Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  Wyrdmake’s eyes snapped open.

  ‘I see it,’ he whispered, almost to himself. ‘Hjolda, it’s big.’

  He looked at Hawser.

  ‘Head up towards the crags as fast and as quietly as you can. Don’t look back.’

  Wyrdmake reached under his pelts and produced a compact plasma pistol. He armed it. It looked utterly incongruous and yet utterly appropriate in his leather-clad hands.

  ‘Go!’ he said.

  The priest turned and sprang out of the shadows of the vast tuber-tree. His pelts flowed out behind him like a cloak as he headed deeper into the forest with great, bounding strides, towards the source of the noise. Within seconds, he had vanished from view.

  Hawser waited a moment, willing the priest to reappear. Then he got up, axe in hand, and started to move as he had been instructed. He cursed every noisy step he took, every crunch of leaf-mould, every crack of dry twig. He felt like a blundering fool.

  He hadn’t gone far when he heard a sound. He stopped and looked around. The forest space was black shadows and bars of white light. Tiny flies danced in the beams. Withered leaf shapes made shadows like calcified wing membranes. He heard the sound again.

  A flutter. A flutter of wings, not far away. A slight disturbance in the forest cover. Branches rustled. Another flutter.

  Without warning there was a frenzy of noise, a violent thrashing that was over as fast and as abruptly as it began. Not ten metres from him, undergrowth shook and tore. He dropped down low, weapon ready. Something that wasn’t human let out a brief, raucous shriek.

  There was a wet leopard-snarl.

  Then, from behind him, deep in the forest, came a cry of agony.

  Hawser knew it was Wyrdmake.

  He rose and turned. The priest was hurt. In trouble. He couldn’t just…

  He heard a throb of sound, the throat-rumble of a carnivore. It was close by. He couldn’t tell which direction it had come from. Fear-sweat was trickling down his back. He raised the axe ready to strike. He moved forwards. He edged around a massive tuber bole that came up out of the dusty forest brush like an inverted mushroom. He kept his back to it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he leaned forwards to peer around the trunk.

  He saw the wolf.

  Half-saw it. It was just a shadow. A wolf-shaped shadow. A shadow-shaped wolf. Vast and ominous, like a blood-dark midnight sky; spectral and malevolent like the final whispered curses of a dying lunatic. It existed in the shadows but not in the patches of sunlight. Hawser could feel the grumble of its throat-noise. Terror was upon him, like all the cold of Fenris concentrated in a hyperdense lump inside his heart.

  The almost-wolf had something in its jaws, a gleaming black tangle of something. It dropped it onto the forest floor. It let out a growl that sounded like the lowest bass thump of a tribal bodhran. Hawser waited for it to turn. He waited for it to turn and see him. He stopped breathing. He pressed himself into the sticky black skin of the tuber bole.

  He waited. He waited. He waited for the jaws to close on him. He waited for eternity to pass so he could breathe again.

  The almost-wolf uttered another wet leopard-growl.

  Hawser heard the dry ground cover stirring, leaf-mulch sifting.

  He risked a second look.

  There was no sign of the almost-wolf. It had moved away. It had slipped into the darkness, into the forest.

  Hawser waited a moment more. Hands tight around the haft of his axe, he slid from the tree shadow and stepped into the gloom of the glade where the almost-wolf had been standing.

  In the mid-point of the clearing, the something that the almost-wolf had dropped was lying on the leaf-loam. It was a muddle of torn black feathers. The feathers were sheened like jet silk. It was Wyrdmake’s crow. It was dead, mangled, one wing almost bitten off. Droplets of blood spattered the feathers and the ground around it, glinting in the dim light like amber beads. Under the feathers, the cunningly wrought thing was just the bones it had always been.

  Hawser had been with the Vlka Fenryka long enough to understand Wyrdmake’s distant cry of pain. Sympathetic magic. What had been done to his cunning spy had also been done to him.

  Hawser straightened up. He tried to remember which direction the priest’s cry of pain had come from. He tried to orientate himself. It was hard. The clotted fear inside him was very great and very cold. It was sliding up his gullet like a glacier. He tried to think like a Wolf, like a man of Tra. He tried to think strategically, as if all he was contemplating was the next move or two on Skarssensson’s hneftafl board, or Rector Uwe’s regicide set.

