Prospero Burns

Six

‘I’ve seen seventy-five years come and go,’ said Kasper Hawser, ‘and I’ve worked fifty years on this project—’

‘And the Prix Daumarl attests to the sterling—’

‘Could I finish? Could I?’

Henrik Slussen nodded, and made a conciliatory gesture with his gloved hand.

Hawser swallowed. His mouth was dry.

‘I have worked for fifty years,’ he resumed, ‘shepherding the concept of the Conservatory from nothing into this, this form. I was raised by a man who understood the value of information, of the preservation of learning.’

‘That’s something we all believe in, Doctor Hawser,’ said one of the thirty-six rubricators sitting in a semi-circle in the writing desks behind Slussen. Hawser had asked Vasiliy to arrange the meeting in the college’s Innominandum Theatre, the lecture theatre panelled in brown wood, rather than the provost’s office as Slussen had requested. A psychological ploy; he could get Slussen and his entourage to take the fold-down seats built for students, and diminish them in contrast to his authority.

‘I believe the doctor was still a little way from finishing,’ Vasiliy told the rubricator. His tone was smooth, but there was unmistakable chastisement in his voice. Vasiliy was standing at Hawser’s left shoulder. Hawser could tell that his mediary had one hand inside his coat pocket, secretly holding on to the small vial of medication in case the tension of the situation became too much for Hawser.

The man worried too much. It was charming.

‘The work the Conservatory has done,’ said Hawser, ‘the work I have done… It has all been about expanding mankind’s understanding of the cosmos. It has not been about salvaging data and placing it in an inaccessible archive.’

‘Explain to me how you think that is happening, doctor?’ asked Slussen.

‘Explain to me the process by which any average citizen can access information from the Administratum datastacks, undersecretary?’ Hawser replied.

‘There is a protocol. A request is made—’

‘It requires approvals. Authorities. A positive request may take years to fill. A refusal may not be explained or appealed. Information assets, precious information assets, are being placed into the same vast pot as general global administrative data. Vasiliy?’

‘Current assessments made by the Office of Efficiency predict that the centralised data-wealth of the Imperium is doubling every eight months. Simply navigating a catalogue of that data-wealth will soon be arduous. In a year or two…’

Slussen did not look at Hawser’s mediary.

‘So it’s a problem of access, and of the architecture of our archives. These are issues that I am happy to explore—’

‘I don’t believe they are issues, undersecretary,’ said Hawser. ‘I believe they are symptoms and excuses. They are soft ways of censoring and forbidding. They are subtle ways of controlling data and deciding who gets to know what.’

‘That’s quite a claim,’ said Slussen, entirely without tone.

‘It’s not the worst thing I’m going to claim today by any means, undersecretary,’ said Hawser, ‘so hold on tight. High level control of global information, that’s bad enough. A conspiracy, if you will, that restricts and seeks to govern the free sharing of composited knowledge throughout mankind, that’s bad enough. But what’s worse is the implication of ignorance.’

‘What?’ asked Slussen.

Hawser looked up at the ceiling of the lecture hall, where egg tempera angels flew and cavorted through gesso clouds. He was feeling a little light-headed, truth be told.

‘Ignorance,’ he repeated. ‘The Imperium is so anxious to retain proprietorial control of all data, it is simply stockpiling everything without evaluation or examination. We are owning data without learning it. We don’t know what we know.’

‘There are issues of security,’ said one of the rubricators.

‘I understand that!’ Hawser snapped. ‘I’m simply asking for some transparency. Perhaps an analytical forum to review data as it comes in. To assess it. It’s six months since Emantine put you in charge, undersecretary. Six months since you began to steer the Conservatory into the dense fog of the Administratum. We are losing our rigour. We are no longer processing or questioning.’

‘I think you’re exaggerating,’ said Slussen.

‘Just this week alone,’ said Hawser, taking the data-slate Vasiliy held out to him, ‘one hundred and eighty-nine major archaeological or ethnological survey reports were filed directly to the Administratum through your office without going through the Conservatory. Ninety-six of those had been directly funded by us.’

Slussen said nothing.

‘Many years ago,’ said Hawser, ‘so many years ago it alarms me to count them, I asked someone a question. In many respects, it was the question that led us to this place, the question that drives the whole ethos of the Conservatory. It comes in two parts, and I’d be very interested to know if you can answer either.’

‘Go on,’ said Slussen.

Hawser fixed him with an intent stare.

‘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?’

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Vasiliy.

‘Finish packing,’ Hawser replied. ‘Perhaps you’d like to help?’

‘You can’t leave.’

‘I can.’

‘You can’t resign.’

‘I did. You were there. I expressed a desire to Undersecretary Slussen to withdraw from the project for the time being. A sabbatical, I think it’s called.’

‘Where are you going to go?’

‘Caliban, perhaps. An investigative mission has been sent to audit the Great and Fearsome Bestiaries in the bastion libraries. The idea appeals. Or Mars. I have a standing invitation to study at the Symposia Adeptus. Somewhere challenging, somewhere interesting.’

‘This is just an overreaction,’ said Vasiliy. The afternoon sunlight was piercing the mesh shutters of the high-hive dwelling, an academic’s quarters, fully furnished, generous. The items in the room that were actually Hawser’s belongings were few, and he was hurling them into his modular luggage. He packed some clothes, some favourite data-slates and paper books, his regicide board.

‘The undersecretary’s answer was just flippant,’ said Vasiliy. ‘Trite. He didn’t mean anything by it. It was a politician’s nonsense, and I’m sure he’ll take it back on reflection.’

