Prospero Burns Read online

Seconds after they had stunned and disempowered the traitors of the Fifteenth with their insidious silence, the sister-warriors struck. They surged through the recoiled mass of Wolves and began to hack and slice with their longswords. Their assault was an odd mixture of frenzy and elegance. Every stroke, every cut, every turn was the skilled action of an elite swordfighter, yet it was driven along by a berserk mania, a hysterical orgy of wounding and killing.

  The Wolves did not hold back either. Released from the hammerblow onslaught of magic, they set in beside the Sisters, matching them blow for blow and kill for kill. The war was physical again. It was kinetic, concussive, visceral and explosive. Blood lay like dew upon what was left of the grass, and hung in the air like a mist.

  Custodes had appeared with the Null Maidens. Their golden forms gleamed amid the swirling scrum of fighting bodies. Released into battle from their normal, solemn duties, they were as unrestrained as any Wolf. The blades of their halberds were thirsty for blood—

  Put drink in my lanx. I am thirsty too. My throat is dry from the urgency of this account. I want you to hear all of this. I want you to see it in your minds.

  See? Do you see? Prospero burns.

  We were driving them back towards the great glass pyramids of Tizca. Drop-pods rained down through the stained sky like meteor showers. The light was bad: not insufficient, I mean. The daylight had gone bad, like meat goes bad.

  Tizca had been violated and deformed. Most of its street plan had been erased, and its buildings and monuments demolished. The landscape was a tangle of black rubble and debris, some of it heaped into steep mountains and ridges, some of it cratered by vast munition strikes. There were corpses everywhere, and in the craters and the gullies, blood had pooled. In places, it ran in gurgling brooks between broken pipes and shattered masonry. Pulped organic matter spattered amongst the debris was the only residue of some fallen souls.

  Each phase of assault was another climb up another hill that had not been there an hour earlier. The rubble slopes were sooty and treacherous. The air was full of beams and pulsed lasers, of hard rounds and rockets and squealing missiles. There was an almost constant downpour of micro debris, and, with that, oily rain as the boiled oceans began to condense and fall back onto the persecuted land. War machines, soiled by smoke-wash, streaked by rainfall, rolled and clanked and strode through the rubble-wastes, their weapons banks flashing and spitting. Pneumatic cannons recoiled pugnaciously into their mounts as they discharged. Main turret weapons boomed like the voice of the Allfather. Flocks of whooping rockets flew together in search of roosts.

  I was with Godsmote and Orcir. We scrambled up another ridge of jumbled wreckage. I was trying to keep up with their fierce rate of advance.

  To the west of us, as we arrived at the summit, one of the great glass pyramids began to collapse, devoured by a languorously slow bloom of fiery light that swelled and expanded, and allowed the monumental structure to fall into its incandescent embrace.

  There was howling in the air once more, the growing chorus of Wolves. Over the din of war and even the tumult of material collapse, the sacking of Prospero was dominated by that sound: part wail, part wet leopard-growl. We know ourselves, my brothers, as Astartes warriors, but I tell you this as an outsider. It is the most chilling sound in the cosmos. It is the primal noise that accompanies death. Nobody who hears it ever forgets it, and few who hear it ever survive. It heralds the approaching destruction, and gives notice that the time for any parlay or mercy is long gone. It is the sound of the sanction of the Sixth, the hunting call of the Space Wolves. It is the dread-sound of wyrdmakers. It turns the blood to ice and the gut to water. I do not believe, and I speak in all honesty, that the Thousand Sons, even though they were Astartes and therefore engineered to be free of fear, were not inspired to terror when they heard it.

  You scare me, wolf-brothers. You scare everything.

  As a prelude to my recurring dream, I often remember a conversation I had with Longfang. I had shared with him, at his request, an account of maleficarum, an event that had befallen me in my previous life, in the ancient city of Lutetia. Longfang told me it was a good tale, but it wasn’t my best. He told me I would learn better ones. He told me I already knew a better one, but I was simply denying it.

