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Wolfsbane – Extract

A Black Library Publication

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One

A company of wolves

Of all the surviving members of Malcador’s Chosen sent to Molech, Garviel Loken was the last to be called to the Wolf King’s presence. Macer Varren and Proximo Tarchon had been summoned first. Ares Voitek had been woken for a while from his healing sleep to attend upon the primarch of the Space Wolves, and the human Rahua revealed reluctantly that even he had been to the Hrafnkel. His reluctance was understandable. A mere human was given such a great honour before Garviel Loken, agent Alpha-Prime of the Knights Errant. Loken was left on Titan and wondering if his lack of summons were a good or a bad thing.

Loken spent the waiting time wisely. There were things to do. There were always things to do, not least submitting to endless interrogations by Malcador’s agents. The questioning was understandable. He had been in the presence of the Warmaster, his gene-father. As the interrogations occupied only a portion of his days, he was permitted to take up his duties between interviews. These occupied a portion more.

He still had too much time on his hands.

The mind of a legionary is capacious, and despite his allotted tasks, there remained plenty of space for doubt: why had he not been brought before Russ?

When the call finally came it was a relief, although he knew there was a chance the meeting could end in his death.

He came from Titan by fast ship to Terra’s orbit. He rode on the command deck all the way, clad in his armour as if he were heading into battle, standing beside the command throne so motionless and stern he seeded disquiet among the small crew.

The ship cut over the plane of the ecliptic. Mars and Terra were in opposition. The lights of the ships blockading the red planet made it seem that there were a dozen worlds attended by a hundred additional moons.

Constant vox-chatter whispered from the comms stations. Sol’s void space was crammed with starships. Activity in the system had reached a fever pitch. Now the warp storms had begun to abate, Dorn anticipated Horus would launch an attack soon, and so the home system of mankind prepared feverishly for battle.

Terra appeared as a star at first, a singular albedo shine that split into dozens then hundreds of lesser lights as Loken’s ship approached. Russ’ ships were moored at the high anchor halo of resupply stations and dry docks, where the battered remnants of the VI and V Legions’ once mighty fleets underwent hurried repairs.

Codes were transmitted and received. Without slowing, the cutter headed directly for the largest ship, a Gloriana-class behemoth swaddled in mending frames, closely overlapped like bandages over its wounds.

The Hrafnkel, Leman Russ’ flagship and one of the most powerful vessels in the whole galaxy.

They touched down on the embarkation deck. Loken was away before the engines had finished their cooling cycle.

A clamour of industry roared into the cutter as the gang ramp descended. Clattering metal and machine tool whines and the grinding shrieks of blades cutting into plasteel assaulted Loken’s hearing. The stink of burning metal filled the place end to end, vast though it was. Sparks fountained in arcs like geysers of lava. Sheets of plastek as tall as Titan banners wafted in hot breezes blowing from the ship’s depths. Menials in the heavy environment suits of the Terran Stevedores and Shipwrights Guilds were at work everywhere, aided by barbarous-looking Fenrisian menials who wore primitive leather masks beneath their visors. Loken halted at the base of the cutter’s ramp to avoid a heavy repair rig rumbling down the embarkation deck’s central road. The servitor drivers wired into the cab stared blankly ahead. A group of Mechanicum adepts followed, directing the machine by means of a remote control box implanted into the chest of a vast brute who was linked to the cogitators aboard by a long, flexed umbilicus covered in rubberised plastek.

The machine chugged past, and Loken set foot upon oily deck plating. The place was so gloomy he thought there was a malfunction in the lighting circuits, but as he looked into the cathedral spaces of the deck he saw chandeliers with every lumen globe intact. It was purposefully dim.

As his eyes adjusted he saw how badly damaged the Hrafnkel was. Repair gangs and heavy plant took the place of gunships and drop pods in the landing circles. Men shouted. Metal scaffold poles were dumped by a hauler, clanging to the deck in a raucous bell peal. Since his return to Terra, Russ had not been idle. He had been out patrolling the Solar reaches beyond the outermost defence sphere. He had ventured beyond the system and fought the campaign at Daverant Reach and the battle at Vanaheim. If he did those things in this wreck, thought Loken, he must be as reckless as they say.

