ASHES OF PROSPERO Page 14

  A twist of bitterness knifed into the heart of Njal’s soul, but it was not his hatred that burned.

  +This is the source of your pride, dog of Fenris! Libraries that housed the wisdom of millennia, broken and empty. The knowledge of the Eleusis, the Pavoni and Anaximenes Cults scattered like ash. The archives of my own Raptorae lost in the inferno. In your ignorance you destroyed that which the Emperor sought, that which could have saved Mankind from a long demise.+

  ‘It was the Allfather that ordered this. You know nothing of what came after, the further treacheries committed by your brothers against the Allfather and those that remained loyal to him.’

  +I can infer much from what I have seen through your eyes. The Imperium is a shadow of the great edifice we built for the Emperor. The Legions? They are no more. You scrabble for weapons and armour when the might of the Mechanicum once laboured to supply the Emperor’s armies. You have sunk even lower than your forefathers into mysticism and superstition, forgetting the Imperial Truth and the rule of Enlightenment. You say that the Space Wolves prevailed at Prospero, but I say that humanity lost.+

  Njal did not reply as he watched the city grow larger through the port. He could imagine how impressive Tizca would have looked in its prime. The glittering ocean and pale cliffs, the bustle of orbital craft and surface vessels like trails of jewel-shelled beetles moving from the mass of white and silver. The sagas had spoken of magnificent illuminations that played upon the skies – rainbow coruscations that danced from satellites and beacon fires lit from pinnacle towers.

  Precincts that covered many square kilometres filled the spaces between the mountain-like edifices of the pyramids. Dead gardens linked by dusty boulevards cut through rubble-choked quadrangles and hexagonal cloisters.

  +You do not even realise that you approach in virtually the same manner as the Wolf King did. You know so little of what transpired, blinded by history and prejudice.+

  ‘Prospero burned for its crimes. Your continued survival is evidence of the outlawed forces that you bargained with.’

  +Outlawed forces? Be careful where you cast your accusations, Librarian. You are an equal abomination under the Edict of the Emperor. How convenient that you forget the very law by which you claimed prosecution of my brothers when it becomes a far closer matter.+

  ‘You dabbled in sorcery, nothing like the runelore of my people. That you think it the same explains much of your delusion.’

  +One law for Prospero, another for Fenris. As much as this destruction is like sharp blades in my heart, it is the thought of the Emperor’s betrayal that cuts me deepest. He took Magnus as his acolyte and then punished him when his learning surpassed the master. I held the Emperor to be our lord and guide, I never realised he could be so weak.+

  ‘The Allfather saved humanity!’ Though rage burned in him at Izzakar’s assertions, Njal kept his voice low in consideration of Majula. ‘All would be lost without his sacrifice.’

  The jets of the Thunderhawk throttled back as it descended sharply towards the broad landing aprons of the Tizcan orbital transfer yards. Much here was left untouched by bombardment though the neighbouring precincts and works were reduced to broken walls and crevasse-slashed craters, a reminder of the fury of the Space Wolves and their allies before the massed landing ten thousand years earlier.

  ‘Landing in four minutes, Stormcaller,’ the pilot signalled, pulling the gunship into a tight turn that brought central Tizca back into view. The building-peaks about the centre still seemed distant, but the clouds that streamed at their summits betrayed the illusion. They were simply so vast that perspective played tricks on the eye. Only the Fang was greater in the experience of the Stormcaller, though he had not laid eyes upon the Imperial Palace.

  The Thunderhawk and its escorting pair of Stormwolf gunships did a last pass around the landing area, gunners and surveyors scouring the labyrinth of toppled columns and collapsed warehouses for any sign of a foe. Content that Arjac’s offensive had cleared away any resistance, the pilot set the gunship down while his companions in each Stormwolf peeled away to deploy their own cargoes of warriors.

  Njal called to Majula, who had been staring silently out of a window since they had dropped beneath the cloud layer. He pointed to the Rhino transport that filled the bulk of the modified transport compartment, its boarding hatch open. She unbuckled her drop harness and joined him at the armoured carrier.

  ‘You know how to drive one of these, Lord of Runes?’

