ASHES OF PROSPERO

by Gav Thorpe

  The inhabitants were as astounding as their surroundings. Daemons by the score, from pink-hued creatures almost as big as Lukas, to cerulean horrors half their size and dozens of smaller entities that scurried and dashed through the legs of their larger cousins. They all had rotund, squat bodies on bow legs, with clawed feet that slapped with constant, maddening overlapping echoes from the stone. Some had tails, barbed or spined or ending in fronds of fingers, or… Lukas shuddered, unable to process much of what he saw. Most had two arms, ending in splayed tube-like fingers, a wyrdglimr emanating from within. Their faces were set within their torsos – grimacing, grinning and scowling, and the air a cacophony of yammering and whistling as the daemons capered about.

  Some did not walk but rode upon living daemon-discs that soared between the inter-layered paths and stairways. Lukas tried to follow their passage, to see the moment when they inverted or turned about to align with the broken geometry of their destination. He never caught the instant of transition, a blink or distraction masking it each time.

  Beyond the distant walls – walls that might have been mirrors or pools or glass – delved long tunnels like the innards of an immeasurable beast, their pulsing sides veined with darkness. Auric flickers travelled these passages, flitting into existence as daemons upon entering, or disappearing into the haze of distance when a daemon departed.

  Just looking at the far edges of the hall made him dizzy despite his enhanced senses. The unnatural vertigo threatened to topple him, to send him tottering towards the chasm-like drop just a few steps away. Around him the Blood Claws reached out to support each other, deliberately staring at the ground beneath them to steady their turbulent perception.

  And nothing seemed permanent. The daemons morphed and mutated and shifted as his gaze roamed over them, like glitching hololiths that flickered between different projections. The chamber itself was like a trick of the eye, stairs and landings disappearing on the periphery of vision, replaced with long corridors or high alcoves when he turned back. Nowhere was the same view twice.

  ‘We should go back,’ said Bahrd, voice hoarse. He retreated towards the portal behind them. Energy licked out across his armour, distorting the view of him, sucking the Blood Claw towards the portal’s embrace.

  ‘No!’ Lukas leapt, grabbing Bahrd’s wrist. The hand came away, trailing dissipating sparks of red and blue, still clutching the chainsword in its grip.

  Lukas’ shout rang around the huge hall, reverberating back from strange directions, growing in volume rather than softening.

  ‘No!’ the echoes called, but in different tones of shock and awe and delighted surprise, and then in wholly changed voices. The voices of Grimnar and Valgarthr, Njal and Bjorn, all shouted back at him. They merged together, becoming a wordless noise that resolved into a howl.

  ‘Lukas!’ hissed Gudbrand. The Trickster’s face stung as the Blood Claw struck him again. Clarity returned. Lukas found himself crouched with one hand to the stone, head thrown back, teeth bared, his claw raised over his head. Startled, he stood quickly.

  ‘That’s not good,’ said Elof, staring outwards.

  All about the hall the daemons had stopped, their gazes moving towards the interlopers. All fell silent and still for several seconds, the tension palpable.

  Ascending the ridge, the Stormcaller saw that the gorge was even longer and deeper than he had thought, rapidly engulfed by darkness, a crack of shadow that cut into the mountainside. Trampling over dead cultists, Njal and several Stormriders met with a pack of Old Guard close by the gorge entrance. More Space Wolves pounded up the slope behind him while an encircling blue host advanced in their wake, wary of counter-attack.

  Majula followed, barely visible within a protective circle of her Navis Guard. They stopped just a short distance away and the Navigator met Njal’s gaze. Though he could see the strain writ in her features, he saw strength too. Dorria and the remains of the squad trained their weapons up and down the mountainside, alert for danger.

  One of the Old Guard broke away from his pack, his face as craggy as the bedrock of the Fang, beard and hair flowing in unkempt waves. The axe in his hand smouldered as blood steamed from its blade.

  ‘Wolf Lord Bulveye?’ the Rune Priest called out.

  ‘You must be Njal Stormcaller,’ he replied, voice touched with hoarseness. ‘The one Halvar told me about. From the future. A strange saga – one that I still find hard to believe.’

  +Technically, it is this oaf who is from the past…+

  ‘I am Njal,’ replied the Stormcaller. ‘We are here to take you back to the mortal universe.’

