Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  ‘What then?’

  ‘The one thing denied to us.’

  ‘Fear.’

  Longfang chuckled, though the chuckle was half-drowned in blood.

  ‘Now you understand. In the Aett, at the hearth-side, when the skjald speaks, then and only then do we allow the fear back. And only if the account is good enough.’

  ‘Letting yourself feel fear? That’s your release?’

  Longfang nodded.

  ‘So what sort of account? A tale of war, or of hunting an ocean orm and—’

  ‘No, no,’ said Longfang. ‘Those are things we can kill, even if it’s hard and we don’t succeed every time. There is no fear there. A skjald has to find a story about something we can’t kill. I told you that. Something that is proof against our blades and our bolts. Something that will not fall down when you strike it with a back-breaker. Something with a thread that cannot be cut.’

  ‘Maleficarum,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Maleficarum,’ the priest agreed.

  He looked at Hawser, and coughed again, aspirating more particles of blood.

  ‘Make it a good one, then,’ he said.

  ‘I was born on Terra,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Like me,’ put in Longfang proudly.

  ‘Like you,’ Hawser agreed. He began again. ‘I was born on Terra. Old Earth, as it was called in the First Age. Most of my life, I worked as a conservator for the Unification Council. When I was about thirty years old, I was working in Old Franc, in the centre of the great city-node Lutetia. It was ruins, most of it, ruins and sub-hive slums. I had a friend. A colleague, actually. His name was Navid Murza. He’s dead now. He died in Ossetia about a decade later. He wasn’t a friend at all, really. We were rivals. He was an extremely accomplished academic and very capable, but he was ruthless too. He’d use people. He didn’t care who he had to go through to get what he wanted. We worked together because that’s how things had turned out. I was always wary of him. He frequently took things too far.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Longfang. ‘Describe this Murza so I can see him.’

  A clavier was playing. It was a recording, one of the high quality audio files that Seelia insisted on listening to in the pension. Hawser was sure that Murza had put it on. Hawser was sure that Murza was sleeping with Seelia. The woman was gorgeous and dark-skinned, with a cloud of tawny hair. During the first few days of the Lutetian placement, she’d seemed quite interested in Hawser. Then Murza had turned up the charm and that had been that.

  If Murza had put the music on, then Murza had got back to the pension ahead of him. They’d become separated during the headlong flight. Hawser let himself in through the side entrance, using the gene-code keypad, and made sure the shutters were secure. The work gang who had tried to trap them at the old cathedral site knew where they were based. Some of them had come to the pension to discuss details with members of the Conservatory team.

  Hawser took off his coat. His hands were unsteady. They’d nearly been beaten. They’d been threatened and nearly been assaulted, and they’d been forced to run for their lives, and adrenaline was thumping around his body, and that still wasn’t the reason he felt so badly shaken.

  It was getting dark. He turned on some glow-globes. The whole team had scattered into the backstreets. They’d make their way back to the pension, one by one, given luck and time.

  Hawser poured himself an amasec to steady his nerves. The bottle of ten year-old, his preference, was missing from the tray. He made do with the cheaper stuff. The decanter clink-clinked against the glass in his fidgety hands.

  ‘Navid?’ he called out. ‘Navid?’

  There was no answer except the melody of the clavier, an old pastoral piece.

  ‘Murza!’ he shouted. ‘Answer me!’

  He poured himself another amasec and went up the stairs into the dorm level.

  The pension was a fortified manse in a gated block called Boborg, just off a thoroughfare called Sanantwun. It was one of a number of safe-homes that a big Uropan mercantile house used as accommodation for visiting trade delegates, and the Conservatory had leased it for a three-month period. It came furnished, with servitor staff, and was as safe as anywhere in Lutetia. The city was a sprawling, blackened, uncouth place, venerably old, but deteriorating into slums. Though Hawser appreciated it for its history, he couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to live there any more if they didn’t have to. For the wealthy and aristocratic who still dwelt in the city-node, and there were many enclaves, surely the Atlantic platforms offered a much higher standard of living, and the superorbital plates vastly more security.

