Prospero Burns

  Adjoining Ogvai’s sleeping chamber was a weaponarium. Most of the items and devices on display were trophies that the jarl had taken from vanquished foes. There were xenosform weapons whose form and function Hawser could barely imagine: staves, wands, fans, sceptres, small delicate machines. On other shelves and racks were arranged biological weapons: teeth, claws, spines, toe-hooks, mandibles, stingers. Some were preserved in jars of fluid suspension. Others were dried. A few were burnished, as if for use. Hawser paused for a moment to marvel at the grotesque size of some of the specimens. One sickle talon was as long as his arm. There was a quill as big as a harpoon. He tried to imagine the proportions of the creatures that had once been attached to them.

  On other stands, firearms and blades were displayed. Hawser hunted along the lines of them until he found the collection of daggers and shorter blades.

  There were several athames. Some were Fenrisian. The conservator in Hawser wished to hell he knew where Ogvai had come by the others. They were priceless relics from before the Age of Strife.

  ‘You could ask him.’

  Hawser snapped around. Without hesitating, he had slipped one of the displayed athames off its hooks and aimed it at the shadow that had spoken.

  ‘It’s one of a number of questions you have for him, isn’t it?’

  ‘Show yourself,’ said Hawser.

  Something took the athame out of his hand. Hawser felt a painful bump, and then he was being strangled, his feet kicking free in loose air.

  He had been picked up and hung from the tip of the sickle talon by his pelt. The athame he had been brandishing was embedded in the wall, quivering. He tried to pull away the knot holding the pelt in place. It was hanging him. He couldn’t get his head free. His legs pinwheeled frantically.

  He was lifted down and thrown onto the deck, choking and gasping.

  Aun Helwintr crouched down beside him, his elbows on his knees.

  ‘I don’t care who you are,’ said the new rune priest. ‘You don’t pull a blade on me.’

  ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Hawser coughed out, snidely.

  ‘You were looking for something, weren’t you?’ remarked Aun Helwintr. ‘You were looking for something and it’s not here.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Your mind is loud, skjald.’

  ‘My what?’

  Aun Helwintr gestured to the racks containing the daggers and athames.

  ‘It’s not here. The particular blade you were looking for.’

  Helwintr’s skin was almost gelid blue under his mane of straight, white hair. His features were long and sharp, like a blade, and his eyes were edged in kohl. He looked amused, like some kind of cunning, dangerous boreal trickster-god.

  Hawser stared up at the rune priest in quiet alarm. He could hear Aun Helwintr’s voice, but the priest’s lips were not moving.

  ‘The measure of your surprise, Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ the rune priest murmured without using his mouth, ‘reflects the unconscious contempt you have for the Sixth Legion Astartes.’

  ‘Contempt? No—’

  ‘You cannot hide it. We are barbarians, arctic savages, gene-fixed and dressed up with war-tech, and sent off to do unseemly labour for our more cultured masters. It is a common belief.’

  ‘I never said that—’ Hawser protested.

  ‘Or even consciously thought it. But deep down inside you, there is a patronising sense of superiority. You are a civilised man, and you’ve come to study us, like a magos biologis observing some primitive tribe of throwbacks. We live like animals, and we follow shamans. And yet… Great Terra! Could it be that our shamans have real gifts? Genuine powers? Could it be that they are more than just bone-rattling, bead-jangling gothi, out of their heads on mushrooms, howling at the sky?’

  ‘Psionics,’ whispered Hawser.

  ‘Psionics,’ Aun Helwintr echoed, smiling. He used his real voice.

  ‘I had heard that some of the Legions actually had psyker contingents,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Most of them have,’ replied Helwintr.

  ‘But the occurrence is so very rare,’ Hawser said. ‘The mutation is a—’

  ‘The psyker mutation is a priceless asset to our species,’ said Helwintr. ‘Without it, we would be condemned to captivity on Terra. The Great Houses of the Navigators allow us to expand our reach. The astrotelepaths allow us to communicate over the gulfs. But caution must always be exercised. Control.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because when you gaze out with your mind, you never know what will stare back.’

  Hawser got up and faced the rune priest.

  ‘Was there a purpose to this demonstration, apart from scaring me?’ he asked.

