Prospero Burns Read online

  It was a simplistic conclusion, one that Hawser felt was beneath Murza’s range as a scholar. Why had Navid made these jottings with such haste and imprecision. Hawser wondered—

  Hawser wondered why he couldn’t stop looking at the eye on the hololithic projection. It was gazing at him, as if challenging him to look away and defying his dismissal of Navid Murza’s scribblings. It was staring at him. It was unblinking. The pupil was static, black iris set in blue, hard as the sky. It made his eyes water. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t break its stare. He tried to turn his head or fight off the force that was pinning his eyelids open and making his eyeballs itch and well up. His hands tightened on the edge of the reading table. He tried to push himself away, push himself back, break contact, as if the image was a live electrical wire he had brushed against and couldn’t break away from. It was like trying to haul out of the undertow of a bad dream that didn’t want to let him go.

  The eye was no longer blue.

  It was gold and black-pinned.

  The back of his head hit the floor with a crack. Pain arrowed into his skull. He’d managed to tip his chair over and had ended up on his back. With his felt-slippered feet sticking up in the air, it would have been comical, except for the pain. He’d struck himself a serious blow hitting the floor.

  Maybe he was concussed. He felt sick.

  He felt weird.

  What had just happened? Had Murza built some kind of hypnotic feedback pattern into his file? Was there some subliminal imaging?

  He got up, and leaned hard on the edge of the table to steady himself. Then he pulled the data-slate link out of the table-jack without looking directly at the hololithic display. The light screen went out. He took a few deep breaths, and then leaned down and righted the chair. Bending over made his head pound and his stomach slosh. He stood up straight again to get some stability.

  There was someone at the far end of the room.

  The figure was about twenty metres away, at the end of the reading tables, standing by the inner stacks furthest from the screen door entranceway. It was looking at him.

  He couldn’t see its face. It was wearing the same soft, beige felt robes of the Bibliotech he was, but it had raised the suit’s hood, like a monk’s cowl. Its arms were by its side. Everything about its outline was soft, almost plump. In the cream library robes, it looked like the naked form of a person who had lost great amounts of weight very dramatically, and whose flesh had become baggy and empty. In the Bibliotech’s half-light, it looked like a ghost.

  Hawser called out, ‘Hello?’

  His voice rolled around the twilight cavern of the Bibliotech like a marble in a foot locker. The figure did not move. It was staring right at him. He couldn’t see its eyes, but he knew it was. He wanted to see its eyes. He felt as if he needed to.

  ‘Hello?’ he called out again.

  He took a step forwards.

  ‘Navid? Is that you? What are you doing?’

  He walked towards the figure. It remained where it was, staring at him, its creamy form so soft in the gloom, it seemed phantasmal.

  ‘Navid?’

  The hooded figure turned suddenly and began to walk away towards the carved black ironwork screen into the inner stacks.

  ‘Wait!’ Hawser called out. ‘Navid, come back! Navid!’

  The hooded figure kept walking. It passed under the ironwork frame and disappeared into the shadows.

  Hawser started to run.

  ‘Navid?’

  He entered the inner stacks. Rows of shelving fanned out before him in the low light. The beautifully made wooden stacks were each twelve metres high, and each row ran off as far as he could see. Sets of brass library steps with complex gears were attached to each stack at intervals and could be run along the shelves on inertia-less rails to allow readers access to the higher levels. As Hawser moved, his body heat triggered catalogue tags on adjacent shelves. Hololithic tags lit up, and a pleasant voice spoke.

  Eastern Literature, Hol to Hom.

  Eastern Literature, sub-section, Homezel, Tomas, works of.

  Eastern Literature, Hom to Hom continued.

  ‘Mute,’ Hawser instructed. The pleasant voice faded. The hololithic tags continued to flare up and then gradually fade as he hurried past.

  ‘Hello?’ he called. He ducked back and tried another row. How could a walking figure have vanished so quickly?

