It seemed that the Lupercal had spies of his own. Hounds were wolves and wolves were hounds. Primarch Dorn had been obliged to compromise Lord Sichar’s position as a double-agent for Amon’s benefit. The Lucifer Black had been right there. Horus’s man had been right there. Lord Sichar’s secret had been revealed. Lord Sichar was suddenly a vulnerability to be expunged and an enemy to be punished.
The concussion bomb had seen to that. It had vaporised the centre of the Parliament chamber, and brought down the roof. Haedo and Amon had been thrown backwards through wooden partitions into the consular voting room. Amon had been first on his feet.
The assassin had run. Leaving at least one more bomb behind him, he had fled for the fields. Amon wondered why. Assassins were focused beings. Execution or suicide was the usual conclusion of their efforts. Did this man think he could escape?
Surely not. Then what was he trying to accomplish?
Amon swooped down at the racing craft. Arms across his face, he struck it like a lightning bolt, shearing the canopy clean away. Glass splinters and pieces of window strut billowed away in the rushing wind. Amon tried to hold on. The black-armoured figure struggled to maintain control of the raker one-handed while he fumbled for his weapon. The craft bucked. Amon slid, and ended up clinging to the raker’s upturned nose.
He dug his fingers into the metal skin of the fuselage, making his own handholds, and dragged himself forwards. The assassin had found his weapon. He fired at Amon over the dashboard hump, and a bolt round shrieked past the custodes’s ear. The raker began to approach maximum velocity. Amon clawed on and reached the torn-open cockpit. The assassin fired again, blasting up at the custodes looming over him. The bolt punched through Amon’s left shoulder and blood sprayed into the slipstream.
Amon punched down with his right fist. The blow crushed the black metal helmet and pulped the head inside it.
The raker veered wildly as the assassin’s corpse lolled sideways from the controls. Clinging on, Amon tried to reach in to cut the engines.
He saw what was in the pillion seat behind the driver.
Another bomb, the largest and most destructive of all. Now Amon understood. The assassin had been planning suicide all along. He had been planning to finish his work by riding the raker out into the middle of the Winter Fields and detonating the device. The bomb would take out Hy Brasil’s vast reactors, buried under the fields. The reactors would annihilate the Planalto. Terra would understand, with a sick jolt, the wrath and influence of Horus Lupercal.
Almost shaken off by the savage vibration of the uncontrolled raker, Amon could see a light-beat countdown. There was no way of telling how much longer was left on the timer.
In sheer desperation, Amon tore out his trigger unit. There was no time for complex readjustment or re-calibration, no time to punch in an alternate set of coordinates. Amon simply managed to reset the altitude, adding two kilometres. Then he hit the actuator stud and hurled the unit into the cockpit.
He leapt clear. The site-to-site teleport vanished most of the speeding raker before Amon had even hit the ice. He landed with a bone-jarring crunch, and tumbled for thirty or forty metres in a flurry of ice. A stabiliser vane and part of the raker’s tail assembly, severed by the teleport beam’s tight focus, clattered and cartwheeled past him, shedding debris, the cut edges glowing and molten.
On his back, half-conscious, Amon slid in circles and slowly, slowly, came to a halt. He looked up into the mauve Sud Merican sky.
Two kilometres above him, there was a bright flash, followed by a blinding, surging, expanding blossom of white light. Then the noise and the shockwave hit him and stamped him down into the ice.
By the walls of the Palace, in the Himalazian dusk, the loyal hound rose from the ice and shook itself. It was hurt, but most of the blood on its snout and flanks belonged to the wolf it had just driven, braying, into the dark with its throat torn open.
It plodded back towards the gates, limping, and leaving spots of blood on the snow behind it. Its breath steamed in the cold evening air.
Behind it, out in the blackness, more wolves were gathering and coming ever closer.
Wolf at the Door
(Mike Lee)
Dawn was still two hours from breaking when the armoured column made its way from the still-burning city and rumbled westwards, along the great causeway that once supplied the Tyrants of Kernunnos with the plundered riches of a dozen worlds. The procession stretched for more than a kilometre, winding out along the western plains like a sinuous, steel-clad dragon. Heavy tanks of the Imperial Army took the lead, their armoured hulls still scarred and smoke-stained from the bitter fighting inside the planetary capital, followed by low-slung Chimera armoured personnel carriers containing the veteran troops of the Arcturan Dragoons. It had been the Dragoons who had spearheaded the attack on the Tyrants’ capital and had fought their way first to the battered palace at the centre of the city. By virtue of blood and valour, they had earned their place in the procession and the ceremonies to follow.
The column set a slow, purposeful pace through the fire-lit darkness, following the causeway past vast landing fields now littered with the burnt-out hulls of great treasure ships. One of the landing fields was little more than a gaping crater, its insides still glowing like molten glass. A treasure ship had tried to escape the doom of Kernunnos and been caught in the opening salvoes of the orbital bombardment. The flare of its exploding reactors had engulfed the multitudes of terrified refugees fleeing along the causeway and flung smaller craft like toys into the flanks of their larger brethren, leaving a swathe of melted wreckage for kilometres in every direction.
Past the debris-strewn landing fields the terrain gave way to broad, rolling plains dominated by the sprawling agri-combines that had once provided the capital with much of its food. Now the fields of wheat, corn and salix were cratered by artillery shells and littered with the hulks of burnt-out tanks. Packs of scavengers slinked about the charred hulls, drawn by the scent of the cooked flesh within. Here and there amid the tanks lay the broken bodies of the Tyrants’ bipedal war engines, their limbs riddled by lascannon fire and their chests burst open like jagged metal flowers. Tank commanders swept the fields with their heavy stubbers as they rode past, their auspex goggles picking out the furtive figures of refugees – men, women and children – fleeing across the ruined fields away from the column.
Thirty kilometres from the city the road began to climb into smoke-wreathed foothills that lay at the foot of a low mountain range that the locals called the Elysians. From time out of mind the region had been the playground of the Tyrants and their supporters in the Senate, but six hours of constant bombardment from orbital batteries and planetside artillery had turned the hills and the mountainsides into a splintered, smouldering wasteland. The villas of the great and powerful had been incinerated, along with the villages that supported them and huge tracts of the surrounding forestland.
It was into these mountains that the Tyrants had fled, following word that the last of their much-vaunted battlefleet had been destroyed in a pitched battle near Kernunnos’s primary moon. There was a refuge deep within the Elysians, a vault bored into the heart of one of the largest peaks that had been built during the Age of Strife, when Old Night had reared up and swallowed mankind’s first interstellar civilisation. The vault had been built to protect the planetary elite from the warp-spawned horrors that had walked the land, and over the centuries its formidable construction had become legendary. It was the ultimate fastness, a citadel that could withstand the fires of Armageddon itself.