The Wolf Priest shot Ragnar a sharp look, but abruptly relented as he met the young Space Wolfs golden eyes. He considered the question for a moment before he replied. 'All of us have the wolf in our blood,' he said. 'It sharpens our senses and gives us the glad rage of the berserker in battle, but like any wild thing it tests its bonds constantly, waiting for the chance to break free.'
Sigurd stared thoughtfully at a pair of Wulfen loping silently along beside Harald's pack. 'It is a constant struggle between man and wolf,' he said, 'and not every soul is strong enough to keep the beast at bay,' The priest laid a hand on the Iron Wolf amulet at his breast. 'W e bind the beast with sacred oaths to Russ and the Allfather, and we of the priesthood purify our battle-brothers with rituals and devotions to strengthen their resolve. For most, that is enough.'
'Yet not enough for Bulveye and his warriors.'
Ragnar expected a pious retort from the young priest, but when Sigurd spoke, his voice was surprisingly compassionate. 'It is not our place to judge these warriors,' he said with conviction. 'Even the ancient Dreadnoughts must sleep between times of war, lest they succumb to their feral natures. How hard must it be to keep one's soul intact after a thousand years of war, much less ten.'
The Wolf Priest shook his head solemnly. 'It is a testament to their courage and honour that they have endured as long as they have.'
The young Space Wolf nodded thoughtfully. 'But… is there no way to restore them?'
Sigurd stiffened slightly. Ragnar was straying into the proscribed territory of the priesthood. 'The transformation is a gradual one,' he said guardedly, 'but once begun, the process is inexorable. As the wolf within gains power, it exerts physical changes on the body.' He gestured to the Wulfen nearby. 'Much depends on the will and the faith of the warrior. The degradation can be halted, sometimes indefinitely, but it cannot be undone.'
The priest's words sent a chill through Ragnar's veins. 'Gabriella says that my eyes have changed colour,' he said numbly. 'How much longer do I have?'
Sigurd frowned. 'Truly, I do not know,' he said reluctantly. 'Again, it depends upon the warrior. The process begins slowly, but accelerates as the wolf gains power.'
'How slowly?' Ragnar asked.
The Wolf Priest glowered at Ragnar. 'Are you trying to shame me with my lack of experience?' he snapped. 'I confess I do not know for certain. The curse usually strikes initiates hardest, because their minds are still adapting to the changes taking place within them. Once a warrior becomes a full-fledged battle-brother… the curse takes years for the transformation to take hold.'
'Years?' Ragnar exclaimed. 'But I felt nothing before I returned to Fenris, just two months ago!'
Sigurd stared sharply at the young Space Wolf. 'That's not possible,' he said. 'Even with an initiate, it takes at least a year for the first changes to make themselves known.'
'If I were wolf-bitten a year ago, Ranek would have known it,' Ragnar declared, 'and I would have never been sent to Terra to serve House Bellisarius.'
The young priest thought it over, and his expression began to darken in consternation. 'It's true,' he said at last. 'Something else must be at work here, but I confess that I don't know what it could be.'
Ragnar nodded. 'Perhaps Bulveye or Torvald can tell us,' he said, daring to hope that things were not as hopeless as Sigurd suggested.
'Perhaps,' the priest allowed. 'We should reach the Wolf Lord's camp in a few more hours. I expect we'll learn a great deal then.'
They reached the first, wood-fringed foothills south of the grey mountains not long afterwards, and Torvald led the Wolves along the winding track of a dry streambed until they were hidden within the walls of a narrow, stony defile. Their pounding footfalls echoed crazily from the rocky walls as their course led north and east from one canyon to the next. The trail doubled back more than once, and without a pattern of stars to navigate by Ragnar soon lost track of where they were.
Within an hour Ragnar began to pick up the faint scents of other Wolves, and reckoned they were approaching the perimeter of the camp. His experienced eyes scanned the slopes of the rocky canyons through which they passed, but if there were sentries observing their approach he couldn't detect them. Then, abruptly, the canyon sloped steeply upward and the path narrowed to a cleft in the stone barely wide enough to admit the broad Space Marines.
Ragnar felt a prickling sensation race across his skin as he worked his way through the pass. Once through the cleft he quickly scanned the close-set walls of the defile that surrounded him and saw a pair of iron bars that had been driven into the stone on either side of the pass. Skulls and iron tokens carved with runes hung from each of the bars, and a wave of invisible power radiated from them.
