Prospero Burns Read online

  We know the conclusion. We know how it ends. We know that Magnus fled, broken, with the last surviving scraps of his once noble force, and, in fleeing, proved beyond any doubt the extent of his necromantic talents. Only the darkest magics allowed him to escape the field of war alive.

  There is one part of the account you do not know, however, and it is my part, and I will tell it once.

  Here and now.

  There was drumming; the anti-music of a sending off. I had been given armour, thrall-armour, to wear under my pelt and reinforce the knotwork leather that had become my everyday garment. I had my axe, and a displacer field unit, and I had been given a short-form laspistol of excellent manufacture. I believe it had come from Jarl Ogvai’s weaponarium. The weapon was old, but in pristine condition. It had been disassembled and reassembled many times to keep its component parts clean and serviceable. During its life, which had been longer than mine, the hand grip had been removed, perhaps due to wear, and replaced with a simple shaped piece of radapple wood that fitted around the frame’s handle-spur. On the faces of the wooden grip, the symbol of Ur was inlaid in gold wire. The weapon had once been the property of an officer in the Defence Corps of the great, doomed Catheric city-project of Ur. Aun Helwintr, proud rune priest, had selected it for me, knowing the account I had made of my own past, and my connection, as a child, to the Ur labour communes.

  ‘Ur was one of many grand and admirable schemes to achieve a finer future for mankind,’ Helwintr told me when he presented me with the weapon. ‘It failed, just as many of them failed, but its spirit was great, and its intention beyond fault. I give this to you to remind you of that spirit. What we do today, however bloody, is done with the same intent. Unification. Salvation. The betterment of man.’

  I could not argue with his words. Toil and blood, effort and hardship, these were payments worth making in return for a greater future. Ideals were never won cheaply, whether the cost was the raising of one dream city or the razing of another.

  My only doubt, and I confess doubt lurked in my heart, was that Ur had any significance for me at all. I had lived my life assuming it did. I had lived my life trusting the solidity of my identity and my memories. Now I trusted nothing. I heard a clavier playing. I saw a toy horse made of wood. I watched the dawn rising over Terra, and turned from a window port to see a face I could not recall. Eyes without features. Features without eyes. Pieces on an old game board. An athame, softly glowing in the darkness like a blade of ice.

  I took the weapon anyway.

  Nidhoggur’s carrier decks were swarming. Hoists conveyed drop-ships overhead to the catapult ramps. Munition trains clattered across the deck grilles. Smoke as white and fine as summer cloud filled the embarkation space to thigh level, because so many transatmospheric drive units were test firing and venting. Under the brilliant light-banks of the ceiling rigs, it felt as though we were gods of Uppland, walking abroad in the heavenscape, masters of creation and destruction. We could hear the rapid hammer and air-gun stutter of the armourers making their last minute adjustments. Wyrd was being forged here.

  I was placed with Jormungndr Two-blade’s pack. Bear was amongst them, and Godsmote and Aeska and Helwintr. Every member of the pack kept their eyes on me, watching to see if I would fall down and roll back my eyes, and froth at the lips and plead for mercy in the voice of the Crimson King.

  I never did. He never chose to speak through me.

  The Wolf King had brought the entire Sixth to sanction Prospero. A full Legion to punish a full Legion. The fleet components that had assembled at Thardia translated to three further assembly points, gathering strength as they went. Amongst them were forces of the Silent Sisterhood and the Custodes, bequeathed by the Allfather himself to strengthen our cause.

  The full force of the Sixth was something I did not believe needed strengthening. There is not an Astartes in the Imperium who can out-match a warrior of the Rout, one to one, and we held a significant numerical superiority. Much is said of Prospero’s noble Spireguard, and other auxiliary contingents, but the only true consideration was Astartes numbers, and Magnus the Red’s Legion was small compared to the Vlka Fenryka.

