Prospero Burns Read online

  He cowered briefly. The terrible downpour of bodies subsided. He looked up and took a step out of the shadowed archway.

  A Quietude super-robust lunged at him. The towering beast had two heads and three surviving upper limbs. Something akin to a plasma beam had blown the other one off. The face-plates of its heads displayed hologram masks of psychopathic rage. It was wielding two large, hook-bladed weapons like tulwars with its upper limbs. It sliced at Hawser.

  Hawser wasn’t sure how he moved out of its path. He threw himself away from it and hit the tiled ground of the courtyard several metres back from the archway, landing in a clumsy and painful tumble. The super-robust came after him, slicing with one blade, then the next. The tip of one hooked blade struck sparks off the tiles. It reached out with its third limb to seize him so it could pin him and butcher him.

  He evaded again, this time more aware of what he was doing, of how superhumanly fast his reactions were, how ridiculously instinctive. The wolf priests, geneweavers and fleshmakers of the Vlka Fenryka, had done so much more than repair his wounds and shave years off his life. They had given him so much more than the enhanced vision of a wolf.

  They had accelerated him, his senses, his speed, his strength, his muscle power, his bone density. Even without any combat training, he had snapped the limbs of the G9K malcontents who had outnumbered him.

  Nevertheless, a super-robust of the Olamic Quietude, spiking on battle-stimms, would kill him easily.

  He ducked a lateral sweep, and then rolled to avoid a downward slash. The super-robust kept coming, kept swinging. Hawser slipped in a pool of Outremar blood, and lost his footing.

  Longfang slammed into the super-robust from behind. The priest had appeared without warning, moving like a phantom. There was no hint of infirmity about him, no creak of age. His eyes were bright and wild, and his long white hair flew out like a mane. This was not a man who needed the hand of another to help him get up off his knees.

  Longfang expertly hooked his arms around the super-robust from behind in a grip that resembled a wrestling hold. He lifted the enemy warrior away from Hawser while keeping its limbs locked so it could not strike with either tulwar. Longtooth grunted with the effort. Having turned it aside, he sent the super-robust staggering forwards with a serious kick to the arse to create some safety distance, and drew his sword, a huge broad blade that slept in a knotwork scabbard across his back. It had a two-handed grip, and a runic blade that glowed like frost. As soon as it was drawn, it began to keen, a weird song only wights or the soulless could sing. Power crackled and hissed through its fierce edge.

  The super-robust turned around and strode back to face and kill the interloper who had interrupted its attack. It seemed undaunted by the searing glimmer of the glacial blade that was whispering a death-lament for it. It flung itself forwards with its powerful upper limbs raised, raining alternating downstrokes with its tulwars. Longfang grunted, reacted, let his long blade and the armour of his left forearm soak up the multiple impacts. The super-robust was as strong as a template construction press. Hawser saw that the old priest had to plant one foot back to brace against the assault.

  With a growl-bark, Longfang put a full body spin and the weight of his shoulders into the answering stroke. The blow sliced the third limb clean off the Quietude warrior’s torso. It staggered back, but it felt no pain. It resumed its drive at Longfang, chopping down alternating blows again. This time it had effect. The hybrid alloy of one of the tulwars smote through the forearm guard of the rune priest’s intricate armour. Leather bindings split, and snake-stones, bezoars, sea-shells and beads made of nacre scattered across the courtyard tiles. Blood gushed out, down to the cuff, dripping off the ridges of the huge gauntlet.

  Longfang let out a wet leopard-growl that palpitated Hawser’s guts. He hacked at the super-robust with his frostblade, driving it backwards across the blood-stained, fire-lit yard. The last blow in the savage series cracked the top fifteen centimetres off the left hand tulwar and stove a deep crack across the super-robust’s barrel chest.

  At that point, two more super-robusts bounded into the courtyard. The first, armed with an accelerator hammer, went immediately to reinforce the unit fighting Longfang. The second, its hologrammatic face expressing first curiosity and then undisguised antipathy, turned for Hawser.

