Prospero Burns

Four

They gave Hawser the Prix Daumarl. When he was told of the decision, he felt flattered and nonplussed. ‘I’ve done nothing,’ he said to his colleagues.

There had been a shortlist of notable candidates, but in the end it had come down to Hawser, and a neuroplasticist who had eradicated the three strands of nanomnemonic plague devastating Iberolatinate Sud Merica. ‘He’s done something, a considerable something, and I’ve done nothing,’ Hawser complained when he found out.

‘Don’t you want the prize?’ Vasiliy asked. ‘I hear the medal is very pretty.’

It was very pretty. It was gold, about the size of a pocket watch, and it came mounted in a Vitrian frame in an elegant casket lined with shot purple silk. The citation bore the hololithic crests of the Atlantic legislature and the Hegemon, and carried the gene-seals of three members of the Unification Council. It began, ‘Kasper Ansbach Hawser, for steadfast contributions towards the definition and accomplishment of Terran Unification…’

Soon after the presentation, Hawser learned that the whole thing was politicking, which he generally detested, though he did not speak up as the politicking in this instance served the cause of the Conservatory.

The award was presented at a dinner held in Karcom on the Atlantic platforms, just after the midsummer of Hawser’s seventy-fifth year. The dinner was arranged to coincide with the Midlantik Conclave, and thus served as an opportunity to celebrate the Conservatory’s thirtieth anniversary.

Hawser found it all rather dreadful. He spent the evening with the elegant little purple box clutched to his chest and a sick smile on his face waiting for the interminable speeches to conclude. Of the many dignitaries and men of influence attending the dinner that midsummer night, no one was paid more deference than Giro Emantine. By then, Emantine was prefect-secretary to one of the Unification Council’s most senior members, and the common understanding was that Emantine would be given the next seat that came vacant. He was an old man, rumoured to be on his third juvenat. He was accompanied by a remarkably young, remarkably beautiful and remarkably silent woman. Hawser couldn’t decide if she was Emantine’s daughter, a vulgar trophy wife, or a nurse.

Emantine’s status placed him directly at the right hand of the Atlantic Chancellor (though nominally the guest of honour, Hawser was three seats down to the left, between an industrial cyberneticist and the chairman of one of the orbital banking houses). When it was Emantine’s turn to speak, he appeared to have great difficulty in remembering who Hawser was, because he spoke fondly of their ‘long friendship’ and ‘close working association’ down the ‘many years since Kas first spoke to me about the notion of founding the Conservatory.’

‘I’ve met him three times in thirty years,’ Hawser whispered to Vasiliy.

‘Shut up and keep smiling,’ Vasiliy hissed back.

‘None of this actually occurred.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Do you suppose he’s on some kind of strong medication?’

‘Oh, Kas! Shut up!’ Vasiliy bent close to Hawser’s ear. ‘This is just the way things are done. Besides, it makes the Conservatory look good. Oh, and his adjunct has informed me that he’ll want to see you afterwards.’

After the dinner, Vasiliy escorted Hawser up to the Chancellor’s Residence on Marianas Derrick.

‘It’s a beautiful city,’ Hawser remarked as they walked up the terrace. He had drunk a couple of amasecs at the end of the meal to settle himself for the acceptance speech, and then there had been the toasting, so he was in a wistful mood.

Vasiliy waited patiently for a moment as Hawser stopped to admire the view. From the terrace they could see out across the plated scape of Karcom and beyond. It glittered in the late sun, the surface of a metropolitan skin nine kilometres thick that capped and encased the ancient dead ocean like an ice-pack. Shoals of aircraft, silver in the sunlight like reef-fish, flitted and drifted over the scape.

‘Amazing enough that man could build this,’ said Hawser, ‘let alone build it three times.’

‘Man probably shouldn’t have kept nuking it, then, should he?’ said Vasiliy.

Hawser looked at his mediary. Vasiliy was terribly young, little more than twenty-five. ‘Isak Vasiliy, you have no soul,’ he pronounced.

‘Ah, but that’s why you hired me,’ Vasiliy replied. ‘I don’t let sentiment get in the way of efficiency.’

‘There is that.’

‘Besides, to me the very fact that the Atlantic platforms have been obliterated and re-built twice is symbolic of the Conservatory’s work. Nothing is so great that it cannot be recovered and restored. Nothing is impossible.’

They went into the Residence. Ridiculously ornate robotic servitors imported from Mars were attending the select group of guests. The Chancellor had commissioned the machines directly from the Mondus Gamma Forge of Lukas Chrom, an ostentatious show of status.

The windows of the Residence had been dimmed against the glare of the setting sun. A pair of servitors in the shape of humming birds brought Hawser a glass of amasec.

‘Drink it slowly,’ Vasiliy advised discreetly. ‘When you speak to Emantine, you need to be coherent.’

‘I doubt I’ll drink it at all,’ Hawser said. He’d taken a sip. The amasec served by the Atlantic Chancellor was of such a fine and extravagantly expensive vintage, it didn’t really taste like amasec anymore.

Emantine approached after a few minutes, his silent female companion in tow. He shed his previous conversational partners behind him like a snake sloughing skin; they knew when their brief allotted audiences with the prefect-secretary were done.

‘Kasper,’ Emanatine said.

‘Ser.’

‘Congratulations on the prize. A worthy award.’

‘Thank you. I… Thank you, ser. This is my mediary, Isak Vasiliy.’

Emantine did not register anyone as lowly as Vasiliy. Hawser felt the prefect-secretary was only registering him because he had to. Emantine drew Hawser away towards the windows.

‘Thirty years,’ Emantine said. ‘Can it really be thirty years since all this began?’

Hawser assumed the prefect-secretary meant the Conservatory. ‘Nearly fifty, actually.’

‘Really?’

‘We measure the life of the Conservatory from its first charter at the Conclave of Lutetia, which was thirty years ago this summer, but it took nearly twenty years to get the movement to that place. It must be fifty years ago I first contacted your office to discuss the very basic first steps. That would have been in Karelia. Karelia Hive. You were with the legation back then, and I dealt, for a long time, with several of your understaffers. I had a dialogue with them for a number of years, actually, before I met you for the first time and—’

‘Fifty years, eh? My my. Karelia, you say? Another life.’

‘Yes, it feels like that, doesn’t it? So, yes, I worked with a number of adjuncts to get some awareness. Made a bit of a nuisance of myself, I’m sure. Doling was one. Barantz, I remember. Bakunin.’