  However, there was an ugly mood of caution amongst the Sixth. The Crimson King’s edge derived from maleficarum, the very root of the entire dispute. Now it came down to a bare fight, he would show his sharpest claws. No matter that we had ten or a hundred or even a thousand times his Thousand Sons, magic could level any fight. All the pack leaders agreed, loath as they were to admit it out loud, that the Silent Sisterhood might make the difference between triumph or destruction. Only they, Allfather willing, might cancel out or dilute the sorcery of Magnus and his disciple-sons.

  There was fear. You could feel it in the thralls at least, and in the support forces. I do not think an Astartes can feel fear, not fear as a man knows it. Trepidation, perhaps. But I knew that the Rout always craved stories of maleficarum, because it was the only thing they couldn’t kill, and thus the only thing that lent their lives even a thrill of apprehension.

  We were slamming out of the immaterium into the face of maleficarum.

  I felt fear. Fear was in my heart. I put on my mask to scare it away.

  I had finished my Rout-mask and leatherware during the passage from Thardia to the target system. Aeska Brokenlip had lent me some general advice, and both Orcir and Erthung Redhand had shown me knotwork designs that I chose to copy. I chose to make the mask with the stylised antlers of a bull saeneyti spreading out from the bridge of the nose to form the brow ridges. I did this in honour of the memory of Ulvurul Heoroth, called Longfang, who sleeps upon the red snow. I stained my mask and all my leather gear black, and added the circumpunct, the mark of aversion, to the centre of the mask’s forehead. With its warding eye, and flaring bull antlers and snarling lips, the mask’s threat would drive off all but the darkest maleficarum.

  The men of Tra armed for the onslaught. This was a murder-make, and they had come to cut threads, and they wore all the faces that Death needed to wear to get the task done. Blades and boltguns predominated, of course: the true, trusted weapons of the Vlka Fenryka were their primary resource. But all the jarls had opened their weaponariums, and Ogvai had shared out devices amongst men in his company who were willing and skilled to operate them. I was not the only soul that day to have received a weapon from the hoard as a gift.

  Some Wolves had enhancements that turned their armoured gauntlets into huge wrecking fists, or even industrial talons. Others prepared enormous melta-weapons with armoured feeder cables, ornately engraved lascannons, or colossal assault cannons with rotating barrels that seemed barely man-portable.

  On the repeater screens up in the rafters of the embarkation deck between the Stormbirds hung like game in a larder, the forward-scan images of ghostly, utopian Prospero grew steadily larger.

  On the final night, a dream came to me. It was the dream I had been having since I left Terra, the dream I no longer trust. It purports to be a memory, but it is laced with deceit. I know that I stayed aboard the superorbital plate Lemurya during the last months before my departure. I leased a luxury suite on the underside of the plate. That much is real. I know that the prolonged exposure to artificial gravity made me feel tired and unrefreshed.

  I remember that golden light sliced into my chamber around the window shutter every morning, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

  I remember there was always an electronic chime before the hour five alarm.

  I had gone to Lemurya to void-acclimate before transferring to the ship on which I had arranged passage. I had also gone there to avoid people. I was hell-bent on taking my sabbatical, on freeing myself from the chains of Terra, and I did not need well meaning souls like Vasiliy trying to convince me otherwise.

  Of course, now I realise that the circumstances were not quite as I understood them. My situation with the Conservatory was not as untenable and unappreciated as I had thought. These facts I have had from e
xemplary sources.

  I do not think I was in my right mind. I was being influenced even then. Indeed, perhaps the manipulation long pre-dated that moment. The urge to leave Terra had been put into me. So had the urge to experience Fenris. Honestly, brothers, tell me, what man who is afraid of wolves goes to face his fear by voyaging to a planet of wolves? It is nonsense. I was not, forgive me, even especially interested in Fenrisian culture.

  The fascination was put into me too.

  The other reason I spent time on the superorbital was to visit the biomech clinics. Some instinct, or implanted instinct, had warned me that Fenris was not a place where a man could make notes or keep written records. I had therefore undertaken an elective procedure to replace my right eye with an augmetic copy that was also an optical recording device. My real eye, surgically removed, is being held in stasis in the clinic’s organ banks, ready to be replanted on my return.

