Prospero Burns

One

Death had them surrounded.

It had come to cut threads, and today it wore four faces.

A burning death for those too hurt or too afraid to flee the settlement as the firestorm swept through it. A freezing death for those who ran away up the scarp to escape the murder-make. Even in spring, the wind came in off the ice flats with a death-edge that sucked an exposed man’s life-heat out through his lungs, and rotted his hands and feet into black twigs, and left him as a stiff, stone-hard bundle covered in rime.

For others, a drowning death, if they attempted to flee across the blue-ice around the spit. Spring’s touch was already working the sea ice loose against the shore, like a tooth in a gum. The ice would no longer take a man’s weight, not reliably. If the ice broke under you, down you went: fast and straight if you plunged through, slow and screaming if an ice plate tipped and slid you in. Either way, the water was oil black, and so cold it would freeze the thoughts in your brain before your lungs were even empty.

For the rest, for those who had remained to fight, a bloody death, the death of the murder-make. This was the death that knocked you down hard onto the ice with an axe or a maul, so you felt nothing except the cold burn of the ice, and the hot burn of your own blood, and the pain-scream of your crippling wound. This was the death that stood over you and knocked you again, and again, and as many times as necessary until you would not rise again, or until you were so disfigured that death could no longer bear to look at you, and moved off in disgust to find another soul to knock.

Any of those four faces would cut your thread as soon as look at you. And those were the faces the Balt were wearing.

The Balt. The Balt had brought the murder-make down on the Ascommani aett. Twenty boat. It was early in the season for a raid. A man had to be desperate to go out making red snow when he could wait for the first grasses and milder weather.

Twenty boat, and all of them still rigged for ice-running under their sea-sails.

If there had been time, the Ascomani might have wondered why their doom had come so early. Ironland, where the Balt had settled, had persisted twenty great years, but many now said its roots were soft. Many now said it would only be one more summer, two at the most, before the ocean sucked it down again into the world-forge.

Ascomani land ran from the spithead to the ice shelf, and was poor for farming and lacked natural defences, but it was yet just one great year old, and the dowsers had proclaimed it strong land, with many years left in it.

So land-thirst. Perhaps it was that.

Fith knew better. Nothing got the murder-urge pumping like fear, and nothing stoked up fear like a bad omen. A broom star. A day star. Colour in the ice. Bloom in the sea. Smoke out on the ice shelf where no settlement was. Some dead thing washed up that should not be. Something born to livestock or to a woman that should not be. Something with birth defects.

Sometimes a bad dream would be enough to do it, a bad dream that told you the tribe down the coast or around the headland was maleficarum. You let land-thirst be your excuse as you reached for your shirt and your blade, but you made sure the gothi marked your face in soot-glue with good cast-out marks like the sun-disk and the warding eye before you opened out your sails.

And there had been a bad omen, all right. Fith had seen it.

Fith had seen the make coming too. He’d seen the sails approaching along the in-shore early enough to blow the scream-horn, but too late for it to do any good. He had merely enabled his kinfolk to die awake.

The Balt main force had come up around the spit in their wyrmboats in the sightless pre-dawn grey, sailing black sails straight out of the water and onto the shore-ice on their rigs, translating from water-craft to ice-craft with barely a jolt. Their skirmishers had put ashore on the far side of the headland, and come romping in over the high back of the snow dunes to fall on the Ascommani settlement from the hind side.

After that, it had been fire and knocking. The Balt were mongrel-big, men with long faces and beards waxed into sun rays under their spectacle-face helms. They were horribly able with axe and maul, and the occasional high-status sword that some carried.

But they brought with them none of the screaming vigour of a normal Balt raid or murder-make. They were silent, terrified of what they had come to kill, terrified of its sky magic. They were silent and grim, and set to murder everything to wipe the magic away. Men, women, the young, livestock, nothing was spared a knock. There was not a shred of mercy. There was not a moment’s thought to claim prisoners or take slaves. Ascommani girls were famously fine-looking, and there were plenty of healthy girl-children too, who would make valuable breeding slaves in time, but the Balt had put away all appetites except for a fierce desire to be cleansed of fear.

The sound of an axe knocking-in is a wet smack of slicing meat and shattering bone, like sap-wood being cut. A maul makes a fat, bruising sound like a mattock driving pegs into marsh loam or wet ice. Worse than both are the after-sounds. The screaming of the agonised, the ruined and the dying. The begging shrieks of the hurt and maimed. The hacking impacts of death knocking until the fallen stop being alive, or stop trying to rise, or stop screaming, or stop being in once piece.

Fith had just enough time to get his shirt on and loft his axe. Several other hersirs fell to arms with him, and they met the first skirmishers coming in through the walls and window-slits of the settlement head on. The panic was up already. It was blind blundering in the dark, a reek of urine, the first noseful of smoke.

Fith’s axe was balanced for a single hand. It was a piece of proper craft, with a high-carbon head that weighed as much as a decent newborn boy. From the toe of the blade to the heel of the beard, it had a smile on it wider than a man’s hand-span, and it had kissed a whetstone just the night before.

The axe is a simple machine, a lever that multiplies the force from your arm into the force delivered by the blade. The rudiments apply whether you’re splitting wood or men.

Fith’s axe was a bone-cutter, a shield-breaker, a helm-cleaver, a death-edge, a cutter of threads. He was a hersir of the Ascommani aett, and he knew how to stand his ground.

It was a throttle-fight in the settlement itself. Fith knocked two Balts back out of the tent wall, but the tight confines were choking his swing. He knew he needed to get out. He yelled to the hersirs with him and they pulled back.

They got out of the tents into the settlement yard, wrapped in swirling black smoke, and went eye to eye with the Balts in their spectacle-helms. It was mayhem. A free-for-all. Blades swung like windmills in a storm.

Fenk went down as a Balt axe split his left calf lengthwise. He bawled in rage as his leg gave out, useless. Seconds later, a maul knocked his head sidelong, snapping his neck and his thread. He flopped down on the earth, his shattered skull-bag leaking blood.

Fith drove off a Balt with a mattock, scared him back with the whistling circles of his swinging axe.

Ghejj tried to cover Fith’s flank, using the basics of shield-wall tactics. But Ghejj had not had time to collect a decent shield from the stack, just a tattered practice square from the training field. A Balt spear punctured him right through, and tore him open so thoroughly, his guts spilled out onto the snow like ropes of sausage. Ghejj tried to catch them, as though he could gather them up and put them back inside himself and everything would be all right again. They steamed in the spring air. He squealed in dismayed pain. He couldn’t help himself. He knew he was ruined unto death.

He looked at Fith as he squealed again. It wasn’t the pain. He was so angry that he was irreparably dead.

Fith put mercy into his stroke.