‘I don’t remember them,’ the prefect-secretary said. His smile had become rather fixed. Hawser took a sip of his amasec. He felt slightly invigorated, slightly warm. He had become fixated upon Emantine’s hand, which was holding a crystal thimble of some green digestif. The hand was perfect. It was clean and manicured, scented, graceful. The skin was white and unblemished and uncreased, and the flesh plump and supple. There were no signs at all of the consequences of age, no wrinkles, no liver spots, no discolourations. The nails were clean. It wasn’t the gnarled, sunken, prominently-veined claw of a hundred and ninety year-old man, and prefect-secretary Giro Emantine was at least that. It was the hand of a young man. Hawser wondered if the young man was missing it. The thought made him snigger.

Of course, the prefect-secretary had access to the best juvenat refinements Terran science could afford. The treatments were so good, they didn’t even look like juvenat treatments, not like the work Hawser had had done at sixty, plumping his flesh with collagenics, and filling his creases and wrinkles with dermics, and perma-staining his skin a ‘healthy’ tanned colour with nanotic pigments, and cleaning his eyes and his organs, and resculpting his chin, and pinching his cheeks until he looked like a re-touched hololith portrait of himself. Emantine probably had gene therapies and skeleto-muscular grafts, implants, underweaves, transfixes, stem-splices…

Maybe it was a young man’s hand. Maybe the skinweaves were why the prefect-secretary’s smile looked so fixed.

‘You don’t remember Doling or Bakunin?’ Hawser asked.

‘They were understaffers, you say? It was a long time ago,’ Emantine replied. ‘They’ve all climbed the ladders of advancement, been posted and promoted and transferred. One doesn’t keep track. One can’t, not when one runs a staff of eighty thousand. I have no doubt they’re all governing their own ecumenopolises by now.’

There was a slightly awkward pause.

‘Anyway,’ said Hawser, ‘I should like to thank you for getting behind the idea of the Conservatory all those years ago, be it thirty or fifty.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Emantine.

‘I appreciate it. We all do.’

‘I can’t take the credit,’ said Emantine.

Of course you damn well can’t, Hawser thought.

‘But the idea always had merit,’ Emantine went on, as if he was content to take the credit anyway. ‘I always said it had merit. Too easily overlooked in the headlong rush to build a better world. Not a priority, some said. The needs – and they’re budgetary often – of Unification and consolidation far exceed conservation. But, we stuck to it. What is it now, thirty thousand officers worldwide?’

‘That’s just direct. It’s closer to a quarter of a million counting freelance associates and archaeologists, and the off-world numbers.’

‘Superb,’ said Emantine. Hawser continued to stare at his hand. ‘Then of course, there’s the renewal of the charter, which is never opposed. Everyone now understands the importance of the Conservatory.’

‘Not quite everyone,’ said Hawser.

‘Everyone who matters, Kasper. You know the Sigillite himself is keenly interested in the Conservatory’s work?’

‘I had heard that,’ Hawser replied.

‘Keenly interested,’ Emantine repeated. ‘Every time I meet with him, he asks for the latest transcripts and reports. Do you know him at all?’

‘The Sigillite? No, I’ve never met him.’

‘Extraordinary man,’ said Emantine. ‘I’ve heard he even discusses the Conservatory’s work with the Emperor on occasion.’

‘Really?’ said Hawser. ‘Do you know him?’

‘The Emperor?’

‘Yes.’

A slightly glassy expression flickered across the prefect-secretary’s face, as if he wasn’t sure if he was being mocked.

‘No, I… I’ve never met him.’

‘Ah.’

Emantine nodded at the purple box still clamped under Hawser’s arm. ‘You deserve that, Kasper. And so does the Conservatory. It’s part of the recognition we were talking about. It’s high-profile, and it’ll bring around those few closed minds.’

‘Bring them around to what?’ asked Hawser.

‘Well, support. Support is vital, particularly in the current climate.’

‘What current climate?’

‘You should cherish that award, Kaspar. To me, it says that the Conservatory has matured into a global force for Unification…’

And it doesn’t hurt at all that your name is forever attached to it by the simple accident that you were at the top of the bureaucratic chain I first approached, Hawser thought. This has done your career no harm, Giro Emantine. To recognise the importance of the Conservatory project, to give it your support and backing when others scorned it. Why, what a wise, humanitarian and selfless man you must be! Not like all those other politicians.

The prefect-secretary was still speaking. ‘So we need to be ready for changes in the next decade,’ he was saying.

‘Uhm, changes?’

‘The Conservatory has become a victim of its own success!’ Emantine laughed.

‘It has?’

‘Whether we like it or not, it’s time to consider legitimacy. I can’t nursemaid the Conservatory forever. My future is beckoning in different ways. A seneschalship to Luna or Mars, maybe.’

‘A seat on the Council, I was told.’

Emantine pulled a modest face. ‘Oh, I don’t know.’

‘It’s what I heard.’

‘The point is, I can’t protect you forever,’ said Emantine.

‘I wasn’t aware the Conservatory was being protected at all.’

‘Its resource and personnel budget has become quite considerable.’

‘And is scrupulously policed.’

‘Of course. But it’s the mandate that bothers some. It’s having what is essentially a vital organ of government, a key and growing human resource, functioning separately from the Hegemonic Administration.’

‘That’s just the way it is,’ replied Hawser. ‘That’s just the way it’s evolved. We’re transparent and open to all. We’re a public office.’

‘It might be time to consider bringing the Conservatory in under the umbrella of the Administration,’ said Emantine. ‘It might be better that way. Centralised, which would help with the bureaucratic management, and with archiving and access, not to mention funding.’

‘We’d become part of the Administratum?’

‘Really just for book-keeping purposes,’ replied the prefect-secretary.

‘I… well, I think I’d be a little hesitant. Resistant, in fact. I think we all would.’

The prefect-secretary put his digestif down and reached out his hand to clasp it around Hawser’s. His young man’s fingers enclosed Hawser’s grandfather hand.

‘We must all move with a fluid, common purpose towards Unification, that’s what the Sigillite says,’ said Emantine.

‘The Unification of Terra and the Imperium,’ replied Hawser. ‘Not the literal union of the intellectual branches of mankind that—’

‘Doctor Hawser, they may refuse to renew the charter if you resist. You’ve spent thirty years showing them that the systematic conservation of knowledge is important. Now the feeling is – and it’s shared by many on the Council – conservation of knowledge is so important, it’s time it was conducted by the Administration of the Hegemony. It needs to be official and sanctioned and central.’

‘I see.’

‘Over the next few months, I’m going to be handing off a lot of responsibilities to my undersecretary, Henrik Slussen. Did you meet him earlier?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll see to it you meet him tomorrow at the manufactory visit. Get to know him. He’s extremely able, and he’ll steward this situation in directions that will reassure you.’

‘I see.’

‘Good. And once again, congratulations. A deserving winner. Fifty years, eh? My my.’

Hawser realised his audience had concluded. His glass was empty too.

‘How can it be so long?’ he asked, as the Astartes took him from the firepit chamber and out along the dark, breathing halls of the Aett. The wind gusted around them. Away from the firelight, his left eye lost its sight again.

‘You’ve been asleep,’ the rune priest replied.

‘You say nineteen years, but you mean Fenrisian years, don’t you? You mean great years?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s three, four, times as long in Terran years!’

‘You’ve been asleep,’ the rune priest said.

The Upplander felt light-headed. The sense of personal dislocation was intense and nauseating. He was afraid he might be sick, or pass out, and he was afraid of doing anything so frail in front of the Astartes. He was afraid of the Astartes. The fear added to his sense of personal dislocation, and made him feel sicker.

There were three of them with him, walking behind him: the rune priest, Varangr, and another whose name the Upplander did not know. Skarsi had shown no particular interest in coming with them. He had turned back to his playing boards, as though the Upplander was a mild diversion that was now finished with, and more important things, like bone counter discs on an inlaid board, had become more significant.

As they walked, the Astartes directed him with the occasional tap on the shoulder to turn him left and right. They walked him through great rock crypts and chambers of basalt, sulking voids of granite, and mournful hollowed halls panelled in bone. He saw all of these places through the green glare of his right eye, with only impenetrable darkness in his left. All of them were empty, except for the plaintive lament of the respiring wind. They were like tombs, tombs waiting to be filled, great sepulchres carved out in the expectation of an immense death toll, in anticipation of the corpses of a million warriors, carried in on their shields and laid to rest. A million. A million million. Legions of the fallen.

The wind was just rehearsing for its role as chief mourner.

‘Where are we going?’ the Upplander asked.

‘To see the priests,’ said Varangr.

‘But you’re a priest,’ the Upplander said to Ohthere, half-turning. Varangr gave him a little push to encourage him forwards.

‘Different priests,’ said Varangr. ‘The other kind.’

‘What other kind?’

‘You know, the other kind,’ said the nameless Astartes.

‘I don’t know. I don’t understand,’ said the Upplander. ‘I don’t understand and I’m cold.’

‘Cold?’ echoed Varangr. ‘He shouldn’t feel the cold, not where he’s been.’

‘It’s a good sign,’ said the other.

‘Give him a pelt,’ said the rune priest.

‘Do what?’ retorted Varangr.

‘Give him a pelt,’ the rune priest repeated.

‘Give him my pelt?’ Varangr asked, looking down at the red-brown skin around his shoulders. The S-curve of his lacquered hair rose like a spear-casting arm as his chin dipped. ‘But it’s my pelt.’

The other Astartes snorted and pulled off his own fur, a grey wolfskin. He held it out to the Upplander.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take it. A gift from Bitur Bercaw to Ahmad Ibn Rustah.’

‘Is this some kind of compact?’ the Upplander asked warily. He didn’t want to accidentally become beholden to a wolf Astartes on top of everything else.

Bercaw shook his head. ‘No, not anything with blood mixed in it. Maybe when you tell my account, you’ll remember this kindness, and make it part of the story.’

‘When I tell your account?’

Bercaw nodded. ‘Yes, because you will. When you tell it, you make me look good, sharing the pelt with you. And you make Var look like a selfish hog.’

The Upplander looked at Varangr. His eyes shone like lamps in the frosty dark. He looked as if he was going to strike Bercaw. Then he saw the rune priest watching him. He sagged a little.

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

The Upplander pulled Bercaw’s gift around his shoulders. He looked up at Ohthere Wyrdmake.

‘I still don’t understand.’

‘I know,’ said the priest.

‘No, no,’ the Upplander replied in frustration. ‘This is where you reassure me. This is where you tell me that everything will be explained.’

‘But I can’t,’ replied the priest, ‘because it won’t. Some things will be explained. Enough things, probably. But not everything, because explaining everything is never a good idea.’

They arrived at the drop.

The long, draughty hall came to an end and they were standing on the lip of a great cliff. A chasm plunged away beneath them, dropping sheer into total blackness. On the far side of the great drop, the Upplander could see the ghost-green ragged wall of the shaft. The sepulchral hall had brought them to an enormous flue, rising vertically through the rock in the heart of the mountain. The shaft vanished into darkness high above them. The winter gale gusted up from far below.

‘Which way now?’ asked the Upplander.

Varangr gripped him firmly by the upper arm.

‘Down,’ he said, and he stepped off the cliff and took the Upplander with him.

He was too shocked to scream out the terror that exploded his chest and burst his brain. They fell. They fell. They fell.

But not hard, and not to their deaths. They fell softly, like flecks of down from a torn sleeping roll, caught by the breeze, like papery flecks of ash, like a pair of humming bird servitors defying gravity with wings so fast they seemed still.

The wind of Fenris was everywhere inside the Aett, gusting in halls, breathing through crypts and vaults and chambers, but in the great vertical flue it blew with enough upward force to catch falling objects and cushion their descent. The rising gale lowered them slowly, dragging against their flapping pelts, and flapping the beads and straps of the Astartes.

Varangr stuck out an arm, the one that wasn’t gripping the Upplander’s limp frame. He stuck it out like an eagle’s wing into the updraught, and steered them. He turned them slowly, at an angle in the fierce blast. The Upplander’s tear-shot eyes, blinking furiously in the wind and out of gutting fear, saw another cliff-lip below, another shelf opening into the flue. They came into it at a perfect angle. Varangr landed on his feet, and turned the landing into a couple of quick steps that bled off his speed. The Upplander’s feet scrambled and kicked, and he fell on his face. The pelt flopped forwards over his head like a hood.

‘You’ll learn the knack,’ said Varangr.

‘How?’ asked the Upplander.

‘By doing it more,’ replied the Astartes.

On his hands and knees, the Upplander convulsed violently and retched. Nothing but spittle and mucus came up out of a gut that had been empty for nineteen years, but his body wrenched and wrung itself in a brutal effort to find something.

Bercaw and the rune priest landed on the lip behind them.

‘Pick him up,’ said the priest.

They carried him forwards, away from the cliff edge. His head lolled, but his left eye woke up. He saw a chamber up ahead, well lit with biolumin lamps and electric filaments in glass tubes. The sudden illumination was painful. He had a hot, orange version of the scene in his left eye, full of fire shadows and the warm yellow glow of tube lights and ivory flooring. In the other eye, the scene was an incandescent green, violently bright. The lamps and other light sources were so intense to his right eye, they had almost scorched out of vision entirely and become white-hot spots and after-image blooms. There were very few shadows in his right eye, and the focus was shot.

The Astartes put him down.

The Upplander could smell blood, salt water and the bleachy reek of counterseptic. The chamber was either a medical facility or an abattoir. Or perhaps it was both, or had been one and was now the other. There was also a hint of laboratory, and a smack of kitchen. There were metal benches and adjustable cots. There were clusters of overhead focus lights, and branches of automated servitor arms and manipulators sprouting from the ceiling like willow trees. There were stone slabs, like butcher blocks or altars. Hidden machinery hummed and whirred, and electronic notes sounded a constant background chorus like a digital rainforest. Archways led through to other kitchen-morgues. The complex was vast. He glimpsed the frosty doors of cryogenic units and the glass-lidded tanks of organic repair vats. Library shelves stretched off into the distance, lined with heavy glass bottles and canisters, like giant jars of pickled and preserved fruit in a winter root cellar. But the flasks did not contain vegetables or radapples in their dark, syrupy suspensions, and they were slotted into the shelves to connect with the facility’s vital support system.

Horned skulls appeared, robed men with animal skull heads like the ones who had surrounded him when he first woke up. The rune priest sensed his alarm.

‘They are just thralls. Servants and grooms. They will not hurt you.’

Other figures appeared from invisible corners of the rambling laboratory. These were Astartes, from the build of them. Horned skulls of significantly greater scale and threat than the ones worn by the thralls covered their faces. Their robes were floor length and had a quilted look, stitched together from sections of soft, napped leather. When they reached out their hands to greet or grasp the Upplander, he saw that their hands were covered in gloves patched together from the same material, and that the gloves were sewn into the enveloping cloaks, as if they were inside patchwork bags of skin with integral glove extensions that allowed them to work. The stitching on the patchwork seams, though expertly neat, reminded the Upplander far too much of surgical sutures.

They were sinister figures, and their presence was not helped by the fact that even Ohthere Wyrdmake showed deference to them.

‘Who are you?’ the Upplander asked.

‘They are the wolf priests,’ said Ohthere softly at his shoulder, ‘the geneweavers, the fleshmakers. They will examine you.’

‘Why?’

‘To make sure you’re healthy. To check their workmanship.’

The Upplander shot a quick glance at the rune priest.

‘Their what?’

‘You came to the Aett broken and old, Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ said one of the wolf priests in a voice that creaked like floe-ice, ‘too broken to live, and too old to heal. The only way to save you was to remake you.’

One of the horned giants took his right hand, another his left. He let them lead him into the slaughterhouse chapel like parents leading a child. He took off the pelt and settled on the black glass bed of a body scanner. There were a lot of wolf priests around him now, shamanic shadows with feral horns and guttural voices. Some were intent on adjusting the backlit wall plates of the control panels. Others were occupied with the elaborate tapping and shaking of rattlebags and bone wands. Both tasks seemed to carry equal significance.

The scanner bed elevated him and tilted him backwards. Manipulator arms, some of them fitted with sensors, others with the finest micrometre tool-heads, clicked down around him in a cage, like a crouching spider. They started working, twitching and brushing and scurrying. He felt the tickle of scan-beams, the nip of pinpricks, the sting of diagnostic light beams penetrating his held-open eyes.

He looked up, past the surgical lights, and saw himself, full length, reflected in the tinted canopy of the body scanner.

He had the fit, athletic body of a thirty year-old. Fitter and more athletic, in fact, than the thirty year-old body he had once possessed. The muscle definition was impressive. There was not an ounce of fat on him. Nor was there any sign of the old augmetic. He had the makings of a moustache and beard, a fuzz of growth a few weeks thick. His hair was shorter than he chose to wear it, as if it was growing back in after being shaved. It was darker than it had been since his fiftieth birthday.

Behind the beard growth, his face was still his own: younger, but still his own. This fact filled him with greater relief and confidence than anything else that had happened since he had woken.

It was the face of Kasper Ansbach Hawser, twenty-five years old, back when he was headstrong and arrogant and knew nothing about anything. This latter detail seemed more than a little appropriate.

In the reflection, dozens of hands in gloves of patchwork skin worked on him.

‘You refashioned me,’ he said.

‘There was significant damage to your limbs and to your internal organs,’ said the ice-creak voice. ‘You would not have survived. Over a period of nine months, we used mineral bonding and bone grafts to reconstitute your skeletal mass, and then resleeved it in musculature gene-copied from your own coding, though reinforced with plastek weaves and polymers. Your organs are primarily gene-copied transplants. Your skin is your own.’

‘My own?’

‘Removed, replenished, rejuvenated, retailored.’

‘You skinned me.’

They did not reply.

‘You worked on my mind too,’ he said. ‘I know things. I know a language I didn’t know before.’

‘We did not teach you anything. We did not touch your mind.’

‘And yet here we are conversing, without a translator.’

Again, they did not reply.

‘What about the eye? Why did you take my eye? Why do I keep going blind in my left eye?’

‘You do not keep going blind in your left eye. The sight in your left eye is human-normal. It is your eye.’

‘Why did the warrior take my right eye?’

‘You know why. It was an implant. It was not your eye. It was an optical recording device. It was not permitted. Therefore, it was detected and removed.’

‘But I can see,’ the Upplander said.

‘We would not blind you and leave you blind,’ said the ice-creak voice.

He looked up at his reflection. His left eye was the eye that he remembered.

His right eye, gold and black-pinned, was the eye of an adult wolf.

Rector Uwe called them in, just as the moon rose. All the children had spent the day outside, because the weather was clement and the grids had forecast no rad clouds or pollution fogs on the desert highland.

The children had worked outdoors, especially the older ones. That, the rector taught, was the purpose of community. The parents, all the adults, they were raising the city, the great city of Ur. They were gone for months at a time, away in the sprawling work camps that surrounded the vast street plan that the Architect had marked out on the chosen earth. Rector Uwe showed the children scenes from Faeronik Aegypt in old picture books. Gangs of industrious labourers with uniform asymmetric haircuts pulled ropes to raise the travertine blocks that made the monuments of Aegypt. This, he explained, was very much the way their parents were working, pulling together with a single purpose to build a city. The difference, he added, was that in old Aegypt, the builders were slaves, and in Ur, the workers were freemen, come willingly to the task, and all according to Catheric teachings.

