Prospero Burns

  ‘Predictions may be made,’ said Aun Helwintr. ‘Wyrd may be parsed. A man’s character may be analysed, and that analysis extrapolated to foresee what career he might take, and where he might find himself at certain points in his life. An experienced diviner can chart a man’s life, and train him like a plant, tend him, make him grow in a specific direction for a specific purpose.’

  ‘Who did that to me?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Someone who exploited your innate characteristics, Kasper,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Someone who saw that your innocent hunger for lost knowledge could be harnessed for their benefit.’

  ‘He means our benighted brother,’ said the Wolf King.

  THE CUSTODES CALLED Amon took Hawser out of the vast cathedral of the command post, and up through melta-cut tunnel levels guarded by Astartes of the Ninth and Fourteenth Legions Astartes. The Custodes carried his ceremonial weapon, the guardian spear, an ornate golden halberd that incorporated a master-crafted bolter. The tunnels were smoky and hazed with heat. Hawser could feel the steady and monumental pump of the atmosphere processors preserving the engineered enclave of Nikaea from instant incineration. His heart thumped and he felt sick. The beautiful Primarch Fulgrim had suggested he be allowed to walk and settle his thoughts, though Hawser suspected that, yet again, other hands were directing his life.

  He was glad to be away from the group of worthies, however. To be the focus of attention for two primarchs, two Custodes and three senior Astartes was overwhelming. They had all loomed over him literally and in terms of potency. He had felt like a child in a room with adults, or an insect in a specimen jar.

  Or a livestock animal tethered out as an offering for predators.

  ‘Are we not moving out of the range of the untouchables?’ Hawser asked his escort.

  ‘Yes,’ replied the Custodes. ‘Only the lower levels are thought-proofed.’

  ‘So my mind is about to become visible?’ Hawser asked. ‘Visible, perhaps to my manipulator? Isn’t there a risk that I’m about to give a great deal away?’

  Amon nodded.

  ‘There’s also a good chance of securing some leverage,’ he said. ‘The Wolf King knew you were a spy, but he kept you around for a long time. He kept you on Fenris and took you out into the Crusade. He wanted whoever was spying on him to see what you saw, and to understand that he was aware of them. The Wolf King believes that he doesn’t win battles by hiding secrets from his enemies. He believes he wins them by showing his enemies exactly what they’re up against and how miserably they’re going to lose.’

  ‘That’s arrogant.’

  ‘That’s his way.’

  ‘This enemy, it’s not really an enemy, is it? Another primarch? We’re talking about rivalry, aren’t we?’

  ‘All of the Legions run networks of intelligencers,’ replied the Custodes. ‘But they do it for different reasons. The Space Wolves do it to strategically evaluate any opponent they might ever, even theoretically, face. The Thousand Sons do it primarily to feed their hunger for learning.’

  ‘Learning?’ Hawser echoed. ‘What do they want to know?’

  ‘As I understand it,’ replied the Custodes, ‘everything.’

  He ushered Hawser ahead of him with a subservient gesture. There was a light ahead of them, as if the sun was rising, shafting its rays down the throat of a specially aligned barrow-grave. The tunnel was broadening out and opening.

  Hawser stepped out onto a platform of black rock like an immense gallery that curved around the upper level of the vast volcanic interior. The ragged lip of the cone above him was backlit by a sky lit pink with Nikaea’s vulcanism. It reminded Hawser, for a swift, unmanning moment, of the view up out of the entry-wound pit on the Quietude’s home world, the view he had turned to look up at so he did not have to behold Longfang’s doom.

  Above the pink horizon, the open sky above the cone was still. There was an eerie calm inside the colossal space that the supervolcano enclosed.

  Hawser glanced at the Custodes, who nodded reassuringly. Around the curved range of the huge gallery, other figures had gathered, looking down into the volcanic bowl. Hawser stepped forwards to the lip, a waist-high wall of glittering black basalt. He felt its gritty surface as he leaned against it. He felt the tug of soft wind stirring far below, the tremor of an atmosphere subjugated but defiant.

  The gallery and its lip had been melta-cut. Below, similar industry had carved out more galleries in concentric rings, stepping down the inner slopes of the cone flue until they became, in turn, stacked tiers of black benches, hewn from the rock, forming a monumental amphitheatre.

