Prospero Burns Read online

  He realised he wasn’t alone. The company was all around him. Their body heat was barely detectable, dimmer than the dull firepits. The Hall was a massive natural cavern, ragged and irregular, and the Astartes were ranged around it, huddled and coiled in their furs, as immobile as a sibling pack of predators, gone to ground overnight, dormant and pressed close for warmth. Faces cowled by animal skin hoods were watching his approach. There were occasional grumbles and murmurs, like animals growling in their sleep or tussling over bones. As his eye resolved the scene better, the Upplander saw some evidence of movement. He saw hands casually raise silver bowls and dishes so that men could sip black liquid from them. He saw hunched shapes engaged in the counter game, hneftafl, that the Upplander had seen Skarsi playing.

  Little heed was paid to him. Tra Company was resting. They had not assembled to give him audience. He was just something being brought through their hall so that business could be settled. He was a minor distraction.

  At the back of the hall, at the highest point of the cavern, was Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot. High Wolf. Pack master. Jarl of Tra. Just from his bearing, his authority was beyond question. He was big, long-boned, a runner who would make pursuit relentlessly across waste and tundra with immeasurable stamina. His hair was long and straight, centre-parted, black, and his head was tilted back to invest his black-circled eyes and clean-shaven jaw with a commanding arrogance. The centre of his lower lip was tagged with a fat steel piercing that gave him a petulance that seemed childish and dangerous.

  He slid forwards off a mound of battered old skins to get a look at the Upplander.

  ‘So this is what a bad omen looks like when it stands up in your face?’ he asked no one. The Upplander’s breath was steaming the frigid air, but barely a curl escaped Ogvai’s mouth alongside his words. Astartes biology was marvellously adapted for heat retention.

  The jarl was wearing a laced leather jacket with no sleeves. His arms were long and his skin was sun-starved white. There were dark tattoos on the albino flesh there. He stretched one arm out and took up a silver bowl. It was full of a liquid so dark it looked like ink. The jarl’s fingers, curled around the lip of the silver lanx, were armoured with dirty rings. The Upplander imagined the jarl wore them less for decoration and more for the damage they would do to the things that he hit.

  Ogvai took a sip, and then offered the lanx to the Upplander. He held it out.

  ‘He can’t drink that,’ said one of the escort. ‘Mjod will go though his innards like acid.’

  Ogvai sniffed.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said to the Upplander. ‘Wouldn’t want to kill you with a toast to your health.’

  The Upplander could smell the petroleum reek of the drink. There was blood in it too, he guessed. Liquid food, fermented, chemically distilled, extremely high calorific content… more akin to aviation fuel than a beverage.

  ‘It keeps the cold out,’ Ogvai remarked as he set the bowl down. He looked at the Upplander.

  ‘Tell me why you’re here.’

  ‘I’m here at the continuing discretion of the Rout,’ the Upplander replied in Juvjk.

  Ogvai curled his lip.

  ‘No, that’s why you’re still breathing,’ he said. ‘I asked why you’re here.’

  ‘I was invited.’

  ‘Tell me about this invitation.’

  ‘I sent a number of messages to the Fenris beacon, requesting permission to enter Fenrisian world-space. I wished to meet with and study the Fenrisian Astartes.’

  One of the escort standing behind the Upplander snorted.

  ‘That doesn’t sound like a request that we would say yes to,’ said Ogvai. ‘Were you persistent?’

  ‘I think I sent the request, with various elaborations, about a thousand times.’

  ‘You think?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. I had a log of the precise number, with transmission dates. My effects were returned to me, but all my data-slates and notebooks were missing.’

  ‘Written words,’ said Ogvai. ‘Written words and word storage devices. We don’t permit them here.’

  ‘At all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So all my notes and drafts, all my work, you destroyed it?’

  ‘I would think so. If that’s what you were idiot enough to bring with you. Don’t you have back-up off-world?’

  ‘Nineteen great years ago, I did. How do you record information here on Fenris?’

  ‘That’s what memories are for,’ said Ogvai. ‘So you sent this message a lot. Then what?’

