Wolves of Fenris (Warhammer 40,000) by Chris Wraight

Author:Chris Wraight [Wraight, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Olvar goes watchfully, swallowing down fear, remembering what Aeolf told him about the place and how to stay alive in it. The sea smokes and belches and fire dances on the water. The earth moves like a floe cracking. He crouches, trying to see the way ahead through twisting sheets of smog. His skin runs with sweat. He is shivering, ankle-deep in slush and gravel. Ahead of him a mountain rises, vaster even that his imagination had made it, scowl-dark and crowned with fulguration.

He is burning with fatigue. He carries his axe in his right hand. The knapped head feels like a lead block in his trembling fingers.

Olvar knows he should move. For two winters he prepared for the forge-test and he cannot turn back. He had been unable to look into the eyes of his mother, who has already grieved for the loss of a son, expecting to see him again only in the afterworld.

Then Olvar hears it once more, closer this time. He snaps around, staring out into the dark, clutching the axe-hilt. Waters foam at the shoreline, flecked grey with cooling slag.

At first he sees nothing but low outlines of empty stone, streaked with melting snow, jagged against a bulging sky of thunderheads.

But he does hear something: a purr, a growl, a hair-lifting, skin-puckering snarl. It has been on his heels for two days, padding closer, hugging the shadows. He cannot see it, cannot smell it, only hear it. It stays downwind of him, slinking around columns of obsidian and granite, a ghoul of the boiling seas.

Olvar pauses. He should go on. He should head for higher ground, earth that does not shudder and crack as the sea drags it down and over into the abyss.

He waits, though. He shivers and he watches. In the gloom, under an overhang that scrapes into the sky like a sickle, he sees them for the first time.

Eyes, black-pinned, like golden orbs, shining in the dark.

Ragnvald strides toward the burning hab-block. Its internals are gutted and glowing, ringed by melting skeletal struts. The sky burns green, shimmering from refractive ice particles. The crump of artillery drums out a steady beat, making the earth shake.

Ahead of him a shattered highway snakes through ruins, strewn with the dead and the harrowed. His grey brothers lope ahead, streaking through shadows, heads low, bolters firing. Ragnvald moves more slowly, feeling ember-dry earth part under his boots.

The Rhino is on its side, half-buried, its smoke stacks still vomiting, its broken tracks stilled. Loer’s squad has already abandoned it, charging off towards the enemy, leaving the shell to be salvaged or scuttled.

But the spirit is intact. Ragnvald can sense it, chittering in agony, locked in the coils at the heart of the machine. He stoops and his servo-arm sweeps around, clanking as its jaws unlock. He links to the Rhino’s core, opening a service hatch. Wiring spills out like entrails.

Then he hears it – a purr, a growl, a hair-lifting, skin-puckering snarl.

Ragnvald unlocks his thunder hammer and

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