ASHES OF PROSPERO Read online

  More Space Marine Conquests stories from Black Library

  • Space Marine Conquests •

  THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL

  More tales of the Space Wolves from Black Library

  LUKAS THE TRICKSTER

  BLOOD OF ASAHEIM

  STORMCALLER

  WOLVES OF FENRIS

  A Space Wolves short story anthology

  WAR OF THE FANG

  A Space Marine Battles book, containing the novella The Hunt for Magnus and the novel Battle of the Fang

  LEMAN RUSS: THE GREAT WOLF

  RAGNAR BLACKMANE

  ARJAC ROCKFIST

  THE ART OF PROVOCATION

  A Space Wolves audio drama

  SAGAS OF THE WOLF

  An audio drama omnibus containing

  Thunder From Fenris, Doomseeker and Deathwolf

  More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

  • The Beast Arises •

  1: I AM SLAUGHTER

  2: PREDATOR, PREY

  3: THE EMPEROR EXPECTS

  4: THE LAST WALL

  5: THRONEWORLD

  6: ECHOES OF THE LONG WAR

  7: THE HUNT FOR VULKAN

  8: THE BEAST MUST DIE

  9: WATCHERS IN DEATH

  10: THE LAST SON OF DORN

  11: SHADOW OF ULLANOR

  12: THE BEHEADING

  • Space Marine Battles •

  THE WORLD ENGINE

  An Astral Knights novel

  DAMNOS

  An Ultramarines collection

  DAMOCLES

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Ultramarines novellas Blood Oath, Broken Sword, Black Leviathan and Hunter’s Snare

  OVERFIEND

  Contains the White Scars, Raven Guard and Salamanders novellas Stormseer, Shadow Captain and Forge Master

  ARMAGEDDON

  Contains the Black Templars novel Helsreach and novella Blood and Fire

  • Legends of the Dark Millennium •

  ASTRA MILITARUM

  An Astra Militarum collection

  ULTRAMARINES

  An Ultramarines collection

  FARSIGHT

  A Tau Empire novella

  SONS OF CORAX

  A Raven Guard collection

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Space Wolves collection

  Visit blacklibrary.com for the full range of novels, novellas, audio dramas and Quick Reads, along with many other exclusive products

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  Warhammer 40,000

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  About the Author

  An Extract from ‘Lukas the Trickster’

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  WARHAMMER 40,000

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  PROLOGUE

  Fenris howled, wordless and agonised, the world’s spirit tortured by the presence of diabolic invaders.

  Pain throbbed along the nerves of Njal Stormcaller. The hurt of his home world became an ache in his chest, its unfamiliar dread a pounding in his skull. Still, he held tight to the wyrd that swelled through him, channelled into his thoughts by brother Rune Priests; power teased from the tormented psyche of a world rebelling to the tread of countless daemons and traitors.

  ‘Damget!’ snarled Aedir the Rod-Breaker as psychic power snaked away from his immaterial grasp, enlivened and made treacherous by the conjurations of the Thousand Sons.

  ‘Fight it,’ said Njal, his eyes fixed upon the grotesque apparition before them, swelling above a sea of half-bird mutants and cackle-mouthed madfolk.

  The Crimson King. Cyclops. Magnus the Red. Daemon Primarch of the Thousand Sons.

  The daemon prince manifested as a towering azure-skinned sorcerer with wings of multicoloured flame-feathers. Energy crackled around a horn-crown, each lightning spark leaving an after-image of pure nightmare upon the sight of those that looked upon the immortal being. Clad in gilded armour forged from dead stars and broken dreams, Magnus stood upon a barren pinnacle, arm raised to the raging heavens while rivers of lava boiled from the fractured earth about him, incinerating Fenrisian, Tzaangor and cultists without discrimination. The followers of Fate’s Architect hailed their lord, screaming prayers and thanks to the Master of Chance that spared them.

  The handful of Space Wolves battle-psykers that held against the insane horde unleashed a torrent of icy blasts and wreathing fire-balls. Flares of pure power and razor-edged shards leapt from fingers and staves. The mobs that hurled themselves across the rocky plates of the Wolf’s Gullet split upon the ire of the Rune Priests like a wave parted by a sharp promontory, their assault slashed through at its heart.

  ‘Onwards,’ urged Njal, stepping into the hurricane of psychic power that flowed from the Crimson King. ‘This chaff will drain us till our sweat runs dry. Our rage must fall upon Magnus.’

  But his earnest plea was in vain. The coruscating hemisphere of warp power that swirled about the Thousand Sons’ primarch – a psychic might that had shrugged aside the firepower of orbiting starships – did not merely shield Magnus from attack, it clouded the wyrdsenses of those nearby. Even Njal, highest-ranking lord of the wyrdhalle, could not find the Cyclops’ reflection in the warp. Though his soul burned sun-like where simple mortals were brief sparks, the Crimson King’s warp presence was hidden by a thousand dark shadowfolds of ancient pacts.

