Prospero Burns

Two

The wind flung them into the rocks abutting the beach, and the wyrmboat shattered like a crockery jar. The impact was sustained, like a relentless series of hammer blows. The world vibrated and up-ended, and the shivering air filled with rock-grit and out-flung stones, along with sleet, with slivers of ice, and with raked splinters of deck-wood as sharp as darning needles. The maniacal wind tore the sails away, like a vicious child plucking the wings off a long-legged fly. The sail-cloth, so full of hard air that it was splitting, cracked as it flew free, and the halyards screamed as they fled through the blocks and sawed into the pins. There was a brief, sharp reek of smoke from unwetted wood as the rigging lines friction-burned their way through and away. Under tension, the escaping lines whirred and buzzed like bees.

Fith smelled the wood-burn in the last instant of the wyrmboat’s life. The deck broke under him, and flipped him into the sleeting sky. Then he hit the ice with his face.

The wyrmboat had gone right over, and folded up into the rocks where the wind had driven it. Thrown clear, Fith slid face-down across the glazed sea, his throat full of ice and blood. He rotated, head and toe, as he slowly came to rest.

He raised his head. The ice beneath him was as dull and cold as the flat of a sword. His chest and face were one big aching bruise, and it felt like he had taken the smile of an axe in his breastbone, and another in his cheek.

He tried to get up. He felt as if he was too cracked to even breathe. Sucking air into his chest was like swallowing broken glass. Part of the wyrmboat’s mainsail, full of wind and trailing its lines, danced away along the shore of the islet like a gleeful phantom, like a capering wight with its arms out-flung.

Fith began to limp towards the ruin of the boat. A few arrows hissed overhead. Hradcana bowmen were scrambling down the rocks to reach the wreck. Hradcana red sails were closing in across the ice. Fith could hear the shriek of their bladed runners.

The ice in his path was scattered with debris. Here was a piece of mast, sheared off. There was part of the starboard rigger, torn off, its iron-shod skate stuck in the crazed ice like a giant’s arrow. Here was a section of spar. Fith picked it up, and hefted it as a weapon.

There was Guthox’s body. The wyrmboat had spilled it as it tumbled, and one of the riggers had sliced right over it, mashing it flat at the waist.

A Hradcana arrow whipped past Fith’s face. He didn’t flinch. He saw his axe lying near Guthox, and discarded the spar.

He picked up his axe.

Close beside the mangled ruin of the wyrmboat, Lern was dragging the Upplander’s corpse onto the shoreline rocks. Blood was streaming down one half of Lern’s face and soaking his whiskers. Fith began to limp faster to reach them.

When he left the ice and set foot on the ice-fused shingle, the Hradcana had come close enough for him to see their wild eyes and the white ash-glue coating their faces. They were so close that he could smell the stink of their ritual ointments. These were foul-smelling pastes their gothi had made, aversion remedies to keep the maleficarum at bay. The warriors had put aside their bows and taken up their axes and their swords. A bad omen had to be more than just killed. It had to be cut apart, hacked apart, dismembered and un-remembered. That was how you got magic to leave you alone.

Brom had got up to face them with his axe. Fith wondered how he was even standing any more. He limped to stand at Brom’s side.

One of the Hradcana was shouting out at them. It wasn’t a challenge or a threat, it was a ritual thing, a statement of intent, a declaration of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Fith knew that from the sing-song cadence of the words, rather than the words themselves. The warrior was using the Hradcana’s private tribal tongue, their wyrd-cant, which Fith did not speak.

‘This is onto you and onto your heads, in the day and the night, in the time of the moving sea and in the time of the still sea,’ the Upplander suddenly said out loud as Fith stepped past him. He wasn’t dead after all, though both of his legs had undoubtedly been broken in the crash. Lern, blood still pouring from his scalp, was trying to make him secure, but the Upplander was pushing away and trying to pull himself up onto a rock.

‘This is the wyrd that you have written for yourself by taking the disaster into your aett and deciding to protect it,’ the Upplander continued. He looked at Fith. ‘That’s what they’re saying. My translator is reading it. Do you understand them?’

Fith shook his head.

‘Why do they call me a disaster? What did I ever do?’

Fith shrugged.

A look of realisation suddenly crossed the Upplander’s drawn face. ‘Oh, it’s just the translator! It’s literal, just literal… “dis-aster”… bad star. They’re calling me Bad Star.’

Fith stood beside Brom and faced the Hradcana. The Hradcana warrior was finishing his declaration. Behind him, Fith could hear the Upplander translating the last of it.

The Hradcana rushed them.