A cohort of dry dock workers jogged in front of him, faceplates misted with breath, brass boots thudding on metal. When they had passed Loken saw a savage figure staring at him across the main roadway of the embarkation deck. He had not been there before.

He was a legionary, that much was certain, but so barbarously dressed only his size and his bearing separated him from the lesser men in their furs and leathers labouring alongside the Terran work gangs. A wolf pelt hung from heavy silver brooches set at his shoulders. The skin lay over a full suit of close-fitting leather that covered him head to toe. The dozens of expertly cut panels mimicked the exposed musculature of a flayed man. It was the brown of flesh left to desiccate in dry highlands. Armour was a generous word for it. The leather was hard, but too full of joins and easy holes for swords to find to offer real protection, and would give none at all against more advanced weapons. But it was impressive. Firelight caught on the edges, gleaming off the involute knotwork covering every part. A mask fashioned into a bestial muzzle hid the warrior’s face. Eyes glinted in the darkness beneath. The flash of a hunting beast’s eyes from the thicket before a furred weight bears you to the ground and hot breath heralds death.

The figure approached. Loken instinctively braced for combat.

The warrior’s red beard parted to show fanged teeth, and he laughed.

‘My friend!’ said the warrior. ‘You are a little edgy today. I bid you welcome to the Hrafnkel, flagship and domain of Leman Russ, the Great Wolf, the Wolf King, the Lord of Winter and War!’

Confusion overtook Loken.

‘Bror Tyrfingr, is that you?’

‘Aye, who did you expect?’ Bror slapped Loken hard on his pauldron. ‘The Allfather Himself?’ Bror held out his hand. Loken took his forearm. Leather glove gripped ceramite plate. ‘It is good to see you, Loken.’

‘When you left Titan, I thought you might never come back. I see I was right.’ Loken gestured at Tyrfingr’s leather suit. ‘You are leaving us then,’ he said. ‘To rejoin your master.’

‘No, no, my friend,’ said Bror. ‘I was commanded by my king to join Malcador’s private army, and there I will remain until told otherwise. My loyalty is to the regent now. He is my jarl,’ he said, the foreign word a wet, guttural growl in his throat. ‘But Leman of the Russ will forever be my primarch. He is my father. I visit with him to renew bonds of kinship and fealty, and to discuss the coming attack upon the Warmaster. I will return to Malcador’s side soon enough. We shall fight together again, you and I, I swear it.’

Loken suspected Bror had returned to report on his new master to his old. Russ had a hunger for intelligence that matched Malcador’s. He refrained from saying so.

‘Why are you dressed in that way?’

‘Ha!’ Bror slapped the leather panels covering his iron-hard stomach. ‘Like a member of the Vlka Fenryka you mean?’

‘This is what Space Wolves wear?’

‘When we are among our own, aye.’ Tyrfingr glanced up. ‘My friend, I advise you, only those not of Fenris use the term “Space Wolf”.’

‘I apologise if I disrespect you,’ said Loken.

There had always been bonds of brotherhood between the different Legions. The Space Wolves defied them in their oddness. They were a breed apart, as isolated as the Khan’s White Scars, and more savage. They were made of the same raw matter, Loken and Tyrfingr, but the mould they were stamped from was so very different.

‘If I took offence at that,’ said Bror, ‘I would have to commit to feud with the entire galaxy. Just try not to say “Space Wolf” aboard this ship. You will seem ignorant. The Rout does not take kindly to ignorance, and they will not take you seriously.’