  He let the axe slip down through both palms, until he had it clenched around the very throat and knob of the haft. This was a battle-ready grip called ‘the open bite’ in Wurgen. It was the maximum extension of arms and haft, so it afforded the longest reach and the greatest leverage. It was not a subtle position from which to start a fight. If he encountered the almost-wolf again, Hawser didn’t expect the fight to be subtle.

  He moved forwards, through the light and shadow, under the canopy of insect-wing leaves. He kept the axe at full extension in the double-handed brace. He became aware of a new sound. It was breathing. Laboured, human breathing. The struggling respiration of someone injured.

  Hawser ducked under a low band of ghost leaves, and saw a large body crumpled in the shade of a misshapen tuber trunk. The man was Astartes. His leatherwork wargear was red.

  ‘Eada?’ Hawser whispered, crouching down beside him.

  Eada Haelfwulf blinked and looked up at him.

  ‘Skjald,’ he smiled. His face was drawn with pain. His torso was wet with gore. Something had delivered several crippling bites to his flank and hip.

  ‘Shhhhh!’ Hawser hissed.

  ‘The wolf had me,’ Eada whispered. ‘Came out of nowhere. Something brought it forth. Someone here today is working against us.’

  ‘I saw it. Stay still.’

  ‘Give me another minute. My wounds are knitting and the blood vessels are closing off. I’ll be on my feet again in a moment.’

  ‘Wyrdmake’s hurt,’ said Hawser.

  ‘I heard him. We have to find him,’ Eada replied.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to Helwintr,’ said Hawser.

  Eada Haelfwulf looked at him in a grave way that suggested he really ought to know. Haelfwulf had pulled off his leather mask. There were specks of blood all over the white skin of his cheek and brow.

  ‘What did you mean, Eada? What did you mean when you said that someone here today was working against us?’

  Eada Haelfwulf coughed, and the action of it made him wince slightly.

  ‘Helwintr and I were working into your memories, skjald.’

  ‘I know,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Imagine your mind like a fortress. Well defended, high ramparts. Helwintr was trying to get in through the front gate. He was out where you could see him, an open approach. I was behind the fort, trying to scale the ramparts while Helwintr’s attack engaged your attention. My aim was to get into an inner chamber next door to the one you keep locked.’

  ‘What happened?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘He broke into someone else’s memories,’ said a voice from behind him.

  Hawser turned.

  Aun Helwintr was standing at the edge of the glade, staring at them. He had a short, thick-bladed fighting sword drawn.

  ‘Come here, skjald,’ he said.

  ‘Hjolda!’ Eada exclaimed. ‘In the name of all the wights of the Underverse, skjald, stay here by me!’

  ‘What?’ Hawser stammered.

  Helwintr took a step closer. Hawser kept staring at him, his grip on his axe tight. He could hear Haelfwulf making a huge effort to rise behind him. He heard Haelfwulf drawing his blade.

  ‘Stay close by me,’ Eada Haelfwulf hissed. ‘I broke through into someone else’s memories, all right. Some thing else’s. It was whatever had reshaped your thoughts, skjald. It had left a doorway open, a doorway back to its own mind, so it could sl
ip back and revisit you whenever it wanted. I looked through the doorway. So did Helwintr. It saw us looking, and it didn’t like it.’

  ‘Come here, skjald,’ said Helwintr, taking another step forwards. He beckoned with his free hand, the warrior’s cocky invitation to an enemy. ‘Come on. Don’t listen to him.’

  ‘Stay where you are,’ Haelfwulf grunted, straightening up behind Hawser. ‘Get ready to move behind me. I’ll defend you.’

  ‘But Helwintr—’ Hawser began.

  ‘Hjolda, listen to me!’ Haelfwulf rasped, his voice cut by a throb of pain. ‘Understand me! The thing that saw us, it didn’t like us prying. It lashed out at us. We fell back, but not fast enough. It touched us with its maleficarum. It touched Helwintr.’

  Hawser gazed in horrid disbelief at Aun Helwintr. The priest took another step forwards. A deep rumble came out of him, a wolf-growl. Through the slits of his mask, his eyes were black-pinned gold.

  ‘You’re the wolf,’ Hawser said, his voice tiny.

  ‘Everything Eada Haelfwulf said is pretty much true,’ said Helwintr. ‘Except one part.’

  Helwintr took another step closer.

  ‘It was Eada that was touched by the maleficarum.’