  Sometimes I wonder what dreams it is seeing.

  My recurring dream finds me waking in my room as the hour five alarm rings. It is the day of the scheduled implant surgery. I am old, older than I am now in every respect except years. My body is weary. I rise and limp to the window, and press the stud to open the shutter. It rises into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. I look out and drink in the view. I have done this every morning of my stay, because I know these may be the last chances I get to see such a magnificent view with my own eyes. My real eyes.

  On that last night before Prospero, the dream had been embellished. I do not believe any new elements had been added, I just think that I had stepped through the dream so many times, I was noticing things in finer and finer detail.

  Through the half-open doors of the closet, I glimpsed a toy horse made of wood standing on top of the foot locker. I could hear clavier music playing from a neighbouring room. I could smell fresh-pressed radapple juice. On a shelf in the corner, my Prix Daumarl sat in its pretty little casket beside an old Ossetian prayer box. By the window, a regicide set lay open on a small table. From the look of the pieces, the game was just two or three moves away from its end.

  I stepped to the window, waiting to see the reflection of the face of the figure standing just behind me. I waited for the terror to constrict me.

  I waited to ask, ‘How can you be here?’

  I turned, hoping the face would be another detail I could resolve in greater clarity than before.

  All I glimpsed before I woke were eyes. They were eyes without features, and they blazed like marks of aversion.

  We had anticipated resistance. Of course we had. For all our confidence and innate superiority, for all our show of terrible force, we did not expect to be unopposed. Never let it be said that the Thousand Sons of Prospero were not great warriors. They were Astartes! That fact alone puts them on a different order of being. During the Great Crusade, we had respected them as brothers and comrades in arms, and now we respected them as mortal foes. Even without their warlock sorcery, they were to be taken seriously.

  Moreover, Prospero was their home world. A Legion is always strongest at its base. The fortress homes of the Allfather’s eighteen Legions Astartes are the most formidable and impregnable sites in the new Imperium.

  As the sanction fleet burned in towards Prospero like a massed, migrating pod of hrossvalur, it became evident that the planet had not lit its defences. The grids were down from outer orbital to close surface. Individual cities were screened, but that was standard operation and not a response to the approaching threat. There were signs that civilian ships had fled or were fleeing the planet and the system in considerable numbers.

  Some of the escaping vessels were overtaken and boarded. Their crews and passengers were taken captive and interrogated by the rune priests, so that every useful scrap of information could be gathered. Later, I heard that one such ship, the Cypria Selene, was carrying Imperial remembrancers who had been posted to Prospero to observe the Fifteenth Astartes. One of them, I was told, was an old man described as ‘the Scribe of Magnus’.

  I would like to have met them, and spoken with them. I would dearly like to have listened to their accounts, and heard the voice of the other side. I did not get the opportunity. I only learned of their presence long after the day was done, and their ultimate fates are unknown to me.

  Two-blade conjectured that the Crimson King had capitulated. Magnus the Red had not signalled surrender, but he had seen the error of his actions and the disgrace he had brought upon the Fifteenth Astartes, so he had sent the innocents away and thrown his defences wide open in order to accept his fate with humility, as a guilty man places his exposed neck upon the headsman’s block. If true, this spoke to great remorse and contrition on Magnus’s part. Two-blade ventured that the action would be over in hours.

  But Ogvai gainsayed him. With wise counsel, the jarl reminded us all that witchcraft had brought this sentence of doom upon Prospero and the Crimson King. It was likely that he had defences, raised and ready, lethal and primed, that were maleficarum and invisible to our sensors.

  We waited. The high-resolution image of Prospero was so large that it filled the repeater screens. We began to feel the slight artificial gravity tugs of orbital corrections.

  An hour later, the main lights on the embarkation deck began to dim for periods of several seconds at a time.

  ‘What’s doing that?’ I asked Aeska Brokenlip.

  ‘The main batteries are drawing power,’ he replied. ‘We have begun the orbital bombardment.’