They left the embarkation deck by a set of large doors and headed upwards into the ship. Loken had been aboard many Gloriana-class vessels. They were all of a pattern, but the Space Wolves had made the ship their own as much as they possibly could, tearing it bloodily from the grasp of reason and refashioning it in their own, superstitious tribal image. Other Legions favoured polished stone, gleaming metal and glass to line their halls. The Space Wolves covered the metal walls with carved wood and bone sheets so large they could only have been harvested from monsters. The greater halls had elaborate interiors of wolf-headed posts and panelling decorated with entwined beasts whose contortions inevitably ended in the fanged mouths of their fellows. Even lesser ways too unimportant for wholesale decoration acknowledged the character of the Legion: mossy rocks in bubbling pools of water, bunches of dried herbs tied up in bundles hanging from the ceiling, primitive weapons chained to the walls, as if imprisoned.

For all its size, the Hrafnkel had the atmosphere of a chieftain’s hall. The air was scented with smoke and poorly preserved meat, herbs, burned fat, wet fur, and the hot, musky smell of animals sleeping in their dens.

Its corridors were as likely to be lit by flickering torches as they were lumen strips or biolume panels. Fire bowls guttered in the suction winds of atmospheric recyc units, the walls behind them furred with soot.

‘You like it dark,’ said Loken.

‘Too much light dulls the senses,’ said Bror. ‘If you think this is dark, you would hate the Aett.’ Another phlegm-rich word, more growled than spoken. If the Fenrisian language had a relationship to Imperial Gothic, it was obscure.

‘The what?’

Tyrfingr chuckled throatily. ‘The Fang. They call it the Fang. Only don’t say that either. It’s the Aett, or nothing.’

The illusion of a savage king’s demesne would have been total had it not broken in many places, showing the technology beneath. Patchwork repairs made after Alaxxes had been undone by the ship’s recent forays beyond the Solar perimeter. New scars piled atop old wounds; the ship was damaged through and through. Whole sections were sealed off. Drifts of wood ash intermingled with mortals’ bones where fires had broken through bulkheads and torched compartments. In other sections, the Space Wolves’ primitive cladding had been ripped out to enable access to the guts of the ship. Beating hammers had the Hrafnkel shivering with a fever’s trembles. It was a giant beast, wounded close to death. It would be decades before it was brought back to its full capabilities.

Loken had heard Leman Russ intended to leave within the week.

Tyrfingr took Loken further into the ship, and the damage became less apparent, though it was never entirely absent. They ascended damp stairways and lifters whose mechanisms struggled against shafts bent out of true. After a time they reached the spinal way, the great stem-to-stern thoroughfare that all grand starships possessed.

Even there, below the towering windows, where a transit monorail ran with shushing haste, and ornate gates led to the palaces of astrotelepathy, astrogation, weapons control, the enginarium and other vasty domains, the sense of a primitive settlement remained strong. Every few hundred metres carved menhirs, their bases still dirty with alien soil, stood sentinel in recesses which in other Legions’ ships statues might occupy. Loken had seen few of Bror’s brothers until they reached the spinal way, where they thronged in some numbers. Most wore segmented leather costumes and masks. They were similar to Bror’s in the broadest sense, but no patterns were the same. Each was a unique expression of the warrior encased inside. The leather suits were more individual to each man than a human face. Fantastic beasts fashioned from hide stared at Loken as he walked by, and he felt out of place in his clean, grey power armour. Those few legionaries wearing their war gear were hardly less outlandish, for the storm-grey battleplate was decorated with twisting patterns, hammered runes, ropes of teeth, and the tips of wolf tails mounted in cast, angular brasses.

Bror took Loken aboard a crew train crammed with thralls. Many of them wore costumes as heavily decorated as those of their masters, and Loken guessed these were the higher ranking kaerls of the Chapter. The monorail accelerated mercilessly, turning the spinal way to a blur.

They reached the command spire soon after, and headed on towards the Wolf’s Hall, Leman Russ’ throneroom.

