Prospero Burns

  When he spoke, it was with a wet leopard-growl.

  ‘The Emperor has made His ruling,’ he said.

  TWELVE

  Thardia

  ‘SO YOU LIKED the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

  ‘It was amusing enough,’ said Longfang. ‘It wasn’t your best.’

  No…

  ‘I can assure you it was,’ said Hawser.

  Longfang shook his head. Droplets of blood flecked from his beard.

  ‘No, you’ll learn better ones,’ he said. ‘Far better ones. And even now, it’s not the best you know.’

  No, again… not this memory… You keep sticking on this memory… We have to get past it…

  ‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser with some defiance. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

  ‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

  Hawser woke with a start. It was all a dream. He lay back, calming down, trying to slow his panicked breathing, his bolting heart. Just a dream. Just a dream.

  Better. We’re closer now. Past the memory of Longfang, closer to the one that matters.

  Hawser felt tired and unrefreshed, as if his sleep had been sour, or sedative assisted. His limbs ached. Sustained artificial gravity always did that to him.

  Golden light was knifing into his chamber around the window shutter, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

  There was an electronic chime.

  Keep with it. Focus.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Hawser. He sat up. He was so stiff, so worn out. He hadn’t felt this bad for a long time. His leg was sore. Maybe there were painkillers in the drawer.

  He limped to the window, and pressed the stud to open the shutter. It rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. He looked out. It was a hell of a view.

  Ignore the view. Who cares about the view? You’ve seen it before, over and over, in life and in your dreams. It’s what’s behind you that matters. Focus!

  The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below him. He was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. He could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, he could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds and, below, he could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one he was aboard, which was…

  It doesn’t matter. It. Doesn’t. Matter. Stay in that moment. Focus your mind on that memory, on the one part of the memory that’s really important!

  Lemurya. Yes, that was it. Lemurya. A luxury suite on the underside of the Lemuryan plate.

  His eyes refocussed. He saw his own sunlit reflection in the thick glass of the window port.

  You’re distracted! Don’t be distracted! Ignore what you look like! This is a dream! A memory! Behind you, that’s all that counts! Turn around! Look behind you! Focus! Who’s behind you?

  Old! So old! So old! How old was he? Eighty? Eighty years standard? He recoiled. This was wrong. On Fenris, they’d remade him, they’d—

  Except he hadn’t been to Fenris yet. He hadn’t even left Terra.

  Focus! Who’s behind you?

  Bathed in golden sunlight, he stared at his aghast reflection. He saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind him.

  Yes! Yes!

  Terror constricted him.

  ‘How can you be here?’ he asked.

  And woke.

  Hawser groaned. He was covered in sweat and his heart was palpitating. The astringent smells of herbal ointments and body paint assaulted his nose.

  ‘Did you see?’ asked Aun Helwintr.

  ‘No,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Ah,’ said the priest.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hawser.

  The priest shrugged.

  ‘We’ll try again,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, or later tonight if there’s strength in you.’

  ‘It was very close this time,’ said Hawser. ‘I mean this time, I actually turned around earlier. I changed my memory, I behaved differently in it. I turned around, but it still wasn’t fast enough.’

  ‘Next time,’ said Helwintr. He seemed distracted.

  They had come up through the silent stands of forest into the crags above the high station, a two-hour trek they had made every day for a week. It was cold, and if they made an early start, frost could be found lingering on the trail. The rocks of the crags, grey and cream, were sheathed in beards of winter lichen: purple, mauve, blue, red, some as rough as sandpaper or as soft as moleskin.

  Aun Helwintr claimed that the loneliness of the crags aided contemplation and inner sight. It was away from the traffic of voices and everyday life, and on Thardia, where humans had only inhabited the high station and the research facility, there was no legacy of wights or ghost memories to tangle a man’s threads.

  Helwintr liked the cold too. Even at its polar extremes, Thardia barely approached the lethal majesty of a Fenrisian winter, but the priest liked the bracing climate and the marks a man’s breath left in the air.

  Helwintr collected up the pots of salve, the talismans, and the other paraphernalia he had arranged around the table rock they had chosen for the day’s effort. The rock, low, flat-topped and large enough for Hawser to lie on it, full length, like a man stretched out on a bed, had a bluish coat of lichen on it. It reminded Hawser of the worn velvet lining of an Ossetian prayer box or an old gaming board.

  The priest was fully caparisoned with winter pelts and his leatherware garb. His mask, head-binding, chest and shoulder wear and arm guards were all of glossy black leather with involuted knotwork. His long white hair, lacquered into an S-tail, was protruding from the back of his scalp-case. His black face-guard was a prophylactic fear-mask with a daemon-snarl to the mouth and snout intended to scare wights away.