Without shields, the two Ascommani took the charge. They put over-swings into the first row of faces, and under-swings into the second. Like the surge of the sea when the sea was wet, the Hradcana slipped back and came in again across the shingle. Brom split a man’s shoulder. Fith smashed a man’s jaw into mammocks and managed to wrest the man’s shield away from him. He punched the iron boss of it into the face of the next Hradcana who came looking for an opening, and broke the man’s nose-bone up into his skull. A big axe, a two-hander, swept at Brom, but Fith knocked it away with his captured shield, and Brom tore out the owner’s belly while his arms were still pushed up.

The next wave came, breaking on their shield. They had to take a few steps back each time. Red-sailed wyrmboats were grounding on the beach, and men were disembarking.

‘Do you think they’ve brought enough bodies?’ Brom asked. He was panting hard, and his face was bloodless with pain and effort, but there was still a laugh in his voice.

‘Nothing like enough,’ said Fith. ‘And nothing like enough threads, either.’

Lern left the Upplander in the rocks and came to stand beside them. He took a sword out of a dead man’s hand, thanked him for it, and hunched his back to face the surge.

The storm was behind them. It was shrieking in across the ice field, across the stilled sea, wailing like an Underverse chorus. Everything in the world that was loose was beginning to shake. The three Ascommani felt the grit of sleet hitting their necks and the backs of their heads. They heard the prickle of it pelting off their mail shirts.

The storm of men was in front of them. They were Hradcana, most of them, three or four score painted for murder, but there were Balt too, just arriving in their slower boats, slithering up the ice-cake beach in their eagerness.

It was a strange eagerness. It was born of desperation, the frantic wish to be free of a burden or a curse, to discharge an onerous duty and be done with it. There was no yelling, no war-shouts, no rousing bellow of comradeship and common purpose. They had no taste for it, or else fear had soured the words in their mouths.

They were chanting instead, steady and slow. They were reciting the rhymes of banishment and aversion they had learned around the aett hearth as children, the sharpened words, the strong words, the power words, the words with enough of a death-edge on them to keep bad stars at bay.

But the bad star was keeping them at bay too.

They were a great gang of men: hersirs, mostly, veterans, riggers, strong men with arms made thick from axe-work and backs made broad from the long oar. They crowded the beach: an army, bigger than any decent raiding party, as many faces as Fith had ever seen in one place. With a host like that, you could take a kingdom. You could conquer a chief’s whole territory.

All they had to do, these men, was kill three hersirs and a cripple. Three hersirs and a cripple with but one shield between them, stuck on a shingle spit in the cold empty, with nowhere left to run and nothing at their backs except the approaching enmity of the winter’s last, psychopathic storm.

Yet they were faltering. They were wary. There was no conviction in their surges. When they rushed in, they rushed in with fear in their eyes and hesitation in their blades. Each surge drove the Ascommani back closer to the ice, where standing steady and meeting a push would be impossible. But after half a dozen surges, Fith, Brom and Lern had knocked ten men down with red snow under them.

Then Fith saw the Balt gothi, Hunur. A wyrmboat had just brought him in, and hersirs were carrying him to the beach. He stood up tall on their cupped palms, such a tall skinny bastard, waving his bear’s arm blade at Uppland above. The storm light, yellow and frosty as the sky closed down, glinted off the gothi’s piercings and silver torc. His mantle of seabird feathers streamed out in the air behind him, white like early snow.

He was screaming. He was howling toxic curses into the thundering wind, calling on the spirits of the air and the wights of the Underverse and all the daemons of Hel to come forth and extinguish the bad star. Fith felt a prickle on his skin that was more than the battering sleet.

The sight of the gothi spurred the Hradcana on, that and the sound of his screams. They surged again, and Fith knew this would be the worst rush yet. The shock of impact drove the three Ascommani back a step. Two axes hooked into Fith’s shield and dragged it down. A third broke its rim. Fith hacked his own axe into a Hradcana skull, then levered it out of the collapsing dead weight and swung it again. The poll of it broke a helmet’s cheek guard and cracked the rim of an eye socket. Fith could no longer cover Brom’s flank.

Brom was mindless with fatigue and pain. He was jeering and lunging with his axe, but there was no strength or skill left in his arm.

Fith heard Lern shouting at Brom to keep his eyes up. Lern was laying in with his wight-loaned sword. He knew to use the tip and not the edge in a crush-fight, jabbing it in at belt height, skinning ribs and gouging hips and rupturing bellies. The blade was good, with a keen point that pinged through the rings of a man’s shirt and speared the meat beneath.