  +We are in the mortal universe, rune-thrower. Merely a place of which you have never heard.+

  ‘A messenger of the Allfather come to pluck me from the field of battle like a Stormrider of legend?’

  ‘Strange that you should say that,’ said Valgarthr, coming up past Njal. The pack leader banged his bolter against his pauldron emblazoned with the company’s symbol. ‘That’s who we have taken as our weregost.’

  Bulveye did not look amused, his glare a calculating one as it ran across Njal’s dwindling command.

  ‘Tell me, Njal, how will we get out of here?’

  +We must return to the heart, to where I died. I can heal my mortal body and open the gateway back to Tizca. The one this brute denied when he sought to slay me.+

  ‘We need a portal to the centre of the maze,’ said Njal. ‘In the heart we can breach the barriers back to Tizca where, Allfather willing, my warriors still hold the gateway. I have gunships waiting to take us away the moment we are free.’

  ‘Then we are fortunate,’ replied Bulveye, thrusting his axe towards the forbidding gorge. ‘A portal lies within this cleft. These lackeys of Magnus tried to take it from us. I thought that if they wanted to get in, my duty was to keep them out.’

  +What of the Crimson King? If he desires entry to the heart, he might yet come himself.+

  ‘Have you seen anything of Magnus, Old Wolf? He will not be far from his minions.’

  ‘Nothing of him, not since we entered the maze. That he still lives is bad enough news.’

  ‘His absence is perhaps good news,‘ said Arjac. ‘We should go before the Crimson King decides to show himself.’

  ‘I cannot abandon a battle not yet won.’ Bulveye’s axe swept out, encompassing the ongoing struggle across the mountainside. ‘My warriors have shed blood for this cause.’

  ‘We really must leave now, Wolf Lord,’ insisted Njal. ‘This battle is only a small part of a far grander war. The fight against the Thousand Sons will not be won here, not at this time. Trust me. For ten thousand years the Space Wolves have waged this war. If it could be so easily ended, I would snatch the chance.’

  ‘I swore an oath to the Wolf King and the Allfather that I would let no son of Prospero escape the Rout.’

  +I told you! Stubborn and stupid, the worst possible combination. He chose to be trapped in the maze rather than let some of my brothers escape. You will not convince him.+

  ‘Russ is gone,’ snapped Arjac, stepping forward. ‘The Allfather… The universe you knew died a hundred centuries ago, Old Wolf. Your oath means nothing now.’

  ‘It means everything,’ growled Bulveye. He bared long fangs and shook his head. ‘If what you say is true, all I have left is that oath.’

  +I warned you. He is not just intractable, he is insane. Get me to my body and we can be rid of his cursed stubbornness.+

  ‘You are trapped in this labyrinth,’ said Njal, picking his words with the same care he would negotiate an icy mountain ledge. One slip could prove disastrous. ‘The Thousand Sons are not. If you really want to see your oath fulfilled it is only possible if you come with us. Inside the maze you will achieve nothing.’

  The statement sobered the Old Wolf, who sagged slightly, dejection written across his features. He gazed sullenly at Njal, but nodded in acceptance of the Stormcaller’s assertion. Njal resisted a sigh of relief.

  ‘All
together?’ said Bulveye.

  ‘Together.’

  CHAPTER 16

  OF MORTALS AND DAEMONS

  A cacophony of laughs, screams, jeers and shrieks resounded through the hall, bouncing back from the impossible spaces above and below. The daemon horde burst into frenetic activity, bounding and capering along the walkways, ladders, stairs and walls, cavorting impossibly as they wreathed themselves in daemonflame and cackled with delight. In the space between, disc-riders slashed up towards the pack, swerving and curving, leaving unnatural vortices in the glittering ochre fog.

  The Blood Claws hurled fragmentation grenades into the coming masses and then opened fire with their pistols. Bolt pistol rounds spat across the impossible depths as blossoms of fire tossed daemon-limbs and spattered gore into the void-space. Lukas ran to the steps on the right, just in time to meet a flurry of knee-high prismatic daemons streaming up towards him… or was it down… or inwards?

  He shook his head and fired his plasma pistol, entirely incinerating the first foe. His claw met the second and third and he bounded forward, stamping on a fourth to pierce the face-chest of a fifth. He smashed the pistol into the flank of the next, sending it spinning from the inverted stair.