  Heoroth Longfang had no intention of breaking the skjald-bond. He had told Hawser to go where he liked because he would be protected by Tra, and that was a compact he intended to honour, or forfeit with his life. A long and, for the most part, secret heritage of genetic engineering had culminated in the ability of Imperial Terra to manufacture hyper-organisms like him. He leapt with all the agility and power that heritage had provided him with, not as a man leaps to jump an obstacle, but as an animal pounces to bring down its prey. He left his immediate adversaries standing, almost awkwardly, suddenly devoid of a combat opponent.

  He landed behind the super-robust rushing Hawser, and saved the skjald’s life for the second time in ninety seconds. The hissing frostblade went up over his white-haired head in a two-handed grip, and then came down in a single, splitting blow of extraordinary force that sheared the super-robust’s torso medially. The sectioned halves parted in an explosive cloud of purple bio-fluid liberated by the rupture, and fell heavily in opposite directions.

  There were beads of glittering purple blood in Longfang’s fine white hair. He looked at Hawser with his tired gold and black-pinned eyes. He knew what was coming.

  ‘Find cover,’ he said.

  Shock took him away. There was a bang like a sonic boom. Heoroth Longfang was simply removed, sideways, from Hawser’s field of vision.

  Hawser reeled from the concussive blow, stunned, dazed, his breather mask cracking, his nose filling with blood from vessels burst by the over-pressure. The super-robust’s accelerator hammer had buried itself in Longfang’s left side and hurled him clean across the courtyard. The priest hit a wall, cracking the tiles, and landed on the ground.

  Both super-robusts hastened to finish him as he tried to rise. Blood was leaking out of Longfang, from his lips, from the waist-joint and hip seals of his runic armour.

  As the Quietude brutes closed in, Longfang raised his hand, as if he could fend them off with force of will alone, as if he could unleash magic, or even maleficarum, under such a miserable duress. For a moment, Hawser almost believed he could. He almost believed the wights of the Underverse might come howling down like an ice storm in response to Longfang’s furious will.

  Nothing happened. No magic, no ice storm, no maleficarum. No wights from the Underverse wailing with rapturous glee.

  Hawser snatched up a blood-flecked Outremar lasrifle, yanking the weapon’s strap free of its previous owner’s broken arm. The rifle had fallen out of the sky, but its mechanism was intact. He opened fire, raking the two super-robusts. His shots struck their backs and shoulders, denting the plasticated finish of their armour, scoring little holes and blemishes. The super-robust with the accelerator hammer even took a shot in the back of the head, causing its neck to whiplash slightly.

  Both stopped, and turned slowly, smoke wisping from the superficial damage.

  ‘Tra! Tra! Help here! Help here!’ Hawser yelled, in Wurgen. He started firing again, unloading the entire energy clip at the super-robusts. They paced towards him, and the paces became faster and turned into running strides. The hammer and the tulwars were lifted up to strike. Hawser backed away, blasting, yelling.

  Jormungndr Two-blade entered the courtyard. He came in over one of the cloister roofs where Outremar bodies had collected like autumn leaves. True to his name, he had a blade in each hand, a matched pair of power swords, shorter and broader than Longfang’s hissing frostblade.

  He uttered the loudest roar of all, and landed hard on the tiles in front of the charging super-robusts. The impact made a sound like a dropped anvil, and pavers cracked under him. He met their united attack aggressively, hammering aside the super-robust with the tulwar
s with his right blade, and then blocking the hammer with his left.

  The super-robust with the tulwars re-joined without hesitation, hacking at him. Two-blade blocked and parried with matching speed, allowing neither of the tulwars to slip past his guard. Simultaneously, his left-hand weapon fended away the follow-up swing from the super-robust with the hammer.

  Now that one of the tulwars had lost a section in the clash with Longfang, the mis-matched lengths played to the super-robust’s advantage. As his left-hand sword was occupied with the other opponent, Two-blade found it supremely difficult to counter the rain of blows from the twin swords unless he managed to catch both down near the hilt. Twice, the broken tulwar flew past a parry that had blocked the long hook of its partner and gouged Two-blade. Within a few seconds of the struggle beginning, Two-blade was bleeding from a deep injury in his right arm.