  Halfway up the stairs, at the turn, there was a tall slit of a window that allowed a view of the city over the block wall. It was getting dark, and the roofs were a lumpy black slope like the scaly ridge of a reptile’s back. The largest ragged lump, sticking up like a broken thorn, was the dead cathedral. It looked like a fang-shaped mountain, dwarfing other mountains around it. The sun, gone from the sky, had left pink smears on the western horizon behind it. Most of the evening light was the artificially bright and oddly unreal radiance cast by the plate that was presently gliding over the city in a north-western direction. Hawser wasn’t exactly sure which one it was, but from the time of day and the geography of its leading coast, he believed it to be Lemurya.

  Hawser sipped his drink. He looked up the rest of the flight of stairs.

  ‘Murza?’

  He went up. The music got louder. He realised how warm it was in the pension. It wasn’t just the amasec in his belly. Someone had cranked the heating system right up.

  ‘Murza? Where are you?’

  Most of the bedrooms were dark. Lamplight and clavier music were coming out of the room Murza had picked when the team first moved in.

  ‘Navid?’

  He went in. The rooms were only small, and Murza’s was almost stifling with heat. It was cluttered too, piled high with kit bags, discarded clothes, books, data-slates. The music was playing from a small device beside the bed. Hawser saw female garments jumbled amongst the others on the floor and a kitbag that wasn’t Murza’s. Seelia had moved her lovely, trusting self in with him.

  Murza had left Seelia to run home on her own through the slum-streets of Lutetia after curfew, which was fairly standard behaviour for Navid Murza.

  Hawser took another sip, and tried to quell his anger. Murza had got them all into danger, and not for the first time. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was something he didn’t really want to consider but knew he was going to have to face up to.

  The bedroom wasn’t just hot. It was fuggy. Humid.

  Hawser pulled open the folding door into the wash closet.

  Murza was sitting in the bottom of the little shower stall with his knees tucked up under his chin and his arms wrapped around his shins. He was naked. Water, hot water from the stream coming out under the stall’s worn plastek bubble, was hosing down on him. He looked forlorn and blank-eyed, his dark hair plastered to his scalp and neck. He was holding the decanter of ten year-old amasec by its neck.

  ‘Navid? What are you doing?’

  Murza didn’t answer.

  ‘Navid!’ Hawser called, and rapped his knuckles on the clear plastek bubble. Murza looked up at him, slowly focussing. It seemed to take him a long time to recognise Hawser.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Hawser repeated.

  ‘I was cold,’ Murza replied. His words came out slurred, and his voice was so quiet, it was hard to hear over the rush of the water.

  ‘You were cold?’

  ‘I came back here and I needed to be warm. Have you ever been that cold, Kas?’

  ‘What happened, Navid? That was a disaster!’

  ‘I know. I know it was.’

  ‘Navid, get out of the shower and talk to me.’

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘Get out of the damn shower, Navid. Come out here and tell me what you think you were playing at setting up a deal like that?’

  Mu
rza looked at him and blinked. Water dripped off his eyelashes.

  ‘Are the others back?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Seelia?’

  ‘None of them.’

  ‘They’ll be all right, won’t they?’ Murza asked. His voice slurred again.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ Hawser snapped. He softened slightly as he saw the anguished look in Murza’s eyes.

  ‘They’ll be fine, I’m sure. She’ll be fine. We’ve planned for this. We know the contingency plan, the back-up. None of them are stupid.’

  Murza nodded.

  ‘I’m not so sure about you,’ Hawser added.

  Murza grimaced and lifted the decanter he was holding to his mouth. A lot of the amasec was already gone. He took a big swig, swallowed some and then swooshed the rest around inside his cheeks as if it was mouthwash.

  When he spat into the shower floor, Hawser saw blood swirling away down the chrome drain.

  ‘What did you do, Navid?’ he asked. ‘What the hell did you do to that man? How did you know how to do it?’