  Njal watched helplessly as the primarch ascended, outstretched wings ornamental and dramatic, his levitation enacted by the smallest expulsion of telekinetic will. With one cruel eye, Magnus looked down at the world about to fall to his reign, and his scarlet gaze seemed to meet that of the Stormcaller.

  ‘The So
ns of Russ will never forget,’ snarled Njal, though he did not expect his oath to be heard. ‘One of us will be the end of you, damned one!’

  The laughter of a demigod shook the Firepeaks. To Njal’s shock a calm, cultured voice appeared in his head, easily bypassing layers of wyrd defences and the protective cage of his psychic hood.

  +Perhaps. But not you.+

  The words came with a look of utter disdain; contempt reserved for the most irritating of gnats that persist despite vigorous swatting. Njal realised that for all his power – a power that had thwarted a greater daemon and earned him the name Stormcaller – he was nothing in the eye of the Crimson King.

  And in that moment, for just an instant, he knew despair and feared for his world.

  CHAPTER 1

  WOES OF FENRIS

  The ring of a staff on stone floors echoed through the still corridors of the Fang. Each impact resounded like a siege hammer, filling the emptiness with a sharp noise. A fastness fashioned from the bedrock of a mountain, the fortress-monastery had housed tens of thousands of Space Wolves in its past. Now it was home to relatively few. Feast-halls that had rung to thunderous voices raised in celebration of victory, and the occasional low laments of defeat, swallowed the noise with their vastness. Hundreds of banners were hung from the high rafters and friezes adorned the walls, deadening the sound of metal on rock. Trenchers and tables, each a hundred metres long, awaited banqueters that would never return. Benches and the high chairs of the Wolf Lords, polished by ten millennia of accommodating the greatest heroes of the Imperium, now sat unused.

  The arrival passed now-empty dorm chambers where the Sons of Russ had rested in preparation for battle for ten thousand years. The only testament to their previous occupation was the scratched runes on cot posts and bare walls: boasts of achievements past and yet-to-be; lines of sagas not completed; jokes both subtle and crude, of foes and masters alike; dedications to the Allfather, God-Emperor of Mankind, and to Russ, and the Great Wolves that had succeeded him. All carved in angular Fenrisian runes, marking each chamber as a predator marks its territory.

  Not only the interior was near-empty. His mind’s eye lifted to unseen deserted ramparts where icewinds howled across naked stone, eating away at defences that had not been breached since they had been laid down at the dawning of the Imperium of Man. Gun turrets growled and whirred, moving to the neural impulses of half-sentient servitors slaved to their cannons, unthinking soul-carcasses oblivious to the desolation around them. Kilometres-long walls scarred the towering slopes of the Fang’s outer skin, cutting dark lines across the snow-wreathed flanks of the hollow mountain.

  The crash of the staff was accompanied by the tread of soft-booted feet – a step surprisingly light given the size of the man that took them. He was broad-shouldered, as were all Space Marines, and a head and a half taller than any normal man. His calves were bound tight with thongs about leggings of tanned hide. His furred coat and the shaggy auburn beard hanging lank from his chin and cheeks steamed, the ice rime slowly fading as he made his way along processionals and galleries, leaving a course of drips and wet footprints in his wake.

  His face was square-jawed, the nose large, nostrils flared like a bull’s. Eyes the colour of slate speckled with green stared directly ahead from beneath thick brows, knotted together in concern. The tips of his upper incisors protruded into his bottom lip, the length of his fangs an indication of his extended years.

  The staff was black, carved with runework that glowed like forgefire. Its head was the polished skull of a blizzard-wolf, his personal totem. On his shoulder sat a black-feathered bird. One eye glittered with augmetics, and wires protruded from its flesh in testament to its altered nature. Nightwing – the Rune Priest’s psyber-familiar, oracle and extension of his senses and thoughts. The lumen-light glittered in its normal eye, reflected from the beady ebon surface like shooting stars against a black sky.

  His solitary progress brought him to the great doors of the King’s Hall. They were barred – the huge barriers of high mountain ash were bound with gilded plasteel, reinforced with rivets each the size of a man’s clenched fist. Silver runes had been hammered into the wood, with a simple challenge:

  Friends welcomed for ever. Foes cursed for eternity.

  Two guards stood by the ornate iron handles – a pair of broad rings, each fashioned in the likeness of the world drake swallowing its tail. The door wardens were clad in the monstrously bulky plate of Tactical Dreadnought armour, two warriors from the Great Wolf’s own guard. The armour was painted in the blue-grey of the Chapter, marked by icons of their Great Company, squad and personal adornments. Each wore several talismans and wolf tails; some were signatures of their past deeds, others awards and trophies of their victories.