Then one of the Hradcana got a shield in the way, and Lern’s sword punched clean through it, almost to the length of a man’s forearm. It punched clean through and the blade stuck fast in the tight-grained wood. Lern tried to pull it out, but the shield man pulled back and dragged Lern out of line. The Hradcana took him and cut his thread: four or five enemy swords stabbing into him repeatedly, rehearsing the lesson in sword-work that Lern had delivered.

He disappeared under their feet, and the surge rolled over him. Brom was on his knees. He wasn’t really aware of where he was any more. Fith had both hands clamped around the throat of his axe, and both sets of knuckles were dripping red.

The surge rolled back and parted, and the Balt gothi approached. Balt hersirs were still carrying him in a cradle of hands. He aimed the bear blade-bone at Fith and for a moment it felt like the two of them were alone on the sleet-battered beach.

The gothi started speaking. He started speaking magic words to forge a spell that would blast Fith off the beach. The men around him, Hradcana and Balt alike, covered their eyes or ears. The hersirs holding Hunur up began to weep, because their hands were busy and they could not block his words out.

Fith didn’t know the meaning of the words, and didn’t want to. He tightened his grip around the throat of his axe. He wondered if he could reach the gothi and bury the smile of it in his pierced face before the Hradcana and the Balt cut him down, or the gothi’s magic turned his bones to melt-water.

‘Enough.’

Fith glanced over his shoulder. The Upplander, crumpled in the lee of a wet-black boulder, his mangled legs twisted under him, had spoken. He was looking up at Fith.

Fith could see he was trembling. His heat was pouring out of his mouth in steaming clouds. Sleet pelted them both, and settled in small white clumps in the Upplander’s matted hair.

‘What?’ Fith asked.

‘I’ve heard enough,’ the Upplander said.

Fith sighed. ‘Have you? Have you, indeed? So now you want the mercy of my axe, now we’ve come to this? You couldn’t have asked the favour earlier, before—’

‘No, no!’ the Upplander snapped. Every word was an effort, and he was clearly frustrated to have to say anything more than was absolutely necessary.

‘I said,’ he replied, ‘I’ve heard enough. I’ve heard enough of that shaman’s ravings. My translator’s sampled enough, and it’s built a workable grammatical base.’

Fith shook his head, not understanding.

‘Help me up,’ the Upplander ordered.

Fith hoisted the Upplander a little more upright. The barest movement caused the Upplander to grimace in pain. The pulverised bones in his legs ground together. Tears welled in his eyes and froze on his lower lashes.

‘All right, all right,’ he said. He adjusted the little translator device woven into his quilted collar.

He began to speak. A huge voice, tinny and harsh, boomed out of the device in his collar. Fith recoiled at the sound of it. The voice boomed out words just like the words the gothi was yelling at them.

The gothi scrambled down out of his hersirs’ hands and stopped shouting. He stared at Fith and the Upplander. There was terror on his twitching face. The Hradcana and the Balt edged backwards, uneasy and unsettled.

‘What did you say?’ Fith asked in the silence as the sleet billowed around them.

‘I used his words back at him,’ said the Upplander. ‘I told him I’d bring a daemon out of the storm if they didn’t back off. If they’re afraid of me because they think I’m a bad star, I might as well act like one.’

The gothi was gabbling at his warriors, trying to spur them in again to finish the matter, but they were really reluctant to move. The gothi was losing his temper. He kept staring at Fith and the Upplander with the same, terrified look as before. So were a lot of the men.

Then Fith realised that none of them were looking at him or the Upplander after all.

They were looking past him. They were looking out at the ice field, out at the still sea, out at the Hel-storm that was screaming in and staining the sky black. Fith turned, the wind in his hair and the sleet in his face, to see the storm approaching. It was a low, racing blackness, like blood swirling through water. The snow and sleet that formed its bow-wave hazed the air like dust. Ice splintered up from the surface of the frozen sea, whirling away like petals in its vortex. Bars of lightning stabbed from the skirts and the belly of the storm like jagged, blinding lances, and smote the sea crust.

There was something in the storm. There was something just ahead of it, staying ahead of it, pounding out of the sleet-blur towards them.

It was a man. It was a huge man, a shadow on the ice, running towards them, running across the sea, out-running the storm.

The Upplander’s bad star magic had brought a daemon down to punish them all.

Hunur screamed. His hersirs had been bewildered for a moment, but they snapped to attention at the squeal of his voice, and loaded their bows. Fith threw himself flat as the first salvo of arrows loosed at the approaching daemon. The men were firing at will, spitting iron-head darts into the air as though they hoped to pin the storm to the sky.