Fith turned away from his last picture of Ghejj and saw that there were fingers scattered on the snow, on the snow that had been churned up by scrambling and sliding feet, along with blood by the bowl-full. They were the fingers of women and children, from hands held up to protect themselves. Defensive wounds.

There on the snow, a complete hand, the tiny hand of a child, perfect and whole. Fith recognised the mark on the ring. He knew the child the hand had once belonged to. He knew the father the child had once belonged to.

Fith felt the red smoke blow up in his head.

A Balt came at him, silent and intent. Fith flexed the lever of his axe, hooked it in, and made a ravine of the Balt’s face.

Four hersirs left. Fith, Guthox, Lern and Brom. No sign of the aett-chief. The chief was probably dead and face down in the red snow with his huscarls.

Fith could smell blood. It was overpoweringly strong, a hot copper reek spicing the freezing dawn air. He could smell Ghejj’s insides too. He could smell the inner parts of him, the ruptured stomach, the yellow fat of his belly meat, the heat of his life.

Fith knew it was time to go.

The Upplander was in the furthest shelter. Even the Ascommani knew to keep him away from people.

The Upplander was propped up against cushions.

‘Listen to me,’ Fith hissed. ‘Do you understand me?’

‘I understand you. My translator is working,’ the Upplander replied, looking pale.

‘The Balt are here. Twenty boat. They will knock you dead. Tell me, do you want the mercy of my axe now?’

‘No, I want to live.’

‘Then can you walk?’

‘Perhaps,’ the Upplander replied. ‘Just don’t leave me here. I am afraid of wolves.’

There are no wolves on Fenris.

When the Upplander had been told this, years before, he’d laughed.

He had heard it from a venerated scholar and conservator, later celebrated iterator, called Kyril Sindermann. The Upplander, not long graduated with distinction from the Universitariate of Sardis, had won a coveted place on an eight-month field mission to audit and preserve some of the arcane datacores of NeoAleksandrya, before sandstorms and scorching radiation squalls erased the precious ruins into the melancholy emptiness of the Nordafrik zone forever. This was many decades before the Upplander decided to go to Fenris, or call himself Ahmad Ibn Rustah. Back then he was twenty-five years old, and known to his friends as Kasper.

Sindermann learned his name early on. Sindermann wasn’t the project head. He had been sent in for a three-week consult, but he was not afraid to get his hands dirty or to mix with the junior team members. He had an easy way with people. Names were important.

One evening, the team had fallen, according to their habit, into discussion over supper in the project’s base, a modular station overlooking the library ruins.

They were all exhausted. Everyone had been working inadvisably long shifts to get the mission accomplished. No one wanted to see the precious digital memories that lingered in the ruins lost for all time.

So, everybody was sand-burned, and everybody was sleep deprived, and everybody had lost significant body mass to water debt. The nights should have been time for restorative rest, but they had found their dreams populated by the data-ghosts of NeoAleksandrya, talkative phantoms that would not let the living slumber undisturbed. So they stayed up to keep the phantoms out, and the nights became time for tired companionship and reflection as the ablative winds howled in over the radgrave of NeoAleksandrya and assaulted the station’s bolted storm shutters.

They talked about everything, just to stay awake. Sindermann, perhaps the greatest polymath the Upplander would ever have the honour of knowing in his long life, had a tireless tongue.

The older team members talked about the various places they had visited in the courses of their careers, and the younger members talked of places they still wanted or hoped to visit. This led, inevitably, to the concoction of an ultimate wish list, a dream itinerary of the places in creation that any scholar, historian or remembrancer would give great wealth or a body part just to glimpse. It was a list of the universe’s secret places, its remote wonders, its enigmatic corners, its rumoured sites and mythical locales. Fenris was one such. Ironically, given what the Upplander would witness towards the end of one of his lives, Tizca was another.

Sindermann, though even then a man of great age and experience, had not been to Fenris himself. The number of outsiders who had ever gone to Fenris was alarmingly small. But then, as Sindermann put it, Fenris did not welcome visitors, nor was it a gracious host. Thanks to its extreme conditions, even a well prepared man might be lucky to survive a few hours on its open surface.

‘Still,’ he had said to them, ‘think of all that ice.’

It had sometimes reached forty degrees in the station at night, at least that when the climate control centre packed up. They had all groaned at Sindermann’s tormenting words.

Then, apropos of nothing in particular, Sindermann made the remark about the wolves, a remark that had been passed to him down such a long relay of other travellers and historians, its provenance was obscure.

‘There are no wolves on Fenris,’ he had said.

The Upplander had smiled, expecting some droll witticism to follow. His smile had covered the shiver he had felt.

‘Except, of course… for the wolves, ser?’ he had replied.

‘Exactly, Kasper,’ the old man said.

Shortly afterwards, the subject had changed, and the remark had been forgotten.

Fith didn’t much want to touch the Upplander, but he wasn’t going to walk far without an arm around his ribs. He hoisted the man up, and the Upplander groaned at the jolt.

‘What are you doing?’ Brom yelled. ‘Leave him!’

Fith scowled. Brom knew better than that. It wasn’t that Fith wanted to drag the Upplander around, but that was the thing with omens. You didn’t invite them into your aett, but once they were in, you couldn’t ignore them.

Fith could no more leave the Upplander lying there than the Balt could have refused to set out on the murder-make that midnight.

Lern stepped up and helped Fith handle the injured man. The shelters of the aett were ablaze, and choking the pale dawn sky with fat rivers of black smoke. The Balt hadn’t finished cutting threads. Sharp screams of anguish and pain split the air like arrows.

They ran along the edge of the scarp, stumbling with the burden of the injured man. Guthox and Brom followed them, snow-running with wide, splayed steps. Brom had got a spear from somewhere. A gang of Balt took off after them, chasing like hunting dogs across the snow, hunched and loping.

Guthox and Brom turned to meet them. Guthox’s axe knocked the first one onto his back, and a jet of blood squirted out in a five-metre arc across the snow. Brom’s spear-tip found the cheek of another Balt, and tore it like cloth, digging out teeth that popped free like kernels of corn. Brom clubbed his victim dead with the butt of his spear-shaft as the man fell down holding his face.

The Balt circled and danced away from Brom’s jabbing spear. Fith left Lern with the Upplander’s weight and turned back. He came past Brom in a screaming charge, and lopped off the top of a Balt’s skull with his circling axe. That shook things up. Spear or no spear, the Balt went for them. They tried to use their shields to get the spear out of their faces. One of them immediately took the spear in the breastbone. It made a dry-branch crack as the iron head went in, and the man puked blood. But the spear was wedged, and the Balt’s dead weight wrenched it out of Brom’s hands. He scrambled back with nothing but a long knife to guard himself.

