Prospero Burns Read online

  The inferno was intense. Despite the storm, Fith could feel the heat of it on his face. The line of boats lit off, like the fire graves of great heroes at a boat burial. Ash and sparks zoomed crazily like fireflies. The wind took hold of the thick black smoke coming off the burning, and carried it out across the sea almost horizontally like a bar of rolling fog.

  The daemon’s lightning-box stopped roaring. He lowered it and looked up the beach at the gothi. Hunur was a shrunken, defeated figure, his shoulders slack, his arms down. A few Hradcana and Balt were fleeing past him up the rock slope, seeking the far side of the islet.

  The daemon raised his lightning-box and pointed it at the gothi. He made it flash and bark just once, and the gothi’s head and shoulders vanished in an abrupt pink cloud. What remained of Hunur snapped back off the rock, as if snatched from behind.

  The daemon walked down to the ice-line. The intense heat of the burning boats had liquefied the sea ice along the shore, creating a molten pool of viscous water that was greedily swallowing the boat wrecks down into the darkness in a veil of angry steam. The iron-edged smell of the ocean was released to the air for the first time that year.

  The daemon knelt down, scooped water up in the cup of his massive right hand, and splashed it over his face. The soot streaked on his cheeks and brow. He rose again, and began to walk back up the beach towards Fith.

  The hrosshvalur rose without much warning: just a blow of sour bubbles in the turbulent melt-pool and a sudden froth of red algae. Like all of the great sea things, its diet had been constrained by the ice all winter long, and it was rapaciously hungry. The burning boats had opened the sea to the air, and their cloudy ruins had brought down quantities of meat and blood to flavour the frigid water with an intoxicating allure. The hrosshvalur may have been leagues away when it got the taste; one particle of human blood in a trillion cubic litres of salt water. Its massive tail flukes had closed the distance in a few beats.

  The daemon heard the liquid rush of its emergence, and turned to look. The melt-pool was barely big enough to fit the sea thing. Its scaled flanks and claw-toed flippers broke the ice wider, and it bellied up onto the beach, jaws wide and eager at the scent of blood. The flesh inside its mouth was gleaming white, like mother of pearl, and there was a painful stink of ammonia. Its teeth were like spears of ragged yellow coral. It brought its shuddering, snorting bulk up onto the shingle, and boomed out its brash, bass cry, the sound you sometimes heard at night, on the open water, through the planks of the hull. Smaller mushveli, yapping and writhing like worms, followed it up out of the melt-hole, equally agitated by the promise of meat. The hrosshvalur drove them aside, snapping the neck of one that got too close, and then wolfing it down whole in two or three jerking gulps. It levered its body across the shingle on its massive, wrinkled flippers.

  The daemon crossed in front of the giant killer. He knew that its appetite was as bottomless as the North Ocean, especially since the turning of spring. It would not stop until it had picked the aett islet clean of anything remotely edible.

  The daemon plucked his axe out of the ice-cake shingle. He pulled it up with his hand clasped high under the shoulder, and then he let the handle slip down through his loose grip, pulled by the head weight, until he had it by the optimum lever point between belly and throat. He ran at the ocean monster.

  It blew its jaws out at him in a blast of rancid ammonia. The jaws hinged out so wide they formed a tooth-fringed opening like a chapel cave. The maw was so big that a full crew of men could have carried a wyrmboat into it on their shoulders. Then its secondary jaws extended too, driven by the undulating elastic of the throat muscles, bristling with spine teeth made of translucent cartilage. The spine teeth, some longer than a grown man’s leg, flipped up out of the gum recesses like the blades of a folding knife, each one as transparent as glacial ice and dewed with drops of mucus. The hrosshvalur lunged at the charging daemon, the vast tonnage of its bulk grinding and scraping off the beach stones.

  The daemon brought his axe down and cut through the lower, primary jaw between the biter-teeth at the front, splitting the jaw like a hull split along its keel. Noxious white froth boiled out of the wound, as if the hrosshvalur had steam for blood. Whooping, it tried to turn its injured head away. The daemon knocked his axe into the side of its skull, so that the blade went through the thick scale plate to its entire depth. Then he put it in again, directly below one of the glassy, staring eyes that were the size of a chieftain’s shield.

