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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.

‘A good kill, brother!’ Harald called.

The champion grinned, his yellow eyes blazing. He shouted something back, but all Harald heard was an inarticulate snarl. Canis was already deep into primal ferocity. He was in the realm of the beast now.

It would be easy to join him. Already Harald growled with triumph at each of Icetooth’s kills. They were as one alpha predator in the field of battle. The bloody charge was exhilarating. The smoky wind blew back Harald’s hair and beard. The beat of his hearts matched the pounding of Icetooth’s paws. The thundering anger of bolters, wolves and men carried him forward. Even the stench of ichor, a miasma both clutching and jagged, was a goad.

The call of absolute frenzy was strong. He held back, though. Not much, but just enough to hold on to his awareness of the wider field of battle.

The Deathwolves battered their way forward to victory and slaughter. The thunderwolf charge blew apart the lines of the Khornate abominations. It reduced hundreds of them to a thick sludge of ichor. The power of the wyrd crackled over them, and the foul liquid did not dissipate. Icetooth’s paws splashed through a deepening mire. Their anger could not summon the strength to meet the challenge of the Deathwolves. Without pause, without mercy, Harald cut through the daemons and reached the wall of Predomitus.

He did not lead the charge through the gates. Instead, he turned right along the ramparts, then turned again to smash back down through the horde. At his back, he felt the blasting wind of two gunships. They made low passes before the gates, hammering the ground with heavy bolters and lascannons. The gap in the wall became an inferno. Harald looked back to see volcanic destruction, the earth and bodies heaving skyward. Daemons burned as they flew. The horde within the city could not break out. The other Stormwolves flew in from the rear of the lines to meet the advancing cavalry, scything a swath of annihilation as they came.

A daemon leapt high over Icetooth’s jaws. It came down directly at Harald, its sword descending to cut his head in two. He brought up the shield and smashed it aside. He finished it off with a bolt shell to the skull. Icetooth seized another abomination by the neck and bit through with a single clamp of his jaws.

Harald seized the moment to look left. In the wake of the cavalry charge, the infantry was advancing, the speed more deliberate but the destruction no less total. The Grey Hunters were still moving towards the gates, cutting an even wider swath. Harald heard their massed war shouts over the cries of the daemons.

Behind the gunships and infantry came the tanks. Predators, Vindicators and Land Raiders in tight formation became a giant grinder, an unstoppable mass of metal and cannon fire. Icetooth ran towards the explosions. Purifying flame pushed back the wyrd-light.

‘Riding close!’ Canis yelled, coherent again, his voice still guttural. He impaled a swordling through the throat and hurled the creature away to the right, into the blades of its kin. ‘Straight to the blasts?’ he asked.

Harald could almost believe Canis was ready to pursue the slaughter right into the tank fire.

‘Not quite,’ he said. But he grinned at his champion. ‘Close though.’

He waited until the smoke was choking, shattered stone was raining down on the field, and the concussions were deafening then swerved off to the right, clearing the way for the tanks. The clanking, booming vehicles moved past the cavalry, rolling over the daemons that had been in pursuit.

Canis growled in disappointment. The field before the Thunderwolves was almost empty of daemons.

‘We aren’t done, brother,’ Harald said. ‘We’re a long way from done.’ He turned Icetooth back towards the wall, and they rode a short distance to the flank of the armour. They came around a hill of skulls, and fell upon another horde.

The abominations were in disarray. They could not mount a counter attack. Their numbers worked against them as they tried to respond to the sudden changes in the Deathwolves’ vector of destruction. All the thousands in the plain became fodder for the claws of the Space Wolves. The daemons could not attack at once. They hindered each other’s movements as Harald triggered conflicting currents of attack. In their rage and frustration, the creatures fell to fighting each other.

The cavalry charge was unrelenting. Hours into the battle, the Deathwolves raced with the same speed and fury as their initial assault. And when at last Harald called a halt, the nature of the plain had changed. The sky overhead remained a storm of dark, mad flame. Smoke rose from the hills of skulls, and blood pooled at their bases. But the cracked earth was barren. The enemy was gone.

Slaughter and victory. So often, they were the same thing. On this day they were. While the gunships continued to pound the gates of Predomitus, Harald regarded the dead land with satisfaction. This much of Nurades was purged.

Beside him, Canis said, ‘A good start.’ He was hungry for more.

We all are, Harald thought. His blood was up. The annihilation of the enemy in this first encounter, and the imperative to keep up the pressure pushed the concerns of the war’s significance to the back of his mind. The plan of a foe was meaningless if the foe was exterminated. And Harald felt the strength of extermination in his hands. He was a predator unleashed, and there was prey on the other side of the walls.

‘Yes,’ he said to Canis. ‘A good start to the hunt. Let us continue.’

