Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Yes. Except only an idiot calls it the Fang.’

  ‘What does a man call it if he isn’t an idiot?’ the Upplander asked.

  ‘The Aett,’ said Skarsi.

  ‘The Aett? Just the Aett?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Literally clan-home, or fireplace? Or… den?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes.’

  ‘Am I annoying you with my questions, Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson?’

  Skarsi grunted. ‘You are.’

  The Upplander nodded. ‘Useful to know.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Skarsi.

  ‘Because if I’m going to be here, and I’m going to ask my questions, I’d best be aware of how many I can get away with at a time. I wouldn’t want to piss the Vlka Fenryka off so much they decide to eat me.’

  Skarsi shrugged and crossed his legs.

  ‘No one’s going to eat you for that,’ he said.

  ‘I know. I was joking,’ said the Upplander.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ replied Skarsi. ‘You’re under Ogvai’s protection, so only he can decide who gets to eat you.’

  The Upplander paused. The heat of the firepit against the side of his face and neck suddenly felt unpleasantly intense. He swallowed.

  ‘The Vlka Fenryka… they’re capable of cannibalism then, are they?’

  ‘We’re capable of anything,’ replied Skarsi. ‘That’s the whole point of us.’

  The Upplander slid off the plinth and stood up. He wasn’t sure if he was moving away from the Astartes lord or the disagreeable heat. He just wanted to move away, to walk around.

  ‘So who… so who’s this Ogvai who has power over my life?’

  Skarsi took another sip from his bowl.

  ‘Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of Tra.’

  ‘Earlier, I heard you say someone called Gedrath was Jarl of Tra.’

  ‘He was,’ said Skarsi. ‘Gedrath’s sleeping on the red snow now, so Og’s jarl. But Og has to honour any of Gedrath’s decisions. Like bringing you here under protection.’

  The Upplander moved around the room, his arms folded against his chest.

  ‘So jarl. That’s lord, we’ve established. And tra and fyf? They’re numbers?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ nodded Skarsi. ‘Three and five. Onn, twa, tra, for, fyf, sesc, sepp, for-twa, tra-tra, dekk.’

  ‘So you’re lord of five, and this Ogvai is lord of three? Fifth and third… what? Warbands? Divisions? Regiments?’

  ‘Companies. We call them companies.’

  ‘And that’s in… Wurgen?’

  ‘Yes, Wurgen. Juvjk is hearth-cant, Wurgen is war-cant.’

  ‘A specialised combat language? A battle tongue?’

  Skarsi waved his hand in a distracted manner. ‘Whatever you want to call it.’

  ‘You have a language for fighting and a language for when you’re not fighting?’

  ‘Fenrys hjolda! The questions never end!’

  ‘There’s always something else to know,’ said the Upplander. ‘There’s always more to know.’

  ‘Not true. There’s such a thing as too much.’

  This last comment had been made by a new voice. Another Astartes had entered the chamber behind the Upplander, silent as the first snow. Varangr lurked at his heels in the doorway.

  The newcomer had the stature of all of his breed, and was dressed in a knotwork leather suit like the others the Upplander had encountered. But he was not masked.

  His head was shaved, apart from a stiffly waxed and braided beard that curled like a horn from his chin. There was a cap of soft leather on his scalp, and a faded tracery of tattooed lines and dots on the weather-beaten flesh of his face. In common with all of the Vlka Fenryka the Upplander had seen, the newcomer’s eyes were black-centred gold, and his lean, craggy face was noticeably elongated around the nose and mouth, as if he had the hint of a snout. When he opened his mouth to speak, the Upplander saw what the extended jaw was made to conceal. The newcomer’s dentition resembled that of a mature forest wolf. The canines in particular were the longest the Upplander had seen.

  ‘There’s such a thing as too much,’ the newcomer repeated.

  ‘Exactly!’ Skarsi exclaimed, getting up. ‘Too much! That’s exactly what I was saying! You explain it to him, gothi! Better still, you try answering his endless questions!’

  ‘If I can,’ said the newcomer. He gazed at the Upplander. ‘What is the next question?’

  The Upplander tried to return the stare without flinching.

  ‘What did that remark mean? Too much?’ he asked.

