur shared a look with his brothers. ‘If Njal’s bringing a pack, a large one, then this battle’s already over.’

‘Then, after it, we take it to the sector,’ said de Chatelaine, her eyes shining. ‘The beginning. This is the crusade we sought.’

The canoness activated a large hololith column. A battle schematic hovered in glowing lines over the marble face, picking out the perimeter of the city, the terrain beyond, and what they had discovered of the enemy positions.

‘When your forces detect our beacon signal,’ said de Chatelaine, ‘they can make planetfall on the open plain, surrounding the enemy. We will break out then, and they will be caught between the two fronts. Caught, and destroyed.’

Gunnlaugur scrutinised the schematic. He sniffed sceptically. ‘They won’t wait.’

Olgeir nodded. ‘They’ve not moved for a while, but this looks complete now.’ He pointed to a low hill, two kilometres to the south-west of Hjec Aleja’s ruined outer gates. ‘They’ve brought wall-breakers. We ran deep augur sweeps while down at the wall’s edge.’

‘And Plague Marines,’ added Hafloí. ‘The last ones left. We’ve been waiting for reinforcements, and so have they.’

‘Then we need to hold out,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘Just a little longer.’

‘They have had all the time they needed,’ said Gunnlaugur, shaking his head. ‘They have dragged those guns halfway across a continent, and now they are ready to use them.’

Olgeir leaned over the column and gestured to the landscape immediately behind the fortified incline. ‘The wall-breakers are there. Couldn’t get a good look, but if they fire, we’ll know all about it.’

It was de Chatelaine’s turn to study the schematic. As she did so, her brow furrowed in concern. ‘We can’t launch a sortie that far out.’

‘You can’t,’ said Ingvar.

‘And you can’t wait for those guns to fire,’ said Gunnlaugur. ‘They’re ready to go. We have to move first.’

De Chatelaine pursed her lips. The Wolves always relished the reckless attack, but that didn’t automatically make it the right tactic. ‘The mortal troops aren’t like you – they won’t last long in the open desert, not against those numbers.’

‘They don’t have to,’ said Gunnlaugur. ‘You just need to retake the outer walls. Get their attention. Seize the towers by the main gate and you’ll give us all the cover we need.’

‘And you’ll take on what’s left.’

Gunnlaugur bowed. ‘For as long as needed.’

Callia shook her head in disbelief. ‘Even for you, that’s–’

‘Possible,’ said Ingvar. ‘We don’t have to hold them forever – just hit them before they move.’

‘They won’t stand still,’ added Gunnlaugur. ‘Wait longer, and the city will be in flames before Njal makes orbit.’

De Chatelaine hesitated. She scrutinised the hololith again. ‘You go out there, in plain view, and they’ll rip you apart.’

Gunnlaugur snorted. ‘Do it in plain view, and we’d deserve to be.’

‘What’s the readiness of the city garrison?’ de Chatelaine asked Callia.

‘Full readiness,’ Callia said.

No hesitation, no shade of doubt. That gave de Chatelaine some comfort.

‘And this is your only counsel?’ she asked Gunnlaugur.

The Wolf Guard shrugged, making bone totems clatter against his armour. ‘We’ll take the guns out anyway. Better to do it with cover, but it’s your city.’

De Chatelaine smiled. ‘So it is.’ She turned from the hololith, giving the nod to Callia. ‘We will need time to prepare. I shall notify you when all is ready.’ Then she looked back at Gunnlaugur. ‘And I will give the order, Wolf Guard. As you say, it is still my city.’

Gunnlaugur inclined his head. ‘We will aim to keep it that way,’ he said.

Five hours later, Callia stood under the arch of the Ighala Gate as the sun set, casting deep orange shafts across the darkening sky above. Towering toxin-clouds glowed in the dusk, vivid and spectacular. The heavy twin defence-doors loomed up ahead of her, bolted and barred as they had been since the final hours of the last assault.

Around her stood the remains of Ras Shakeh’s Celestian contingent. The remaining Battle Sisters of the Wounded Heart lined up behind them, their ebony armour glinting with the last rays of the dying light. Beyond that stood attack squads of Ras Shakeh Guard, arrayed in the mixed uniforms of hastily combined regiments. Some of their gear was in good condition, some of it looked barely capable of resisting a determined bayonet strike.

