Prospero Burns

Fifteen

I do not believe we killed it, brothers. I do not think the Primordial Annihilator can be harmed in the way that a mortal thing can. But we drove it back, we drove it out. We hurt it for a while at least.

When we emerged, the battle was done. The Wolf King had engaged Magnus in monumental single combat, and broken his spine. Then, at the very moment when we bested the daemon in the temple hall, sorcery boiled loose across the entire, ruined world. Blood rain fell. The Crimson King, and those of his Thousand Sons who had survived, vanished, fleeing by means of their proscribed magic.

Only in this way could they escape total extermination by the Rout.

Let this lesson be remembered.

Bloody rain was still falling as we regrouped. The sky was nightfall dark, black as a raven’s wing feathers, and underlit by the firestorms engulfing the glass city. With Godsmote, who had recovered from his injuries enough to walk, I stayed with Bear as the wolf priests tended his arm.

Bear’s face was impassive. He showed no hint of pain or discomfort as the priests worked at his stump with bone cutters and hooks. An augmetic would be fitted in time. But I saw him grimace slightly as a Dreadnought thumped by our position in the streaming downpour.

Drops of blood rain beaded Bear’s face.

‘I don’t mind the arm,’ he grumbled. ‘Not when you consider.’

‘Consider what?’ I asked.

‘It’s supposed to be an honour,’ said Godsmote, nodding towards the Dreadnought as it moved away. ‘But who wants to lose so much they end up like that? That’s no way to live forever.’

Bear nodded grimly.

‘What I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘is how you broke its spell. It knew the names of every one of us, and yet that power had no mastery over you.’

‘It’s probably because it learned all our names from you, skjald,’ Godsmote said. ‘And you’ve never got his name right, not since the first day you came to us.’

I have remarked that whatever put the fluency in Juvjk and Wurgen into my mind did a good but imperfect job. Sometimes, at points of stress or when distracted, I lapse, and mis-speak a word, regressing to the Low Gothic of my former life. For reasons I cannot explain, this is especially frequent in the case of terms for birds and animals.

From the outset, my mind had decided that Bear’s name was Bear. But that was the Low Gothic translation. It was a habit that had stuck, and Bear, forever taciturn, had never seen fit to correct me.

In the language of the Vlka Fenryka, his name was Bjorn.

I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it.

Once Prospero had burned, I felt great pity for the Wolves. Not for their losses, which were great and lamentable, but for their emptiness. Their anger was spent, and though complete, their victory seemed hollow. They stood around me, silent and hunched, mongrel figures in the blackened ruin, washed by the blood-dark rain. Their fury was exhausted because they had run out of enemies to kill.

They semed lost, as if they did not know what to do next. They would not take part in any rebuilding or recovery. They would not manage the aftermath.

The Vlka Fenryka only know how to do one thing.

Sparks fly up. Memory contracts like the flesh on a corpse, tightening on the increasingly pronounced bones pulling the jaws open in a silent scream. In deep lakes of black water, we can watch the reflections of sidereal time pass overhead. I see the Wolves as inheritors, the last guardians of an ancient domain that is so old and crumbling into neglect it has become an incomprehensible ruin. Still, they guard it, like dogs left to guard a house they do not understand.

As long as they endure, their accounts will live on, told and retold by skjalds like me to men like you. A fire will be burning. We will smell the copal resin smoking into the air. Perhaps I will not see the men around me, but I will see their shadows, cast up the cave wall by the spitting fire, like cave art lent the illusion of movement by the inconstant flames.

I will try to listen to what is being said by the men during the long, mumbling conversations, so that I can hear all the secrets of the world, and learn every account from the very first to the very last.

In the coldest, deepest part of the cave, there is a blackness cut by a cold, blue glow. The air smells sterile, like rock in a dry polar highland that lacks any water to form ice. It is far away from the soft warmth and the firelight of the cave, far away from the fraternity of murmuring voices and the smell of smouldering resin. It is there I will be forced to sleep out most of my days. I am too dangerous to keep among the Rout, too compromised. I know too much, and too much knows me. But the Vlka Fenryka have grown fond of me, and with that strange, gruff sentimentality of theirs, they cannot bring themselves to quickly and mercifully cut my thread.

So I will be put to sleep in the deep cold of the ice, in stasis far below the Aett, with only Cormek Dod and the other muttering Dreadnoughts as companions. None of us like it there. None of us choose to be there. We miss the firelight. We miss the sunlight. We’ve dreamed the same dreams a hundred times over, a thousand times. We know them off by heart. We don’t choose the dark.

Nevertheless, once in a while, when we are disturbed and revived, we are never content to see the daylight.

If you have to come and wake us, times are not good.

I am standing in the high meadow in Asaheim where I last saw Heoroth Longfang alive, but it is the Wolf King who is towering at my side. The air is as clear as glass. To the west of us, beyond a vast, rolling field of snow and a mighty evergreen forest, mountains rise. They are white, as clean and sharp as carnassials. I know full well that the grey skies behind them aren’t storm clouds. They are more mountains, greater mountains, mountains so immense the sheer scale of them breaks a man’s spirit. Where their crags end, buried like thorns in the skin of the sky, the wrath of the winter season Fenrisian storms is gathering and clotting, angry as patriarch gods and malign as trickster daemons.

It is the last hour of the last day before I voluntarily enter stasis.

‘You understand why?’ asks the Wolf King at my side. His voice is a wet leopard-purr.

‘I do,’ I say. ‘I understand.’

‘Ogvai, he speaks highly of your skills as a skjald.’

‘The jarl is kind.’

‘He’s honest. That’s why I keep him. But you understand, you can’t play out a game with a broken piece on the board.’

‘I understand.’

‘The accounts, though. We don’t want to lose them. Future generations should hear them, and learn from them.’

‘I’ll conserve them for you, lord,’ I say. ‘They will be here in my head, ready to tell.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘Make sure of it. I won’t be around to watch over the Vlka Fenryka forever. When I’m gone, you’d better make sure they hear the stories.’

I laugh, thinking he’s joking.

‘You’ll never be gone, lord,’ I say.

‘Never is a long time, skjald,’ he replies. ‘I’m tough, but I’m not that tough. Just because something’s never happened, it doesn’t mean it never will.’

‘There’s a first time for everything.’

‘Exactly,’ he grunts.

‘The unprecedented. Like… Astartes fighting Astartes? Like the Rout being called to sanction another Legion?’

‘That?’ he answers. He laughs, but it is a sad sound. ‘Hjolda, no. That’s not unprecedented.’

I am lost for a reply. I am never sure when he is joking. We are looking towards the forest line. The first flakes of snow are fluttering down.

‘Are there wolves on Fenris?’ I ask.

‘Go and look for yourself,’ he tells me. ‘Go on.’

I look at him. He nods. I start towards the forest line across the snow. I begin to run. I pull my pelt, the one Bercaw gave me, tight around me, like a second skin. In the enormous darkness under the evergreens, I see eyes staring at me: luminous, gold and black-pinned. They are waiting for me, ten thousand pairs of eyes looking out at me from the shadows of the forest. I am not afraid.

I am not afraid of the wolves any more.

Behind me, the Wolf King watches me until I’ve disappeared into the trees.

‘Until next winter,’ he says.