Curse of the Wulfen

by David Annandale

  More Space Wolves from Black Library

  SPACE WOLVES

  A Legends of the Dark Millennium Space Wolves novel

  Book 1: BLOOD OF ASAHEIM

  Book 2: 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

  SAGAS OF THE WOLF

  An audio drama omnibus containing the audio dramas Thunder From Fenris, Doomseeker and Deathwolf.

  BLOOD ON THE MOUNTAIN

  A Space Wolves novella

  ICECLAW

  A Space Wolves audio drama

  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

  They met in the dark of the mountain’s roots. Here the night of stone was endless. It was not silent, for things of fur and fang and steel prowled, growling warnings to each other. It was not empty, for within it lay the tombs of legends. The tombs were unquiet. The legends they enclosed were granted only a provisional death. These sagas had not ended. One was ten thousand years old, and its thread carried on.

  Three warriors met in the dark, in the tombs. When they saw each other, they were startled. When they saw where they had come to, they were disturbed.

  The warrior whose mane and beard were as coarse and grey as a wolf’s pelt spoke first. ‘Brothers,’ Harald Deathwolf said, ‘you are well met. I did not expect your company.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said Krom Dragongaze. Even in the gloom, his eyes glittered with dark light.

  ‘Nor I,’ Ulrik the Slayer echoed. The ancient of the Chapter shook his head. His hair was as white as his gaze was dark. His eyes were shadows that watched and judged. He pointed at the vault door by which they stood. ‘There is a purpose in this,’ he said.

  ‘The purpose is not mine,’ said Harald. ‘I did not intend to come here.’ He looked at the name inscribed over the door, and was uneasy.

  ‘You did not choose to come to the vaults?’ the Slayer asked.

  ‘I did,’ said Harald. ‘But with no clear design. That is…’ he hesitated.

  ‘You walked as if in a trance,’ Dragongaze said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So we all did,’ said the Slayer. ‘But not as we believed.’

  ‘No.’ Harald tried to see the last few hours clearly, but it was as if he had only just awakened, a sensation itself almost unknown to him in his centuries as a Space Marine. He had been conscious, yet his perception had narrowed to nothing except his next footstep. He had moved through tunnels and shafts, down and down and down, deeper and deeper into the dark, into the night of stone. ‘I had a destination,’ he said. ‘Though I did not know why I went. The need to be there was absolute.’ He could not look away from the inscription. ‘My destination was not here.’

  ‘You thought to stand before Bjorn the Fell-Handed,’ Dragongaze said.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And yet we are here,’ said the Slayer. The Wolf Priest rested a gauntlet against the vault door, gently, as if not to wake the legend inside. ‘We marched to one goal, and arrived at another. This is a powerful omen, brothers. We must take heed.’

  ‘An omen of what?’ said Dragongaze.

  ‘I will think upon it,’ the Slayer said. ‘This much is clear. Something is coming. The force of our compulsion speaks to its magnitude. And when the event arrives, we three must be mindful of the roles we will have to play.’

  ‘It is a warning,’ Harald said. ‘An omen of doom. How can it be otherwise? We sought Bjorn, but we came here.’

  The other two said nothing. They all gazed at the inscription. They stared at the runes of warning and the name of the mad legend, and felt a shadow deeper yet than the night of stone fall over their souls.

  Beyond me lies a restless sleep, said the door. Beyond me lies the madness of wrath.

  Murderfang.

  The future stalked towards them, jaws agape.

  Part 1: The Return

  Chapter 1

  The Dooms on Nurades

  ‘The sky is blue today, governor.’

  Andras Elsener, Lord Governor of Nurades, looked up from the sea of parchment and data-slates on the vast iron table before him. Everything was a priority, and everything had to be decided now. And this was merely what he had to wade through for the next hour. It was early in the day yet. The interruption was welcome, though he knew he would pay for the break in his concentration later.

  Klein, his major-domo, stood at the chamber window. Elsener’s quarters were high in the spire of Hive Genos. The view from his office looked out across the spires of the hive from a point that was frequently, although not always, a little below cloud cover. Sometimes Elsener could see many kilometres of the sprawl of the hive. Sometimes he saw nothing but a choking, industrial grey-brown. Twice in his life he had witnessed the weak disc of the sun visible through unusually thin clouds.

  He had never seen a blue sky.

  Elsener approached the window in wary awe. Klein seemed just as uneasy. He was about to open the door to the balcony but Elsener stopped him.

  ‘No,’ said the governor. ‘Wait.’

  The sky was clear. The blue was startling. It was searing. As Elsener watched, the last of the cloud cover peeled away like burning paper. The blue became brighter and brighter, though Elsener could not see the sun. The colour became painful. Elsener squinted. Klein shielded his eyes.

  And then, though the colour still grew more intense, it also became darker. Blue became violet.

  ‘The Emperor save us,’ Elsener muttered.

