Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  Hawser turned aside. The man was big and aggressive, and he was evidently upset. It was the sort of confrontation Hawser had sought to avoid for most of his life.

  Chinstrap grabbed Hawser’s right arm. The grip was painful.

  ‘You tell them that,’ he said. ‘Seventeen hundred men Division Kill’s lost in one day of surface assault, and now those stupid animals tell us to piss off? Seventeen hundred lives wasted?’

  ‘You’re clearly upset,’ said Hawser. ‘This has been a costly engagement, and I am sympathetic to—’

  ‘Screw you.’

  The other men, the members of Chinstrap’s loading team, had closed in.

  ‘Let go of my arm,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Or what?’ Chinstrap asked.

  ‘Run!’ Murza told him.

  Murza was usually right about these things. It wasn’t that Murza was a coward, Hawser supposed, it was simply because he was far more the rationalist. After all, neither of them were fighters. They were academics, field archaeologists, average men with above average minds. Neither of them had any military schooling and neither had been on any kind of self-defence training programme. They were armed only with their wits and their accreditation papers, which stated their names, the fact that they had both recently celebrated their thirtieth birthdays, and their status as conservators working in Lutetia for the Unification Council.

  None of which was going to do them very much good.

  ‘They can’t be allowed to get away with this—’ Hawser began.

  ‘Oh, just run you idiot!’ Murza shouted back.

  The other members of the placement team were already running, no further encouragement needed. Their boots were clattering down the cobbled back alley as they scattered into the warren of unmapped streets criss-crossing the slum quarters of Lutetia around the dead cathedral.

  The cathedral was just a giant corpse-building. It had died as a place of worship during the Nineteenth War of Uropan Succession three thousand years earlier, and since then its structure had been put to other uses: a parliament hall for three centuries, a mausoleum, an iceworks, an almshouse, and, latterly, a market when the last of the roof fell in. For the last eight hundred or so years, it had been an empty husk, a physicalised memory, lifting its rusting iron ribs at the overcast sky.

  The rumours of its past had persisted as long as those ribs, if not longer. Murza had not been able to keep the excitement out of his voice when he’d briefed the team two days before. The site had been a place of worship for as long as records existed, and the cathedral stood upon the plot of previous structures called cathedrals, and was indeed only called a cathedral because of that masonic legacy.

  There were cellars down there, deep under the foundations, the basements of previous incarnations, cisterns buried under the sub-fabric of later builds. Some said if you could trace your way down through the dark, you’d reach the centre of the Earth, and the catacombs of old Franc.

  One of Murza’s contacts (and he, as usual, had a network of well paid informers watching the traffic of artefacts and relics throughout the entire Lutetian city-node area) had reported that a gang of labourers had excavated the entrance to a drainage sump while reclaiming old stone. Some silver amulets and a ring scooped from the sump had been enough to convince the contact that the area was worth a look, and worth the fee that the conservators would have to pay the gang to reveal the precise location.

  Hawser had been mistrustful from the start. The labourers, all local, were big men caked in black mud from street work. All of them showed signs of atomic mutation, a trait common in the slum. Hawser immediately felt threatened by them, physically intimidated, the way he had been by the bigger, older boys back at Rector Uwe’s commune. He was no fighter. Confrontation, especially physical confrontation, made him lock up and freeze.

  The slum district was a maze. Nothing identifiable remained of the planned city that had once occupied the area. The streets had corroded into sub-streets and under-runs, alleys and cul-de-sacs, all of them dark and thick with filth, none of them charted or named. Children played in the piles of trash, and the sounds of wailing babies and arguing adults echoed down from the tenement levels rising above them. Washing lines were strung from building to building, like the canopy of a dingy, man-made jungle. It was shadowy and airless.

  The labourers led them into the alley maze. It seemed an unnecessarily circuitous route to Hawser, and he said so to Murza, who told him to hush. After walking for about twenty minutes, the labourers turned and told Murza it was time to pay them the agreed fee.

  The leader of the gang happened to add that what he meant by the agreed fee was significantly higher than anything Murza had discussed with the team.

  Hawser realised they were in trouble. He realised it was all simply a trap designed to extort, and that its most likely consequences would be a beating or a kidnapping. It was going to cost the Conservatory programme: it was going to cost them in medical fees, or ransom or simply excess pay-offs. It might even cost them lives. He felt outrage. He felt stupid that he’d allowed Murza to walk them into another less than brilliant situation.

  ‘This is no time to feel choleric!’ Murza shouted. The gang was closing in on them, surly, barking threats. Some had shovels or picks.

  ‘Run!’ Murza yelled.

  Hawser recognised that running was the only sensible course of action, but the physical threat had finally eclipsed his outrage, and intimidation had glued him to the spot. One of the labourers stepped towards him, spitting curses through buckled brown teeth, shaking a fist with kielbasa knuckles. Hawser tried to force his feet to work.

  Murza grabbed his arm so hard it hurt and yanked him backwards.

  ‘Come on! Come on, Kas!’

  Hawser started to stumble, his legs beginning to move. The labourer was reaching for them. Hawser realised the labourer had drawn a gun, some kind of pistol.

  Dragging Hawser after him, Murza looked over his shoulder and yelled something at the labourer, a single word or sound. There was an odd pulse, a pop like the equalisation of air at the skin of an environment bubble. The labourer yelled and fell backwards, writhing.

  They ran, side by side, Murza still gripping his arm.

  ‘What did you do?’ Hawser yelled. ‘What did you do? What did you say to him?’

  Murza couldn’t answer. There was blood drooling from his mouth.

  Chinstrap’s fingers dug into his arm like hooks. Scared, Hawser shoved. He just shoved to lurch the man away, so he could walk on, get past them, leave them behind.

  Chinstrap hit the side of the pile of rubber-sleeved crates on the back of the track. He was airborne and travelling backwards. His spine and shoulders took the first impact, and his skull cracked back across the top of the uppermost crate. Then he plunged forwards and hit the ground flat on his face, loose as a sack of stones. His face just slapped into the gritty ice, shattering his plastek rebreather.

  While Chinstrap was still in the air, one of his men swung a punch at the back of Hawser’s head. The punch seemed to Hawser to be ridiculously telegraphed, as if the man was trying to be sporting and give him a chance. He put his hand up to stop the fist from hitting his face and caught it in his palm. There was a little shock. He felt finger bones break and knuckles detonate, and none of them were his.

  The third man decided to kill Hawser, and made an effort to insert a heavy, cast iron crate spanner into Hawser’s skull. Once again, however, he appeared to be doing this in a delicate fashion, like an over-emphatic stage punch that goes wide of the mark but looks good from the audience. Hawser didn’t want the spanner to come anywhere near him. He swung out his left hand in an impulsive, flinching gesture to brush the man’s arm away.

  The man screamed. He appeared to have developed a second elbow halfway down his forearm. The skin of his arm folded there like an empty sock. He fell over, the spanner bouncing solidly off the ice.

  The other men fled.

  Bear was waiting for him at the f
oot of a Stormbird ramp.

  ‘You’re late,’ he said.

  Hawser handed the homer back to him.

  ‘I’m here now.’

  ‘We would have left without you if you’d been much longer.’

  ‘I’m sure you would.’

  ‘You smell of blood,’ said Bear.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Hawser. He looked at Bear.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me how thoroughly you’d rebuilt me?’ he asked.

  Seven

  Longfang

  Jarl Ogvai’s solution to the Quietude’s resistance was as direct as it was effective. Having been granted an unequivocal mandate for theatre control by the commander of the Expedition Fleet, he gathered his iron priests, gave them instruction, and set them to work.

  It took them about two days to complete the calculations and the preparation work. By then, the fleet’s massive drop forces had been extracted from the planet’s surface.

  At a moment on the third day considered propitious by the jarl’s closest advisors, the iron priests unleashed their handiwork.

  A series of colossal controlled explosions tore the graving dock out of its stable orbit. Plumes of shredded, metallic debris streamed out behind it, glittering in the hard sunlight. The dock arced across the vast orange surface of the world, a tiny twin conjoined to it by the ligaments of gravity. They danced together, two encircling objects, like a child’s brightly coloured spinning toy.

