Prospero Burns Page 36

  Brother, what? I said we were like stooping hawks. Hawks. You know the word, surely? Ah. Ah, I see what has happened. Sometimes, in my excitement, in my enthusiasm for the drama of the account, I lapse back into my old ways, and use a word of Low Gothic instead of Juvjk. It is a habit of mine that I have never left behind, the last traces of the language I spoke in my previous life. I ask your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt the tale.

  The first thing I did when I set foot on Prospero was kill a man.

  This is an important part of my personal account, for until that day, I had never cut a thread. No, not ever. I am a skjald, not a warrior, but that day, that dark day, I was determined I would be more than a helpless observer. On the home world of the Olamic Quietude, men had given of themselves to protect me during the fighting. I did not want to be a burden of that sort again. I had asked for weapons and armour so I could protect myself, and on Prospero I intended to do more than that, and fight with my brothers as the need arose. The wolf priests built my arms and back strong for just such a purpose, after all.

  The Stormbird carrying us, its lifters howling, settled us down with a hard slam on a space of flat rockcrete below some derrick or manufacturing facility in the industrial quarters of Tizca, Prospero’s glorious city of cities. Even now, brothers, even now it is gone, the idea of Tizca will persist down the ages like Roma and Aleksandrya and Memphys as one of the great cities of mankind. It was and is a Carthage, a L’Undone, an Atlantys even, its thread burned and cut, its towers fallen, its rubble long since ploughed under, yet persisting in the memory of our race. It had been planned and raised as a magnificent open city, with beautiful acres of parkland and urban gardens spacing out the vast towers of glass and the crystal ziggurats. Their sheer glass faces reflected either the sun, so they radiated light like mirrors, or the bruise-blue sky, so they became part of heaven. At night, they were reflecting bowls for the stars, perfect scrying surfaces in which the constellations could be watched as they performed their ritual choreography. There were busy quarters of bustling streets and squares, of fine markets and elegant public spaces, especially leading down towards the harbour.

  We set down in one of the vast city’s less glamorous wards, one of the necessary, functional sectors, and even here there was splendour. Buildings of the most mundane and unremarkable function were clad in glass, or raised to be crowned with majestic finials or spires. Tizca’s basic functions of trade and produce-handling, cargo transfer, manufacturing, provision and distribution were all contained by a mask of aesthetic perfection where most cities wear such crude organs around their skirts away from the sites of civic refinement.

  When we arrived, the mask was already knocked away. The hammering shock of the bombardment, as well as several munition strikes, had shattered most of the glass off the buildings around us, exposing their superstructures and girderwork. Some burned furiously. The air wobbled with heat distortion. The open spaces and loading yards were littered with mirror shards, like beaches of polished glass shingle, and every last fragment reflected back a version of the flames so they twinkled and flashed like trillions of fireflies. Each step we took as we bounded from the Stormbird’s ramp crunched. Penetrating warheads had blown titanic holes in the rockcrete ground, revealing some of the service tunnels below, the hidden network of arteries that invisibly maintained the city’s needs.

  Other Stormbirds shrieked overhead, so low it felt we could reach up and touch them. Some set down on nearby sites. The daylight had turned an odd, murky colour, a violet hue that suggested the blue sky had contracted some kind of disease. Smoke moved in the wind, swirling and spinning, reducing our visibility. All I could smell was burning. All I could hear was howling: transatmospheric engines howling, infernos howling, voices howling.

  Then I began to hear, behind the howling, the distant thump of bombs and the nearby bang of bolter fire.

  We entered the derrick tower, a multi-levelled manufacturing plant that had been skinned of its glass cladding. Fire squirmed in its upper levels, silhouetting the black ribs of the girders against bright orange. Low down, where we were, the fire cast hectic, jumping shadows. The Wolves did not hesitate. They ploughed in, hunting targets, dividing to quarter the area. Godsmote and Aeska were the first two to mount the metal-mesh stairs up to the second level, where a railed hoist platform connected to a larger gantry over some kind of machine bay. I ran with them. I jumped as I heard the sudden, shocking retort of bolters discharging underneath us as our comrades met the first resistance. Aeska yelled something and began firing at a walkway on the level above us. His mass-reactive rounds bit chunks out of the decking and the rail. I saw human bodies fall into the flames far below. I realised we were being shot at.