She didn’t like to think too closely about numbers. They had mustered a few thousand, all told, with a skeleton reserve to follow them down and an even thinner defence force to man the wall-guns. Still, it was good to be on the front foot again. Huddling behind the gates waiting for the inevitable assault was not what she had been trained for.

Her comm-bead crackled.

‘You have clearance, Sister,’ came de Chatelaine’s voice. ‘Go with hate, and the Emperor guide your aim.’

Callia smiled. ‘And yours, canoness preceptor.’

The bolts on the gate began to grind open, sending sparks flying from the adamantium sheaths. On the walls above, lascannons swivelled on their mounts, holding fire for now but already picking targets. A hundred sharpshooters mounted on the parapets crouched down, resting long muzzles on the hot stone.

Callia tensed, clutching the grip on her bolter. She could feel her heart-rate pick up, slipping into the pre-combat state she cherished.

Cleanse my soul.

The words came to her unbidden. Callia couldn’t remember who’d taught them to her. Bajola, perhaps.

Clear my mind.

The last of the bolts powered home, sliding into the wall-mounts on immense pistons. A thin line ran up the centre of the two doors, and dust showered down the joint.

Enable my body.

With a jolt, the gate-engines kicked in and the two doors parted, grating slowly apart and exposing the bridge beyond. Las-beams whickered out into the gathering gloom, angled down from the parapets to lay a covering wall of fire. A wide, empty expanse stretched off, cleared of buildings during the first siege and home to nothing more than broken earth.

Callia advanced, the Celestians on either side of her, until they were directly under the arch. The narrow span of the bridge ran ahead of them, empty, before terminating on the far side of a deep gorge. In the distance, hidden by both gathering darkness and smog, ran the jagged outlines of the lower city, its habs now bombed-out and derelict.

‘With me,’ voxed Callia to her retinue. She strode out into the foetid air beyond the gate. More las-beams scythed out above her, whining into the line of buildings in the distance. The volume picked up as the gunners found their targets, aiming to give the infantry a clear run for as long as possible.

Callia glanced upwards, looking back over her shoulder. The face of the gate bore the tattered remains of Wounded Heart banners and iconography. Though scorched and ripped, the symbols of the Imperium still endured.

‘Forward,’ she ordered.

The vanguard broke into a run, leaving the cover of the Gate and charging out across the bridge. For a few moments they were totally exposed, running across the open span with no cover of any sort. Then they reached the far side and split into four columns, fanning out across the wasteland. Battle Sister squads headed each unit, followed by the more numerous Guard detachments, all heading straight towards the forbidding line of silhouettes ahead.

For a while, there was no return fire. The lascannons on the high wall behind them kept firing, briefly lighting the scene before them in stark flash-frames. It was eerily silent, save for the echo of breathing in their helms and the crunch of boots on gravel.

Callia ran hard, her movements boosted by her power armour, her head low and her bolter trained on the lines of cover ahead. They rapidly closed the gap between the Gate and the first ranks of ruined hab-blocks. Her column took the central path, the one cleared by the Wolves to aid the passage of arms down to the outer wall. The other groups split off, one to the left and two to the right, moving swiftly to take up positions in cover before the fight down to the perimeter.

A las-beam from the Ighala formation hit the remnants of a big tower ahead of her, scything clean through the weakened masonry and sending bricks cascading to the ground. More hit, crowning the shattered ruins with blooms of incandescence.

The lead group reached the line of buildings and kept running. Callia leapt across a tangled line of razor wire and felt her boots thud onto rockcrete on the far side. The serrated outlines of the lower city rose up on either side of her, enclosing the night sky like two walls of a canyon. The street ahead was littered with wreckage – blast-rubble from the walls above, the carcass of a Rhino transport, the cracked edges of craters where ordnance had hammered down during the worst of the previous fighting.

Her Celestians ran alongside her, sweeping their weapons two-handed as they searched for targets. Callia could hear the clatter of boots as the Guard units worked to keep pace. They would already be looking for ways to bring heavy weapons teams down to tactical points to cover the onwards advance.

