Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  ‘We got rid of our gods, Kas. Something was always going to take their place.’

  His face was pleading. It was the face I had known for years, un-aged since the day he perished in Ossetia. He was no longer wearing the Warmaster’s armour. He was human-sized, and dressed in the soft, cream-felt robes of the Lutetian Bibliotech.

  I knew, with painful certainty, that Navid Murza’s face had been the one I had turned around and seen that day, long ago, in my suite aboard the Lemuryan superorbital. His was the face that my dreams had blocked, the face my memories had refused to recover. This had been the trigger event: a man, dead for so long, come back to find me in a locked room to warp my mind with fear, reboot my memories, adjust my will and drive me to Fenris.

  This was the ‘best piece’ of maleficarum, the one that Longfang knew I had.

  ‘So all this is for nothing?’ I whispered. ‘Prospero has burned, for nothing? Astartes has murdered Astartes, for nothing?’

  Navid grinned.

  ‘It’s exquisite, isn’t it?’

  ‘The Crimson King was loyal. Misguided, but loyal. So this tragedy need never have happened?’

  ‘I know!’ he said, exalted, his eyes bright. ‘But now this has happened, oh Kas, now this has happened, a door has been opened. A precedent has been set. If you think Prospero is a tragedy, an abomination, a terrible mistake, you should see what happens next. Two Legions Astartes, locked in mortal combat? Kas, that’s just the overture.’

  He was close to me. His hands were reaching out. He had folded back the integral gloves of the soft robes to free his hands. I did not want him to touch me.

  ‘How long did I know you before you weren’t Navid Murza any more?’ I asked.

  ‘I was always me, Kas,’ he cooed. He touched the side of my face with one hand. I felt his fingers against the knotwork of my mask. My headgear’s marks of aversion were not keeping him at bay.

  Him. It, I think. I could smell its breath, the charnel stink of a predator’s bacteria-swilling mouth, the venomous air of Prospero outside my private dream, burning up at the end of all its days.

  ‘Always you?’ I asked. ‘No, I think there was a Navid Murza once, and you took his place.’

  ‘It’s naive of you to think so, Kas,’ it said, stroking my cheek.

  ‘It’s naive of you to get this close,’ I replied, and spoke the word Navid had spoken, all those years before, in the back alley behind the cathedral corpse. Enuncia, he had called it, part of the primeval vocabulary of magic. He had been so cocky, so arrogant; he had never expected me to retain its form, not after so many years and so brief an exposure, but I had spent a long time with the rune priests of Fenris recovering and replaying my memories. I had heard it over and over again, enough times to commit its jagged, razor-edged shape to memory.

  I had it, word perfect.

  I spat it into the thing’s face. It was the single most important word I have ever uttered as a skjald.

  Its face exploded in a blizzard of flesh and blood. Its head snapped back as though it had been struck in the face with an axe. It tumbled away from me, screaming and howling, the sounds horribly muted by its mangled mouth.

  I was hurt too. I could feel how raw my throat was from retching up the word. I could taste the blood in my mouth. My lip was split. Several of my teeth were loose.

  Caring little for any of that, I moved forwards, raising my pistol.

  ‘Tra! Tra! Help here!’ I shouted, and then had to spit blood through the slit of my mask.

  I fired at the writhing, robed form. Its cream-felt shape crashed over the chamber’s bed and fell on the floor on the other side, squealing like a butchered pig. Furniture toppled over. Books spilled from broken shelves. Damaged, the bedside dataplate began to repeat, ‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm. Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm…’

  I fired at the thrashing shape again.

  ‘Skjald? Skjald?’

  Voices were calling me in Wurgen. The chamber door opened, and Godsmote appeared with Orcir. They hesitated for a second. Behind them lay the bright glint of the looking-glass hallway on Prospero. Ahead of them lay a cramped and gloomy sleepchamber overlooking Terra. At the doorway, where they stood, two realities had been grafted together. Their dismay was understandable.

  ‘Help me!’ I yelled. I pointed at the thrashing figure in the corner of the room.

  ‘Kill it!’

