The Gate of Bloodfire led through stone thick enough to have served as a fortress wall by itself, and the interior beyond it was not what the approach suggested.
The Fang gave its scale to its visitors over time rather than all at once: the corridors that seemed appropriately sized revealed themselves to connect to chambers that changed those proportions entirely, each room a piece of a structure that had grown for ten thousand years without any particular intention of stopping. Sons of Fenris moved through the Valgard in the purposeful way of people who know exactly where they are going in a complex they know completely, and when they saw what Bjorn the Fell-Handed was escorting through the main approach, they adjusted.
Dozens of them, coming from various directions, all arriving with the same general energy.
Wolf Nolan was already scanning for faces he recognized. He found one in the third cluster of Space Wolves that came around the corner ahead: a Wolf Priest who had just removed his skull helm, holding it in one hand, his face showing the specific expression of someone who has encountered an unexpected situation and is deciding at speed how to respond to it.
"Ulrik," Wolf Nolan said, and something in the way he said it covered a great deal of history in a single syllable.
Cypher, meanwhile, had been receiving information from a space Wolf with dark red hair who had been doing most of the talking in their brief exchange. He relayed the relevant part when the cluster dispersed somewhat: the Great Hunt was underway, which was why the Fang was quieter than it would otherwise have been. The majority of the Chapter's warriors had departed for the traditional pursuit across Fenris's wilderness. Bjorn the Fell-Handed had personally come to receive them because there was, at present, no one else of sufficient rank to do so.
Bjorn made a sound that might have been acknowledgment or might have been something that Dreadnought chassis are not entirely optimized for conveying, and led them deeper.
The great hall smelled of old stone and roasting meat and the specific ancient character of a space that has been used for feasting by warriors for millennia, the accumulated residue of ten thousand years of exactly this kind of gathering in the walls and the ceiling beams.
Bjorn did not ask whether anyone was hungry. He waved his power claw once in the direction of the serving corridors, and the mortal servants who had been waiting with the contained energy of people who understood what a visiting Primarch required began moving with the organized efficiency of people who have prepared for exactly this contingency.
The mead came in vessels carved from kraken bone: deep, wide cups that required two hands for a standard human to hold comfortably and one hand for an Astartes. The mead itself was the color of deep water at night, and it was cold, and its effect on the nervous system of anyone without specific metabolic advantages was substantial.
The three of them looked at each other across the feast table with the expressions of people who have recently survived a Daemon Prince's psychic storm and a Warp ejection, and had found themselves on Fenris, and have now been presented with strong mead by the oldest Space Marine alive.
There was not much to discuss. They picked up the cups.
After the third round, something shifted in the hall's atmosphere in the specific way that happens when a group of warriors decides collectively that rank and ceremony can wait. Several Space Wolves who had been standing at appropriate respectful distances drifted closer. Someone produced a bone-handled knife and a sea monster tooth and made a claim about the tooth's origin that a Space Wolf three seats down immediately disputed.
Wolf Nolan discovered that someone in the room had the same fundamental approach to competitive physical games that he did, which turned out to be Lukas the Trickster, who had apparently been watching the proceedings from a calculated position of apparent disinterest and whose eyes had been tracking Wolf Nolan since roughly the moment the mead started flowing. The two of them ended up on top of a table within the next hour by a sequence of events that seemed logical at the time. The games that followed were enthusiastic and drew a crowd. Neither of them appeared particularly concerned about the collateral consequences for the table.
Cypher found himself in conversation with the Wolf Priest Ulrik and a Rune Priest whose title was Windcaller, both of whom were interested in a dagger he had acquired from the tooth of a sea creature. The conversation was technical and specific and conducted with the focused attention of people who knew a great deal about the relevant materials. Cypher had more to say on the subject than most would have predicted, and the other two's estimation of him adjusted accordingly.
Nolan dealt with twelve rounds of mead with the assistance of whatever Mortarion's particular contribution to his internal biology had made of his toxin-processing organs, which functioned with such mechanical efficiency that the pleasant warmth that the first three cups had been building was dismantled by the fourth. He looked at the cup in his hand with an expression that he was reasonably certain no one in the hall was interpreting correctly.
He ate an unreasonable quantity of roasted elk and talked to Bjorn.
The conversation they had across the next several hours was one of the more unusual ones Nolan had participated in: an exchange with a mind that had been awake, on and off, across ten thousand years, that had known the Emperor personally, that had watched from a Dreadnought chassis as the galaxy became something the Great Crusade had not planned for. Bjorn's observations were not bitter. They were the observations of something so old that it had passed through bitterness and arrived somewhere harder to name.