Still no return fire. The Celestians tore down the main thoroughfare, hugging the shadow of the buildings on either side, their armour dark against dark and their robes fluttering about them like death-shrouds.

‘Where are they?’ voxed Callia’s subordinate Djinate, advancing hard on her right flank.

‘Watch the habs,’ replied Callia, running, angling her helm up to the broken rooftops. ‘It’s only a matter of–’

The first stabs of light lanced out of the dark before she’d finished speaking. Callia didn’t break stride, weaving across a patch of shattered brickwork as the barrage of small-arms fire came in. Her Sisters did the same, scattering across the open ground, using what cover the battlefield gave them and losing no momentum.

Callia let the targeting lines on her helm intersect, pinpointing a location ten metres up in the empty heart of a multi-storey hab-tower.

She took aim, compensating for her own movement, and loosed two shots. Then she kept running, barely hearing the crack and subsequent blast of bolt-rounds obliterating the sniper-nest. By then, other Sisters had opened up on their own targets and the air filled with the resounding roar and crack of bolter discharge.

‘The flanks,’ warned Callia, spotting another sniper position and dispatching it with a single bolt-round. ‘They’ll be coming around.’

The thoroughfare they ran down was broken up with the intersecting streets of the lower city, all overshadowed by the close-packed hab-blocks. Even as Callia spoke, enemy units broke from cover some twenty metres back from her position, streaking out of the dark and engaging the Guard units following in her wake. The enemy troops were wearing gas masks, and their bulbous eyes glowed softly in the dark. Grenades started to fly, detonating with puffs of toxic smoke.

The Guard responded, and the staccato growl of a tripod-mounted autocannon opened up from back up the street. Whisper-snaps of las-fire followed, crackling into the bands of mutants emerging from the gloom.

Callia pressed on, confident in the main Guard contingents to hold their own. Speed was the main thing – to secure the outer gates before the enemy could muster a full defence and drag them into street-to-street combat. Locator runes cycling across her helm-lens showed the positions of the other Battle Sister units – they were closing on the lower city edge, pushing rapidly, giving the enemy no time to form up before they reached the target defence points.

Callia swung her bolter and squeezed off another round, watching as the shell shot into the maw of a shadowed intersection to her left. She heard the wet grunt of impact, followed by the rip of explosion, and a bloated mutant staggered out in front of her, stomach spilling, gas mask ripped from its neck.

Still running, she launched a kick at its reeling face, breaking its neck before she’d landed. More mutants emerged in its wake, some with close-combat weapons, a few with projectile cannons.

Callia charged into them, firing from the waist with one hand, lashing out with her blade with the other. She was far too fast for them – a few seconds of fury, and they lay at her feet, coughing up blood and phlegm.

These were the outriders. The real enemy lay beyond the outer perimeter, holed up in their vast complex of tunnels, trenches and gun-towers. She knew they would be stirring now, roused by the sudden break from the inner gates, preparing their terror weapons again and priming the launchers. If the vanguard couldn’t make their objectives before the enemy responded, this sortie would be very short-lived.

‘Maintain pace,’ she ordered, kicking away the last choking mutant and breaking back into a sprint.

It was good, thought Callia, to recover land they had given up after such heavy bloodshed. Her helm-display showed each assault column driving towards their objective, supported by Guard units that made good ground and seized strategic intersections. Some of the devotional buildings around them were half intact, showing the old emblems of the Wounded Heart amid the filth and desecration. This push might be little more than temporary, but it felt like a reclamation of sorts.

Another autocannon opened up from behind them, sending a heavy rain of shells rattling into the night and cracking into the buildings ahead. The Guard were getting faster at bringing them into position, securing the path back up to Ighala and clearing the long transit routes of the enemy.

Callia’s bolter clicked empty and she slammed a new magazine in, barely pausing. The air was now falling away to perfect dark, shrouded by the ever-roiling clouds of smoke piling up from enemy positions beyond the walls. The ground became slimy with old chem-weapon discharge, glistening with ophidian dullness under the muzzle-flares of the massed bolters and lasweapons.