  ‘The purpose was the fear,’ Helwintr replied. ‘Just for a second, you thought some kind of fell magic had swept you away. Some kind of maleficarum. You felt the same way that night, years ago, beside that cathedral corpse.’

  Hawser looked at him sharply.

  ‘I can read the pin-sharp memory you shared with Longfang,’ Helwintr told him.

  ‘Are you saying,’ Hawser began, ‘are you saying that my colleague Navid Murza was a psyker, and I never knew it?’

  ‘You come from a society that accepts and uses psykers, skjald. On Old Terra, they walked amongst you on a daily basis. Did you recognise them all? On Fenris, could you tell a ranting shaman from a man who truly has the sight?’

  Hawser tightened his lips. He had no answer. Helwintr leaned closer, and stared down into Hawser’s eyes.

  ‘The truth of it all is that your colleague probably wasn’t a psyker. He had found a crude shortcut to something else. And that is the point. That is the lesson. Psyker ability is not a thing of itself. It allows us to draw on a greater power. It is just another path to that same something else. The best path. The safest path. Even then, it’s not without its pitfalls. If you’d care to, you may define maleficarum as any sorcery that is not performed under the most stringent application of psyker control.’

  ‘Just like that, you tell me I live in a universe of magic,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Just like that,’ agreed Helwintr. ‘Is it so hard to reconcile with all the other wonders and horrors?’

  ‘What about the knife?’ asked Hawser. ‘It was the knife.’

  ‘It was not the same,’ Helwintr replied. ‘But something wanted you to think it was. Something wanted you to think that the Sixth Legion Astartes had manipulated you and intervened in your life at some point in the past. Something wanted you to mistrust us and make us enemies.’

  He took an athame off the stand and showed it to Hawser.

  ‘This is the blade Ogvai used,’ he said. ‘You recognise it well enough now, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

  ‘It was made to look like the one you remembered,’ said Helwintr. ‘Something got into your memories and altered them to turn you against us.’

  Hawser swallowed.

  ‘What could do that?’ he asked. ‘Who could do that?’

  Helwintr shrugged, as though he didn’t care.

  ‘Perhaps it was whoever made sure you could speak Juvjk and Wurgen from the moment you arrived on Fenris,’ he said.

  AUN HELWINTR RAISED his left hand and beckoned, though Hawser was sure the gesture was unnecessary. Fith Godsmote disengaged his practice cage and jumped down to approach them.

  It was extremely noisy in the training hall of Niddhoggur’s company deck. Godsmote’s cage was whining to a halt, but most of the others were still occupied, and their mechanised armatures of blades of target drones were emitting high pitched screams as they whirled around. On the open deck mats, Wolves in leatherwork armour sparred with each other using staves of bone.

  Godsmote, like all of them, looked like a flayed human in his leatherware. His black-pinned gold eyes blazed inside the slits of his gleaming brown mask. He had been training with two axes, and he held on to them as he came over rather than racking them.

/>   ‘Priest?’ he said.

  ‘A duty for you,’ said Helwintr.

  ‘I serve,’ Godsmote nodded.

  Helwintr glanced at Hawser.

  ‘Say to him what you said to me,’ the priest prompted.

  ‘I’ve never been a fighter,’ said Hawser.

  Godsmote snorted.

  ‘This is known about you,’ he remarked, amused.

  ‘Can I finish?’ Hawser asked.

  Godsmote shrugged.

  ‘I’ve never been a fighter, but the Vlka Fenryka have seen fit to rebuild me with great strength and speed. I have the physical capacity, but none of the skills.’

  ‘He wants to learn how to handle a weapon,’ said Helwintr.

  ‘Why?’ asked Godsmote. ‘He’s our skjald. We’ll protect him.’

  ‘If he wants to, it’s his choice,’ said Helwintr. ‘Tell yourself that part of our duty to protect him is teaching him to protect himself.’

  Godsmote looked down at Hawser dubiously.

  ‘There’s no sense trying to teach you everything,’ he said. ‘We’ll pick one thing and focus on that.’

  ‘What do you suggest?’ asked Hawser.