  ‘I got permission. Permission to set down. Coordinates were given. The permit was verified as Astartes. But during planetfall, my lander suffered a serious malfunction and crashed.’

  ‘It didn’t crash,’ said Ogvai. He took another sip of his ink-black drink. ‘It was shot out of the sky. Wasn’t it, Bear?’

  Nearby, at the foot of the jarl’s seating mound, one of the dark masses of huddled furs stirred.

  ‘You shot him down, didn’t you, Bear?’

  There was a grumble of reply.

  Ogvai grinned. ‘That was why he had to come out and rescue you. Because he shot you down. It was a mistake, wasn’t it, Bear?’

  ‘I recognised my failing, jarl, and I was sure to correct it,’ Bear replied.

  ‘If you knew all this, why did you ask me?’ asked the Upplander.

  ‘Just wanted to see if you remembered the story as well as I did.’ Ogvai frowned. ‘Your telling’s not up to much, though. I’ll put that down to the fact that you’ve been in the icebox a long time and your brain’s probably still frosty. But as a skjald, you’re not really what I expected.’

  ‘As a skjald?’

  Ogvai leaned forwards and rested the elbows of his long, white arms on his knees. His pale skin glowed in the gloom, like glacier ice.

  ‘Yes, as a skjald. I’ll tell it now, then. I’ll tell the account. Gedrath, who came before me, he warmed to your messages. He talked to us in Tra, and to me, who was his right hand, and to the other jarls, and to the Wolf King too. A skjald, he said. That would be amusing. Diverting. A skjald could bring new accounts from Upp and out, and he could learn ours too. Learn them, and tell them back to us.’

  ‘This is what you thought I’d be?’ asked the Upplander.

  ‘Is it what you thought you’d be?’ asked the jarl. ‘You wanted to learn about us, didn’t you? Well, we don’t give our stories cheaply. We don’t give them to just anybody. You sounded promising, and eager.’

  ‘Then there was the name,’ said one of the escort behind the Upplander. Ogvai nodded, and the Tra veteran stepped forwards. He was lanky and grey-haired, with blue tattooing writhing up and out from the edges of his leather face mask and across his deep brow. Plaited grey beard tails sprouted from the mask’s lower rim.

  ‘What’s that, Aeska?’ asked Ogvai.

  ‘The name he gave us,’ said Aeska. ‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Ogvai.

  ‘Jarl Gedrath, rest his thread, had a romantic soul,’ said the warrior.

  Ogvai grinned. ‘Yes. It appealed to him. To me too. I was his right hand, and he looked to me. He didn’t want to appear whimsical or weak, but a man’s heart can be touched by an old memory or the smell of history. That’s what you intended, wasn’t it?’

  He was looking directly at the Upplander.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Upplander. ‘To be honest, after a thousand or so messages, I was willing to try anything. I didn’t know if you’d know the significance.’

  ‘Because we’re stupid barbarians?’ asked Ogvai, still smiling.

  The Upplander wanted to say yes. Instead, he said, ‘Because it’s old and obscure data by any standard, and that was before I knew you kept no written or stored records. Long ago, before Old Night, before even the rise of man from Terra, and the Outward Urge, and the Golden Era of Technology, there was a man called Ahmad Ibn Rustah, or ebn Roste Esfahani. He was a learned man, a conservator who went out into the world to discover and pr
eserve knowledge, learning it first-hand so he knew it to be accurate, to be the truth. He went from Isfahan in what we know as the Persian region, and travelled as far as Novgorod, where he encountered the Rus. These were the peoples of the Kievan Rus Khaganate, part of the vast and mobile genetic group that encompassed the Slav, the Svedd, the Norsca and the Varangaria. He was the first outsider to integrate with them, to appreciate their culture and to report them to be far more than the stupid barbarians they were thought to be.’

  ‘You see a parallel here?’ asked Ogvai.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  Ogvai sniffed and rubbed the end of his nose with the pad of his thumb. His finger nails were thick and black, like chips of ebony. They each had deep and complex patterns embossed or drilled into them. ‘Gedrath did. You used the name as a shibboleth.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  There was silence.