Guthox used his axe to break a shield, and the arm holding it, then felled the Balt with a neck wound. He turned to fend off a bearded Balt axe with the cheek of his own, but the Balt was big and strong, and drove Guthox onto his heels with a series of relentless knocks.

Fith still had momentum. His charge ran down two more Balt, one of which he left bleeding to death, the other dazed, and he turned in time to rescue Guthox by burying the toe-point of his axe through the spine of the big Balt hacking at him.

Fith jerked the axe out with a snarl, and the Balt collapsed on his face. Brom was finishing another with angry, repeated stabs. The Balt had wounded Brom on his first pass, but had then made the mistake of getting too close to the hersir’s long knife.

They ran back to where Lern was toiling with the Upplander. Brom had recovered his spear, but he was leaving red snow behind him.

The Upplander was panting with effort. Heat was steaming out of his loose, gasping mouth. Under his storm cloak, the Upplander wore garments made from fabrics unfamiliar to Fith or his kinsmen. The sky-fall had hurt the Upplander, broken some bones was Fith’s guess, though Fith had never seen an Upplander opened up to know if they worked the same way inside as Ascommani, or Balt, or any other aettkind.

Fith had never seen an Upplander before. He’d never been tied up in an omen this bad. He wondered what had become of the aett’s gothi. The gothi was supposed to be wise, and he was supposed to use that wisdom to steer and safeguard the wyrd of the aett.

Fine job he’d done. The gothi had not known what to make of the Upplander when the hersirs had first brought him in from the crash site, and he hadn’t known what to do after that, except shake his bone jangles and his rattle full of fish teeth, and beseech the spirits with the same old tired chants, pleading with them to come down from Uppland and take back their lost kinsman.

Fith believed in the spirits. He firmly believed. He believed in Uppland above where the spirits lived, and the Underverse below, where the wights went. They were the only thing a man had to cling to in the changing landscape of the mortal world. But he was also a pragmatist. He knew there were times, especially when a man’s thread was pulled so thin it might snap, that you had to make your own wyrd.

Three bow shots away from the aett, the Ascommani kept a basin for their boats. It was a little ice crater open to the sea on the north head, and they had better than ten boat in it. Most were up on blocks, hoisted from the ice, so the men could labour in daylight hours to remove the rigs ready for the spring waters. But one was the aett-chief’s boat, ready to run at a moment’s nod. It was called ‘keeping it nocked’. You nocked the cleft of an arrow against a bowstring ready for tension, ready to fly. The chief’s wyrmboat stood on its runners on the hard ice, its sails ready to drop and fill, checked only by the anchor lines.

‘Into the boat!’ Fith ordered as they scrambled down the slope to the basin edge.

‘Which boat?’ asked Lern.

‘The chief’s boat!’ Fith snapped.

‘But it’s the chief’s boat…’ Guthox said, wary.

‘He’s not going to be needing it,’ said Fith. ‘Not as much as we do, anyway.’

Guthox looked at him blankly.

‘The chief’s sleeping on the red snow, you arsehole,’ said Fith. ‘Now get in the boat.’

They got into the boat, and laid the Upplander down in the bow. The Balt began to appear at the crest of the slope. The hersirs heard the air-buzz of the first arrows.

Fith dropped the sea sails, and they filled in an instant. The canvas cracked like thunder as it took the world’s breath. There was a hard snow-wind that morning, and he’d barely noticed it. The anchor lines creaked and strained as the wyrmboat mithered on the ice, impatient to slip.

‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled out.

Guthox looked at him from the stern, where the wind-pull was chaffing the taut lines against the rail.

‘He’s really not coming?’ he asked.

‘Who?’

‘The chief. You saw his thread cut?’

‘He’d be here if he was coming,’ said Fith.

They heard cracking sounds like green wood spitting in a fire. The iron heads of arrows were smacking into the ice around them, drilling up puffs of ice dust or cracking punctures into the blue-black glass of the crust. Two arrows hit the boat. One went into the main mast as deep as the length of a man’s forearm.

‘Cut the lines!’ Fith yelled.

Guthox and Lern cut the lines with their axes. The wyrmboat took off like an escaping animal, its sails bellied out full and as rigid as iron. The lurch shook them on their feet. The bladed runners of the ice rig shrieked as they scratched across the marble ice of the basin.

Lern took the helm. He was the best steersman of them. He draped his armpit over the tiller, loading it with his weight to drive the blade of the sternpost rudder into the ice, and balanced the tension of the ropes coming from the quarter rudders, one in each fist. Steering a rigger was a battle of muscle and wit. One bad judgement, one over-light feathering of the quarters, one heavy-handed dig of the main blade, and the combination of polished ice and raw wind shear could tumble even the biggest wyrmboat, and knock it into kindling.

They left the basin. They went through the sea-cut in the granite lip that let out onto the open water. But it wasn’t water. It was long past the great year’s glacial maximum, and time was turning, but this stretch of sea along the shadowed inlet remained the sky’s looking glass. In some places it was grey-green like an old mirror, in others blue like uncut sapphire, in others bright and clear like fine crystal, but everywhere it was thick to a depth two or three times the height of a man.

As soon as they were clear of the basin, and the boat’s runners were shrieking across the surface of the mirror sea like the baleful voices of the wights of the Underverse, the cold hit them. It was the open cold, the cold of the dull, iron-hard end of winter, the blunt cold of the open ice range. All of them gasped at the shock of it, and immediately laced up their collars or wrapped up scarf bindings to protect their mouths and noses.

Fith looked at the Upplander sprawled in the bow. He was panting from a combination of pain and exertion, and the breath heat was steaming out of him in great spectral clouds that the wind was stripping away.

Fith moved down the vibrating wyrmboat towards him, walking with the practised, rolling gait of an experienced ice-mariner.

‘Cover up your mouth!’ he shouted.

The Upplander looked up at him blankly.

‘Cover up your mouth! Breathe through your nose!’

‘What?’

Fith knelt down beside him.

‘The heat’ll bleed right out of you, with your mouth open like that. Breathe through your nose. Conserve it.’

He opened one of the woven-grass coffers tucked in under the boat’s rail, and pulled out a blanket and some furs. They were all stiff with cold, but he shook them out and swaddled the Upplander in them.

‘Through your nose,’ he reminded. ‘Don’t you know that? Don’t you know the cold?’

‘No.’

‘Then why the hell would you come to this land, if you didn’t know all the ways it would try to kill you?’

The Upplander had no answer. He couldn’t summon the effort. Renewed pain was gripping him, and it was extraordinarily comprehensive. It pinned his thoughts, and refused to allow him even a small reserve of mental power to use for other things. He’d never known pain like it, except perhaps once.

