Prospero Burns

Eight

‘We are the Allfather’s killers,’ said the rune priest.

‘You’re soldiers,’ said Hawser. ‘You’re Astartes born. Astartes are the finest warriors Terra has ever manufactured. You’re all killers.’

Longfang coughed. Blood from the mist he was exhaling was beginning to collect around his mouth and soak his beard. It dripped onto the gossamer-white pelt he wore.

‘That’s too simple a view,’ he said. ‘I told you this. A role for each primarch-son. A role for each primarch’s Legion. Defenders and champions, storm troops and praetorians… we all have our duties. Sixth Legion are the executioners. We are the last line. When all else fails, we are the ones expected to do whatever is necessary.’

‘Isn’t that true of all Legions?’ Hawser asked.

‘You still don’t understand, skjald. I’m talking about degree. There are lines that other Legions will not cross. There are divides of honour and fealty and devotion. There are some acts so ruthless, some deeds so unpalatable, that only the Vlka Fenryka are capable of undertaking them. It’s what we were bred for. It’s the way we were designed. Without qualm or sentiment, without hesitation or whimsy. We take pride in being the only Astartes who will never, under any circumstances, refuse to strike on the Allfather’s behalf, no matter what the target, no matter what the cause.’

‘It’s why the Sixth Legion Astartes is considered so bestial,’ said Hawser.

‘That’s secondary,’ Longfang replied. ‘It’s a by-product of our ruthlessness. We are not feral savages. It’s just that two centuries of doing things that other Legions find distasteful have earned us that reputation. The other Legions think we are untamed, untrained dogs, but the truth is that we are the most harshly trained of all.’

Longfang was about to say something else, but a tremor ran through him. He closed his eyes for a moment.

‘Pain?’ asked Hawser.

‘Nothing,’ Longfang replied with a dismissive wave of his right hand. ‘It’ll pass.’

He wiped the blood from his mouth.

‘We are the Allfather’s killers,’ he repeated. ‘It is a matter of honour that we will face anything down. This also may explain why others may regard us as deranged. We deny fear. It plays no part in our lives. Once we deploy, fear is gone from us. It doesn’t ride with us. It doesn’t stay our hands. We exclude it from our hearts and from our heads.’

‘So the stories?’ asked Hawser.

‘Think of the extremity of our lives,’ said Longfang. ‘The unremitting punishment of Fenris, the unstinting combat against mankind’s foes. Where do we find release from that? Not in the dainty pleasures of mortal men. Not in wine or song, or womenfolk, or banquet feasting.’

‘What then?’

‘The one thing denied to us.’

‘Fear.’

Longfang chuckled, though the chuckle was half-drowned in blood.

‘Now you understand. In the Aett, at the hearth-side, when the skjald speaks, then and only then do we allow the fear back. And only if the account is good enough.’

‘Letting yourself feel fear? That’s your release?’

Longfang nodded.

‘So what sort of account? A tale of war, or of hunting an ocean orm and—’

‘No, no,’ said Longfang. ‘Those are things we can kill, even if it’s hard and we don’t succeed every time. There is no fear there. A skjald has to find a story about something we can’t kill. I told you that. Something that is proof against our blades and our bolts. Something that will not fall down when you strike it with a back-breaker. Something with a thread that cannot be cut.’

‘Maleficarum,’ said Hawser.

‘Maleficarum,’ the priest agreed.

He looked at Hawser, and coughed again, aspirating more particles of blood.

‘Make it a good one, then,’ he said.

‘I was born on Terra,’ said Hawser.

‘Like me,’ put in Longfang proudly.

‘Like you,’ Hawser agreed. He began again. ‘I was born on Terra. Old Earth, as it was called in the First Age. Most of my life, I worked as a conservator for the Unification Council. When I was about thirty years old, I was working in Old Franc, in the centre of the great city-node Lutetia. It was ruins, most of it, ruins and sub-hive slums. I had a friend. A colleague, actually. His name was Navid Murza. He’s dead now. He died in Ossetia about a decade later. He wasn’t a friend at all, really. We were rivals. He was an extremely accomplished academic and very capable, but he was ruthless too. He’d use people. He didn’t care who he had to go through to get what he wanted. We worked together because that’s how things had turned out. I was always wary of him. He frequently took things too far.’

‘Go on,’ said Longfang. ‘Describe this Murza so I can see him.’

A clavier was playing. It was a recording, one of the high quality audio files that Seelia insisted on listening to in the pension. Hawser was sure that Murza had put it on. Hawser was sure that Murza was sleeping with Seelia. The woman was gorgeous and dark-skinned, with a cloud of tawny hair. During the first few days of the Lutetian placement, she’d seemed quite interested in Hawser. Then Murza had turned up the charm and that had been that.

If Murza had put the music on, then Murza had got back to the pension ahead of him. They’d become separated during the headlong flight. Hawser let himself in through the side entrance, using the gene-code keypad, and made sure the shutters were secure. The work gang who had tried to trap them at the old cathedral site knew where they were based. Some of them had come to the pension to discuss details with members of the Conservatory team.

Hawser took off his coat. His hands were unsteady. They’d nearly been beaten. They’d been threatened and nearly been assaulted, and they’d been forced to run for their lives, and adrenaline was thumping around his body, and that still wasn’t the reason he felt so badly shaken.

It was getting dark. He turned on some glow-globes. The whole team had scattered into the backstreets. They’d make their way back to the pension, one by one, given luck and time.

Hawser poured himself an amasec to steady his nerves. The bottle of ten year-old, his preference, was missing from the tray. He made do with the cheaper stuff. The decanter clink-clinked against the glass in his fidgety hands.

‘Navid?’ he called out. ‘Navid?’

There was no answer except the melody of the clavier, an old pastoral piece.

‘Murza!’ he shouted. ‘Answer me!’

He poured himself another amasec and went up the stairs into the dorm level.

The pension was a fortified manse in a gated block called Boborg, just off a thoroughfare called Sanantwun. It was one of a number of safe-homes that a big Uropan mercantile house used as accommodation for visiting trade delegates, and the Conservatory had leased it for a three-month period. It came furnished, with servitor staff, and was as safe as anywhere in Lutetia. The city was a sprawling, blackened, uncouth place, venerably old, but deteriorating into slums. Though Hawser appreciated it for its history, he couldn’t understand why anyone would choose to live there any more if they didn’t have to. For the wealthy and aristocratic who still dwelt in the city-node, and there were many enclaves, surely the Atlantic platforms offered a much higher standard of living, and the superorbital plates vastly more security.

Halfway up the stairs, at the turn, there was a tall slit of a window that allowed a view of the city over the block wall. It was getting dark, and the roofs were a lumpy black slope like the scaly ridge of a reptile’s back. The largest ragged lump, sticking up like a broken thorn, was the dead cathedral. It looked like a fang-shaped mountain, dwarfing other mountains around it. The sun, gone from the sky, had left pink smears on the western horizon behind it. Most of the evening light was the artificially bright and oddly unreal radiance cast by the plate that was presently gliding over the city in a north-western direction. Hawser wasn’t exactly sure which one it was, but from the time of day and the geography of its leading coast, he believed it to be Lemurya.

Hawser sipped his drink. He looked up the rest of the flight of stairs.

‘Murza?’

He went up. The music got louder. He realised how warm it was in the pension. It wasn’t just the amasec in his belly. Someone had cranked the heating system right up.

‘Murza? Where are you?’