  ‘I understand I’ve been brought here so you can decide what to do with me,’ said the Upplander.

  ‘Yes, that’s about it. It falls to me to decide, now I’m jarl and Gedrath is gone.’

  ‘Not to… your primarch?’ asked the Upplander.

  ‘The Wolf King? That’s not the kind of decision he bothers himself with,’ replied Ogvai. ‘Tra had seneschalship of the Aett the season you came along, so Gedrath was the lord in charge. This is down to his whimsy. Now I find out if Tra comes to regret it. Do you really want to learn about us?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That means learning about survival. About killing.’

  ‘You mean war? I have lived most of my life on Terra, a world that is still riven by conflict as it restores itself. I’ve seen my fair share of war.’

  ‘I don’t mean war so much,’ said Ogvai doubtfully. ‘War’s just an elaboration and codification of a much purer activity, which is being alive. Sometimes, at the most basic level, to be alive you must stop other people being alive. This is what we do. We are extremely good at it.’

  ‘I have no doubt of that, ser,’ the Upplander replied.

  Ogvai picked up his lanx and held it pensively in front of his mouth in both hands, ready to sip.

  ‘Life and death,’ he said softly. ‘That’s what we’re about, Upplander.’ He said the name scornfully, as if mocking. ‘Life and death, and the place where they meet up. That place, that’s where we do business. That’s the space we inhabit. That’s the place where wyrd gets decided. You want to come with us, you’ll have to learn about both of them. You’ll have to get close to both. Tell me, you ever been close to either? You ever been to the place where they meet?’

  He could hear music. Someone was playing the clavier.

  ‘Why can I hear music?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Murza replied. He clearly didn’t care either. A fat pile of manuscripts and maps was spread out over the battered desktop, and he was picking over them.

  ‘It’s a clavier,’ said Hawser, cocking his head.

  The day was fine, sunny. The white dust kicking up from the Army shelling seemed to have dried out the previous day’s rain and left the sky a deep, dark blue, like the lid of a box lined with velvet. Sunlight sloped in off the street through the blown-out window and doorway, and brought the distant music with it.

  The building had once been a clerical office, perhaps for patents or legal work, and a penetrator shell had gone through its upper storeys like a round through a brainpan. The floor of the front office they were standing in was stained navy blue from the hundreds of bottles of ink that had been blown off the shelves and shattered. The ink had soaked in and dried months before. The blue floor matched the sky outside. Hawser stood in the patch of sunlight and listened to the music. He hadn’t heard a clavier playing in years.

  ‘Look at this, will you?’ Murza said. He passed a hand-held picter unit to Hawser. Hawser looked at the image displayed on the back-plate screen.

  ‘This has just come through from our contact,’ he said. ‘Do you think it’s a match?’

  ‘The image quality is poor—’ Hawser began.

  ‘But your mind isn’t,’ snapped Murza.

  Hawser smiled. ‘Navid, that’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

  ‘Get over it, Kas. Look at the pict. Is it the box?’

  Hawser studied the image again, and compared it to the various antique archive picts and reference drawings that Murza had arranged in a line across the desk.

  ‘It looks genuine,’ he said.

  ‘It looks beautiful is what it looks,’ smiled Murza. ‘But I do not want to get bitten like we did at Langdok. We have to be sure this is genuine. The bribes we’ve paid, the finder’s fees. There’ll be more, you can count on it. The local priesthood will have to be financially persuaded to look the other way.’

  ‘Really? You’d think they’d be grateful. We’re attempting to salvage their heritage before this war obliterates it. They must realise we’re attempting to save something they can’t?’

  ‘You know that this is much more complicated than that,’ replied Murza. ‘It’s a matter of faith. That much should be obvious to a good Catheric boy like you.’