  ‘Even knowledge has its limits. There is a place where it becomes unsafe.’

  ‘You can know too much?’ asked the Upplander.

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘I disagree.’

  The newcomer smiled slightly. ‘Of course you do. I am not at all surprised.’

  ‘Do you have a name?’ the Upplander asked him.

  ‘We all have names. Some of us have more than one. Mine is Ohthere Wyrdmake. I am rune priest to Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson. What is your next question?’

  ‘What is a rune priest?’

  ‘What do you suppose it is?’

  ‘A shaman. A practitioner of ritual.’

  ‘A rattler of bones. A pagan wizard. You can barely disguise the superior tone in your voice.’

  ‘No, I meant no affront,’ the Upplander said quickly. The priest’s lips had curled into an unpleasant snarl.

  ‘What is your next question?’

  The Upplander hesitated again.

  ‘How did Gedrath, Jarl of Tra, die?’

  ‘He died the way we all die,’ said Skarsi, ‘with red snow under him.’

  ‘It must have been sudden. In the last few days.’

  Skarsi looked at the rune priest.

  ‘It was a time ago,’ the priest told the Upplander.

  ‘But Gedrath gave me his protection, and that has passed to Ogvai. Ogvai must have replaced him in the last week. What? Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘You are basing your assumptions on a false premise,’ said Ohthere Wyrdmake.

  ‘Really?’ asked the Upplander.

  ‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘You’ve been here for nineteen years.’

  Four

  Skjald

  They gave Hawser the Prix Daumarl. When he was told of the decision, he felt flattered and nonplussed. ‘I’ve done nothing,’ he said to his colleagues.

  There had been a shortlist of notable candidates, but in the end it had come down to Hawser, and a neuroplasticist who had eradicated the three strands of nanomnemonic plague devastating Iberolatinate Sud Merica. ‘He’s done something, a considerable something, and I’ve done nothing,’ Hawser complained when he found out.

  ‘Don’t you want the prize?’ Vasiliy asked. ‘I hear the medal is very pretty.’

  It was very pretty. It was gold, about the size of a pocket watch, and it came mounted in a Vitrian frame in an elegant casket lined with shot purple silk. The citation bore the hololithic crests of the Atlantic legislature and the Hegemon, and carried the gene-seals of three members of the Unification Council. It began, ‘Kasper Ansbach Hawser, for steadfast contributions towards the definition and accomplishment of Terran Unification…’

  Soon after the presentation, Hawser learned that the whole thing was politicking, which he generally detested, though he did not speak up as the politicking in this instance served the cause of the Conservatory.

  The award was presented at a dinner held in Karcom on the Atlantic platforms, just after the midsummer of Hawser’s seventy-fifth year. The dinner was arranged to coincide with the Midlantik Conclave, and thus served as an opportunity to celebrate the Conservatory’s thirtieth anniversary.

  Hawser found it all rather dreadful. He spent the evening with the elegant little purple box clutched to his chest and a sick smile on his face waiting for the interminable speeches to conclude. Of the many dignitaries and men of influence attending the dinner that mid
summer night, no one was paid more deference than Giro Emantine. By then, Emantine was prefect-secretary to one of the Unification Council’s most senior members, and the common understanding was that Emantine would be given the next seat that came vacant. He was an old man, rumoured to be on his third juvenat. He was accompanied by a remarkably young, remarkably beautiful and remarkably silent woman. Hawser couldn’t decide if she was Emantine’s daughter, a vulgar trophy wife, or a nurse.

  Emantine’s status placed him directly at the right hand of the Atlantic Chancellor (though nominally the guest of honour, Hawser was three seats down to the left, between an industrial cyberneticist and the chairman of one of the orbital banking houses). When it was Emantine’s turn to speak, he appeared to have great difficulty in remembering who Hawser was, because he spoke fondly of their ‘long friendship’ and ‘close working association’ down the ‘many years since Kas first spoke to me about the notion of founding the Conservatory.’

  ‘I’ve met him three times in thirty years,’ Hawser whispered to Vasiliy.

  ‘Shut up and keep smiling,’ Vasiliy hissed back.