He could hear a clavier playing. The keys were ringing out a cheerful music hall melody that he could just pick out above the screaming of the runners and the roaring of the brutish crew.

He could hear a clavier playing, and he knew he ought to know why.

The Balt came after them. Lern shouted out as soon as he spotted them, and pointed astern. Wyrmboats were skating out from around the spithead. They were black-sail boats, rigged for a murder-make by night. The Balt were resolved to see the make through to its bloody end. Fith had hoped the Balt might give up once the main raid on the aett was over.

But no. The Balt had to be terrified to keep up the pursuit. They weren’t going to rest until everyone was dead.

What had their gothi told them, Fith wondered? What interpretation had he spouted that night when the broom star had sliced the sky, a ribbon of light that had left an accusatory glowing scar directly over Ascommani territory. How had he explained the land fall, the noise-shock of the star hitting ice?

What had he told his wide-eyed hersirs, his chief, the Balt womenfolk, the children woken up and crying because of the noise?

Fith had seen the Balt gothi once, three great years back, at a time when the Balt and the Ascommani had been on trading terms, when they could visit aett to aett for a barter-make with cargoes of pelts and grass-weave and smoked meat, and exchange them for preserved herbs, lamp-oil, whale-fat candles and ingots of pig iron.

There had been a formal meeting of the chiefs, with an exchange of gifts, a lot of bowing, a lot of long-winded rehearsal of lineage and bloodline from the skjalds, and a lot of blowing of the Balt’s bronze horns, which made a sound half like a sea-cave echo and half like a muffled fart.

The Balt gothi had been skinny, ‘taller than a warbow and twice as thin’ as the saying went, with a heavy jaw like that of a mule-horse or a simpleton. There were so many metal piercings in his lips and nose and ears, he looked as if he had been plagued with boils and cold sores.

He had a wand made of a bear’s arm blade, and a silver torc. Someone had braided seabird feathers into his long, lank hair, so that they made a white mantle around his bony shoulders. His voice was thin and reedy.

His name was Hunur.

He spoke sense, though. During the barter-make, Fith had come to the gothi’s shelter, joined the listeners sharing the fire, and listened to him talk. The Balt gothi knew how the world worked. He talked plainly about the Verse and the Underverse, as if he had been told their secrets by the wights themselves.

The Ascommani gothi was a crazy brute. He had fits, and he smelled like a sea-cow, both of which factors had probably led to his election as gothi. He was good with stars, Fith had to give him that. It was as if he could hear the noise their rigs made as they skated around the glass of the sky. But the rest of the time he was foul-tempered and raving.

His name was Iolo.

At the barter-make, Iolo and Hunur had squared up to one another, sniffed and growled like rutting bull seals, and then spent the whole time trying to steal one another’s secrets.

But it had also been as if they were afraid of one another. It was as if, in trying to steal one another’s secrets, they were afraid that they were risking infection.

That was how it went with magic. Magic had an underside. Magic could transform a man’s life, but it could corrupt it too, especially if you weren’t careful, if you didn’t watch it and soothe it and keep it sweet. Magic had a nasty undercurrent that could infect a man if he wasn’t paying attention.

Magic could turn nasty. Magic could turn on you, even if you were the most exact and painstaking practitioner or gothi.

The worst magic of all, that was sky magic, and it was sky magic that was riding in the bow of their wyrmboat.

Fith wondered what the Balt gothi had said to his people to get them so fired up.

Lern swung them west, down the mirror-throat of the inlet, under the shadows of the spithead cliffs and out onto the ice field, the apron of the great glacier.

Ice was better than water; the same area of sail could invest you with ten times the speed. But the effort was mighty. Fith knew they’d have to change steersman in another hour, or stop to let Lern rest, because the concentration was so intense. Already, Lern’s eyes looked drawn, what Fith could see of them over the lip of his collar.

They cut up across a long strayke of ice field the colour of grey fish-scales, and passed through the collar ridges where glacial moraines of broken rock pushed up through the ice of the glass like extrusions of deformed bone.

The Balt boats were steadily falling behind. A good Balt boat was one thing, axe-carved from ocean-wood and whale bones, but a good Ascommani boat was quite another, especially a fine rig built for an aett’s chief.

They might live yet.

It was a fragile thought, and Fith hated himself for even thinking it and thus jinxing it. But it was real. They might yet outrun the Balts’ murder-make and find sanctuary.

The Hradcana, they were the best hope. The Hradcana were a major power in the west, with several aetts along the jagged backbone of the ice field, less than a day away. More important, a peace-make understanding had endured between the Hradcana and the Ascommani for the lifetimes of the last six chiefs. Most important of all, the Hradcana and the Balt had quarrelled and made red snow on and off for ten generations.

When Guthox saw the first Hradcana sails ahead, Fith’s spirit lifted. Some beacon look-out had seen them raking in across the ice field and sent a horn-blast down the chain, and the Hradcana chief had ordered out his wyrmboats to greet and assist the Ascommani visitor.

Then he realised, with a sinking feeling, that the explanation didn’t fit the facts.

‘We’re too far out,’ he murmured.

‘What?’ Brom asked. He was trying to sew his cut up with fishing wire and a bone needle. The work was too fussy for gloves, but the windchill was too severe for bare hands to function with any finesse. He was making a mess of himself.

‘We’re too far out for any Hradcana lookout to have spotted us yet,’ Fith said. ‘They’re coming out because they knew we were coming.’

‘Crap!’ Brom snorted.

Fith looked at the sails of the Hradcana boats. Sails were the most distance-visible aspect of a boat, so they were often used to declare intention. A straw-yellow sail invited trade and barter. A purple sail indicated aett-mourning, the cut thread of a chief or a queen. A white sail, like the one dragging Fith’s wyrmboat, proclaimed open approach and embassy. A black sail, like the ones the Balt had come in under, was a treacherous sail, because it hid its declaration in the night, and thus defied the convention.

A red sail was an open announcement of the intention to murder.

The Hradcana sails were red.

Fith settled down in the rattling bow of the wyrmboat beside the Upplander.

‘What are you?’ he asked.

‘What?’

‘What have you done? Why have you brought this on us?’

‘I did nothing.’

Fith shook his head. ‘Red sails. Red sails. Gothi has spoken to gothi through the Underverse. The Balt came at us, now the Hradcana come at us too. Who else? Have you turned the whole Verse against us, or just against you?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ the Upplander said.

‘Did you make it your destiny to die here?’ asked Fith.

‘No!’

‘Well,’ the hersir replied, ‘you certainly seem to have put some effort into making it happen.’

It was an exalted place.

Even on that pestilential day, with the tail-end of the six-week campaign to take the Boeotian citadel chattering and booming in the distance, there was an odd stillness in the shrine.