  I saw men on the same platform level as us, men in crimson coats and silver helmets. They had golden braid frogging on their coats, as though they had dressed for a parade in the sun. Some had sabres in their hands, drawn and ready. All of them were blasting with lasweapons.

  Godsmote roared and ran at some, his axe raised. I saw one of the red-coated figures burst as a bolt from Aeska’s gun struck him. Smoke from the fires above us suddenly gusted down as the wind direction changed, and fogged my location, blinding me for a moment.

  As the smoke sucked back out, I felt a dull concussion from the front, then another. Two las-rounds had struck my displacer field, and been dissipated in crackling balls of energy. The shooter was directly ahead of me, six spans away, beside the gantry rail. He was a young man, handsome, regal in his gold-frogged red coat and his silver helm. He was aiming his lasweapon and yelling at me. He fired again, and the shot crackled off my body-shield.

  The pistol from Ur was in my right hand. I didn’t even think about it. My reaction was instinctive, but made swift and effective by the training I received from Godsmote. I fired back and killed him.

  The only thing that betrayed my novice status, the only thing that gave me away as a combat virgin, was the fact that I employed overkill. Godsmote had taught me to aim and shoot. I could pull a gun and hit a target at twenty spans. My first shot went into his chest and would have been entirely sufficient. But he was shooting at me, and he’d have killed me already had it not been for the displacer field, so I kept the trigger squeezed.

  The pistol from Ur put three more rounds into his belly, and the sheer force of impact doubled him up so the next two shots punched into the side of his neck and the top of his head. He fell against the rail, and then collapsed in a sort of sitting position, all very suddenly and untidily. I kept waiting for him to fall down completely and stretch out dead on the deck, but he did not. He remained tangled and contorted, half-raised by the rail behind him.

  I stepped towards him. My shots had killed him three or four times over. Blood from the rupturing torso wounds was streaming out of his corpse and spattering down through the deck grille into the darkness below. There was a huge, scorched puncture mark in the crown of his polished silver helmet as though a blacksmith had hammered a sooty augur through it. A steam of blood vapour wafted out of it from his cooked braincase.

  I expected his expression to register something. Anger, perhaps, defiance, or full on hatred for me. I expected at least a rictus of agony, or even a look of sadness or dismay.

  There was nothing. His face was slack. Not one hint of a vital emotion could be read. I have come to learn since that is the case with the faces of the dead. We find no messages or legacies there, no final communication. Life departs, and the face sinks. As the thread is cut, the tension goes, and only the untended ruin of absence remains.

  The soldiers in red coats were the Prosperine Spireguard. Their noble and well-appointed regiments were the domestic defence forces. They were as finely drilled and effective as any elite division of the Imperial Army.

  They looked too civilised and decorative to bear the brunt of the Wolves’ assault. They looked like men confounded by disruption to some formal colours ceremony. They looked as if they ought to be running away.


  They did not run away. Let us agree on their courage and make it part of this account. They met the Sixth Astartes, the most efficient and ruthless killing machine in the entire arsenal of the Imperium, and did not give ground. They faced demented, barbarian giants that looked like feral caricatures of Astartes, and did not break. They had been ordered to defend Tizca, and they did not falter from that order.

  And so they died. This is what happens when loyalty meets loyalty. Neither side was going to leave its grim and onerous duty undone, and so destruction of at least one was assured.