  ‘Of course. I am a Space Marine first, a Librarian second. I wielded bolter and blade, steered Land Speeder and wore jump pack as did any other warrior of the Space Wolves.’

  He clambered through the hatch. The interior had been hastily emptied of bracing and other impediments to his bulkier Terminator armour, and the whole divide between the driver’s position and the crew compartment had been cut away. While Majula strapped herself into one of the few remaining seats, Njal crouched and shuffled up to the controls, his massive fists hovering over the steering columns and ignition runes as he re-acquainted himself with the layout.

  ‘It’s been a while,’ he admitted. ‘Probably a century since I had to do this myself.’

  Through the driver’s armoured vision slit he saw sunlight creep through a crack in the Thunderhawk’s ramp, rapidly becoming bathing sunshine as the assault gate opened. He tapped a rune and the Rhino’s engine grumbled into life. Setting the drive gears, he pushed the control levers forward. Jerkily the Rhino rumbled down the ramp, engine coughing as Njal shifted into combat mode. A hum from the secondary systems set the hull vibrating around him.

  ‘Easy, just like old times,’ he told the Navigator.

  He turned across the ripped blacktop of the landing strip, while around him other dropships descended. The Longclaw was not a designated drop craft – hence the improvisation with Arjac’s landing – and it would take several hours to ferry the remaining thralls to the surface.

  Humming an ancient skald-verse, he steered the transport onto the cracked remnants of a roadway that headed towards the towering pyramids.

  A temporary command post had been erected beside the doors at Void Gate Six, to help accommodate the passage of gunships and transports through the loading dock. Aldacrel manned the station assisted by two of his thralls and a logistae servitor. Load-out data burbled from the half-machine’s slack lips while the Iron Priest tapped runes on a cogitator plate he had wired into the main system via the void gate’s command circuit. Behind him stood Axh-Atarz, robed in the red of Mars, monitoring this near-sacrilegious adaption with a censer and a scowl.

  ‘Stop frowning, Martian,’ the Iron Priest growled, not looking up from his work. ‘The spirits are placated, nothing is amiss here.’

  A buzz of verbal static might have been a grunt of derision but it was impossible to tell. Aldacrel ignored his tech-priest companion, attention drawn to the Stormfang that was still sat in the open void chamber. The Iron Priest activated the vox-hail.

  ‘Fang-four, you had departure permission two minutes ago. Fang-two will be on landing course in three minutes. I am closing the inner gate. You need to go now.’

  ‘Profound… Unexpected vox issues.’ More crackling preceded a high-pitched whine in Aldacrel’s ear. The channel cleared a few seconds later. ‘Course locked in, preparing to leave. Close the doors whenever you’re ready.’

  Aldacrel gave a nod to one of his thralls. The assistant turned and with deft metallic fingers – replacements for digits lost to a trauma during his induction – activated the inner gate, sealing the bay from the wall panel behind them. The bay cycled through the air evacuation procedure and then with a blare of alarms the outer doors parted.

  ‘Fang-four you have…’ Aldacrel didn’t manage to finish the transmission. On a blaze of plasma, the small gunship pounced from the void chamber, one wing barely missing the edge of the outer gate.

  ‘At least he’s trying to get back on schedule,’ Aldacrel said to nobody in particular. He turned h
is attention to the next ream of reports scribbled by the logistae’s quill-fingers, but a shout from the main corridor broke his concentration. The Iron Priest looked up to see a Space Wolf running towards him, wolfshead helm in hand. He stopped at the window of the inner gate, peered into the chamber and then turned towards Aldacrel’s post.

  ‘Armour-master, where’s my gunship?’

  As the Space Wolf came up to the armourplas window of the small command module, Aldacrel recognised Harkon Reaver-Born.

  ‘I…’ began the Iron Priest. He looked at the pilot, to the empty void bay, and back to Harkon. ‘You were meant to be aboard Fang-four.’

  ‘My armour recyclers were blocked somehow and I had to swap filters,’ explained the Space Marine. ‘When I came back, my helm had disappeared. I found it in the ablutions chamber.’

  Aldacrel absorbed this without comment, and it fell to one of his thralls to ask the obvious question.

