Prospero Burns Read online

  The hologram re-lit. The Astartes didn’t move.

  ‘Ser, this is a profound discovery. It is beyond value. It should be preserved for the benefit of future generations. My team has the expertise. The right equipment too. Please, ser.’

  ‘This area is not safe,’ said the Astartes. ‘You will remove yourselves.’

  ‘But ser—’

  ‘I have given you an order, civilian.’

  ‘Ser, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

  ‘The Fifteenth.’

  The Fifteenth. So, the Thousand Sons.

  ‘What is your name?’

  Hawser turned. The Tupelov Lancers had led most of the team out of the shrine, leaving only him behind. Two more Astartes, each as immense as the first, had manifested behind him. How could something that big move so stealthily?

  ‘What is your name?’ the new arrival repeated.

  ‘Hawser, ser. Kasper Hawser, conservator, assigned to—’

  ‘Is that a joke?’

  ‘What?’ asked Hawser. The other Astartes had spoken.

  ‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

  ‘I don’t understand, ser.’

  ‘You told us your name. Was it supposed to be a joke? Is it some nickname?’

  ‘I don’t understand. That’s my name. Why would you think it’s a joke?’

  ‘Kasper Hawser? You don’t understand the reference?’

  Hawser shook his head. ‘No one’s ever…’

  The Astartes turned his beaked visor and glanced at his companions. Then he looked back down at Hawser.

  ‘Clear the area.’

  Hawser nodded.

  ‘Once the security of this area can be guaranteed,’ said the Astartes, ‘your team may be permitted to resume its duties. You will evacuate to the safe zone and await notification.’

  No notification ever came. Boeotia fell, and the Yeselti line came to an end. Sixteen months later, by then working on another project in Transcyberia, Hawser heard that conservator teams had finally been let into the Boeotian Lowlands.

  There was no trace that any shrine had ever existed.

  Fith wondered what kind of wight he would come back as. The kind that flashed and flickered under the pack ice? The kind you could sometimes see from a boat’s rail, running along in the shadow of the hull? The kind that mumbled and jittered outside an aett’s walls at night, lonely and friendless in the dark? The kind that sang a wailing windsong between the high ice peaks of a scarp on a late winter day?

  Fith hoped it would be the darkest kind. The kind with the oil-black eyes and the slack-hanging mouth, the kind with rust and mould clogging the links of its shirt. The kind that clawed its way up from the Underverse using its fleshless hands as shovels, gnawed its way through the rock waste and permafrost, and then went walking at night.

  Yes.

  Walking until it reached Ironland and the hearth-aetts of the shit-breath Balt. Walking with a special axe in its hand, an axe forged in the Underverse from the bitter wrath of the restless and murdered, hammered out on god’s own anvil, and quenched in the bile and blood of the wronged and the unavenged. It would have a smile on it, a smile sparked on wyrd’s grindstone to a death-edge so keen it would slice a man’s soul from his flesh.

  Then threads would be cut. Balt threads.

  Fith hoped that would be the way. He wouldn’t mind leaving the Verse so much if there was an expectation of returning. He hoped the wights would let him do that. They could carry him away to the Underverse for all he cared, knocked down by a Balt maul or a Balt arrow, his own cut thread flapping after him in the gales of Hel, just so long as they let him return. Once he reached that unfamiliar shore, they had to remake him, build him back up out of his own raw pain, until he looked like a man, but was nothing more than an instrument, like an axe or a good blade, forged for one pure, singular purpose.

  It wouldn’t be long before he found out.

  Guthox had taken the tiller so that Lern could bind his rope-sawn fingers. The red sails were gaining on them, faster than the black sails of the Balt.

  They had one chance left, in Fith’s opinion. A half-chance. One last arrow in wyrd’s quiver. If they cut north slightly, and ran through the top of Hradcana territory, they might make it to the ice desert beyond. The desert, well, that was death too, because it was a fatal place that no man or beast could live in, but that was a worry for later. They would make their own wyrd.

  If they went to the desert, neither the Hradcana nor the Balt would follow. If they could get through a cut in the rock rampart the Hradcana called The Devil’s Tail, they’d be free and clear, free to die on their own terms, not hounded and knocked to Hel by a pack of soul-cursed murder-makers.