  Figures crowded the watching galleries, and packed the benched tiers. Hawser peered to make them out. Most were so far away, they were specks: robed adepts, nobles in finery with attendants, groups of Astartes.

  Hawser glanced back at Amon, his escort.

  ‘What is happening here?’ he asked.

  ‘Philosophies are being tested,’ replied the Custodes. ‘The uses and abuses of power are being considered and weighed.’

  ‘By whom?’ asked Hawser.

  Amon Tauromachian made a sound that was probably laughter.

  ‘My dear ser,’ he said, ‘look again.’

  Hawser looked down. The wind stirred up at him. Vertigo tugged his belly at the soaring plunge past the galleries beneath, down the sculpted slopes, over the banked tiers of seating, staged like an ancient Romanii arena, where freemen would bay and jeer as slaves were thrown to wolves.

  Down, down, over the heads of some of the Imperium’s most potent and significant beings, to the polished floor of the amphitheatre, where a spread eagle the size of a Stormbird had been inlaid in gold in the black marble.

  Adjacent to the inlaid eagle’s head was a stepped dais.

  The dais held light.

  The light had been there all the time, too bright to be reconciled, so sublime that his mind had denied it rather than recognise it. It was the source of the rays he had mistaken as sunrise. It was a supernova of blue-white radiance that shafted light into the sky like a spear.

  It was a light and it was a figure, and the thought and reality of both made him sob out loud. He had been looking right at it, but his brain had been too afraid to consciously acknowledge what it was seeing.

  The Master of Mankind was holding audience, and the light of his magnitude was humbling to behold.

  It was the second most extraordinary thing Kasper Hawser would ever witness.

  ‘YOU HAVE TO look,’ said Amon.

  ‘I can’t bear to,’ mumbled Hawser, wiping the tears from his eyes.

  ‘You can’t look away either,’ replied the Custodes.

  Shaking, Hawser gazed down. He perceived the shape of a throne in the radiance, a seat of flaring wings. Black banners hung above the seated figure, suspended by choirs of cherubs that were barely visible in the glare.

  Flanking the throne on the dais were Custodes warriors, their lance weapons held at attention. The outflung light seemed to infuse them too, transforming their lustrous golden armour into living, writhing magma.

  ‘Who are those other men?’ asked Hawser. ‘They can’t even be men, to stand on the dais so close to the light and not be burned away.’

  Amon stepped in beside him, and identified the figures one by one, pointing his index finger.

  ‘The Choirmaster of the Astropaths, the Lord Militant of the Imperial Army, my lord Kelbor-Hal, Fabricator General of Mars, the Master of Navigators, and my lord Malcador, the Sigillite.’

  ‘Ser, I have lost the ability to feel,’ said Hawser. ‘This day has numbed me. Awe has given way to some kind of trauma, I think. My mind is broken. My sanity has fled. I can no longer register shock, or be impressed. You have just named the five principals of the Emperor’s court, and they are just words to me. Words. You might as well tell me I have sunk with Atlantys or been buried in the caves of Agarttha. A man should not be forced to face the myths that underpin his universe.’

  ‘Unfortunately,
some men must,’ said Amon. ‘And isn’t that what you’ve been doing your entire life? So your bio-briefing ran, anyway. You’ve searched your whole career for the myths that have been hidden by the dust of ages, and now they confront you, you shy away? It suggests a lack of backbone.’

  Hawser jerked his gaze away from the spectacle and stared at the towering Custodes by his side.

  ‘I think I might be permitted a little recoil! I’m not used to this rarefied society like you!’

  ‘I apologise, ser,’ said Amon, ‘if I offended you, but it is your inquisitive quality that caused you to be selected as a player in the game. It’s what made you appealing to the Fifteenth Legion Astartes. You were already an eager seeker of knowledge. They merely had to harness it.’

  ‘How could they do that? I’ve never even encountered one of their kind.’

  ‘Never?’ asked Amon.

  ‘Never! I—’

  Hawser’s voice dried up. Another memory swam close out of the lightless abyss at the back of his mind.

  Boeotia. So long ago, so very, very long ago.