Though they could not work on the city itself, the children still worked. They harvested fruit and vegetables from the tented fields, and washed them and packed them to be shipped to the work camps. They patched and mended worn clothes sent back from the labour site in yellow sacks, and wrote messages of encouragement and salvation on slips of paper that they tucked into pockets to be discovered at random.

In the afternoons, the rector gave the children instruction. He taught lessons in language, history and Catheric lore in the long room of the commune, or out under the trees of the tent fields, or even out in the actual open, in fair weather. The children learned their letters and their numbers, and the basic elements of salvation. They learned about the world as well: the name of the desert highlands, and the long valley, and the site chosen for Ur. They learned the names of all the other communes, just like their own, where other rectors looked after other student bodies, all part of the greater community. Rector Uwe had no staff, except for Niina the nurse-cook, so as the older children learned, they took charge of the younger ones’ instruction. The rector let the brightest of all use the half-dozen teaching desks in the annex beside the commune’s library.

Kas was only a little boy, four or five, but he was already one of the brightest. Like a lot of the children in the rector’s care, Kas was an orphan as far as the rector could determine. One of the Architect’s surveyor troops had found him in the cot-box of an overturned trackwagon out on the radland flats, a year back. The wagon had tipped on a salt depression, with no hope of righting. Its cells were flat dead, and there was no sign of any adults, except for a few bones and hanks of clothing about a kilometre further on.

‘Figure predators got them,’ said the surveyor troop leader when he brought Kas in. ‘The ride went over, so they walked to find water and help, and preds found them first. The boy’s lucky.’

Rector Uwe nodded, and touched the little gold crux around his neck. It was an odd definition of the word.

‘Lucky we found him,’ the leader clarified. ‘Lucky the predators didn’t.’

‘You see any preds?’ the rector asked.

‘The usual meat birds,’ the leader replied. ‘Plus dog tracks. A lot of dog tracks. Big, maybe even wolves. They’re getting bolder. Coming closer, every year.’

‘They know we’re here,’ replied the rector, meaning mankind, back to his old tricks, with all the bonus scraps and left-overs that entails.

There were a lot of orphans in the commune, because building a city was hard, but most came with names. The boy didn’t have one, so Rector Uwe chose one for him. A suitable name. The troops had found a little toy horse made of wood, like the Horse of Ilios, in the trackwagon with the child, so that made the choice easier.

He called them in at moonrise. After work and lessons, they had run out into the open woods and the meadow beyond the stream that moved their wheel. The meadow grass was the last, long straw from summer, bleached by sun and rads. The sky was wort-blue. Stars prickled the early evening. The children chased along the avenues of trees, under the tunnels of their rad-blacked leaves. They swung and played shouting games. Thunder warriors was popular with the boys. They made guns from fingers and death noises with their mouths, and came back in for supper with skinned knees.

There were always stragglers at supper call. Niina used the threat of wolves to bring the laggards in.

‘The wolves are out there! The wolves will get you, now the moon’s up!’ she’d call from the back door of the kitchen.

When he came in that night, red-faced and out of breath, Kas looked at Rector Uwe.

‘Are the wolves here?’ he asked.

The boy was flushed and sweating. He’d probably been playing thunder warriors with the older boys, running to keep up and shout as loud. But he also appeared scared.

‘Wolves? No, that’s just what Niina says,’ Rector Uwe replied. ‘There are preds, so we must be careful. Dogs, most likely. A lot of wild dogs, living in packs. They’re scavengers. Sometimes they come down off the high desert and raid our midden. But only if they’re bold, only if the winter’s been bleak. They’re more scared of us than we are of them.’

‘Dogs?’ Kas asked.

‘Just dogs. Dogs used to live with men, as their companions. Some communes still keep them as guards and to mind livestock.’

‘I don’t like dogs,’ the boy replied, ‘and I am afraid of wolves.’

He ran off to join the end of the noisy game. He ran with a little boy’s acceleration, from nothing to maximum speed in a blink. Rector Uwe smiled, but his heart was heavy. He wondered what it had been like in the cabin of that overturned trackwagon. He wondered how much a three year-old could remember. He wondered how close the preds had got, how close they had got to breaking into the wagon body, how terrifying they would have been.

The clement weather stayed with them for several weeks. Autumn was late. In the evenings, the light spun out, long and golden, and stretched the shadows of the raddled trees. The sky was like the glass of a blue bottle. Occasional little clouds dotted the horizon, cotton-white, like smoke signals lost for words. The children played out late. It was good to get open air into them, not recyc.

After supper, most nights, Rector Uwe liked to take out his regicide set and play a game or three with the smartest kids. He liked to teach them (he even had a few old books of instruction that he was prepared to lend) but he also enjoyed the challenge of a live player, however unschooled they might be, because it was an improvement over the programmed opposition provided by the teaching desks.

The rector’s regicide set was very old and very worn. The case was something he called shagreen, framed with discoloured ivory and lined with blue velvet. The board, unfolded, was made of inlaid walnut (it was slightly warped), and the pieces were made of bone and stained hoganny.

Kas was a quick learner, quicker even than some of the older clever boys. He had the wit for it. Uwe taught him what he could, knowing it would take a long time to season him and show him a decent range of opening schemes and ending-outs.

As they played that night, a game that Rector Uwe easily won, Kas mentioned the name of one of the other boys, and said that the boy had heard dogs barking earlier that day.

‘Dogs? Where?’

‘Up on the western slopes,’ Kas replied, considering his next move with his chin on his fist, the way he had seen the rector do it.

‘Probably crows cawing,’ said the rector.

‘No, it was dogs. Did you know that all dogs, everywhere in our world, all of them descended from a pack of wolves tamed on the shores of the Youngsea River?’

‘I did not know that.’

‘It was fifty-five thousand years ago.’

‘Where did you learn this?’

‘I asked the teaching desks about dogs and wolves.’

‘You are properly afraid of them, aren’t you?’

Kas nodded. ‘It is sensible. They are predators and they devour.’

‘Are you afraid of meat-birds?’

Kas shook his head. ‘Not really, though they are ugly and they can hurt you.’

‘What about eater-pigs and wild swine?’

‘They are dangerous,’ the boy nodded.

‘But you’re not afraid of them?’

‘I would be careful if I saw one.’

‘Are you afraid of snakes?’

‘No.’

‘Of bears?’

‘What is a bear?’

Rector Uwe smiled. ‘Make your move.’

‘They are all animals besides,’ the boy said, moving his piece.

‘What are?’

‘The things you’re asking me about, the snakes and the pigs. Are bears animals? I think they are all animals, and some of them are dangerous. I don’t like spiders. Or scorpions. Or big scorpions, the red ones, but I am not afraid of them.’

‘No?’

‘Yaena has a red scorpion in a jar in his foot locker, and when he shows it to us, I am not afraid of it.’

‘I will be talking to Yaena about that.’

‘I am not afraid of it, though. Not like Simial and the others. But I am afraid of wolves, because they are not animals.’

‘Oh? What are they then?’

The boy scrunched up his face, as if determining the best way of explaining it.

‘They are… well, they are like ghosts. They are devils, like scripture tells us about.’

‘They are supernatural, you mean?’

‘Yes. They come to destroy and devour, because that is their nature, their only nature. And they can be wolves, that is dog-shape, or they can walk about in the shape of men.’

‘How do you know this, Kasper?’

‘Everyone knows it. It is common knowledge.’

‘It may not be correct. Wolves are just dogs. They are canine animals.’

The boy shook his head fiercely. He leaned forwards and dropped his voice very low.

‘I have seen them,’ he whispered. ‘I have seen them walk about on two feet.’

He was given some food, a basic nutrient broth and some dry biscuits, and then he was left on his own in a draughty room near the kitchen-morgue. The room was panelled in white bone, and it had a small firepit and a bench cot. It also had a lamp, a small metal-bodied biolumin unit of the type stamped out in their millions for the Imperial Army. Light from the lamp let him see the room around him with both eyes. He was getting used to the discrepancy between vision types.

The food had come on a brushed metal tray. It made a poor hand mirror, but a mirror nonetheless. He looked at his new eye in its rubbed surface.

His new eye had extraordinary night and low-light response. He had spent a great deal of his time, since waking, moving around in pitch darkness without even realising it. That was why his real eye had seemed blind. It was also why the world looked spectral green, and why actual light sources flared to white blooms of painful radiance. The Wolves of Fenris lived in darkness most of the time. They hadn’t much need for artificial light.

His new eye lacked good, defined distance vision. Everything became slightly unfocussed at distances of more than thirty metres, like looking through an extremely wide-angle optical lens, the sort he had often used on good quality picter units for architectural recording. But the peripheral vision and the sensitivity to movement were astonishing.

Exactly what you’d expect from a predator’s eye.

He held the tray up in front of his face, and closed one eye, then the other, back and forth. When he switched back to his wolf eye for the fifth time, he noticed, in the battered reflection, the half-shadow in the doorway behind him.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said, without looking around.

The Astartes came into the room.

The Upplander put the tray down, and turned to look at him. The Astartes was as big as all his kind, wrapped in a slate-grey pelt. His fur and his armour looked wet, as if he had been outside. He had removed his leather mask, to show his face, weathered and tattooed. The Upplander knew the face.

‘Bear,’ he said.

The Astartes grunted.

‘You’re Bear,’ the Upplander said.

‘No.’

‘Yes. I don’t know many Astartes, I don’t know many Space Wolves—’

He saw the Astartes’s lip curl at the use of the term.

‘But I know your face. I remember your face. You’re Bear.’

‘No,’ the warrior said. ‘But you might remember my face. I’m known as Godsmote now, of Tra. But nineteen winters ago I was called Fith.’

The Upplander blinked.

‘Fith? You’re Fith? The Ascommani?’

The Astartes nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Your name was Fith?’

‘My name’s still Fith. They call me Godsmote or Godsmack in the Rout, because I’ve got a good swing on me, a swing like an angry god, and I once buried the smile of a blade in the forehead of a warboss…’

His voice trailed off.

‘That’s another story. Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘They… they made you into a Wolf,’ said the Upplander.

‘I wanted it. I wanted them to take me. My aett was gone, and my folk. I barely had my thread left. I wanted them to take me.’

‘I told them. I told Bear to take you. You and the other one.’

‘Brom.’

‘Brom, yes. I told Bear to take the both of you. I told him to make bloody sure he took the both of you, after all you did for me.’

Fith nodded. ‘They changed you too. They changed us both. Made us both sons of Fenris. It’s what Fenris always does. Changes things.’

The Upplander shook his head in slow disbelief. ‘I can’t believe it’s you. I’m glad it is. I’m happy to see you alive. But I can’t believe… look at you!’

He glanced down at the brushed steel tray.

‘Come to that, look at me. I can’t believe this is me either.’

He stood up and held out his hand to the Astartes.

‘I want to thank you,’ he said.

Fith Godsmote shook his head. ‘No need to thank me.’

‘Yes, there is. You saved my life, and it cost you everything.’

‘I don’t see it like that.’

The Upplander shrugged, and lowered his hand.

‘And you don’t look too happy I saved your life,’ the Astartes added.

‘I was then,’ the Upplander replied. ‘Nineteen winters ago. Now, well, everything’s a little strange to me. I’m adjusting.’

‘We all adjust,’ said Fith. ‘It’s part of changing.’

‘Bear, he’s still alive, is he?’ the Upplander asked.

‘Yes. Bear’s running a thread still.’

‘Good. He didn’t think to come and see me now I’m awake?’

‘I don’t see he’s got much reason to,’ replied the Astartes. ‘I mean, his debt to you is long since done. He made an error, and he atoned for it.’

‘Yes, about that,’ the Upplander said, sitting down again and leaning back. ‘What was his error? His oversight, that he had to make amends for?’

‘It was his fault you were out there. It was his fault you fell as a bad star.’

‘Was it?’

Fith nodded.

‘Was it really?’

Fith nodded again. ‘You’ll see Bear, I should think, when Ogvai calls you to Tra. You’ll probably see him then.’

‘So why’s Ogvai going to call me to Tra?’

‘He’ll decide what we should do with you.’

‘Ah,’ said the Upplander.

Fith reached under his pelt and produced a limp plastek sack, tied shut. It was a miserable bundle, and the skin of the bag was wet with droplets of ice mush and meltwater.

‘When I heard you had come back awake, I fetched this. It’s the bits you were carrying with you when you came to Fenris. All that I could find, anyway. I thought you might want them.’

The Upplander took the cold, wet sack and began to unpick the knot.

‘So where is Brom?’ he asked.

‘Brom never made it,’ Fith replied.

The Upplander stopped picking at the knot and looked at the Astartes.

‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

‘No need to be. There is a place for all things, and Brom is in Uppland now.’

‘That word,’ the Upplander said, ‘I remember that word. When I got here, when the Ascommani pulled me from the crash site, that’s what you called me. An Upplander.’

‘Yes.’

‘It meant heaven, didn’t it? It meant the places up there, above the world?’ The Upplander pointed at the chamber’s ceiling. ‘Upplander is someone who comes down to the land, to the mortal Verse. The stars, other planets, heaven, they’re all the same thing, aren’t they? You thought I was some sort of god, fallen out of heaven.’

‘Or a daemon,’ Fith suggested.

‘I suppose. Anyway, my point is… you know about space and the stars now. You know about other planets. You must have been to some. Now you’ve become an Astartes, you’ve learned about the universe and your place in it.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you still use a word like Uppland. You said Brom is in Uppland. Heaven and hell are primitive concepts, aren’t they? Is it just the reassurance of old names?’

Fith didn’t reply for a moment. Then he said, ‘There’s still an Uppland, as far as I’m concerned. Just like there’s a Verse and an Underverse. And as for Hel, I know there’s a Hel. I’ve seen it several times.’

When they came to take him to see the Jarl of Tra, he was in fear for his life. This was an unnecessary fear, he reasoned, because the Wolves had put significant effort into preserving and maintaining his existence. It seemed unlikely that they would expend that effort only to dispose of him.

But the fear clawed him and would not go away. It hung around him like a pelt. Whatever they were, the Wolves showed absolutely not a scrap of sentiment. They arbitrated decisions, right or wrong, on what seemed like whims, though were probably the blink-fast instincts of accelerated warriors. He was, to them, a curiosity at best. The work they had put into saving his life must have been a considerable effort. To them, with their halfway-immortal lives, it might just have been a way of fending off boredom through a long winter.

Fith Godsmote came to fetch him, along with others from Tra whose names the Upplander would only learn later. Fith was junior to them all, and from a different company. They were hulking, longtooth monsters with shadowed eyes. The Upplander realised that Fith’s inclusion in the honour guard was a mark of respect shown to a novitiate by his elders. Fith had saved the Upplander and brought him to the Aett, so it was only right that he should be part of an escort, even if the escort duty would normally fall to the company veterans.

That made logical sense. It made logical sense when they first came to his white bone room and summoned him with a gesture. By the time they had ascended to the Hall of Tra, a climb that had taken an hour, and had woven up deep staircases and rock chutes and one, stomach-wrenching ascent on the wind itself, fear had mutated the logic, and the only sense the Upplander could see was that Fith Godsmote had to be present at his death as some form of punishment duty.

The Hall of Tra was cold and lightless. His wolf-eye caught the ghost radiation of barely smouldering firepits. In terms of heat and light, the Wolves were making no allowances for human tolerances of comfort. They had given him a pelt and an eye to see through the dark with. What more could he want?

He realised he wasn’t alone. The company was all around him. Their body heat was barely detectable, dimmer than the dull firepits. The Hall was a massive natural cavern, ragged and irregular, and the Astartes were ranged around it, huddled and coiled in their furs, as immobile as a sibling pack of predators, gone to ground overnight, dormant and pressed close for warmth. Faces cowled by animal skin hoods were watching his approach. There were occasional grumbles and murmurs, like animals growling in their sleep or tussling over bones. As his eye resolved the scene better, the Upplander saw some evidence of movement. He saw hands casually raise silver bowls and dishes so that men could sip black liquid from them. He saw hunched shapes engaged in the counter game, hneftafl, that the Upplander had seen Skarsi playing.

Little heed was paid to him. Tra Company was resting. They had not assembled to give him audience. He was just something being brought through their hall so that business could be settled. He was a minor distraction.

At the back of the hall, at the highest point of the cavern, was Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot. High Wolf. Pack master. Jarl of Tra. Just from his bearing, his authority was beyond question. He was big, long-boned, a runner who would make pursuit relentlessly across waste and tundra with immeasurable stamina. His hair was long and straight, centre-parted, black, and his head was tilted back to invest his black-circled eyes and clean-shaven jaw with a commanding arrogance. The centre of his lower lip was tagged with a fat steel piercing that gave him a petulance that seemed childish and dangerous.

He slid forwards off a mound of battered old skins to get a look at the Upplander.

‘So this is what a bad omen looks like when it stands up in your face?’ he asked no one. The Upplander’s breath was steaming the frigid air, but barely a curl escaped Ogvai’s mouth alongside his words. Astartes biology was marvellously adapted for heat retention.

The jarl was wearing a laced leather jacket with no sleeves. His arms were long and his skin was sun-starved white. There were dark tattoos on the albino flesh there. He stretched one arm out and took up a silver bowl. It was full of a liquid so dark it looked like ink. The jarl’s fingers, curled around the lip of the silver lanx, were armoured with dirty rings. The Upplander imagined the jarl wore them less for decoration and more for the damage they would do to the things that he hit.

Ogvai took a sip, and then offered the lanx to the Upplander. He held it out.

‘He can’t drink that,’ said one of the escort. ‘Mjod will go though his innards like acid.’

Ogvai sniffed.

‘Sorry,’ he said to the Upplander. ‘Wouldn’t want to kill you with a toast to your health.’

The Upplander could smell the petroleum reek of the drink. There was blood in it too, he guessed. Liquid food, fermented, chemically distilled, extremely high calorific content… more akin to aviation fuel than a beverage.

‘It keeps the cold out,’ Ogvai remarked as he set the bowl down. He looked at the Upplander.

‘Tell me why you’re here.’

‘I’m here at the continuing discretion of the Rout,’ the Upplander replied in Juvjk.

Ogvai curled his lip.

‘No, that’s why you’re still breathing,’ he said. ‘I asked why you’re here.’

‘I was invited.’

‘Tell me about this invitation.’

‘I sent a number of messages to the Fenris beacon, requesting permission to enter Fenrisian world-space. I wished to meet with and study the Fenrisian Astartes.’

One of the escort standing behind the Upplander snorted.

‘That doesn’t sound like a request that we would say yes to,’ said Ogvai. ‘Were you persistent?’

‘I think I sent the request, with various elaborations, about a thousand times.’

‘You think?’

‘I can’t be sure. I had a log of the precise number, with transmission dates. My effects were returned to me, but all my data-slates and notebooks were missing.’

‘Written words,’ said Ogvai. ‘Written words and word storage devices. We don’t permit them here.’

‘At all?’

‘No.’

‘So all my notes and drafts, all my work, you destroyed it?’

‘I would think so. If that’s what you were idiot enough to bring with you. Don’t you have back-up off-world?’

‘Nineteen great years ago, I did. How do you record information here on Fenris?’

‘That’s what memories are for,’ said Ogvai. ‘So you sent this message a lot. Then what?’

‘I got permission. Permission to set down. Coordinates were given. The permit was verified as Astartes. But during planetfall, my lander suffered a serious malfunction and crashed.’

‘It didn’t crash,’ said Ogvai. He took another sip of his ink-black drink. ‘It was shot out of the sky. Wasn’t it, Bear?’