‘He said it didn’t matter,’ said Hawser. He stopped what he was doing and looked at his mediary for a moment. He was holding a small toy horse made of wood, deciding whether to pack it or not. He’d owned it for a long time.

‘He said it didn’t matter, Vasiliy. The causes of the Age of Strife were of no consequence to this new golden age. I have never heard such folly!’

‘It was certainly hubristic,’ said Vasiliy.

Hawser let a thin smile cross his lips. His leg ached, as it always did in times of stress. He put the wooden horse back on a side shelf. He didn’t need it.

‘I’m going,’ he said. ‘It’s been too long since I did any field work, far too long. I’m sick to the eye teeth of this bean-counting and political fancywork. I’m not made for it. There is no part of me that ever wanted to be a bureaucrat – you understand that, Vasiliy? No part. It disagrees with me. I need to work in a marked trench, or a library, with a trowel or a notebook or a picter. I’ll only be gone a short while. A few years at most. Enough time to clear my head and refresh my perspective.’

Vasiliy shook his head.

‘I know I’m not going to talk you out of this,’ he said. ‘I know that look, the one you’ve got in your eye. It says stay away from the crazy man.’

Hawser smiled.

‘There, you see? You know the omens to look for. You’ve been warned.’

The Quietude’s home world, that neon orange ball, was actually skinned with ice in the parts that mattered. The Quietude, it appeared, had artificially extended its ice caps like an armoured sheath.

A message was sent to Ogvai asking for further expertise.

‘We’re going to the surface,’ Fith Godsmote said to Hawser. ‘You’ll come. Make an account.’

It almost sounded like a question, but it was really a statement of the imminent.

Stormbirds had been brought into the graving dock’s extravagant facilities. As the men of Tra readied their weapons and kit, and lined up to board, Hawser saw that some of them were engaged in half-joking arguments.

‘What’s going on?’ he asked Godsmote.

‘They are debating which bird you should ride on,’ said Godsmote. ‘When you came to Fenris, you were a bad star and you fell out of the sky. No one wants to ride down the sky with a bad star.’

‘I can imagine,’ said Hawser.

He looked at the Astartes, and called out, ‘Which craft is Bear travelling on?’

Some of the men pointed.

‘That one, then,’ said Hawser, walking towards the vehicle. ‘Bear won’t let me fall out of the sky twice.’

The men of Tra laughed, all except Bear. The laughter was edged with wet leopard-growls.

Hawser had to wear a plastek rebreather over his nose and mouth, because there was something in the atmosphere that didn’t agree with standard human biology. The Astartes had no need of support. Many went bare-headed.

The view was extraordinary. The sky, only faintly bruised by vapour, was an oceanic amber canopy that had such bright clarity it looked like blown glass. Everything had a slightly yellow cast to it, an orange tinge. It reminded Hawser of something, and it took him a little while to pull up the memory.

When he finally did, it was surprisingly sharp. Ossetia, a few days before his fortieth birthday; Captain Vasiliy sniggering as she allowed him to try on her heavyweight headgear, him blinking as he peered out through the giant slide-visor at a world tinted orange.

Then he heard, in his head, the March of Unity being played on an old clavier, and tried to think about something else.

They had set down on a great ice field. Under the orange sky, the landscape was flat but dimpled, like a textured flooring fabricated and rolled out from a machine. It was ice, though. The dimples were where small liquid ripples had flash-frozen, and punch samples had been taken by the engineer corps of the advancing Imperial Army brigades. The chemical composition matched those derived from orbital scanning. Stupendous towers the size of hive city spire caps, but of a design ethic that matched the graving dock far above, protruded from the ice field at regular intervals of approximately six hundred and seventy kilometres like cloves studding a pomander.

Almost the first thing the Wolf beside Hawser said was, ‘There’s no hunting here.’

He meant the ice was sterile. Hawser could sense it too. This was not the absolute white wilderness of Asaheim. This was an engineered landscape. The towers were generators, in his estimation. In the face of a massive extraplanetary invasion, the Olamic Quietude had used its appreciable technology to extend its natural ice caps to form shields. The thickness and composition were such that great parts of the orbital bombardment had been reflected or resisted.

There were cities under the ice where the Quietude was preparing its counter-attack.

The Imperial Army had targeted some of the towers, and were attacking them in vast numbers. Hawser saw tides of men and armoured fighting machines washing in across the ice towards one, pouring in across pylon bridges and support struts. Mass gunfire had stippled the ice field, and the crust around the tower’s structure was beginning to melt, suggesting that damage had been done to parts of its mechanism.

There were fires burning everywhere. Thousands of threads of dirty smoke rose into the ochre sky across the giant vista, each one spewing from a destroyed machine, just dots on the ice in the general mass of attackers. It was a scale that he could not really comprehend, like the scenic backdrop of some painting of a general or warmaster with a raised sword and his boot on a fallen helm. Hawser had always presumed the apocalyptic battle scenes rendered behind them were somewhat over-enthusiastic and largely intended to fluff the sitter’s importance.

But this was bigger than anything he had ever seen: a battlefield the size of a continent, an armed host that numbered millions, and that host only one of hundreds of thousands that the Imperium had birthed upon the awakening cosmos. In one repellant moment, he saw the contradictory scales of mankind: the giant stature that allowed the species pre-eminence in the galaxy, and the individual stature of a great-coated trooper, one of scores, falling and lost under the charging boots of his comrades as they stormed the alien gates.

Quietude defences lashed the advancing lines with withering disdain. Along the leading edge of the attack, the air seemed to distort as the Quietude’s weapon effects impacted and mangled armour, ice and human bodies. High on the ominous tower, massive lamp-like turrets rotated slowly and projected down beams of annihilating energy, washing them slowly as they turned like the beacons of fatal lighthouses. The beams left black, steaming, sticky scars gouged through the densely packed hosts of advancing Imperials.