Most of the bedrooms were dark. Lamplight and clavier music were coming out of the room Murza had picked when the team first moved in.

‘Navid?’

He went in. The rooms were only small, and Murza’s was almost stifling with heat. It was cluttered too, piled high with kit bags, discarded clothes, books, data-slates. The music was playing from a small device beside the bed. Hawser saw female garments jumbled amongst the others on the floor and a kitbag that wasn’t Murza’s. Seelia had moved her lovely, trusting self in with him.

Murza had left Seelia to run home on her own through the slum-streets of Lutetia after curfew, which was fairly standard behaviour for Navid Murza.

Hawser took another sip, and tried to quell his anger. Murza had got them all into danger, and not for the first time. That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was something he didn’t really want to consider but knew he was going to have to face up to.

The bedroom wasn’t just hot. It was fuggy. Humid.

Hawser pulled open the folding door into the wash closet.

Murza was sitting in the bottom of the little shower stall with his knees tucked up under his chin and his arms wrapped around his shins. He was naked. Water, hot water from the stream coming out under the stall’s worn plastek bubble, was hosing down on him. He looked forlorn and blank-eyed, his dark hair plastered to his scalp and neck. He was holding the decanter of ten year-old amasec by its neck.

‘Navid? What are you doing?’

Murza didn’t answer.

‘Navid!’ Hawser called, and rapped his knuckles on the clear plastek bubble. Murza looked up at him, slowly focussing. It seemed to take him a long time to recognise Hawser.

‘What are you doing?’ Hawser repeated.

‘I was cold,’ Murza replied. His words came out slurred, and his voice was so quiet, it was hard to hear over the rush of the water.

‘You were cold?’

‘I came back here and I needed to be warm. Have you ever been that cold, Kas?’

‘What happened, Navid? That was a disaster!’

‘I know. I know it was.’

‘Navid, get out of the shower and talk to me.’

‘I’m cold.’

‘Get out of the damn shower, Navid. Come out here and tell me what you think you were playing at setting up a deal like that?’

Murza looked at him and blinked. Water dripped off his eyelashes.

‘Are the others back?’

‘Not yet,’ said Hawser.

‘Seelia?’

‘None of them.’

‘They’ll be all right, won’t they?’ Murza asked. His voice slurred again.

‘No thanks to you,’ Hawser snapped. He softened slightly as he saw the anguished look in Murza’s eyes.

‘They’ll be fine, I’m sure. She’ll be fine. We’ve planned for this. We know the contingency plan, the back-up. None of them are stupid.’

Murza nodded.

‘I’m not so sure about you,’ Hawser added.

Murza grimaced and lifted the decanter he was holding to his mouth. A lot of the amasec was already gone. He took a big swig, swallowed some and then swooshed the rest around inside his cheeks as if it was mouthwash.

When he spat into the shower floor, Hawser saw blood swirling away down the chrome drain.

‘What did you do, Navid?’ he asked. ‘What the hell did you do to that man? How did you know how to do it?’

‘Please don’t ask me,’ Murza replied.

‘What did you do?’

‘I saved your life! I saved your life, didn’t I?’

‘I’m not sure, Navid.’

Murza glared at him.

‘I didn’t have to do that. I saved your life.’

He spat again, and more blood swirled in the water.

‘Get out of there,’ said Hawser. ‘You’re going to have to explain everything to me.’

‘I don’t want to,’ replied Murza.

‘That’s bad luck. Get out of that cubicle. I’ll come back in ten minutes. You’ll need to be ready to explain things. Then I’ll decide what we tell the others.’

‘Kas, no one else has to know about—’

‘Get out of there and we’ll discuss it.’

Hawser went down to the common room, refilled his glass and sat in an armchair trying to steady his wits. He’d been at it five minutes when the others came back, first Polk and Lesher, then the twins from Odessa, then Zirian and his pale, tearful assistant Maris. Finally, just as Hawser was really beginning to worry, Seelia appeared, escorted by Thamer.

‘Are we all here?’ she asked, trying to sound confident, but clearly exhausted and rattled. Several of the returning team had already disappeared to wash and change.

‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

‘Even Navid?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Bastard,’ Thamer muttered.

‘I’m going to talk to him,’ Hawser said. ‘Just leave it, please.’

‘All right,’ said Thamer, sounding unconvinced.

Hawser told Polk and the twins to prepare some supper for the team, and got Lesher and Zirian to begin planning some other ideas so that their placement wouldn’t be an entire waste of time. He knew it would be, but at least the semblance of activity kept their minds off the day’s unpleasantness. He couldn’t get the image of the pistol out of his mind. He kept seeing the black hole of the end of its muzzle aiming at him.

He went back upstairs. Murza’s shower was off, and Murza was sitting on the end of his bed wearing an undershirt and combat trousers. He had not bothered to dry himself off. Water dripped from his hair. He’d poured some amasec into a small porcelain cup and was drinking from that, nursing it morosely with both hands. The decanter was on the floor beside him.

‘We shouldn’t have gone into that,’ said Hawser, jumping straight in without preamble.

‘No,’ Murza agreed without looking up.

‘Your call, and it was a bad one.’

‘Agreed.’

‘You assured us the intelligence was good and we’d be safe. I shouldn’t have listened to you. I should have had security checked, and I should have set up a proper route for abort extraction, a vehicle, probably.’

Murza looked up at him.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you didn’t, and you didn’t because you’re supposed to be able to trust me.’

‘Why do you do it, Navid?’

Murza shrugged. He reached one hand up to his mouth, and probed under his lip with a finger as if one of his teeth was loose. He winced.

‘Do you get greedy?’ Hawser asked.

‘Greedy?’

‘I know what that feels like, Navid. We’re two of a kind. We’re driven by a real hunger to discover and preserve these things, to find the lost treasures of our species. It’s a worthy, worthy cause, but it’s an obsession too. I know it. You know we’re more alike than either of us care to admit.’

Murza raised his eyebrows in a slightly amused agreement.

‘Sometimes you go too far,’ said Hawser. ‘I know I’ve done that. Pushed too hard, paid too much of a bribe, gone somewhere I shouldn’t have gone, faked up some paperwork.’

Murza sniffed. It was a sort-of laugh.

Hawser sat down on the end of the bed beside him.

‘You just take it further than I do, Navid,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’

‘It feels like you don’t care who gets hurt. It feels like you’d sacrifice everyone just to get what you want.’

‘Sorry, Kas.’

‘That’s greedy on a whole new level.’

‘I know.’

‘It makes me think that it’s greedy in a very different way. Not a worthy way, a selfish one.’

Murza stared at the floor.

‘Any truth in that?’ asked Hawser. ‘Is it a selfish flaw, do you think?’

‘Yes. Yes, I think so.’

‘All right.’

Hawser picked up the decanter at Murza’s feet and refilled his own glass. Then he leaned over and poured some amasec into the porcelain cup Murza was clutching.

‘Listen to me, Navid,’ he said. ‘Today you could have got us all hurt or worse. It was a total screw-up. Things like it have happened before. I’m not going to let them happen again. We play by the rulebook. We don’t mess around with safety and take chances from now on, all right?’

‘Yes. Yes, Kas.’

‘All right, let’s draw a line under that. It’s done. Conversation over. Clean slate tomorrow. It’s not what really troubles me, and you know that.’

Murza nodded.

‘You did something this evening in the shadow of the dead cathedral. I don’t know what it was. I’ve never seen or heard anything like it. I think you said a word or something like a word to that thug with the gun and knocked him right over.’