'Those are way-posts, part of Torvald's system of wards,' Sigurd explained as he emerged from the cleft behind Ragnar. 'They confound attempts to locate Bulveye's camp using sorcery.' The Wolf Priest gazed upon the way-post with a mixture of awe and superstitious dread. 'Torvald and his kin have learned a great deal during their long campaign in the Eye.'
The path to Bulveye's camp had been carefully chosen, the approach forcing the Wolves to travel single-file and climb a steep, rocky approach into a high, sheer-sided canyon. At the southern end of the canyon, Ragnar saw the first of Bulveye's warriors: a pair of men crouching in the shadow of a boulder, covering the entrance to the canyon with a pair of plasma guns. Both warriors wore cloaks of tanned hide that had been covered in dirt and dust, and their motionless forms allowed them to blend in perfectly with their surroundings. Like Torvald, their long hair was thick and braided, and their beards hung halfway down their patched breastplates. They said nothing as the rescue party climbed past, studying them with cold, lupine eyes.
A little farther up the canyon a massive boulder had been rolled into a narrow place, creating a kind of dog-leg to prevent a clear line of fire into the area beyond. More warriors stood guard on the other side of the boulder, brandishing old, worn bolt pistols and ancient, nine carved blades. Their armour was decorated with intricate runes and carvings of battle scenes or voyages, and there were skulls or other battle trophies hanging from their broad belts. The warriors stared at Ragnar and the newcomers with frank but wary interest, stealing sidelong glances at one another and communicating in subtle gestures or nods.
More than a dozen metres further up the canyon they came upon a series of well-worn but serviceable wilderness shelters built alongside the rock walls. The camp looked as if it had been occupied for some time, and many of the shelters were marked with recent war trophies such as daemon talons and damaged pieces of blue and gold armour. More than a score of yellow-eyed warriors sat outside the shelters, cleaning their weapons or making repairs to their gear. On the surface, it looked no different from any other Space Wolf field camp that Ragnar had seen… except for the wary, challenging stares of the battle-brothers and the sense of history that stretched like an invisible tapestry across the camp and its inhabitants.
He'd felt such a thing once before, back when he was but a young lad plying the salt oceans of Fenris. His longship had been blown far off course during a storm, and they'd put in at a small island in search of fresh water. There they stumbled onto the camp of a small band of their clansmen who had been stranded there by a similar storm two years before. Ragnar still remembered the first time he'd set foot in their camp, and how the survivors had stared at him like a pack of wild dogs. They had lived in another world altogether since they had been lost, and their experiences had forged a bond that no one else could understand, much less share. It was a world in which he and his clansmen could not ever fully belong, and Ragnar felt the same sensation as he walked among the warriors of the Thirteenth Company.
They passed silently through the small camp and headed up to the far end of the canyon. Just off to the left, Ragnar was surprised to find a pack of huge, Fenrisian wolves stretched out in front of the entrance to a large cave. The wolves raised their shaggy heads as Torvald and the Wulfen approached, and the smallest of the pack rose onto its paws and loped into the darkness beyond the cave mouth. Torvald raised his axe, signalling for the party to halt, and went inside without a word. The Wulfen sank onto their haunches, some closing their eyes to rest while others dragged scraps of flesh from pouches at their belts and tore at them with their powerful jaws.
Harald's Blood Claws lowered Inquisitor Volt carefully to the ground. The old man spent several long minutes fishing a metal vial from his pack. He opened it with trembling hands and drank its contents in a single swallow. A little further away, Haegr set Gabriella on her feet. Though obviously tired, the Navigator was studying the Wulfen and the grim little camp with wide-eyed interest.
Ragnar slowly turned in place, surveying the canyon and its strange, forbidding inhabitants. He reminded himself that despite the differences between them, they were bound by the same oaths and the same world. The Thousand Sons were still their implacable foes, and Ragnar had no doubt that they would be able to count upon Bulveye and his warriors when the time came to strike at the heart of Madox's grand scheme. For the first time since crashing upon the shadow world, the young Space Wolf felt a spark of real hope.
Suddenly, a sharp cry echoed from the rocky walls. Ragnar whirled to see Gabriella stagger and fall to her knees, her hands pressed tightly to her face. Fierce green light from her pineal eye flared between her pale fingers.
'Lady!' Ragnar shouted, rushing to the Navigator's side.