  He resolved the problem directly. Ducking a vicious but telegraphed swing from the accelerator hammer, he kicked out at the super-robust with the tulwars, catching it in the left kneecap. The huge plasteel boot delivered a torsion injury that twisted the super-robust off balance, and Two-blade put his right-hand sword through one of its faces.

  The super-robust tottered backwards with sparks shorting and spitting from its splintered face mask. Purple gore splashed down its chest from under the mask’s rim.

  Jormungndr Two-blade did not pause to enjoy the satisfaction of this advantage. He had to jerk his head back hard to avoid the hammer again. The evasion was whisker-close. The hammer-wielder had thrown such bodily force behind the latest blow that the swing had described an almost complete circle. The hammerhead, missing Two-blade on the downward half of the orbit, ended up striking the ground of the yard and creating, with a painful, plosive bang, a radiating crater in the tilework that looked like a bullet hole in a mirror, or the ripple of a stone hitting the surface of still water.

  Two-blade struck the super-robust with his left-hand sword. The super-robust deflected the slash with the long haft of its hammer, bringing it up level in front of its face like a stave, before swinging it up higher for another downward, post-setting blow. Two-blade managed to get his swords up and crossed against each other, and caught the neck of the hammer in the V formed by their blades. Even so, the impact drove him down onto one knee.

  Straining, Two-blade kept the swords locked. The super-robust with the tulwars was recovering its wits as its secondary head took over its biological operations. It moved in from the side to attack Two-blade while his weapons were occupied.

  Two-blade sliced his swords together, uttering a bellow of effort. The swords scissored the neck of the accelerator hammer. The hammer head was not entirely cut off, but the haft just below the head exploded and buckled as the Astartes’ blades sliced through grip, trunking, liner and core.

  Two-blade came up off his knees and drove in against the super-robust, head-down, stabbing it repeatedly through the torso with murderous, under-arm punches, first with the right sword, then the left, and then alternating, jabbing blow after vicious blow. He drove it backwards, killing it three or four times over to make sure it was dead. By the end, it was only held upright by his blades.

  He let it fall. The other one had reached him. He spun to greet its tulwars, and delivered a rotating lateral slash that knocked it flying. It landed on its face, and tried to rise. Two-blade pounced onto its back, held it face-down with his knee, and drove a sword down through it, pinning it to the ground.

  Purple liquid began to creep out from under it.

  Hawser crossed the yard to where Longfang lay. Two-blade wrenched his sword out of the super-robust’s corpse and followed. Two-blade’s escalated Astartes metabolism had already kicked in, and his wounds had stopped bleeding.

  Heoroth Longfang’s wounds had not stopped bleeding. The priest had propped himself against a wall, his legs out straight in front of him. He was breathing hard. Blood was seeping out of far too many of the seams in his armour.

  ‘A fine day for sitting on your arse,’ remarked Jormungndr Two-blade.

  ‘I like the weather here,’ replied Longfang.

  ‘We’ll do all the work, then,’ said Two-blade. He was silent for a while, staring down at the old rune priest.

  ‘I’ll send Najot Threader back to you, when I find him.’

  ‘Not necessary,’ replied Longfang.

  ‘I won’t let you go without honour,’ said Two-blade. There was a tiny hitch in his voice that surprised Hawser. ‘When I find Najot Threader—’

  ‘No,’ Longfang replied more emphatically. ‘Eager though you are to see me off, I’m not going anywhere. I just need to rest. Enjoy this nice weather for a while.’

  Hawser looked at Two-blade, and saw he was smiling a broad smile under his mask that showed his teeth.

  ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he said.

  ‘There’s a good boy,’ said Longfang. ‘Now go and kill something. The skjald here can stay and keep me company.’

  Two-blade looked at Hawser.

  ‘Amuse him,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘I said amuse him,’ replied Two-blade. ‘You’re Tra’s skjald. Amuse him. Take his mind off what’s coming.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Hawser. ‘What’s coming?’

  Two-blade snorted.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  The big Wolf knelt down quickly, and bowed his head to Longfang.