The battle for Predomitus took days. Days of unending massacre. In the stages of the purging, the Deathwolves broke though a crush of daemons at the gates, then moved up the primary thoroughfares of the hive. The war was an interior one now. Only rarely did the company emerge into open air, though the pilots of the gunships kept as close to the position of their brothers as possible, strafing the exposed positions of the hive. They blew up towers where the concentration of daemons was so great that the buildings themselves had begun to distort, rockcrete walls turning into scaly flesh.

In the hive, the daemons answered the challenge of the Deathwolves. They poured in from halls and chambers. They crashed through skylights and ventilation shafts. They erupted from the floors of the route. The Great Company cut them down. Harald kept up the speed of the attack, moving almost as quickly as the initial charge. There was no chance of surprise when the battle was continuous, as unbroken as the flow of a burning river of blood.

The Deathwolves moved fast, with the savagery of the beasts they rode. But Harald chose the path of their assault with care. Aboard the Alpha Fang, he had studied hololithic schematics of Nurades’ hive cities. The frenzy of his hunt was tempered by strategy. He embraced the wolf. He fought as if he were one. As if he were one. There was a difference. Never to be forgotten.

Once the gate was taken, Harald began the second stage of the assault on Predomitus. He split his forces to take the cavalry and infantry down the narrower passages, while the tanks moved implacably down the main arteries. The smaller routes were large enough to permit rapid deployment, but not so wide the daemons could mass sufficient numbers together to slow the advance. The daemons took the bait, and Harald exterminated them.

‘This is the long charge, brothers,’ Harald voxed the Great Company as the Wolf Guard and Grey Hunters slaughtered daemons, rejoined the tanks on the great avenues, then split off to repeat the pattern. ‘This is how we will take back Predomitus. Our victory rests on momentum and speed. Depend upon that.’

Canis tore a swordling in half then gestured at the vista of towering walls and branching avenues lying ahead. ‘This is a vast hunt,’ he said.

Harald switched to a private channel. ‘We do not seek a complete purge,’ he said. That would be impossible. ‘It will be enough to break the daemons’ grip.’ He pointed up and to the left, where the upper storeys of a spire flashed with lasbeam fire. ‘Nurades still has uncorrupted defence forces. We will give them the means to mount their war of reclamation, then move to the next target.’ He thought the prospect of an unending, savage advance would please Canis.

He was right. The champion howled as he and Fangir hurled themselves at the next group of daemons.

The course of the war took the Deathwolves deep into the underhive. There the concentration of daemons was immense. And in the Industrium Sub-terranal, the abominations mounted a challenge to Harald’s advance.

The Industrium was a tangle of passages. Machinery was piled upon machinery in a gloom lit by fiery outgassing, and centuries of construction and decay had created jumbled layers of manufactoria. The millions of serfs who worked the Industrium were gone, transformed or dead. Many regions of the steel maze were ruins, and the dead metal was changing into hungry flesh. But much of the machinery was still active, gears turning, jaws grinding ore, forges pouring out molten metal with the mindless persistence of titanic servitors. The passages here were short, broken, unpredictable. Machinic walls rumbled towards each other, then parted. Angles were sharp, and speed was dangerous, difficult, and still necessary. And here, there were other daemons.

Until now, the Deathwolves had fought only Khornate abominations, howling embodiments of rage. In the Industrium, they encountered daemons of Tzeentch. Instead of roars, mad laughter echoed down the passageways. Voices intoned sentences that hovered on the edge of human meaning. The words scratched at the back of Harald’s eyes.

‘Silence the tongues of the wyrd!’ he yelled, his voice ringing off the iron walls. The lead Thunderwolves trampled the daemonic, misshapen horrors of glistening pink muscle. They came apart beneath claws and chainswords. Flesh parted, darkened to the blue of contusions and reformed. The daemons multiplied in their destruction, but were hammered into oblivion by the bolter fire of the Grey Hunters.

Sudden, inhuman shrieks split the air apart. Airborne daemons, things that were little more than wings and horns and whiplash tails, came screaming around the sharp turns, and flew out from between dark crevasses in the machinery. They were mindless but agile. They fell upon the Deathwolves, lunging in with their horns or slashing past with their spiked tails. They came from all directions, attacked and flew off, then came back.

Harald trusted to the predatory instincts of Icetooth to deal with the daemons that scampered forwards on the floor of the Industrium. He kept his focus on the air, drilling bolt shells into the screaming daemons that swooped his way, raising Glacius to cleave their undersides open if they got by his barrage.