  ‘Master, if Harkon is here, then who is piloting Fang-four?’

  ‘Course overridden. Let’s go somewhere more interesting,’ Lukas said with a laugh, half turning in the pilot’s seat. He pulled a beacon transponder out from the console and crushed the device in his fist. ‘We won’t be needing that.’

  At the co-pilot position, Gudbrand grinned.

  The Trickster craned his head to look at the six Blood Claws strapped into the Stormfang’s main compartment. The space was cramped, filled by the bulk of the gunship’s massive helfrost destructor. They looked back at him, faces lit by sigils gleaming on the buzzing warp core beneath their feet. ‘Twenty minutes ‘til planetfall, let’s pass the time with some songs. Who knows the words to She Was only a Hearthguard’s Daughter?’

  CHAPTER 9

  TIZCA AWAKENS

  The Wolf Guard led the way, fifty metres ahead of four power-armoured squads of Stormriders, who split into battle-packs to secure junctions and overpasses as the expedition ventured deeper into the city. In their wake came half of the thralls from the first wave, a three-dozen-strong platoon of soldiers, and with them the Navis Guard despatched on the insistence of Navigator Majula. The force advanced along deserted streets and over crumbling viaducts. The dust of their passage settled slowly in their wake, footprints left in the ash of a past age.

  Arjac studied the schematics of the sensorium, vectoring data from his brothers as well as the last in-load from the Longclaw before the drop had been launched. The Pyramid of Photep was at the centre of the sprawling conurbation, its grand entrance opposite a ziggurat structure identified in the archives as the Great Library. Around were smaller four-sided and six-sided edifices that had housed the various cults and sects of Prosperine tradition, each laid to waste and looted over generations like the rest of the city.

  According to the Stormcaller the recent psychic disturbances emanated from the main pyramid but there was nothing on the sensorium and no updates from the rapid strike vessel monitoring the city from orbit. Even so, Arjac did not relax. Not only did centuries of training and experience not allow such laxity, he could sense a pregnant tension permeating his surrounds. Nothing specific, perhaps simply the weight of history and myth, imbued by Tizca’s legendary status in the sagas of the Space Wolves.

  They trod in the footsteps of the Wolf King, on ground that had been the battleground of heroes like Griegor Fellhand and Thorwal King’s-Bane. The Great Wolf had been right. If they could return in victory from this expedition it would be a reminder of the Rout’s power, a testament to the strength of Fenris even in these troubled times.

  A few hundred metres from the Pyramid of Photep, as the squad crossed a bridge over an arid canal bed, a low-pitched hum alerted the hearthegn to a disturbance on the sensorium. The warning came from Berda’s suit, a short distance to his left, his assault cannon trained on a crossroads at the bottom of a barren slope of ferrocrete. In a sub-view Arjac monitored Berda’s visual feed while the other Wolf Guard tracked his gaze left and right, but there was nothing to be seen on the flat expanse of road.

  ‘The spirit is likely bored,’ complained Sven.

  The pack paused nonetheless, the instinct of battle-drill taking them into a defensive semicircle even though there was no visible threat.

  ‘What is it?’ The female voice on the vox was unfamiliar until Arjac realised it was the commander of the Navis Guard, Dorria.

  ‘Spirit glitch. Remain in position.’

  ‘A spirit glitch?’

  ‘Remain in position,’ he said again, holding his temper in check. He sympathised a little with Dorria, for she was another guard sent to this desolate place by the one she was meant to protect. Despite that, he had objected, vocally, to the inclusion of the Navis Guard, uncertain exactly where they lay in the hierarchy of the expedition.

  A thermal register pinged a warning from Ulfar on the right flank, detecting a small temperature build-up in a high glass pyramid about seventy metres from the junction.

  ‘Not yours as we–’

  Sven’s complaint died as energy readings spiked all around the task force, thermal and motion-sensitive augur systems whining into life. It was not the suits alone that detected something amiss. A frisson of unease scurried across Arjac’s skin and, judging by the mutters and whispers of his companions, he was not the only one whose battle instincts had been pricked.

  ‘Any spirit-guided defences would have been stripped away millennia ago,’ said Berda.