  Violet turned to a dark, grimy crimson. The colour of rotting blood stabbed at the back of Elsener’s eyes. He could not look away. At the height of the searing, the sky ignited. Flames burst across the firmament. They were huge, arcing, roiling, as if Nurades had been pitched into a molten cauldron. The sky burned all the colours of the spectrum at once, destroying them with fury. As they died, the colours gave birth to other things, things that existed instead of colours, things that bled the eyes and tore at the mind
.

  The ground heaved. The central spire of Genos swayed back and forth. Narrower towers collapsed. But new spires rose, piercing up through the layers of the hive, thrusting towards the sky like monstrous daggers, and they were towers of bone.

  Elsener saw dots appear in the sky. They fell – dark, tumbling, blazing orbs. Closer, and he saw they were skulls. They were a laughing, screaming hail. Jaws agape, they smashed onto the roofs and walkways and roads. They shattered on Elsener’s balcony. Where each landed, its fire spread. It grew taller. It took on a shape. Now it had arms, legs. Now a head. Horns.

  Muscle and sinew and blood-red flesh. It carried a sword.

  Elsener cried out and hurled himself away from the window. He must not look. He must not see. Already he could feel his brain squirming as if it would change into an animal inside his skull.

  Klein shrieked. He clawed at his face hard enough to tear open his cheeks. He clutched at his ragged flaps of skin, then ran at the governor, howling and drooling. Elsener drew his personal laspistol and shot the major-domo through the neck.

  Then he ran. He did not look back, not even when the window smashed, and a snarling abomination called out to him in a voice of rattling bone. He knew what would happen if he looked. Perhaps he would die in the next few seconds, but if he did not look, he might yet retain his soul.

  He prayed to the Emperor as he charged through the door and down the halls of his residence. He prayed the Father of Mankind would grant that he reached the astropathic choir in time. He prayed someone would hear Nurades’ cry for help.

  The next time Lord Governor Andras Elsener dared to look at the sky, it was weeks later, and he saw the cry answered.

  He saw salvation slash through sky with bloody claws.

  In the strategium overlooking the bridge of the strike cruiser Alpha Fang, the great predator leaned over a hololithic map of Nurades. A mantle of troll hide was draped over his armour, a trophy made of the prey itself. His gestures suggested contained force. At any moment, they could turn into the strike of a hunter. And moment by moment, he chose restraint. His calm was that of a wolf that had already chosen when and how to attack.

  Harald Deathwolf pointed to the sigil for Hive Predomitus.

  ‘We begin there,’ he said. The hive was located at the base of a high mountain chain dividing the Lacertus Peninsula from the rest of the continent. ‘We break the daemons’ hold.’ He moved his hand south-west, passing over Hive Genos. ‘And push them into the sea.’

  Canis Wolfborn looked from the map to the oculus. It showed the void riven by the mad flares of the warp storm, and the planet turning in agony. The atmosphere quivered like maggots. The Deathwolf champion grunted. ‘Saving that?’

  The huge warrior was more restless than Harald. His mane and beard were a lighter shade and longer, more unruly. If Harald was the wolf assured of closing its jaws on its prey, the Feral Knight was the beast barely held back. The bridge was not his natural domain. He belonged in the field, unleashed and roaring.

  ‘Mistress of the vox,’ Harald called without looking up from the map. ‘Any traffic planetside?’

  ‘Some, lord,’ Giske Ager replied. ‘Fragments only. There are brief bursts of coherent data. Orders perhaps. There are many cries.’

  Harald nodded. He addressed the assembled Wolf Guard, not just Canis. The Deathwolf huscarls varied widely in age. But whether they counted themselves among the Riders of Morkai, the Thunder­claws or the Redhowl Hunters, they were all riders of wolves, and there was a kinship in their countenance – a narrowed, farseeing, predatory gaze.

  ‘We have answered a plea for help,’ Harald said. ‘We have not come to enact Exterminatus. This planet will not be lost. I will see it returned to the embrace of the Allfather.’

  ‘A hunt then,’ said Vygar Helmfang.

  ‘A great one.’

  ‘Good.’ Canis growled in satisfaction and anticipation. His question, Harald understood, had not been an expression of doubt in the mission. Canis wanted reassurance that he would not be cheated of prey by cyclonic torpedoes.

  The assembled Wolf Guard also sounded pleased with Harald’s deployment strategy. The Lacertus Peninsula was the most densely populated and industrially active region of Nurades. When the Space Wolves took it, they would hold the key to the rest of the world.

  Harald wondered if it might also unlock something else. The encounter before Murderfang’s vault troubled him. He was waiting for whatever event it heralded to make itself manifest. He did not know if the plight of Nurades meant more than it appeared, but there were unusual circumstances. From what had been gathered from the astropathic shriek that had reached Fenris, the coming of the warp storm had been extremely sudden. A matter of seconds. There was something about that arrival that did not seem like the result of the vagaries of the warp and a chance weakness in the materium.