  ‘Please don’t ask me,’ Murza replied.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I saved your life! I saved your life, didn’t I?’

  ‘I’m not sure, Navid.’

  Murza glared at him.

  ‘I didn’t have to do that. I saved your life.’

  He spat again, and more blood swirled in the water.

  ‘Get out of there,’ said Hawser. ‘You’re going to have to explain everything to me.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ replied Murza.

  ‘That’s bad luck. Get out of that cubicle. I’ll come back in ten minutes. You’ll need to be ready to explain things. Then I’ll decide what we tell the others.’

  ‘Kas, no one else has to know about—’

  ‘Get out of there and we’ll discuss it.’

  Hawser went down to the common room, refilled his glass and sat in an armchair trying to steady his wits. He’d been at it five minutes when the others came back, first Polk and Lesher, then the twins from Odessa, then Zirian and his pale, tearful assistant Maris. Finally, just as Hawser was really beginning to worry, Seelia appeared, escorted by Thamer.

  ‘Are we all here?’ she asked, trying to sound confident, but clearly exhausted and rattled. Several of the returning team had already disappeared to wash and change.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Even Navid?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Thamer muttered.

  ‘I’m going to talk to him,’ Hawser said. ‘Just leave it, please.’

  ‘All right,’ said Thamer, sounding unconvinced.

  Hawser told Polk and the twins to prepare some supper for the team, and got Lesher and Zirian to begin planning some other ideas so that their placement wouldn’t be an entire waste of time. He knew it would be, but at least the semblance of activity kept their minds off the day’s unpleasantness. He couldn’t get the image of the pistol out of his mind. He kept seeing the black hole of the end of its muzzle aiming at him.

  He went back upstairs. Murza’s shower was off, and Murza was sitting on the end of his bed wearing an undershirt and combat trousers. He had not bothered to dry himself off. Water dripped from his hair. He’d poured some amasec into a small porcelain cup and was drinking from that, nursing it morosely with both hands. The decanter was on the floor beside him.

  ‘We shouldn’t have gone into that,’ said Hawser, jumping straight in without preamble.

  ‘No,’ Murza agreed without looking up.

  ‘Your call, and it was a bad one.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘You assured us the intelligence was good and we’d be safe. I shouldn’t have listened to you. I should have had security checked, and I should have set up a proper route for abort extraction, a vehicle, probably.’

  Murza looked up at him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t, and you didn’t because you’re supposed to be able to trust me.’

  ‘Why do you do it, Navid?’

  Murza shrugged. He reached one hand up to his mouth, and probed under his lip with a finger as if one of his teeth was loose. He winced.

  ‘Do you get greedy?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘Greedy?’

  ‘I know what that feels like, Navid. We’re two of a kind. We’re driven by a real hunger to discover and preserve these things, to find the lost treasures of our species. It’s a worthy, worthy cause, but it’s an obsession too. I know it. You know we’re more alike than either of us care to admit.’

  Murza raised his eyebrows in a slightly amused agreement.

  ‘Sometimes you go too far,’ said Hawser. ‘I know I’ve done that. Pushed too hard, paid too much of a bribe, gone somewhere I shouldn’t have gone, faked up some paperwork.’

  Murza sniffed. It was a sort-of laugh.

  Hawser sat down on the end of the bed beside him.

  ‘You just take it further than I do, Navid,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It feels like you don’t care who gets hurt. It feels like you’d sacrifice everyone just to get what you want.’

  ‘Sorry, Kas.’

  ‘That’s greedy on a whole new level.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘It makes me think that it’s greedy in a very different way. Not a worthy way, a selfish one.’

  Murza stared at the floor.

  ‘Any truth in that?’ asked Hawser. ‘Is it a selfish flaw, do you think?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’

  ‘All right.’

  Hawser picked up the decanter at Murza’s feet and refilled his own glass. Then he leaned over and poured some amasec into the porcelain cup Murza was clutching.