After seven Fenrisian hours, the hall's energy gradually descended from its peak. The Sons of Fenris wound down in the way of people who have been welcoming and intended to go on welcoming but could see that their guests had reached the natural end of a very long day. Bjorn the Fell-Handed had been watching the three of them with the patient attention of someone who has learned to read a great deal into small things, and he gave the signal that moved the servants to begin the transition.
The quarters they were shown to were comfortable in the specific sense that they were large and dry and free of the wind. Bjorn had intended to give Nolan the Wolf King's personal chambers: the rooms that Leman Russ had occupied before his departure, maintained in his absence.
Nolan declined immediately and completely. Bjorn accepted this without argument.
When Nolan's eyes opened again, the light in the chamber had the quality of Fenrisian morning coming through stone: cold and pale and even.
Cypher was seated cross-legged on the floor with the components of a suit of power armor arranged around him in a pattern that suggested either chaos or a very specific organizational system that was not immediately apparent. His hands moved through the components with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done this enough times that the process does not require his full attention, which left enough of his attention free to be somewhere else entirely.
Wolf Nolan had put on Fenrisian robes and was working through a series of movements with the Frost Fang that were somewhere between training and meditation, his feet tracing the same path back and forth across the chamber's open space, the chainaxe's teeth cycling at low speed.
Nolan stood, drove the power armor's systems through their startup sequence, and looked at the armor components around Cypher.
"Wolf Cub's?" he said.
"What remains of it," Cypher said, without looking up. "There are several servo housings that need replacing entirely. I have the parts." His hands selected two components from the arrangement and fitted them together in the specific way that they were supposed to fit, which was not the obvious way. "What is your current inventory of the same?"
The answer was that Nolan's inventory was considerably more complete than what Cypher was working with, and considerably more adequate than Wolf Nolan had access to through his own means, and the next portion of the morning was spent in the practical activity of repairing what the Eye of Terror had done to Wolf Nolan's armor to the point where it was functional rather than held together by familiarity and will.
The finished result was significantly more intact than when they had arrived on Fenris. Wolf Nolan put it on and moved through a series of test actions, found it satisfactory, and looked at the other two with the expression of someone who has just processed that the morning has been productive and is now available for the next thing.
Nolan had been sitting in the chamber's corner for the last portion of the armor work, not particularly engaged in the technical process but thinking about something else. He said:
"There is no immediate emergency. We are, for the moment, in a position of relative safety. We are also three, which is a situation I have not had the opportunity to run a simulation in before." He looked at the other two. "I would like to try it."
Cypher set down the last tool he had been using and considered this.
"The difficulty would be substantially higher with three active identities," he said.
"Yes."
"We have no information about what the Emperor will assign to three simultaneous activations."
"Correct."
"Very well," Cypher said, and stood.
Wolf Nolan had already arrived at an opinion before the question was fully posed. He leaned the Frost Fang against the wall. "I don't care about the difficulty. What I care about is whether the Emperor can provide equipment or a storage ability so I can actually start rebuilding the Thirteenth Company. I have no ship. I have no base. I have less than a hundred brothers. What I have is a chainaxe and your company, which is excellent but insufficient for logistics." He looked at Cypher. "Although."
Cypher tilted his head.
"If the situation on Fenris is resolved and you want something to do afterward," Wolf Nolan said, "I heard you mention a Black Fortress. Huron Blackheart's, was it?"
"I have been considering a direct acquisition of it," Cypher said, with the measured tone of someone discussing a plan they have been developing for some time and have reached the stage of being willing to disclose. "It would require appropriate assistance. It is also the kind of operation that a base of operations would follow naturally from."
Wolf Nolan's expression went through several stages rapidly and arrived at enthusiasm. "Brother. I genuinely like the way you think. Let's do this."
"After Fenris," Nolan said.
"Obviously after Fenris, I wasn't suggesting we leave in the middle of..."
"Throne coins," Nolan said, and produced three of them from simulator storage: palm-sized, catching the Fenrisian morning light. He handed one to each of them.
"Whatever the Emperor assigns with three of us active simultaneously, the difficulty is going to be higher than anything any one of us has encountered alone. Keep that in mind." He looked at Wolf Nolan specifically. "The rest will be what it is."
Wolf Nolan held the throne coin in his ceramite palm and looked at it.
"I know. Stop being so long-winded about it."
"Three," Nolan said. "Two. One."
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