The daemon struck. He came in off the sea at the tip of the storm in great bounding strides. Fith could hear the ice crunch under each pounding step. Furs and a ragged robe fluttered out behind him. He leapt up into the beach rocks, turned the bound into a sure-footed hop that propelled him off one of the largest boulders and up into the air, arms outstretched. This soaring leap took him clean over Fith and the Upplander. Fith ducked again. He saw the great axe uplifted in the daemon’s right hand. The air was thatched with black arrows.

The daemon hung for a second in the mayhem of sleet, arms wide against the black sky like wings, robes trailing like torn sails. The host of Balt and Hradcana below him tilted back from him in fear, like corn stalks sloped by the wind.

Then he smashed down into them. The impact threw men into the air on either side. Shields, raised in haste at the last moment, fractured and splintered. Blades shattered. Bows broke. Arms snapped.

The daemon howled. He had landed in a crouch, at least two men crushed beneath his feet. He rose, hunched over in a fighter’s stance. He swung his broad upper body, and put the full force of his vast shoulders behind his axe. Its death-edge went through three men. Arterial blood, black in the foul light, jetted into the air, and drops of it rained down in the sleet. Men were screaming. Hradcana voices, Balt voices, all screaming.

The daemon drove into the enemy mass, breaking wood and bone. He seemed blade-proof, as if he was made of iron. The tongues of swords cracked as they rebounded off him, the handles of axes snapped. There were two or three black-fletched arrows buried in the daemon’s bulk, but he didn’t appear to even feel them, let alone be slowed down by them.

The daemon let out another roar. It was an animal sound, the deep, reverberative throat-roar of a leopard. The sound penetrated. It cut through the booming swirl of the storm, and through the frenetic din of steel and sleet and voices. It cut like the keenest death-edge. Fith felt it in his gut. He felt it shiver his heart, colder than ice, worse than fear.

He watched the slaughter unfolding in front of him.

The hulking daemon drove into the great gang of killers. He pushed them against the wind and down the beach. They mobbed around him and onto him, like dogs on a bear, trying to out-man him, trying to smother his blows and choke his swing, trying to ring him and pull him down. They were terrified of him, but they were even more terrified of letting him live.

Their efforts were nothing. It was as if the Hradcana and the Balt were made of straw, cloth dummies stuffed with dry grass, like they were empty vessels with no weight. The daemon broke them and knocked them down. He swung and sent them flying. Men took off from each ploughing impact. They left the ground, flung into the sleet, limbs pinwheeling, a boot flying off, a shield in tatters. They flew out sideways, tumbling over the ice-caked shingle and ending up in still death-heaps. They lofted up from an axe-whack, split asunder, squirting blood from their cleaved bodies, raining broken rings from their shredded shirts, chainmail rings that pinged like handfuls of coins as they scattered across the beach. They cartwheeled over his shoulders, pitched like forked bales.

They littered the shingle. Most times, they were no longer in one piece once he’d done with them. Some lay as if they were sleeping. Others were crumpled in limp, slack poses that the living could not mimic. Some were split and steaming in the sleet. Some were just portions and pieces scattered by the relentless axe. Blood ran between the ice-black beach stones, coiling, trickling, deep and glossy, thick red, meat red, or cooling into slicks of rusty brown and faded purple.

The daemon’s axe was a massive thing, a two-hander with a long, balanced handle. Both grip and blade were engraved with complex, weaving patterns and etched chequers. It sang to itself. Fith could hear it. The axe hummed and purred, as though the death-edge was privately chortling with delight at the rising tally of threads. A drizzle of blood droplets was flying off it, as if the blade was licking its lips clean.

Nothing stopped it. It was unimaginably sharp, and it was either as light as a gull’s bone, or the daemon was as strong as a storm giant. It carved through everything it encountered. It went through shields, whether they were cured leather or hardwood or beaten copper. It went through armour, through padded plates, through iron scales, through chain. It went through the hafts of spears, through the handles of good axes, through the blades of swords that had been passed down for generations. It went through meat and muscle and bone.

It went through men effortlessly. Fith saw several men remain on their feet after the axe had sheared off their heads, or half of their heads, or their bodies from the shoulders. They stayed standing, their truncated figures swaying slightly with the pulse of the blood spurting from the stump or cross-sectioned portion. Only then would they collapse, soft and boneless, like falling cloaks.

The murder-makers were close to breaking. The daemon had cut so many of their threads, and left so many of them scattered on the blood-drenched beach, their resolve had thawed like ice in springtime. The storm was right above the islet now, enfolding the beach and the crag in its sharp, screaming embrace. The wind had been put to a whetstone. The air was shot through with bullets of hail. Where the demented sleet hit the hard stones of the beach, it scoured the blood away, and turned the dead into puffy, bleached, white things that looked like they had been waterlogged for a month.