  Hawser wore leather gear of his own, dark brown and of simpler design, with a half-mask and no full-head casing. It had been a twenty-six week translation from Nikaea to Thardia, and he’d used his time to learn and practise some basic hideworking skills. Men from Tra, at different times, had shown him various techniques, and had reviewed his work and suggested refinements. Hawser had begun some rudimentary knotwork decoration down the left arm guard, but it was slow, and he was disgruntled at his lack of ability. The rest of the leatherware was plain and undecorated.

  His accoutrements gathered, Helwintr crouched on a slab of rock, his legs bent wide, his back hunched. The pose reminded Hawser, just for a moment, of an amphibian on a lily-pad. Then it reminded him of something else: a lupine predator, vigilant on a rock, calm but alert in the sunlight, resting but surveying the forest below.

  Helwintr took an athame from his belt and began to make marks in the lichen covering the rock he was squatting on.

  Hawser was cold. He left the priest to whatever abstruse gothi business had engaged him. The open air of any planet’s biosphere was more conducive to such activities than the chambers of a void-borne starship. Helwintr was making the best use of the taskforce’s brief stay-over at Thardia.

  To the east, in the glassy sky, a constellation unfamiliar to the heavenscape of Thardia glimmered and shone. It was a star-pattern that this world’s sky had never seen before, and never would again, a star-pattern that even a spiritually bankrupt gothi could read as an astral house of doom and destruction.

  It was the lights of the taskforce ships at high anchor. Taskforce Geata, six companies of the Sixth, along with their support vessels and enthralled servers. A notable concentration of strength by the standards of any Legion, especially in this age when the demands of the Great Crusade diluted the Astartes a
cross the vast celestial stage. By the standards of the Sixth, almost unheard of. The official line was that the companies were assembling at Thardia for a moot and resupply, but Hawser knew something else was going on.

  There was a chill in his bones. Hawser drew his axe and moved down the slope away from the priest, beginning his long, repetitive regimen of practice strokes and turns that Godsmote had taught him. He was beginning to handle the weapon well enough to have earned Godsmote’s approval once or twice. Hawser could turn the axe, rotate and check the angles of stroke and attack, block, and switch hands, either from one to another or from a single to a double-handed grip. He had even mastered a showy little spin, a rapid, one-handed rotation that mimicked some of the dazzling blade skills he’d seen displayed by warriors like Bear and Erthung, but Godsmote had warned him against it. Too flashy, he’d said. Too much risk of losing control or grip, just for the sake of showing off.

  Axe-fighting was a complex and demanding dance. It looked much more brutal and simplistic than sword-work, but in some respects it was vastly more subtle than the ballet of the swordsman. The killing edge of an axe was in a position to harm an opponent for a much smaller percentage of engagement time than the killing surfaces of a sword. Axe fighting was about swinging and circling, moving and evading, choosing the moment to land the blow. It was about seeing that opening coming three or four steps ahead, like a good regicide player, and then taking advantage of it without telegraphing the stroke. It was about predicting the interface between swing and moving target. Misjudge that, and you’d lose the fight.

  Axes were cold-climate weapons, because they were as much working tools for ice and firewood and butchery as they were weapons. But the art of using an axe in a fight was about predictive judgement, so it was no wonder that cultures like the Fenrisians had become preoccupied by prophecy. Reading the future was a survival skill at the micro level, and thus had become bred into their culture at the macro. Games of predictive strategy were compulsory activities in the Rout.

  For his part, Hawser had spent many of his childhood hours playing regicide with Rector Uwe.

  Hawser put his shoulders and back into the loops and turns, making his weapon hum as it cut the air. The exercise began to warm him up too.

  He turned hard, swinging around, chopping the axe in a figure of eight, and as he did so, he realised that he was clearly beginning to inherit the Vlka Fenryka’s gift for prophecy. He knew before he’d even turned that he was going to have to stop the axe swing short.

  Ohthere Wyrdmake was standing right behind him. The keen bite of Hawser’s redirected axe still barely missed him.

  ‘Move,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘With me, now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now!’

  Wyrdmake’s manner was hard to read at the best of times. His inscrutability, the sheer imposing threat of him, made him an uncomfortable presence to be around, and the rune priests were the most remote and inhuman of all the Vlka Fenryka.

  He was blinking rather rapidly, though, and there was a touch of perspiration on his brow. To Hawser, Wyrdmake seemed agitated and uncomfortable.

  ‘There’s danger here,’ he said.

  ‘We must warn Helwintr,’ Hawser replied. He looked back up the slope to the rock where Aun Helwintr had been crouching. There was no sign of Tra’s rune priest.

  Hawser looked back at Wyrdmake. The priest put an index finger against his lips, seized Hawser by the wrist, and started to drag him towards the forest line.

  The forest vegetation was dark, tuberous growths with glossy black trunks and lacy foliage like the ragged wings of dead insects. Only at a distance, in general, structural terms, did it resemble actual trees.