The young Space Wolf had nearly reached Gabriella when a wave of sorcery buffeted him like an unseen wind. Its terrible energies sank through his armour and deep into his flesh, setting blood and bones afire. A cry of terrible agony tore its way past Ragnar's lips as he collapsed to his knees.
Dimly, he was aware that he was not alone. Harald and his Blood Claws had fallen too, and were writhing upon the ground. Even Haegr was down on one knee, his eyes screwed shut with pain.
Ragnar closed his eyes as another wave of agony wracked his body. His muscles roiled beneath his skin, and his flesh crawled. He tasted blood in his mouth, and then he was aware of nothing but a chorus of hungry, bestial howls filling the air and a red tide rising up to swallow his mind.
The air above the rolling plain hissed with bolts of lascannon fire, and rumbled with the thunder of heavy guns. Pillars of black smoke rose into the sky from the burning hulks of tanks and armoured personnel carriers, painting the western horizon the colour of old blood.
Rebel troops had reached to within half a kilometre of the Charys starport before their offensive ground to a temporary halt. Outnumbered and outgunned, the Imperial defenders had managed to retreat in good order despite constant artillery barrages and furious assaults. The causeway linking the capital city to the starport was choked with bodies and wrecked vehicles, testament to the desperate rearguard action fought by the Twentieth Hebridean Foot and the Tairan Irregulars, two of Athelstane's veteran units. The tattered colours of the regiments fluttered in the rough wind blowing over the causeway, surrounded by the bodies of their fallen colour guard. Both units had died to a man, holding back the traitors' armoured assault long enough for the rest of the Imperial units to reach the port's fortified perimeter.
Now the frenzied rebel troops found themselves under the guns of the starport's defenders, forced to march across hundreds of metres of open ground covered by mines, anti-tank guns and artillery batteries. After two bloody assaults, the traitors were forced to pull back out of range until their heavy artillery could be brought forward to pound the Imperial positions.
Just over a kilometre from the beleaguered defenders, the first batteries of rebel guns were being rolled into position by the light of the dying sun. Bare-chested gun crews strained and cursed as they unlimbered heavy, stub-nosed siege mortars and tried to roll them into position along the reverse slope of a low, treeless hill. Other crews took pry-bars to squat, wooden crates containing the massive high-explosive shells. Within the hour they would be ready to fire the first salvoes.
The gun crews were exhausted, and they'd grown careless with the promise of impending victory. No sentries were posted to watch the surrounding terrain, so there was no one to take note of the eight armoured figures observing the battery from a copse of trees a hundred metres to the west.
Mikal Sternmark flexed his armoured fingers around the hilt of Redclaw and tasted the scents of the enemy troops. 'Ammunition?' he asked of his men.
Sven eyed his two packmates. 'Jurgen and Bors can shoot those bloody flashlights for another month before they run dry,' he said, scowling at the hellguns in the Wolves' hands. He checked the power meter on his meltagun. 'And I've got one shot left.'
Haakon cleared his throat. Several pieces of shrapnel had lodged in his neck over the course of the afternoon, leaving him hoarse. 'I'm out of rockets,' he grated. 'Bjorn, Nils and Karl are down to five rounds each.'
'Grenades?' the Wolf Guard asked.
Sven shook his head. 'Not since that fight back at the crossroads.'
Sternmark nodded, although he couldn't honestly say he remembered which fight Sven was talking about. The day had blurred into one long, deadly pursuit. They would retreat a few hundred metres, lay an ambush for their pursuers, and then strike, kill as many as they could and retreat to the next ambush point further down the road. The Wolves had left hundreds of dead traitors and wrecked vehicles in their wake, until finally they'd eluded their pursuers inside the drainage network at the edge of the city.
They could have slipped into the low hills south of the capital, lain low until nightfall, and then crept past the rebel positions under the cover of darkness and into safety behind the Imperial lines, but Sternmark would be damned before anyone said he slunk back to camp like a whipped dog.
The red tide was rising. He could feel it pressing against the backs of his eyes, and he welcomed it.
'We'll advance in standard skirmish formation,' he told his men, and then pointed with his bloodstained blade at a team of gunners who were fixing fuses to a trio of waiting shells. 'Sven, when we're in range, you put your last shot right there.'
Sven let out a low whistie. 'Pull the trigger and eat dirt. Aye, lord.'
The Wolf Guard ignored the Grey Hunter's impertinence. He was already moving, gliding swiftly from the shadows beneath the trees.