As long as they endure, their accounts will live on, told and retold by skjalds like me to men like you. A fire will be burning. We will smell the copal resin smoking into the air. Perhaps I will not see the men around me, but I will see their shadows, cast up the cave wall by the spitting fire, like cave art lent the illusion of movement by the inconstant flames.
I will try to listen to what is being said by the men during the long, mumbling conversations, so that I can hear all the secrets of the world, and learn every account from the very first to the very last.
IN THE COLDEST, deepest part of the cave, there is a blackness cut by a cold, blue glow. The air smells sterile, like rock in a dry polar highland that lacks any water to form ice. It is far away from the soft warmth and the firelight of the cave, far away from the fraternity of murmuring voices and the smell of smouldering resin. It is there I will be forced to sleep out most of my days. I am too dangerous to keep among the Rout, too compromised. I know too much, and too much knows me. But the Vlka Fenryka have grown fond of me, and with that strange, gruff sentimentality of theirs, they cannot bring themselves to quickly and mercifully cut my thread.
So I will be put to sleep in the deep cold of the ice, in stasis far below the Aett, with only Cormek Dod and the other muttering Dreadnoughts as companions. None of us like it there. None of us choose to be there. We miss the firelight. We miss the sunlight. We’ve dreamed the same dreams a hundred times over, a thousand times. We know them off by heart. We don’t choose the dark.
Nevertheless, once in a while, when we are disturbed and revived, we are never content to see the daylight.
If you have to come and wake us, times are not good.
I AM STANDING in the high meadow in Asaheim where I last saw Heoroth Longfang alive, but it is the Wolf King who is towering at my side. The air is as clear as glass. To the west of us, beyond a vast, rolling field of snow and a mighty evergreen forest, mountains rise. They are white, as clean and sharp as carnassials. I know full well that the grey skies behind them aren’t storm clouds. They are more mountains, greater mountains, mountains so immense the sheer scale of them breaks a man’s spirit. Where their crags end, buried like thorns in the skin of the sky, the wrath of the winter season Fenrisian storms is gathering and clotting, angry as patriarch gods and malign as trickster daemons.
It is the last hour of the last day before I voluntarily enter stasis.
‘You understand why?’ asks the Wolf King at my side. His voice is a wet leopard-purr.
‘I do,’ I say. ‘I understand.’
‘Ogvai, he speaks highly of your skills as a skjald.’
‘The jarl is kind.’
‘He’s honest. That’s why I keep him. But you understand, you can’t play out a game with a broken piece on the board.’
‘I understand.’
‘The accounts, though. We don’t want to lose them. Future generations should hear them, and learn from them.’
‘I’ll conserve them for you, lord,’ I say. ‘They will be here in my head, ready to tell.’
‘Good,’ he says. ‘Make sure of it. I won’t be around to watch over the Vlka Fenryka forever. When I’m gone, you’d better make sure they hear the stories.’
I laugh, thinking he’s joking.
‘You’ll never be gone, lord,’ I say.
‘Never is a long time, skjald,’ he replies. ‘I’m tough, but I’m not that tough. Just because something’s never happened, it doesn’t mean it never will.’
‘There’s a first time for everything.’
‘Exactly,’ he grunts.
‘The unprecedented. Like… Astartes fighting Astartes? Like the Rout being called to sanction another Legion?’
‘That?’ he answers. He laughs, but it is a sad sound. ‘Hjolda, no. That’s not unprecedented.’
I am lost for a reply. I am never sure when he is joking. We are looking towards the forest line. The first flakes of snow are fluttering down.
‘Are there wolves on Fenris?’ I ask.
‘Go and look for yourself,’ he tells me. ‘Go on.’
I look at him. He nods. I start towards the forest line across the snow. I begin to run. I pull my pelt, the one Bercaw gave me, tight around me, like a second skin. In the enormous darkness under the evergreens, I see eyes staring at me: luminous, gold and black-pinned. They are waiting for me, ten thousand pairs of eyes looking out at me from the shadows of the forest. I am not afraid.
I am not afraid of the wolves any more.
Behind me, the Wolf King watches me until I’ve disappeared into the trees.
‘Until next winter,’ he says.
Dan Abnett, Prospero Burns
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends