Prospero Burns

Three

If the daemon, Bear, represented salvation, then he also represented a final submission. The Upplander no longer needed to fight the cold to stay awake, or the pain to stay alive. He let go, and sank like a rock into the glassy silence of a freezing sea. Pain devoured him. It beset him like a blizzard, so violent and furious that he could see it, even with his blinded eye.

The blizzard continued long after the pain blew out.

They were approaching the special place that Bear had promised to take him to. They were arriving in a snow storm. It was a terrible snow storm.

Or was it white noise? Flecks of static instead of particles of snow? A faulty pict-feed? The signal trash of a damaged augmetic optic? Just fuzz, just buzzing white speckles against—

Against blackness. The blackness, now that had to be real. It was so solid. Solid blackness.

Unless it was blindness. His eye hurt. The absence of it hurt. The socket where his eye had been hurt.

Snow and static, blackness and blindness; the values interchanged. He couldn’t tell them apart. His core temperature was plummeting. Pain was being diluted with numbness. The Upplander knew he had long since ceased to be a reliable witness of events. Consciousness refused to reignite in any stable fashion. He was caught in an ugly cleft of half-awareness, a pitiful fox-hole in the lee-side of a snow-bank of insensibility. It was unbearably hard to distinguish between memories and pain-dreams. Was he seeing white noise on a blacked-out display screen, or blizzarding snow against solid black rock? It was impossible to tell.

He fancied the blackness was a mountain beyond the snow, a mountain that was too big to be a mountain, a black tooth of rock that loomed out of the blizzard, broader and taller than could be taken in at a single glance. It was so big that it had already filled his field of vision, up and down and side to side, before he even realised it was there. At first, he thought it was the blackness of the polar sky, but no, it was a solid wall of rock, rushing towards him.

He sighed, reassured, able at last to comfort himself by definitively separating one memory-fact from dream-fiction. The mountain, that was definitely a dream.

No mountain could be that big.

He was carried in out of the storm, down into the warm and muffled blackness of a deep cave. He lay there and dreamed some more.

The Upplander dreamed for a long time.

The dreams started out as pain-dreams, sharpened by the pangs of his injuries, distorted by opiates flooding into his bloodstream. They were fragments, sharp and imperfect, like segments of a puzzle, or pieces of a broken mirror, interspersed with deadened periods of unconsciousness. They reminded him of the moves of a regicide game, a match between two experienced players. Slow, considered moves, strategically deep, separated by long stretches of contemplative inaction. The regicide board was old and inlaid with ivory. He could smell the lint that had collected in the corners of the board’s case. Nearby, there was a small toy horse, made of wood. He was drinking radapple juice. Someone was playing the clavier.

The sharp edges of his mental fragments dulled, and the dreams became longer and more complex. He began to dream his way through epic cycles of dreams. They lasted years, they enumerated generations, they saw the ice encroach and thaw away again, the ocean harden and return to motion, the sun rush across the cloud-barred sky like a disc of beaten copper, winking, glittering, growing bright like a nova and then dull like a dead stellar ember. Day, night, day, night…

Inside the dreams, men came to him and sat by him in the secret gloom of the cave. They talked. A fire was burning. He could smell the copal resin smoking into the air. He could not see the men, but he could see their shadows, cast up the cave wall by the spitting fire. They were not human. The shadow shapes had animal heads, or antlers, or horns sometimes. Man-shapes sat and panted through dog-snouts. Spiked branches of horn-crest nodded as others spoke. Some were hunched with the weighty shoulder hump of winter-fat cattle. After a while, he became uncertain if he was seeing shadows on the cave wall, or ancient parietal art, smudged lines of ochre and charcoal, that had been lent the illusion of movement by the inconstant flames.

He tried to listen to what was being said by the men during the long, mumbling conversations, but he couldn’t concentrate. He thought that if he was able to focus, he would hear all the secrets of the world come tumbling out in a murmured river, and learn every story from the very first to the very last.

Sometimes the Upplander’s dreams picked him up and carried him outside the cave. They took him up to some high vantage where there were only stars overhead, in a roof of velvet blue, and sunlit lands below, a tapestry of worlds, all sewn together, all the worlds in creation, like the inlaid board of a great game. And on that board, epic histories played out for him. Nations and empires, creeds and races, rising and falling, bonding and fighting, forming alliances, making war. He witnessed unifications, annihilations, reformations, annexations, invasions, expansions, enlightenments. He saw it all from his lofty vantage, a seat so high and precarious that sometimes he had to cling on to the throne’s golden arms for fear of falling.

Sometimes his dreams swept him back inside himself, into his own flesh, into his own blood, and there, at a microscopic level, he observed the universe of his own body as it disassembled atom from atom, his essence sampled down to the smallest genetic packet, like light sifted and split into its component colours by a subtle lens. He felt he was being dismantled, working part from working part, like an old timepiece, and every last piece of the damaskeened movement laid out for repair. He felt like a biological sample: a laboratory animal, belly slit and pegged open, its organs removed one by one like the gears of a pocket watch; like an insect, pinned and minutely sectioned for a glass slide to learn what made it tick.

When his dreams took him back to the cave, where the therianthrope shadows sat muttering in the fire-light, he often felt as if he had been put back together in an altogether different order. If he was an old timepiece, then his dismantled movement had been rearranged, and some parts cleaned or modified, or replaced, and then his mainspring and his escapement, his going train and his balance wheel, and all his tiny levers and pins had been put back together in some inventive new sequence, and his cover screwed shut so that no one could see how he had been re-engineered.

And when he was back in the cave, he thought about the cave itself. Warm, secure, deep in the black rock, out of the storm. But had he been taken back there for his own protection? Or had he been taken back there for safekeeping until the man-shapes around the fire got hungry?

The strangest and most infrequent dreams of all were of the coldest, deepest part of the cave, where a voice spoke to him.

In this place, there was only blackness cut by a cold, blue glow. The air smelled sterile, like rock in a dry polar highland that lacked any water to form ice. It was far away from the soft warmth and the firelight of the cave, far away from the fraternity of murmuring voices and the smell of smouldering resin. The Upplander’s limbs felt leaden there, as though he had swallowed ice, as though cold liquid metal ran in his veins and weighed him down. Even his thoughts were slow and viscous.

He fought against the arctic slowness, afraid to let it pull him down into dreamless sleep and death. The best he could muster felt like a feeble twitch of his heavy limbs.

‘Be still!’

That was the first thing the voice said to him. It was so sudden and unexpected, he froze.

‘Be still!’ the voice repeated. It was a deep, hollow voice, a whisper that carried the force of thunder. It wasn’t particularly human. It sounded as if it had been fashioned out of the bleating, droning notes of an old signal horn. Each syllable and vowel sound was simply the same low, reverberative noise sampled and tonally adjusted.

‘Be still. Stop your twitching and your wriggling.’

‘Where am I?’ the Upplander asked.

‘In the dark,’ the voice replied. It sounded further away, a ram’s horn braying on a lonely cliff.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

There was a silence. Then the voice came again, directly behind the Upplander’s right ear, as if the speaker had circled him.

‘You don’t have to understand the dark. That’s the thing about the dark, it doesn’t need to be understood. It’s just the dark. It is what it is.’

‘But what am I doing here?’ he asked.

When the voice answered, it had receded. It came as a rumble from somewhere ahead of him, like the sound of a wind moaning through empty caves. It said, ‘You’re here to be. You’re here to dream the dreams, that’s all. So just dream the dreams. They’ll help pass the time. Dream the dreams. Stop your twitching and your wriggling. It’s disturbing me.’

The Upplander hesitated. He didn’t like the threat of anger in the voice.

‘I don’t like it here,’ he ventured at length.

‘None of us like it here!’ the voice boomed, right in the Upplander’s left ear. He let out an involuntary squeak of terror. Not only was the voice loud and close and angry, but there was a wet leopard-growl in its thunder.

‘None of us like it here,’ the voice repeated, calmer now, circling him in the darkness. ‘None of us chose to be here. We miss the firelight. We miss the sunlight. We’ve dreamed all the dreams they give us a hundred times over, a thousand times. We know them off by heart. We don’t choose the dark.’

There was a long pause.

‘The dark chooses us.’

‘Who are you?’ the Upplander asked.

‘I was called Cormek,’ the voice said. ‘Cormek Dod.’

‘How long have you been here, Cormek Dod?’

Pause, then a rumble. ‘I forget.’

‘How long have I been here?’

‘I don’t even know who you are,’ the voice replied. ‘Just be still, and shut up your racket, and stop disturbing me.’

Then the Upplander woke up, and he was still on the metal stretcher Bear had strapped him to.

The stretcher was swaying slightly, suspended. The Upplander’s vision swam into focus and he looked up, up at the chains rising from the four corners of the stretcher. They all met at a central ring, and became a single, thicker length of chain. The main chain, dark and oiled, extended up and away, into the oppressive twilight of the vast roof space above him. It felt like a cave, an enormous cave, but it wasn’t the dream-cave where the animal-men had murmured by the firelight, and it wasn’t the deep, cold cave with the blue glow either.

Everything was in shadow, in a twilight of a greenish cast. From what he could make out in the half-light, the cave was a vast space, like the nave of a cathedral, or the belly-hold of a voidship. And it wasn’t actually a cave, because the structural angles and edges were too straight and regular.

The Upplander couldn’t turn his head or move his limbs, but he was relieved to find that he was no longer in pain. There was not even a vestigial nag of discomfort from his torso or his shattered legs.

His relief was rather eclipsed by the anxiety he felt at his new situation: trapped and pinned, strapped down, unable to twist his head to see anything but the black roof space above. A dull, drowsy weight on his heart made him feel sluggish and leaden, as if he’d taken a tranquiliser or a sleeping draught. He blinked, wishing he could rub the grit out of his eyes, wishing the stretcher would stop swinging.

A swaying length of thick chain ran back down out of the darkness at an oblique angle to the central chain supporting him, and from its rhythmic jolts, it seemed clear that he was being hoisted up into the vaulted roof of the cathedral. The links clattered through an invisible block high above him.

He stopped ascending. The stretcher wobbled for a moment, and then swung hard to his left, out across the room, drawn with such force it started to rotate. Then the chain began to rattle back up in fits and starts, and the stretcher began to descend. The taut chains securing the four corners of the stretcher shuddered with every downward jerk.

He began to panic. He strained at the buckled canvas restraints. They wouldn’t give, and he didn’t want to tear or strain any of his wounds.

He came down lower, in a series of jolting drops, onto some sort of deck area or platform. Men moved in quickly from either side to take hold of the stretcher and steady it.

The Upplander looked up at their faces, and his anxiety transmuted into fear.

The men wore robes of simple, poor-quality cloth over tight body-suits of intricately fashioned brown leather. Each leather suit was constructed in artful panels, some shaped, some decorated with piercing or knotwork or furrowed lines, so that the whole resembled an anatomist’s diagram of human musculature: the wall of muscle around the ribs, the tendons of the arms, the sinews of the throat.

Their faces were animal skulls, masks fashioned from bone. Stub horns curled from discoloured skull brows. Branching antler tines rose from unicorn centre-burrs.

The eyes staring out of the mask slits at the Upplander were inhuman. They were the black-pinned yellow eyes of wolves. They shone with their own light.

Get off me! he shouted, but his voice was dust-dry in his throat, as though he hadn’t spoken for centuries. He coughed, panic rising in his chest. The bone faces crowded in around him, puzzled at his antics. All of them smiled the simpleton smile of skulls, the idiot grin of death’s face, but the eyes in the sockets and slits put the lie to that glee. The fire in the yellow eyes was predatory, a fierce intellect, an intent to do harm.

‘Get away from me!’ he cried, finding his voice at last, dragging it out, old and rusty, from the parched creek bed of his throat. ‘Get back!’

The skulls did nothing of the kind. They came closer. Hands sheathed in intricate brown leather gauntlets reached towards his face to clamp his mouth. Some of them had only two or three fingers. Some had dewclaws.

The Upplander began to thrash in his restraints, pulling and twisting in a frenzied effort born of panic. He no longer cared if he tore sutures, or reopened a healing gash, or jarred a mending bone fracture.

Something broke. He felt it snap, thought it was a rib or a hamstring, braced himself for the searing pain.

It was the canvas cuff on his right arm. He’d torn it clean off the metal boss that anchored it to the stretcher’s frame.

He lashed out with his freed arm and felt his knuckles connect with the hard ridges of a skull mask. Something let out a guttural bark of distress. The Upplander punched again, yelling, then he scrabbled at the buckles girthed around his throat, and undid the neck straps. With his throat free, he could lift his shoulders off the hard bed of the stretcher, and raise his head clear of the leather brace that was preventing all lateral movement. He bent up, leaning over to unfasten the canvas cuff holding his left wrist. The right-hand strap was still buckled around his right forearm with a frayed tuft sprouting from its underside where he’d torn it off the steel boss.

The skulls came at him, grabbing him and trying to press him back down. Unbraced, the stretcher swung wildly. The Upplander fought them off. His legs were still strapped in. He punched and twisted, and cursed at them in Low Gothic, Turcic, Croat and Syblemic. They gibbered at him, in commotion, trying to pin him and restrain him.

The Upplander’s right leg came free. He bent it, and then lashed out a kick with as much force as he could muster. He caught one of the skulls full in the chest, and rejoiced to see the figure recoil with enough violence to tumble at least another two of its robed companions backwards.

Then his left leg tore free too. As his weight shifted suddenly, the stretcher tipped and he spilled off, falling into half a dozen of the skulls trying to keep him in place. His fists were flying. The Upplander had never been taught to fight, and he’d never had to, but terror and a frantic survival instinct impelled him, and there didn’t appear to be any huge mystery to it. You swung your fists. If your fists connected with things, you hurt them. The things jerked backwards. They uttered growls of pain or barks of breath. If you were lucky, they fell down. The Upplander milled his arms like a madman. He kicked out. He drove them back. He kicked one of them so hard that it sprawled and broke its skull mask against the smooth granite of the platform.

The Upplander found his feet. The skulls were circling him, but they had become wary. Some of them had been bruised by his slugging fists. He snarled at them, stamping his feet and gesticulating wildly with his fists, as though he was trying to scare off a flock of birds. The skulls drew back a little.

The Upplander took a second to get his bearings.

He was standing on a platform of dark granite, a shelf that had been cut, sharp and square-edged, from the rock around it. Behind him, the stretcher was swinging on its chains. To his left, a row of oblong granite blocks lined one side of the platform, permanent catafalques onto which stretchers like his own could be lowered and rested. Above him dangled four or five more chain pulleys of various gauges and sizes.

To his right, the platform overhung a gulf. It went straight down into darkness, and smelled of wet minerals and the centre of the world. The gulf was a shaft, rectangular in cross-section, and the sides of the shaft had been cut, like the platform, out of the living rock. The shaft dropped into the darkness below him in square-cut, oblong bites, like the layers of a cake, or the cubic levels of a monolithic quarry. They looked like they had been cut with sideways slices of a giant chisel.

All around him, the chamber rose in majesty, its cyclopean walls rock-hewn like the shaft, too regular and rectilinear to be a natural cave, too make-shift and imperfect to have been planned in one piece. Monumental stonemasons and mining engineers had opened this cavity over a period of decades or centuries, excising one or two levels of oblong blocks at a time, increasing the space in rectilinear levels, quarrying each layer of stone away and leaving artificial lines of division and stratification in the gigantic walls. Each phase must have been a monstrous effort, from the sheer tonnage of rock alone. The square-cut bites showed how huge and unwieldy each removed block of stone must have been. The cubic mass of a mountain had been hollowed out of the heart of a bigger mountain.

The platform and the shaft top were lit by the frosty green twilight. Watermarks streaked the horizontally scored, stratified walls, leaving downstrokes of emerald minerals and algae stain. The Upplander could not see how far up the ceiling was, because it was lost in the cavity’s darkness.

He edged backwards, the skulls around him. He became conscious of the way that every sound they made became a deep bell-echo in the vast chamber. He tried to move to keep the catafalques between him and the skulls. They circled in between the biers, trying to outflank him. He noticed that, although they looked solid-hewn, the catafalques had metal plates set in their sides. The plates incorporated vent caps, indicator lights and recognisably Terran control pads. Stout, reinforced metal ducting sprouted like drainpipes from the plates and disappeared flush into the platform. There was tech in this primordially quarried chamber, a lot of tech, and it was largely concealed.

The skulls attempted to rush him. The Upplander darted backwards and reached the pendulating stretcher. He grabbed its metal frame and steered it at the skulls, ramming it at them. They jumped back out of its way, and he rammed it again to keep them at bay. He saw the buckled canvas cuffs anchored to the stretcher’s bed. He had assumed he’d simply pulled them all off their pins, like the right-hand cuff that was still fastened around his forearm. But both leg straps and the left-hand cuff had been ripped. The waxed canvas and leather trusses had torn open along their stitching. He’d as good as wrenched himself free of his bonds.

The thought disturbed him. He was sick and injured, surely? He didn’t feel sick and injured. The Upplander looked down at himself. He was whole. His feet were bare. They were pink and clean. The still-buckled canvas cuff hung around his right wrist. His body was cased in a dark grey bodyglove with reinforced panels at the major joints like the undersuit of some void-armour. It was tight and form-fitting. It revealed a figure that looked remarkably lean and strong, with surprising muscle definition. It did not look like the well-worn, over-taxed eighty-three year-old body he had last looked down at. No thickness at the hips, no incipient paunch from too many amasecs over too many years.

No augmetic implant from that day in Ossetia.

‘What the hell…?’ the Upplander breathed.

Sensing his sudden disconcertion, the skulls came at him.

He swung the stretcher into them with all the force he could muster. Its metal nose caught one in the breastbone, and almost flipped it onto its back. He glimpsed a cracked dog-skull mask, strap broken, sliding away across the platform. Another skull grabbed the opposite end of the stretcher and tried to wrench it out of his hands. The Upplander uttered a despairing, denying cry that echoed around the vast chamber, and hauled the stretcher out of the skull’s grip. The skull’s feet left the ground for a moment as it tried to cling on.

The Upplander pulled the stretcher right back and let it fly. It swung like a wrecking ball. It struck one skull down and slammed into a second, knocking it off the edge of the platform into the gulf.

The skull managed to catch the lip of the platform as it went over. Its hands clawed frantically at the granite surfaces. The weight of its legs and body slid it backwards. The other skulls rushed forwards and grabbed it by the hands and sleeves.

While they were occupied pulling their kin to safety, the Upplander ran.

He left the chamber, his bare feet slapping against the cool stone floor. He passed under a broad lintel, and down the throat of an entrance hall big enough to fly a cargo spinner through. The permeating green dusk cast a confused light. His shadow ran away from him in different directions.

The grand entrance hall, and the rock-cut tunnel that lay beyond it, were more finished than the vast chamber behind him. The rock walls had been planed or polished to a dull shine, like dark water ice in the middle of a hard winter. The floor was stone. The ceiling, and the edges of the floor where it met the wall, along with the interspersed archways, ribs and regular wall panels, were dressed in beams and fittings of gleaming off-white, like varnished blond wood. Most of the white wood finishings were massive, as thick as tree boles, and hard-edged, although some were expertly curved to form arches, or chamfered to make wall ribs.

The gloomy place made memories fire in his head, sudden and sharp. The halls reminded him of ikon caskets he had once recovered from atomic bunkers under the nanotic ground zero outside Zincirli, in Federated Islahiye. They reminded him of Gaduarene reliquaries with their engravings of lightning stones, and the case of Rector Uwe’s treasured old regicide set. They reminded him of the elegant, silk-lined boxes of the Daumarl Medal. They reminded him of Ossetian prayer boxes, the ones made of grey slate set into frames of expertly worked ivory. Yes, that was it. Gold sheets, hammered around carcasses of wood and pin-screwed bone, so old, so precious. The white posts and pillars finishing his surroundings looked like they were made of bone. They had an unmistakable, slightly golden, cast, a warmth. He felt as if he were inside a box of Ossetian slate lined with ivory, as if he were the ancient treasure, the rusted nail, the lock of saintly hair, the flaking parchment, the keepsake.

He kept running, straining to hear whether he was being followed. The only sounds were the slaps of his soles and the faraway sigh of wind gusting along empty hallways. The draught made it feel as though he were in some high castle, where a casement shutter had been left open somewhere, allowing air to stir through unpopulated chambers.

He stopped for a moment. Turning to his left, he could feel the breath of the wind against his face, a faint positive pressure from one direction.

Then he heard something else, a ticking sound. A clicking. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It was ticking like a clock, but faster, like an urgent heartbeat.

He slowly made sense of what he was hearing.

Something was padding along the stone floor of the tunnel, somewhere close by, a quadruped, soft-footed, moving with purpose, but not running. It had claws, not the retractable claws of a feline, but the claws of a dog, prominent and unconcealed, the wear-blunted tips tap-tap-tapping on the stone floor with every step.

He was being stalked. He was being hunted.

He started to run again. The tunnel broadened out, under a fine, spandrelled arch of blond wood, and revealed a great flight of stairs up ahead. The steps were cut from the native rock, square and plain. They became winders after the first ten steps where the flight turned away. The depth of the tread and the height of the risers were two or three times the normal dimensions. It was a giant’s staircase.

He heard the claw-clicks closing in behind him, and began to bound up the steps. The lustrous green twilight threw strange shadows. His own shadow loomed alarmingly at his side, staining the wall like the therianthropic shapes in his dream-cave. His shadow-head looked more like an animal’s on the curving wall, so much so that he had to stop for a moment and feel at his face to check that he had not woken in possession of a snout or muzzle.

His fingers found the lean flesh of his face, human and familiar, with a trace of moustache and a patch of beard on the chin.

Then he realised he could only see out of one eye.

The last breathing memory he had was of Bear taking his right eye out with his fingers. The pain had been dull, but enough to shock him into unconsciousness.

Yet it was his right eye he could see out of. It was his right eye that was showing him the frosty green twilight around him. His left eye registered only blackness.

The claw-taps approached behind him, louder, nearly at the bullnose step at the foot of the flight. He resumed his escape. Looking down, he watched the shadows on the winding steps move and alter behind him. The edge-step shadows fanned out into a radiating geometric diagram, like the delicate compartments of a giant spiral seashell, or the partitioned divisions of some intricate brass astrolabe or timepiece.

Tick, tick, tick – each second, each step, each stair, each turn, each division.

A new shadow loomed below him. It spread up across the outside wall of the giant staircase, cast by something on the stairs but out of sight around the turn.

It was canine. Its head was down, and its ears were forward and alert. Its back, thickly furred, was arched and tensed. Its forepaws rose and took each step with mesmeric precision and grace. The ticking had slowed down.

‘I’m not afraid of you!’ he cried. ‘There are no wolves on Fenris!’

He was answered by a wet throat-growl that touched some infrasonic pitch of terror. He turned and ran, but his foot caught a step wrong, and he tripped and fell hard. Something seized him from behind, something powerful. He cried out, imagining jaws closing on his back.

A tight grip rolled him onto his back on the steps. There was a giant standing over him, but it was a man, not a wolf.

The face was all he saw. It was sheathed in a tight mask of lacquered brown leather, part man, part daemon-wolf, as intricately made as the body-suits of the skulls. Knotted and straked, the leather pieces circled the eye sockets and made heavy lids. They barred the cheek like exposed sinew, and buffered the chin. They wrapped the throat, and were shaped to mimic a long moustache and a bound-up tusk of chin-beard. The eyes revealed through the mask slits were the colour of spun gold with black pinprick pupils.

The mouth held bright fangs.

‘What are you doing here?’ the giant rumbled. It bent down and sniffed at him. ‘You’re not meant to be here. Why are you here?’

‘I don’t understand!’ the Upplander quailed.

‘What are you called?’ the giant asked.

Some shred of wit remained in the Upplander’s head.

‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ he replied.

The giant grasped him by the upper arm and dragged him the rest of the way up the stairs. The Upplander scrambled to keep up, his feet slipping and milling, like a child pulled along by an adult. The giant had a lush black pelt around one shoulder and his immense, corded physique was packed into a leatherwork bodyglove. The build, the scope of the giant’s physicality, was unmistakable.

‘You’re Astartes…’ the Upplander ventured, half-running, half-slithering in response to the dragging grip.

‘What?’

‘Astartes. I said, you’re—’

‘Of course I’m Astartes!’ the giant rumbled.

‘Do you have a name?’

‘Of course I have a name!’

‘W-what is it?’

‘It’s shut up or I’ll slit your bloody throat! That’s what it is! All right?’

They had reached a landing, and then the doorway of a massive but low-ceilinged chamber. The Upplander felt heat, the warmth of flame. Vision was suddenly, curiously, returning to his dead left eye. He could see a dull, fiery glow ahead. It was enough to catch the shape of things in the dark, the shape of things his right eye saw in hard, cold, green relief.

The giant dragged him in through the stone archway.

The chamber was circular, at least thirty metres across. The floor was a great disk of polished bone or pale wood, laid in almost seamless sections. There were three plinths in the room, each one a broad, circular platform of grey stone about five metres in diameter rising about a metre off the bone floor. Each plinth was simply cut and worked smooth. In the centre of each was a firepit, crackling with well-fed flames, oozing a blush of heat into the air. Conical iron hoods hung down over each fire from the low, domed ceiling to vent the smoke.

Through his right eye, the chamber was a bright place of spectral green light. The licking flames were blooming white in their brightness. To his left, it was a dark, ruddy cave suffused by an uneven golden glow from the fires. The expanse of bone floor and brushed pale stone reflected the firelight’s radiance. Opposite the chamber door, where the low wall met the down-curved edge of the domed roof, there were shallow, horizontal window slits, like the ports of a gun emplacement. The depth of the angled recesses around the slits spoke of the extraordinary thickness of the walls.

Four men occupied the room, all seated on the flat top of the furthest plinth. All of them were giants in furs and leather like the one who clasped his arm.

They were relaxed, sipping from silver drinking bowls, playing games with bone counters on wooden boards laid out on the plinth between them. It looked like one of the men, cross-legged and nearest the firepit, was playing all of the other three, simultaneously running three boards.

They looked from their games, four more daemon faces cased in tight leather masks, four more sets of yellow eyes, catching the lamplight like mirrors. The flash was brightest in the green-cast view of the Upplander’s right eye.

‘What have you found now, Trunc?’ asked one.

‘I’ve found Ahmad Ibn Rustah on the Chapter stairs is what I’ve found,’ replied the giant holding him.

Two of the men by the fire snorted, and one tapped a finger to his crown to imply a touch of simple-headedness.

‘And what’s an Ahmad Ibn Rustah, then?’ asked the first one again. The pelt he was wearing was red-brown, and his hair, long and braided stiff with wax or lacquer, projected out of the back of his full-head mask in an S-curve like a striking serpent.

‘Don’t you remember?’ the giant replied. ‘Don’t you remember, Var?’ The giant let go of the Upplander’s arm and shoved him down onto the bone floor until he was kneeling. The floor was warm to the touch, like fine ivory.

‘I remember you talking shit yesterday, Trunc,’ returned Var of the serpent-crest. ‘And the day before that, and the day before that. It all blurs into one to me.’

‘Yes? Bite my hairy arse.’

The men lounging on the plinth burst out laughing, all except the one sitting cross-legged.

‘I remember,’ he said. His voice was like good steel drawing across an oiled whetstone. The others fell silent.

‘You do?’ asked Trunc.

The one sitting cross-legged nodded. His mask was the most intricate of all. The cheeks and brow were seething with interlocking figures and spiralling ribbon-shapes. His wide shoulders were draped with two pelts, one coal-black, the other white.

‘Yes. And you’d remember him too, Varangr, if you only thought about it for a bloody minute.’

‘I would?’ asked Var of the serpent-crest uncertainly.

‘Yes, you would. It was Gedrath. It was the old Jarl of Tra. Remember now?’

Var nodded. The crest of bound hair went up and down like the arm of a hand pump. ‘Oh, yes, Skarsi, I do. I do!’

‘Good,’ said the man in the black and white pelts, and casually fetched Var an open-handed clip around the side of the head that seemed to deliver the same playful force of a mallet seating a fence-post.

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Var mumbled.

The man in the black and white pelts uncrossed his legs, slipped to the edge of the plinth, and stood up.

‘What do we do with him, Skarsi?’ Trunc asked.

‘Well,’ the man said, ‘I suppose we could eat him.’

He stared down at the kneeling Upplander.

‘That was a joke,’ he said.

‘I don’t think he’s laughing, Skarsi,’ said one of the others.

The man in the black and white pelts aimed an index finger at Trunc.

‘You go down and find out why he’s awake.’

‘Yes, Skarsi,’ Trunc nodded.

Skarsi turned the finger towards Varangr.

‘Var? You go and find the gothi. Bring him here. He’ll know what’s to be done.’

Var nodded his serpent-crest again.

Skarsi pointed at the other two men. ‘You two, go and… just go. We’ll finish the game-circle later.’

The two men got off the plinth and followed Var and Trunc towards the chamber door. ‘Just because you were losing, Skarsi,’ laughed one of them as he went by.

‘You’ll look pretty funny with a hneftafl board jammed up your arse,’ Skarsi replied. The men laughed again.

When the four of them had passed through the arched doorway and out of sight, Skarsi turned back to the Upplander and hunkered down to face him with his hands clasped and his elbows resting on his knees. He cocked his huge, masked head on one side, studying the man kneeling on the floor in front of him.

‘So, you’re Ibn Rustah, then?’

The Upplander didn’t reply at first.

‘You got a voice in you?’ Skarsi asked, ‘or is it just the words I’m using?’ He tapped the lips of his tight leather mask. ‘Words? Yes? You need a translator? A translator?’

The Upplander put his hand to his chest, and then remembered that his environment suit was long gone.

‘I’ve lost my translator unit,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know where it went. But I understand you. I’m not sure how. What are you speaking?’

Skarsi shrugged. ‘Words?’

‘What language?’

‘Uh, Juvjk, we call it. Hearth-cant. If I speak Low Gothic like this, is it any better?’

‘Did you switch just then?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Between Juvjk and Low? Yes.’

The Upplander shook his head, slightly mystified.

‘I heard a sort of accent shift,’ he replied, ‘but the words stayed the same. It was all just the same.’

‘You know you’re speaking Juvjk back to me, don’t you?’ Skarsi said.

The Upplander hesitated. He swallowed.

‘I couldn’t speak Juvjk yesterday,’ he confessed.

‘That’s what a good night’s sleep’ll do for you,’ said Skarsi. He rose. ‘Get up and come sit over here,’ he said, pointing at the plinth where the four Astartes had been gaming. The Upplander got up and followed him.

‘You’re Space Wolves, aren’t you?’

Skarsi found that amusing. ‘Oh, now those words aren’t Juvjk. Space Wolves? Ha ha. We don’t use that term.’

‘What do you use, then?’

‘The Vlka Fenryka, if we’re being formal. Just the Rout, otherwise.’

He beckoned the Upplander to sit on the broad stone plinth, sliding one of the wooden game-boards out of his way. In the firepit, kindling spat and cracked, and the Upplander could feel the fierce press of heat against his left side.

‘You’re Skarsi?’ he asked. ‘Your name?’

Skarsi nodded, taking a sip of dark liquid from a silver bowl.

‘That’s so. Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl of Fyf.’

‘You’re some kind of lord?’

‘Yes. Some kind.’ Skarsi appeared to smile behind his mask.

‘What does Jarl of Fyf mean, then? What language is that?’

Skarsi picked up one of the bone-disc counters from the game boards and started to play with it absent-mindedly.

‘It’s Wurgen.’

‘Wurgen?’

‘You ask a lot of questions.’

‘I do,’ said the Upplander. ‘It’s what I do. It’s why I came here.’

Skarsi nodded. He flipped the counter back onto the board. ‘It’s why you came here, eh? To ask questions? I can think of plenty of better reasons for going to a place.’ He looked at the Upplander. ‘And where is here, Ahmad Ibn Rustah?’

‘Fenris. The fortress of the Sixth Legion Astartes, called – forgive me – the Space Wolves. The fortress is known as the Fang. Am I right?’

‘Yes. Except only an idiot calls it the Fang.’

‘What does a man call it if he isn’t an idiot?’ the Upplander asked.

‘The Aett,’ said Skarsi.

‘The Aett? Just the Aett?’

‘Yes.’

‘Literally clan-home, or fireplace? Or… den?’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘Am I annoying you with my questions, Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson?’

Skarsi grunted. ‘You are.’

The Upplander nodded. ‘Useful to know.’

‘Why?’ asked Skarsi.

‘Because if I’m going to be here, and I’m going to ask my questions, I’d best be aware of how many I can get away with at a time. I wouldn’t want to piss the Vlka Fenryka off so much they decide to eat me.’

Skarsi shrugged and crossed his legs.

‘No one’s going to eat you for that,’ he said.

‘I know. I was joking,’ said the Upplander.

‘I wasn’t,’ replied Skarsi. ‘You’re under Ogvai’s protection, so only he can decide who gets to eat you.’

The Upplander paused. The heat of the firepit against the side of his face and neck suddenly felt unpleasantly intense. He swallowed.

‘The Vlka Fenryka… they’re capable of cannibalism then, are they?’

‘We’re capable of anything,’ replied Skarsi. ‘That’s the whole point of us.’

The Upplander slid off the plinth and stood up. He wasn’t sure if he was moving away from the Astartes lord or the disagreeable heat. He just wanted to move away, to walk around.

‘So who… so who’s this Ogvai who has power over my life?’

Skarsi took another sip from his bowl.

‘Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of Tra.’

‘Earlier, I heard you say someone called Gedrath was Jarl of Tra.’

‘He was,’ said Skarsi. ‘Gedrath’s sleeping on the red snow now, so Og’s jarl. But Og has to honour any of Gedrath’s decisions. Like bringing you here under protection.’

The Upplander moved around the room, his arms folded against his chest.

‘So jarl. That’s lord, we’ve established. And tra and fyf? They’re numbers?’

‘Uh huh,’ nodded Skarsi. ‘Three and five. Onn, twa, tra, for, fyf, sesc, sepp, for-twa, tra-tra, dekk.’

‘So you’re lord of five, and this Ogvai is lord of three? Fifth and third… what? Warbands? Divisions? Regiments?’

‘Companies. We call them companies.’

‘And that’s in… Wurgen?’

‘Yes, Wurgen. Juvjk is hearth-cant, Wurgen is war-cant.’

‘A specialised combat language? A battle tongue?’

Skarsi waved his hand in a distracted manner. ‘Whatever you want to call it.’

‘You have a language for fighting and a language for when you’re not fighting?’

‘Fenrys hjolda! The questions never end!’

‘There’s always something else to know,’ said the Upplander. ‘There’s always more to know.’

‘Not true. There’s such a thing as too much.’

This last comment had been made by a new voice. Another Astartes had entered the chamber behind the Upplander, silent as the first snow. Varangr lurked at his heels in the doorway.

The newcomer had the stature of all of his breed, and was dressed in a knotwork leather suit like the others the Upplander had encountered. But he was not masked.

His head was shaved, apart from a stiffly waxed and braided beard that curled like a horn from his chin. There was a cap of soft leather on his scalp, and a faded tracery of tattooed lines and dots on the weather-beaten flesh of his face. In common with all of the Vlka Fenryka the Upplander had seen, the newcomer’s eyes were black-centred gold, and his lean, craggy face was noticeably elongated around the nose and mouth, as if he had the hint of a snout. When he opened his mouth to speak, the Upplander saw what the extended jaw was made to conceal. The newcomer’s dentition resembled that of a mature forest wolf. The canines in particular were the longest the Upplander had seen.

‘There’s such a thing as too much,’ the newcomer repeated.

‘Exactly!’ Skarsi exclaimed, getting up. ‘Too much! That’s exactly what I was saying! You explain it to him, gothi! Better still, you try answering his endless questions!’

‘If I can,’ said the newcomer. He gazed at the Upplander. ‘What is the next question?’

The Upplander tried to return the stare without flinching.

‘What did that remark mean? Too much?’ he asked.

‘Even knowledge has its limits. There is a place where it becomes unsafe.’

‘You can know too much?’ asked the Upplander.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘I disagree.’

The newcomer smiled slightly. ‘Of course you do. I am not at all surprised.’

‘Do you have a name?’ the Upplander asked him.

‘We all have names. Some of us have more than one. Mine is Ohthere Wyrdmake. I am rune priest to Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson. What is your next question?’

‘What is a rune priest?’

‘What do you suppose it is?’

‘A shaman. A practitioner of ritual.’

‘A rattler of bones. A pagan wizard. You can barely disguise the superior tone in your voice.’

‘No, I meant no affront,’ the Upplander said quickly. The priest’s lips had curled into an unpleasant snarl.

‘What is your next question?’

The Upplander hesitated again.

‘How did Gedrath, Jarl of Tra, die?’

‘He died the way we all die,’ said Skarsi, ‘with red snow under him.’

‘It must have been sudden. In the last few days.’

Skarsi looked at the rune priest.

‘It was a time ago,’ the priest told the Upplander.

‘But Gedrath gave me his protection, and that has passed to Ogvai. Ogvai must have replaced him in the last week. What? Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘You are basing your assumptions on a false premise,’ said Ohthere Wyrdmake.

‘Really?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Yes,’ said the priest. ‘You’ve been here for nineteen years.’