  He had asked, ‘Ser, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

  ‘The Fifteenth.’

  The Fifteenth. So. The Thousand Sons.

  ‘What is your name?’

  Hawser had turned. The Tupelov Lancers had led most of the team out of the shrine, leaving only him behind. Two more Astartes, each as immense as the first, had manifested behind him. How could something that big have moved so stealthily?

  ‘What is your name?’ the new arrival had repeated.

  ‘Hawser, ser. Kasper Hawser, conservator, assigned to—’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘What?’ Hawser had asked. The other Astartes had spoken.

  ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

  ‘I don’t understand, ser.’

  ‘You told us your name. Was it supposed to be a joke? Is it some nickname?’

  ‘I don’t understand. That’s my name. Why would you think it’s a joke?’

  ‘Kasper Hawser? You don’t get the reference?’

  ‘It was years ago,’ Hawser said to Amon. ‘Just once, and so briefly. I had barely remembered it. It couldn’t have been then. It was so… insignificant. They asked about my name.’

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with my name, is there?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘Names are important,’ said Amon. ‘They invest power on those who own them, and grant power over those who own them to those who learn them.’

  ‘I… what?’

  ‘When you know someone’s name, you have power over them. Why do you suppose no one knows the Emperor by anything other than his rank?’

  ‘You speak of this as if it were sorcery!’ exclaimed Hawser.

  ‘Sorcery? Now there’s an accusation. You know the power of words. You saw what Murza did with words in Lutetia.’

  ‘Has the damn rune priest shared that story with everybody?’ Hawser snapped.

  ‘Who gave you your name?’

  ‘Rector Uwe, when I was a foundling. No one knew my name when I was brought to the commune. He chose it for me.’

  ‘It is a name from a folktale. Kaspar Hawser, Casper Hauser, there are variant forms. In ancient times, in the city of Nuremborg, before even the Age of Technology, he was a boy from nowhere, without parents or a past, who had been raised in nothing but a darkened cell, with nothing but a toy horse carved of wood to play with, who emerged into the world only to die in equal mystery, a riddle, in the gardens of Ansbach. This rector, he chose your name well. It is suffused with a sublime power derived from significance. The foundling child. The past of utter darkness. The quest for truth. Even the wooden horse, an attendant symbolism, representing the deceit by which one party may penetrate the defences of a rival.’

  ‘The Strategy of Ilios?’ asked Hawser. ‘Is that what I am?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Amon. ‘Though the Wolves, with their senses sharper than any of the Astartes, saw through it in a second.’

  ‘It is simply preposterous to suggest my life has been controlled through my name,’ spat Hawser. ‘Where would you come by such a notion?’

  The Custodes tapped the throat of his armour.

  ‘Names are crucial signifiers for my kind. A Custodes’s name is engraved inside the chest plate of his gold armour. The name begins at the collar, on the right side, with just the first element exposed, and then runs around the inside of the plate. For some of the oldest veterans, the accumulated names filled up the linings of their torso plates, and were engraved outside like belts across the abdomen. Constantin Valdor’s name is nineteen hundred and thirty-two elements long.’

  ‘I know this tradition amongst the Custodes,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Then you will understand that “Amon” is just the start of his name, the earliest part of it. The second part is “Tauromachian”, then “Xigaze”, the site of his organic birth, then “Lepron”, the house of his formative study, then “Cairn Hedrossa”, the place where he was first tutored in weapon use—’

  ‘Stop. Stop! You mean to say your name, not his,’ protested Hawser.

  ‘When one shares a name,’ said the voice that belonged to Amon, Custodes of the first circle, ‘it becomes especially easy to achieve mastery and control. My name is also Amon. For the moment, I have used that coincidence to eclipse your noble escort. Turn and know me, Kasper Ansbach Hawser.’

  Hawser was abruptly aware that the Custodes was oddly still, as if paralysis had seized him, or his burnished armour had been used to clothe a statue. Amon Tauromachian, Custodes, stood with one hand resting on the gallery parapet, gazing out into the amphitheatre, utterly still.

  Hawser began to turn, looking to his right. His skin began to crawl. An emotion finally pierced the traumatic numbness that had overwhelmed his mind.

  It was fear.