  Orcir pushed past me, bracing his heavy bolter. There was no hesitation. He fired a sustained burst of shots from the massive weapon, the noise of which was overwhelming in the confines of the tiny room. The bolts shredded the figure. They blew the soft, plump folds of its Bibliotech robes apart and obliterated the body underneath. Blood, sap and fibrous tissue plastered the wall behind it.

  But it was not dead.

  It rose up, a shattered human skeleton, dripping with gore, and remade itself. It grew. Skin rewove. Organs reassembled or uncooked. The last remnants of the cream Bibliotech robes sloughed off like shedding skin as white-gold armour formed underneath it. Remade, the Warmaster wore a vengeful, insane expression. One of his eyes was blown.

  ‘Get back,’ I warned my brothers.

  ‘Hjolda!’ Orcir gasped. ‘Lupercal? Lord Lupercal?’

  ‘Get back!’ I cried.

  ‘Orcir,’ Horus whispered, saying the name like a charm. An unseen force propelled Orcir towards the giant.

  The Anathame glimmered in Horus’s hand. He struck it down into Orcir’s chest. Orcir screamed out. His thread already cut, he tried to use his heavy bolter, point-blank, against his killer. Horus spoke Orcir’s name again, and once again the name gave Horus power over our wolf-brother. This time, the unseen force lifted Orcir off the killing blade, and threw him like a doll across the bedchamber. His armoured corpse hit the viewing port, and the window shattered.

  There was a monstrous bang of decompression. Every stick of furniture, every loose object in the room, every bead of blood, rushed out of the broken port along with the atmosphere and all the tumbling shards of window glass. Orcir’s body, limp and spread-eagled, fell away from the window, spinning end over end, and dropped towards Terra, getting smaller and smaller, beginning to burn up like a shooting star.

  The decompression did not dislodge Horus. He roared in the failing air. I felt my feet lose purchase. I tried to brace, but the explosive voiding of the chamber would not let me go. The glass shade of a lamp smashed off my shoulder. A book struck my knee. I grabbed the doorframe. A toy horse made of wood flew past my head and went out into the blackness.

  I could not hold on. My grip broke, and I shot backwards like a cork. I was suddenly pulled up hard as Godsmote’s fist clamped around my arm and anchored it. He had hooked the head of his axe to the door frame, and was clenching the weapon’s haft with one hand as he clung on to me. The effort of pulling me in made him roar. As soon as I had a grip too, I added my strength to his.

  We pulled ourselves through the doorway, and slammed the door. On the outside, it was just a mirrored surface. We were in the temple precinct again, in the glass hall.

  I expected questions from Godsmote, urgent demands for explanation, but he did not even break stride. Driven and single-minded as all Wolves, he knew we were not yet safe. We moved quickly, down the side hall into the main atrium, the space ruined by gunfire.

  Horus came behind us. He exploded through the temple’s glass wall, bringing sheets of mirror down as though they had been rammed by a Land Raider. He tore his way from one reality to the next, out of my past into my present, out of my memories into my reality. He was running, each great, racing stride ringing out on the polished floor.

  ‘Kasper!’ he commanded.

  I felt the tug upon me, the power of my name, but Kasper Hawser is only one of the many names I own, and none of them are my true, birth-name, my signifier. Not even I know that. I resisted.

  He was gaining on us. Godsmote turned to fight him, Astartes against primarch-thing, Fenrisian Wolf against
Luna Wolf.

  ‘Godsmote!’ Horus declaimed. Godsmote faltered for a second, and then put his arms into that famous stroke of his, his godsmack. The axe-bite took Horus in the ribcage on the left side, and actually knocked him sideways a few paces. He howled. Godsmote ripped his axe out and did it again, ripping a gash in the Warmaster’s left thigh.

  ‘Fith of the Ascommani!’ Horus bawled out. He had dug deeper into my memory and found a truer, older name for my friend and wolf-brother. At the merest breath of it, Godsmote was picked up and tossed across the hall. He slammed against the looking-glass wall four or five metres off the floor, cracked a huge sunburst pattern in its surface with his impact, and fell onto the ground beneath.

  Horus straightened up and came for me. I shot at him until my cell was spent, and then threw the pistol aside and drew my axe. He knocked me down with a slap, tore off my displacer field unit, and wrenched my axe from my hands. His titanic hand was around my throat. My feet left the ground.

