Prospero Burns

Twelve

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

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

No…

‘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.’

No, again… not this memory… You keep sticking on this memory… We have to get past it…

‘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.’

Hawser woke with a start. It was all a dream. He lay back, calming down, trying to slow his panicked breathing, his bolting heart. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Better. We’re closer now. Past the memory of Longfang, closer to the one that matters.

Hawser felt tired and unrefreshed, as if his sleep had been sour, or sedative assisted. His limbs ached. Sustained artificial gravity always did that to him.

Golden light was knifing into his chamber around the window shutter, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

There was an electronic chime.

Keep with it. Focus.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

‘Thank you,’ said Hawser. He sat up. He was so stiff, so worn out. He hadn’t felt this bad for a long time. His leg was sore. Maybe there were painkillers in the drawer.

He limped to the window, and pressed the stud to open the shutter. It rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. He looked out. It was a hell of a view.

Ignore the view. Who cares about the view? You’ve seen it before, over and over, in life and in your dreams. It’s what’s behind you that matters. Focus!

The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below him. He was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. He could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, he could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds and, below, he could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one he was aboard, which was…

It doesn’t matter. It. Doesn’t. Matter. Stay in that moment. Focus your mind on that memory, on the one part of the memory that’s really important!

Lemurya. Yes, that was it. Lemurya. A luxury suite on the underside of the Lemuryan plate.

His eyes refocussed. He saw his own sunlit reflection in the thick glass of the window port.

You’re distracted! Don’t be distracted! Ignore what you look like! This is a dream! A memory! Behind you, that’s all that counts! Turn around! Look behind you! Focus! Who’s behind you?

Old! So old! So old! How old was he? Eighty? Eighty years standard? He recoiled. This was wrong. On Fenris, they’d remade him, they’d—

Except he hadn’t been to Fenris yet. He hadn’t even left Terra.

Focus! Who’s behind you?

Bathed in golden sunlight, he stared at his aghast reflection. He saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind him.

Yes! Yes!

Terror constricted him.

‘How can you be here?’ he asked.

And woke.

Hawser groaned. He was covered in sweat and his heart was palpitating. The astringent smells of herbal ointments and body paint assaulted his nose.

‘Did you see?’ asked Aun Helwintr.

‘No,’ said Hawser.

‘Ah,’ said the priest.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hawser.

The priest shrugged.

‘We’ll try again,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow, or later tonight if there’s strength in you.’

‘It was very close this time,’ said Hawser. ‘I mean this time, I actually turned around earlier. I changed my memory, I behaved differently in it. I turned around, but it still wasn’t fast enough.’

‘Next time,’ said Helwintr. He seemed distracted.

They had come up through the silent stands of forest into the crags above the high station, a two-hour trek they had made every day for a week. It was cold, and if they made an early start, frost could be found lingering on the trail. The rocks of the crags, grey and cream, were sheathed in beards of winter lichen: purple, mauve, blue, red, some as rough as sandpaper or as soft as moleskin.

Aun Helwintr claimed that the loneliness of the crags aided contemplation and inner sight. It was away from the traffic of voices and everyday life, and on Thardia, where humans had only inhabited the high station and the research facility, there was no legacy of wights or ghost memories to tangle a man’s threads.

Helwintr liked the cold too. Even at its polar extremes, Thardia barely approached the lethal majesty of a Fenrisian winter, but the priest liked the bracing climate and the marks a man’s breath left in the air.

Helwintr collected up the pots of salve, the talismans, and the other paraphernalia he had arranged around the table rock they had chosen for the day’s effort. The rock, low, flat-topped and large enough for Hawser to lie on it, full length, like a man stretched out on a bed, had a bluish coat of lichen on it. It reminded Hawser of the worn velvet lining of an Ossetian prayer box or an old gaming board.

The priest was fully caparisoned with winter pelts and his leatherware garb. His mask, head-binding, chest and shoulder wear and arm guards were all of glossy black leather with involuted knotwork. His long white hair, lacquered into an S-tail, was protruding from the back of his scalp-case. His black face-guard was a prophylactic fear-mask with a daemon-snarl to the mouth and snout intended to scare wights away.

Hawser wore leather gear of his own, dark brown and of simpler design, with a half-mask and no full-head casing. It had been a twenty-six week translation from Nikaea to Thardia, and he’d used his time to learn and practise some basic hideworking skills. Men from Tra, at different times, had shown him various techniques, and had reviewed his work and suggested refinements. Hawser had begun some rudimentary knotwork decoration down the left arm guard, but it was slow, and he was disgruntled at his lack of ability. The rest of the leatherware was plain and undecorated.

His accoutrements gathered, Helwintr crouched on a slab of rock, his legs bent wide, his back hunched. The pose reminded Hawser, just for a moment, of an amphibian on a lily-pad. Then it reminded him of something else: a lupine predator, vigilant on a rock, calm but alert in the sunlight, resting but surveying the forest below.

Helwintr took an athame from his belt and began to make marks in the lichen covering the rock he was squatting on.

Hawser was cold. He left the priest to whatever abstruse gothi business had engaged him. The open air of any planet’s biosphere was more conducive to such activities than the chambers of a void-borne starship. Helwintr was making the best use of the taskforce’s brief stay-over at Thardia.

To the east, in the glassy sky, a constellation unfamiliar to the heavenscape of Thardia glimmered and shone. It was a star-pattern that this world’s sky had never seen before, and never would again, a star-pattern that even a spiritually bankrupt gothi could read as an astral house of doom and destruction.

It was the lights of the taskforce ships at high anchor. Taskforce Geata, six companies of the Sixth, along with their support vessels and enthralled servers. A notable concentration of strength by the standards of any Legion, especially in this age when the demands of the Great Crusade diluted the Astartes across the vast celestial stage. By the standards of the Sixth, almost unheard of. The official line was that the companies were assembling at Thardia for a moot and resupply, but Hawser knew something else was going on.

There was a chill in his bones. Hawser drew his axe and moved down the slope away from the priest, beginning his long, repetitive regimen of practice strokes and turns that Godsmote had taught him. He was beginning to handle the weapon well enough to have earned Godsmote’s approval once or twice. Hawser could turn the axe, rotate and check the angles of stroke and attack, block, and switch hands, either from one to another or from a single to a double-handed grip. He had even mastered a showy little spin, a rapid, one-handed rotation that mimicked some of the dazzling blade skills he’d seen displayed by warriors like Bear and Erthung, but Godsmote had warned him against it. Too flashy, he’d said. Too much risk of losing control or grip, just for the sake of showing off.

Axe-fighting was a complex and demanding dance. It looked much more brutal and simplistic than sword-work, but in some respects it was vastly more subtle than the ballet of the swordsman. The killing edge of an axe was in a position to harm an opponent for a much smaller percentage of engagement time than the killing surfaces of a sword. Axe fighting was about swinging and circling, moving and evading, choosing the moment to land the blow. It was about seeing that opening coming three or four steps ahead, like a good regicide player, and then taking advantage of it without telegraphing the stroke. It was about predicting the interface between swing and moving target. Misjudge that, and you’d lose the fight.

Axes were cold-climate weapons, because they were as much working tools for ice and firewood and butchery as they were weapons. But the art of using an axe in a fight was about predictive judgement, so it was no wonder that cultures like the Fenrisians had become preoccupied by prophecy. Reading the future was a survival skill at the micro level, and thus had become bred into their culture at the macro. Games of predictive strategy were compulsory activities in the Rout.

For his part, Hawser had spent many of his childhood hours playing regicide with Rector Uwe.

Hawser put his shoulders and back into the loops and turns, making his weapon hum as it cut the air. The exercise began to warm him up too.

He turned hard, swinging around, chopping the axe in a figure of eight, and as he did so, he realised that he was clearly beginning to inherit the Vlka Fenryka’s gift for prophecy. He knew before he’d even turned that he was going to have to stop the axe swing short.

Ohthere Wyrdmake was standing right behind him. The keen bite of Hawser’s redirected axe still barely missed him.

‘Move,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘With me, now.’

‘What?’

‘Now!’

Wyrdmake’s manner was hard to read at the best of times. His inscrutability, the sheer imposing threat of him, made him an uncomfortable presence to be around, and the rune priests were the most remote and inhuman of all the Vlka Fenryka.

He was blinking rather rapidly, though, and there was a touch of perspiration on his brow. To Hawser, Wyrdmake seemed agitated and uncomfortable.

‘There’s danger here,’ he said.

‘We must warn Helwintr,’ Hawser replied. He looked back up the slope to the rock where Aun Helwintr had been crouching. There was no sign of Tra’s rune priest.

Hawser looked back at Wyrdmake. The priest put an index finger against his lips, seized Hawser by the wrist, and started to drag him towards the forest line.

The forest vegetation was dark, tuberous growths with glossy black trunks and lacy foliage like the ragged wings of dead insects. Only at a distance, in general, structural terms, did it resemble actual trees.

Some of the growths were of fantastic size, bloated and wizened with age. Hawser had paid them little attention each day as he’d trekked through the glades. Now he was among them, furtive and confused, he became aware of how alien they were. There was a smell of dust and cinnamon. A black humus of decaying leaves covered the soil, and insects, tiny as pepper dust, billowed in the sunlit spaces between the plant shadows.

Hawser tried to make as little noise as possible, desperately trying to apply the techniques of stalking and foot-placement Godsmote had taught him, but he was like a noisy sack that Wyrdmake was dragging behind him. The priest moved in utter silence.

They got into cover in the shadow of a vast tuber-growth. The veined filigree of its canopy hung overhead like a widow’s veil. Hawser had leaf dust in his throat and tried not to cough.

Wyrdmake pushed Hawser back against the plant bole. The bark of the tuber was as glossy and black as the skin of an aubergine. The priest held up a hand indicating that Hawser should keep himself there, and then raised his head.

Hawser could half-see Wyrdmake in the shadows in front of him. Like Hawser and Helwintr, the priest of Fyf was clad in leatherwork gear, pelts and mask. Totemic strings of beads and animal teeth were looped around his neck. Hawser wondered how they didn’t make a sound when he moved. He became locked on the question. It was so silly. It almost made him laugh out loud. How did they not make a noise? Was there a trick to it?

Wyrdmake kept himself raised up for a moment, panning his head around, watching the glade, listening. Then he crouched down beside Hawser and started to fiddle with one of the bead strings around his neck.

‘I know what Helwintr’s been doing this past week,’ Wyrdmake whispered to him. ‘He’s had my blessing and advice on the matter. Getting past your sculpted memories is a very worthwhile goal for you and the Vlka Fenryka.’

Hawser swallowed and nodded. Wyrdmake had taken two black feathers off his necklace, and he was using a small length of thin silver wire to bind them to a garnet bead and a human finger bone he’d produced from a belt pouch.

‘The memory architecture is very strong,’ Wyrdmake continued as he worked, his voice barely a whisper. ‘There is cunning in it. Maleficarum. Helwintr reports to me every day. He is frustrated. Today, he tried a new technique. A new way, perhaps to unlock your thoughts. You know Eada Haelfwulf?’

Hawser nodded. Haelfwulf was another rune priest attached to Tra Company, serving their needs as one of Helwintr’s senior gothi. He was a tall, raw-boned warrior who dyed his leather gear red to match his flame-hair and beard.

‘Haelfwulf came with you today.’

‘I didn’t see him,’ Hawser whispered.

‘That was the idea,’ Wyrdmake whispered back. ‘He stayed back, out of sight, to secretly push at your memories from another angle while Helwintr kept you occupied.’

‘So? What’s happened?’

Wyrdmake shook his head.

‘I don’t know. But about an hour ago, I felt a terrible presentiment. A beforehand sense that something ill was about to take place up here in the crags. I came at once.’

‘You’re scaring me,’ Hawser whispered.

‘Good. That means you’re taking me seriously.’

‘Where’s Helwintr?’

‘When I arrived, all I saw was you, busy at your axe-work.’

‘Helwintr was right there!’ Hawser hissed. ‘He was on the rock not twenty metres back from me.’

‘Not when I arrived.’

‘He wouldn’t just disappear. He was busy with something. Some cunning work. He was listening.’

‘He’d sensed it too,’ Wyrdmake said. He had finished what he’d been doing with the feathers and the trinkets from his pouch. He cupped them in his hands, blew on them, and then threw his hands up.

Something black fluttered away into the canopy. Hawser heard its noisy wings. He got the brief impression of a raven, even though he knew no raven could have been hidden about Wyrdmake’s person.

‘What—’ he began.

Wyrdmake silenced him.

‘Wait now.’

The priest closed his eyes, as if concentrating hard. Hawser became acutely conscious of the sound of his own breathing. The forest was eerily quiet. There was an occasional sound: the fidget of the wind, or of some small creature, the tick of burrowing insects, the soft brush of leaf litter drifting down from the tuber-trees.

He heard a flutter from not far away. The sound of a large bird moving through the upper levels of the canopy.

‘Did you… did you make a crow?’ Hawser asked.

Wyrdmake peered at him.

‘A what?’ he whispered.

‘A crow.’

‘What word is that, skjald?’

‘Crow.’

‘You mean crow?’ the priest asked.

‘That’s what I said,’ Hawser whispered.

‘Not in Juvjk or Wurgen you didn’t. You spoke the Terran-tongue name for it.’

‘No, I didn’t, I—’

‘Be. Quiet.’

Wyrdmake closed his eyes again. Hawser shut up. He heard the wings beating once more, but further off. He heard another noise too, the faintest suggestion of something moving somewhere through the trees. Whatever it was, it was bigger than a burrowing insect or a forest floor creature.

Wyrdmake’s eyes snapped open.

‘I see it,’ he whispered, almost to himself. ‘Hjolda, it’s big.’

He looked at Hawser.

‘Head up towards the crags as fast and as quietly as you can. Don’t look back.’

Wyrdmake reached under his pelts and produced a compact plasma pistol. He armed it. It looked utterly incongruous and yet utterly appropriate in his leather-clad hands.

‘Go!’ he said.

The priest turned and sprang out of the shadows of the vast tuber-tree. His pelts flowed out behind him like a cloak as he headed deeper into the forest with great, bounding strides, towards the source of the noise. Within seconds, he had vanished from view.

Hawser waited a moment, willing the priest to reappear. Then he got up, axe in hand, and started to move as he had been instructed. He cursed every noisy step he took, every crunch of leaf-mould, every crack of dry twig. He felt like a blundering fool.

He hadn’t gone far when he heard a sound. He stopped and looked around. The forest space was black shadows and bars of white light. Tiny flies danced in the beams. Withered leaf shapes made shadows like calcified wing membranes. He heard the sound again.

A flutter. A flutter of wings, not far away. A slight disturbance in the forest cover. Branches rustled. Another flutter.

Without warning there was a frenzy of noise, a violent thrashing that was over as fast and as abruptly as it began. Not ten metres from him, undergrowth shook and tore. He dropped down low, weapon ready. Something that wasn’t human let out a brief, raucous shriek.

There was a wet leopard-snarl.

Then, from behind him, deep in the forest, came a cry of agony.

Hawser knew it was Wyrdmake.

He rose and turned. The priest was hurt. In trouble. He couldn’t just…

He heard a throb of sound, the throat-rumble of a carnivore. It was close by. He couldn’t tell which direction it had come from. Fear-sweat was trickling down his back. He raised the axe ready to strike. He moved forwards. He edged around a massive tuber bole that came up out of the dusty forest brush like an inverted mushroom. He kept his back to it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he leaned forwards to peer around the trunk.

He saw the wolf.

Half-saw it. It was just a shadow. A wolf-shaped shadow. A shadow-shaped wolf. Vast and ominous, like a blood-dark midnight sky; spectral and malevolent like the final whispered curses of a dying lunatic. It existed in the shadows but not in the patches of sunlight. Hawser could feel the grumble of its throat-noise. Terror was upon him, like all the cold of Fenris concentrated in a hyperdense lump inside his heart.

The almost-wolf had something in its jaws, a gleaming black tangle of something. It dropped it onto the forest floor. It let out a growl that sounded like the lowest bass thump of a tribal bodhran. Hawser waited for it to turn. He waited for it to turn and see him. He stopped breathing. He pressed himself into the sticky black skin of the tuber bole.

He waited. He waited. He waited for the jaws to close on him. He waited for eternity to pass so he could breathe again.

The almost-wolf uttered another wet leopard-growl.

Hawser heard the dry ground cover stirring, leaf-mulch sifting.

He risked a second look.

There was no sign of the almost-wolf. It had moved away. It had slipped into the darkness, into the forest.

Hawser waited a moment more. Hands tight around the haft of his axe, he slid from the tree shadow and stepped into the gloom of the glade where the almost-wolf had been standing.

In the mid-point of the clearing, the something that the almost-wolf had dropped was lying on the leaf-loam. It was a muddle of torn black feathers. The feathers were sheened like jet silk. It was Wyrdmake’s crow. It was dead, mangled, one wing almost bitten off. Droplets of blood spattered the feathers and the ground around it, glinting in the dim light like amber beads. Under the feathers, the cunningly wrought thing was just the bones it had always been.

Hawser had been with the Vlka Fenryka long enough to understand Wyrdmake’s distant cry of pain. Sympathetic magic. What had been done to his cunning spy had also been done to him.

Hawser straightened up. He tried to remember which direction the priest’s cry of pain had come from. He tried to orientate himself. It was hard. The clotted fear inside him was very great and very cold. It was sliding up his gullet like a glacier. He tried to think like a Wolf, like a man of Tra. He tried to think strategically, as if all he was contemplating was the next move or two on Skarssensson’s hneftafl board, or Rector Uwe’s regicide set.

He let the axe slip down through both palms, until he had it clenched around the very throat and knob of the haft. This was a battle-ready grip called ‘the open bite’ in Wurgen. It was the maximum extension of arms and haft, so it afforded the longest reach and the greatest leverage. It was not a subtle position from which to start a fight. If he encountered the almost-wolf again, Hawser didn’t expect the fight to be subtle.

He moved forwards, through the light and shadow, under the canopy of insect-wing leaves. He kept the axe at full extension in the double-handed brace. He became aware of a new sound. It was breathing. Laboured, human breathing. The struggling respiration of someone injured.

Hawser ducked under a low band of ghost leaves, and saw a large body crumpled in the shade of a misshapen tuber trunk. The man was Astartes. His leatherwork wargear was red.

‘Eada?’ Hawser whispered, crouching down beside him.

Eada Haelfwulf blinked and looked up at him.

‘Skjald,’ he smiled. His face was drawn with pain. His torso was wet with gore. Something had delivered several crippling bites to his flank and hip.

‘Shhhhh!’ Hawser hissed.

‘The wolf had me,’ Eada whispered. ‘Came out of nowhere. Something brought it forth. Someone here today is working against us.’

‘I saw it. Stay still.’

‘Give me another minute. My wounds are knitting and the blood vessels are closing off. I’ll be on my feet again in a moment.’

‘Wyrdmake’s hurt,’ said Hawser.

‘I heard him. We have to find him,’ Eada replied.

‘I don’t know what happened to Helwintr,’ said Hawser.

Eada Haelfwulf looked at him in a grave way that suggested he really ought to know. Haelfwulf had pulled off his leather mask. There were specks of blood all over the white skin of his cheek and brow.

‘What did you mean, Eada? What did you mean when you said that someone here today was working against us?’

Eada Haelfwulf coughed, and the action of it made him wince slightly.

‘Helwintr and I were working into your memories, skjald.’

‘I know,’ said Hawser.

‘Imagine your mind like a fortress. Well defended, high ramparts. Helwintr was trying to get in through the front gate. He was out where you could see him, an open approach. I was behind the fort, trying to scale the ramparts while Helwintr’s attack engaged your attention. My aim was to get into an inner chamber next door to the one you keep locked.’

‘What happened?’ asked Hawser.

‘He broke into someone else’s memories,’ said a voice from behind him.

Hawser turned.

Aun Helwintr was standing at the edge of the glade, staring at them. He had a short, thick-bladed fighting sword drawn.

‘Come here, skjald,’ he said.

‘Hjolda!’ Eada exclaimed. ‘In the name of all the wights of the Underverse, skjald, stay here by me!’

‘What?’ Hawser stammered.

Helwintr took a step closer. Hawser kept staring at him, his grip on his axe tight. He could hear Haelfwulf making a huge effort to rise behind him. He heard Haelfwulf drawing his blade.

‘Stay close by me,’ Eada Haelfwulf hissed. ‘I broke through into someone else’s memories, all right. Some thing else’s. It was whatever had reshaped your thoughts, skjald. It had left a doorway open, a doorway back to its own mind, so it could slip back and revisit you whenever it wanted. I looked through the doorway. So did Helwintr. It saw us looking, and it didn’t like it.’

‘Come here, skjald,’ said Helwintr, taking another step forwards. He beckoned with his free hand, the warrior’s cocky invitation to an enemy. ‘Come on. Don’t listen to him.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Haelfwulf grunted, straightening up behind Hawser. ‘Get ready to move behind me. I’ll defend you.’

‘But Helwintr—’ Hawser began.

‘Hjolda, listen to me!’ Haelfwulf rasped, his voice cut by a throb of pain. ‘Understand me! The thing that saw us, it didn’t like us prying. It lashed out at us. We fell back, but not fast enough. It touched us with its maleficarum. It touched Helwintr.’

Hawser gazed in horrid disbelief at Aun Helwintr. The priest took another step forwards. A deep rumble came out of him, a wolf-growl. Through the slits of his mask, his eyes were black-pinned gold.

‘You’re the wolf,’ Hawser said, his voice tiny.

‘Everything Eada Haelfwulf said is pretty much true,’ said Helwintr. ‘Except one part.’

Helwintr took another step closer.

‘It was Eada that was touched by the maleficarum.’

Hawser froze up. He heard the sounds coming from the wounded rune priest behind him. The ragged, pained breathing slowly became a deeper, panting, huffing noise. He heard skin and sinew stretching, he heard the phlegmy click and gurgle of cartilage and joint fluid. He heard bones protesting as they deformed, and organs bubble and slosh as they realigned. He heard the stifled agony of something enduring extreme physical transmutation.

‘Don’t look around,’ said Aun Helwintr. The priest stood his ground and brought his sword up to a ready stance.

Hawser felt the hot breath on the nape of his neck, the wet, frothing leopard-purr.

He turned. The open bite grip delivered the axe in a full, chest-height rotation swing, a half-circle blow that buried the axe-head in the right shoulder of the thing behind him.

The almost-wolf that had been Eada Haelfwulf roared in frustrated pain. The weight of it struck Hawser and smashed him over onto his back. He couldn’t even see it. It was just a shadow blur and a predator sound. He glimpsed teeth. He rolled hard on the leaf-loam, seeing the teeth raking for him.

Helwintr charged the almost-wolf head-on. The pair clashed, grappled and went over in a thrashing, struggling tangle. Even as an insubstantial shadow, a smoke-wisp that only existed where the sunlight didn’t fall, the almost-wolf was twice the size of the Astartes. Locked together, they became a furious blur. Hawser tried to get up. He couldn’t find his axe. He cried out as blood jetted out of the fight and spattered his face and chest. He couldn’t tell if the blood had been spilled by teeth or sword. He couldn’t tell if it belonged to Helwintr or the almost-wolf.

He circled the tumult of the fight. Helwintr had almost disappeared into the spreading shadow the almost-wolf cast around it. Both combatants were moving too fast for him to track.

There was a crack of bone, a sound of flesh shredding. Helwintr flew backwards in a shower of blood. He hit a tuber bole and somersaulted onto the forest floor. His leather gear was ripped and his sword was missing. He was wounded badly in the face, neck and left leg. He tried to rise, yelling at his limbs to move, to obey.

The almost-wolf uttered its loudest throat-noise yet. It swung its massive snout around to face Hawser, ignoring the Astartes it had maimed. All Hawser could see was the shadow of it, like a piece of night cut out and pasted onto daylight. At the heart of the darkness, the huge teeth glimmered like icicles.

A thin, searing beam of light squealed across the glade and exploded the ground underneath the almost-wolf. As it tried to recover, a second beam hit it squarely in the chest and threw it backwards. It demolished two large tuber trees as it went tumbling over. The dry boles burst like ripe seed cases and filled the air with a choking blizzard of string vegetable pulp. Broken, parts of the canopy foliage came crashing down.

Ohthere Wyrdmake lowered his plasma pistol. His left arm hung slack and limp. Blood around the shoulder, not yet dried, made it look as though his arm had almost been bitten clean off.

On the far side of the demolished tuber trees, sunlight fell on Eada Haelfwulf lying tangled in a sticky mass of broken bark and vegetable matter. Dense clouds of disturbed spores and plant dust billowed in the sunlit air.

Smoke rose from the terrible plasma weapon wound that scorched Eada’s chest. Hawser’s axe was still buried in his right shoulder.

The thralls and wolf priests backed off, and slipped out of the deep armoured chamber in the heart of Nidhoggur. Powerful banks of lights had been secured to the ceiling to bathe the chamber in a constant, simulated daylight. Marks of aversion had been notched into the chamber floor.

Eada Haelfwulf, stripped of his pelt, his wargear and his armour, was chained to an upright cruciform of plasteel in the centre of the chamber. He was near death. The apparatus that secured him was the work of the wolf priests, part restraint, part interrogation device, part life support mechanism. Tube lines and feeds ran from beating vital units on the floor behind the cross, and burrowed like worms into the sutured flesh graft that patched the wound cavity in his chest.

He looked out at Hawser and the Wolves, imploring, ashamed, knowing what he had done, what he had been. Clear fluid, viscous, wept from his nose, mouth and tear ducts, matting his beard and drying like glue on his bare flesh. There was a musky animal stink in the chamber that overwhelmed the astringent smell of counterseptic and the odour of blood.

‘Forgive me,’ he gurgled. ‘I could not fight it.’

‘What did you see?’ asked Ohthere Wyrdmake.

Eada whined, as if the memory was too painful to recall. He closed his eyes and turned his head from side to side reluctantly. Mucus ran from his mouth and nose.

‘Even if he answers, we can’t trust anything he says now,’ said Helwintr. ‘It’s been inside him. It’s used him. Its touch is on him and he won’t ever cast it out in this life.’

‘I’d still like to hear his answer,’ replied Wyrdmake. The senior priest of Fyf flexed his left arm. The injury done by sympathetic magic was healing with the usual, startling speed of Astartes self-repair, but it was still sore.

‘And I’d like it if he wasn’t on my damn ship,’ grumbled Ogvai from behind them. ‘He’s poison. He’s spoiled. He’s turned.’

Wyrdmake raised a hand to crave the jarl’s indulgence.

‘A little of Eada Haelfwulf yet remains,’ he said.

Eada moaned. Spittle and flecks of mucus flew from his lips and face as he shook his head.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ he moaned.

‘Too late,’ said Ogvai.

‘The maleficarum could have taken any of us,’ said Wyrdmake.

‘It could just as easily have swallowed me,’ added Helwintr. Helwintr’s wounds were bound up too. He looked up at Haelfwulf.

‘Do what you can, Eada,’ he said. ‘You can’t make this right, but you can carve some honour out of this yet. What did you see?’

‘I saw through the doorway in the skjald’s memories,’ Eada said. He shuddered, and a thick curd of mucus welled up over his lower lip and rolled down his chin into his beard.

‘And what did you see there?’ asked Hawser.

‘Whatever redesigned the architecture of your mind,’ Eada said, struggling to speak, ‘it left a link into you, a trap door so it could creep back in and make further adjustments as necessary. When I probed you from the blindside, I went through the trap door by mistake. The thing in there, it was focussed on keeping Helwintr out. Like you, it was looking at him. I stepped into one of its memories for a moment.’

‘I’m waiting,’ said Ogvai.

‘I saw a blade, lord,’ said Eada Haelfwulf. ‘A sacred dagger like the ritual knives we use, but an old and wretched thing, crafted by alien hands, shaped by alien thoughts. Its proportions are wrong. It is a nemesis weapon. It is sentient. It lies within the rusting hulk of a ship cast down from the stars, a ship that wallows in the depths of a miasmal fen. The blade is called the Anathame.’

Eada broke off as more coughing wracked him, and foul, syrupy matter splattered down his chest.

‘So?’ asked Ogvai.

‘It didn’t want me to see it, lord,’ said Eada Haelfwulf. ‘It didn’t want me to be able to tell you about it. It seized me, and skinwrought me, and turned me against the skjald and my brothers. The only good that comes of this is that I can tell you about this thing. This Anathame.’

‘And what is it for?’ asked Wyrdmake.

‘It will split the race of men,’ said Eada. ‘It will warp the future. It will murder the Wolf King’s brother, great Horus, honoured Warmaster.’

‘Murder him?’ Ogvai echoed.

‘The Warmaster we admire and follow will cease to be,’ said Eada.

‘Lies,’ said Ogvai. He turned away from the chained figure. ‘These are just the false things the maleficarum wants us to hear. His mouth lies. That is how he wants to split the race of men, by dividing us with mistrust and infamy.’

‘Please, lord!’ Eada cried.

‘Perhaps we should listen to this,’ said Hawser. ‘Perhaps there is some kernel of truth here that Eada Haelfwulf is trying to impart. He—’

‘No,’ said Ogvai.

‘He may yet—’

‘No!’ Ogvai snapped. He looked down at Hawser. ‘Don’t listen to his lies, skjald. Look for yourself.’

Hawser looked at the figure chained to the plasteel cruciform. The chamber’s harsh overhead lights were casting a sharp, black shadow on the deck below the structure’s base. The shadow silhouette of the spread-eagled figure did not belong to a man.

It belonged to a monstrous wolf.

Hawser recoiled from the sight.

Ogvai looked over at Helwintr. Wyrdmake had turned his gaze towards the aversion marks on the deck.

The Jarl of Tra walked up to the foot of the heavy shacklepost, and looked up at the miserable body suspended on it. Mucus dripped out of Haelfwulf’s mouth.

He gazed down at his lord and whispered, ‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it.’

‘I know,’ said Ogvai. ‘Until next winter.’

Ogvai drew his bolt pistol, pressed the muzzle up under Eada’s chin, and vaporised his head with a single mass-reactive round.

‘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.’

Hawser woke with a start.

Godsmote was shaking him.

‘Wake up,’ the warrior said.

‘What?’ Hawser murmured, his head still murky with sleep. He was in his quarters aboard Nidhoggur. Godsmote had interrupted his repeating dream pattern and, somehow, that was more distressing and confusing than following it to its usual frustrating conclusion.

‘Get up,’ said Godsmote.

‘What’s happening?’ Hawser asked.

‘Someone’s calling for you,’ said Godsmote.

A pinnace carried Hawser and his escort from Tra’s cruiser to the Wolf King’s massive warship. The anchored fleet components looked like monolithic blocks of dark grey stone suspended over the disk of Thardia. Everything had the hard-edged shadow of light in a vacuum.

Hawser peered out. The scale of the vessel was incredible. Even the smaller escorts and fleet tenders were blunt-nosed slabs like slices of mountain cliff. The principal warships were shockingly vast. The surface detail of their flanks took forever to flash past the ports as the pinnace flitted between them.

The most massive ship of all was a slate-grey monster with a ploughshare prow. This was the apex predator, the alpha male of the fleet.

‘The Hrafnkel,’ said Godsmote. ‘Flagship of the Wolf King.’

The deck spaces of the flagship, vast as cityscapes, were heaving with activity. Hundreds of thousands of ratings, thralls and servitors worked to status-sweep the colossal ship from its last translation and prep it for the next immaterial transfer. Deck plates and interior struts were being examined and reinforced. Powerlines were being tested. In some stretches of companionway, inspection plates had been lifted in forty- or fifty- metre long trenches. In the lofty arming chambers, cathedrals of war, automated hoists raised payloads of void munitions from the armoured magazines to delivery points where gunnery trains coiled like sea-orms, waiting to thread the service arteries of the ship and deliver the titanic warheads to the Hrafnkel’s batteries. Regiments of men, dwarfed by the arched vaults, unpacked weapons and laid them out in rows along the deck to be stripped and hand-checked before distribution to the troop contingents.

The moaning shiver of the ship’s vast engines rose and fell, swelling and dying away, making the intensity of the deck lights rise and fall. The drive was being tested. It was like a warrior limbering his shoulders and flexing his sword arm.

‘War,’ said Hawser as they strode along.

‘Always,’ said Bear.

‘This isn’t normal readiness,’ said Hawser. ‘This is something particular. It’s—’

‘It’s only war,’ said Helwintr. ‘Whatever else it is, it’s only ever war.’

Leman Russ dominated the command bridge, even though the command bridge was a multi-levelled vault that reminded Hawser of a palace throne room. Officers and servitors attended control positions wrought from brass and gold which encircled the great dome of the bridge and plugged into the bulkhead walls with fat braids of gilded cables, circuits and tubes. These extending fans of tubework made the consoles resemble giant pipe organs. To reinforce the mental image, most control positions had triple or quadruple sets of keyboards. The keys were made of bone, inlaid with instructional marks. Use and age had yellowed some. They looked like the grin of old teeth.

They looked like the keys of a battered clavier.

Hololithic screens, many projected from overhead or under-deck emitters, turned the central part of the command area into a flickering picture gallery. The crew moved among the images, surrounding some for study, adjusting the data flow of others with finger touches of their reactive gloves. Some images were large, others small, or arranged in stacked series that could be flipped through with a deft gesture. As Helwintr, Bear and Godsmote brought him in, Hawser saw one ensign slide a luminous rectangular map of fleet dispersal through the air for his superior’s attention. Some of the slightly incandescent images showed topographical maps, contour overlays, positional guides or course computations. Others scrolled with constant feeds of written data, or showed, in small frames, real-time pict-links to the talking heads of other ship commanders as they reported in.

The air was filled by the mechanical chatter of machinery, the brittle stenographic clack of keys, the crackle of voxed voice messages or Mechanicum vocalisers, the drone of background chatter. Command officers with cuffs and high collars stiff with gold braid rasped orders into vox-mics that were attached to the consoles by flex leads. They held the mics up to their mouths, and the small acoustic side-baffles of the microphone heads obscured the lower parts of their faces like half-masks. Just eyes, without noses or mouths, which reminded Hawser of something.

Cherubs, giggling at private jokes, buzzed through the bridge hustle, carrying messages and communiqué pouches. Insectoid remotes, as perfect and intricate as dragonflies, kept obedient station in the air at the shoulders of their Mechanicum masters, their wings droning in hover-mode at a disturbingly low vibrational threshold.

In the centre of the command bridge was a massive brass and silver armature, an instrument designed for complex celestial display and calculation. It resembled an orrery with its skeletal metal hemispheres and its surrounding discs and measuring orbits, but it was ten metres in diameter and grew out of the desk grille on a stand as thick as a tree trunk. Attendants manned small lectern consoles around it, tapping out small adjustments that caused the main frame of it to turn, realign and spin in subtle measures.

The hemispheric theatre of the planetarium was currently used to display a large-scale hololithic image of a planet. The glowing topographical light map, three dimensional and rotating in an authentic orbital spin showed day and night side and was contained inside the moving, spherical cage of the brass instrument. Smaller side projections hung in the air, enlarging particular surface details, and various declinations, aspectarians, and astronomical ephemerides.

The planet under scrutiny was as beautiful as a star sapphire. The hololithic resolution imaged its greens and blues, its ribbons of cloud and mountain range, its traceries of river basins, its sheened oceans, its turquoise aura of atmosphere. As he got closer, Hawser saw that the vast image was actually a mosaic compiled from thousands of separate detailed pict scans, a work composition that suggested a vast effort of careful and systematic intelligence gathering.

Despite the size and majesty of the planetarium display, Russ was still the most compelling thing in the chamber. As soon as he saw Hawser and his escort arrive, he pushed aside the huddle of Navigators clutching their dossiers of sidereal times and zodiacal interlocks.

‘Bring him!’ he growled, and pointed to the shipmaster’s reclusiam.

Helwintr, Bear and Godsmote led Hawser into the reclusiam space behind the Wolf King. The shipmaster, a stern giant with a long, wirewool beard of grey and an extravagantly peaked cap, saluted and withdrew to give the primarch privacy. Command officers scurried after their immaculately uniformed master, clutching armfuls of data-slates and dockets.

Russ waved a jewelled sceptre and raised falsehood screens around the reclusiam space. The ambient noise of the bridge chatter dropped away. It was suddenly as quiet as a monastic chapel.

The Wolf King idly tossed the sceptre away. It bounced into the seat of the shipmaster’s red-leather throne. He turned to face Hawser. His presence was almost intolerable. A dynamic, lethal energy pulsed within him. He was hunched, his arms clamped around his body, as though he was trying to prevent himself from exploding. If the explosion happened, Hawser had no doubt it would take the entire flagship with it.

‘Do you hear me, brother?’ he asked Hawser.

‘What?’ Hawser replied, trembling. ‘Lord, what are you asking me?’

‘I know you can hear me, brother,’ Russ said. ‘I know you can.’

‘Lord, please,’ said Hawser. ‘Explain to me what you’re saying.’

The Wolf King ignored his words. He continued to stare into Hawser’s eyes, as though they were murky pools out of which something might suddenly surface.

‘Magnus, Magnus, Crimson King, brother of mine,’ he said. ‘I know you can hear me. You planted this instrument, this poor unwilling fellow, Ibn Rustah, you planted him among us so you could learn our secrets. Guess what? We’re as smart as you. Smarter, perhaps. We saw your spy for what he was, and we made no effort to remove him. We kept him with us so we could look back at you, Magnus. So we could learn your secrets. An eye can look out and it can look in. You should know that, you who look deeper than most.’

The Wolf King turned and walked a few paces away. He picked up the sceptre again, and sat down in the throne. He rested the sceptre in his lap, leaned his head on one fist and gazed back at Hawser.

‘I’ve got nothing to hide from you, Magnus. Nothing. You know how I work. My enemies should know what’s coming to greet them. It fixes them in the right mental place to be annihilated. I don’t like to hide my strengths or my approach. I’d rather my foe knows the full, unimaginable fury that is about to descend upon him.’

The Wolf King paused. He swallowed. He seemed to be considering his next words.

‘That’s not why I’m talking to you now. I’m talking to you because I hope you’ll listen. I’m talking to you as the personal courtesy extended from one brother to another. What is about to happen should not be happening. You know I do not want this. You know it tears my heart to commit against you, and it breaks the very soul of our father to place his sons in opposition. But you have done this. You have brought this. You have brought this action.’

Russ swallowed again. He looked down at the deck, though he was still directing his words at Hawser.

Hawser stood numb, shaking, rooted to the spot.

‘We gave you every chance, Magnus. We indulged your learning, we gave you room to explore. When we became fearful of where those explorations were leading you, and how they might endanger everything we value, we told you of our concerns. The Council at Nikaea, that was supposed to be a moment of reconciliation. You swore you would renounce the cunning arts. You swore! You swore you would abide by our father’s ruling!’

His voice dropped to a whisper.

‘You did not. You have proved your intent to ignore the Ruling of Nikaea beyond all doubt. So this is on you. You must have known our father’s hands would be tied. He would have no other option than to turn to me to issue sanction.’

Russ looked up into Hawser’s eyes.

‘This is a courtesy, then. From brother to brother. A grace period I would extend to no other enemy. Settle your affairs. Evacuate the civilians from your cities. Deactivate your defence systems. Bring yourself and your Thousand Sons out into the open, and prepare to surrender to me upon my arrival. Please, Magnus. The Wolves of Fenris have been unleashed upon you. Only you have the power to make the consequences bloodless.’

He rose to his feet.

‘Please, Magnus. Please.’

The Wolf King looked away. He turned his back on Hawser.

‘Does he answer?’ he asked, distractedly.

‘I cannot feel an answer,’ Hawser replied, his voice wobbling. ‘But then, I’ve never really known how I work as a conduit.’

Russ grunted.

‘Or if I do,’ Hawser added. He was painfully aware that the other Wolves, especially Helwintr, were glaring at him.

‘I’ve never been totally convinced of that either,’ he said.

The Wolf King made no comment.

‘My lord,’ said Hawser. ‘What… what did your brother do?’

‘He performed an act of maleficarum that drove his sorcery right to the heart of Terra and into the presence of the Emperor,’ said Helwintr.

‘But… why?’ asked Hawser.

‘It was an alleged attempt to communicate a warning,’ said Russ without turning. His voice was a soft grumble, like thunder grinding in the far distance.

‘A warning, my lord?’

‘One of such terrible importance, Magnus felt it was worth exposing his own treachery to reveal it,’ Russ murmured.

‘Forgive me,’ said Hawser, ‘but does that not speak to some loyalty in your brother? Has the warning been examined? Has it been taken seriously?’

Russ turned back to face him.

‘Why would it? My brother is a madman. A dabbling warlock.’

‘Lord,’ said Hawser, ‘he was prepared to admit he was ignoring the edicts of Nikaea, and risk the censure that he knew must result from that admission, to relay a warning. Why would he do that unless the warning was valid?’

‘You’re not a warrior, skjald,’ said the Wolf King in an almost kindly tone. ‘Strategy is not your strong suit. Consider the reverse of your proposition. Magnus wants the ruling of Nikaea overturned. He wants permission and approval to continue with his arcane tinkerings and his foul magics. So he manufactures a threat, something he can warn us about that is so astonishing we would have to forgive him, and set aside our objections. Something so unthinkable, we would have to thank him and tell him he had been right all along. All along. This is his ploy.’

‘Do you know what was so unthinkable? asked Hawser.

‘Magnus claimed that great Horus was about to turn against the Imperium,’ said Russ. ‘From the look on your face, Ahmad Ibn Rustah, I see you recognise how ridiculous that sounds.’

Hawser switched his gaze to Helwintr. The priest’s masked face was unreadable.

‘Wolf King, great lord,’ Hawser began, ‘that’s not the first time that warnings concerning the Warmaster have been voiced. Please, lord—’

‘Our skjald refers to the incident involving Eada Haelfwulf, lord,’ said Helwintr.

‘I know of it,’ said Russ. ‘It seems corroborative, I grant you. But once again, consider the strategy. It involved maleficarum turning and twisting one of our own gothi, in the immediate vicinity of you, an identified conduit for the enemy’s power. Of course poor Haelfwulf would gabble out the same damned lie with his dying breath. It’s supposed to make Magnus’s story sound more credible by coming from a secondary source.’

Russ looked down into Hawser’s eyes.

‘Truth is, it’s the proof I need that Magnus is desperately trying to coordinate a campaign of disinformation to support his ruse. He doesn’t need to answer through you, skjald. He’s answered already.’

The Wolf King turned to Helwintr and the escort.

‘Take him away, but keep him with us, right to the advance. I want that channel to my brother left open. My poor brother. I want him to see us coming. I want him to know it’ll never be too late for him to beg for mercy.’

‘My lord,’ said Hawser. ‘What happens now?’

‘Now?’ Leman Russ replied. ‘Now, Prospero falls.’