  Harald sensed a larger game behind the incursion. He could not guess what it was, nor what, if anything, it portended for the Space Wolves.

  No matter, he tried to tell himself. His Great Company would stamp out the daemonic taint, and end the game before it began.

  The Deathwolves fell upon the daemonic hordes much as the warpspawn had attacked the people of Nurades – with sudden, lightning violence.

  The drop pods came first, streaking through the tormented sky in a cluster towards the plain between the mountains and the gates of Hive Predomitus. The Stormwolf gunships followed in their contrails. They hammered the landing site with twin-linked lascannon and heavy bolter fire, annihilating daemonkind in the vicinity.

  The flanks of the pods slammed down and the Space Wolves stormed out. Grey Hunters howled their eagerness for war. Their helms bore totemic skulls and tails. Some were fashioned into snarling lupine form. They thundered away, in pack after pack. They hurled frag grenades ahead of them, then followed up the blasts with a stream of bolter fire. Monstrosities disintegrated. The Deathwolves pushed the enemy further back, allowing the gunships to land. Caught in the heat of first blood, the Grey Hunters would have followed their instincts to charge on if their pack leaders had not held them back long enough for the rest of their brothers to disembark.

  The wait was a short one. Harald’s full company launched a blistering assault on the enemy within seconds of having their boots on the ground.

  Before the gates of Predomitus, a mass of horned, scarlet-scaled abominations rioted.

  ‘Swordlings of Khorne.’ Canis spat his contempt. His breath came in low growls.

  ‘They have not been idle,’ Harald said.

  In the midst of the daemons rose tall hills of blackened skulls. Millions of Nuradeans had been sacrificed to Khorne, but the hunger of the god and his servants was unending. From the open gates of the city, the daemons dragged thousands upon thousands of howling victims.

  ‘I can see the hills growing,’ Canis said. His face was dark with horrified fury.

  ‘So vast a slaughter,’ Harald growled. ‘Let our answer be more terrible still.’

  The Stormwolf squadrons took to the air, pounding the warpspawn with guns. Lasbeams and shells burned daemons and blew them apart. They cut a seared, smoking furrow through the mass of wyrdflesh.

  ‘The hunt is on, brothers!’ Harald called. His roar was a clarion call to war, and Grey Hunters and Wolf Guard answered with a roar of their own. The battle cry thundered from the throats of men and beasts, and the thunderwolf cavalry led the charge into the furrow. Harald was at the front atop Icetooth, with Canis at his shoulder, as the immense Fangir shook the earth as he loped forward. Alongside the cavalry sped the Huntbrothers and the Frostrunners, Fenrisian wolves, some pure animal, others cybernetic hybrids, all of them monsters, flesh with strength of steel and steel with the wrath of flesh.

  The cavalry slammed into their lines with the force of a nova cannon. Tens of thousands of daemons massed on the plain. They were hatred
embodied. But they fell back, trampled into oblivion by the wolves, blasted apart by bolter fire. Harald felt the exultant ferocity of war flood his veins. The vastness of the enemy army meant nothing except a near-inexhaustible supply of prey. His view turned from the hills of bodies and the burning towers of Predomitus to the horrors that surged, grasping for him. He swung his right arm out. The storm shield on his forearm smashed horns and skulls. He relished the impact. The jar was solid, crunching. He fired his bolt pistol as he swung. Wyrdflesh erupted before him. With his left hand, he wielded the frost axe Glacius. Its huge, wedge-shaped blade was a single crystal shard. It glinted the blue of razored cold. The edge was as long as Harald’s arm. Daemonic flesh and muscle and bone ruptured at its strike.

  Moments into the charge, Harald’s senses were filled with the stench of roiling smoke and spraying ichor. Daemons howled with unnatural voices. The air shook with the clash of rages.

  The swordlings tried to surround the charge and bring the cavalry down in a tide of blood. No matter how many of them rushed in, they could not stop the Deathwolves’ momentum, although they exacted a toll. Harald heard the agonised snarls of a thunderwolf and the growls of Rangvald, its rider. He heard the crash as Wolf Guard and beast hit the ground under a mass of clawing, slashing daemons. There was an explosion of bolter fire as the brothers nearby sought to blast the swordlings away from the fallen rider.

  ‘Ride on, brothers,’ Rangvald shouted, fighting to the last.

  And they did. The charge could not slow for anyone. Its success against such a vast horde depended on relentless violence and speed. With each fallen brother, the wrath of the Space Wolves and the thunderwolves grew, and they smashed the daemons with ever-greater ferocity. Harald saw only red – the red of the abominated flesh, the red of flame, and the red of his anger. Icetooth crushed daemons in his jaws. He smashed them to nothing beneath his enormous claws.

  At Harald’s shoulder, Canis’ snarls were expressions of wrath and laughter. He swept his huge wolf claws back and forth, embracing the enemy with destruction. Every blade was as long as a gladius. Harald glanced to the right in time to see Canis slash a daemon’s spine into sections with a single swipe.