They tried to make a stand up ahead of her. Callia saw them massing across the width of the street, trying to haul drum-barrelled guns onto heaps of refuse and get some kind of fire-line established.

The Celestians needed no orders – they assaulted it in unison, laying down a curtain of bolter-fire before picking up the pace and charging head-on. The surviving enemy troops managed to get a volley of return las-fire clear, but it barely slowed them. Callia charged up the earth slope of the bulwark, drew her blade, then leapt into the mass of bodies beyond. Her sword flashed out, jamming under the neck of a grasping mutant before slicking away and cutting deep into the outstretched arm of another.

Then her Sisters were with her, whirling, cutting, blasting, crushing. Sororitas power armour didn’t quite have the juggernaut impact of full Adeptus Astartes plate, but it was still formidable, capable of seeing off all but the most determined impacts and hugely augmenting the physical movements of its wearer. The barricade was smashed apart, its defenders crushed and bludgeoned aside and trodden into the shattered earth beyond.

Then the outer walls loomed, battered by past bombardments but partially intact. Callia located the target tower on her forward view – a squat rockcrete structure built up against the wall itself, just over two hundred metres north of the ruined outer gates.

‘Objective sighted,’ she voxed, firing all the while. ‘Follow me in.’

The Celestians streaked across the last of the open ground, trading shots with the scattered resistance holed up in the buildings around them. More heavy weapons fire broke out from behind them, testament to the growing security of the Guard positions.

Callia reached the tower entrance on ground level – a gaping hole where doors had once stood. Bodies, fresh with hot blood, slumped over the jagged edges of metal plates. Djinate slammed against the wall on the far side of the entrance hole, priming a frag grenade and hefting it one-handed.

Callia nodded, and Djinate hurled the grenade into the dark. A second later and the interior of the tower filled with a boom of heat, light and screaming. Callia ducked inside, her helm-lens compensating for the swirl of smoke burning across her visual field. Disorientated mutants stumbled into her path, clutching at shrapnel wounds or gasping from severed chem-tubes, and she dispatched them one by one.

‘Get a Guard squad at the breach,’ she voxed, racing for the spiral stairway with Djinate close behind. ‘I want this one secured first.’

She took the stairs two at a time, racing up around a tight spiral. The enemy defenders seemed to have clustered, foolishly, at the base of the tower, and she encountered no more living until reaching the summit. Half a dozen mutants tried to rush her then, tearing across the open-roofed platform at her as she emerged.

Callia charged straight into them, blade in hand and already spiralling. She jabbed it up, impaling a porcine maul-carrier under the chin, then pulled it round, severing the neck of a three-eyed horror with flailing jowls. The edge flashed in the night, catching the now-vivid glow from the piled-high toxin-clouds, and the savage beauty of it made her laugh out loud.

By the time Djinate caught up, the tower summit was heaped with bodies and Callia stood alone at the epicentre, her breathing heavy, her blade slick with diseased gore.

‘Objective achieved,’ observed Djinate.

Callia strode over to the parapet facing towards the lower city. Lines of tracer-fire scythed out from the fixed gun positions, cracking against the bulwarks where enemy warbands still hunkered down. Guard units were dragging heavy weapons down the cleared thoroughfare, and a long lascannon barrel was being hauled along on the back of a half-track, ready for lifting up to the tower top where it would be mounted.

They were moving efficiently, going fast, taking care to clear out the remaining pockets of resistance. Other towers and bulwarks along the city’s perimeter were rocked with explosions prior to being seized, cleared and occupied.

Callia turned around and walked over to the parapet’s outward-facing edge. The tower she’d taken ran up the inside curve of the outer wall, cresting the upper edge by a few metres and affording a clear view of the plains outside.

Just a few dozen metres out, and the madness began. Hordes of glow-eyed mutants were advancing out of the night, roused by the clamour of combat from within the city. The front ranks looked as ramshackle as those the Sisters had already swept away, but behind them came more organised units – plate-armoured and carrying more lethal weaponry. The throttled growl of vehicle engines keying up rumbled across the plain, out of sight behind the shifting curtains of smog but not far away.