  Lukas did not dare glance back, knowing that having stepped from the portal stone he was undoubtedly at some strange angle to the rest of the Blood Claws, and to acknowledge it might prove unwise. Instead he hacked his wolf claw through the stream of minions dashing along the stair, stepping back carefully until he regained the promontory.

  The others had formed a tight group back to back, pistols and chainswords barking and snarling as daemons leapt from above and swept in on their discs with gouts of wyrdfyr streaming from their fingertips. Gudbrand stumbled back, falling to one knee as his arm burned amid mystical flame, the paint and ceramite sloughing off in a stream. Jerrik leapt to defend the discommoded Space Wolf, hacking his chainsword through the body of a disc as it swept overhead, splitting it from grinning face to whipping tail.

  Through the maelstrom Lukas spied something odd – or rather something that seemed odd amongst the bizarreness, a pattern of normality. The daemons pressed in close, throwing themselves ceaselessly into the weapons of the Blood Claws, uncaring of their immediate demise. Yet he knew that though they were inhuman in morals and ambition, they craved existence as much as any mortal creature. They rarely sacrificed themselves except when driven by a higher daemonic power, and the tide of unreal apparitions were dying in droves to protect something.

  He sidestepped, swiping the legs from a pink horror, and blasted the next assailant with plasma to open a brief window of opportunity. Stepping into the morass of fluttering daemonflesh, Lukas searched the chamber, a hunter’s instincts chiming along his nerves.

  Lukas spied what he sought some distance below. A disc slightly larger than the others, piles of books and scrolls upon it, floating next to a crack in the wall. On the ledge beside it were two blue-bodied horrors. The twinned daemons heaved at something, dragging it out of the warp-lit aperture towards their grotesque mount.

  ‘No time to waste, or this place will be our death,’ Lukas snapped at the others, clubbing aside a pink-fleshed incarnation of insanity, his claw parting three of its four arms as it whirled away into the gleaming mist. ‘Follow me without regret!’

  He shouldered aside two blue-hued creatures where a pink horror had been split by bolt fire a second earlier, kicking a smaller daemon out of the way as he leapt from the outcrop. Lukas landed on a disc that had been rising up towards the ledge, bundling its rider off the edge. He jumped again, sideways, landing impossibly on a stair that had been at a right angle to him just moments before. Lukas started up the stairwell, to discover that in fact he headed down towards the disc he had spied. He heard the thump of his pack-brothers landing behind him.

  The next jump, downwards this time, took him onto another disc, the daemon on its back flattened into bone-studded flesh by his impact. Lukas crouched, cast a glance towards the daemons with the chest, and pounced again, landing in a roll along a stone walkway just above where they laboured. He tried to track their progress with his pistol, seeking a shot as he ran along the bridgeway, but they passed directly under, out of sight.

  A Blood Claw plummeted past, shouting, bolt pistol still flaring vengeance into the tumble of daemonic bodies that followed.

  ‘Elof!’ Gudbrand’s shout of dismay spurred Lukas on and he vaulted around the edge of the walkway, landing on the underside so that the daemons he pursued were above him. He fired up, but the weird perspective affected his aim and plasma scorched across the ledge just behind them.

  Shrieking, the daemons doubled their efforts, bodily picking up their trunk to throw it onto the disc.

  Lukas jumped.

  It improved Arjac’s mood considerably to see gunships of the Old Guard sweep low over the slopes, their shadows passing over the assembling Space Wolves forces. They dared intense ground fire to unleash a storm of ordnance and energy blasts that raked bloody lines through the host gathering about the hearthegn’s position. While the rest of the Old Guard withdrew towards the gorge, Terminators and Dreadnoughts from both companies formed strongpoints in the line, their covering fire holding back a resurgence from the Thousand Sons and their cultist allies. Arjac lumbered forward, anvil shield alight with incoming fire as he guarded his power-armoured cousins.

  Pack by pack, the host of the Rout shrank back upon itself. Fierce pride burned in Arjac’s chest at their faultless performance of the plan, even though ten millennia separated him from them. It pleased him deeply that he and his brothers kept alive the finest warrior traditions of the Wolf King’s sons.