  He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned in time to see the hooded figure, just for a second, as it crossed a division between stacks. He broke into an urgent sprint to catch up with it, but when he got to the division, there was no sign.

  Except a couple of hololithic shelf tags slowly fading away again, as if passing body heat had only recently brought them to life.

  ‘Navid! I’ve had enough of this!’ Hawser yelled out. ‘Stop playing games!’

  Something made him turn. The hooded figure was behind him, right behind him, silent and ghostly. It slowly raised its hands up from its sides, raising them out straight like wings, or like a celebrant priest invoking a deity.

  The softly gloved right hand held a knife.

  It was a ceremonial blade. An athame. Hawser recognised its form at once. It was a sacrificial blade.

  ‘You’re not Navid,’ he whispered.

  ‘Choices have to be made, Kasper Hawser,’ said a voice. It wasn’t Murza, and it wasn’t the hooded figure either. Fear crushed Hawser’s heart.

  ‘What choices?’ he managed to ask.

  ‘You have much to offer, and we would be pleased to have a relationship with you. It would be of mutual benefit. But you have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser.’

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ Hawser replied. ‘Where’s Murza? He said he was bringing me to meet with the people he works with.’

  ‘He did. He has. Navid Murza is a disappointment. He is rash. He is unreliable. An unreliable servant. An unreliable witness.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘We are looking for someone more suited to our needs. Someone who knows what he’s looking for. Someone who can recognise the truth. Someone who can see with better eyes. You.’

  ‘I think you’ve mistaken me for some kind of idiot who wants to join a pathetic secret club,’ Hawser answered fiercely. ‘Take off that stupid hood. Let me see your face. Is that you, Murza? Is this another of your stupid games?’

  The hooded figure took a step forwards. It almost seemed to glide.

  ‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser,’ said the voice.

  Hawser realised the voice was coming from all around him. It definitely wasn’t coming from the figure. It was the soft and pleasant system voice of the stack shelves. How could anything or anyone speak to him through the Bibliotech’s artificial system?

  ‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser.’

  Hawser heard Navid cry out. It wasn’t a vocalisation. It was a tremor of pain. He turned his back on the hooded figure, and started to stride down the aisle, not quite running, but moving more urgently than a walk.

  ‘You have to make a choice,’ the shelves whispered to him as he walked by. ‘You have to make a choice. See for us, and we will show you such things.’

  ‘Navid?’ Hawser called out, ignoring the voice,

  A four-way junction in the stacks lay ahead. A set of library steps had been rolled to the end of one of the adjacent stacks, and Murza had been bound to its brass rail by his wrists. He was lying on the floor, half twisted, with his legs stretched out into the centre of the junction area and his arms pulled up painfully by the restraint. He looked half-drugged, or woozy as if he’d been felled by violence.

  There were six more hooded figures standing in a vague semi-circle around him.

  ‘You have to make a choice,’ said the voice.

  ‘What are you doing to him?’ Hawser demanded.

  ‘You have to make a choice. See for us, and we will show you such things. Things you cannot imagine.’

  Murza let out a low mo
an.

  Hawser ignored the hooded figures and crouched down by Murza. He tilted the man’s face up. Murza was flushed and sweaty. Fear pricked his eyes.

  ‘Kas,’ he stammered. ‘Kas, help me. I’m so sorry. They like you. You interest them.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know! They won’t tell me! I just wanted to make an introduction, that’s all. Show that I was useful to them too, that I could bring them the people they needed.’

  ‘Oh, Navid, you’re such a fool…’

  ‘Please, Kas.’

  Hawser looked up at the robed figures behind him.

  ‘We’re going to walk out of here now,’ he said, with more conviction than he actually felt. ‘Navid and I, we’re going to get up and walk out of here.’

  ‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser,’ said the pleasant, artificial voice.

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Yes. We have extended an invitation to you. We do not extend invitations like this to just anybody. You are a rare creature, and this is a rare offer. Do not underestimate the potency of the things we are inviting you to share. They are the things you have spent your life seeking.’