  I’m not sure how he was certain of these things. Right then and there, with his thread breaking, I believe he could perceive time in ways that we cannot. I believe he was not bound by the thread of life and could, in those twelve minutes surrounding his death, look up and down its length, and know the elusive past and the inescapable future.

  For the latter point, the account I was denying, I believe he meant the event-memory that forms the kernel of my recurring dream. The face I could never turn in time to see, the face at my shoulder, that was the truth he wanted me to admit. By the time I came to Prospero, I was desperate to free myself of the burden too.

  I did, though in doing so, I merely replaced it with a greater one.

  I ran with Tra, with the wolf-shadows in the smoke, across the ravished landscape. It was late in the day. The flame-light of the tortured world was keeping the encroaching gloom of evening at bay, but when night finally fell, as it must, I knew it would be eternal and no sunrise would ever dispel it.

  I had killed six men – two with my axe, four with my pistol. These are the ones I know of, clean kills in the dizzy incoherence of war. I had also helped to slay one of the Thousand Sons. He would have killed me, one to one. He had felled Two-blade in a bruising clash, and pinned him to the ground with the tongue of a fighting spear, which had gone through-and-through Two-blade’s hip and into the soil. Leaning on the spear to keep the brave Wolf down, he was drawing his bolt pistol to cut Two-blade’s thread.

  I suppose he considered me of no consequence: a thrall, a less-than-Astartes thing blundering in the smoke. He reckoned without the Fenrisian strength the wolf priests had woven into my limbs when they re-engineered me. I cried out a battle curse in Wurgen, and sprang at him, putting the momentum of my running leap into a two-handed downstroke that buried the smile of my axe in the top of his skull. The attack left me rolling on the blood-mire of the earth. The Thousand Sons warrior lurched backwards off Two-blade, uttering some foul, gurgling sound. He let go of the fighting spear’s shaft and clawed at his scalp with his left hand, trying to grasp the blood-slick axe and wrench it out. I had not killed him. His helm had cushioned most of the blow. He swung around and aimed his bolt pistol at me, to punish me for the affront I had caused.

  Two-blade pulled himself up, the spear still through him. He unpinned himself from the ground and came for the traitor foe from behind. He used his famous paired swords like shears and snipped off the warrior’s head. Blood jetted into the air. I had to brace my foot against the detached head to twist my axe free.

  Jormungndr Two-blade dragged the spear out of himself, glanced at me, and continued on his way.

  Some enemy resistance had collected in the glass precincts and annexes of one of the great pyramids. I wanted to see one of these places for myself. I wanted to see its fine decoration and soaring majesty before it was lost to the eyes of man.

  Fine alabaster steps detailed with gold led up to a portico of glass and silver. The only thing that marred the entranceway was the stream of blood running down the fine steps from the sprawled body near the top. Orcir and Godsmote were ahead of me. The doors and walls and ceiling were vitreous mirrors. Shots had struck the mirroring in places, punching holes that were encircled by crazed lines and the talcum scurf of powdered glass. Inside, it was still, the horror without muffled and kept at bay. We could hear the distant rumble of the war, the patter of debris and rain on the high roof panes. Wisps of smoke drifted in the air like holy incense. The mirrored structure of the precinct hall trapped light and bathed us in an ethereal radiance. We slowed our surging advance down to a walking pace and cast our eyes around the glory of the interior. This was but an annex, a side chapel. What wonders must the pyramids contain? The co
nservator part of me, relic of my old lifetime, stirred within my breast, and urged me to examine the complex symbology of the designs wrought in the gold and silver frames of the looking-glass walls, and to record the delicate tracery of glyphs chased into the crystal.

  We saw ourselves too, reflected in the gleaming surfaces: startled and uneasy, dark and hunched, barbaric intruders besmirched with gore, framed in the honeyed light. We were uninvited, invaders, like wild animals that had worried a fence post loose or leapt a boundary ditch and found their way into some civilised commune to desecrate and befoul the place, and scavenge for food, and kill.

  Predators. We were predators. We were why walls were raised and watchfires lit at night.