Kasper Hawser had felt it before, in other places where mankind had focussed its worship for unnumbered generations. A cathedral in Silesia, just the shell of it, brittle as paper, rising above the fuming, white rubble and slag of the atomic dustbowl. The deep, painted caves in Baluchistan where a closed priesthood had concealed precious cellulose scrolls inscribed with their sacred mysteries, and thus preserved the essence of their faith through the Age of Strife. The high, monastic refuges in the Caucasus where scholars and savants fleeing Narthan Dume’s pogroms had hidden in exile, forlorn, ascetic outposts perched at such an altitude, you could see the expanding hive zones of the Caspian Bloc to the east and the nano-toxic waters of the Pontus Euxinus to the west, and the voice of some forgotten god lingered in the wind and the thin air and the bright sky.

The scholars had come out of Dume’s Panpacific realm with a priceless cargo of data that they had painstakingly liberated from the Tyrant’s library prior to one of his data purges. Some of that material, rumour suggested, dated from before the Golden Age of Technology.

When Hawser and his fellow conservators finally located the refuges, they found them long-since extinct. The cargo of data, the books and digital records, had degraded to powder.

The more man masters, the more man finds there is to be mastered; the more man learns, the more he remembers he has forgotten.

Navid Murza had said that. Hawser had never seen eye to eye with Navid Murza, and the various associations they’d been forced to make during their careers had fostered a sour and immotile disdain between them.

But there was no faulting Murza’s passionate intent. The strength of his calling matched Hawser’s.

‘We have lost more than we know,’ he said, ‘and we are losing more all the time. How can we take any pride in our development as a species when we excel at annihilation and fail to maintain even the most rudimentary continuity of knowledge with our ancestors?’

Murza had been with him that day, in Boeotia. Both of them had been awarded places on the conservator team by the Unification Council. Neither of them had yet seen their thirtieth birthday. They were both still young and idealistic in the most vacuous and misguided ways. It rankled with both of them that they had tied in the appointment rather than one winning and one losing.

Nevertheless, they were professionals.

The vast refinery eight kilometres away had been mined by the retreating Yeselti forces, and the resulting fires had blanketed that corner of Terra in lethal black smoke, a roiling, carcinogenic soup of soot-black petrocarbon filth as thick as oceanic fog and as noxious as a plague pit. The conservators wore sealed bodygloves and masks to go in, shambling through the murk with their heavy, wheezing aug-lung packs in their hands, like suitcases. The packs were linked to the snouts of their masks by wrinkled, pachydermic tubes.

The grave gods loomed to meet them through the smoke. The gods wore masks too.

They stood for a while, looking up at the grave gods, as immobile as the ancient statues. Divine masks of jade and gold, and staring moonstone eyes looked down on haz-guard masks of plastek and ceramite, and lidless photo-mech goggles.

Murza said something, just a wet sputter behind his visor.

Hawser had never seen anything like the gods in the Boeotian shrine. None of them had. He could hear the visor displays of several team members clicking and humming as they accessed the memories of their data-packs for comparative images.

You won’t find anything, Hawser thought. He could barely breathe, and it wasn’t the tightness of the mask or the spit-stale taste of the aug-lung’s air flow. He’d scanned the grapheme inscriptions on the shrine wall, and even that quick glance had told him there was nothing there that they’d expected to find. No Altaic root form, no Turcic or Tungusic or Mongolic.

The picters they carried were beginning to gum up in the sooty air, and battery packs were failing left and right. Hawser told two of the juniors to take rubbings of the inscriptions instead. They turned their goggles towards him, blank. He had to show them. He cut sheets of wrapping plastek into small squares and used the side of the wax marker-brick to scrub over the faint relief of the mural marks.

‘Like at school,’ one of the juniors said.

‘Get on with it,’ Hawser snapped.

He began an examination of his own, adjusting the macular intensity of his goggles. Without laboratory testing, it was impossible to know how long the shrine had stood there. A thousand years? Ten thousand? Exposed to the air, it was degrading fast, and the pervasive petrochemical smog was destroying surface detail before his very eyes.

He had a desire to be alone for a minute.

He went outside, back up the throat of the entranceway. The Boeotian Conflict had uncovered this treasure. The site had been exposed by a parcel of wayward submunitions rather than the diligent hand of an archaeologist. But for the war, this treasure would never have been found, and because of the war, it was perishing.

Hawser stood at the entrance and put his aug-lung on the ground beside him. He took a sip of nutrient drink from his mask feeder, and cleaned his fogging goggles with hand spray.

To the north of his position, the conflict in the Boeotian citadel underlit the horrendous black roof of the sky, a bonfire shaped like a city. The blackness of the vast smoke canopy was all around, as dense as Old Night itself. Gusting pillars of bright flame came and went in the distance as the smoke shifted.

This, he remarked to himself with leaden irony, was what the great era of Unification looked like.

According to history tracts that were already published and in circulation, that were already being taught in scholams, for goodness sake, the glorious Unification Wars had brought the Age of Strife to an end over a century and a half earlier. Since then, there had been more than one hundred and fifty years of peace and renewal as the Emperor led the Great Crusade outwards from Terra, and courageously reconnected the lost and scattered diaspora of mankind.

That’s what the history tracts said. Reality was far less tidy. History only recorded broad strokes and general phases of development, and assigned almost arbitrary dates to human accomplishments that had been made in far less definitive instalments. The aftershocks of the Unification War still rolled across the face of the planet. Unification had been triumphantly declared at a point when no power or potentate could hope to vanquish the awesome Imperial machine, but that hadn’t prevented various feudal states, religious adherents, remote nations or stubborn autocrats from holding out and trying to ring-fence and preserve their own little pockets of independence. Many, like the Boeotian Yeselti family, had held out for decades, negotiating and conniving their way around treaties and rapprochements and every other diplomatic effort designed to bring them under Imperial sway.

Their story demonstrated that the Emperor, or his advisors at least, possessed extraordinary patience. In the wake of the Unification War, there had been a strenuous and high-profile effort to resolve conflicts through non-violent means, and the Yeselti were not tyrants or despots. They were simply an ancient royal house eager to maintain their autonomous existence. The Emperor allowed them a twilight grace of a century and a half to come to terms, longer than the lifespan of many Terran empires.

The story also demonstrated that the Emperor’s patience was finite, and that when it was exhausted, so was his mercy and restraint.

The Imperial Army had advanced into Boeotia to arrest the Yeselti and annex the territory. Hawser’s accredited conservator team was one of hundreds assigned to follow the army in, along with flocks of medicae, aid workers, renovators, engineers and iterators.

To pick up the pieces.

Hawser’s mask-mic clicked.

‘Yes?’

It was one of the juniors. ‘Come inside, Hawser. Murza’s got a theory.’