  The Spireguard had ballistic armour woven into their distinctive red coats, but this could not withstand the mass-reactive devastation of bolter rounds. Some carried displacer fields or riot shields, but neither could cope with the withering ferocity of autocannons. Their silvered helms, some plumed, all alloyed from plasteel, were unable to block the slicing edge of axes or frostblades. Their gun-carriages and fighting vehicles were well plated and, in some cases, shielded, but all crumpled into mangled wreckage when struck by shoulder-launched missiles or conversion beamers, or burned like corpse-boxes on funeral pyres when caught by heavy flamers or melta effects. Jarl Ogvai, so several brothers attest, faced one gun-carriage down as if it was a saeneyti calf that he intended to wrestle to the ground and hog-tie. He gutted it with his power claws, shredding metal like scraps of foil. He split its casing wide open and then filled its interior with bolter fire that pulped the crew.

  The devastation was heartbreaking. The ground, as we advanced, was littered with the tattered and disfigured dead. Blade weapons had sectioned some, heat weapons had blackened and fused others. The marks of bolter impacts had left huge wounds that looked like deep bitemark craters in radapples. For their part, the Spireguards’ lasguns and autoweapons barely scratched the marauding Rout. Minor injuries were taken. Only crew-served weapons and fighting vehicles offered any genuine hazard. Once the Sixth’s armoured support began their advance, clanking and clattering up from the steam-haze of the seafront zones where their heavy landers had come in, even that small hope was extinguished. Predators and Land Raiders, grey as granite and just as monolithic, crushed through buildings in the lower town, levelled structures and demolished towers. Their tracks cut new roads into the city’s streetplan, death roads of pulverised rubble. Their weapons selected and annihilated anything that crossed their range.

  Dark shapes ran with them and around them, bounding along the new-made death roads into the fire of combat. They looked like wolves, or the shadows of wolves at least. I am not sure if they were real, or just the product of my imagination. The smoke was treacherous, and played many tricks.

  I have never known my Rout brothers as savage as they were that day, nor have I ever known them so grim. There is a strange lightness to them in most times of war, an execution yard humour that allows them to bond and endure, and to laugh wyrd in the face. It is almost a glee, a relish, the eagerness of a duty well done. Even during the war with the Olamic Quietude I saw it: the caustic jokes, the barracking, the acid comments, the bleak, phlegmatic mindset.

  But not on Prospero. The task was too dark, too thankless. Nothing could lighten the burden of what they were about, so they lost themselves in the fury of their actions. In some ways, this made Prospero’s punishment all the more extreme and unholy. Not only was no quarter offered, no quarter was even considered. Teeth were only bared in wet leopard-snarls of rage and hatred, not in menacing grins. The only words uttered were curses and condemnations. Golden, black-pinned eyes darkened with resolve and hardened with duress. Blood begat blood. Slaughter begat slaughter. Fire fed fire, and in that fuelled frenzy, a planet perished, a society bled out, and a wound was torn in the flank of the Imperium that would never heal.

  The Rout of the Vlka Fenryka did everything that was asked of them, without question or dubiety. They were not in the wrong. They were the perfect warriors, the perfect executioners, precisely as they were engineered and bred to be. They were the Emperor’s sanction. This account, my account, absolves them of all blame and celebrates their trueheartedness.

  It must also reflect one other thing. This account must reflect one other, secret thing. Hear it, and decide what must be done, even if what must be done is slit my throat and cut my thread so I can never recite this account again.

  The day blurs in my memory. An experience of such extreme intensity, of such violence and unending cacophony, will always do that. Moments conflate, events knock into one another and overlap.

  I remember I was in a park, or what was left of some public garden. All the vegetation was burning. There was a small shrine structure, which had taken an indirect hit and was bleeding smoke into the violet air. We had entered from the east, with crossfire coming at us. I had temporarily turned off my displacer field because it was beginning to lose its charge.

  Then we met the Thousand Sons for the first time.

  Something had made them hold back. It was not fear. Perhaps they could not stomach the heresy of a fight against their Astartes kin. Perhaps it was some kind of tactical ploy intended to achieve an advantage.

  Perhaps it was restraint. As though accepting their punishment, they had not opposed our initial advance, but, like the Spireguard, they ultimately found they could not stand by and watch their city burn.