‘I think…’ said Murza very quietly. ‘I think I quite probably killed him, Kas.’

‘Fug me,’ Hawser murmured. ‘I need to know how that’s even possible, Navid.’

‘No, you don’t,’ Murza replied. ‘Can we not just leave it? If I hadn’t done it, he would have shot you.’

‘I accept that,’ said Hawser. ‘I accept you did it for good reasons. I accept you saved my life, probably, and reacted in a bad situation. But I need to know what you did.’

‘Why?’ asked Murza. ‘It’d be so much better for you if you didn’t.’

‘Two reasons,’ Hawser replied. ‘If we’re going to work together at all from this point on, I’m going to need to be able to trust you. I’m going to need to know what you’re capable of.’

‘Fair enough,’ Murza replied. ‘And the other reason?’

‘I’m greedy too,’ said Hawser.

Hawser stopped speaking. For a moment, he thought Longfang was asleep, or worse, but the rune priest opened his eyes.

‘You stopped,’ Longfang said in Juvjk. ‘Keep going. This man Murza you talk of, he has maleficarum in him, and yet you toast with him like a brother.’

Blood was still misting out of Longfang’s mouth with every halting breath. The fold of gossamer-white pelt below his chin had become quite dark and wet.

Hawser took a deep breath. His throat was dry. The rumble and flare of the doom come to the Quietude’s cities continued to roll around the vast, firelit darkness of the space around them. In the distance, beyond the high, tiled walls of the mansion complex, apocalyptic firestorms coiled up the far side of the pit, consuming citadel structures in showers of sparks like heartwood caught in a bonfire. Closer at hand, bolters and plasma weapons traumatised the air with their discharge.

‘This man,’ said Longfang, ‘this Murza. Did you kill him? Because of his maleficarum, I mean. Did you cut his thread?’

‘I saved his life,’ said Hawser.

‘You’ve never told me much about your childhood, or your education,’ Hawser remarked.

‘I don’t intend to start now,’ Murza replied.

He hesitated.

‘Sorry. Sorry, I didn’t mean to be sharp. It’s just that it’s all so complicated, and it will take time we haven’t got. Here’s the simple version. I was privately educated. The schooling was a tradition that mixed classical training with an emphasis on the esoteric.’

‘Esoterica is a very important branch of classical study,’ said Hawser. ‘For millennia, occulted knowledge has been passionately, jealously guarded.’

Murza smiled.

‘Why is that, Kas, do you suppose?’

‘Because men have always believed in supernatural forces that would grant them great powers, and give them mastery over the cosmos. We’ve been thinking that way since we watched the shadows play on the cave walls.’

‘There is another possible reason, though, isn’t there?’ Murza asked. ‘I mean, there has to be, logically?’

Hawser sipped his glass and looked at Murza beside him.

‘Is that a serious question?’ he asked.

‘Do I look like I’m serious, Kas?’

‘You’re smiling like an idiot,’ said Hawser.

‘All right… Did what I did tonight look serious?’

‘Are you suggesting that was something? Some kind of… what? It was a trick.’

‘Was it?’ asked Murza.

‘Some kind of trick.’

‘And if it wasn’t, Kas, if it wasn’t, then there’s another, logical reason why certain knowledge has always been very jealously guarded. Wouldn’t you say?’

Hawser stood up. He did it rather suddenly, and swayed, surprised by how considerably the amasec had gone to his head.

‘This is ridiculous, Navid. Are you saying you… you can perform magic? You honestly expect me to believe you’re some kind of sorcerer?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Good.’

‘I haven’t studied for anything like long enough.’

‘What?’ said Hawser.

‘Sorcerer’s the wrong word. Better terms would be adept or magus. At my very junior level, acolyte or apprentice.’

‘No. No, no, no. You had a weapon of some kind. Something small, concealed. Under your cuff or in a ring. Digitally based.’

Murza looked up at him. He ran his left hand through his dripping hair, trying to comb it back. There was a glitter in his eyes, an appealing, predatory thing. Navid Murza had always benefited from excess charisma. It was what carried him so far.

‘You wanted to know, Kas. You asked to know. I’m telling you. Do you want to hear it?’

‘Yes.’

Murza got dressed. Hawser went down to the others and made up some excuse about stepping out with Murza to ‘have a serious talk about his shortcomings’.

Murza was waiting for him on the small, rusty landing platform at the rear of the pension. It was dark and surprisingly cold. The petrochemical whiff of traffic exhaust mixed with the vent-off of cooking smells from the eating houses along Sanantwun. Beyond the secure walls of Boborg, the lights of Lutetia glimmered like a draped constellation.

Murza was wearing a long coat, and he had a small rucksack over his shoulder. He’d called a skike for them, and it was sitting on the platform with its potent little lifter motors revving. They checked with the Boborg watchman, signed their gene-codes out of the gated perimeter, and took the little transponder that would admit them back into the pension’s airspace later.

‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked as they ducked in under the rain hood and took their seats behind the skike’s centrally-mounted servitor pilot.

‘It’s a secret,’ Murza smiled back, locking his seat-belt in place. ‘It’s all about secrets, Kas.’

He pressed the ‘go’ switch, and the skike rose off the platform with a whine, carried by its three engines, the two under the passenger cage and the other one under the nose forks. At rooftop height, it rotated to face north, and then took off at a high rate of knots. From the high vantage, with the cold wind in his face, Hawser could see what seemed like the whole spread of night-shadowed Lutetia. They shared the darkness with the zipping running lights of other skikes and speeders.

‘You look nervous?’ Hawser said to Murza.

‘Do I?’

‘Are you nervous?’

Murza laughed.

‘A little,’ he admitted. ‘This is a big night, Kas. It’s been a while coming. I’ve wanted to tell you about this stuff for years, since we first met, really. I thought you’d understand. I knew you’d understand.’

‘But?’

‘You’re so serious! There was always a danger you’d go all disapproving and older brother on me, and spoil everything.’

‘Am I really like that?’

‘You know you are,’ chuckled Murza.

‘So this interest of yours has been going on for a long time?’

‘When I was still quite young, at the end of my schooling, I was inducted into a private society dedicated to the rediscovery and restoration of the powers man used to command.’

‘So, some foolish schoolboy club?’

‘No, the society is old. Hundreds of years old, at least.’

‘And does it have a name?’

‘Of course,’ smiled Murza. ‘But it’s too soon to tell you that.’

‘But its remit is essentially similar to the Conservatory’s?’

‘Yes, but more specific.’

‘It only concerns itself with what I might regard as occult material?’

‘Yes,’ said Murza.

‘Is this why you joined the Conservatory, Navid?’

‘Conservatory work gave me great access to the sorts of material the society was seeking, yes.’

Hawser glowered. He looked out of the skike to give himself time to check his annoyance. The superorbital plate Lemurya had long since slid out of the sky, but the immense moonshadow of Gondavana was passing silently over the world, east to west like a giant cyclonic pattern, and the slightly smaller ghost of Vaalbara was crossing beneath it, south-west to north-east.

‘So what do I conclude from that, Murza?’ Hawser asked at length. ‘That for years you’ve been passing stuff to this mysterious society? That the Conservatory work is just a cover for you? That you’ve been exploiting the Council’s investments and—’

‘You see? You see this? Just like an older brother! Listen to me, Kas. I have never betrayed the Conservatory. I have never withheld anything, not a single find, not a book, not a page, not a button or a bead. I have dedicated myself to my work. I have never given the society anything that I haven’t given to the Conservatory.’

‘But you’ve shared?’

‘Yes. At certain times, I’ve shared certain discoveries with the society. Isn’t sharing the point? Isn’t that the guiding principle of the Conservatory?’

‘Not in such a clandestine way, Navid. There’s a nuance here, and you know it. You’re observing letter, not spirit.’

‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ said Murza, sullenly. ‘We can get the skike to turn back.’

‘No, we’ve come too far,’ Hawser replied.

‘Yes, I think we have,’ said Murza.

Longfang lurched forwards violently as another spasm of pain shook him. Hawser recoiled. He wasn’t sure what to do. There was little help he could offer. He couldn’t do anything to make the rune priest more comfortable, and he felt in some physical danger from the convulsions. An armoured Astartes, even a dying one, was not something a human being could cradle in his arms.

‘I’m not dying,’ said Longfang.

‘I didn’t say you were,’ said Hawser.

‘I can see it in your eyes, skjald. I can see your thoughts.’

‘No.’

‘Don’t tell me “no”. You’re afraid of me dying. You’re afraid of what to do if that happens. You’re afraid of being left here on your own with a corpse.’

‘I’m not.’

‘And I’m not dying. This is just healing. Sometimes healing hurts.’

Hawser heard a sharp noise from somewhere close by. He glanced at Longfang. The priest had heard it too. Before the priest could do or signal anything, Hawser had put a finger to his lips and signed for quiet. He got up off the ground, and picked up the nearest weapon.

Slowly, with the weapon raised, he edged around the courtyard, checking each archway and cloister. There was no sign of anything. The noise had probably been debris falling from above, a false alarm.

Hawser went back to Longfang, sat down with him again, and handed the weapon over.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I needed something.’

Longfang looked down at the frostblade in his hands and then back up at Hawser.

‘You realise I’d have killed any other man for taking this without asking, don’t you?’ he said.

‘You’d have had to get up first, wouldn’t you?’ Hawser replied.

Longfang laughed. The laugh turned into a bloody cough.

‘I don’t remember Terra,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t remember it. I’m oldest of all, and I don’t remember it. I was made there, one of the last few that was, and I remind all the brothers of our proud link to the birth-sphere. But the truth is, I remember very little. Dark barrack fortresses, exercise camps, fight-zones, off-world expeditions. That’s all. I don’t remember Terra.’

‘Maybe one day you’ll go back,’ suggested Hawser.

‘Maybe one day you’ll finish this account and tell me something about it,’ replied Longfang.

The skike dropped them in a puddle of floodlights outside a sulking monster of a building in the western quarter of the city-node.

‘The Bibliotech,’ said Hawser.

‘Indeed.’ Murza was smiling, but his nerves were getting worse.

‘I called ahead. I’m hoping they’ll meet you.’

‘They?’

Murza led him up the steps into the vast portico. The ancient stone columns soared away into the darkness above them. The floor was tiled black and white. Hawser could smell the dry air of climate control. He’d been to the Bibliotech many times before, for study and research. Never in the middle of the night. The sodium lamps cast a frosty, yellow glare on everything.

‘The society has had its eye on you,’ Murza said. ‘For quite a while now, in fact. I told them about you, and they think you might be very useful to them. A useful ally, like me.’

‘Do they pay you for what you deliver to them, Navid?’

‘No,’ Murza said quickly. ‘No money. I’m not rewarded financially.’

‘But you are rewarded. How?’

‘With… secrets.’

‘Like how to kill a man with a word?’

‘I shouldn’t have done that.’

‘No, you shouldn’t.’

Murza shook his head.

‘No, I mean that was beyond my skill-set. Way beyond my skill-set. It was an abuse of my power. I don’t have anything like that level of control, which is why I damaged my mouth trying to do it. Besides, Enuncia shouldn’t be used for harm.’

‘What’s “Enuncia”, Navid?’

Murza didn’t answer. They had already taken stimm shots to lessen the effects of the alcohol in their systems, and used enzyme sprays to neutralise the stink of amasec in their mouths. The Bibliotech’s book priests were waiting for them, robed and silent in their ceremonial vestments. Murza and Hawser removed their boots and outer clothes, and the book priests dressed them in the visitor gowns: the soft, cream-felt, one-piece robes with integral gloves and slippers. The book priests fastened the robes around the men’s throats, then gathered their hair and added tight skull caps. Murza took two data-slates out of his rucksack and led the way into the Bibliotech. Book priests opened the towering screen doors.

The grand hall was empty. None of the long reading desks was occupied. Three hundred pendant lights hung from the high ceiling on long brass chains, and lit the great length of the room in pairs that marched away from them. It was like stepping into the stomach of a great whale. The light from the pendant lamps reflected in soft, brushed spots off the warm wood of the reading desks, and glittered wetly off the polished black ironwork of the shelf cages lining the walls.

‘Where are they then?’ Hawser asked.

‘They’re all over the world,’ Murza replied cockily. ‘But I’m hoping a few of the members who operate in Lutetia will be able to meet us here.’

‘This is about recruiting me, then?’

‘This could be the most exceptional night of your life, Kas.’

‘Answer the damn question!’

‘All right, all right,’ Murza hissed. ‘Keep your voice down, the book priests are looking at us.’

Hawser glanced and saw the disapproving faces of the priest officers peering in through decorative holes in the screen door. He lowered his voice.

‘This is about recruiting me?’

‘Yes. I don’t know what it is, Kas. I just can’t seem to keep them happy. They keep wanting more. I thought if I brought you in—’

‘I don’t like any of this, Navid. I don’t like where this is going.’

‘Just wait here, all right? Wait here and then hear them out.’

‘You probably can’t keep them happy because you’re such a liability, Navid! I don’t want to get drawn into your games!’

‘Please, Kas! Please! I need this! I need to show them I can deliver! And you’ll see! You’ll see what it can do for you!’

‘I’m not meeting anybody without knowing their names.’

Murza handed him one of the data-slates.

‘Sit down here. Read this. I’ve marked the file. I’ll be back in a minute.’

He hurried away.

Hawser sighed, and then pulled out a chair at one of the reading tables. He switched on the data-slate, lit it, saw the item Murza had called ‘For Kasper’, and selected it. It had a little marker image in the shape of a toy horse beside it. Preferring to read things on a large view, he plugged the slate into the reading table’s terminal jack, and opened the full screen. A seamless slot in the edge of the wooden desk top opened, and a hololithic screen a metre square projected up in front of Hawser, tilting to the optimum angle.

Images began to form and move.

It was random notes at first, digital facsimile pages copied from Murza’s tattered work journal. Hawser had seen the kind of thing before, because he had peer reviewed and worked up a lot of Murza’s material over the years. They counted on each other for that. Quite often, after a Conservatory expedition, one of them would supervise the physical archiving of any artefacts recovered, while the other collated and audited their working notes for the Imperial Catalogue and for scholastic publication. He was used to Murza’s short-hands, his annoying tics, his habit of skipping, and sometimes annotating laterally.

It was definitely Murza’s rough journal. Hawser found himself smiling at the old copperplate typeface that Murza always chose to work in, and the occasional doodles and sketches that he’d copied into the memory.

The pages seemed to have come from a number of different sources, though. They were extracts, bits that Murza had snipped and sampled from his journal from different times. Hawser recognised notes recorded during more than a dozen different expeditions they had made together over the previous few years. If this was all linked to Murza’s underlying obsession, then his madness did indeed run back a long way. Hawser saw reference to an expedition to Tartus that he knew Murza had made the year before their first meeting.

He looked up from the light screen. A sound.

One of the book priests, perhaps? There was no sign of anyone.

He went on reading, trying to make sense of what Murza had loaded into the file. There seemed to be no particular connection between the facts and locations Murza had put together. What was he missing? What had Murza found?

Just his own madness?

He looked up again.

He could have sworn that he’d heard footsteps, soft felt steps approaching across the stone tiles of the Bibliotech floor. Murza returning, perhaps.

There was no one there.

Hawser got to his feet. He walked down the table to the far end and back again. He stopped. He swung around sharply.

He thought he caught a glimpse of someone flitting past the backlit holes of the main screen doors. Just a glimpse. A robed figure.

‘Navid?’ he called out.

There was no reply.

He went and sat down again, and turned the display to the next sequence of pages. These were annotated pictures of excavation finds, artefacts removed from dig sites around the world. The annotations were all in Murza’s style. Two of the artefact specimens were from lunar excavations.

Had Murza been to the moon? He’d never said so. That was special permit work. You needed direct Council authority.

Hawser sat back for a moment. Maybe this was Murza simply studying artefacts retrieved by other field workers. He tried to find dig dates and source codes.

There weren’t any.

The artefacts were all figurines or amulets, worked in stone, in clay, in metal. They were, in no particular order, a sampler of the uncounted ethnic cultures that had formed the long and half-known patchwork of mankind’s history. Some were a thousand years old, some were tens of thousands. Some were so old or obscure in origin that it was impossible to cite their provenance. There was no commonality of age, or geographical location, no shared thread of ritual significance or religious practice, no unity of script or language. A five hundred year-old Panpacific Dumaic battle standard had been placed in the file between a four thousand year-old ceremonial synapse shunt from the Nanothaerid Domination and a thirty thousand year-old votive bowl from Byzantine Konstantinopal. There was absolutely no—

There was one linking element.

Hawser began to see it. He was trained to notice these things, and he’d been doing his job well for a long time. He had a memory that leaned towards the eidetic, and as he switched between the holo-images, rotating some in three dimensions with quick gestures of his felt-gloved hands, he saw what Murza had seen.

Eyes. Stylised eyes. A whole varied symbology of eyes, of eye-like dots, of circumpuncts, of monads, of omphalos, of aversion marks.

‘The all-seeing singularity,’ Hawser whispered to himself. You idiot, Navid. This is so simplistic. Every culture in human history has noted and reflected the significance of the eye in its ritual and art. You are making connections where there are no connections. These tiny similarities are only due to the fact that all of these things were made by human beings. For fug’s sake, Navid. You’re seeing some kind of conspiracy in history, some kind of illuminating tradition, an occult continuity, and it’s all nonsense! Your mind is simply making sense of shadows on the cave wall! There is no sense! They’re only shadows, Navid, they’re only—

Hawser blinked. His skin was prickling. It was the dry heat of the Bibliotech and the over-warmth of the felt robes. He had stopped at the annotated image of an uraeus or wedjat. It was an amulet, partially damaged, formed in the traditional eye-and-teardrop shape. Navid’s careful note indicated it was between thirty and thirty-five millennia old, and was composed of carnelian, gold, lapis lazuli and faience.

‘The wedjat/uraeus perfectly typifies ABSOLUTELY ambiguity of eye as symbol/motif,’ Navid’s rambling note went on, ‘espc. in the Faeronik Era, it seems it was both a talisman of protection, of guarding, AND of wrath & malice. It is good & evil AT ONCE, it is good & light and dark, it is positive & negative. The wedjat, later known as the Eye of Horus, may perhaps be said to represent DUPLICITY: a thing or person that can present one face to the world & then turn to present a contrary aspect. But this ‘traitorous’or ‘treacherous’ interpretation may be offset/modified/qualified by notion that wedjat is COSMOLOGICALLY NEUTRAL. Eye is both aggressive AND passive, protective AND proactive. Alignment depends upon WHO or WHAT is employing device.’

It was a simplistic conclusion, one that Hawser felt was beneath Murza’s range as a scholar. Why had Navid made these jottings with such haste and imprecision. Hawser wondered—

Hawser wondered why he couldn’t stop looking at the eye on the hololithic projection. It was gazing at him, as if challenging him to look away and defying his dismissal of Navid Murza’s scribblings. It was staring at him. It was unblinking. The pupil was static, black iris set in blue, hard as the sky. It made his eyes water. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t break its stare. He tried to turn his head or fight off the force that was pinning his eyelids open and making his eyeballs itch and well up. His hands tightened on the edge of the reading table. He tried to push himself away, push himself back, break contact, as if the image was a live electrical wire he had brushed against and couldn’t break away from. It was like trying to haul out of the undertow of a bad dream that didn’t want to let him go.

The eye was no longer blue.

It was gold and black-pinned.

The back of his head hit the floor with a crack. Pain arrowed into his skull. He’d managed to tip his chair over and had ended up on his back. With his felt-slippered feet sticking up in the air, it would have been comical, except for the pain. He’d struck himself a serious blow hitting the floor.

Maybe he was concussed. He felt sick.

He felt weird.

What had just happened? Had Murza built some kind of hypnotic feedback pattern into his file? Was there some subliminal imaging?

He got up, and leaned hard on the edge of the table to steady himself. Then he pulled the data-slate link out of the table-jack without looking directly at the hololithic display. The light screen went out. He took a few deep breaths, and then leaned down and righted the chair. Bending over made his head pound and his stomach slosh. He stood up straight again to get some stability.

There was someone at the far end of the room.

The figure was about twenty metres away, at the end of the reading tables, standing by the inner stacks furthest from the screen door entranceway. It was looking at him.

He couldn’t see its face. It was wearing the same soft, beige felt robes of the Bibliotech he was, but it had raised the suit’s hood, like a monk’s cowl. Its arms were by its side. Everything about its outline was soft, almost plump. In the cream library robes, it looked like the naked form of a person who had lost great amounts of weight very dramatically, and whose flesh had become baggy and empty. In the Bibliotech’s half-light, it looked like a ghost.

Hawser called out, ‘Hello?’

His voice rolled around the twilight cavern of the Bibliotech like a marble in a foot locker. The figure did not move. It was staring right at him. He couldn’t see its eyes, but he knew it was. He wanted to see its eyes. He felt as if he needed to.

‘Hello?’ he called out again.

He took a step forwards.

‘Navid? Is that you? What are you doing?’

He walked towards the figure. It remained where it was, staring at him, its creamy form so soft in the gloom, it seemed phantasmal.

‘Navid?’

The hooded figure turned suddenly and began to walk away towards the carved black ironwork screen into the inner stacks.

‘Wait!’ Hawser called out. ‘Navid, come back! Navid!’

The hooded figure kept walking. It passed under the ironwork frame and disappeared into the shadows.

Hawser started to run.

‘Navid?’

He entered the inner stacks. Rows of shelving fanned out before him in the low light. The beautifully made wooden stacks were each twelve metres high, and each row ran off as far as he could see. Sets of brass library steps with complex gears were attached to each stack at intervals and could be run along the shelves on inertia-less rails to allow readers access to the higher levels. As Hawser moved, his body heat triggered catalogue tags on adjacent shelves. Hololithic tags lit up, and a pleasant voice spoke.

Eastern Literature, Hol to Hom.

Eastern Literature, sub-section, Homezel, Tomas, works of.

Eastern Literature, Hom to Hom continued.

‘Mute,’ Hawser instructed. The pleasant voice faded. The hololithic tags continued to flare up and then gradually fade as he hurried past.

‘Hello?’ he called. He ducked back and tried another row. How could a walking figure have vanished so quickly?

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned in time to see the hooded figure, just for a second, as it crossed a division between stacks. He broke into an urgent sprint to catch up with it, but when he got to the division, there was no sign.

Except a couple of hololithic shelf tags slowly fading away again, as if passing body heat had only recently brought them to life.

‘Navid! I’ve had enough of this!’ Hawser yelled out. ‘Stop playing games!’

Something made him turn. The hooded figure was behind him, right behind him, silent and ghostly. It slowly raised its hands up from its sides, raising them out straight like wings, or like a celebrant priest invoking a deity.

The softly gloved right hand held a knife.

It was a ceremonial blade. An athame. Hawser recognised its form at once. It was a sacrificial blade.

‘You’re not Navid,’ he whispered.

‘Choices have to be made, Kasper Hawser,’ said a voice. It wasn’t Murza, and it wasn’t the hooded figure either. Fear crushed Hawser’s heart.

‘What choices?’ he managed to ask.

‘You have much to offer, and we would be pleased to have a relationship with you. It would be of mutual benefit. But you have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser.’

‘I still don’t understand,’ Hawser replied. ‘Where’s Murza? He said he was bringing me to meet with the people he works with.’

‘He did. He has. Navid Murza is a disappointment. He is rash. He is unreliable. An unreliable servant. An unreliable witness.’

‘So?’

‘We are looking for someone more suited to our needs. Someone who knows what he’s looking for. Someone who can recognise the truth. Someone who can see with better eyes. You.’

‘I think you’ve mistaken me for some kind of idiot who wants to join a pathetic secret club,’ Hawser answered fiercely. ‘Take off that stupid hood. Let me see your face. Is that you, Murza? Is this another of your stupid games?’

The hooded figure took a step forwards. It almost seemed to glide.

‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser,’ said the voice.

Hawser realised the voice was coming from all around him. It definitely wasn’t coming from the figure. It was the soft and pleasant system voice of the stack shelves. How could anything or anyone speak to him through the Bibliotech’s artificial system?

‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser.’

Hawser heard Navid cry out. It wasn’t a vocalisation. It was a tremor of pain. He turned his back on the hooded figure, and started to stride down the aisle, not quite running, but moving more urgently than a walk.

‘You have to make a choice,’ the shelves whispered to him as he walked by. ‘You have to make a choice. See for us, and we will show you such things.’

‘Navid?’ Hawser called out, ignoring the voice,

A four-way junction in the stacks lay ahead. A set of library steps had been rolled to the end of one of the adjacent stacks, and Murza had been bound to its brass rail by his wrists. He was lying on the floor, half twisted, with his legs stretched out into the centre of the junction area and his arms pulled up painfully by the restraint. He looked half-drugged, or woozy as if he’d been felled by violence.

There were six more hooded figures standing in a vague semi-circle around him.

‘You have to make a choice,’ said the voice.

‘What are you doing to him?’ Hawser demanded.

‘You have to make a choice. See for us, and we will show you such things. Things you cannot imagine.’

Murza let out a low moan.

Hawser ignored the hooded figures and crouched down by Murza. He tilted the man’s face up. Murza was flushed and sweaty. Fear pricked his eyes.

‘Kas,’ he stammered. ‘Kas, help me. I’m so sorry. They like you. You interest them.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know! They won’t tell me! I just wanted to make an introduction, that’s all. Show that I was useful to them too, that I could bring them the people they needed.’

‘Oh, Navid, you’re such a fool…’

‘Please, Kas.’

Hawser looked up at the robed figures behind him.

‘We’re going to walk out of here now,’ he said, with more conviction than he actually felt. ‘Navid and I, we’re going to get up and walk out of here.’

‘You have to make a choice, Kasper Hawser,’ said the pleasant, artificial voice.

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yes. We have extended an invitation to you. We do not extend invitations like this to just anybody. You are a rare creature, and this is a rare offer. Do not underestimate the potency of the things we are inviting you to share. They are the things you have spent your life seeking.’

‘This is a mistake,’ said Hawser.

‘The only mistake would be if you said no, Kasper Hawser,’ said the voice. ‘A yes is far simpler. The signifier of yes should be easy for a man of your education to recognise. It is around you.’

Hawser blinked. He looked at Murza, the figures, the looming shapes of the stacks, the extending perspective of the aisles.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘A ritual conducted on a crossed point, representing the unity of approaching directions. Eight adepts offering admission to one novitiate. Identities are masked, representing the mysteries awaiting beyond initiation. This is a variation on the initiation rites of the witch-cults of the Age of Strife. Which one? The Knower Sect? The Illuminated? The Cognitae?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said the voice.

‘No, because that’s the whole sell, isn’t it?’ said Hawser. ‘Caveat emptor. The initiate gets to know nothing: no truths, no names, no identities, until after initiation, when it’s too late. Revelation breaks the compact of secrecy. I know what you want from me.’

‘You have a choice to make.’

‘Eight adepts, but there can be only eight. The sacred number. One must step aside to let a replacement in. And one has made a mistake and broken the compact of secrecy.’

Murza moaned again. He pulled weakly at his bonds, making the set of brass library steps rattle.

The hooded figure with the athame held the blade out to Hawser.

‘Oh, please, Kas,’ Murza whimpered. ‘Please.’

Hawser took the blade.

‘You really have got yourself in a mess, Navid,’ he said.

Hawser made a quick, simple, strike with the dagger. Murza yelped. The cord binding his wrists parted.

Hawser turned to the hooded figures, brandishing the athame.

‘Now fug off!’ he said.

The semi-circle of figures hesitated for a moment. Then they began to tremble. Each soft, cream suit began to shudder, as if pressurised air hoses had been attached to them to inflate them. They swelled slightly, in ugly, lumpen ways that evoked malformation and defect, and they began to writhe, stirred by ethereal things moving inside them. The felt suits grew plump, distending like balloons. A whine began, a high-pitched note growing louder and louder. It was a shrill wail coming from the stack voice system. Murza and Hawser clamped their hands to their ears. When the noise reached its peak, it cut off abruptly. The hoods of the shuddering figures slipped back and released vapour into the gloomy air. The vapour was golden and it vanished almost as soon as it emerged, like smoke, from the neck holes of the suits. Empty and slack, the seven felt body-robes fell softly onto the floor.

Hawser stared down at the empty suits, at the impossibility of them. There had been men inside them. Even the most subtle and fine-scale teleportation work could not have removed them from inside their robes. He realised he was breathing hard, and tried to contain his panic. He had a peculiar fear inside him, a kind he only rarely experienced, a kind that had followed him from childhood at the commune, from the nightmares he’d had of something scratching at the door.

Murza was clinging to the base of the library steps he’d been tied to. He was sobbing.

‘Get up, Murza,’ Hawser said. He felt something on his cheek, something too cold for a tear.

It had begun to snow in the library.

The snow was gentle and silent. It drifted down out of the fusty darkness above the stack tops, and glittered like starshine as it passed through the glow of the aisle lamps.

‘Snow?’ Hawser whispered.

‘What?’ Murza murmured.

‘Snow? How can it be snow?’ Hawser said.

‘What are you talking about?’ Murza said, not really interested.

Hawser stepped away from him, looking up into the darkness, his hands out, upturned, to feel the cold sting of snowflakes landing on his palms.

‘Great Terra,’ he whispered. ‘This isn’t right. Snow, that’s not right.’

‘Why do you keep talking about snow?’ Murza moaned.

‘This isn’t how it happened,’ said Hawser.

‘It’s enough like how it happened for the story to stay true,’ said Longfang.

Tra’s rune priest was lying at the mouth of the aisle to Hawser’s left, propped up against the stack as if it was the orange-tiled wall of a mansion in a city near another star. The blood down his front had caked dry like rust, and he was no longer breathing out a bloody steam, but his lips were wet and red, in sharp contrast to his almost colourless skin.

‘How can you be here with me?’ Hawser asked.

‘I’m not,’ said Longfang, his voice a sigh. ‘You’re here with me. Remember that? This is only your account.’

‘Kas?’ Murza called. ‘Kas, who are you talking to?’

‘No one,’ said Hawser.

The snow was falling a little more heavily. Hawser knelt down beside Longfang.

‘So, did you like my story?’

‘I did. I felt your fear. I felt his more.’

Longfang nodded his head towards Murza.

‘Who are you talking to, Kas?’ Murza called out. ‘Kas, what’s happening?’

‘He got in over his head,’ Hawser said to Longfang.

‘He was never trustworthy,’ the priest replied. ‘You should have smelled that on him from the start. In your tale, he was nicer, a better friend to you, than he is now I see him myself. You’re too trusting, skjald. People use you because of that.’

‘I don’t think that’s true,’ said Hawser.

‘What isn’t true?’ Murza whined.

‘You look old,’ said Longfang looking up at Hawser.

‘I’m a lot younger here than I am as you know me.’

‘We made a better you,’ replied Longfang.

‘Why is it snowing in here?’ asked Hawser.

‘Because the snow comforts me,’ said Longfang. ‘It’s the snow of Fenris. Of winter approaching. Get me up.’

Hawser reached out his hand. The priest took it and got to his feet. There seemed to be no weight to him this time. He left a pool of blood on the library floor.

The snowfall grew a little heavier.

‘Come on,’ he said. He started to shuffle down the aisle. Hawser walked with him.

‘Kas? Kas, where are you going?’ Murza called out behind them.

‘What happens?’ Longfang asked.

‘I’ll take him back to the pension, clean him up. We do some soul-searching. I try to weigh up the huge asset he represents to the Conservation programme in terms of his scholarship, ability and sheer tenacity against the huge liability of him consorting with dilettante occultists.’

‘What do you decide?’

‘That he was a valuable commodity. That I should keep any inquiry internal. That I believed him when he swore to me he was renouncing all his old connections and associations so he could dedicate himself to th—’

‘You should have smelled his treachery.’

‘Maybe. But for ten years after that night we worked together. There was never any more trouble. He was a superb field researcher. We kept working together until… until he was killed in Ossetia.’

‘There was never any more trouble?’ asked Longfang.

‘No.

‘Never?’

‘Never,’ said Hawser.

‘Kas?’ Murza’s voice echoed out. It was a long way behind them, muffled by the distance and the snow. ‘Kas? Kas?’

‘So you liked the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

‘It was amusing enough,’ said Longfang. ‘It wasn’t your best.’

‘I can assure you it was,’ said Hawser.

Longfang shook his head. Droplets of blood flecked from his beard.

‘No, you’ll learn better ones,’ he said. ‘Far better ones. And even now, it’s not the best you know.’

‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser with some defiance. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

‘What do you mean?’

The snow had become quite heavy. It was lying on the ground, and their feet were crunching over it. Hawser saw his breath in the air in front of him. It was getting lighter. The stacks were just black slabs in the blizzard, like stone monoliths or impossibly giant tree trunks.

‘Where are we going?’ Hawser asked.

‘Winter,’ said Longfang.

‘So this is a dream too?’

‘No more than your tale was, skjald. Look.’

The snow was a kind of neon white, scorching the eye as it reflected a sun high up on a noon apex, the brief, bright bite of a winter day.

The air was as clear as glass. To the west of them, beyond a vast, rolling field of snow and a mighty evergreen forest, mountains rose. They were white, as clean and sharp as carnassials. Hawser realised the murderous gun-metal skies behind them weren’t storm clouds. They were more mountains, greater mountains, mountains so immense the sheer scale of them broke a man’s spirit. Where their crags ended, buried like thorns in the skin of the sky, the black-hearted wrath of the winter season Fenrisian storms were gathering and clotting, angry as patriarch gods and malign as trickster daemons. In no more than an hour, two at the most pleading limits of a man’s prayers, the sun would be gone and the light too, and the storms would have come in over the peaks on their murder-make. The fury would be suicidal, like men rushing a firm shield wall, and the snow-clouds would disembowel themselves on the mountain tops and spill their contents on the valley.

‘Asaheim,’ said Hawser, so cold he could barely speak. It felt as if all of his blood had gone solid.

‘Yes,’ said Longfang.

‘A whole great year I lived in the Aett, I never went outside of it. I never saw the top of the world.’

‘Now you’re seeing it,’ said Longfang.

‘What are we doing?’

‘We’re being quiet,’ said Longfang. ‘This is my tale.’

The rune priest began to advance down the long white shoulder of the vast snow field. His head was low, his stance wide-spaced. The gossamer-white pelt across his back caused him to almost vanish into the lying snow. He had a long steel spear in his right hand.

Hawser followed him, head down, putting his feet in Longfang’s footprints. The prints were shallow: the snow was as hard as rock. Their breath came out of their mouths in long sideways streams like silk banners.

Snow stopped its slow, gentle fall and began coming in from the direction of the mountains, loose flakes driven by the wind in circling, dizzy patterns. Hawser felt it sting his face. The nature of light in the world around them changed. A shadow against the sky tilted. The horizon was filling up with a grey vapour. The sun seemed to look away. It was as though a veil had been drawn, or a screen pulled across a door. There was still sunlight, bright yellow sunlight, at the top of the sky, and it was reflecting its neon-burn off the ridge of the snow line, but down where they were, the snow was suddenly a dark, cold pearl colour.

Longfang pointed. Down at the tree line, huge, slow shapes processed in a loose, plodding group. They were vast quadruped herbivores, part bison, part elk, darkly pelted in black, woolly coats. Their bone antler branches were the size of tree canopies. Hawser could hear the snort and huff of them.

‘Saeneyti,’ whispered Longfang. ‘Stay low and quiet. Their antlers work as acoustic reflectors. They’ll hear us long before they’re in spear-throwing range.’

Hawser realised he had a spear of his own.

‘Are we hunting?’

‘We’re always hunting,’ said Longfang.

‘So if they heard us, they’d run?’

‘No, they’d turn on us to defend the calves. Those antlers are longer and sharper than our spears, skjald. Remember to put that in your account.’

‘I thought this was your account, priest?’

Longfang grinned.

‘I just want you to get the details right.’

‘All right.’

‘And watch the treeline,’ Longfang added.

Hawser turned to look at the edge of the forest. He could see its shadowed, evergreen blackness through the snow. The towering tree trunks looked like the ends of Bibliotech book stacks. He knew that even in full sunshine, light didn’t dare penetrate the mossy darkness of the fir glades.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Because we may not be the only ones hunting,’ Longfang replied.

Hawser swallowed.

‘Priest?’

‘Yes?’

‘What is the point of this tale? What is the purpose of telling it to me?’

‘Its point is its point.’

‘Very gnomic. I mean what am I supposed to learn from it?’

‘It’s about time we trusted you with one of our secrets,’ Longfang replied. ‘A good one. A blood one.’

As if to emphasise the word, Hawser realised he could suddenly smell blood. He could smell Longfang’s blood. Immediately afterwards, he smelled something else too: the dung-stink and ferment-odour of cattle. He could smell the saeneyti.

The wind had changed. It was bringing the stink of the herd up towards them. The clouds moved, shoved by the wind, racing and scudding. The sun came back out and turned its glare on them like a lamp. They were black dots in a broad neon snow field.

They were painfully visible.

The big bull leading the herd turned its bearded head and made a booming, trumpeting sound through nostrils the size of sewer pipes. It shook its crown of antlers. The herd took off in agitation, hooting and braying, waddling their huge bodies away double-time, kicking up powder snow.

The bull peeled away from the fleeing herd and came back up the slope.

‘Shit!’ said Hawser. He hadn’t fully appreciated the size of the creature. Four, perhaps five metres tall? How many tonnes? And the width of those antlers, like the spread wings of a drop-ship.

‘Move yourself!’ Longfang shouted. He had his arm crooked back, the spear locked to throw, standing his ground. The bull was coming on. It was too big, too tall, too cumbersome to develop any real speed, but it was inexorable and it was angry.

‘I said move!’ Longfang cried.

Hawser started to stumble across the snow away from Longfang.

‘No. To the side. The side!’ Longfang ordered.

Hawser was running away from Longfang and the approaching bull. If it ran Longfang down, it would simply run him down too. Longfang intended him to turn wide, out of its line of charge.

Given the breadth of its antler crown, that was going to be some distance.

The snow was hard to run on. He was already out of breath. It felt like he was struggling with his old, human body, the one he had worn before Fenris, the weak, aging Kasper Hawser. Every step was an effort to lift his feet high enough to clear the snow. He had to bound. The light, fluorescent-bright, burned his eyes.

He looked back in time to see Longfang cast. The spear flashed in the bright sunlight. It seemed to strike the huge beast, but it vanished against shaggy black hair. The bull saeneyti kept coming. Longfang vanished in a welter of pulverised snow.

Hawser yelled the priest’s name involuntarily.

The bull swung towards him.

Hawser turned and fled. He knew it was futile. He could hear its muffled thunder, its snorting and grunting, the oceanic surge of its gastric caverns. He could smell its rank breath, its spittle, its giant mauve tongue. It boomed again like a carnyx.

Hawser knew he wasn’t going to outrun it. Expecting an antler spike to split through his torso from the back at any moment, he turned and threw his spear.

It weighed too much. It didn’t even reach the saeneyti, even though the bull was closing the distance and was scarcely five metres away.

Hawser fell on his backside. Wide-eyed and helpless, he watched death ploughing towards him, head down.

A black wolf hit the saeneyti from the side. It looked like a normal wolf, until Hawser tried to reconcile the size of it compared to the saeneyti bull, which he knew to be the size of the very largest prehistoric Terran saurians. The wolf had gone for the nape of the neck. It had closed its jaws just in front of the humped shoulder mass where the saeneyti carried its winter fat.

The bull lifted its head and let out an excruciating, throttled noise. It tried to twist its head to hook the predator with its crown of antlers and toss it away, but the wolf was tenacious and held on. Jaws clamped, it made a wet leopard-growl that was half muffled by the bull’s pelt.

Blood as black as ink was running down the bull’s wattle, spattering the snow between its front feet. It was streaming down through the black wool. The saeneyti snorted again, pink froth foaming at its mouth and nose. Its eyes were wild and mad, red-rimmed, staring insanely out from under the thick fringe of winter fur.

It went down hard, front legs collapsing first. It fell onto its front knees, and then the back end followed. Finally, its body went over in a catastrophic roll onto its side like the hull of a capsizing yacht. Hawser could see the saeneyti’s huge, protruding tongue shuddering between its yellow teeth, lips peeled back. Its breath pumped out in clouds like a malfunctioning steam engine. Blood vomited out of its mouth across the snow and lay there smoking.

The wolf maintained its grip until the bull gave up its last, trembling rumble, then it let go. Blood dripped from its snout. It padded around the massive corpse twice, moving quickly, head low, sniffing.

It stopped beside the head of its kill, and raised its own head, ears upright, to stare at Hawser. Its eyes were golden and black-pinned. Hawser stared back. He knew if he tried to get back on his feet, the wolf would still be taller than him.

‘There are no wolves on Fenris.’

Hawser looked up. Longfang was standing beside him, staring at the wolf.

‘That’s evidently not true at all,’ Hawser replied in a tiny voice.

Longfang grinned down at him.

‘Try to keep up, skjald. There were no wolves on Fenris until we got here.’

Longfang looked back at the wolf.

‘Twice he’s helped protect you,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Hawser.

‘He had a different name last time you were in his company,’ said Longfang. ‘Then, he was called Brom.’

The black wolf turned and ran for the forest, accelerating as only a mammalian apex predator can. It vanished into the enormous darkness under the evergreens.

After a few seconds, Hawser saw its eyes staring out of the blackness at them: luminous, gold and black-pinned.

It took him another few moments to realise that there were another ten thousand pairs of eyes watching them from the shadows of the forest.

‘I think you should explain,’ said Hawser. He felt angry, and curiously cold given the heat washing across the courtyard. ‘What do you mean he was called Brom? What do you mean by that?’

Longfang didn’t answer. He stared back at Hawser with a sneering look that defied argument.

‘This is ridiculous!’ Hawser exclaimed. ‘This is just some of your myth-making! This is a mjod story! A mjod story!’

He hoped this would provoke a reaction, stir something in the old rune priest that would make him reveal some actual truth.

Longfang remained silent.

‘Well, I don’t think much of your account then,’ said Hawser.

He heard footsteps behind him and turned. Bear was walking towards him, with Aeska Brokenlip close behind him. They were both spattered with Quietude gore. Hawser became aware again of the constant noise around him, the swirling din of end-war circling the pit.

‘Tell him to speak plainly to me!’ Hawser said to Bear, rising. ‘Tell him not to insult me with riddles!’

Bear crouched down beside the priest. He leaned his axe against the orange-tiled wall and reached out to the priest’s throat. Aeska looked on, wiping spats of blood off his nose.

Bear stood again and looked at Aeska.

‘What?’ asked Hawser.

‘Heoroth Longfang has gone,’ said Aeska.

‘What? No. He’s hurt but he’s mending.’

‘Bio-track on his armour says his thread parted twelve minutes ago,’ said Bear flatly.

‘But I was just talking to him,’ said Hawser. ‘I was just talking to him. I was watching over him while he healed himself.’

‘No, skjald, you were seeing him through the last of the pain,’ said Aeska. ‘I hope your account was a good one.’

‘I was watching over him while he healed!’ Hawser insisted.

Bear shook his head.

‘He was holding on long enough to watch over you,’ he said.

Hawser gazed down at the body of the rune priest propped up in a sitting position against the alien wall. He had words in his mouth, but they were all broken and none of them worked.

Others were approaching. Hawser saw it was Najot Threader, Tra’s wolf priest. He approached with a retinue of thralls clad in cloaks of patchwork skin.

‘Look away,’ said Aeska Brokenlip.