A fire was driving the gothi Hunur. A fire had been lit in his blood. He had seen the evil of the bad star hanging in the future, and he had raised the murder-make to exterminate it. Now the evil was manifesting, driven into the open, he was all the more determined to end it.

He scrambled back to some higher rocks above the beach, and yelled down at the last of the Balt wyrmboats, where men had yet to disembark. They got out their bows, and Fith saw a glimpse of tallow flame in the stormy gloom.

The bowmen started to loose pitch-arrows.

The arrows were longer than regular man-stoppers, with simple iron spike tips and knobs of pitch-soaked rag knotted around the shafts behind the head. The rags caught as soon as flame was applied. Burning arrows ripped into the lightning-split sky.

Other men were spinning bottles on leather cords, letting them fly under their own weight. The bottles were filled with liquid pitch and other volatiles. Their contents sprayed out as they struck the beach and shattered. The burning arrows quickly ignited the spreading slicks.

Bright flames leapt up with a plosive woof like the sound of wind biting sailcloth. A great thicket of fire spread along the beach, fed by the blazing arrows. The flames were painfully bright, almost greenish and incandescent. The daemon, and the press of murder-makers around him, were swept up in the flames within seconds.

A burning man’s screams are unlike the screams of a cut or knocked man. They are shrill and frantic. Engulfed, wrapped up in flames they could not shrug off or outrun, men stumbled out of the fight, mouths stretched wide, breathing fire. In the driving wind, the flames and the rank, black fat-smoke poured off them, like the burning tails of falling stars.

Their flaming arms milled in the air. Their hair and beards burned. Their undershirts ignited and cooked the rings of their shirts into their flesh. They ran into the sea, but the sea was just hard ice and couldn’t quench their agonies, so they fell down onto it instead, and burned to death with the ice crust sizzling under them. They were gaunt black shapes in clothes of fire, like the effigies that burned at Helwinter. They were human tinder, crackling and sparking and fizzling in the sleet, hearth-brush kindling blown on by the storm until it flared white-hot.

The daemon came through the flames. He was singed black, like a coal carving. His furs and ragged robe were alive with little blue flames. His eyes were like polished moonstones in his soot-black face. He roared again, the throat-thunder of a hunting cat. It wasn’t just his eyes that lit a wild white against his blackened flesh. His teeth glinted too: white bone, long canines no human mouth should possess.

The daemon buried the smile of his axe in the beach ice, and left it sticking fast with its handle pointing at the sky. Two more flaming arrows hit him. He tore one out of his cloak, flames licking around his fingers.

He brought something up from his side, something metal and heavy that had been strapped there. It was a box with a handle. Fith didn’t know what it was for. All he knew was it was some daemonic device. The daemon pointed it at the Balt wyrmboats.

The box made a noise like a hundred thunderbolts overlapping. The sound was so loud, so sudden, so alien, it made Fith jerk in surprise. Gouting flashes of fire bearded the front of the daemon’s curious box, blinking and flickering as fast as the rattling thunder-roar.

The nearest Balt wyrmboat shivered, and then disintegrated. Its hull shredded and flew apart, reduced to wood chips and pulp and spinning nails. The mast and the quarter rigs exploded. The figurehead splintered. The men on board atomised in puffs of red drizzle.

The wyrmboat behind it began to shred too, and then the boat beyond that. The daemon kept his roaring lightning-box aimed at the boats, and invisible hands of annihilation demolished the craft drawn up along the ice-line. A thick brume of wood-fibre and blood-mist boiled off the destruction into the wind. Then the pitch bottles that had yet to be thrown exploded.

The inferno was intense. Despite the storm, Fith could feel the heat of it on his face. The line of boats lit off, like the fire graves of great heroes at a boat burial. Ash and sparks zoomed crazily like fireflies. The wind took hold of the thick black smoke coming off the burning, and carried it out across the sea almost horizontally like a bar of rolling fog.

The daemon’s lightning-box stopped roaring. He lowered it and looked up the beach at the gothi. Hunur was a shrunken, defeated figure, his shoulders slack, his arms down. A few Hradcana and Balt were fleeing past him up the rock slope, seeking the far side of the islet.

The daemon raised his lightning-box and pointed it at the gothi. He made it flash and bark just once, and the gothi’s head and shoulders vanished in an abrupt pink cloud. What remained of Hunur snapped back off the rock, as if snatched from behind.

The daemon walked down to the ice-line. The intense heat of the burning boats had liquefied the sea ice along the shore, creating a molten pool of viscous water that was greedily swallowing the boat wrecks down into the darkness in a veil of angry steam. The iron-edged smell of the ocean was released to the air for the first time that year.