Callia leaned against the parapet edge. More Sisters emerged from the stairwell and took up position on either side of her.

The enemy encampment was vast. It was like a miniature city in itself – a huge, rambling collection of trenches, infantry detachments, tank squadrons and luminous, belching chemical works. Toxin-clouds blossomed above it all, blotting out the stars in swirling columns of virulence.

It was like kicking an ant’s nest. Now the enemy was stirring, sending out its gathered strength. The defenders of Hjec Aleja had provoked it, forcing the assault early in order to buy the Wolves some breathing room, but set against the advance of such a huge, brooding mass of slaved warriors, the gamble now felt perilously fine.

‘So, we’ve done our part,’ Callia breathed, leaning against a rockcrete battlement and angling her bolter. ‘Now, Sons of Fenris, do yours.’

Chapter Three

He no longer remembered his name.

For a while, after the sickness had first come, he’d remembered it. After that, when he’d torn his uniform to get at the sores and his skin had started to pucker, he’d still remembered it. During the long nights in Hjec Morva when everything seemed to be dissolving into a long, sweaty frenzy of contagion he’d repeated it to himself, over and over, together with his rank and his regiment, as if by mouthing the syllables he could stave off the horror that was already combining and multiplying within his body.

Now, much later, he remembered doing that, but he no longer remembered why. His name was long gone, as was his old military grade, as was caring about either.

He pushed at the pustules clustering across the back of his neck and smiled as they burst. Milky fluid leaked down his chest and gave off an interesting smell – like fungus, or rotten boot leather.

Orders came to him in different ways now. Sometimes the Masters sought him out in person, lumbering through the trenches in their gloriously distended battleplate, speaking to him in a language he knew wasn’t Gothic but that somehow made sense. Other times his duties would just become clear to him, formulating in his mind as if crystallised from a dream.

This was one of those times. He pulled himself out of what had been a shallow, dream-filled sleep and hoisted his autogun into position. His uniform – what remained of it – was crusted with dusty mud from the trench floor. His weapon-casing was already beginning to rust. Once, that would have appalled him. Now he just didn’t care and nor did it seem to have any effect on the operation of the gun.

He adjusted his helm, biting down against the rebreather that pressed against the inside of his mouth, then climbed up, grabbing hold of the wooden ladder that ran up the inside wall of the trench and out to the world of fire beyond.

Others came with him – his men, the ones who had followed him into damnation right from the start. Just like him, their movements were heavy, their reactions dulled by the mucus that seeped from their ears and nostrils. Some carried autoguns like him, others had resorted to meat-hooks and rusty spikes laced with the special nerve-toxins the Masters gave them.

In his more lucid moments, he wondered why the Plaguefather had afflicted them in so many different ways. He wondered why, if the gods of decay desired his service, they hadn’t made him faster, more deadly, more skilful. To lace his body with such gurgling rottenness seemed like a strange choice. But then the Father’s ways were hardly likely to be transparent to him. All things considered, it wasn’t worth worrying about overmuch.

He reached the lip of the trench wall and heaved himself over the top, and the full vista of war stretched out and away, glimpsed through bleary gas mask-lenses. The whole camp was moving. The charred desert ahead of him, thrown into perpetual twilight by the churning smog, crawled with a steadily growing carpet of advancing men. It was a strangely awesome sight – like the planet itself stirring to excise the last remnant of those who opposed the Father. He dimly felt his small role in that, and a swell of something like satisfaction grew in his rheumy chest.

Far away, he saw the outer walls of the city. He saw bright flashes of weaponry igniting along the parapets, tiny and blurred in the distance. He saw the army of the Masters marching to respond. He saw thousands of warriors, all like him, picking themselves up, dragging themselves out of the earth, falling into loose assault formations. He saw the big tanks grind into motion, gouging up desiccated earth under their tracks. He saw artillery pieces crank into firing angles, and gun-crews working to deliver the payloads of chem-bombs and incendiary canisters.

Then he was marching himself, shambling like the others over the broken, dusty ground. His men fell in around him, dozens of them, faces hidden behind their black rebreathers. They did not follow the infantry heading for the city. They had their own duty, up on the earthworks guarding the Masters and their glorious Machines. They would not be hurled up against the inferno of the wall assault. They would stay amid the gun-towers and trenches, forming the final line of defence that would keep the Machines guarded.