  The ocean monster boomed, and spewed out a great torrent of rank effluvium. The daemon kept hacking until there was a bubbling pink slit where the hrosshvalur’s head met its neck. The beach underneath them was awash with stinking milky fluid. The slit puckered and dribbled as air gusted out of it. The beast wasn’t dead, but it was mortally stricken. The yapping mushveli began to eat it alive. The daemon left it to die, and walked towards Fith.

  The Upplander had been awake to see most of the spectacle. He watched the daemon’s approach. Close to, they could see the plated form of the daemon’s decorated grey armour under his scorched robes and furs. They could see the corded brown lines tattooed into his face, down the line of his nose, across the planes of the cheek and around the eyes. They could smell him, a scent like an animal, but clean, the heady pheromone musk of an alpha dog.

  They could see his fangs.

  ‘You are Ahmad Ibn Rustah?’ the daemon said.

  The Upplander paused while his translator dealt with the words.

  ‘Yes,’ the Upplander replied. He shuddered with cold and pain. It was a miracle he was still conscious.

  ‘And you are?’ he asked.

  The daemon said his name. The translator worked quickly.

  ‘Bear?’ asked the Upplander. ‘You’re called Bear?’

  The daemon shrugged.

  ‘Why are you here?’ asked the Upplander.

  ‘There was an error,’ said the daemon. The purring growl was never far from the edges of his voice. ‘An oversight. I made the error, so now I make amends. I will take you out of this place.’

  ‘These men too,’ said the Upplander.

  The daemon looked at Fith and Brom. Brom was unconscious against a rock, dusted with pellets of hail. The blood seeping from his wounds had frozen. Fith was just staring at the daemon. There was still blood on the handle of his axe.

  ‘Is he dead?’ the daemon asked Fith, nodding at Brom.

  ‘We’re both dead,’ Fith replied. That was all that was left for him now; the voyage to the Underverse to be remade.

  ‘I haven’t got time,’ the daemon said to the Upplander. ‘Just you.’

  ‘You’ll take them. After what they gave today, keeping me alive, you’ll take them.’

  The daemon let out a soft, throbbing growl. He stepped back and took some sort of tool or wand from his belt. When he adjusted it, it made small, musical noises.

  The daemon looked out to sea, out into the storm in the direction he had come from. Fith followed his gaze. Driving sleet flecked his face and made him blink and wince. He could hear a noise like a storm inside the storm.

  The daemon’s boat appeared. Fith had never seen its like before, but he recognised the smooth boat-lines of the hull, and fins like rudders. It was not an ice rig or a water boat: it was an air boat, a boat for riding the wind and the storm. It came slowly towards them across the ice, hanging in the sky at mast-top height. Screaming air blasted down from it, keeping it up. The air flung ice chips up off the sea. Small green candles lit on and off at the corners of its wind rigs.

  It came closer, until Fith had to shield his face from the blitzing air and the ice chips. Then it settled down on the sea crust with a crunch and opened a set of jaws as large as the hrosshvalur’s.

  The daemon scooped up the Upplander in his arms. The Upplander shrieked as his broken leg bones ground and rubbed. The daemon didn’t seem particularly bothered. He looked at Fith.

  ‘Bring him,’ he said, nodding at Brom again. ‘
Follow. Don’t touch anything.’

  Hawser had been working in the upper strata of Karelia Hive for over eight months when someone from the Council legation finally agreed to see him.

  ‘You work in the library, don’t you?’ the man asked. His name was Bakunin, and he was an understaffer for Emantine, whose adjunct had repeatedly refused Hawser’s written approaches for an interview or assessment. Indirectly, this meant that Bakunin reported to the municipal and clerical authorities, and was therefore part of the greater administrative mechanism that eventually came to the attention of Jaffed Kelpanton in the Ministry of the Sigillite.

  ‘Yes, the Library of the Universitariate. But I’m not attached to the Universitariate. It’s a temporary position.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bakunin, as if Hawser had said something interesting. The man had one eye on his appointment slate and could not disguise his eagerness to be elsewhere.