The long defensive corridor leading to the hall was lined solely with enormous sheets of ivory. The place was populated by the Varagyr, who other men called the Wolf Guard. These heavily decorated Space Wolves Veterans stood guard outside the hall, though Loken would have applied that term only loosely, because they did not stand at rigid attention, but congregated in clumps of two or three, talking with each other in the uncouth Fenrisian tongue as loudly as revellers, seemingly inattentive to their task. Not even their livery had any consistency to it. The Legion badge of a red, snarling wolf upon the heraldry plate of the left pauldron was the only commonality. In other places of prominence Loken saw double-headed wolves, rearing wolves, howling wolves and all manner of wolves besides.

‘My lord does not stand on ceremony,’ whispered Bror, seeing the look on Loken’s face. ‘We don’t do parades.’

‘I see,’ said Loken.

‘Better to be loyal and a little rough than polished drillmasters with treacherous hearts, eh?’ Bror said.

His words came across as a direct challenge, until Bror elbowed Loken and grinned. His elbow thudded off plasteel. Even though Loken wore his own armour, he was glad Bror wasn’t wearing battleplate.

‘These here are the Wolf Guard of the Einherjar, the jarl’s inner circle. They are here to honour you. All this is for your benefit.’ Bror raised a hand and grinned at a fellow of his. The warrior was dressed in his power armour without his helm, and had his face covered by a leather mask like Bror’s. He nodded in response.

‘I am honoured,’ said Loken.

‘You should be,’ said Bror.

Loken was sincere. He was honoured. Once he would have dismissed the force as savages, regarding his own Legion as far superior. That was before the Luna Wolves had become the Sons of Horus, and the Sons of Horus had become traitors. Russ’ wolves, the true wolves, had proved the more faithful.

They passed through the throng of warriors, having to beg pardon so they could go between them. There was no sense of discipline to them at all, but Loken knew this concealed a terrifying prowess in war.

Braziers gave off a suffocating heat. Firebowls burned animal oils that furred the ceiling with fatty deposits. At the far end of the corridor huge, circular ivory doors barred the way. A serpent ran around the outside, framing in its circle of scales a tempestuous sea crammed with monsters and foundering wooden ships. The serpent’s mouth was clamped firmly around its own tail. Loken recognised the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of eternity, but he had never seen a representation like this before.

‘Bror Tyrfingr!’ roared a bearded giant. He wore a leather suit like Bror’s and smelled like the cave of a hibernating bear. He grappled Bror, a half-wrestle, half-embrace that had the pair of them staggering about the corridor. Loken was forced to step back to avoid their boisterous greeting. The men grunted as they pushed at each other, before collapsing into laughter and hugging fiercely.

‘Ah, brother Loken,’ said Bror, his arm hung around the shoulders of the warrior. ‘This is Varagyr Kettril Modinsson, called Dourface, of the retinue of Hvarl Red-Blade, the Jarl of Sepp.’

Kettril gave Loken a massive, infectious smile. ‘The lone wolf,’ he said. He held out his arm. Loken took it, only to be pulled into an embrace he would rather have avoided. He got a mouthful of musty pelt before Kettril released him.

‘It is a privilege to meet you, brother, wolf to wolf,’ said Kettril.

‘I have no brotherhood, not anymore,’ said Loken, a statement that caused Kettril to pull him close again.

‘Never say that again,’ Kettril whispered. ‘We are all wolves of the Emperor here. If you find yourself lacking in a good warrior to watch your back,’ he nodded his head towards Bror in jest, ‘you can call on me. This I swear by the fires of the world forge.’

‘I thank you,’ said Loken, unsure of what to say.

‘The Einherjar have gathered to the Wolf King,’ said Kettril to Bror. ‘Speak clearly and with pride,’ he said to Loken. ‘And leave nothing out.’

Kettril whistled shrilly between his teeth. The doors opened. Beneath the ivory cladding were standard adamantium blast doors, thick and proud as those of any ship. This epitomised the Space Wolves, Loken thought. The deception of iron hidden under primitivism.

‘Go on then,’ said Kettril. ‘Do not keep the Lord of Winter and War waiting.’

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In memory of Alan Bligh, the world’s finest historian
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A Black Library Publication

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