  But it was a long run to The Devil’s Tail. Brom was too messed up to take a turn at the tiller, and even in rotation, the rest of them would be hard pressed to keep going. It was a run you’d break into four or five shorter runs, maybe sleeping out on the ice and cooking some food to rebuild your strength. To make it non-stop, that would be a feat of endurance, a labour so mighty the skjalds should sing about it.

  If there were any Ascommani skjalds left alive.

  Braced against the rail, Fith talked it over with Lern and Brom. All three of them were hoarse from the fight, from yelling hate back into the Balts’ faces.

  Brom was in poor shape. There was no blood in his face, and his eyes had gone dim like dirty ice, as if his thread was fraying.

  ‘Do it,’ he said. ‘The Devil’s Tail. Do it. Let’s not give these bastards the satisfaction.’

  Fith made his way to the bow, and knelt down beside the swaddled Upplander.

  The Upplander was speaking.

  ‘What?’ asked Fith, leaning close. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Then he said,’ the Upplander hissed, ‘then he said I can see you. I can see right into your soul. That’s what he said. I can reflect your harm back at you and I can know what you know. Oh god, he was so arrogant. Typical Murza. Typical. The statues are priceless, Hawser, he said, but how valuable is something, do you suppose, that someone would protect with priceless statues?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re telling me,’ said Fith. ‘Is it a story? Is it something that happened in the past?’

  Fith was afraid. He was afraid he was hearing sky magic, and he didn’t want any part of it.

  The Upplander suddenly started and opened his eyes. He stared up at Fith in sheer terror for a second.

  ‘I was dreaming!’ he cried. ‘I was dreaming, and they were standing looking down at me.’

  He blinked, and the reality of his situation flooded back and washed the nonsense of his fever dream away, and he sank and groaned.

  ‘It was so real,’ he whispered, mainly to himself. ‘Fifty fugging years ago if it was a day, and it felt like I was right back there. Do you ever have dreams like that? Dreams that unwrap fresh memories of things you’d forgotten you’d ever done? I was really there.’

  Fith grunted.

  ‘And not here,’ the Upplander added dismally.

  ‘I’ve come to ask you, one last time, do you want the mercy of my axe?’ asked Fith.

  ‘What? No! I don’t want to die.’

  ‘Well, first thing, we all die. Second thing, you’re not going to get much say in the matter.’

  ‘Help me up,’ said the Upplander. Fith got him to his feet and propped him against the bow rail. The first pricking gobs of sleet were hitting their faces. Up ahead, the sky had risen up in a great, dark summit of cloud, a bruised stain like the colour of a throttled man’s face, and it was rolling in on the ice field.

  It was a storm, coming in hard, flinging ice around the sky. Late in the winter for a storm that dark. Bad news, whichever way you looked at it. The rate it was coming, they weren’t going to get anywhere much before it blew in across them.

  ‘Where are we?’ the Upplander asked, squinting into the dazzle of the ice field rushing by.

  ‘We’re
somewhere near the middle of shit-goes-our-luck,’ said Fith.

  The Upplander clung onto the rail as the wyrmboat quaked across a rough strayke.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

  They were coming up fast on one of the Hradcana’s remote northern aetts. It was just an outpost, a few shelters built on some crags that rose above the ice plain. The Hradcana used it to resupply and safe-harbour their fisher boats when the sea thawed out. It was uninhabited for months at a time.

  A row of spears had been set tip-down in the sheet ice in front of the aett. They stood like a row of fence posts, six or seven of them. On the raised end of each spear-haft, a human head had been impaled.

  The heads were turned to look out onto the ice field at them. Their eyes had been pinned open.

  They were most likely the heads of criminals, or enemy captives, ritually decapitated for the purpose, but it was possible they were Hradcana, sacrificed in desperation because of the extremity of the maleficarum. Their eyes were open so they could see the evil coming and ward it off.

  Fith spat and cursed. He dearly wished Iolo had been able to badge their faces with cast-out marks, to bounce the warding magic back. The wyrmboat had eyes on its prow, of course: the all-seeing sun-disc eyes of the sky god, painted bold and bright, and decorated with precious stones. All wyrmboats had them, so they could find their way, see off danger, and reflect an enemy’s magic.