In the shrine, Murza was shining his lamp pack up angled stone flues cut in the walls. Motes of soot tumbled in the beam, revealing, by their motion, a flow of circulation.

‘Airways. This is in use,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘This isn’t a relic. It’s old, yes, but it’s been in use until very recently.’

Hawser watched Murza as he prowled around the shrine. ‘Evidence?’

Murza gestured to the faience bowls of various sizes dotted along the lip of the altar step.

‘There are offerings of fish and grain here, also copal resins, myrrh I believe. Scanners show carbon counts that indicate they’re no more than a week old.’

‘Any carbon count is compromised in this atmosphere,’ Hawser replied. ‘The machine’s wrong. Besides, look at the state of them. Calcified.’

‘The samples have degraded because of the atmosphere,’ Murza insisted.

‘Oh, have it both ways, why not?’ said Hawser.

‘Just look at this place!’ Murza shot back, gesturing with his gloved hands in exasperation.

‘Exactly what are you proposing, then?’ asked Hawser. ‘An occulted religious observance conducted outside the fringe of Boeotian society, or a private order of tradition sanctioned by the Yeselti?’

‘I don’t know,’ Murza replied, ‘but this whole site is guarding something, isn’t it? We need to get an excavator in here. We need to get into the recess behind the statues.’

‘We need to examine, record and remove the statues methodically,’ Hawser said. ‘It will take weeks just to begin the preservation treatments before we can lift them, piece by—’

‘I can’t wait that long.’

‘Well, sorry, Navid, but that’s the way it is,’ said Hawser. ‘The statues are priceless. They’re our first concern for conservation.’

‘Yes, they are priceless,’ Murza said. He stepped towards the solemn, silent grave gods. The juniors were watching him. A few took sharp breaths as he actually stepped up onto the base of the altar, gingerly placing his foot so as not to dislodge any of the offertory bowls.

‘Get down, Murza,’ said one of the seniors.

Murza edged up onto the second step, so he was almost at eye level with some of the gazing gods.

‘They are priceless,’ he repeated. He raised his right hand and gently indicated the blazing moonstone eyes of the nearest effigy. ‘Look at the eyes. The eyes are so important, don’t you think? So telling?’

He glanced over his shoulder at his anxious audience. Hawser could tell Murza was smiling, despite the haz-mask.

‘Get down, Navid,’ he said.

‘Look at the eyes,’ Murza said, ignoring the instruction. ‘Down through time, they’ve always meant the same thing to us, haven’t they? Come on, it’s basic! Someone!’

‘Protection,’ mumbled one of the juniors awkwardly.

‘I can’t hear you, Jena. Speak up!’

‘The eye is the oldest and most culturally diverse apotropaic symbol,’ said Hawser, hoping to cut to the chase and end Murza’s showboating.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Murza. ‘Kas knows. Thank you, Kas. The eye guards things. You put it up for protection. You put it up to ward off evil and harm, and to keep safe the things you hold most precious.’ His fingertip traced the outline of the unblinking eye again. ‘We‘ve seen this so many times, just variations of the same design. Look at the proportional values! The eye shape, the brow line, this could have been stylised from a nazar boncugu or a wedjat, and it’s not a million kilometres away from the Eye of Providence that is so proudly displayed in such places as the Great Seal of the Unification Council. These are gods of aversion, there’s no doubt about it.’

He jumped down from the steps. Some of the party gasped in alarm, but Murza did not disturb or break any of the precariously placed bowls.

‘Gods of aversion,’ he said. ‘Keep out. Stay away.’

‘Have you finished?’ Hawser asked.

‘The pupils are pieces of obsidian, Kas,’ Murza said eagerly as he came towards Hawser. ‘You get as close as I did, get your photo-mech to decent resolution, you can see that they’re carved. A circle around the edge, a dot in the middle. And you know what that is.’

‘The circumpunct,’ Hawser replied quietly.

‘Which represents?’ Murza pressed.

‘Just about anything you want it to,’ said Hawser. ‘The solar disc. Gold. Circumference. Monad. A diacritical mark. The hydrogen atom.’

‘Oh, help him out, Jena, please,’ Murza cried. ‘He’s just being awkward!’

‘The eye of god,’ said the female junior nervously. ‘The all-seeing singularity.’

‘Thank you,’ Murza said. He looked directly at Hawser. His eyes, behind the tinted lenses of the goggles, were fierce. ‘It says keep out. Stay away. I can see you. I can see right into your soul. I can reflect your harm back at you, and I can know what you know. I can read your heart. I can keep you at bay, because I am power and I am knowledge, and I am protection. The statues are priceless, Hawser, but they are gods of aversion. They’re guarding something. How valuable is something, do you suppose, that someone would protect with priceless statues?’

There was silence for a moment. Most of the team shifted uncomfortably.

‘They’re a family group,’ said Hawser quietly. ‘They are a representation of a dynastic line. A portrait in statue form. You can see the gender dimorphism, the height differentials, and the placements, thus determining familial relationships, hierarchies and obligations. The tallest figures on the highest step, a man and a woman, lofty and most exalted. Below them, children, perhaps two generations, with their own extended families and retainers. The first son and first daughter have prominence. It’s a record of lineage and descent. They’re a family group.’

‘But the eyes, Kas! So help me!’

‘They are apotropaic, I agree,’ said Hawser. ‘What could they be guarding? What could be more priceless than a gold and jade effigy of a god-king, and his queen, and his divine sons and daughters?’

Hawser stepped past Murza and faced the altar.

‘I’ll tell you. The physical remains of a god-king, and his queen, and his divine sons and daughters. It’s a tomb. That’s what’s in the recess. A tomb.’

Murza sighed, as if deflated.

‘Oh, Kas,’ he said. ‘You think so small.’

Hawser sighed, knowing they were about to go around again, but they turned as they heard noises from the entrance.

Five soldiers clattered into the shrine, spearing the gloom with the lamps strapped to their weapons. They were Imperial Army, hussars from the Tupelov Lancers, one of the very oldest regiments. They had left their cybernetic steeds outside the shrine and dismounted to enter.

‘Clear this site,’ one of them said. They were in full war-armour, combat visors down, frosty green photo-mech cursors bouncing to and fro along their optical slits.

‘We’ve got permission to be here,’ said one of the seniors.

‘Like crap you have,’ said the hussar. ‘Gather your stuff and get out.’

‘Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?’ Murza exclaimed, pushing forwards. ‘Who’s your commander?’

‘The Emperor of Mankind,’ replied the hussar. ‘Who’s yours, arsewipe?’

‘There’s been a mistake,’ said Hawser. He reached for his belt pack. Five saddle carbines slapped up to target him. Five lamp beams pinned him like a specimen.