  ‘Until next winter,’ he said.

  Longfang nodded back. They clasped fists, and then Two-blade stood and walked away without looking back. His massive plasteel boots crunched on the grit coating the courtyard ground. By the time he was on the far side and vanishing from view, he had accelerated into a run.

  Hawser glanced back at Longfang.

  ‘I know it’s an indelicate question, but what is coming?’ he asked.

  Longfang laughed and shook his head.

  ‘You’re dying, aren’t you?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Maybe. You don’t know much about Astartes anatomy. We can shrug off a hell of a lot of damage. But sometimes there’s a hell of a lot of pain in that process, and you’re never sure if you’re going to get there.’

  ‘What should I do?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘Your job,’ said the priest.

  He sat down beside the priest.

  Longfang’s skin looked even more translucent than before. He was speckled with blood, both purple and red, both human and foe. Some of it was drying and streaking.

  His respiration was laboured. Something was critically wrong with his lungs. Every breath produced a blood mist.

  ‘So I… I am to amuse you, then?’ asked Hawser. ‘You want me to recite an account?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You might want to tell me some of yours,’ said Hawser. ‘You might want to tell me anything that matters to you. In case.’

  ‘You’d be my confessor, would you?’ said Longfang.

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Aeska Brokenlip told me that the accounts that entertain the Rout most are the ones that scare them.’

  ‘True enough.’

  ‘So what scares you?’

  ‘You want to know?’

  ‘I want to know.’

  ‘What scares us most,’ said Heoroth Longfang, ‘are the things that even we can’t kill.’

  Eight

  Longfang’s Dream of Winter

  ‘We are the Allfather’s killers,’ said the rune priest.

  ‘You’re soldiers,’ said Hawser. ‘You’re Astartes born. Astartes are the finest warriors Terra has ever manufactured. You’re all killers.’

  Longfang coughed. Blood from the mist he was exhaling was beginning to collect around his mouth and soak his beard. It dripped onto the gossamer-white pelt he wore.

  ‘That’s too simple a view,’ he said. ‘I told you this. A role for each primarch-son. A role for each primarch’s Legion. Defenders and champions, storm troops and praetorians… we al
l have our duties. Sixth Legion are the executioners. We are the last line. When all else fails, we are the ones expected to do whatever is necessary.’

  ‘Isn’t that true of all Legions?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘You still don’t understand, skjald. I’m talking about degree. There are lines that other Legions will not cross. There are divides of honour and fealty and devotion. There are some acts so ruthless, some deeds so unpalatable, that only the Vlka Fenryka are capable of undertaking them. It’s what we were bred for. It’s the way we were designed. Without qualm or sentiment, without hesitation or whimsy. We take pride in being the only Astartes who will never, under any circumstances, refuse to strike on the Allfather’s behalf, no matter what the target, no matter what the cause.’

  ‘It’s why the Sixth Legion Astartes is considered so bestial,’ said Hawser.

  ‘That’s secondary,’ Longfang replied. ‘It’s a by-product of our ruthlessness. We are not feral savages. It’s just that two centuries of doing things that other Legions find distasteful have earned us that reputation. The other Legions think we are untamed, untrained dogs, but the truth is that we are the most harshly trained of all.’

  Longfang was about to say something else, but a tremor ran through him. He closed his eyes for a moment.

  ‘Pain?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Nothing,’ Longfang replied with a dismissive wave of his right hand. ‘It’ll pass.’

  He wiped the blood from his mouth.

  ‘We are the Allfather’s killers,’ he repeated. ‘It is a matter of honour that we will face anything down. This also may explain why others may regard us as deranged. We deny fear. It plays no part in our lives. Once we deploy, fear is gone from us. It doesn’t ride with us. It doesn’t stay our hands. We exclude it from our hearts and from our heads.’

  ‘So the stories?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Think of the extremity of our lives,’ said Longfang. ‘The unremitting punishment of Fenris, the unstinting combat against mankind’s foes. Where do we find release from that? Not in the dainty pleasures of mortal men. Not in wine or song, or womenfolk, or banquet feasting.’