  ‘None of this actually occurred.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Do you suppose he’s on some kind of strong medication?’

  ‘Oh, Kas! Shut up!’ Vasiliy bent close to Hawser’s ear. ‘This is just the way things are done. Besides, it makes the Conservatory look good. Oh, and his adjunct has informed me that he’ll want to see you afterwards.’

  After the dinner, Vasiliy escorted Hawser up to the Chancellor’s Residence on Marianas Derrick.

  ‘It’s a beautiful city,’ Hawser remarked as they walked up the terrace. He had drunk a couple of amasecs at the end of the meal to settle himself for the acceptance speech, and then there had been the toasting, so he was in a wistful mood.

  Vasiliy waited patiently for a moment as Hawser stopped to admire the view. From the terrace they could see out across the plated scape of Karcom and beyond. It glittered in the late sun, the surface of a metropolitan skin nine kilometres thick that capped and encased the ancient dead ocean like an ice-pack. Shoals of aircraft, silver in the sunlight like reef-fish, flitted and drifted over the scape.

  ‘Amazing enough that man could build this,’ said Hawser, ‘let alone build it three times.’

  ‘Man probably shouldn’t have kept nuking it, then, should he?’ said Vasiliy.

  Hawser looked at his mediary. Vasiliy was terribly young, little more than twenty-five. ‘Isak Vasiliy, you have no soul,’ he pronounced.

  ‘Ah, but that’s why you hired me,’ Vasiliy replied. ‘I don’t let sentiment get in the way of efficiency.’

  ‘There is that.’

  ‘Besides, to me the very fact that the Atlantic platforms have been obliterated and re-built twice is symbolic of the Conservatory’s work. Nothing is so great that it cannot be recovered and restored. Nothing is impossible.’

  They went into the Residence. Ridiculously ornate robotic servitors imported from Mars were attending the select group of guests. The Chancellor had commissioned the machines directly from the Mondus Gamma Forge of Lukas Chrom, an ostentatious show of status.

  The windows of the Residence had been dimmed against the glare of the setting sun. A pair of servitors in the shape of humming birds brought Hawser a glass of amasec.

  ‘Drink it slowly,’ Vasiliy advised discreetly. ‘When you speak to Emantine, you need to be coherent.’

  ‘I doubt I’ll drink it at all,’ Hawser said. He’d taken a sip. The amasec served by the Atlantic Chancellor was of such a fine and extravagantly expensive vintage, it didn’t really taste like amasec anymore.

  Emantine approached after a few minutes, his silent female companion in tow. He shed his previous conversational partners behind him like a snake sloughing skin; they knew when their brief allotted audiences with the prefect-secretary were done.

  ‘Kasper,’ Emanatine said.

  ‘Ser.’

  ‘Congratulations on the prize. A worthy award.’

  ‘Thank you. I… Thank you, ser. This is my mediary, Isak Vasiliy.’

  Emantine did not register anyone as lowly as Vasiliy. Hawser felt the prefect-secretary was only registering him because he had to. Emantine drew Hawser away towards the windows.

  ‘Thirty years,’ Emantine said. ‘Can it really be thirty years since all this began?’

  Hawser assumed the prefect-secretary meant the Conservatory. ‘Nearly fifty, actually.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We measure the life of the Conservatory from its first charter at the Conclave of Lutetia, which was thirty years ago this summer, but it took nearly twenty years to get the movement to that place. It must be fifty years ago I first contacted your office to discuss the very basic first steps. That would have been in Karelia. Karelia Hive. You were with the legation back then, and I dealt, for a long time, with several of your understaffers. I had a dialogue with them for a number of years, actually, before I met you for the first time and—’

  ‘Fifty years, eh? My my. Karelia, you say? Another life.’

  ‘Yes, it feels like that, doesn’t it? So, yes, I worked with a number of adjuncts to get some awareness. Made a bit of a nuisance of myself, I’m sure. Doling was one. Barantz, I remember. Bakunin.’