The struggle was composed of moments as disjointed as the space of the Industrium. A war of reckless speed. The pistoning, clanking, smoke-spewing masses of machinery rising hundreds of metres on either side. The ceiling just above Harald’s head one moment, invisible in the dark heights the next. No way to prepare for each jagged intersection – nothing for it but to race deep into the whirring saw blades of war. The Deathwolves and the screamers streaking past and through each other, ichor and blood a thick spray in the gloom. The shrieks of the abominations entwined with chants and laughter. The howls of the thunderwolves and snarls of their riders cut though the foul braiding of Chaos with the purity of savagery. War turned into a blur of slashing lethality.

In the depths of the Industrium’s maze, Harald became aware of a stronger presence. The attacks of the screamers were too precise for mindless daemons. They were directed by a powerful will. Its whisper travelled through the clamour of battle, slithering worm-like through the interstices of cackle and growl and roar. It spoke to the Deathwolves. It would not be ignored.

Another attack, more insidious, more dangerous.

Slithertwyst welcomes you. Slithertwyst has been waiting. You have been long in coming. Will you make the path interesting? Chains and ropes, manacles and webs, such rattling and struggling and twisting and twisting and twisting. Do you see? You do not see. Hurry, playthings. Hurry and see.

Hissing with secrets, dark with knowledge.

‘Shut out the lies!’ Harald called to his riders.

But in his heart, he dreaded that somewhere in the daemon’s blandishments was a truth more corrosive than any lie.

Shut out Slithertwyst? Silence Slithertwyst? Will you silence fate? Will you shut out your days and ways to come?

On the right, dying metal shrieked. A chain of collapses smothered explosions and a stream of incandescent gas flashed overhead. Harald hunched beneath it. On instinct he turned towards the falling wall. Millions of tonnes of metal toppled towards the Deathwolves. Disintegrating machinery threw out spinning shrapnel. The collapse stretched ahead and behind the cavalry. There was no evading the avalanche – Harald raced towards the certainty of crushing oblivion and it parted before him, a conglomeration with the mass of a hundred Stormwolves tearing to either side like a shredded curtain.

Harald and Canis rode head-on at the daemon that whispered in their souls. Slithertwyst stood astride a screamer. The herald of Tzeentch was a being of limbs and horns and teeth, a huge pink abomination draped in robes of shifting, oily blue. Things sprouted from its body that changed from tentacles to horns from moment to moment. It raised a twisted blade, laughing and whispering at the same time, three more arms spreading wide in welcome to the Space Wolves.

Harald urged Icetooth into a leap. The thunderwolf sailed upwards and came down on the head of the winged daemon, slamming it to the ground. The herald leapt from its wounded steed and flailed at Harald’s storm shield with claws and tentacles. The power of the wyrd was in its strength. It hit with serpentine speed and the force of a battering ram, forcing Harald and Icetooth back. The other daemon rose to the aid of its master, and Canis and Fangir fell upon it. Canis slashed the winged monster with his wolf claws, his attack as ferocious as Fangir’s, while Harald blocked Slithertwyst’s blade thrust with Glacius and fired a sustained volley with his bolt pistol into the daemon’s face.

The mass-reactive shells exploded inside its skull. The herald was not a thing of true flesh, but here on Nurades it had a physical reality, and the blasts blew its head into two halves. They hung, deflated sacks of flesh, to either side of the body. The claws scrabbled blindly for Harald, and Icetooth snarled in pain and rage as they dug furrows into his hide. The thunderwolf leapt again, away from the screamer as Slithertwyst’s shredded body crashed into the wreckage of burning machinery. The cavalry attacked the thrashing daemon with chainswords and bolt pistols, shattering its body even further. Eldritch flame erupted from where Slithertwyst had fallen. There was a sudden blast, and a foul wind, strong as a hurricane howled through the ruins to batter the Deathwolves.

As they rode through the collapse to the next open passage, Canis said, ‘Easy prey.’

The champion was right. They had hit Slithertwyst hard, but Harald had not expected the battle to be so brief.

‘Too easy, do you think?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Canis grinned. ‘Just poor prey. At least they are many.’

Harald glanced back. The glow of the daemonic fire was fading, the wind dropping. He saw no hint of a resurrection. The whispers had stopped. But for a moment, in the curls of the wind, he thought he heard serpentine laughter.

Canis was satisfied to view the daemons as outmatched, but Harald was not. ‘Yet the wyrd is strong on this world,’ he said.

Canis didn’t answer. He was riding towards his next kill, shouting with feral eagerness.

Doubt gnawed at the edges of Harald’s war lust. There is something I am not seeing.

Ahead, a swarm of the pink daemons squeezed through a narrow passage. There was no time to contemplate the nature of the herald’s demise. The slaughter called, and could not be ignored.

Onwards, then, and onwards, the Deathwolves forever charging, forever cutting through daemonic bodies, ending laughter and chants, purifying every corner they passed in the Industrium’s maze.

Taking back Predomitus.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2016.
This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Curse of the Wulfen © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Curse of the Wulfen, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-78572-057-4

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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