  When the time came for the drop, I think I was dozing, or daydreaming. I had been thinking about the commune where I had grown up, the tent fields on the desert highlands, the long room, the teaching desks in the library annex, the bedtime stories of wolves to keep us in our place.

  Godsmote nudged me.

  ‘We’re ready,’ he said.

  The drums were thundering. We boarded our Stormbird. As skjald, I had the right to go where I wanted, and choose any accelerator seat I liked, but I took one of the spares at the back of the cabin and not one of the numerical ranks. I would not insult my brothers by breaking their cohort.

  Each seat’s arrestor cage locked down with a pneumatic hiss. We checked our restraints. Thralls and servitors secured bulkier weapons to the overhead racks or the magnetic stowage plates, and then scurried clear as the ramp began to rise. The entire airframe was already rattling with pent-up main-engine fury, and the burner roar almost drowned out the screaming vox-chatter of pilots, ground crew and deck supervisors.

  Then the lights went as red as blood, and the sirens howled like carnyx horns, and the hydraulic bolts fired like lightning stones, and acceleration hit us like a warhammer blow.

  One after another, our Stormbirds spat out of Nidhoggur’s belly like tracer rounds from a basket magazine. In the sky around us, a score of other ships discharged their cargoes in similar fashion.

  I looked at Godsmote.

  ‘We are all bad stars now,’ I said.

  The hearth-fire still burns brightly. There is still meat on your plate and mjod in your lanx, and I still have more of this account to tell.

  So then, on Prospero, many great years ago, we fought against the Traitor Fifteenth. A hard fight. The hardest. The most bitter in the history of the Vlka Fenryka. Firestorms, burning air, crystal cities where the Thousand Sons waited for us with flame-light reflecting off their casement glass. Anyone who was there will remember it. No one who was there could forget it.

  We descended through flames. We speared down past orbital defence platforms ablaze from end to end, great rigs that had been crippled before they could take a shot. They burned as they tumbled and rolled away in slow, decaying orbits, spilling out trails of debris or shorting out great blossoms of reactor energy.

  Below, the world burned too. The fleet’s bombardment had torched Prospero, and ignited the atmosphere. Spiral patterns of soot and particulated debris thousands of leagues across cycled like hurricanes. Giant columns of plasma ener
gy had roasted all vegetation and wildlife, and turned the seas into scalding banks of steam and toxic gas. Vast las bombardments from the heavy batteries had evaporated river deltas and flash-thawed ice-caps. Kinetic munitions and gravity bombs had fallen like Helwinter hail, and planted new forests of bright liquid flame that sprouted and grew, spread and died back, all in a few minutes. Shoals of targeted missiles, silver-swift as midsummer fish running from a catcher’s net, delivered warheads that blasted the soil into the sky and thickened the air into poisonous soup. Magma bombs and atomics, the godhammers, had altered the geography itself. Mountains had been levelled, plains split, valleys thrown up into new hills of rubble and spoil. Prospero’s crust had fractured. We saw the throbbing, glowing tracks of its mortal wounds, brand new canyons of fire that split entire continents. This was the grand alchemy of war. Heat and light, and energy and fission had transformed water into steam, rock into dust, sand into glass, bone into gas. Swirling mushroom clouds, as tall as our Aett on Fenris, punctuated the horizon we rushed towards.

  The ride was not smooth. No power dive from a low anchored carrier ever is. We dropped straight, like stooping hawks, and only levelled out when the surface was right under us. As our nose came up, fighting like a great ocean orm on a hook, the gravity force was huge. The Stormbird shook as if it was intent on shredding to pieces. Then we were level and hugging the topography. Our pilots did not stint on speed. The craft continued to quake. We bellied and bounced as the terrain shifted, and banked hard at every squeal of the collision alarms.

  Some of our drop-boats did not survive the experience. Some failed to recover from their dive approaches. Two that I know of were destroyed when they collided and tore the wings off one another. By then, of course, the warriors of Prospero had finally begun to respond. Battery fire was coming up from the main city. Inbound boats were blown out of the air, exploding outright or veering wildly away like burning moths. Wyrd’s hand was on us. Threads were being cut. We—