  They were veterans famed among the Chapter and the returning Rune Priest knew them well. To the right, Alrik Doomseeker, his paired claws raised but not active, expression hidden within his helm. On the other side was Sven Halfhelm, thunder hammer lifted to bar further passage, a cruciform storm shield held across his body. He wore no helm, and an old scar that ran across his right eye from cheek to forehead was pale against tanned skin.

  ‘I request audience with the Great Wolf,’ said the visitor. His voice was quiet but powerful, spoken with assured authority.

  ‘Then speak the ally-words and you shall pass,’ replied Alrik.

  ‘Aett-skald.’ He whispered the code, gaze moving from one guardian to the other. ‘Such knowledge could easily be plucked from the mind of another. Logan needs better security if he thinks a simple password could prevent a foe from entering his inner halls.’

  ‘An issue we have raised with the Great Wolf, for sure,’ said Sven, withdrawing his hammer with a wheeze of armour servos. ‘But who save for the Rune Priests could guard against the daemons again? We have missed you, Lord of Runes. I hope your journey into the ice was fruitful.’

  Alrik turned and signalled to a cluster of lenses that stared down from the lintel above the gate. The sentry devices clicked and whirred as the servitor bound within the gateway accessed its protocols and studied the new arrival for its own clarification. Several seconds passed before the heavy clank of locks turning announced that all had been found in order.

  The doors swung inwards with a grinding of gears, revealing the King’s Hall in all its glory. The visitor watched Alrik step within and announce his arrival through the amplifier of his war-plate.

  ‘A Lord of the Fang returns, Great Wolf. The Tempest that Walks. Njal Stormcaller!’

  A blizzard raged along the slopes of the fjord, the snow flurries almost horizontal as gales drove them into the valley. Unheeding of the storm, Arjac, known as Rockfist to his brothers, forged through the drifts. His already considerable frame had been grown into the superhuman physique of a Space Marine by the Canis Helix gene-seed. Clad in a suit of Tactical Dreadnought armour – bulky war-plate designed to withstand plasma blasts and the freezing void of space – he did not even notice the driving ice and wind that would have swept away the strongest of normal men.

  He followed a near-invisible track down towards the northern shoreline, winding his way between snow-covered boulders, picking past ice crevasses that could devour battle tanks. Lumpen shapes marred the snow to either side. Here and there, a rictus face or outstretched hand broke the pale blanket. He passed dead by the score, frozen where they had fallen. Some of them had been slain by exposure to the elements as they crawled homewards, but most had been killed by violence. Their guts hung open and arteries had spilled the last of their life into the uncaring snow.

  Fitful gusts of smoke drifted up from the fjord and Arjac saw charred timbers jutting from the ice that had trapped the waters: remnants of pyreships, several dozen of them. Those that still gave off a smog could not have been lit long before the storm had hit, their flames tamped by the blizzard. He could see them not far from the vague boundary between land and water, held on giant sleds because no keel could break the ice. Bodies had
been stacked like firewood on the decks, young and old, men and women.

  A large settlement of longhouses clustered along the banks of the river at the fjord’s head, but only a few dozen fur-wrapped figures waited at the harbour, the last inhabitants of Elsinholm.

  The snows had relented by the time Arjac had descended to the town. He passed empty longhalls, their roofs made of kraken skin, their walls frozen daub and stones between bones of the gigantic beasts of the deep. Signs of the kraken hunt were everywhere, from the discarded flensing pikes frozen to racks by the quaysides, to the huge dragway into the centre of the town where a monstrous catch would be taken and divided up between the townsfolk.

  A call signalled that one of the mourners at the iceside had spotted him and seconds later the people from the harbour surged up the frozen mud of the street, calling thanks to the gods and the Sky Warriors.

  Decorum returned as they neared Arjac. The crowd slowed, their enthusiasm suddenly curtailed, most stopping some distance away while a handful dared approach closer. The people looked haggard – most of them were in their old age, though there were a few younger men and women scattered throughout. Their faces were pinched from cold and hunger. They eyed the Space Wolves Terminator with a mixture of hope and desperation.

  One of them – obviously the town elder, whom he had been told by the Great Wolf was called Rangvaldr – broke from the group and approached, making signs of welcome with a three-fingered hand. The top of the aettjarl’s head barely reached the wolf symbol on Arjac’s plastron, but he raised his chin to meet the gigantic warrior eye to eye. There was no lack of spirit in his gaze.

  ‘Bless the Sons of the Wolf King. Our message was heard,’ said the chieftain.

  ‘The Great Wolf hears and sees all that happens in his domain.’ Arjac tilted his head towards the pyreboats and then glanced back to the path of corpses above the town. ‘How many?’

  ‘Three hundred and four,’ Rangvaldr said with a mournful look. ‘From the invasion. We had not even found them all before this latest calamity, which has taken forty-two more.’

  ‘Your message spoke of a beast from the highlands descending to attack your people.’