Prospero Burns Read online

  The thought disturbed him. He was sick and injured, surely? He didn’t feel sick and injured. The Upplander looked down at himself. He was whole. His feet were bare. They were pink and clean. The still-buckled canvas cuff hung around his right wrist. His body was cased in a dark grey bodyglove with reinforced panels at the major joints like the undersuit of some void-armour. It was tight and form-fitting. It revealed a figure that looked remarkably lean and strong, with surprising muscle definition. It did not look like the well-worn, over-taxed eighty-three year-old body he had last looked down at. No thickness at the hips, no incipient paunch from too many amasecs over too many years.

  No augmetic implant from that day in Ossetia.

  ‘What the hell…?’ the Upplander breathed.

  Sensing his sudden disconcertion, the skulls came at him.

  He swung the stretcher into them with all the force he could muster. Its metal nose caught one in the breastbone, and almost flipped it onto its back. He glimpsed a cracked dog-skull mask, strap broken, sliding away across the platform. Another skull grabbed the opposite end of the stretcher and tried to wrench it out of his hands. The Upplander uttered a despairing, denying cry that echoed around the vast chamber, and hauled the stretcher out of the skull’s grip. The skull’s feet left the ground for a moment as it tried to cling on.

  The Upplander pulled the stretcher right back and let it fly. It swung like a wrecking ball. It struck one skull down and slammed into a second, knocking it off the edge of the platform into the gulf.

  The skull managed to catch the lip of the platform as it went over. Its hands clawed frantically at the granite surfaces. The weight of its legs and body slid it backwards. The other skulls rushed forwards and grabbed it by the hands and sleeves.

  While they were occupied pulling their kin to safety, the Upplander ran.

  He left the chamber, his bare feet slapping against the cool stone floor. He passed under a broad lintel, and down the throat of an entrance hall big enough to fly a cargo spinner through. The permeating green dusk cast a confused light. His shadow ran away from him in different directions.

  The grand entrance hall, and the rock-cut tunnel that lay beyond it, were more finished than the vast chamber behind him. The rock walls had been planed or polished to a dull shine, like dark water ice in the middle of a hard winter. The floor was stone. The ceiling, and the edges of the floor where it met the wall, along with the interspersed archways, ribs and regular wall panels, were dressed in beams and fittings of gleaming off-white, like varnished blond wood. Most of the white wood finishings were massive, as thick as tree boles, and hard-edged, although some were expertly curved to form arches, or chamfered to make wall ribs.

  The gloomy place made memories fire in his head, sudden and sharp. The halls reminded him of ikon caskets he had once recovered from atomic bunkers under the nanotic ground zero outside Zincirli, in Federated Islahiye. They reminded him of Gaduarene reliquaries with their engravings of lightning stones, and the case of Rector Uwe’s treasured old regicide set. They reminded him of the elegant, silk-lined boxes of the Daumarl Medal. They reminded him of Ossetian prayer boxes, the ones made of grey slate set into frames of expertly worked ivory. Yes, that was it. Gold sheets, hammered around carcasses of wood and pin-screwed bone, so old, so precious. The white posts and pillars finishing his surroundings looked like they were made of bone. They had an unmistakable, slightly golden, cast, a warmth. He felt as if he were inside a box of Ossetian slate lined with ivory, as if he were the ancient treasure, the rusted nail, the lock of saintly hair, the flaking parchment, the keepsake.

  He kept running, straining to hear whether he was being followed. The only sounds were the slaps of his soles and the faraway sigh of wind gusting along empty hallways. The draught made it feel as though he were in some high castle, where a casement shutter had been left open somewhere, allowing air to stir through unpopulated chambers.

  He stopped for a moment. Turning to his left, he could feel the breath of the wind against his face, a faint positive pressure from one direction.

  Then he heard something else, a ticking sound. A clicking. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It was ticking like a clock, but faster, like an urgent heartbeat.

  He slowly made sense of what he was hearing.