  Some of the growths were of fantastic size, bloated and wizened with age. Hawser had paid them little attention each day as he’d trekked through the glades. Now he was among them, furtive and confused, he became aware of how alien they were. There was a smell of dust and cinnamon. A black humus of decaying leaves covered the soil, and insects, tiny as pepper dust, billowed in the sunlit spaces between the plant shadows.

  Hawser tried to make as little noise as possible, desperately trying to apply the techniques of stalking and foot-placement Godsmote had taught him, but he was like a noisy sack that Wyrdmake was dragging behind him. The priest moved in utter silence.

  They got into cover in the shadow of a vast tuber-growth. The veined filigree of its canopy hung overhead like a widow’s veil. Hawser had leaf dust in his throat and tried not to cough.

  Wyrdmake pushed Hawser back against the plant bole. The bark of the tuber was as glossy and black as the skin of an aubergine. The priest held up a hand indicating that Hawser should keep himself there, and then raised his head.

  Hawser could half-see Wyrdmake in the shadows in front of him. Like Hawser and Helwintr, the priest of Fyf was clad in leatherwork gear, pelts and mask. Totemic strings of beads and animal teeth were looped around his neck. Hawser wondered how they didn’t make a sound when he moved. He became locked on the question. It was so silly. It almost made him laugh out loud. How did they not make a noise? Was there a trick to it?

  Wyrdmake kept himself raised up for a moment, panning his head around, watching the glade, listening. Then he crouched down beside Hawser and started to fiddle with one of the bead strings around his neck.

  ‘I know what Helwintr’s been doing this past week,’ Wyrdmake whispered to him. ‘He’s had my blessing and advice on the matter. Getting past your sculpted memories is a very worthwhile goal for you and the Vlka Fenryka.’

  Hawser swallowed and nodded. Wyrdmake had taken two black feathers off his necklace, and he was using a small length of thin silver wire to bind them to a garnet bead and a human finger bone he’d produced from a belt pouch.

  ‘The memory architecture is very strong,’ Wyrdmake continued as he worked, his voice barely a whisper. ‘There is cunning in it. Maleficarum. Helwintr reports to me every day. He is frustrated. Today, he tried a new technique. A new way, perhaps to unlock your thoughts. You know Eada Haelfwulf?’

  Hawser nodded. Haelfwulf was another rune priest attached to Tra Company, serving their needs as one of Helwintr’s senior gothi. He was a tall, raw-boned warrior who dyed his leather gear red to match his flame-hair and beard.

  ‘Haelfwulf came with you today.’

  ‘I didn’t see him,’ Hawser whispered.

  ‘That was the idea,’ Wyrdmake whispered back. ‘He stayed back, out of sight, to secretly push at your memories from another angle while Helwintr kept you occupied.’

  ‘So? What’s happened?’

  Wyrdmake shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know. But about an hour ago, I felt a terrible presentiment. A beforehand sense that something ill was about to take place up here in the crags. I came at once.’

  ‘You’re scaring me,’ Hawser whispered.

  ‘Good. That means you’re taking me seriously.’

  ‘Where’s Helwintr?’

  ‘When I arrived, all I saw was you, busy at your axe-work.’

  ‘Helwintr was right there!’ Hawser hissed. ‘He was on the rock not twenty metres back from me.’

  ‘Not when I arrived.’

  ‘He wouldn’t just disappear. He was busy with something. Some cunning work. He was listening.’

  ‘He’d sensed it too,’ Wyrdmake said. He had finished what he’d been doing with the feathers and the trinkets from his pouch. He cupped them in his hands, blew on them, and then threw his hands up.

  Something black fluttered away into the canopy. Hawser heard its noisy wings. He got the brief impression of a raven, even though he knew no raven could have been hidden about Wyrdmake’s person.

  ‘What—’ he began.

  Wyrdmake silenced him.

  ‘Wait now.’

  The priest closed his eyes, as if concentrating hard. Hawser became acutely conscious of the sound of his own breathing. The forest was eerily quiet. There was an occasional sound: the fidget of the wind,
or of some small creature, the tick of burrowing insects, the soft brush of leaf litter drifting down from the tuber-trees.

  He heard a flutter from not far away. The sound of a large bird moving through the upper levels of the canopy.

  ‘Did you… did you make a crow?’ Hawser asked.

  Wyrdmake peered at him.

  ‘A what?’ he whispered.

  ‘A crow.’

  ‘What word is that, skjald?’

  ‘Crow.’

  ‘You mean crow?’ the priest asked.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Hawser whispered.

  ‘Not in Juvjk or Wurgen you didn’t. You spoke the Terran-tongue name for it.’

  ‘No, I didn’t, I—’

  ‘Be. Quiet.’

  Wyrdmake closed his eyes again. Hawser shut up. He heard the wings beating once more, but further off. He heard another noise too, the faintest suggestion of something moving somewhere through the trees. Whatever it was, it was bigger than a burrowing insect or a forest floor creature.

  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.