Super-heavy tanks in deep formation braced for ice-firing and began to devastate the lower flanks of the tower. Parts of it blew out, ejecting huge sprays of debris. The explosions looked small from a distance, and the clouds of debris little more than exhalations of dust, but Hawser knew it was simply scale at work again. The tower was immense. The cloudbursts of debris were akin to those that might rain down after the destruction of a city block.

As he watched, a whole bridge section collapsed, spilling Imperial soldiers into the gulf between the tower and the ice shelf it was plugging. Hundreds of soldiers fell, tumbling, tiny, the sunlight catching braid and armour. Several armoured vehicles plunged with them, sliding off the bridge section as it caved, tracks snapping and lashing. They had been assaulting one of the main exterior gates, which had remained shut and unyielding throughout. Another bridge section collapsed about five minutes later when one of the tower’s subturrets succumbed to bombardment from the superheavy tanks and slumped like a landslip, its form unforming, its structure blurring, its weight ripping down off the face of the main tower and exploding the massive bridge into the gulf.

How many thousand Imperial lives went in that second, Hawser wondered? In that flash? In that senseless roar?

What am I doing here?

‘Come on. You, skjald, come on.’

He turned from his ringside view of armageddon and saw the flame-lit face of Bear. There was no smile or expression of regard to be found there. Hawser had learned this to be a character mark of the sullen Wolf. He presumed that Bear was particularly sullen with him because he, a human, had caused Bear, an Astartes, embarrassing problems in the eyes of his company, and the Vlka Fenryka as a whole.

‘Where?’ Hawser asked.

Bear bristled slightly.

‘Where I tell you,’ he said. He turned, and tilted his head to indicate that Hawser should follow.

They left the powdery, yellow lip of an ice ridge where most of Tra had settled to observe the assault. Behind them, an expanding column of thick cream dust was slowly filling the amber sky. It was emerging from the tumult surrounding the tower assault, climbing into the sky like a stained glacier, ponderous and threatening. The upper parts, where it broadened, were already seventy kilometres across, and the formations of Army gunships and ground-attack craft lining up on the tower were having to fly instruments-only as they penetrated the sulphurous pall.

Hawser followed Bear up the slope. The fine yellow powder-ice was adhering to the Wolf’s dark, almost matt-grey armour. Sometimes Hawser stumbled or slipped a little as the soft slope trickled or subsided under him, but every single step Bear took was sure: deep strides, planting his massive, armour-shod feet, not once having to steady himself with a hand. He began to leave Hawser behind.

Hawser fixated on the black leather braids and runic totems tied to the Wolf’s belt and carapace, imagined himself grabbing hold of them and clinging on, and tried to catch up.

They wound up the cliff slope, through groups of lounging Wolves, past the brooding Terminator monsters, their gross armour burnished and glinting in the sun, past teams of thralls making adjustments and spot repairs to seams and joints as their masters waited impatiently to go back and view the battle. The Terminators were as immobile and sinister as cast bronze sculptures, all arranged to face the nearby conflagration.

Away from the unmarked but defined perimeter of Tra’s vantage point, the rear echelon and supply encampments of the Imperial Army group were spread out like a souk. There was a dead space, a fringe of about two kilometres, between Tra’s position and the closest Army post, indicating the intense reluctance of any soldier, officer or even mediary of the Imperial Army to come within sight of a Fenrisian Wolf.

If only they knew, Hawser thought. There are no wolves on Fenris.

‘Keep up!’ Bear said, turning to glance back. Now at last there was an expression on his face. It was annoyance. His black hair made a ragged curtain that threw his eyes into shadow and made them shine with nocturnal malevolence.

Hawser was dripping with sweat under his body-suit and the pelt draped over his shoulders. He was out of breath, and the sun was burning his neck.

‘I’m coming,’ he said. He wiped perspiration off his face, and took a long suck from the water-straw that fed into his rebreather mask. He stopped deliberately to catch his breath. He was interested to see how far he could push Bear. He was interested to see what Bear would do.

He hoped it wouldn’t be hit him.

Bear watched. He’d braided his jet-black hair around his brow and temples before the attack on the graving dock to afford and cushion the fit of his Mark-IV helm. One of the braids had worked loose, and was causing the curtain across his eyes. Bear began to plait it back into place, waiting for Hawser.

Hawser took another deep breath, flexed his neck in the prickling heat, and caught up.

They entered the Army encampment. It had only been there a few hours, but it was already the size of a large colony town. Arvus- and Aves-pattern transatmospheric lifters were still coming in and out to make drops in a haze of ice vapour on the far edge. The vapour was catching the sun and creating partial rainbows. The encampment, a patchwork of prefab tents and enviro-modules mixed with pods, containers, payload crates and vehicles: some beige, some gold, some khaki, some russet, some grey, looked to Hawser like a patch of mould or lichen, spreading out across the clean surface of the ice field. When he mentioned it later, this description also won him some approval from the Wolves.

No one challenged their entry into the encampment. Around the edges of the mobile base were pickets of Savarene Harriers with their shakos and gold-topped staves, and G9K Division Kill eliters wearing long dusters over semi-powered combat suits. Not a single gun twitched in their direction. As the Wolf approached with the human bumbling along behind him, the soldiers found other, far more important things to look at. In the ‘streets’ of the tent town, the bustling military personnel gave them a wide berth.

It was like a souk, a busy market, except all the traders were provisioners of military service and all the produce was munitions and materiel.

‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked.

Bear didn’t reply. He just kept striding on through the camp.

‘Hey!’ Hawser shouted, and ran to catch up. He reached out, and pulled at the thick, blunt edge of Bear’s left armour cuff. The ceramite was numbingly cold.

Bear stopped, and very slowly turned. He looked at Hawser. Then he looked down at the vulnerable human hand touching his arm.

‘That was a bad idea, wasn’t it?’ said Hawser, removing his hand warily.

‘Why don’t you like me?’ he asked.

Bear turned away and started walking again.

‘I have no opinion either way,’ said Bear. ‘But I do not think you should be here.’

‘Here?’

‘With the Rout.’

Bear stopped again and looked back at him.

‘Why did you come to Fenris?’ he asked.

‘That’s a good question,’ said Hawser.

‘What’s the answer?’

Hawser shrugged.

Bear turned and started walking again.

‘The jarl wants you to see something,’ he said.

Close to the centre of the vast encampment, which was feeling more and more like a carnival ground to Hawser, a large command shelter had been erected. There were tented shades overhead to screen off the harshest of the ice desert’s hard sunlight, and walls of reinforced shockboarding to baffle any stray or lucky munition strike. Nearby, a crew of polished silver servitors laboured to install and activate a portable void shield generator that would, by nightfall, be protecting the high-value section of the encampment under a fizzling blue parasol. The tent shades and shockboarding distorted the travelling roar of the conflict on the other side of the ridge, and somehow made it louder and more intrusive than it had been on the slope where the Wolves had gathered.

A crowd of perhaps two hundred had gathered under the central awning. They were surrounding a mobile strategium desk, the top of which was alight with active and moving hololithic displays.

The crowd, all Imperial Army officers, parted to let Hawser and his towering Astartes escort through. As he stepped up on to the self-levelling interlock staging, Hawser felt a pop in his ears and a chill on his face that announced he had just entered an artificial environment bubble. He unclasped his rebreather, and let the mask dangle around his neck. He smelled clean air, and the body sweat of hot, agitated, tired men.

Ogvai was at the centre of the crowd beside the strategium desk. He was not escorted by any of Tra, and he had removed his helm and some of the significant parts of his arm, shoulder and torso plating. Hugely armoured from the gut down, he stood with his long, white arms emerging from the rubberised black of his sleeveless underlayer with its feeder pipes and heat soaks like necrotised capillaries, and his long, black centre-parted hair, resembling a wager-bout pit fighter ringed by an audience at a country fair.

As a child at the commune, Hawser had seen men of that kind many times. Rector Uwe had sometimes taken the children to the festivals at the work camps of Ur where, in sight of the slowly forming, monolithic plan of the city-dream, the labour force would halt to celebrate the periodic feasts of Cathermas, Radmastide and the Divine Architect, as well as the observances of the builder-lodges. These holidays were basically excuses for spirited fairs and jubilees. Some of the larger labourers would strip to the waist and invite all-comers to bouts of sparring for beer, coins and the crowd’s entertainment. They would tower head and shoulders above the onlookers too.

Except here, the onlookers were Army service personnel, many of them large and imposing men. Ogvai was a raw-boned monster in their midst. With his skin so white, he looked like he was carved out of ice and immune to the merciless heat, where they were all ruddy and sweating. The fat silver piercing in his lower lip made him look like he was taunting them all.

Why has he stripped back his armour, Hawser wondered? He looks… informal. Why does he want me here?

Bear stopped at the edge of the ring of onlookers with Hawser beside him. Ogvai saw them. He was in discussion with three senior Army officers around the desk. He leaned forwards, resting his palms on the edge of the desk and his weight straight-armed on his hands. It was casual and rather scornful. The officers looked uncomfortable. One was a field marshal of the Outremars, obediently holding up the holographic visage of his telepresent khedive master like a waiter holding a grox’s head on a platter. Beside him was a thick-set, choleric G9K Division Kill combat master in a flak coat and a quilted tank driver’s cap. The third was a freckled, pale-blond man in the austere uniform of the Jaggedpanzor Regiments. It was curious to hear Ogvai speaking in Low Gothic: curious to know that he could, curious to hear his jaw and dentition manage the brittle human noises.

‘We are wasting time,’ he was saying. ‘This assault is not punching hard enough.’

The hololithic image of the Outremar khedive squealed in outrage, a sound distorted by the digital relay.

‘That is a frank and open insult to the architects of this planetary attack,’ the image declared. ‘You exceed yourself, jarl.’

‘I do not,’ Ogvai corrected pleasantly.

‘Your comment was certainly critical of the competency of this assault,’ said the Jaggedpanzor officer, in a tone rather more conciliatory than the one the khedive had adopted, probably because he was actually standing in Ogvai’s presence.

‘It was,’ Ogvai agreed.

‘This is not “punching hard” enough for you?’ asked the G9K commander, making a general gesture at the display in front of them.

‘No,’ said Ogvai. ‘It’s all very well as mass surface drops go. I guess one of you planned it?’

‘I had the honour of rationalising the invasion scheme on behalf of the Expedition Commander,’ said the khedive.

Ogvai nodded. He looked at the Jaggedpanzor officer.

‘Can you kill a man with a rifle?’ he asked.

‘Of course,’ said the man.

‘Can you kill a man with a spade?’ Ogvai asked.

The man frowned.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

Ogvai looked at the G9K man.

‘You. Can you dig a hole with a spade?’

‘Of course!’ the man answered.

‘Can you dig a hole with a rifle?’

The man didn’t reply.