  Something was padding along the stone floor of the tunnel, somewhere close by, a quadruped, soft-footed, moving with purpose, but not running. It had claws, not the retractable claws of a feline, but the claws of a dog, prominent and unconcealed, the wear-blunted tips tap-tap-tapping on the stone floor with every step.

  He was being stalked. He was being hunted.

  He started to run again. The tunnel broadened out, under a fine, spandrelled arch of blond wood, and revealed a great flight of stairs up ahead. The steps were cut from the native rock, square and plain. They became winders after the first ten steps where the flight turned away. The depth of the tread and the height of the risers were two or three times the normal dimensions. It was a giant’s staircase.

  He heard the claw-clicks closing in behind him, and began to bound up the steps. The lustrous green twilight threw strange shadows. His own shadow loomed alarmingly at his side, staining the wall like the therianthropic shapes in his dream-cave. His shadow-head looked more like an animal’s on the curving wall, so much so that he had to stop for a moment and feel at his face to check that he had not woken in possession of a snout or muzzle.

  His fingers found the lean flesh of his face, human and familiar, with a trace of moustache and a patch of beard on the chin.

  Then he realised he could only see out of one eye.

  The last breathing memory he had was of Bear taking his right eye out with his fingers. The pain had been dull, but enough to shock him into unconsciousness.

  Yet it was his right eye he could see out of. It was his right eye that was showing him the frosty green twilight around him. His left eye registered only blackness.

  The claw-taps approached behind him, louder, nearly at the bullnose step at the foot of the flight. He resumed his escape. Looking down, he watched the shadows on the winding steps move and alter behind him. The edge-step shadows fanned out into a radiating geometric diagram, like the delicate compartments of a giant spiral seashell, or the partitioned divisions of some intricate brass astrolabe or timepiece.

  Tick, tick, tick – each second, each step, each stair, each turn, each division.

  A new shadow loomed below him. It spread up across the outside wall of the giant staircase, cast by something on the stairs but out of sight around the turn.

  It was canine. Its head was down, and its ears were forward and alert. Its back, thickly furred, was arched and tensed. Its forepaws rose and took each step with mesmeric precision and grace. The ticking had slowed down.

  ‘I’m not afraid of you!’ he cried. ‘There are no wolves on Fenris!’

  He was answered by a wet throat-growl that touched some infrasonic pitch of terror. He turned and ran, but his foot caught a step wrong, and he tripped and fell hard. Something seized him from behind, something powerful. He cried out, imagining jaws closing on his back.

  A tight grip rolled him onto his back on the steps. There was a giant standing over him, but it was a man, not a wolf.

  The face was all he saw. It was sheathed in a tight mask of lacquered brown leather, part man, part daemon-wolf, as intricately made as the body-suits of the skulls. Knotted and straked, the leather pieces circled the eye sockets and made heavy lids. They barred the cheek like exposed sinew, and buffered the chin. They wrapped the throat, and were shaped to mimic a long moustache and a bound-up tusk of chin-beard. The eyes revealed through the mask slits were the colour of spun gold with black pinprick pupils.

  The mouth held bright fangs.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ the giant rumbled. It bent down and sniffed at him. ‘You’re not meant to be here. Why are you here?’

  ‘I don’t understand!’ the Upplander quailed.

>   ‘What are you called?’ the giant asked.

  Some shred of wit remained in the Upplander’s head.

  ‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ he replied.

  The giant grasped him by the upper arm and dragged him the rest of the way up the stairs. The Upplander scrambled to keep up, his feet slipping and milling, like a child pulled along by an adult. The giant had a lush black pelt around one shoulder and his immense, corded physique was packed into a leatherwork bodyglove. The build, the scope of the giant’s physicality, was unmistakable.

  ‘You’re Astartes…’ the Upplander ventured, half-running, half-slithering in response to the dragging grip.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Astartes. I said, you’re—’

  ‘Of course I’m Astartes!’ the giant rumbled.

  ‘Do you have a name?’

  ‘Of course I have a name!’

  ‘W-what is it?’

  ‘It’s shut up or I’ll slit your bloody throat! That’s what it is! All right?’