  Fith hoped it would be enough. The boat was a strong boat, an aett-chief’s boat, but it had run hard and it was tired, and Fith was worried that its eyes might not be powerful enough to turn the magic back anymore.

  ‘Gods of Aversion,’ the Upplander murmured, gazing at the staked heads. ‘Keep out. Stay away. I can see you.’

  Fith wasn’t listening to him. He yelled back down the long, narrow deck at Guthox, signalling him to turn wide. The aett was inhabited. A second later, the spiked heads flashed by, and they were skating the inshore ice under the shadow of the crag.

  Guthox cried out. They were still two or three decent bow shots from the islet, but someone was either gifted or favoured by the Underverse. An arrow had gone into him.

  Now more struck, thakking into the hull or falling short and skipping across the ice. Fith could see archers on the rim of the islet crag, and others on the beach.

  He raced back down the boat to Guthox. Lern and Brom were moving too.

  It was a monstrously lucky shot, except for Guthox. The arrow had gone through the tight-ringed sleeve of his shirt, the meat of his left tricep, shaving the bone, and then through the sleeve again, and then the shirt proper, before punching into the hersir’s side between his ribs, effectively pinning his arm against his body. Guthox had immediately lost control of one of the quarter rudder ropes. The pain was immense. He had bitten through his tongue in an effort not to scream.

  Two arrows were embedded in the deck boards beside them. Fith saw they had fish-scale tips: each head shaped and finished from a single, iron-hard scale from a deep water monster. They were barbed, like a backwards-slanted comb.

  That was what had gone into Guthox. It would never come out.

  Guthox spat blood and tried to turn the tiller. Brom and Lern were shouting at him, trying to take over, trying to snap the arrow shaft so they could free Guthox’s arm. Guthox was slipping away.

  Another wave of arrows hit. One, perhaps, came straight from the same gifted or favoured archer. It hit Guthox in the side of the head, and ended his pain by cutting his thread.

  Blood droplets and sleet stung their faces. Guthox fell away from the tiller and, though Brom and Lern sprang in, the wind became their steersman for a split-second.

  That was all the time the wind needed, and it had no interest in sparing their lives.

  Two

  Dis-aster

  The wind flung them into the rocks abutting the beach, and the wyrmboat shattered like a crockery jar. The impact was sustained, like a relentless series of hammer blows. The world vibrated and up-ended, and the shivering air filled with rock-grit and out-flung stones, along with sleet, with slivers of ice, and with raked splinters of deck-wood as sharp as darning needles. The maniacal wind tore the sails away, like a vicious child plucking the wings off a long-legged fly. The sail-cloth, so full of hard air that it was splitting, cracked as it flew free, and the halyards screamed as they fled through the blocks and sawed into the pins. There was a brief, sharp reek of smoke from unwetted wood as the rigging lines friction-burned their way through and away. Under tension, the escaping lines whirred and buzzed like bees.

  Fith smelled the wood-burn in the last instant of the wyrmboat’s life. The deck broke under him, and flipped him into the sleeting sky. Then he hit the ice with his face.

  The wyrmboat had gone right over, and folded up into the rocks where the wind had driven it. Thrown clear, Fith slid face-down across the glazed sea, his throat full of ice and blood. He rotated, head and toe, as he slowly came to rest.

  He raised his head. The ice beneath him was as dull and cold as the flat of a sword. His chest and face were one big aching bruise, and it felt like he had taken the smile of an axe in his breastbone, and another in his cheek.

  He tried to get up. He felt as if he was too cracked to even breathe. Sucking air into his chest was like swallowing broken glass. Part of the wyrmboat’s mainsail, full of wind and trailing its lines, danced away along the shore of the islet like a gleeful phantom, like a capering wight with its arms out-flung.

  Fith began to limp towards the ruin of the boat. A few arrows hissed overhead. Hradcana bowmen were scrambling down the rocks to reach the wreck. Hradcana red sails were closing in across the ice. Fith could hear the shriek of their bladed runners.