‘You’ve got to use the right tool for the right job,’ said Ogvai. ‘You’ve got a big, well-supported army, and a world to take. It doesn’t automatically follow that throwing the former at the latter will get you what you want.’

Ogvai looked over at Bear.

‘Like you wouldn’t try to hunt an urdarkottur with an axe, eh, Bear?’

Bear laughed a wet leopard-growl.

‘Hjolda, no! You’d need a long-tooth spear to get through the fur.’

Ogvai looked at the Army commanders.

‘The right tool for the job, see?’

‘And are you the right tool?’ the khedive asked.

Hawser heard the Jaggedpanzor officer gasp and recoil slightly.

‘Don’t push it,’ Ogvai said to the hologram. ‘I’m trying to help you save a little face here. It’s you the fleet commander is going to drag over the coals if this situation doesn’t start to improve.’

‘We are very grateful for any advice the Astartes can offer,’ the field marshal carrying the hololithic plate suddenly said, holding the platter to one side in case his distant, holoform-represented master said anything else provocative.

‘That’s why we sent the request to you,’ said the G9K man.

Ogvai nodded.

‘Well, we all serve the great Emperor of Terra, don’t we?’ he said, flashing a smile that showed teeth. ‘We all fight on the same side for the same goals. He made the Wolves of Fenris to break the foes that couldn’t otherwise be broken, so you don’t have to ask twice, or even that politely.’

Ogvai looked at the projected, slightly shimmering face of the khedive.

‘Though a little basic respect is always good,’ he said. ‘I want to be clear, mind. If you want us to do this, don’t get in the way. Go back to your superiors and make sure they send official communiqués to the Commander of the Expedition Fleet that my Astartes have been given theatre control to end this war. I’m not moving until I get that confirmed.’

Why did he want me to see that, Hawser wondered? Does he want me to be impressed? Is that it? He wants me to see him intimidate and bully senior and serious Crusade commanders. And he wants them to see he can do it stripped to the waist like he’s relaxing.

The meeting began to disperse. Ogvai wandered towards Bear and Hawser.

‘You see?’ he asked, in Juvjk.

‘See what?’ Hawser replied.

‘What I brought you here to see,’ snapped Bear.

‘That everyone fears you?’ asked Hawser.

Ogvai grinned.

‘That, yes. But also that I abide by the codes of war. We abide by the codes of war. The Vlka Fenryka abide by the codes of rule.’

‘Why is it important to you that I understand that?’

‘The Sixth Legion Astartes has a reputation,’ said Bear.

‘All the Legions Astartes have reputations,’ replied Hawser.

‘Not like ours,’ said Ogvai. ‘We are known for our ferocity. We are thought to be feral and undisciplined. Even brother Legions consider us to be wild and bestial.’

‘And you’re not?’ asked Hawser.

‘If we need to be,’ said Ogvai. ‘But if that was our natural state, we’d all be dead by now.’

He leaned down towards Hawser like a parent addressing a child.

‘It takes a vast amount of self control to be this dangerous,’ he said.

Hawser requested permission to stay in the Army encampment for an hour or two more, until it was time to depart. Ogvai had already wandered off. Bear gave Hawser a small homer wand and told him to return to the dropsite the moment it chimed.

It had been a long time since Hawser had been around regular humans, a lifetime in which he had been reborn as something that was not entirely human any more. After waking, he’d lived in the fastness of the Fang with the Rout for the best part of a great year, acclimatising, learning their customs, learning their stories, learning his way around the gloomy vaults of the Aett.

In all that time, three things had been kept from him. The first was the person of the Wolf King. Hawser didn’t even know if the Sixth Primarch was actually on Fenris during that period. He doubted it. The Wolf King was more likely upp, leading companies in the service of the Emperor. Hawser reconciled himself to the fact that Skarssen and Ogvai would be the most senior Wolves he would have access to.

The second thing was a secret, something about Hawser himself. It was hard to say how Hawser knew this, but he did. It was a gut response, an instinct. Wolves often described to him particular moments in combat in such terms: visceral stimuli felt in their living bowels that made the split-second difference between living and dying. They always sounded proud of being sensitive to them. Hawser flattered himself that his immersion in their society was teaching him to recognise the same trick.

If it was, then it was telling him something. The Astartes and their thralls were withholding some details from him, one thing in particular. It was an intensely subtle thing. There were no crass signs like conversations abruptly halting when he entered rooms, or sentences suddenly trailing off when the speaker thought better of them.

The third thing was Imperial human company.

Towards the end of his first great year, Dekk Company returned to the Aett from a long tour of service in the Second Kobolt War, and Tra found itself rotated into the line, with instructions to shadow and support the 40th Expedition Fleet in the Gogmagog Cluster.

There never seemed any question that Hawser, as skjald, would go with them. He was part of their portage, part of company support, along with the thralls, the armourers, the pilots, the servitors, the musicians, the victuallers and the butchers.

They embarked onto Nidhoggur, one of the grim, comfortless warships that served the Sixth Legion, and made the translation to the immaterium with a flotilla of service tenders in support. Nine weeks later, at a mandeville point shy of Gogmagog Beta, they retranslated and made contact with the 40th Expedition Fleet, which was, by then, pressing fruitlessly into Olamic Quietude territory.

‘What sort of thing are you?’

Hawser looked up from the strategium desk and found he was being addressed by the G9K Division Kill combat master who had been in conference with Ogvai.

‘Do you have clearance to be here?’ the man asked, clearly emboldened now that the brute Astartes had gone.

‘You know I do,’ Hawser replied with a confidence that surprised even him. The man was prepared to argue the toss, so Hawser brushed back his hair, which had grown long during the great year spent at the Aett, and properly revealed his gold and black-pinned eye.