‘Whoa! Whoa!’ Hawser cried. ‘I’m just reaching for my accreditation!’

He took out the pass-pad and flicked it on. The holographic credentials issued by the Unification Council Office of Conservation billowed up into the smoky air, slightly blurred and malformed by the edges of the smoke. Hawser couldn’t help but notice the Eye of Providence on the Council seal that flashed up before the data unfurled.

‘That’s all very well,’ said one of the hussars.

‘This is all current. It’s valid,’ said Hawser.

‘Things change,’ said the hussar.

‘This was personally ratified by Commander Selud,’ said one of the seniors. ‘He is primary commander and—’

‘At oh-six thirty-five today, Commander Selud was relieved of command by Imperial decree. All permits and authorities are therefore rescinded. Get your stuff, get moving, and live with your disappointment.’

‘Why was Selud removed?’ asked Murza.

‘Are you High Command? Do you need to know?’ sneered one of the hussars.

‘Just unofficially?’ Murza pleaded.

‘Unofficially, Selud’s made a total clusterfug of the whole show,’ said the hussar. ‘Six weeks, and he still manages to let the refinery fields catch fire? The Emperor’s sent someone in to tidy the whole mess up and draw a line under it.’

‘Who?’ asked Hawser.

‘Why are these civilians still here?’ a voice asked. It was deep and penetrating, and it had the hard edges of vox amplification. A figure had entered the chamber behind the Tupelov Lancers. Hawser wasn’t sure how it could have possibly walked in without anyone noticing.

It was an Astartes warrior.

By the pillars of Earth, an Astartes! The Emperor has sent the Astartes to finish this!

Hawser felt his chest tighten and his pulse sprint. He had never seen an Astartes in the flesh before. He hadn’t realised they were so big. The curvature of the armour plating was immense, oversized like the grave god statues behind him. The combination of the gloom and his goggles made it hard to resolve colour properly. The armour looked red: a bright, almost pale red, the colour of watered wine or oxygenated blood. A cloak of fine metal mesh shrouded the warrior’s left shoulder and torso. The helmet had a snout like a raven’s beak.

Hawser wondered what Legion the warrior belonged to. He couldn’t see any insignia properly. What was it that people were calling them these days, now that the bulk of all Astartes forces had deployed off Terra to spearhead the Great Crusade?

Space Marines. That was it. Space Marines. Like the square-jawed heroes of ha’penny picture books.

This was no square-jawed hero. This wasn’t even human. It was just an implacable thing, a giant twice the size of anybody else in the chamber. Hawser felt he ought to have been able to smell it: the soot on its plating, the machine oil in its complex joints, the perspiration trickling between its skin and its suit-liner.

But there was nothing. No trace, not even a hint of body heat. It was like the cold but immense blank of the void.

Hawser could not imagine anything that could stop it, let alone kill it.

‘I asked a question,’ the Astartes said.

‘We’re clearing them now, ser,’ stammered one of the Lancers.

‘Hurry,’ the Astartes replied.

The hussars started to herd the team towards the entrance. There were a few mumbles of protest, but nothing defiant. Everyone was too cowed by the appearance of the Astartes. The aug-lungs were wheezing and pumping more rapidly than before.

‘Please,’ said Hawser. He took a step towards the Astartes and held out the pass-pad. ‘Please, we’re licensed conservators. See?’

The hologram re-lit. The Astartes didn’t move.

‘Ser, this is a profound discovery. It is beyond value. It should be preserved for the benefit of future generations. My team has the expertise. The right equipment too. Please, ser.’

‘This area is not safe,’ said the Astartes. ‘You will remove yourselves.’

‘But ser—’

‘I have given you an order, civilian.’

‘Ser, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

‘The Fifteenth.’

The Fifteenth. So, the Thousand Sons.

‘What is your name?’

Hawser turned. The Tupelov Lancers had led most of the team out of the shrine, leaving only him behind. Two more Astartes, each as immense as the first, had manifested behind him. How could something that big move so stealthily?

‘What is your name?’ the new arrival repeated.

‘Hawser, ser. Kasper Hawser, conservator, assigned to—’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘What?’ asked Hawser. The other Astartes had spoken.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘I don’t understand, ser.’

‘You told us your name. Was it supposed to be a joke? Is it some nickname?’

‘I don’t understand. That’s my name. Why would you think it’s a joke?’

‘Kasper Hawser? You don’t understand the reference?’

Hawser shook his head. ‘No one’s ever…’

The Astartes turned his beaked visor and glanced at his companions. Then he looked back down at Hawser.

‘Clear the area.’

Hawser nodded.

‘Once the security of this area can be guaranteed,’ said the Astartes, ‘your team may be permitted to resume its duties. You will evacuate to the safe zone and await notification.’

No notification ever came. Boeotia fell, and the Yeselti line came to an end. Sixteen months later, by then working on another project in Transcyberia, Hawser heard that conservator teams had finally been let into the Boeotian Lowlands.

There was no trace that any shrine had ever existed.

Fith wondered what kind of wight he would come back as. The kind that flashed and flickered under the pack ice? The kind you could sometimes see from a boat’s rail, running along in the shadow of the hull? The kind that mumbled and jittered outside an aett’s walls at night, lonely and friendless in the dark? The kind that sang a wailing windsong between the high ice peaks of a scarp on a late winter day?

Fith hoped it would be the darkest kind. The kind with the oil-black eyes and the slack-hanging mouth, the kind with rust and mould clogging the links of its shirt. The kind that clawed its way up from the Underverse using its fleshless hands as shovels, gnawed its way through the rock waste and permafrost, and then went walking at night.

Yes.

Walking until it reached Ironland and the hearth-aetts of the shit-breath Balt. Walking with a special axe in its hand, an axe forged in the Underverse from the bitter wrath of the restless and murdered, hammered out on god’s own anvil, and quenched in the bile and blood of the wronged and the unavenged. It would have a smile on it, a smile sparked on wyrd’s grindstone to a death-edge so keen it would slice a man’s soul from his flesh.

Then threads would be cut. Balt threads.

Fith hoped that would be the way. He wouldn’t mind leaving the Verse so much if there was an expectation of returning. He hoped the wights would let him do that. They could carry him away to the Underverse for all he cared, knocked down by a Balt maul or a Balt arrow, his own cut thread flapping after him in the gales of Hel, just so long as they let him return. Once he reached that unfamiliar shore, they had to remake him, build him back up out of his own raw pain, until he looked like a man, but was nothing more than an instrument, like an axe or a good blade, forged for one pure, singular purpose.

It wouldn’t be long before he found out.

Guthox had taken the tiller so that Lern could bind his rope-sawn fingers. The red sails were gaining on them, faster than the black sails of the Balt.