  It took eighteen full rotations for the murdered orbit to decay to the inevitable, the terminal. The debris plumes had formed fine brown threads around the world by then, like the most delicate of rings around a gas giant. Friction and atmospheric retardation were beginning to burn the graving dock, to ablate its superstructure. It began to glow as it fell, like a metal ingot in a smithy, first dull red, then pink, then white with heat. Its curving descent, the steady unwinding of orbital passage, was tantalisingly slow.

  It fell as all bad stars fall. Hawser knew about that. As bad stars went, it was the worst.

  It struck the ice field between two of the stupendous towers, the towers that rose at intervals of approximately six hundred and seventy kilometres, and probably had been there for thousands of years. There was, at first, a wink of light, then a rapidly expanding brilliance like a sunburst squirting up through the ice. The brilliance became a dome of blinding radiance that travelled outwards in all directions, vaporising the ice crust and annihilating the towers like trees in a hurricane.

  The impact event created a lethal pulse of infrared radiation. Ejecta clogged the air and scarred the atmosphere with a vast darkness of dust and aerosolised sulphuric acid. Incendiary fragments vomited up by the bolide-type impact pelted back down, adding to the firestorm outwash.

  Tra had gathered on the embarkation deck of the ship to watch the mortal blow being delivered via pict-feed to several huge repeater screens designed for assault briefings. Thralls and deck crew gathered too. Some still had tools or polishing rags in their hands, or even weapons that they were in the process of repairing or cleaning.

  There was general silence as they watched the languid descent, a little muttering, a few murmurs of impatience. When the impact came at last, the Wolves exploded into life. They stamped their armour-shod feet and smashed the hafts of their axes and hammers on the deck; they beat their storm shields with their swords; they threw their heads back and howled.

  The noise was numbing. It sent a shockwave through Hawser. All around him, the armoured giants bayed. Exposed throats swelled, mouths opened to what seemed like impossible widths, and spittle flew out between exposed canines and carnassials. The pronounced, ‘snouted’ shape of the Fenrisian physiognomy had never been more obvious to Hawser.

  He only truly recognised that later. In the heat of the moment, there on the embarkation deck, all that he was able to register was the shock of the bestial noise. The savagery of the Wolves’ delight assaulted him like a physical trauma. It reached into his chest and squeezed with fingers that were prodigiously clawed. The hooded Fenrisian thralls, and even some of the deck crew, had begun to howl and shout too, shaking their fists. The roaring was tribal and primal.

  Just as he began to believe he couldn’t tolerate it for a second more, Hawser tipped his head back, closed his eyes, and began to howl with them.

  In the aftermath, a deluge of acid rain began to fall, and the stratosphere began to collapse. Tra’s Stormbirds led the way down into the toxin dust, into the discoloured smoke banks seething with crown-of-thorns lightning.

  The dark ships, wings broad, looked to Hawser like their namesakes, circling ravens as black as thunderstorm clouds, as they descended into the broken and exposed heart of the ancient Quietude cities.

  He said this to the Wolves, and they asked him what ‘ravens’ were.

  The pacification took three weeks, ship time. Time to learn things, Hawser decided. Some of the things would be about himself.

  Accounts were already accumulating. Some were brought back from the sub-surface fighting by packs returning for replevin, others relayed by the members of packs waiting in reserve, stories that had filtered up from the planet through the links.

  Some were worthy accounts of actions. Others seemed to Hawser to display, already, the hallmarks of the embroidered, the enhanced. Mjod stories, Aeska Brokenlip had called these, accounts exaggerated by the strength of the Fenrisians’ lethal fuel.

  Yet it didn’t seem likely they were mjod stories, because Aeska had also made it clear that no self-respecting member of the Rout, and certainly no man of Tra, would ever be boastful. The braggart was one of the lowest forms of life, according to the traditions of the Vlka Fenryka. A warrior’s stories were the measure of him, and the truth of them was the measure of his standing. A battlefield quickly exposed the braggart’s lies: it tested his strength, his courage, his technical prowess.