‘I am a watcher, chosen by the favour of the Sixth Legion Astartes,’ said Hawser.

The combat master’s expression registered distaste.

‘But you’re human?’

‘Generally speaking.’

‘How can you live with those beasts?’

‘Well, I watch my tongue, for a start. What’s your name?’

‘Pawel Korine, combat master first class.’

‘I get the distinct impression that no one here is comfortable having the Wolves as allies.’

Korine studied Hawser uncertainly.

‘I’ll watch my tongue, I think,’ he said. ‘I don’t want them looking at me through your eyes and deciding I need to be taught a lesson in obedience.’

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ Hawser smiled. ‘I can be discreet and selective. I’d like to know what you think.’

‘So you’re some kind of… what? Chronicler? Remembrancer?’

‘Something like that,’ said Hawser. ‘I make accounts.’

Korine sighed. He was a heavy-set man with Prussian ethnic traits, and he carried himself with the manner of a career soldier. G9K had a considerable reputation as a front-line force. It famously maintained an archaic performance-based pay and advancement model that was said to have its origins in the prediluvian traditions of mercantile-sponsored mercenaries. For Korine to have achieved the post of combat master first class, he had certainly seen some considerable active service.

‘Tell me what you meant,’ said Hawser.

Korine shrugged.

‘I’ve witnessed plenty,’ he said. ‘I know, I know, that old soldier routine. But trust me. Thirty-seven years non-adjusted, that’s what I’ve spent in this Crusade. Thirty-seven years, eight campaigns. I know what ugly looks like. I’ve seen Astartes fight four times. Every time, it’s scared me.’

‘They’re designed to be scary. They wouldn’t be effective if they weren’t.’

Korine didn’t look especially convinced.

‘Well, that’s a whole different issue,’ he replied. ‘I say if man’s going to take back this great Imperium, he ought to do it by the sweat of his brow and the strength of his arm, and not build damned supermen to do the work for him.’

‘I’ve heard that line of argument before. It has some merit. But we couldn’t even unify Terra without the Astartes to—’

‘Yes, yes. And what will we do when the work is done?’ Korine asked. ‘When the Crusade is over, what will we do with the almighty Space Marines? What do you do with something that can only ever be a weapon when the war is over?’

‘Maybe there will always be war,’ said Hawser.

Korine crinkled his thin lips distastefully.

‘Then we really are all wasting our lives,’ he replied.

His wrist-mounted communicator, thickly cushioned in black rubber, beeped, and he checked the display.

‘Six hour evacuation has just been posted,’ said Korine. ‘I have to see what’s going on. You can walk with me if you wish.’

They went out, back into the open and the roasting sunlight. Hawser felt the artificial atmosphere sleeve pop around him and replaced his rebreather. Activity levels in the camp had risen. Out in the rainbowed band of vapour beyond the camp edge, lifter craft were queuing out across the ice desert in a wavering, hovering line as they waited their turn to swing in and load up. The distant ones crinkled in an eerie heat-haze.

‘You don’t approve of Astartes then, combat master?’ Hawser asked as they strode through the camp.

‘Not at all. Extraordinary things. Like I said, I’ve seen them fight four times.’

They entered the combat master’s command post, a large enviro-tent where dozens of G9K officers and technicians were already dismantling the site for withdrawal. Korine went to a small desk and began to sort through his personal equipment.

‘The Death Guard, once,’ he said, holding up a finger to begin a tally. ‘Murderous efficiency with such small numbers. Blood Angels.’ Another raised finger. ‘A firefight gone bad in a casein works on one of the Fraemium moons. They arrived like… like angels. I don’t mean to be glib. They saved us. It was like they were coming to save our souls.’

Korine looked at Hawser. He raised a third finger.

‘White Scars, side by side, for six months on the plains of X173 Plural, hosing xeno-forms. Total focus and dedication, merciless. I cannot, hand on my heart, fault their duty, devotion to the Crusade cause, or their supreme effort as warriors.’

‘You said four times,’ Hawser pressed.

‘I did,’ said Korine. He raised a fourth finger in a gesture that reminded Hawser of surrender.

‘The Space Wolves, two years ago non-adjusted. Dekk Company, they called themselves. They came in to support our actions during the Kobolt scrap. I’d heard stories. We’d all heard stories.’

‘What kind of stories?’

‘That there are Space Marines and there are Space Marines. That there are supermen and there are monsters. That in order to breed the Astartes perfection, the Emperor Who Guides Us All has gone too far once or twice, and made things he should not have made. Things that should have been stillborn or drowned in a sack.’

‘Feral things?’ asked Hawser.

‘The worst of them all are the Space Wolves,’ replied Korine. ‘They were animals, Great Terra, they were animals those things that fought with us. When you have sympathy with the enemy, you know you have the wrong kind of allies. They killed everything, and destroyed everything and, worst of all, they took great relish in the apocalypse they had brought down upon their foe. There was nothing admirable about them, nothing rousing. They just left a sick taste in the mouth as if, by calling on their help, we had somehow demeaned ourselves in an effort to win.’

Korine paused and turned to hand out instructions to some of his men. They were obedient, well-drilled, attentive. Hawser could see that Korine was a soldier who expected an army to be supremely disciplined in order to function. One of his men, a burly second-classer with a chinstrap beard, brought a data-slate over for Korine’s review. He glared belligerently at Hawser.

Korine handed the data-slate back to his officer.

‘Full withdrawal from the surface,’ he said. He sounded broken. ‘All forces. We’re to stand down and get clear so the Wolves can take it on alone. Shit. This assault has cost us thousands of men, and we’re just scrapping it.’