  Something else stood behind him, something that had approached behind his back without betraying its presence. It was an Astartes warrior in red and gold, his bulk half blurred by the distortion field of a falsehood device. He leaned his massive elbows on the parapet, like a casual spectator, the gaze of his green-lensed visor on the theatre below rather than on Hawser.

  ‘I am Amon of the Fifteenth Astartes, Captain of the Ninth Fellowship, Equerry to the Primarch.’ The Astartes was using his own voice now.

  ‘How long have I been conversing with you rather than the Custodes?’

  ‘Since we came into the open air,’ the Equerry replied.

  ‘Did you create me?’ asked Hawser. ‘Did you twist me to your will?’

  ‘We guided you to our pathway,’ the warrior replied. ‘Hidden Ones are more obliging if they are not bent against their will, even unconsciously.’

  ‘So you freely admit I’m an asset?’

  ‘Curious, is it not? We know you’re our spy, and so do the Wolves. One might be tempted to presume you were useless.’

  ‘Why am I not?’

  ‘Because things are not yet played out.’

  The Equerry of the Thousand Sons gestured down at the bowl of the amphitheatre. Far below, a shock-haired giant was ascending a small plinth to stand at a wooden lectern facing the radiant dais.

  ‘This is not a council,’ said the Equerry. ‘This is a trial without legitimacy or statute. My beloved primarch, behold him there, is about to plead for mercy on behalf of knowledge to a court driven by superstition and credulity. The Emperor has been steered into this. He has been manipulated into serving judgement on the Crimson King.’

  ‘By who? How is that even possible?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘By the Crimson King’s brothers. Other primarchs are jealous of the Thousand Sons, and the arts we have mastered for the benefit of the Imperium. They call our talents sorcery, and rail against them, but it is simply jealousy. Some hide their envy well. Sanguinius, for example, and the Khan, they pretend it is a minor concern that should simply be settled for the good of everyone, but i
nside they burn with a jealous rage. Others cannot even begin to hide it. Mortarion. The Wolf King. Their hatred is perhaps more honest because it is open.’

  The Equerry looked at Hawser for the first time. The red and gold visage of his crested helm was threatening. The lens slits shone with green light, but the light died as the Equerry lifted the helmet clear of his head. The Equerry was a veteran soldier, with a close-cropped grizzle of hair, and skin like aged paper.

  ‘The Council of Nikaea is intended to resolve the issues surrounding the use of Librarian adepts in the Legions,’ he said. His voice, no longer disguised by the helmet-mic, was deep and rich. ‘We believe that what some call magic is a tool vital to the continued survival of the Imperium. Our opponents call us heretics and decry the lore we have accumulated. If the Emperor rules against us, a divisive wedge will be driven so deeply into the brotherhood of primarchs it will never recover.’

  ‘Especially if you defy the Emperor’s ruling,’ said Hawser.

  ‘He would have no choice but to sanction us,’ the Equerry of the Thousand Sons agreed.

  ‘And that sanction would be the Sixth.’

  ‘Sanction is the only reason he permits the feral and monstrous Sixth to endure. The only way he can justify their creation and continued existence is as his ultimate deterrent.’

  ‘And I am your early warning. Through me, you will see them coming.’

  ‘Yes, Kasper Hawser. Just so.’

  ‘He will rule against you,’ said Hawser. ‘No matter how you dress it up, the art you speak of is maleficarum, and that, I have come to believe, is what led mankind into Old Night.’

  The Equerry turned to look back at the scene below. Hawser studied his profile. He wondered what a warlock was supposed to look like. He wondered if sorcery had a smell.

  He tried to remember if it had been this warrior’s face that had been waiting behind him that morning when he had woken on the orbital plate and looked down at Terra. Had it been this face? Was it familiar?

  ‘Let me tell you of Old Night,’ said the Equerry, ‘since you’ve spent your career trying to uncover its traces. It was the catastrophe of universal proportions the myths say it was. A cosmological apocalypse. And yes, the abuse of certain arcane and transformatory talents were specific causal events. But I stress the word abuse. I’m talking about whole cultures and societies misusing and misapplying esoteric practices, often because they had no understanding of what they were doing. But do you know the most frightening thing about Old Night, Kasper?’