For all its size, the Hrafnkel had the atmosphere of a chieftain's hall. The air was scented with smoke and poorly preserved meat, herbs, burned fat, wet fur, and the hot, musky smell of animals sleeping in their dens.

Its corridors were as likely to be lit by flickering torches as they were lumen strips or biolume panels. Fire bowls guttered in the suction winds of atmospheric recyc units, the walls behind them furred with soot.

'You like it dark,' said Loken.

'Too much light dulls the senses,' said Bror. 'If you think this is dark, you would hate the Aett.' Another phlegm-rich word, more growled than spoken. If the Fenrisian language had a relationship to Imperial Gothic, it was obscure.

'The what?'

Tyrfingr chuckled throatily. 'The Fang. They call it the Fang. Only don't say that either. It's the Aett, or nothing.'

The illusion of a savage king's demesne would have been total had it not broken in many places, showing the technology beneath. Patchwork repairs made after Alaxxes had been undone by the ship's recent forays beyond the Solar perimeter. New scars piled atop old wounds; the ship was damaged through and through. Whole sections were sealed off. Drifts of wood ash intermingled with mortals' bones where fires had broken through bulkheads and torched compartments. In other sections, the Space Wolves' primitive cladding had been ripped out to enable access to the guts of the ship. Beating hammers had the Hrafnkel shivering with a fever's trembles. It was a giant beast, wounded close to death. It would be decades before it was brought back to its full capabilities.

Loken had heard Leman Russ intended to leave within the week.

Tyrfingr took Loken further into the ship, and the damage became less apparent, though it was never entirely absent. They ascended damp stairways and lifters whose mechanisms struggled against shafts bent out of true. After a time they reached the spinal way, the great stem-to-stem thoroughfare that all grand starships possessed.