  They were resplendent in gold-edged red, their helmets marked with the distinctive nasal crest of their Legion. Though in form and armour and stature they were equivalent to the warriors of the Sixth, they could not have been more different. They moved differently. The Wolves bounded and sprang; they seemed to glide and stride. The Wolves were head-down and fast moving; they were upright and measured. The Wolves were howling; they were silent.

  I was standing in the middle of the burning lawns as the lines of rival Astartes first engaged, wild grey shapes hurling themselves at gold and red centurions. The noise was like a thunderclap. It was the slap of great masses crashing together, like the clashing rocks of myth, but there was a ringing peal to it as well. It sounded like the voice of the monstrous storms that sheer altitude sometimes detonated outside the high places of the Aett on Fenris.

  This was how battles must have looked when only gods and their demigod offspring walked upon Terra. Humanoid giants in regal armour, some dark and pelt-clad like sky deities of boreal Aesir, some golden and haughty like scholar gods of Faeronik Aegypt. Immense blows were landed by warriors of either side: men were smashed off their feet, or cut apart, bodies were rotated hard, heads snapped around. Fenrisian blades hammered into Prosperine armour, Prosperine force burned back into Fenrisian plate. The line faltered in both directions as it compensated for the force of collision. Then it seemed as though the carnivorous lust of the Vlka Fenryka would entirely overwhelm the warriors of the Fifteenth.

  That was the moment we started to die, my brothers. That is the moment we started to die in any significant numbers. The Thousand Sons unleashed their maleficarum, the poison in their veins.

  Electrical discharge leapt from staffs and fingertips. Radiant filth, like the unlight of the warp, spilled out of eye slits and speared from warding palms. Wolves were torn apart by the touch of their battle magic, or thrown back, mangled and scorched. Some were petrified into smouldering attitudes of excruciation. Their weapons charged with sorcerous power, fuming with helsmoke and sick light, the accursed traitors launched into our assaulting ranks.

  Threads were cut in swathes, like scythed corn. Threads were more than cut. Some were torched back along their lengths, so that men did not merely die; the lives they had led before their deaths burned away into forgetfulness. Some were left as smears of blood, or haphazardly butchered carcasses. Some were pulled limb from limb by invisible wights and the sprites of the air. Some were left as nothing but heaped white bones and scads of blackened armour.

  Oje died there, turned inside out by a warlock’s gesture. I saw Svessl too, split in two by an invisible blade. His blood came out of him with great, explosive force, like l
iquid from a pressurised cask. Hekken: cooked inside his armour. Orm Ormssen: exsanguinated. Vossul: blinded and pulped. Lycas Snowpelt: gutted and decapitated. Bane Fel: engulfed in a cold blue fire that consumed him but would not go out. Sfen Saarl: withered to a vile powder. Aerdor: transmogrified into a twisted, steaming, inhuman stump.

  Too many. Too many! The accounts needed for all their sendings off would last for months. The kindling needed for all their funeral pyres would exhaust an entire great year’s supply.

  I felt vindication, for the maleficarum of the Thousand Sons was everything it had been accused of being. Our prosecution was legitimised. But I felt fear, for I did not believe we would win or even live. For all our fury, for all our might as warriors, we would be exterminated, proving that the Thousand Sons of Prospero were monsters and warlocks.

  I did the one thing a skjald should not do. I looked away. I averted my gaze so that I did not have to witness the fall of the Rout.

  I missed, therefore, the beginning of salvation. I missed the first glimpse of the Null Maidens pouring down the black heaps of burning rubble into the fight. Their blades were bright. Pulsing beads and beams of energy spat from their weapons. They uttered no war cry or challenge.

  The blankness of them washed across the line. The rank clouds of maleficarum burned away, or blew aside like fog in a night wind. The warlocks of the Fifteenth choked on the abominable words of their conjurations. They gagged on the pestilential utterance of their spells. I saw them stagger back, clutching at their throats, pawing at the neck seals of their helms. I saw blood spurting and leaking through visor slits in stringy ropes. I saw arcane gestures and motions seize up and cripple hands into palsied, arthritic claws.