  The steady withdrawal was as tempered as every shot and blow struck in its execution, putting to the lie the notion that the Space Wolves were an unthinking, ragged horde. As meticulously as it had been assembled the battleline retreated until just a few packs of the heaviest warriors held the approaches – and Bulveye, who refused to move down into the gorge until the bulk of his host was safely back at the gate, within. The few remaining armoured vehicles escorted the others as they fell back, their heavy weapons deterring any enemies from venturing to the clifftops.

  ‘Now comes the difficult part,’ Arjac said, hurling Foehammer at a squad of Thousand Sons moving across the mountainside in the wake of the withdrawal. Heavier fire from his companions scythed through mobs of cultists pressing in from the other flank. ‘The moment we move into that defile we’ll be targeted from in front and above.’

  ‘Not so hard as you think, young wolf,’ said Bulveye. ‘Perhaps it is my age finally telling, but I avoid walking anywhere if I can.’

  His plan became obvious when intense fire burst across the mountainside, accompanied by the roar of plasma jets. Two Thunderhawks crossed each other, heavy bolters and battlecannons hurling death. In their wake, the Stormbird descended, adding the ire of its weapons to the downpour of firepower. Tatters of smoke, drifting ash and a sprawl of craters were all that remained of the enemy front line when the massive gunship touched down. The cloud of its landing billowed over the Space Wolves and coated their armour with a layer of dull brown.

  ‘Clawrend, my chariot,’ declared Bulveye.

  A cavernous space opened up, more than enough to accommodate the remaining warriors of the Old Guard and Stormriders. The rampway was so broad that Bjorn and one of his venerable brothers could enter side by side. As before, Bulveye insisted that he would remain last, so Njal ushered Majula up into the interior with Dorria and the rest of her bodyguards, the whine of jets building outside as the pilot prepared to lift off.

  Bulveye stood defiant, immobile at the bottom of the ramp while his command pack ascended, his axe raised in challenge to the Thousand Sons and their cultist allies – enemies now only vague shapes in the smog and dust. Honour contented, or perhaps pride sated, he turned and strode up the gangway while a Thunderhawk made one last attack run.

  Through the closing ramp Njal saw
the enemy as the Stormbird turned, a half-seen sea of robe-clad heretics led by knots of armoured legionaries. The nose of the Stormbird dipped towards the gorge, the snarl of its engines ringing back from the steep canyon sides as it descended into the darkness.

  While the others secured themselves, Njal joined Bulveye heading for the main command deck. Through the canopy ahead, above a bank of servitor-pilots overseen by a lone Iron Priest, he saw the gorge walls sliding past in the glare of the main lumens. Blue sparks from the engines of the Thunderhawks flashed ahead, still accelerating hard.

  He held his breath as the half-mechanical command crew steered the huge aircraft along the winding path of the gorge, at times the vast wings no more than a few metres from each cliff side. Readouts spewed surveyor returns but the servitors were wired directly into the augur system, the living mind of the Stormbird itself.

  ‘I hope you have appeased your craft’s spirit well, I would not wish it to have a surly moment now,’ said Njal.

  Bulveye gave him an odd look.

  ‘You sound like a Mechanicum Priest, wyrdskaldr.’

  Njal’s retort was forgotten as the lights of the preceding gunships lit up portions of a huge edifice. The end of the gorge had been cut flat and a massive relief carved into the bare stone. It was impossible to tell its full extent from the glimpses in the lantern beams but the erratic circles of light crossed a huge, lidless eye staring directly at them.

  ‘Let’s leave him a scar,’ growled Bulveye.

  The Iron Priest nodded and passed a command to the gunnery servitors wired into the Stormbird’s lascannon array. Red stabs of energy pulsed out, scorching three clefts across the pupil of the massive cyclops.

  The pilots took the gunship deeper, past the nose towards a yawning mouth lined with fangs that rivalled the columns of the King’s Hall. Brighter than the plasma flare, the portal within gleamed red and gold like a fire within the primarch’s throat. The Stormbird banked, lining up a perpendicular approach. Sparks fell like a waterfall of pure ruby within the throat of the monument, and branches of power lashed out to snare the Thunderhawks while other tendrils latched onto the Stormbird. Alerts screamed and banks of lights gleamed in warning as the portal wrenched the huge gunship into the gap between realities.