  They had reached a landing, and then the doorway of a massive but low-ceilinged chamber. The Upplander felt heat, the warmth of flame. Vision was suddenly, curiously, returning to his dead left eye. He could see a dull, fiery glow ahead. It was enough to catch the shape of things in the dark, the shape of things his right eye saw in hard, cold, green relief.

  The giant dragged him in through the stone archway.

  The chamber was circular, at least thirty metres across. The floor was a great disk of polished bone or pale wood, laid in almost seamless sections. There were three plinths in the room, each one a broad, circular platform of grey stone about five metres in diameter rising about a metre off the bone floor. Each plinth was simply cut and worked smooth. In the centre of each was a firepit, crackling with well-fed flames, oozing a blush of heat into the air. Conical iron hoods hung down over each fire from the low, domed ceiling to vent the smoke.

  Through his right eye, the chamber was a bright place of spectral green light. The licking flames were blooming white in their brightness. To his left, it was a dark, ruddy cave suffused by an uneven golden glow from the fires. The expanse of bone floor and brushed pale stone reflected the firelight’s radiance. Opposite the chamber door, where the low wall met the down-curved edge of the domed roof, there were shallow, horizontal window slits, like the ports of a gun emplacement. The depth of the angled recesses around the slits spoke of the extraordinary thickness of the walls.

  Four men occupied the room, all seated on the flat top of the furthest plinth. All of them were giants in furs and leather like the one who clasped his arm.

  They were relaxed, sipping from silver drinking bowls, playing games with bone counters on wooden boards laid out on the plinth between them. It looked like one of the men, cross-legged and nearest the firepit, was playing all of the other three, simultaneously running three boards.

  They looked from their games, four more daemon faces cased in tight leather masks, four more sets of yellow eyes, catching the lamplight like mirrors. The flash was brightest in the green-cast view of the Upplander’s right eye.

  ‘What have you found now, Trunc?’ asked one.

  ‘I’ve found Ahmad Ibn Rustah on the Chapter stairs is what I’ve found,’ replied the giant holding him.

  Two of the men by the fire snorted, and one tapped a finger to his crown to imply a touch of simple-headedness.

  ‘And what’s an Ahmad Ibn Rustah, then?’ asked the first one again. The pelt he was wearing was red-brown, and his hair, long and braided stiff with wax or lacquer, projected out of the back of his full-head mask in an S-curve like a striking serpent.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ the giant replied. ‘Don’t you remember, Var?’ The giant let go of the Upplander’s arm and shoved him down onto the bone floor until he was kneeling. The floor was warm to the touch, like fine ivory.

  ‘I remember you talking shit yesterday, Trunc,’ returned Var of the serpent-crest. ‘And the day before that, and the day before that. It all blurs into one to me.’

  ‘Yes? Bite my hairy arse.’

  The men lounging on the plinth burst out laughing, all except the one sitting cross-legged.

  ‘I remember,’ he said. His voice was like good steel drawing across an oiled whetstone. The others fell silent.

  ‘You do?’ asked Trunc.

  The one sitting cross-legged nodded. His mask was the most intricate of all. The cheeks and brow were seething with interlocking figures and spiralling ribbon-shapes. His wide shoulders were draped with two pelts, one coal-black, the other white.

  ‘Yes. And you’d remember him too, Varangr, if you only thought about it for a bloody minute.’

  ‘I would?’ asked Var of the serpent-crest uncertainly.

  ‘Yes, you would. It was Gedrath. It was the old Jarl of Tra. Remember now?’

  Var nodded. The crest of bound hair went up and down like the arm of a hand pump. ‘Oh, yes, Skarsi, I do. I do!’

  ‘Good,’ said the man in the black and white pelts, and casually fetched Var an open-handed clip around the side of the head that seemed to deliver the same playful force of a mallet seating a fence-post.

  ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Var mumbled.

  The man in the black and white pelts uncrossed his legs, slipped to the edge of the plinth, and stood up.

  ‘What do we do with him, Skarsi?’ Trunc asked.

  ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘I suppose we could eat him.’

  He stared down at the kneeling Upplander.

  ‘That was a joke,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think he’s laughing, Skarsi,’ said one of the others.

  The man in the black and white pelts aimed an index finger at Trunc.

  ‘You go down and find out why he’s awake.’

  ‘Yes, Skarsi,’ Trunc nodded.

  Skarsi turned the finger towards Varangr.

  ‘Var? You go and find the gothi. Bring him here. He’ll know what’s to be done.’

  Var nodded his serpent-crest again.

  Skarsi pointed at the other two men. ‘You two, go and… just go. We’ll finish the game-circle later.’

  The two men got off the plinth and followed Var and Trunc towards the chamber door. ‘Just because you were losing, Skarsi,’ laughed one of them as he went by.

  ‘You’ll look pretty funny with a hneftafl board jammed up your arse,’ Skarsi replied. The men laughed again.

  When the four of them had passed through the arched doorway and out of sight, Skarsi turned back to the Upplander and hunkered down to face him with his hands clasped and his elbows resting on his knees. He cocked his huge, masked head on one side, studying the man kneeling on the floor in front of him.

  ‘So, you’re Ibn Rustah, then?’

  The Upplander didn’t reply at first.

  ‘You got a voice in you?’ Skarsi asked, ‘or is it just the words I’m using?’ He tapped the lips of his tight leather mask. ‘Words? Yes? You need a translator? A translator?’

  The Upplander put his hand to his chest, and then remembered that his environment suit was long gone.

  ‘I’ve lost my translator unit,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know where it went. But I understand you. I’m not sure how. What are you speaking?’

  Skarsi shrugged. ‘Words?’

  ‘What language?’

  ‘Uh, Juvjk, we call it. Hearth-cant. If I speak Low Gothic like this, is it any better?’

  ‘Did you switch just then?’ asked the Upplander.

  ‘Between Juvjk and Low? Yes.’

  The Upplander shook his head, slightly mystified.

  ‘I heard a sort of accent shift,’ he replied, ‘but the words stayed the same. It was all just the same.’

  ‘You know you’re speaking Juvjk back to me, don’t you?’ Skarsi said.

  The Upplander hesitated. He swallowed.

  ‘I couldn’t speak Juvjk yesterday,’ he confessed.

  ‘That’s what a good night’s sleep’ll do fo
r you,’ said Skarsi. He rose. ‘Get up and come sit over here,’ he said, pointing at the plinth where the four Astartes had been gaming. The Upplander got up and followed him.

  ‘You’re Space Wolves, aren’t you?’

  Skarsi found that amusing. ‘Oh, now those words aren’t Juvjk. Space Wolves? Ha ha. We don’t use that term.’

  ‘What do you use, then?’

  ‘The Vlka Fenryka, if we’re being formal. Just the Rout, otherwise.’

  He beckoned the Upplander to sit on the broad stone plinth, sliding one of the wooden game-boards out of his way. In the firepit, kindling spat and cracked, and the Upplander could feel the fierce press of heat against his left side.

  ‘You’re Skarsi?’ he asked. ‘Your name?’

  Skarsi nodded, taking a sip of dark liquid from a silver bowl.

  ‘That’s so. Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl of Fyf.’

  ‘You’re some kind of lord?’

  ‘Yes. Some kind.’ Skarsi appeared to smile behind his mask.

  ‘What does Jarl of Fyf mean, then? What language is that?’

  Skarsi picked up one of the bone-disc counters from the game boards and started to play with it absent-mindedly.

  ‘It’s Wurgen.’

  ‘Wurgen?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘I do,’ said the Upplander. ‘It’s what I do. It’s why I came here.’

  Skarsi nodded. He flipped the counter back onto the board. ‘It’s why you came here, eh? To ask questions? I can think of plenty of better reasons for going to a place.’ He looked at the Upplander. ‘And where is here, Ahmad Ibn Rustah?’

  ‘Fenris. The fortress of the Sixth Legion Astartes, called – forgive me – the Space Wolves. The fortress is known as the Fang. Am I right?’