The daemon knelt down, scooped water up in the cup of his massive right hand, and splashed it over his face. The soot streaked on his cheeks and brow. He rose again, and began to walk back up the beach towards Fith.

The hrosshvalur rose without much warning: just a blow of sour bubbles in the turbulent melt-pool and a sudden froth of red algae. Like all of the great sea things, its diet had been constrained by the ice all winter long, and it was rapaciously hungry. The burning boats had opened the sea to the air, and their cloudy ruins had brought down quantities of meat and blood to flavour the frigid water with an intoxicating allure. The hrosshvalur may have been leagues away when it got the taste; one particle of human blood in a trillion cubic litres of salt water. Its massive tail flukes had closed the distance in a few beats.

The daemon heard the liquid rush of its emergence, and turned to look. The melt-pool was barely big enough to fit the sea thing. Its scaled flanks and claw-toed flippers broke the ice wider, and it bellied up onto the beach, jaws wide and eager at the scent of blood. The flesh inside its mouth was gleaming white, like mother of pearl, and there was a painful stink of ammonia. Its teeth were like spears of ragged yellow coral. It brought its shuddering, snorting bulk up onto the shingle, and boomed out its brash, bass cry, the sound you sometimes heard at night, on the open water, through the planks of the hull. Smaller mushveli, yapping and writhing like worms, followed it up out of the melt-hole, equally agitated by the promise of meat. The hrosshvalur drove them aside, snapping the neck of one that got too close, and then wolfing it down whole in two or three jerking gulps. It levered its body across the shingle on its massive, wrinkled flippers.

The daemon crossed in front of the giant killer. He knew that its appetite was as bottomless as the North Ocean, especially since the turning of spring. It would not stop until it had picked the aett islet clean of anything remotely edible.

The daemon plucked his axe out of the ice-cake shingle. He pulled it up with his hand clasped high under the shoulder, and then he let the handle slip down through his loose grip, pulled by the head weight, until he had it by the optimum lever point between belly and throat. He ran at the ocean monster.

It blew its jaws out at him in a blast of rancid ammonia. The jaws hinged out so wide they formed a tooth-fringed opening like a chapel cave. The maw was so big that a full crew of men could have carried a wyrmboat into it on their shoulders. Then its secondary jaws extended too, driven by the undulating elastic of the throat muscles, bristling with spine teeth made of translucent cartilage. The spine teeth, some longer than a grown man’s leg, flipped up out of the gum recesses like the blades of a folding knife, each one as transparent as glacial ice and dewed with drops of mucus. The hrosshvalur lunged at the charging daemon, the vast tonnage of its bulk grinding and scraping off the beach stones.

The daemon brought his axe down and cut through the lower, primary jaw between the biter-teeth at the front, splitting the jaw like a hull split along its keel. Noxious white froth boiled out of the wound, as if the hrosshvalur had steam for blood. Whooping, it tried to turn its injured head away. The daemon knocked his axe into the side of its skull, so that the blade went through the thick scale plate to its entire depth. Then he put it in again, directly below one of the glassy, staring eyes that were the size of a chieftain’s shield.

The ocean monster boomed, and spewed out a great torrent of rank effluvium. The daemon kept hacking until there was a bubbling pink slit where the hrosshvalur’s head met its neck. The beach underneath them was awash with stinking milky fluid. The slit puckered and dribbled as air gusted out of it. The beast wasn’t dead, but it was mortally stricken. The yapping mushveli began to eat it alive. The daemon left it to die, and walked towards Fith.

The Upplander had been awake to see most of the spectacle. He watched the daemon’s approach. Close to, they could see the plated form of the daemon’s decorated grey armour under his scorched robes and furs. They could see the corded brown lines tattooed into his face, down the line of his nose, across the planes of the cheek and around the eyes. They could smell him, a scent like an animal, but clean, the heady pheromone musk of an alpha dog.

They could see his fangs.

‘You are Ahmad Ibn Rustah?’ the daemon said.

The Upplander paused while his translator dealt with the words.

‘Yes,’ the Upplander replied. He shuddered with cold and pain. It was a miracle he was still conscious.

‘And you are?’ he asked.

The daemon said his name. The translator worked quickly.

‘Bear?’ asked the Upplander. ‘You’re called Bear?’

The daemon shrugged.

‘Why are you here?’ asked the Upplander.

‘There was an error,’ said the daemon. The purring growl was never far from the edges of his voice. ‘An oversight. I made the error, so now I make amends. I will take you out of this place.’

‘These men too,’ said the Upplander.