‘Better that than thousands more.’

Korine sat down, opened a haversack, and pulled out a slightly battered metal flask. He poured a generous measure into the cap and passed it to Hawser, and then took a swig from the flask.

‘When the 40th discovered that the Wolves were the only Astartes in range who could help us tackle the Quietude, we almost cancelled the request. I heard that as a fact from one of the senior men close to the fleet commander. It was a genuine consideration that we didn’t want to involve ourselves with the Wolves again.’

‘You’d rather face defeat?’

‘It’s about ends, and the means that get you there,’ Korine replied. ‘It’s about contemplating the question, what are the Wolves for? Why did the Emperor make them like that? What purpose could he possibly have for something so inhuman?’

‘Do you have answers to any of those questions, Combat Master Korine?’ asked Hawser.

‘Either the Emperor is not as perfect an architect of this new age as we like to suppose, and he is capable of manufacturing nightmares, or he has anticipated threats we can’t possibly imagine.’

‘Which would you prefer?’

‘Neither notion fills me with great confidence about the future,’ replied Korine. ‘Do you have an answer, as you keep their company?’

‘I don’t,’ said Hawser. He’d finished his drink, and Korine refilled the cap. It was a strong spirit, an amasec or a schnapps, and there was a flush on Korine’s cheeks, but Hawser felt nothing except the slightest burn in his throat. Life on Fenris had evidently bred a stronger constitution into him.

‘The things we fought in Kobolt space,’ said Korine quietly, ‘they were lethal and proud. They had no interest in human ways or human business, and they were quite capable of fighting us to a standstill. They had mighty vessels, like cities. I saw one of them. I was part of an assault against it. Someone called it Scintilla City because it sparkled like it was all made of glass. We later found out it was called Thuyelsa in their language, and it was a structure they called a craftworld. Anyway, we never worked out why they were fighting us or what they were trying to defend, except perhaps that they were trying to keep us at bay, or keep for themselves whatever it was they had, but you knew, you just knew inside yourself they had something worth defending. A legacy, a history, a culture. And it was all lost.’

Korine looked down into his flask, as if some truth might lurk inside in the dark. Hawser suspected he might have been looking in that very same place for an answer for quite some time.

‘At the end,’ Korine said, ‘they began to plead. The Wolves were upon them, and the city-vessel was shattering around them, and they realised that they were going to lose everything. They began to plead for terms, as if anything was better than losing everything. We never really understood what they were trying to tell us, or what kind of surrender they were trying to make. I personally believe that they would have given all of their lives if Scintilla City had been allowed to survive. But it was too late. The Wolves couldn’t be called off. They sacked it. The Wolves destroyed it all. There wasn’t even anything left for us to salvage, no treasure for us to plunder, nothing of value to claim as a prize. The Wolves destroyed it all.’

Korine fell silent.

The homer wand Bear had given to Hawser gave out a little beep.

Hawser set the cap down and nodded to the combat master.

‘Thank you for the drink and the conversation.’

Korine shrugged.

‘I think perhaps you malign the Wolves a little,’ Hawser added. ‘It may be that they are misunderstood.’

Korine made a sound, possibly a laugh.

‘Isn’t that what all monsters say?’ he asked.

Hawser left the G9K enviro-tent. All around him, personnel were busy dismantling the encampment for surface departure.

He stood for a moment, consulting the homer’s direction indicator. Behind his back, someone cursed him.

He swung around.

Korine’s second-classer, the man with the chinstrap, and several other G9Kers were loading impact-resistant crates onto a flatbed truck.

‘Did you speak to me?’ Hawser asked.

Chinstrap’s glare was toxic. He set down the crate-end he had been lifting, and walked towards Hawser. His men looked on.

‘Sack of shit animal,’ Chinstrap hissed.

‘What?’

‘Go back to the filth you run with. You should be ashamed. They’re not human. They’re animals!’

Hawser turned aside. The man was big and aggressive, and he was evidently upset. It was the sort of confrontation Hawser had sought to avoid for most of his life.

Chinstrap grabbed Hawser’s right arm. The grip was painful.

‘You tell them that,’ he said. ‘Seventeen hundred men Division Kill’s lost in one day of surface assault, and now those stupid animals tell us to piss off? Seventeen hundred lives wasted?’

‘You’re clearly upset,’ said Hawser. ‘This has been a costly engagement, and I am sympathetic to—’

‘Screw you.’

The other men, the members of Chinstrap’s loading team, had closed in.

‘Let go of my arm,’ said Hawser.

‘Or what?’ Chinstrap asked.

‘Run!’ Murza told him.

Murza was usually right about these things. It wasn’t that Murza was a coward, Hawser supposed, it was simply because he was far more the rationalist. After all, neither of them were fighters. They were academics, field archaeologists, average men with above average minds. Neither of them had any military schooling and neither had been on any kind of self-defence training programme. They were armed only with their wits and their accreditation papers, which stated their names, the fact that they had both recently celebrated their thirtieth birthdays, and their status as conservators working in Lutetia for the Unification Council.

None of which was going to do them very much good.

‘They can’t be allowed to get away with this—’ Hawser began.

‘Oh, just run you idiot!’ Murza shouted back.

The other members of the placement team were already running, no further encouragement needed. Their boots were clattering down the cobbled back alley as they scattered into the warren of unmapped streets criss-crossing the slum quarters of Lutetia around the dead cathedral.