  ‘This is a mistake,’ said Hawser.

  ‘The only mistake would be if you said no, Kasper Hawser,’ said the voice. ‘A yes is far simpler. The signifier of yes should be easy for a man of your education to recognise. It is around you.’

  Hawser blinked. He looked at Murza, the figures, the looming shapes of the stacks, the extending perspective of the aisles.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘A ritual conducted on a crossed point, representing the unity of approaching directions. Eight adepts offering admission to one novitiate. Identities are masked, representing the mysteries awaiting beyond initiation. This is a variation on the initiation rites of the witch-cults of the Age of Strife. Which one? The Knower Sect? The Illuminated? The Cognitae?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the voice.

  ‘No, because that’s the whole sell, isn’t it?’ said Hawser. ‘Caveat emptor. The initiate gets to know nothing: no truths, no names, no identities, until after initiation, when it’s too late. Revelation breaks the compact of secrecy. I know what you want from me.’

  ‘You have a choice to make.’

  ‘Eight adepts, but there can be only eight. The sacred number. One must step aside to let a replacement in. And one has made a mistake and broken the compact of secrecy.’

  Murza moaned again. He pulled weakly at his bonds, making the set of brass library steps rattle.

  The hooded figure with the athame held the blade out to Hawser.

  ‘Oh, please, Kas,’ Murza whimpered. ‘Please.’

  Hawser took the blade.

  ‘You really have got yourself in a mess, Navid,’ he said.

  Hawser made a quick, simple, strike with the dagger. Murza yelped. The cord binding his wrists parted.

  Hawser turned to the hooded figures, brandishing the athame.

  ‘Now fug off!’ he said.

  The semi-circle of figures hesitated for a moment. Then they began to tremble. Each soft, cream suit began to shudder, as if pressurised air hoses had been attached to them to inflate them. They swelled slightly, in ugly, lumpen ways that evoked malformation and defect, and they began to writhe, stirred by ethereal things moving inside them. The felt suits grew plump, distending like balloons. A whine began, a high-pitched note growing louder and louder. It was a shrill wail coming from the stack voice system. Murza and Hawser clamped their hands to their ears. When the noise reached its peak, it cut off abruptly. The hoods of the shuddering figures slipped back and released vapour into the gloomy air. The vapour was golden and it vanished almost as soon as it emerged, like smoke, from the neck holes of the suits. Empty and slack, the seven felt body-robes fell softly onto the floor.

  Hawser stared down at the empty suits, at the impossibility of them. There had been men inside them. Even the most subtle and fine-scale teleportation work could not have removed them from inside their robes. He realised he was breathing hard, and tried to contain his panic. He had a peculiar fear inside him, a kind he only rarely experienced, a kind that had followed him from childhood at the commune, from the nightmares he’d had of something scratching at the door.

  Murza was clinging to the base of the library steps he’d been tied to. He was sobbing.

  ‘Get up, Murza,’ Hawser said. He felt something on his cheek, something too cold for a tear.

  It had begun to snow in the library.

  The snow was gentle and silent. It drifted down out of the fusty darkness above the stack tops, and glittered like starshine as it passed through the glow of the aisle lamps.

  ‘Snow?’ Hawser whispered.

  ‘What?’ Murza murmured.

  ‘Snow? How can it be snow?’ Hawser said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Murza said, not really interested.

  Hawser stepped away from him, looking up into the darkness, his hands out, upturned, to feel the cold sting of snowflakes landing on his palms.

  ‘Great Terra,’ he whispered. ‘This isn’t right. Snow, that’s not right.’

  ‘Why do you keep talking about snow?’ Murza moaned.

  ‘This isn’t how it happened,’ said Hawser.

  ‘It’s enough like how it happened for the story to stay true,’ said Longfang.

  Tra’s rune priest was lying at the mouth of the aisle to Hawser’s left, propped up against the stack as if it was the orange-tiled wall of a mansion in a city near another star. The blood down his front had caked dry like rust, and he was no longer breathing out a bloody steam, but his lips were wet and red, in sharp contrast to his almost colourless skin.