  THE AXE WAS a single-bladed weapon with an almost silvered finish to the plasteel head. Its haft was a touch under a metre long, and hand shaped from a piece of bone from Asaheim. The polished ivory possessed a yellow glow. Hawser wasn’t sure what kind of animal the bone had been taken from, but he had been told it was supple and pretty much unbreakable.

  Unbreakable for his purposes, anyway.

  The axe lived on his hip in a loop of plasteel that was held to his belt by a piece of leatherwork.

  ‘Don’t loiter,’ Bear warned him.

  Hawser didn’t intend to, but he was sweating like a pig in the heat, and it was a considerable effort to keep up with the striding Astartes.

  He was the only regular human amongst them; a slight figure dwarfed by the two dozen fully armoured Wolves thundering down the tunnel around him. The thralls and the regular human-sized servants were following them at a distance.

  Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot led the party, his helm clamped under his arm. There was no orderly ranking to the group, but Aun Helwintr and Jormungndr Two-blade flanked the jarl, and Najot Threader and the other wolf priests seemed to glide along in the rear part of the group.

  The Wolves were marching purposefully, as if Ogvai was in a hurry to be somewhere. After forty weeks of transit, Hawser wondered what could be so important it couldn’t have been undertaken with more circumspection. They had deployed from Nidhoggur the moment it achieved high anchor, which made it feel like an urgent combat drop, but it was clearly not that at all. They had come in blind, through terrifying atmospherics that had required instrumentation-only guidance, and eventually slid under a volcanic shelf and set down in deep, sheltered landing pits.

  The local heat was immense. The rock around them was black and volcanic, and there was a bad-egg whiff of sulphur in the air. The air itself shimmered with a haze of heat. As he walked down the Stormbird’s ramp behind Godsmote, Hawser had felt an ear-pop sensation that suggested that vast, hidden atmosphere processors were waging a monumental war to maintain a viable environment.

  This wasn’t a world designed to support life.

  The landing pits, and the tunnels that led away from them into the core of the planet, had been clean cut on a massive scale, as if with industrial meltas. The tunnels sliced through the volcanic rock, leaving an unnaturally smooth surface like glass. There was a constant rumble of the storms outside, and the seismic growing pains of the young planet under their feet. Fiery light, undulating and seething, oozed through the glassy walls and floor of the tunnels, and lit their way. It was like being stoppered inside a glass bottle that had been cast into a bonfire. Hawser was disconcerted by an odd sense of the very old and the very new. The subterranean spaces were like ancient habitation cave sites he had investigated on many Conservatory expeditions during his life, yet these had been cut recently, by hand. There was an odd disconnection between the temporary and the permanent too: someone had commanded enough power and resources to bore holes and chambers out of the solid rock of a supervolcano, and to install a zone of safe environment on an inimical world, both of them monumental feats of physical engineering.

  Yet Hawser had the distinct feeling that once the intended business here, whatever it was, was done, the whole site would be abandoned. It was purpose built. It was not beyond reason to presume that the lifelessness of the world was part of that purpose. Whatever that business, there was a chance it might turn ugly. Of course there was. An entire company of the Vlka Fenryka had been summoned to achieve it.

  Whoever had ordered the construction of this environment, had wanted it done in a remote place where there was no danger anyone could get caught in the crossfire.

  ‘What is this place?’ Hawser asked, scrambling to keep up.

  ‘Quiet,’ Bear hissed.

  ‘Forty weeks! How much longer before you tell me anything?’

  ‘Quiet,’ Bear hissed, with greater emphasis.

  ‘I can’t tell the account if I don’t know the details,’ said Hawser, a little more loudly. ‘It’d be a poor story then, not at all fitting for Tra’s fireside.’

  Ogvai came to a sudden halt, so sudden it almost took the fast moving group by surprise. Everyone stopped obediently. Ogvai turned, and glowered back through the figures at Hawser. Sweat was running down Hawser’s face in the heat. All the Wolves had mouths half-open, teeth bared, and were slightly panting, like dogs on a warm day.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ he growled.

  ‘I’m asking how I’m supposed to be a skjald if you don’t tell me anything, jarl,’ Hawser called back.

  Ogvai looked at Aun Helwintr. The rune priest closed his eyes for a second, took a calming breath, and nodded.

  Ogvai acknowledged the nod and turned back to Hawser.

  ‘This place is called Nikaea,’ he said.