  They’d met in the culinahalle on Aleksanterinkatu 66106. It was a high-spar place, with a good reputation and great views down over the summitstratum commercias. Acrobats and wire artists were performing over the drop in the late afternoon sun that flooded through the solar frames.

  ‘So, your position?’ Bakunin inquired. Elegant transhuman waiters with elective augmetic modifications had brought them a kettle of whurpu leaf and a silver tray of snow pastries.

  ‘I’m contracted to supervise the renovation. I’m a data archaeologist.’

  ‘Ah yes. I remember. The library was bombed, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Pro-Panpacifists detonated two wipe devices during the insurrection.’

  Bakunin nodded. ‘There can be nothing whatsoever to recover.’

  ‘The Hive Council certainly didn’t believe so. They passed the area for demolition.’

  ‘But you disagreed?’

  Hawser smiled. ‘I persuaded the Universitariate Board to hire me on a trial basis. So far, I’ve recovered seven thousand texts from an archive that had been deemed worthless.’

  ‘Good for you,’ said Bakunin. ‘Good for you.’

  ‘Good for all of us,’ said Hawser. ‘Which brings me to the purpose of this meeting. Have you had a chance to read my petition?’

  Bakunin smiled thinly. ‘I confess, no. Not cover to cover. Things are very busy at the moment. I have reviewed it quickly, however. As far as the general thrust of your position goes, I am with you all the way. All the way. But I can’t see how it isn’t already covered under the terms of the Enactment of Remembrance and—’

  Hawser raised his hand gently. ‘Please, don’t point me to the Offices of the Remembrancers. My requests keep getting channelled in that direction.’

  ‘But surely you’re talking about commemoration, about the systematic accumulation of data to document the liberation and unification of human civilisation. We are blessed to be living through the greatest moment in the history of our species, and it is only right that we memorialise it. The Sigillite himself supports and promotes the notion. You know he was a direct signatory of the Enactment?’

  ‘I know. I am aware of his support. I celebrate it. So often, at the great moments in history, the historian is forgotten.’

  ‘From my review of your statements and personal history,’ said Bakunin, ‘I am in no doubt that I can secure you a high-profile position in the Remembrance order. I can recommend you, and I’m confident I can do the same for several other names on the list you submitted.’

  ‘I’m grateful,’ said Hawser, ‘truly, I am. But that’s not why I requested this meeting. The remembrancers perform a vital function. Of course we must record, in great detail, the events that are surrounding us. Of course we must, for the public good, for the greater glory, for posterity, but I am proposing a rather more subtle endeavour, one that I fear is being overlooked. I’m not talking about writing down what we’re doing. I’m talking about writing down what we know. I’m talking about preserving human knowledge, systemising it, working out what we know and what we’ve forgotten.’

  The understaffer blinked, and his smile became rather vacuous. ‘That’s surely… pardon me, ser… but that’s surely an organic process of the Imperium. We do that as we go along, don’t we? I mean, we must. We accumulate knowledge.’

  ‘Yes, but not rigorously, not methodically. And when a resource is lost, like the library here in Karelia, we shrug and say oh dear. But that data wasn’t lost, not all of it. I ask the question – did we even know what we had lost when the wipe devices detonated? Did we have any idea of the holes it was eating in the collective knowledge of our species?’

  Bakunin looked uncomfortable.

  ‘I need someone to champion this, ser,’ Hawser said. He knew he was getting bright-eyed and eager, and he knew that people often found that enthusiasm off-putting. Bakunin looked uneasy but Hawser couldn’t help himself. ‘We… and by we I mean all the academics who have put their names to my petition… we need someone to take this up the line in the Administratum. To get it noticed. To get it to the attention of somebody who has the position and influence to action it.’

  ‘With respect—’

  ‘With respect, ser, I do not want to spend the remainder of my career following the various Crusade forces around like a loyal dog, dutifully recording every last detail of their meritorious actions. I want to see a greater process at work, an audit of human knowledge. We must find out the limits of what we know. We must identify the blanks, and then strive to fill those blanks or renovate missing data.’

  Bakunin let out a nervous little laugh.