  Hawser froze up. He heard the sounds coming from the wounded rune priest behind him. The ragged, pained breathing slowly became a deeper, panting, huffing noise. He heard skin and sinew stretching, he heard the phlegmy click and gurgle of cartilage and joint fluid. He heard bones protesting as they deformed, and organs bubble and slosh as they realigned. He heard the stifled agony of something enduring extreme physical transmutation.

  ‘Don’t look around,’ said Aun Helwintr. The priest stood his ground and brought his sword up to a ready stance.

  Hawser felt the hot breath on the nape of his neck, the wet, frothing leopard-purr.

  He turned. The open bite grip delivered the axe in a full, chest-height rotation swing, a half-circle blow that buried the axe-head in the right shoulder of the thing behind him.

  The almost-wolf that had been Eada Haelfwulf roared in frustrated pain. The weight of it struck Hawser and smashed him over onto his back. He couldn’t even see it. It was just a shadow blur and a predator sound. He glimpsed teeth. He rolled hard on the leaf-loam, seeing the teeth raking for him.

  Helwintr charged the almost-wolf head-on. The pair clashed, grappled and went over in a thrashing, struggling tangle. Even as an insubstantial shadow, a smoke-wisp that only existed where the sunlight didn’t fall, the almost-wolf was twice the size of the Astartes. Locked together, they became a furious blur. Hawser tried to get up. He couldn’t find his axe. He cried out as blood jetted out of the fight and spattered his face and chest. He couldn’t tell if the blood had been spilled by teeth or sword. He couldn’t tell if it belonged to Helwintr or the almost-wolf.

  He circled the tumult of the fight. Helwintr had almost disappeared into the spreading shadow the almost-wolf cast around it. Both combatants were moving too fast for him to track.

  There was a crack of bone, a sound of flesh shredding. Helwintr flew backwards in a shower of blood. He hit a tuber bole and somersaulted onto the forest floor. His leather gear was ripped and his sword was missing. He was wounded badly in the face, neck and left leg. He tried to rise, yelling at his limbs to move, to obey.

  The almost-wolf uttered its loudest throat-noise yet. It swung its massive snout around to face Hawser, ignoring the Astartes it had maimed. All Hawser could see was the shadow of it, like a piece of night cut out and pasted onto daylight. At the heart of the darkness, the huge teeth glimmered like icicles.

  A thin, searing beam of light squealed across the glade and exploded the ground underneath the almost-wolf. As it tried to recover, a second beam hit it squarely in the chest and threw it backwards. It demolished two large tuber trees as it went tumbling over. The dry boles burst like ripe seed cases and filled the air with a choking blizzard of string vegetable pulp. Broken, parts of the canopy foliage came crashing down.

  Ohthere Wyrdmake lowered his plasma pistol. His left arm hung slack and limp. Blood around the shoulder, not yet dried, made it look as though his arm had almost been bitten clean off.

  On the far side of the demolished tuber trees, sunlight fell on Eada Haelfwulf lying tangled in a sticky mass of broken bark and vegetable matter. Dense clouds of disturbed spores and plant dust billowed in the sunlit air.

  Smoke rose from the terrible plasma weapon wound that scorched Eada’s chest. Hawser’s axe was still buried in his right shoulder.

  The thralls and wolf priests backed off, and slipped out of the deep armoured chamber in the heart of Nidhoggur. Powerful banks of lights had been secured to the ceiling to bathe the chamber in a constant, simulated daylight. Marks of aversion had been notched into the chamber floor.

  Eada Haelfwulf, stripped of his pelt, his wargear and his armour, was chained to an upright cruciform of plasteel in the centre of the chamber. He was near death. The apparatus that secured him was the work of the wolf priests, part restraint, part interrogation device, part life support mechanism. Tube lines and feeds ran from beating vital units on the floor behind the cross, and burrowed like worms into the sutured flesh graft that patched the wound cavity in his chest.

  He looked out at Hawser and the Wolves, imploring, ashamed, knowing what he had done, what he had been. Clear fluid, viscous, wept from his nose, mouth and tear ducts, matting his beard and drying like glue on his bare flesh. There was a musky animal stink in the chamber that overwhelmed the astringent smell of counterseptic and the odour of blood.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he gurgled. ‘I could not fight it.’

  ‘What did you see?’ asked Ohthere Wyrdmake.