  Shots came at us down the length of the hall and broke our contemplation. They whipped past us, small bad stars. Some struck the floor and excavated sprays of pulverised stone. Some struck the mirror-walls and punched holes through them. The impacts made the glass walls shiver. The reflections of us hastening to cover wobbled and shuddered. We returned fire, positioned behind turned glass pillars and rows of silver statues. Some of the gunshots screaming at us were bolter rounds. Terrible bites were torn from the gleaming pillars. Silver figures lost their heads or limbs, or toppled from their plinths. I saw one of the Thousand Sons at the end of the hall, unloading his bolter at us. An aura surrounded him, as if he was wearing his own personal storm. Orcir swung from cover and let rip with his heavy bolter. The shots annihilated the traitor, and threw his torn corpse back into the mirrored wall behind him, which promptly shattered and came down in a deafening cascade of glass.

  Orcir and Godsmote moved up. Enemy fire was still coming our way. From the gauge of it, we suspected Spireguard. I could hardly bear to see the incrementally increasing damage that was being done to the grand hall: the spreading cracks, the falling glass, the shot holes, the collapsing statuary, the destroyed detailing. Orcir fired his huge, underslung weapon again, clearing the way. I slipped to the left behind him, into the mouth of a side hallway, hoping to find better cover. My displacer field had still not recharged. The rate of gunfire suddenly increased again, and drove me back along the side hall. I lost sight of Godsmote and Orcir. Mirrors were around me. Looking glass, reflecting me. I pressed on, gun drawn, axe slung but ready, to the end of the side hall, and opened a glass door. There was a room beyond. I stepped through.

  Golden light was knifing into the chamber, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

  I stepped forwards, wary. There was an electronic chime.

  ‘Yes?’ I whispered.

  ‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

  ‘Thank you,’ I replied. I was so stiff, so worn out. I hadn’t felt so bad for a long time. My leg was sore. I thought, maybe there are painkillers in the drawer.

  I limped to the window, and pressed the stud to open the shutter. It rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing more of the golden light to flood in. I looked out. It was a hell of a view.

  The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below me. Solar disc, circumpunct, it stared at me, an eye. I was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. I could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, I could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds and, below, I could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one I was aboard.

  I knew where I was. I had reached the end of my dream.

  My eyes refocussed. I saw my own sunlit reflection in the mirror of the window port. I saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind me.

  Terror constricted me.

  ‘How can you be here?’ I asked.

  I did not wake.

  ‘I have always been here,’ answered Horus Lupercal.

  Fourteen

  Looking Glass

  He did not need to name himself. I had seen his proud likeness many times on posters and pict-casts, on souvenir medals and holo-portraits: Primarch, Warmaster, the beautiful one, the foremost of the first sons. He was a giant, like all of his brothers. The little sleepchamber of the superorbital suite barely contained the scale of him. He was wearing the striking, Imperial white-gold armour of his Legion. A single, staring eye was fashioned across the breastplate. It was surrounded by an eight-pointed star.

  He smiled down at me, a reassuring smile, the smile bestowed by a wise father on a miscreant child.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  ‘You were never supposed to, Kasper,’ he said. ‘You were only ever a playing piece on a board. But I have grown fond of you down the years, and I wanted to see you one last time before the game was over.’

  ‘We’ve never met before, my lord,’ I said. ‘I would have remembered.’

  ‘Would you? I doubt it,’ he replied.

  ‘Ser,’ I said. ‘I have been privy to warnings. Grave warnings. A threat upon your life. I was shown a weapon—’

  ‘This?’ he asked. He drew the Anathame from his belt. It shone with malign light, just as it had done in my un-memories. ‘It’s too late. A year or so from now, this blade will have done its work upon me. I will be finished, and I will be renewed.’

  ‘A year or so from now? How can you speak of time in such a topsy-turvy sense?’

  He smiled again.

