“I do not know for sure,” said Ahriman, “but all that lives on the surface of Fenris does so because it can adapt to changing circumstances. These wolves are no exception.”
“Then I wish I could adapt like them. I am sick of this damned heat,” said Phosis T’kar angrily. “My body is gene-wrought to withstand all extremes, but the fire of this sun saps us all of life. Even Hathor Maat struggles with it.”
“Speak for yourself, T’kar,” retorted Hathor Maat. “I am quite comfortable.”
Despite his bluster, Maat suffered as the rest of them did. Without the powers of the Pavoni to call on, he was unable to regulate his body as efficiently as would normally be the case. Yet the wolves of Fenris marched as though through a balmy summer’s day, the heat as untroubling to them as the frozen tundra of their home world.
“It is thanks to their engineering,” said Magnus, joining their conversation. The primarch had said nothing since the march had begun, content to let his captains do the talking.
“They were engineered?” asked Ahriman. “By whom?”
“By the first colonists of Fenris,” said Magnus with a smile. “Can’t you see the dance of helices within them? The ballet of genes and the remarkable feats of splicing the earliest scientists achieved?”
Ahriman shared a glance with his fellow captains, and Magnus laughed.
“No, of course you do not,” said Magnus, shaking his head. “Uthizzar, you have travelled to Fenris, have you not?”
It was a rhetorical question, for Magnus knew everything about their secondments and legacies of honour. Uthizzar nodded.
“Briefly, my lord,” he said. “It was not a pleasant experience.”
“I imagine it was not. Fenris does not welcome visitors, nor is it a gracious host,” said Magnus with a hidden smile. “It is a world like no other, unforgiving and pernicious. The ice waits to kill those who travel its frozen seas and snow-locked cliffs at the first signs of complacency. A mortal man, even a well-prepared one, would freeze to death on Fenris within minutes of setting foot on its surface.”
“Yet the tribes survive there well enough,” said Ahriman. “Apparently, they are little more than feral savages, endlessly waging war for the few scraps of land that survive the upheaval of the Great Year.”
“That they are,” said Magnus. “But also so much more.”
“What makes them so special?” asked Hathor Maat, unwilling to believe that such barbarous mortals could earn the primarchs’ approbation.
“Were you not listening? Fenris is a death world, a planet so hostile it would test even your powers of bio-manipulation. Yet these mortals carve themselves land, home and families on a world most right-thinking men would avoid.”
“So how do they do it?”
Magnus smiled, and Ahriman saw he was enjoying the role of teacher once more.
“First, tell me what you know of the Canis Helix?”
“It’s a genetic primer,” said Hathor Maat, “a precursor gene that allows the remainder of the Space Wolf gene-seed to take root in an aspirant’s body.”
Magnus shook his head. His great eye glittered with green and gold as he regarded his captains.
“That is part of its function, yes, but it was never intended to be used so… obviously,” he said.
“Then how was it supposed to be used?” asked Ahriman. He looked over at Skarssen, the warrior once more wearing his leather mask, and wondered if the Apothecaries of the Fang knew as much as Magnus. The Wolf Lord walked warily around Magnus, having tasted a measure of his power. Ahriman suspected his primarch’s boast that he could destroy the Space Wolf ships in orbit was a calculated bluff. Clearly Skarssen wasn’t so sure.
“Imagine the time when mankind first discovered Fenris,” continued Magnus, “a world so utterly inimical to life that humans simply could not survive. Everything about Fenris was death, from the blood-freezing cold to the sinking lands to the howling winds that suck the life from your lungs. Back then, of course, geneticists saw impossibility as a challenge, and daily wrought new codes within the chromosomes of human and animal genomes as easily as the Mechanicum punch data-wafers for servitors.”
“So you’re saying that these colonists brought gene-bred wolves with them to Fenris?” said Phosis T’kar.
“Perhaps they did,” allowed Magnus, “but more likely they adapted, imperfectly at times and without thought to the consequences. Or perhaps there were other, older races living on Fenris.”
Ahriman watched Magnus as he spoke, feeling that there was more to the origins of Fenris than he was telling. Magnus was a traveller who had ventured deeper into the hidden reaches of the Great Ocean than any living soul. Perhaps he had actually witnessed the earliest days of the Wolf King’s world.
Magnus gave a studied shrug and said, “You look at those beasts and you see wolves, but is that only because it is what you expect to see?”
“What else would we see?” asked Hathor Maat. “They arewolves.”
“When you have travelled as far as I have, and seen as I have seen, you will learn that it is possible to look beyond the expected and into the true heart of a thing.”
Magnus gestured towards a wolf loping alongside the column, its powerful muscles driving it uphill through the heat without pause.
“I can look past the flesh and muscle of that beast, paring back the bone into the heart of its marrow to read every scar and twist in its genetic code. I can unravel the millennia of change back to the logos of its origins,” said Magnus. Ahriman was surprised to hear sadness in his voice, as though he had seen things he would rather not have seen. “The thing it is, what it wished to be, and all the stages of that long evolutionary road.”
The wolf stopped beside Magnus and he nodded towards it. An unspoken discourse seemed to pass between them. Ahriman caught a knowing glance from Ohthere Wyrdmake. Despite his reservations, he felt the urge to nurture the nascent kinship between them.
“Away with you!” shouted Phosis T’kar, shooing it. “Damned wolves.”
Magnus smiled. “I told you, there areno wolves on Fenris.”
THEY HAD MET the previous evening, after Ahriman returned to his corporeal body. Opening his eyes, he groaned as his flesh ached with the stress of his body of light’s reintegration. His leg flared painfully, his entire body a mass of discomfort.
With careful slowness, Ahriman uncrossed his legs and used his heqa staff to push himself to his feet. His right thigh felt numb, like it belonged to someone else, and cold pain burned the muscles and sinews the length of his leg. He opened his robe gingerly, pressing his fingertips to the bulked musculature of his smooth torso and grimacing in pain.
Repercussions covered his flesh where the void-hunters had wounded him, blackened patches of skin drained of their vitality. More completely than any wound dealt with blade or bullet, injuries to the subtle body damaged the very essence of a traveller’s flesh.
An Astartes could rise above pain, his body designed to allow him to function without loss of effectiveness, but nothing save rest and meditation could undo the damage of repercussions.
He saw his grimoire lying open on the ground of his pavilion and knelt to retrieve it, wincing as the dead areas of his body pulled tight. He felt like he had fought for a month without rest, his body pushed nearly to the limits of its endurance.
Ahriman secreted his grimoire and changed from his robe into a hooded tunic of crimson, edged with ivory and sable. Though his body ached for sleep, he had one last meeting to attend, one he had not anticipated until his near-fatal flight into the Great Ocean.
The flap at his pavilion’s entrance pushed open and Sobek entered, his face a mask of concern. Cooler night air gusted in with him.
“My lord, is everything all right?”
“Everything is fine, Sobek,” said Ahriman.