  Eada whined, as if the memory was too painful to recall. He closed his eyes and turned his head from side to side reluctantly. Mucus ran from his mouth and nose.

  ‘Even if he answers, we can’t trust anything he says now,’ said Helwintr. ‘It’s been inside him. It’s used him. Its touch is on him and he won’t ever cast it out in this life.’

  ‘I’d still like to hear his answer,’ replied Wyrdmake. The senior priest of Fyf flexed his left arm. The injury done by sympathetic magic was healing with the usual, startling speed of Astartes self-repair, but it was still sore.

  ‘And I’d like it if he wasn’t on my damn ship,’ grumbled Ogvai from behind them. ‘He’s poison. He’s spoiled. He’s turned.’

  Wyrdmake raised a hand to crave the jarl’s indulgence.

  ‘A little of Eada Haelfwulf yet remains,’ he said.

  Eada moaned. Spittle and flecks of mucus flew from his lips and face as he shook his head.

  ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he moaned.

  ‘Too late,’ said Ogvai.

  ‘The maleficarum could have taken any of us,’ said Wyrdmake.

  ‘It could just as easily have swallowed me,’ added Helwintr. Helwintr’s wounds were bound up too. He looked up at Haelfwulf.

  ‘Do what you can, Eada,’ he said. ‘You can’t make this right, but you can carve some honour out of this yet. What did you see?’

  ‘I saw through the doorway in the skjald’s memories,’ Eada said. He shuddered, and a thick curd of mucus welled up over his lower lip and rolled down his chin into his beard.

  ‘And what did you see there?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Whatever redesigned the architecture of your mind,’ Eada said, struggling to speak, ‘it left a link into you, a trap door so it could creep back in and make further adjustments as necessary. When I probed you from the blindside, I went through the trap door by mistake. The thing in there, it was focussed on keeping Helwintr out. Like you, it was looking at him. I stepped into one of its memories for a moment.’

  ‘I’m waiting,’ said Ogvai.

  ‘I saw a blade, lord,’ said Eada Haelfwulf. ‘A sacred dagger like the ritual knives we use, but an old and wretched thing, crafted by alien hands, shaped by alien thoughts. Its proportions are wrong. It is a
nemesis weapon. It is sentient. It lies within the rusting hulk of a ship cast down from the stars, a ship that wallows in the depths of a miasmal fen. The blade is called the Anathame.’

  Eada broke off as more coughing wracked him, and foul, syrupy matter splattered down his chest.

  ‘So?’ asked Ogvai.

  ‘It didn’t want me to see it, lord,’ said Eada Haelfwulf. ‘It didn’t want me to be able to tell you about it. It seized me, and skinwrought me, and turned me against the skjald and my brothers. The only good that comes of this is that I can tell you about this thing. This Anathame.’

  ‘And what is it for?’ asked Wyrdmake.

  ‘It will split the race of men,’ said Eada. ‘It will warp the future. It will murder the Wolf King’s brother, great Horus, honoured Warmaster.’

  ‘Murder him?’ Ogvai echoed.

  ‘The Warmaster we admire and follow will cease to be,’ said Eada.

  ‘Lies,’ said Ogvai. He turned away from the chained figure. ‘These are just the false things the maleficarum wants us to hear. His mouth lies. That is how he wants to split the race of men, by dividing us with mistrust and infamy.’

  ‘Please, lord!’ Eada cried.

  ‘Perhaps we should listen to this,’ said Hawser. ‘Perhaps there is some kernel of truth here that Eada Haelfwulf is trying to impart. He—’

  ‘No,’ said Ogvai.

  ‘He may yet—’

  ‘No!’ Ogvai snapped. He looked down at Hawser. ‘Don’t listen to his lies, skjald. Look for yourself.’

  Hawser looked at the figure chained to the plasteel cruciform. The chamber’s harsh overhead lights were casting a sharp, black shadow on the deck below the structure’s base. The shadow silhouette of the spread-eagled figure did not belong to a man.

  It belonged to a monstrous wolf.

  Hawser recoiled from the sight.

  Ogvai looked over at Helwintr. Wyrdmake had turned his gaze towards the aversion marks on the deck.

  The Jarl of Tra walked up to the foot of the heavy shacklepost, and looked up at the miserable body suspended on it. Mucus dripped out of Haelfwulf’s mouth.