  ‘Life signs!’ The barked report came from Valgarthr’s auspex bearer, Gardr. ‘Multiple sources!’

  The Stormriders splintered into smaller packs without any need for a command, taking up watch stations just as the individual Wolf Guard had done, moving quickly to the rampart on the edge of the viaduct and onto the steps leading down to the roadways.

  ‘Orders?’ Dorria’s tone was urgent, but not panicked. Her gold-clad squad formed a tight knot around their commander, but the dispersal of the Stormriders had left them exposed in the middle of a featureless ferrocrete plaza.

  ‘Locate cover,’ growled Arjac. Overlaying the city schematic with the sensorium data, it seemed that every temple-pyramid in the city centre had just erupted into activity yet he could see nothing.

  ‘Here, two points north-west,’ called Ingvarr. His sub-screen view zoomed towards a breach in one of the pyramid walls, magnifying rapidly. A cerulean glimmer shone from the interior.

  A second later, light burst from each pyramid, their crystal flanks glowing from within, rays of azure, gold, scarlet and purple flickering from their broken carcasses.

  A ripple of hisses announced Ulfar’s pre-emptive burst of fire, the salvo of cyclone missiles snaking down towards the entrance of the closest temple, just in time to meet a horde of robed figures dashing from within. The fragmentation warheads blossomed in their midst, shredding gold-stitched cloth, turning flesh to bloody rags.

  Ruby-beams burst from vantage points in the upper storeys. Lasfire skittered across the roadways and walls, zipping away from the armour of the Space Wolves. The whine of bullets and crack of more energy weapons joined a background crackle like the hum of a monstrously powerful generator.

  The foes that spilled suddenly from hiding were garbed alike, gilded grotesque masks and flowing red crests, their robes embroidered with flame designs and sigils in the shape of an eye with a spiral for a pupil. Arjac recognised the device immediately, still fresh in the memory from the battle for Fenris.

  ‘Cultists of Magnus,’ he snarled, fighting the urge to counter-charge towards the massing mobs of degenerates pouring along the roads. Among them came bounding, jittering things more avian than human – mutants wyrd-touched by the power of the eternal change. Their hooting calls and gibbering cries carried along with the snap of rifles and bark of the Space Marines’ return fire.

  Above, two Stormwolf gunships screamed down from the skies, their helfrost cannons unleashing pale blasts into the swarming cultists. Where the ravening strikes landed, ice-rimmed blackness exploded, sucking all heat from the d
etonation zone. Frozen bodies fell to the cracked ground and shattered. Hair and robes, flesh and bone turned to fragile powder.

  Heavy bolters punished those that had eluded the opening blasts, slashing a ruinous swathe through a horde of acolytes boiling forth from the Pyramid of Photep itself. Their assault ramps yawning open like the mouths of deathwolves, the gunships each spat forth a squad of Stormrider skyclaws, their jump packs flaring as they fell like bolts of vengeance into the morass of debased humanity. Volleys of fire and scorching plasma blasts from the thrall platoons met the surging cultists, as fighting rippled across the precincts of the Great Library and Pyramid of Photep.

  ‘Push on to the objective,’ declared the hearthegn. ‘Kill everything in our path.’

  The road took Njal and Majula over secondary canals and under broken viaducts. The signs of battle were everywhere upon road and wall and stanchion, except for the normal detritus of massed combat. Not a single tank carcass, piece of armour or shell casing remained. The corpse of Tizca had been repeatedly targeted by scavengers for ten millennia so that nothing was left. Rogue traders and treasure hunters had plundered the deepest vaults, daring ancient Prosperine curses and automated defences for the chance at archeotech riches. Inquisitorial cleanse teams had razed libraries and swept away the contents of vast data storage systems, so that even cogitator memories and crystal repositories were emptied. And those that hid from the light of the Emperor also. The xenos and cultists that hoped to glean some dark knowledge in the shadows now ruled Magnus’ kingdom.

  Njal’s othersenses sparked into life, a formless but significant disquiet that had him activating the remote storm bolters a few seconds before a mass of mutated cultists burst from the ruins ahead, yelling unholy praises as their wild las-blasts and bullets sprayed from the Rhino’s armoured shell.