  ‘I had grown fond of you,’ he hissed in Navid Murza’s voice. ‘I even confessed as much. And you repay my indulgence with this abuse when you should have accepted the gift of a painless death that I was offering you. Now it certainly won’t be painless.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I grunted back.

  ‘Oh, you will,’ he promised.

  The gleaming, frostblade head of a Fenrisian axe flashed down between us and parted his arm at the elbow. I fell onto the floor with his severed forearm still clutching at my throat. His blood, or whatever foetid ichor passed for his blood, hosed at me.

  ‘Step back,’ said Bear, and put two more axe strokes into him. Horus bellowed Bear’s name, in rage and pain, but obtained no mastery of him. Bear’s axe continued to bite him. Just as had been the case when it wore the mask of Amon on Nikaea, the Primordial Annihilator could not subdue Bear with his name.

  Bear had done terrible damage to the Horus-thing. One arm was off, the white-gold armour was rent open in a dozen bloody places, and there was a grisly cleft through the side of the Lupercal’s head. The brainpan had split open. The white bone of skull fragments protruded. Part of his cheek had torn away. The blood streaming out of him was forming a widening pool around his feet.

  ‘Skjald?’ Bear growled. ‘Run now.’

  I got up. Bear settled his grip and prepared to face the next round. Twitching, the Horus-thing advanced, splashing one step after another through its sappy blood, leaving footprints of gore on the glass floor.

  ‘Run now,’ Bear urged me.

  The Horus-thing accelerated. Bear bent low and put his back into the swing that greeted it. The blow didn’t land. Pain and anger seemed to amplify the Horus-thing’s power. It smashed Bear aside with a vicious sweep of its remaining arm, and then stooped and tried to rain blows down on the fallen Wolf. Bear rolled wildly to avoid them, escaping a pounding fist that cracked the floor in several places. With no time or opportunity to rise again, Bear slid around on his back, and hacked at the monster again, with his axe, left-handed.

  The Horus-thing caught the axe-head this time. It caught it neatly in its huge, armoured paw, and locked its grip. Blood and oily fluid bubbled out of its mouth as it looked down at Bear and uttered some eldritch unword of Enuncia.

  Balefire, the corposant that lights treetops and mastheads in the darkest winter nights, swirled down the axe from head to throat, wrapping it in greenish yellow flame, consuming it. The flames spread to Bear’s left hand and forearm, burning them away in a wild, incandescent flare. Bear howled. The Horus-thing was exacting punishment for his own missing arm. He was a predator, playing with his prey before the kill.

  I snatched up my axe from the floor where it had landed. I did not hesitate. I got between them and struck off Bear’s left arm just below the elbow before the maleficarum could spread to the rest of him. He had saved me by severing a limb. I was determined to repay him, and repay him for the constant protection he had offered me, without comment, since our first meeting on the shore of the ice field, when I mistook him for a daemon.

  I knew, now, what a daemon really looked like.

  Bear rolled clear, clenching his teeth in pain. I tried to drag him back towards the hall’s portico. I confess I did not expect to have done much more than delay our ultimate demise.

  By then, Aun Helwintr had felt the terrible forces that had been released in the temple precinct. Ominous in his pelt and his long black cloak, his white hair twisted and lacquered into horns, he stepped into the crystal hall behind us, forming with his hands the warding gestures that all rune priests are taught, the gestures of banishment and aversion. The Horus-thing vomited blood and recoiled, but its power dwarfed that of the imposing priest.

  For this reason, Helwintr had not come to our aid alone.

  One entire glass wall of the temple hall, on the right-hand side, blew in and shattered in a vast cascade of glass. A second later, the same thing happened to the left-hand side. Light and smoke from the killing grounds outside swirled in through the building’s ruptured frames. Parts of the roof glazing fell in and smashed.

  A huge and heavy shape strode into the hall through the torn down right-hand wall. It was a biped, a construct five metres tall, squat but massive, thickly armoured with adamantium, badged in the colours of the Vlka Fenryka. On either side of its bulky main hull, weapon-pods cycled and target-locked.