  ‘Listen to me, Navid,’ he said. ‘Today you could have got us all hurt or worse. It was a total screw-up. Things like it have happened before. I’m not going to let them happen again. We play by the rulebook. We don’t mess around with safety and take chances from now on, all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, Kas.’

  ‘All right, let’s draw a line under that. It’s done. Conversation over. Clean slate tomorrow. It’s not what really troubles me, and you know that.’

  Murza nodded.

  ‘You did something this evening in the shadow of the dead cathedral. I don’t know what it was. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. I think you said a word or something like a word to that thug with the gun and knocked him right over.’

  ‘I think…’ said Murza very quietly. ‘I think I quite probably killed him, Kas.’

  ‘Fug me,’ Hawser murmured. ‘I need to know how that’s even possible, Navid.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Murza replied. ‘Can we not just leave it? If I hadn’t done it, he would have shot you.’

  ‘I accept that,’ said Hawser. ‘I accept you did it for good reasons. I accept you saved my life, probably, and reacted in a bad situation. But I need to know what you did.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Murza. ‘It’d be so much better for you if you didn’t.’

  ‘Two reasons,’ Hawser replied. ‘If we’re going to work together at all from this point on, I’m going to need to be able to trust you. I’m going to need to know what you’re capable of.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Murza replied. ‘And the other reason?’

  ‘I’m greedy too,’ said Hawser.

  Hawser stopped speaking. For a moment, he thought Longfang was asleep, or worse, but the rune priest opened his eyes.

  ‘You stopped,’ Longfang said in Juvjk. ‘Keep going. This man Murza you talk of, he has maleficarum in him, and yet you toast with him like a brother.’

  Blood was still misting out of Longfang’s mouth with every halting breath. The fold of gossamer-white pelt below his chin had become quite dark and wet.

  Hawser took a deep breath. His throat was dry. The rumble and flare of the doom come to the Quietude’s cities continued to roll around the vast, firelit darkness of the space arou
nd them. In the distance, beyond the high, tiled walls of the mansion complex, apocalyptic firestorms coiled up the far side of the pit, consuming citadel structures in showers of sparks like heartwood caught in a bonfire. Closer at hand, bolters and plasma weapons traumatised the air with their discharge.

  ‘This man,’ said Longfang, ‘this Murza. Did you kill him? Because of his maleficarum, I mean. Did you cut his thread?’

  ‘I saved his life,’ said Hawser.

  ‘You’ve never told me much about your childhood, or your education,’ Hawser remarked.

  ‘I don’t intend to start now,’ Murza replied.

  He hesitated.

  ‘Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sharp. It’s just that it’s all so complicated, and it will take time we haven’t got. Here’s the simple version. I was privately educated. The schooling was a tradition that mixed classical training with an emphasis on the esoteric.’

  ‘Esoterica is a very important branch of classical study,’ said Hawser. ‘For millennia, occulted knowledge has been passionately, jealously guarded.’

  Murza smiled.

  ‘Why is that, Kas, do you suppose?’

  ‘Because men have always believed in supernatural forces that would grant them great powers, and give them mastery over the cosmos. We’ve been thinking that way since we watched the shadows play on the cave walls.’

  ‘There is another possible reason, though, isn’t there?’ Murza asked. ‘I mean, there has to be, logically?’

  Hawser sipped his glass and looked at Murza beside him.

  ‘Is that a serious question?’ he asked.

  ‘Do I look like I’m serious, Kas?’

  ‘You’re smiling like an idiot,’ said Hawser.

  ‘All right… Did what I did tonight look serious?’

  ‘Are you suggesting that was something? Some kind of… what? It was a trick.’

  ‘Was it?’ asked Murza.

  ‘Some kind of trick.’

  ‘And if it wasn’t, Kas, if it wasn’t, then there’s another, logical reason why certain knowledge has always been very jealously guarded. Wouldn’t you say?’

  Hawser stood up. He did it rather suddenly, and swayed, surprised by how considerably the amasec had gone to his head.