  The ice in his path was scattered with debris. Here was a piece of mast, sheared off. There was part of the starboard rigger, torn off, its iron-shod skate stuck in the crazed ice like a giant’s arrow. Here was a section of spar. Fith picked it up, and hefted it as a weapon.

  There was Guthox’s body. The wyrmboat had spilled it as it tumbled, and one of the riggers had sliced right over it, mashing it flat at the waist.

  A Hradcana arrow whipped past Fith’s face. He didn’t flinch. He saw his axe lying near Guthox, and discarded the spar.

  He picked up his axe.

  Close beside the mangled ruin of the wyrmboat, Lern was dragging the Upplander’s corpse onto the shoreline rocks. Blood was streaming down one half of Lern’s face and soaking his whiskers. Fith began to limp faster to reach them.

  When he left the ice and set foot on the ice-fused shingle, the Hradcana had come close enough for him to see their wild eyes and the white ash-glue coating their faces. They were so close that he could smell the stink of their ritual ointments. These were foul-smelling pastes their gothi had made, aversion remedies to keep the maleficarum at bay. The warriors had put aside their bows and taken up their axes and their swords. A bad omen had to be more than just killed. It had to be cut apart, hacked apart, dismembered and un-remembered. That was how you got magic to leave you alone.

  Brom had got up to face them with his axe. Fith wondered how he was even standing any more. He limped to stand at Brom’s side.

  One of the Hradcana was shouting out at them. It wasn’t a challenge or a threat, it was a ritual thing, a statement of intent, a declaration of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Fith knew that from the sing-song cadence of the words, rather than the words themselves. The warrior was using the Hradcana’s private tribal tongue, their wyrd-cant, which Fith did not speak.

  ‘This is onto you and onto your heads, in the day and the night, in the time of the moving sea and in the time of the still sea,’ the Upplander suddenly said out loud as Fith stepped past him. He wasn’t dead after all, though both of his legs had undoubtedly been broken in the crash. Lern, blood still pouring from his scalp, was trying to make him secure, but the Upplander was pushing away and trying to pull himself up onto a rock.

  ‘This is the wyrd t
hat you have written for yourself by taking the disaster into your aett and deciding to protect it,’ the Upplander continued. He looked at Fith. ‘That’s what they’re saying. My translator is reading it. Do you understand them?’

  Fith shook his head.

  ‘Why do they call me a disaster? What did I ever do?’

  Fith shrugged.

  A look of realisation suddenly crossed the Upplander’s drawn face. ‘Oh, it’s just the translator! It’s literal, just literal… “dis-aster”… bad star. They’re calling me Bad Star.’

  Fith stood beside Brom and faced the Hradcana. The Hradcana warrior was finishing his declaration. Behind him, Fith could hear the Upplander translating the last of it.

  The Hradcana rushed them.

  Without shields, the two Ascommani took the charge. They put over-swings into the first row of faces, and under-swings into the second. Like the surge of the sea when the sea was wet, the Hradcana slipped back and came in again across the shingle. Brom split a man’s shoulder. Fith smashed a man’s jaw into mammocks and managed to wrest the man’s shield away from him. He punched the iron boss of it into the face of the next Hradcana who came looking for an opening, and broke the man’s nose-bone up into his skull. A big axe, a two-hander, swept at Brom, but Fith knocked it away with his captured shield, and Brom tore out the owner’s belly while his arms were still pushed up.

  The next wave came, breaking on their shield. They had to take a few steps back each time. Red-sailed wyrmboats were grounding on the beach, and men were disembarking.

  ‘Do you think they’ve brought enough bodies?’ Brom asked. He was panting hard, and his face was bloodless with pain and effort, but there was still a laugh in his voice.

  ‘Nothing like enough,’ said Fith. ‘And nothing like enough threads, either.’

  Lern left the Upplander in the rocks and came to stand beside them. He took a sword out of a dead man’s hand, thanked him for it, and hunched his back to face the surge.

  The storm was behind them. It was shrieking in across the ice field, across the stilled sea, wailing like an Underverse chorus. Everything in the world that was loose was beginning to shake. The three Ascommani felt the grit of sleet hitting their necks and the backs of their heads. They heard the prickle of it pelting off their mail shirts.