The cathedral was just a giant corpse-building. It had died as a place of worship during the Nineteenth War of Uropan Succession three thousand years earlier, and since then its structure had been put to other uses: a parliament hall for three centuries, a mausoleum, an iceworks, an almshouse, and, latterly, a market when the last of the roof fell in. For the last eight hundred or so years, it had been an empty husk, a physicalised memory, lifting its rusting iron ribs at the overcast sky.

The rumours of its past had persisted as long as those ribs, if not longer. Murza had not been able to keep the excitement out of his voice when he’d briefed the team two days before. The site had been a place of worship for as long as records existed, and the cathedral stood upon the plot of previous structures called cathedrals, and was indeed only called a cathedral because of that masonic legacy.

There were cellars down there, deep under the foundations, the basements of previous incarnations, cisterns buried under the sub-fabric of later builds. Some said if you could trace your way down through the dark, you’d reach the centre of the Earth, and the catacombs of old Franc.

One of Murza’s contacts (and he, as usual, had a network of well paid informers watching the traffic of artefacts and relics throughout the entire Lutetian city-node area) had reported that a gang of labourers had excavated the entrance to a drainage sump while reclaiming old stone. Some silver amulets and a ring scooped from the sump had been enough to convince the contact that the area was worth a look, and worth the fee that the conservators would have to pay the gang to reveal the precise location.

Hawser had been mistrustful from the start. The labourers, all local, were big men caked in black mud from street work. All of them showed signs of atomic mutation, a trait common in the slum. Hawser immediately felt threatened by them, physically intimidated, the way he had been by the bigger, older boys back at Rector Uwe’s commune. He was no fighter. Confrontation, especially physical confrontation, made him lock up and freeze.

The slum district was a maze. Nothing identifiable remained of the planned city that had once occupied the area. The streets had corroded into sub-streets and under-runs, alleys and cul-de-sacs, all of them dark and thick with filth, none of them charted or named. Children played in the piles of trash, and the sounds of wailing babies and arguing adults echoed down from the tenement levels rising above them. Washing lines were strung from building to building, like the canopy of a dingy, man-made jungle. It was shadowy and airless.

The labourers led them into the alley maze. It seemed an unnecessarily circuitous route to Hawser, and he said so to Murza, who told him to hush. After walking for about twenty minutes, the labourers turned and told Murza it was time to pay them the agreed fee.

The leader of the gang happened to add that what he meant by the agreed fee was significantly higher than anything Murza had discussed with the team.

Hawser realised they were in trouble. He realised it was all simply a trap designed to extort, and that its most likely consequences would be a beating or a kidnapping. It was going to cost the Conservatory programme: it was going to cost them in medical fees, or ransom or simply excess pay-offs. It might even cost them lives. He felt outrage. He felt stupid that he’d allowed Murza to walk them into another less than brilliant situation.

‘This is no time to feel choleric!’ Murza shouted. The gang was closing in on them, surly, barking threats. Some had shovels or picks.

‘Run!’ Murza yelled.

Hawser recognised that running was the only sensible course of action, but the physical threat had finally eclipsed his outrage, and intimidation had glued him to the spot. One of the labourers stepped towards him, spitting curses through buckled brown teeth, shaking a fist with kielbasa knuckles. Hawser tried to force his feet to work.

Murza grabbed his arm so hard it hurt and yanked him backwards.

‘Come on! Come on, Kas!’

Hawser started to stumble, his legs beginning to move. The labourer was reaching for them. Hawser realised the labourer had drawn a gun, some kind of pistol.

Dragging Hawser after him, Murza looked over his shoulder and yelled something at the labourer, a single word or sound. There was an odd pulse, a pop like the equalisation of air at the skin of an environment bubble. The labourer yelled and fell backwards, writhing.

They ran, side by side, Murza still gripping his arm.

‘What did you do?’ Hawser yelled. ‘What did you do? What did you say to him?’

Murza couldn’t answer. There was blood drooling from his mouth.

Chinstrap’s fingers dug into his arm like hooks. Scared, Hawser shoved. He just shoved to lurch the man away, so he could walk on, get past them, leave them behind.

Chinstrap hit the side of the pile of rubber-sleeved crates on the back of the track. He was airborne and travelling backwards. His spine and shoulders took the first impact, and his skull cracked back across the top of the uppermost crate. Then he plunged forwards and hit the ground flat on his face, loose as a sack of stones. His face just slapped into the gritty ice, shattering his plastek rebreather.

While Chinstrap was still in the air, one of his men swung a punch at the back of Hawser’s head. The punch seemed to Hawser to be ridiculously telegraphed, as if the man was trying to be sporting and give him a chance. He put his hand up to stop the fist from hitting his face and caught it in his palm. There was a little shock. He felt finger bones break and knuckles detonate, and none of them were his.

The third man decided to kill Hawser, and made an effort to insert a heavy, cast iron crate spanner into Hawser’s skull. Once again, however, he appeared to be doing this in a delicate fashion, like an over-emphatic stage punch that goes wide of the mark but looks good from the audience. Hawser didn’t want the spanner to come anywhere near him. He swung out his left hand in an impulsive, flinching gesture to brush the man’s arm away.

The man screamed. He appeared to have developed a second elbow halfway down his forearm. The skin of his arm folded there like an empty sock. He fell over, the spanner bouncing solidly off the ice.

The other men fled.

Bear was waiting for him at the foot of a Stormbird ramp.

‘You’re late,’ he said.

Hawser handed the homer back to him.

‘I’m here now.’

‘We would have left without you if you’d been much longer.’

‘I’m sure you would.’

‘You smell of blood,’ said Bear.

‘Yes, I do,’ said Hawser. He looked at Bear.

‘Why didn’t you tell me how thoroughly you’d rebuilt me?’ he asked.