  THEY ENTERED A great circular chamber, melta-cut from the bedrock. The surfaces of the room were like black glass shot with glittering mica, but still it reminded Hawser of the ivory-cased chambers of the Aett.

  People were waiting for them. Warriors of the Sixth Legion Astartes had been posted around the perimeter, but they were not from Tra. Another company was present.

  Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl of Fyf, rose to his feet from a stone bench.

  ‘Og!’ he growled, and the two mighty jarls bear-hugged, banging their armoured chests against each other. Ogvai exchanged some rough sparring remarks with Skarssen and then turned to the other alpha wolf who had been sitting with the Jarl of Fyf.

  ‘Lord Gunn,’ Ogvai acknowledged with a tip of his head. The other warrior was older and bigger than either Skarssen and Ogvai. His beard was waxed into two, sharp, up-and-forward-curving tusks, and the left side of his face was inked with dark lines that resembled knotwork.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Hawser asked Godsmote.

  ‘Gunnar Gunnhilt, called Lord Gunn, Jarl of Onn,’ Godsmote replied.

  ‘He’s jarl of the First Company?’ Hawser asked.

  Godsmote nodded.

  Three companies. Three companies? What could be happening on this place Nikaea that demanded the presence of three companies of Wolves?

  Lord Gunn pushed past Ogvai and confronted Hawser.

  ‘Is this the skjald?’ he asked. He took Hawser’s head between his huge hands and wrestled it back, stretching Hawser’s eyes wide to peer into them, and then pulled open Hawser’s jaw and leaned down to sniff Hawser’s breath, as though he was livestock.

  He let go of Hawser and turned away.

  ‘Has it begun?’ asked Ogvai.

  ‘Yes,’ Skarssen replied, ‘but only in a preliminary way. They don’t know we’re here yet.’

  ‘I don’t want them to know,’ said Ohthere Wyrdmake. Wyrdmake was one of a number of rune priests who had been standing, silent, spectral and attentive, behind the seated ja
rls. They were all panting slightly, open-mouthed. The volcanic heat of the chamber didn’t seem to touch Skarssen’s priest. Even the diffuse, pulsating light of it on his face took a greenish cast, like cold fire. Wyrdmake looked at Aun Helwintr. Something passed between them.

  ‘I don’t want them to know,’ Wyrdmake repeated.

  ‘We’re here purely as a safety measure,’ said Lord Gunn. ‘Make that understood. We only reveal our strength if wyrd turns against us. If that happens, this becomes a no-quarter operation, where our only purpose is to secure the primary. Anything and everything that moves contrary to us under those circumstances gets a kill-stroke. Are we clear? I don’t care who it is. This is why we exist. Make sure that all in Tra know that—’

  Wyrdmake cleared his throat.

  ‘Something to say, priest?’ Lord Gunn asked.

  Wyrdmake nodded his head towards Hawser.

  ‘You said it was safe enough to talk,’ said Lord Gunn.

  ‘We’re as safe as we can be down here,’ Wyrdmake replied. ‘However, I don’t see the need to discuss Rout strategy in front of a skjald. He can wait somewhere.’

  ‘Varangr!’ Skarssen called. His herald appeared from the ranks around the chamber walls.

  ‘Yes, Skarsi?’

  ‘Var, take Ibn Rustah and put him somewhere.’

  ‘Where, Skarsi?’

  ‘I think it was suggested earlier today that he should be put in the quiet room as soon as he made planetfall.’

  ‘Really, Skarsi? Really? The quiet room?’

  ‘Yes, Var!’ Skarssen snapped. He looked at Lord Gunn. ‘You have a problem with that?’ he asked.

  Lord Gunn shrugged and chuckled a little wet leopard-chuckle.

  ‘Valdor made a special point of asking us not to do anything provocative, but we don’t take our orders from him. What do you think, priest?’

  Wyrdmake gently bowed his head.

  ‘Whatever pleases my Lord Gunn,’ he said.

  ‘Very little ever pleases me, gothi,’ replied Lord Gunn. ‘Being here doesn’t please me. The nature of this council, the gravity of what’s at stake here, the infernal politicking and pussy-footing, none of it pleases me. However, sticking this little runt in the quiet room might amuse me for a short while.’