  Hawser didn’t rise to the bait. He’d never made an attempt to hide the tradition of belief he’d been raised to. All teaching at the commune that had been his first home had been Catheric, as had all the communes and camps serving the Ur project. A city built by and for the faithful. It was an appealing idea, one of an infinite number that had tried and failed to make sense of mankind’s lot after Old Night. Hawser had never been much of a believer himself, but he’d had great patience and respect for the ideas of men like Rector Uwe. In turn, Uwe had never presumed to impose his beliefs on Hawser. He’d supported Hawser’s ambition to attend a universitariate. Almost accidentally, in conversation with a faculty senior many years later, Hawser had discovered that he had been awarded his scholarship to Sardis principally on the basis of the letter Uwe had sent to the master of admissions.

  Without Rector Uwe, Hawser would never have left the commune and Ur, and entered academia. But for his place at Sardis, Hawser would still have been at the commune when the predators, the human predators, had stolen in off the western slope radlands and put an end to the dream of Ur.

  It was a salvation he still found uncomfortable, two decades later.

  Hawser was interested in the tradition and histories of faith and religion, but it was hard in the modern age to believe in any god who had never bothered to prove his existence, when there was one who most profoundly had. It was said that the Emperor denied all efforts to label Him a god, or entitle Him with divinity, but there was no getting around the fact that, as He had risen to prominence on Terra, all the extant creeds and religions of the world had correspondingly dried up like parched watercourses in summer.

  Murza now, he hid his beliefs. Hawser knew for a fact that Murza had also been raised Catheric. They’d discussed it sometimes. Catheric had a strand of Millenarianism in it. The proto-creeds that had given rise to it had believed in an end time, an apocalypse, during which a saviour would come to escort the righteous to safety. An apocalypse had come all right. It had been called Strife and Old Night. There had been no saviour. Some philosophers reasoned that mankind’s crimes and sins had been so great, redemption had been withheld. Salvation had been postponed indefinitely until mankind had atoned sufficiently, and only once that had happened would the prophecy be revisited.

  That didn’t satisfy Hawser especially. No one knew, or could remember, what the human race might have done to displease god so spectacularly. It was, Hawser reasoned, hard to atone if you didn’t know what you were atoning for.

  The other thing that made him uneasy was that the rise of the Emperor was seen by an increasing number of people as evidence that the postponement was over.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s easy to mock religion,’ Murza said.

  ‘It is,’ Hawser agreed.

  ‘It’s easy to scorn it for being old-fashioned and inadequate. A heap o
f superstitious rubbish. We have science.’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘Science, and technology. We are so advanced, we have no need of spiritual faith.’

  ‘Are you going somewhere with this?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘We forget what religion offered us.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Mystery.’

  That was his argument. Mystery. All religions required a believer to have faith in something inexpressible. You had to be prepared to accept that there were things you could never know or understand, things you had to take on trust. The mystery at the heart of religion was not a mystery to be understood, it was a mystery to be cherished, because it was there to remind you of your scale in the cosmos. Science deplored such a view, because everything should be explicable, and that which was not was simply beneath contempt.

  ‘It’s no coincidence that so many old religions contained myths of forbidden truth, of dangerous knowledge. Things that man was not meant to know.’

  Murza had a way of putting things. Hawser believed that Murza was considerably more scornful of the faith that had raised him than Hawser was, even though Murza believed and Hawser didn’t. At least Hawser had respect for Catherisism’s morality. Murza made a great show of treating anyone who professed a faith as an irredeemable idiot.

  But he cared. Hawser knew that. Murza believed. The little sign of the crux he wore under his shirt, the genuflection he sometimes made when he thought no one was looking. There was an inkling of the spiritual about the sardonic Navid Murza, and he kept it alive to preserve his sense of mystery.

  It was mystery that propelled Murza and Hawser on their expeditions to recover priceless relics of data from the world’s shattered corners. Rescued data unlocked the mysteries that Old Night had burned into the tissue of mankind’s collective knowledge like lesions.

  Sometimes it was mystery that sent them after spiritual relics too. Prayer boxes in Ossetia, for example. Neither of them believed in the faith that had constructed the boxes, or the sacred virtue of the things they were supposed to contain. But they both believed in the importance of the mystery the items had represented to past generations, and thus their value to human culture.