They were needed, those Machines. They had been hauled across the pitiless sands by a hundred thousand blessed drone-slaves, their barrels anointed with pungent oils, their innards infected with the most virulent scrapcodes, their mechanisms augmented with the living sinews of sacrificial thralls, their kill-range extended through the occult rites of the Masters’ red-robed, half-metal servants.

As he marched, dragging his newly bulging body up the incline towards the earthworks’ summit, he envisioned the blessed slaughter to come. The barrels would be winched onto scaffolds and the breeches would be filled with flesh-burners and stone-breakers. Then, finally, when the blood of the sacrificed boiled on the iron shells and the hooded ones had doused the fire-pits with fresh spoors, the thunder would begin.

He reached his designated place in the defence lines, high on the earthworks, facing south, away from the desperate battles already breaking out across the city walls. The attention of the entire host was turned to the east, towards the fragile battlements, the slender lines of defence that dared to oppose the inevitable.

He reached his assigned trench and dropped down beyond the leading parapet, landing on the firing step and turning to take up his fire position. All along the defensive bulwark his fellow warriors did the same, dropping heavily into the protective earth-bank and slotting autoguns and lasguns into targeting grooves.

He looked out into the night, and wondered why he’d been stationed so far back from where the fighting would come. Defensive duties were surely no longer required.

The first clue came with a low growl, running along the earth like a tremor. He stiffened, looking back and forth, seeing nothing.

He pondered voxing a warning, but couldn’t quite remember how to use the comm-bead. His mind was sluggish, as if in a fever.

Another growl, closer this time, emerging from the smog-filled night – everywhere, nowhere.

From further down the trench, he saw las-beams flicker out soundlessly, followed by the clatter of projectile fire. He heard short, strangled cries, like animals having their necks wrenched.

He stood back from his fire-point. To the north was the inner defence cordon guarding the blessed machines. The earthwork ran around it, manned by hundreds of gunners, each protected by hard-packed walls and backed up by gun-towers every hundred metres.

As he peered into the gloom, some vestige of fear stirred in his sluggish soul. Marker lights were going out along the length of the trench, one by one. He saw a gun-tower open fire just a hundred metres away, spraying a curtain of explosive shells into the dark, before a dull explosion took that out, too.

He couldn’t see what was doing it. He couldn’t see where the noises were coming from.

More growls, closer now, snickering in the air, punctuated by savage-sounding cracks and crackles. The remaining hairs on his neck stood up stiffly, as if an old race-memory lurked at the base of his brain-stem, not quite driven into abeyance by the plague.

He stood down from the firing step and advanced slowly along the trench floor. Others came with him, sharing his caution. For a moment longer, he saw nothing solid – just toxic dust swirls spilling into the trench shaft, spiralling away in the night, lit red from chem-fires.

Then something burst along the trench towards them – a grey ghost, massive and blurred by speed. He only had time for the briefest of impressions – the dull boom of machine-armour moving, a blade snarling in the dark, two red eyes blazing like afterburners. It was huge, it was fast.

The ghost bounded across the packed space of the inner trench, slaying as it came. Its victims died so quickly they had no time to scream, no time to react, just to be spliced open as an energy-spitting blade ripped them into meat-chunks.

He aimed his autogun. He even managed to get a shot away. He saw it splinter from the creature’s shoulder – a burst of ice-white against the roiling dark.

Then it was on him – a hurricane of movement, a deafening snarl, a jackhammer impact. He didn’t feel the bite of the blade, just a smash of a huge iron-bound fist, hurling him high into the air. His head cracked back, shattering his helm.

He landed with a snap of bone. Something burst, and hot liquid sprayed across his hands. He tried to get up, but his legs would no longer work. The air was filled with bestial noises – growls, tears, bellows of rage. He half saw more bodies flung across his field of vision, trailing gobbets of blood like gruesome mortar-trails.

Then it was on him again. He stared up at something he vaguely recognised from old devotional vids – a warrior-god towering over him, a grey-clad titan, a force of winter elements hurled out of the night and made into hellish, feral reality.