  ‘I don’t remember them,’ the prefect-secretary said. His smile had become rather fixed. Hawser took a sip of his amasec. He felt slightly invigorated, slightly warm. He had become fixated upon Emantine’s hand, which was holding a crystal thimble of some green digestif. The hand was perfect. It was clean and manicured, scented, graceful. The skin was white and unblemished and uncreased, and the flesh plump and supple. There were no signs at all of the consequences of age, no wrinkles, no liver spots, no discolourations. The nails were clean. It wasn’t the gnarled, sunken, prominently-veined claw of a hundred and ninety year-old man, and prefect-secretary Giro Emantine was at least that. It was the hand of a young man. Hawser wondered if the young man was missing it. The thought made him snigger.

  Of course, the prefect-secretary had access to the best juvenat refinements Terran science could afford. The treatments were so good, they didn’t even look like juvenat treatments, not like the work Hawser had had done at sixty, plumping his flesh with collagenics, and filling his creases and wrinkles with dermics, and perma-staining his skin a ‘healthy’ tanned colour with nanotic pigments, and cleaning his eyes and his organs, and resculpting his chin, and pinching his cheeks until he looked like a re-touched hololith portrait of himself. Emantine probably had gene therapies and skeleto-muscular grafts, implants, underweaves, transfixes, stem-splices…

  Maybe it was a young man’s hand. Maybe the skinweaves were why the prefect-secretary’s smile looked so fixed.

  ‘You don’t remember Doling or Bakunin?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘They were understaffers, you say? It was a long time ago,’ Emantine replied. ‘They’ve all climbed the ladders of advancement, been posted and promoted and transferred. One doesn’t keep track. One can’t, not when one runs a staff of eighty thousand. I have no doubt they’re all governing their own ecumenopolises by now.’

  There was a slightly awkward pause.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Hawser, ‘I should like to thank you for getting behind the idea of the Conservatory all those years ago, be it thirty or fifty.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ said Emantine.

  ‘I appreciate it. We all do.’

  ‘I can’t take the credit,’ said Emantine.

  Of course you damn well can’t, Hawser thought.

  ‘But the idea always had merit,’ Emantine went on, as if he was content to take the credit anyway. ‘I always said it had merit. Too easily overlooked in the headlong rush to build a better world. Not a priority, some said. The needs – and they’re budgetary often – of Unification and consolidation far exceed conservation. But, we stuck to it. What is it now, thirty thousand officers worldwide?’

  ‘That’s just direct. It’s closer to a quarte
r of a million counting freelance associates and archaeologists, and the off-world numbers.’

  ‘Superb,’ said Emantine. Hawser continued to stare at his hand. ‘Then of course, there’s the renewal of the charter, which is never opposed. Everyone now understands the importance of the Conservatory.’

  ‘Not quite everyone,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Everyone who matters, Kasper. You know the Sigillite himself is keenly interested in the Conservatory’s work?’

  ‘I had heard that,’ Hawser replied.

  ‘Keenly interested,’ Emantine repeated. ‘Every time I meet with him, he asks for the latest transcripts and reports. Do you know him at all?’

  ‘The Sigillite? No, I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Extraordinary man,’ said Emantine. ‘I’ve heard he even discusses the Conservatory’s work with the Emperor on occasion.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hawser. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘The Emperor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  A slightly glassy expression flickered across the prefect-secretary’s face, as if he wasn’t sure if he was being mocked.

  ‘No, I… I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Ah.’

  Emantine nodded at the purple box still clamped under Hawser’s arm. ‘You deserve that, Kasper. And so does the Conservatory. It’s part of the recognition we were talking about. It’s high-profile, and it’ll bring around those few closed minds.’

  ‘Bring them around to what?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Well, support. Support is vital, particularly in the current climate.’

  ‘What current climate?’

  ‘You should cherish that award, Kaspar. To me, it says that the Conservatory has matured into a global force for Unification…’

  And it doesn’t hurt at all that your name is forever attached to it by the simple accident that you were at the top of the bureaucratic chain I first approached, Hawser thought. This has done your career no harm, Giro Emantine. To recognise the importance of the Conservatory project, to give it your support and backing when others scorned it. Why, what a wise, humanitarian and selfless man you must be! Not like all those other politicians.

  The prefect-secretary was still speaking. ‘So we need to be ready for changes in the next decade,’ he was saying.