  ‘How can you be here with me?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Longfang, his voice a sigh. ‘You’re here with me. Remember that? This is only your account.’

  ‘Kas?’ Murza called. ‘Kas, who are you talking to?’

  ‘No one,’ said Hawser.

  The snow was falling a little more heavily. Hawser knelt down beside Longfang.

  ‘So, did you like my story?’

  ‘I did. I felt your fear. I felt his more.’

  Longfang nodded his head towards Murza.

  ‘Who are you talking to, Kas?’ Murza called out. ‘Kas, what’s happening?’

  ‘He got in over his head,’ Hawser said to Longfang.

  ‘He was never trustworthy,’ the priest replied. ‘You should have smelled that on him from the start. In your tale, he was nicer, a better friend to you, than he is now I see him myself. You’re too trusting, skjald. People use you because of that.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Hawser.

  ‘What isn’t true?’ Murza whined.

  ‘You look old,’ said Longfang looking up at Hawser.

  ‘I’m a lot younger here than I am as you know me.’

  ‘We made a better you,’ replied Longfang.

  ‘Why is it snowing in here?’ asked Hawser.

  ‘Because the snow comforts me,’ said Longfang. ‘It’s the snow of Fenris. Of winter approaching. Get me up.’

  Hawser reached out his hand. The priest took it and got to his feet. There seemed to be no weight to him this time. He left a pool of blood on the library floor.

  The snowfall grew a little heavier.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. He started to shuffle down the aisle. Hawser walked with him.

  ‘Kas? Kas, where are you going?’ Murza called out behind them.

  ‘What happens?’ Longfang asked.

  ‘I’ll take him back to the pension, clean him up. We do some soul-searching. I try to weigh up the huge asset he represents to the Conservation programme in terms of his scholarship, ability and sheer tenacity against the huge liability of him consorting with dilettante occultists.’

  ‘What do you decide?’

  ‘That he was a valuable commodity. That I should keep any inquiry internal. That I believed him when he swore t
o me he was renouncing all his old connections and associations so he could dedicate himself to th—’

  ‘You should have smelled his treachery.’

  ‘Maybe. But for ten years after that night we worked together. There was never any more trouble. He was a superb field researcher. We kept working together until… until he was killed in Ossetia.’

  ‘There was never any more trouble?’ asked Longfang.

  ‘No.

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Never,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Kas?’ Murza’s voice echoed out. It was a long way behind them, muffled by the distance and the snow. ‘Kas? Kas?’

  ‘So you liked the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

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

  ‘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.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The snow had become quite heavy. It was lying on the ground, and their feet were crunching over it. Hawser saw his breath in the air in front of him. It was getting lighter. The stacks were just black slabs in the blizzard, like stone monoliths or impossibly giant tree trunks.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked.

  ‘Winter,’ said Longfang.

  ‘So this is a dream too?’

  ‘No more than your tale was, skjald. Look.’

  The snow was a kind of neon white, scorching the eye as it reflected a sun high up on a noon apex, the brief, bright bite of a winter day.

  The air was as clear as glass. To the west of them, beyond a vast, rolling field of snow and a mighty evergreen forest, mountains rose. They were white, as clean and sharp as carnassials. Hawser realised the murderous gun-metal skies behind them weren’t storm clouds. They were more mountains, greater mountains, mountains so immense the sheer scale of them broke a man’s spirit. Where their crags ended, buried like thorns in the skin of the sky, the black-hearted wrath of the winter season Fenrisian storms were gathering and clotting, angry as patriarch gods and malign as trickster daemons. In no more than an hour, two at the most pleading limits of a man’s prayers, the sun would be gone and the light too, and the storms would have come in over the peaks on their murder-make. The fury would be suicidal, like men rushing a firm shield wall, and the snow-clouds would disembowel themselves on the mountain tops and spill their contents on the valley.