  ‘When this blade cuts my thread, Kasper, occulted gods will take me in their arms. They will warp me. My life will change from mortal order to immortal Chaos. I will defy the laws of the cosmos and the rules of creation. Look at the two of us here, standing in your past. Prospero burns in your present, Kasper, but neither of us is there.’

  ‘Why?’ I cried. ‘Why? What have you done? What madness have you wrought?’

  ‘I am clearing the board for the game to come,’ he said. ‘I am setting it out the way I want it. Two key obstacles to my ambitions are the Sons of Prospero and the Wolves of Fenris. The former is the only Legion that has lorecraft enough to hinder me magically; the latter is the only Legion dangerous enough to represent a genuine military threat. The Emperor’s sorcerers and the Emperor’s executioners. I have no wish to store up a fight with either for my future, so I have invested time and energy arranging events to turn them upon each other.’

  I gazed at him in disbelief. He shrugged, ruefully.

  ‘I had hoped for more, if I am honest,’ he said. ‘Magnus is terribly misguided. His dabblings have brought him perilously close to damnation, and my father was right to restrain him. But he would never have toppled over the brink without this violent provocation. I had so wanted the Wolves and the Sons to annihilate each other here on Prospero, and remove themselves as threats at a stroke. But Magnus and Russ have remained true to character. Magnus, high-minded and pious, has accepted his punishment and been destroyed. Russ, relentless and brute-loyal, has not wavered in his appalling task. The Thousand Sons have been destroyed. The Wolves remain in play.’

  He looked at me, and there was a glitter in his eye.

  ‘But in the fate of Magnus and his sons, there is compensation for me. Broken by defeat, they nevertheless come across to my side. As a consequence, I earn some redress against the fact that the Vlka Fenryka remain a stark and extant danger to me.’

  ‘No man can do this,’ I cried, shaking my head. ‘No man can orchestrate events on such a scale!’

  ‘No? Not with years of gamesmanship and manipulation? Not with the dissemination of secrets and lies? Ugly rumours of Magnus’s necromantic practices? Blunt questions about Russ’s psychopathic tactics? Plus, of course, the deliberate manufacture of a network of spies like you, Kasper, real spies and pawns to make both sides paranoid, to make both sides suspect the worst and prepare for reaction? I turned the very traits and habits of each Legion’s character into weapons of self-destruction.’

  ‘No!’ I in
sisted. ‘No man can do such a thing.’

  ‘Whoever said I was a man?’ he replied.

  I backed away. I felt the cold glass of a window or a mirror against my back.

  ‘What are you really?’ I asked.

  ‘You know my name,’ he laughed.

  ‘That’s just a mask, isn’t it?’ I said, pointing at his face. ‘What are you really?’

  ‘Which mask would you prefer?’ he asked. He raised his hand to his face, and tore away the flesh. It split like the husk of a pea-pod, like fibrous vegetable matter, spilling sap like languid honey. The features of Horus Lupercal parted, and underneath them was the laughing face of Amon, Equerry to the Crimson King.

  ‘This one? The one you spoke to on Nikaea? The real Amon was far below at his primarch’s side.’

  He dropped the shredded Horus face onto the deck. It landed with the splat of rotten fruit. Then he peeled the Amon face away too. Milky sap spurted out and spattered down his breastplate, drooling across the great staring eye. Now the sadly knowing features of my old colleague Navid Murza gazed at me.

  ‘Or this one?’

  ‘The real one,’ I said. ‘The real one. No mask, just your real face.’

  ‘You could not bear to look upon it,’ Navid said. ‘No one can behold the baleful light of the Primordial Annihilator and survive. Your sanity would be the last thing to burn up, Kasper. Oh, Kasper. I was not lying when I said I had grown fond of you. You were good to me. I am sorry for the life I have given you.’

  ‘What is the Primordial Annihilator, Navid?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The warp, Kasper,’ he said. ‘The warp. The warp is everything, and everything is the warp. Your Allfather thinks He can win a war against it where other, greater races have lost. He can’t. Mankind will be the warp’s finest victory.’

  He took a step towards me. At his throat, I could see the glint of the Catheric crux he always wore. It was melting.