The daemon looked at Fith and Brom. Brom was unconscious against a rock, dusted with pellets of hail. The blood seeping from his wounds had frozen. Fith was just staring at the daemon. There was still blood on the handle of his axe.

‘Is he dead?’ the daemon asked Fith, nodding at Brom.

‘We’re both dead,’ Fith replied. That was all that was left for him now; the voyage to the Underverse to be remade.

‘I haven’t got time,’ the daemon said to the Upplander. ‘Just you.’

‘You’ll take them. After what they gave today, keeping me alive, you’ll take them.’

The daemon let out a soft, throbbing growl. He stepped back and took some sort of tool or wand from his belt. When he adjusted it, it made small, musical noises.

The daemon looked out to sea, out into the storm in the direction he had come from. Fith followed his gaze. Driving sleet flecked his face and made him blink and wince. He could hear a noise like a storm inside the storm.

The daemon’s boat appeared. Fith had never seen its like before, but he recognised the smooth boat-lines of the hull, and fins like rudders. It was not an ice rig or a water boat: it was an air boat, a boat for riding the wind and the storm. It came slowly towards them across the ice, hanging in the sky at mast-top height. Screaming air blasted down from it, keeping it up. The air flung ice chips up off the sea. Small green candles lit on and off at the corners of its wind rigs.

It came closer, until Fith had to shield his face from the blitzing air and the ice chips. Then it settled down on the sea crust with a crunch and opened a set of jaws as large as the hrosshvalur’s.

The daemon scooped up the Upplander in his arms. The Upplander shrieked as his broken leg bones ground and rubbed. The daemon didn’t seem particularly bothered. He looked at Fith.

‘Bring him,’ he said, nodding at Brom again. ‘Follow. Don’t touch anything.’

Hawser had been working in the upper strata of Karelia Hive for over eight months when someone from the Council legation finally agreed to see him.

‘You work in the library, don’t you?’ the man asked. His name was Bakunin, and he was an understaffer for Emantine, whose adjunct had repeatedly refused Hawser’s written approaches for an interview or assessment. Indirectly, this meant that Bakunin reported to the municipal and clerical authorities, and was therefore part of the greater administrative mechanism that eventually came to the attention of Jaffed Kelpanton in the Ministry of the Sigillite.

‘Yes, the Library of the Universitariate. But I’m not attached to the Universitariate. It’s a temporary position.’

‘Oh,’ said Bakunin, as if Hawser had said something interesting. The man had one eye on his appointment slate and could not disguise his eagerness to be elsewhere.

They’d met in the culinahalle on Aleksanterinkatu 66106. It was a high-spar place, with a good reputation and great views down over the summitstratum commercias. Acrobats and wire artists were performing over the drop in the late afternoon sun that flooded through the solar frames.

‘So, your position?’ Bakunin inquired. Elegant transhuman waiters with elective augmetic modifications had brought them a kettle of whurpu leaf and a silver tray of snow pastries.

‘I’m contracted to supervise the renovation. I’m a data archaeologist.’

‘Ah yes. I remember. The library was bombed, wasn’t it?’

‘Pro-Panpacifists detonated two wipe devices during the insurrection.’

Bakunin nodded. ‘There can be nothing whatsoever to recover.’

‘The Hive Council certainly didn’t believe so. They passed the area for demolition.’

‘But you disagreed?’

Hawser smiled. ‘I persuaded the Universitariate Board to hire me on a trial basis. So far, I’ve recovered seven thousand texts from an archive that had been deemed worthless.’

‘Good for you,’ said Bakunin. ‘Good for you.’

‘Good for all of us,’ said Hawser. ‘Which brings me to the purpose of this meeting. Have you had a chance to read my petition?’

Bakunin smiled thinly. ‘I confess, no. Not cover to cover. Things are very busy at the moment. I have reviewed it quickly, however. As far as the general thrust of your position goes, I am with you all the way. All the way. But I can’t see how it isn’t already covered under the terms of the Enactment of Remembrance and—’

Hawser raised his hand gently. ‘Please, don’t point me to the Offices of the Remembrancers. My requests keep getting channelled in that direction.’

‘But surely you’re talking about commemoration, about the systematic accumulation of data to document the liberation and unification of human civilisation. We are blessed to be living through the greatest moment in the history of our species, and it is only right that we memorialise it. The Sigillite himself supports and promotes the notion. You know he was a direct signatory of the Enactment?’

‘I know. I am aware of his support. I celebrate it. So often, at the great moments in history, the historian is forgotten.’

‘From my review of your statements and personal history,’ said Bakunin, ‘I am in no doubt that I can secure you a high-profile position in the Remembrance order. I can recommend you, and I’m confident I can do the same for several other names on the list you submitted.’