They had one chance left, in Fith’s opinion. A half-chance. One last arrow in wyrd’s quiver. If they cut north slightly, and ran through the top of Hradcana territory, they might make it to the ice desert beyond. The desert, well, that was death too, because it was a fatal place that no man or beast could live in, but that was a worry for later. They would make their own wyrd.

If they went to the desert, neither the Hradcana nor the Balt would follow. If they could get through a cut in the rock rampart the Hradcana called The Devil’s Tail, they’d be free and clear, free to die on their own terms, not hounded and knocked to Hel by a pack of soul-cursed murder-makers.

But it was a long run to The Devil’s Tail. Brom was too messed up to take a turn at the tiller, and even in rotation, the rest of them would be hard pressed to keep going. It was a run you’d break into four or five shorter runs, maybe sleeping out on the ice and cooking some food to rebuild your strength. To make it non-stop, that would be a feat of endurance, a labour so mighty the skjalds should sing about it.

If there were any Ascommani skjalds left alive.

Braced against the rail, Fith talked it over with Lern and Brom. All three of them were hoarse from the fight, from yelling hate back into the Balts’ faces.

Brom was in poor shape. There was no blood in his face, and his eyes had gone dim like dirty ice, as if his thread was fraying.

‘Do it,’ he said. ‘The Devil’s Tail. Do it. Let’s not give these bastards the satisfaction.’

Fith made his way to the bow, and knelt down beside the swaddled Upplander.

The Upplander was speaking.

‘What?’ asked Fith, leaning close. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Then he said,’ the Upplander hissed, ‘then he said I can see you. I can see right into your soul. That’s what he said. I can reflect your harm back at you and I can know what you know. Oh god, he was so arrogant. Typical Murza. Typical. The statues are priceless, Hawser, he said, but how valuable is something, do you suppose, that someone would protect with priceless statues?’

‘I don’t know what you’re telling me,’ said Fith. ‘Is it a story? Is it something that happened in the past?’

Fith was afraid. He was afraid he was hearing sky magic, and he didn’t want any part of it.

The Upplander suddenly started and opened his eyes. He stared up at Fith in sheer terror for a second.

‘I was dreaming!’ he cried. ‘I was dreaming, and they were standing looking down at me.’

He blinked, and the reality of his situation flooded back and washed the nonsense of his fever dream away, and he sank and groaned.

‘It was so real,’ he whispered, mainly to himself. ‘Fifty fugging years ago if it was a day, and it felt like I was right back there. Do you ever have dreams like that? Dreams that unwrap fresh memories of things you’d forgotten you’d ever done? I was really there.’

Fith grunted.

‘And not here,’ the Upplander added dismally.

‘I’ve come to ask you, one last time, do you want the mercy of my axe?’ asked Fith.

‘What? No! I don’t want to die.’

‘Well, first thing, we all die. Second thing, you’re not going to get much say in the matter.’

‘Help me up,’ said the Upplander. Fith got him to his feet and propped him against the bow rail. The first pricking gobs of sleet were hitting their faces. Up ahead, the sky had risen up in a great, dark summit of cloud, a bruised stain like the colour of a throttled man’s face, and it was rolling in on the ice field.

It was a storm, coming in hard, flinging ice around the sky. Late in the winter for a storm that dark. Bad news, whichever way you looked at it. The rate it was coming, they weren’t going to get anywhere much before it blew in across them.

‘Where are we?’ the Upplander asked, squinting into the dazzle of the ice field rushing by.

‘We’re somewhere near the middle of shit-goes-our-luck,’ said Fith.

The Upplander clung onto the rail as the wyrmboat quaked across a rough strayke.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

They were coming up fast on one of the Hradcana’s remote northern aetts. It was just an outpost, a few shelters built on some crags that rose above the ice plain. The Hradcana used it to resupply and safe-harbour their fisher boats when the sea thawed out. It was uninhabited for months at a time.

A row of spears had been set tip-down in the sheet ice in front of the aett. They stood like a row of fence posts, six or seven of them. On the raised end of each spear-haft, a human head had been impaled.

The heads were turned to look out onto the ice field at them. Their eyes had been pinned open.

They were most likely the heads of criminals, or enemy captives, ritually decapitated for the purpose, but it was possible they were Hradcana, sacrificed in desperation because of the extremity of the maleficarum. Their eyes were open so they could see the evil coming and ward it off.

Fith spat and cursed. He dearly wished Iolo had been able to badge their faces with cast-out marks, to bounce the warding magic back. The wyrmboat had eyes on its prow, of course: the all-seeing sun-disc eyes of the sky god, painted bold and bright, and decorated with precious stones. All wyrmboats had them, so they could find their way, see off danger, and reflect an enemy’s magic.

Fith hoped it would be enough. The boat was a strong boat, an aett-chief’s boat, but it had run hard and it was tired, and Fith was worried that its eyes might not be powerful enough to turn the magic back anymore.

‘Gods of Aversion,’ the Upplander murmured, gazing at the staked heads. ‘Keep out. Stay away. I can see you.’

Fith wasn’t listening to him. He yelled back down the long, narrow deck at Guthox, signalling him to turn wide. The aett was inhabited. A second later, the spiked heads flashed by, and they were skating the inshore ice under the shadow of the crag.

Guthox cried out. They were still two or three decent bow shots from the islet, but someone was either gifted or favoured by the Underverse. An arrow had gone into him.

Now more struck, thakking into the hull or falling short and skipping across the ice. Fith could see archers on the rim of the islet crag, and others on the beach.

He raced back down the boat to Guthox. Lern and Brom were moving too.

It was a monstrously lucky shot, except for Guthox. The arrow had gone through the tight-ringed sleeve of his shirt, the meat of his left tricep, shaving the bone, and then through the sleeve again, and then the shirt proper, before punching into the hersir’s side between his ribs, effectively pinning his arm against his body. Guthox had immediately lost control of one of the quarter rudder ropes. The pain was immense. He had bitten through his tongue in an effort not to scream.

Two arrows were embedded in the deck boards beside them. Fith saw they had fish-scale tips: each head shaped and finished from a single, iron-hard scale from a deep water monster. They were barbed, like a backwards-slanted comb.

That was what had gone into Guthox. It would never come out.

Guthox spat blood and tried to turn the tiller. Brom and Lern were shouting at him, trying to take over, trying to snap the arrow shaft so they could free Guthox’s arm. Guthox was slipping away.

Another wave of arrows hit. One, perhaps, came straight from the same gifted or favoured archer. It hit Guthox in the side of the head, and ended his pain by cutting his thread.

Blood droplets and sleet stung their faces. Guthox fell away from the tiller and, though Brom and Lern sprang in, the wind became their steersman for a split-second.

That was all the time the wind needed, and it had no interest in sparing their lives.