  A second Dreadnought entered through the gap blown in the left-hand side of the hall. It cycled its weapons. The constructs closed the distance a little, vicing the Horus-thing between their positions, driving it back towards the end of the hall. Each step they took shook the ground.

  They opened fire in unison at some shared, mind-linked command. The tempest wrath of assault cannons and twin-linked lascannons macerated the Horus-thing. Flailing, it was blasted into fragments, into a haze of matter that spattered what little of the hall’s mirrored surface remained, and stained it like mould.

  Something thrashed at the heart of the blast zone, something that took form as the humanoid figure of Horus was annihilated. Gale force winds and energies screamed out at us. The air filled with swarms of flies.

  Something rose up, slowly, out of the molten fireball created by the Dreadnoughts’ barrage. It was hard to look at, hard to understand. It defied visual interpretation, like a dream that refuses to let you turn around and see its face.

  It was tall and misshapen, a shadow cast by shadows. There was a suggestion of anatomy that was both utterly human and corrupted beyond any organic limit. Everything about it had been put together wrong, so that the sight of it dislocated the senses and depraved the mind. It was gristle and rancid meat, blisters and herniated intestines, ulcerated tongues and rotting teeth. It was blinking eyes that were as large as drinking bowls or clustered like the spawn of amphibians. It had horns, two huge, upcurved horns.

  Everything in the room suddenly cast too many shadows. The clouds of flies grew thicker, trying to invade our eyes, our nostrils, our mouths, our wounds.

  A voice said, ‘Oh, Aun Helwintr. You do not learn from your mistakes. You have brought mighty warriors to confront me and drive me out, but I know their names and thus have power over them. I name them both. Patrekr the Great Fanged. Cormek Dod.’

  ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Helwintr replied. I was astonished to see that he was smiling. Figures streamed into the shattered hall behind him, and stepped in through the walls the Dreadnoughts had breached. A dozen Null Maidens. Two dozen. Their swords were drawn. Their leader, Jenetia Krole, raised her hand and pointed an accusing finger at the shadow-shape looming before us.

  It let out a long and harrowing cry of anguish as it felt its power negated. The pariah gene shared by the members of the Silent Sisterhood blocked the puissance of its sorcery and banished its potent maleficarum. The wind immediately began to die back. The swarming flies fell dead, and piled on the ground in black drifts as thick as the heaps of fragmented glass.

  ‘Knock it down and c
ut its thread,’ ordered Aun Helwintr, and the Dreadnoughts resumed their conflagration.

  They did not stop until every last speck of the deviltry was obliterated.

  Fifteen

  Threads

  I do not believe we killed it, brothers. I do not think the Primordial Annihilator can be harmed in the way that a mortal thing can. But we drove it back, we drove it out. We hurt it for a while at least.

  When we emerged, the battle was done. The Wolf King had engaged Magnus in monumental single combat, and broken his spine. Then, at the very moment when we bested the daemon in the temple hall, sorcery boiled loose across the entire, ruined world. Blood rain fell. The Crimson King, and those of his Thousand Sons who had survived, vanished, fleeing by means of their proscribed magic.

  Only in this way could they escape total extermination by the Rout.

  Let this lesson be remembered.

  Bloody rain was still falling as we regrouped. The sky was nightfall dark, black as a raven’s wing feathers, and underlit by the firestorms engulfing the glass city. With Godsmote, who had recovered from his injuries enough to walk, I stayed with Bear as the wolf priests tended his arm.

  Bear’s face was impassive. He showed no hint of pain or discomfort as the priests worked at his stump with bone cutters and hooks. An augmetic would be fitted in time. But I saw him grimace slightly as a Dreadnought thumped by our position in the streaming downpour.

  Drops of blood rain beaded Bear’s face.

  ‘I don’t mind the arm,’ he grumbled. ‘Not when you consider.’

  ‘Consider what?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s supposed to be an honour,’ said Godsmote, nodding towards the Dreadnought as it moved away. ‘But who wants to lose so much they end up like that? That’s no way to live forever.’

  Bear nodded grimly.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is how you broke its spell. It knew the names of every one of us, and yet that power had no mastery over you.’