‘I’m grateful,’ said Hawser, ‘truly, I am. But that’s not why I requested this meeting. The remembrancers perform a vital function. Of course we must record, in great detail, the events that are surrounding us. Of course we must, for the public good, for the greater glory, for posterity, but I am proposing a rather more subtle endeavour, one that I fear is being overlooked. I’m not talking about writing down what we’re doing. I’m talking about writing down what we know. I’m talking about preserving human knowledge, systemising it, working out what we know and what we’ve forgotten.’

The understaffer blinked, and his smile became rather vacuous. ‘That’s surely… pardon me, ser… but that’s surely an organic process of the Imperium. We do that as we go along, don’t we? I mean, we must. We accumulate knowledge.’

‘Yes, but not rigorously, not methodically. And when a resource is lost, like the library here in Karelia, we shrug and say oh dear. But that data wasn’t lost, not all of it. I ask the question – did we even know what we had lost when the wipe devices detonated? Did we have any idea of the holes it was eating in the collective knowledge of our species?’

Bakunin looked uncomfortable.

‘I need someone to champion this, ser,’ Hawser said. He knew he was getting bright-eyed and eager, and he knew that people often found that enthusiasm off-putting. Bakunin looked uneasy but Hawser couldn’t help himself. ‘We… and by we I mean all the academics who have put their names to my petition… we need someone to take this up the line in the Administratum. To get it noticed. To get it to the attention of somebody who has the position and influence to action it.’

‘With respect—’

‘With respect, ser, I do not want to spend the remainder of my career following the various Crusade forces around like a loyal dog, dutifully recording every last detail of their meritorious actions. I want to see a greater process at work, an audit of human knowledge. We must find out the limits of what we know. We must identify the blanks, and then strive to fill those blanks or renovate missing data.’

Bakunin let out a nervous little laugh.

‘It’s no secret that we used to know how to do things that we can’t do anymore,’ said Hawser, ‘great feats of technology, and constructions, miracles of physics. We’ve forgotten how to do things that our ancestors five thousand years ago considered rudimentary. Five thousand years is nothing. It was a golden age, and look at us now, picking through the ashes to put it back together. Everyone knows that the Age of Strife was a dark age during which mankind lost countless treasures. But really, ser, do you know what we lost exactly?’

‘No,’ replied Bakunin.

‘Neither do I,’ Hawser replied. ‘I cannot even tell you something as basic as what we lost. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘Please,’ said Bakunin. He shivered as though he was sitting in a draught. ‘Caches of data are being recovered all the time. Why, just the other day, I heard that we now had complete texts for all three of Shakespire’s plays!’

Hawser looked the understaffer in the eye.

‘Answer me this,’ he said. ‘Does anyone even know why the Age of Strife happened? How did we end up in the great darkness of Old Night to begin with?’

Hawser woke up. He could still smell the whurpu leaf and hear the background chatter of the culinahalle.

Except he couldn’t.

Those things were years ago and far away. He’d blacked out and been dreaming for a second. He could smell blood and lubrication oil. He could smell body odours, scents of dirt and pain.

The pain of his own injuries was incandescent. He wondered if the Astartes – Bear – would give him a shot of something. It didn’t seem likely. Bear’s attitude towards suffering appeared to be fixed to a different scale. It was more probable that the Upplander’s mind would, at some point, cease registering the extremes of pain in a desperate effort to protect itself.

The cabin space was dark around the metal stretcher he had been laid out on. His limbs had been strapped down. They were in the air still. Everything was vibrating. There was a constant howl from the drop-ship’s engines. Every so often, turbulence jolted them.

Bear appeared. He loomed up over the stretcher, looking down. He’d sheared off the burnt ends of his mane of hair, and tied the rest back with a loop of leather. His face was long and noble, with high cheek ridges, a long nose and a prominent mouth, like a snout almost. No, not a snout, a muzzle. The intricate lines of the brown tattoos followed the geometry of Bear’s face, and accented the planes of the cheek and nose, and the angles of the cheeks and brows. His skin was wind-burned and tanned. It looked as if his face had been carved out of hardwood, like the figure post of a wyrmboat.

He stared down at the Upplander. The Upplander realised the Astartes was scanning him with a handheld device.

He clicked it off and put it away.

‘We’re coming in now,’ he said. The Upplander’s translator raced to keep up. ‘There’ll be a surgeon waiting to tend you, but this is a special place. You know that. So let’s start as we mean to go on.’

He reached down, and with the fingers of his left hand, he gouged out the Upplander’s right eye.