  ‘It’s no secret that we used to know how to do things that we can’t do anymore,’ said Hawser, ‘great feats of technology, and constructions, miracles of physics. We’ve forgotten how to do things that our ancestors five thousand years ago considered rudimentary. Five thousand years is nothing. It was a golden age, and look at us now, picking through the ashes to put it back together. Everyone knows that the Age of Strife was a dark age during which mankind lost countless treasures. But really, ser, do you know what we lost exactly?’

  ‘No,’ replied Bakunin.

  ‘Neither do I,’ Hawser replied. ‘I cannot even tell you something as basic as what we lost. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘Please,’ said Bakunin. He shivered as though he was sitting in a draught. ‘Caches of data are being recovered all the time. Why, just the other day, I heard that we now had complete texts for all three of Shakespire’s plays!’

  Hawser looked the understaffer in the eye.

  ‘Answer me this,’ he said. ‘Does anyone even know why the Age of Strife happened? How did we end up in the great darkness of Old Night to begin with?’

  Hawser woke up. He could still smell the whurpu leaf and hear the background chatter of the culinahalle.

  Except he couldn’t.

  Those things were years ago and far away. He’d blacked out and been dreaming for a second. He could smell blood and lubrication oil. He could smell body odours, scents of dirt and pain.

  The pain of his own injuries was incandescent. He wondered if the Astartes – Bear – would give him a shot of something. It didn’t seem likely. Bear’s attitude towards suffering appeared to be fixed to a different scale. It was more probable that the Upplander’s mind would, at some point, cease registering the extremes of pain in a desperate effort to protect itself.

  The cabin space was dark around the metal stretcher he had been laid out on. His limbs had been strapped down. They were in the air still. Everything was vibrating. There was a constant howl from the drop-ship’s engines. Every so often, turbulence jolted them.

  Bear appeared. He loomed up over the stretcher, looking down. He’d sheared off the burnt ends of his mane of hair, and tied the rest back with a loop of leather. His face was long and noble, with high cheek ridges, a long nose and a prominent mouth, like a snout almost. No, not a snout, a muzzle. The intricate lines of the brown tattoos followed the geometry of Bear’s face, and accented the planes of the cheek and nose, and the angles
of the cheeks and brows. His skin was wind-burned and tanned. It looked as if his face had been carved out of hardwood, like the figure post of a wyrmboat.

  He stared down at the Upplander. The Upplander realised the Astartes was scanning him with a handheld device.

  He clicked it off and put it away.

  ‘We’re coming in now,’ he said. The Upplander’s translator raced to keep up. ‘There’ll be a surgeon waiting to tend you, but this is a special place. You know that. So let’s start as we mean to go on.’

  He reached down, and with the fingers of his left hand, he gouged out the Upplander’s right eye.

  Three

  Aett

  If the daemon, Bear, represented salvation, then he also represented a final submission. The Upplander no longer needed to fight the cold to stay awake, or the pain to stay alive. He let go, and sank like a rock into the glassy silence of a freezing sea. Pain devoured him. It beset him like a blizzard, so violent and furious that he could see it, even with his blinded eye.

  The blizzard continued long after the pain blew out.

  They were approaching the special place that Bear had promised to take him to. They were arriving in a snow storm. It was a terrible snow storm.

  Or was it white noise? Flecks of static instead of particles of snow? A faulty pict-feed? The signal trash of a damaged augmetic optic? Just fuzz, just buzzing white speckles against—

  Against blackness. The blackness, now that had to be real. It was so solid. Solid blackness.

  Unless it was blindness. His eye hurt. The absence of it hurt. The socket where his eye had been hurt.

  Snow and static, blackness and blindness; the values interchanged. He couldn’t tell them apart. His core temperature was plummeting. Pain was being diluted with numbness. The Upplander knew he had long since ceased to be a reliable witness of events. Consciousness refused to reignite in any stable fashion. He was caught in an ugly cleft of half-awareness, a pitiful fox-hole in the lee-side of a snow-bank of insensibility. It was unbearably hard to distinguish between memories and pain-dreams. Was he seeing white noise on a blacked-out display screen, or blizzarding snow against solid black rock? It was impossible to tell.