Just then, in a blaze of clarity and terror, he knew what it was. He remembered his humanity. He remembered what had happened to him. He remembered his old name.

I was Jevold.

Then the sword plunged down, slicing clean at the neck, and the misery of existence was ended.

Ingvar leapt away from the headless corpse, swaying clear of a row of incoming las-impacts and tearing down the earthwork’s boundary trench. Dausvjer whirled around him, lacerating flesh and ripping through armour plates. The trench defenders charged at him in clumps of bodies, moving slowly as if in some dreadful dream.

He tore through them. He kicked out, pulverising torsos and breaking limbs. He punched, smashing skulls and cracking atrophied ribs. He hacked with the blade, biting into tumours and organs and spilling their contents out across the earth. The hordes clustered around him, swarming him with weight of numbers, before being broken and hurled away, tumbling through the air in a ballet of spiralling limbs. The carnage was voluminous, remorseless, implacable.

Ingvar wanted to roar – to open his throat and declaim the name of the Allfather, of Russ, of Fenris. He wanted to bellow at them as he slaughtered, relishing every splash of blood against his armour.

For now, though, he was silent. The Sisters had done their work, drawing the attention of the enemy towards Hjec Aleja’s walls, and the need for stealth was still acute.

The Wolves, all five of them capable of bearing an axe, had sprinted out of the city just as the assault on the outer walls began, breaking clear of the Ighala Gate and ghosting through the deserted suburbs, heading down and away from the growing fighting and finding passage through the dark. Once beyond the city’s southern limits they’d pulled around, running fast through empty lands before angling back up towards the enemy encampment. The few scouts they’d come across had been murdered swiftly. Like a deadly riptide, the Wolves had swept up out of the gloom and into the maze of trenches, spreading out across a wide front and kindling blade-weapons as they came. By the time they hit the main defence-lines, their momentum was unstoppable.

Ingvar heard a muffled crump as one of the pack – Gunnlaugur, he guessed – took out another gun-tower. Ingvar kept moving, barrelling down the jagged line of the trench, cleansing it, harrowing it, purging it. A big mutant swayed into his path, its fists crowned with grafted spikes, its heavy helm bleeding marshlight from nine iron-ringed lenses. It lunged at him, gurgling through a clutch of breathing tubes and going for his throat.

Ingvar severed the tubes with a tight swipe of his blade, spinning out of range of the spike-thrust before backhanding the mutant with the heel of his sword, breaking the creature’s neck and driving its jawbone up into its skull. As the creature toppled into the dust, Ingvar spun to face three more warriors. They lumbered towards him numbly, firing a mix of las-beams and bullets from corroded weaponry. Ingvar charged straight into them, arms wide as if in an embrace. He bore them down with him, crushing ribcages and smashing limbs. Then he was up again, grinding the remains into the bloody mire at his feet, sword crackling, helm scanning for more targets.

‘Target located,’ came Olgeir’s heavy voice over the squad-comm.

Ingvar switched to Olgeir’s loc-reading – forty metres to the north, up amid the big tank formations and heading into the heart of the encampment.

He smashed aside a grasping claw, ducked under a hastily aimed thicket of green-tainted las-beams, and started running again. He leapt up the far side of the trench wall, boosted by his armour, and sprinted across open ground.

Enemy troops swarmed at him from the poison-clouds, throwing themselves at his feet, hurling spiked grenades into his path, trying to land a shot, do some damage.

It barely troubled him.

Click here to buy Stormcaller.

To Hannah, with love.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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

Cover by Raymond Swanland.

© Games Workshop Ltd, 2014. All rights reserved.

Black Library, the Black Library logo, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy logo, The Horus Heresy eye device, Space Marine Battles, the Space Marine Battles logo, Warhammer 40,000, the Warhammer 40,000 logo, Games Workshop, the Games Workshop logo and all associated brands, names, characters, illustrations and images from the Warhammer 40,000 universe are either ®, ™ and/or © Games Workshop Ltd 2000-2014, variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world.
All rights reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78251-619-4

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at

blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at

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.