  And, Aeska had added, that was another reason why skjalds existed. They were brokers of truth, neutral mediators who would not let any fluctuations like pride or bias or mjod affect the agreed value of truth.

  ‘So skjalds tell accounts to keep you entertained, to keep you honest, and to keep the history?’ Hawser asked.

  Aeska grinned.

  ‘Yes, but mostly to keep us entertained.’

  ‘What entertains the Wolves of Fenris?’ Hawser pressed. ‘What entertains them most?’

  Aeska thought about it.

  ‘We like stories about things that scare us,’ he replied.

  Apart from the stories that appeared to be exaggerations, there were others that puzzled Hawser.

  According to the general picture, the battle far below was apocalyptic. With the ice-shield gone, the core cities of the Quietude were exposed, like the setts of some animal dug up by trappers. Conditions were hellish. There was acid rain and a pestilential sub-climate that included noxious gas clouds and hail. The irradiated cliffs of the impact crater were continuing to collapse into the continent-sized hole. The cities were mangled, pinned and crushed like passengers in a wrecked vehicle, leaking life and heat, bleeding power.

  The forces of the Quietude had nowhere left to run, so they were fighting to the last.

  Tra formed the strategic spearhead of the Imperial assault. Imperial Army hosts, now equipped for chemical war and hazard environs, followed their lead.

  The accounts that puzzled Hawser were strange fragments reporting almost pernicious brutality. The Wolves seemed eager to record moments that did not portray them as heroic or daring or even lucky; they seemed almost gleeful about scraps that illuminated nothing but atrocity.

  They were non-stories, with no point, no beginning, middle and end. They were not cause and effect. They were simply descriptions of murder and dismemberment committed on Quietude combatants.

  Hawser wondered if he was supposed to weave some kind of narrative thread around these anecdotes, to sew them into a context that might make them more heroic and dramatic. He wondered if he had misunderstood something, somethi
ng cultural that even the processes nanotically wired into his brain had not been able to translate.

  Then he recalled the assault on the graving dock, and the episode when Bear and Orcir had finally dislodged the crew of robusts who had earlier vaporised Hjad on the underspace slope. He recalled the grisly ritual slaughter that had followed.

  They are chasing out the maleficarum, Ogvai had said. They are casting it out. They are hurting it so badly it will know not to come back. They are punishing it, and explaining pain to it, so it will not be eager to return and bother us.

  These accounts, Hawser decided, were the same thing, marks of aversion in word form. They were designed to scare the maleficarum.

  So what scares the Wolves, he wondered?

  ‘You look discomforted,’ remarked Ulvurul Heoroth. Heoroth, called Longfang, was Tra’s rune priest, a man far older than Ohthere Wyrdmake. Like Ogvai and many of Tra, he had a skin like ice, but it did not glow with inner light like a glacier, the way that Ogvai’s flesh did. It was glassy and dark, like the half-translucent plate of ice on a midwinter lake.

  His skin was not the only evidence that he was old. He was lean and bony, and his long hair was thin and white. He appeared hunched and sclerotic in his runic armour. Age had not afflicted him the way it had altered other senior Wolves. It had bleached him and wizened him, and grown out his canines into the teeth that had given him his war-name. Some said there would be other longfangs one day, if any of the Rout lived long enough. Wyrd alone had kept Heoroth Longfang’s thread uncut. He was as old as it was possible for a Wolf to be, the oldest of the last few Sixth Legion Astartes who had been created on Terra and shipped to Fenris as the foundation of the Wolf King’s retinue.

  The warship’s massive embarkation deck, a long gallery with Stormbirds racked laterally from overhead rails ready for launch, was quieter than it had been at the moment of impact. The priest was kneeling, like a crusader knight of Old Terra at a Cruxian shrine, looking up at the repeater screens. The two packs he was about to lead surfacewards in support of Ogvai were preparing nearby. Hawser could hear the shrill buzz of fitter drills screwing armour into place. He could hear the hiss of hydraulics and the whirr of lifter gear. Fifty metres away from him, along the main plain of the deck, a circle of Wolves gathered to kneel around their squad leader and take their pledge, the signifier known to other Legions Astartes as the oath of moment.