Nearby, at the foot of the jarl’s seating mound, one of the dark masses of huddled furs stirred.

‘You shot him down, didn’t you, Bear?’

There was a grumble of reply.

Ogvai grinned. ‘That was why he had to come out and rescue you. Because he shot you down. It was a mistake, wasn’t it, Bear?’

‘I recognised my failing, jarl, and I was sure to correct it,’ Bear replied.

‘If you knew all this, why did you ask me?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Just wanted to see if you remembered the story as well as I did.’ Ogvai frowned. ‘Your telling’s not up to much, though. I’ll put that down to the fact that you’ve been in the icebox a long time and your brain’s probably still frosty. But as a skjald, you’re not really what I expected.’

‘As a skjald?’

Ogvai leaned forwards and rested the elbows of his long, white arms on his knees. His pale skin glowed in the gloom, like glacier ice.

‘Yes, as a skjald. I’ll tell it now, then. I’ll tell the account. Gedrath, who came before me, he warmed to your messages. He talked to us in Tra, and to me, who was his right hand, and to the other jarls, and to the Wolf King too. A skjald, he said. That would be amusing. Diverting. A skjald could bring new accounts from Upp and out, and he could learn ours too. Learn them, and tell them back to us.’

‘This is what you thought I’d be?’ asked the Upplander.

‘Is it what you thought you’d be?’ asked the jarl. ‘You wanted to learn about us, didn’t you? Well, we don’t give our stories cheaply. We don’t give them to just anybody. You sounded promising, and eager.’

‘Then there was the name,’ said one of the escort behind the Upplander. Ogvai nodded, and the Tra veteran stepped forwards. He was lanky and grey-haired, with blue tattooing writhing up and out from the edges of his leather face mask and across his deep brow. Plaited grey beard tails sprouted from the mask’s lower rim.

‘What’s that, Aeska?’ asked Ogvai.

‘The name he gave us,’ said Aeska. ‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Ogvai.

‘Jarl Gedrath, rest his thread, had a romantic soul,’ said the warrior.

Ogvai grinned. ‘Yes. It appealed to him. To me too. I was his right hand, and he looked to me. He didn’t want to appear whimsical or weak, but a man’s heart can be touched by an old memory or the smell of history. That’s what you intended, wasn’t it?’

He was looking directly at the Upplander.

‘Yes,’ said the Upplander. ‘To be honest, after a thousand or so messages, I was willing to try anything. I didn’t know if you’d know the significance.’

‘Because we’re stupid barbarians?’ asked Ogvai, still smiling.

The Upplander wanted to say yes. Instead, he said, ‘Because it’s old and obscure data by any standard, and that was before I knew you kept no written or stored records. Long ago, before Old Night, before even the rise of man from Terra, and the Outward Urge, and the Golden Era of Technology, there was a man called Ahmad Ibn Rustah, or ebn Roste Esfahani. He was a learned man, a conservator who went out into the world to discover and preserve knowledge, learning it first-hand so he knew it to be accurate, to be the truth. He went from Isfahan in what we know as the Persian region, and travelled as far as Novgorod, where he encountered the Rus. These were the peoples of the Kievan Rus Khaganate, part of the vast and mobile genetic group that encompassed the Slav, the Svedd, the Norsca and the Varangaria. He was the first outsider to integrate with them, to appreciate their culture and to report them to be far more than the stupid barbarians they were thought to be.’

‘You see a parallel here?’ asked Ogvai.

‘Don’t you?’

Ogvai sniffed and rubbed the end of his nose with the pad of his thumb. His finger nails were thick and black, like chips of ebony. They each had deep and complex patterns embossed or drilled into them. ‘Gedrath did. You used the name as a shibboleth.’

‘That’s right.’

There was silence.

‘I understand I’ve been brought here so you can decide what to do with me,’ said the Upplander.

‘Yes, that’s about it. It falls to me to decide, now I’m jarl and Gedrath is gone.’

‘Not to… your primarch?’ asked the Upplander.

‘The Wolf King? That’s not the kind of decision he bothers himself with,’ replied Ogvai. ‘Tra had seneschalship of the Aett the season you came along, so Gedrath was the lord in charge. This is down to his whimsy. Now I find out if Tra comes to regret it. Do you really want to learn about us?’

‘Yes.’

‘That means learning about survival. About killing.’

‘You mean war? I have lived most of my life on Terra, a world that is still riven by conflict as it restores itself. I’ve seen my fair share of war.’

‘I don’t mean war so much,’ said Ogvai doubtfully. ‘War’s just an elaboration and codification of a much purer activity, which is being alive. Sometimes, at the most basic level, to be alive you must stop other people being alive. This is what we do. We are extremely good at it.’

‘I have no doubt of that, ser,’ the Upplander replied.

Ogvai picked up his lanx and held it pensively in front of his mouth in both hands, ready to sip.

‘Life and death,’ he said softly. ‘That’s what we’re about, Upplander.’ He said the name scornfully, as if mocking. ‘Life and death, and the place where they meet up. That place, that’s where we do business. That’s the space we inhabit. That’s the place where wyrd gets decided. You want to come with us, you’ll have to learn about both of them. You’ll have to get close to both. Tell me, you ever been close to either? You ever been to the place where they meet?’

He could hear music. Someone was playing the clavier.

‘Why can I hear music?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Murza replied. He clearly didn’t care either. A fat pile of manuscripts and maps was spread out over the battered desktop, and he was picking over them.

‘It’s a clavier,’ said Hawser, cocking his head.

The day was fine, sunny. The white dust kicking up from the Army shelling seemed to have dried out the previous day’s rain and left the sky a deep, dark blue, like the lid of a box lined with velvet. Sunlight sloped in off the street through the blown-out window and doorway, and brought the distant music with it.

The building had once been a clerical office, perhaps for patents or legal work, and a penetrator shell had gone through its upper storeys like a round through a brainpan. The floor of the front office they were standing in was stained navy blue from the hundreds of bottles of ink that had been blown off the shelves and shattered. The ink had soaked in and dried months before. The blue floor matched the sky outside. Hawser stood in the patch of sunlight and listened to the music. He hadn’t heard a clavier playing in years.

‘Look at this, will you?’ Murza said. He passed a hand-held picter unit to Hawser. Hawser looked at the image displayed on the back-plate screen.

‘This has just come through from our contact,’ he said. ‘Do you think it’s a match?’

‘The image quality is poor—’ Hawser began.

‘But your mind isn’t,’ snapped Murza.

Hawser smiled. ‘Navid, that’s probably the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

‘Get over it, Kas. Look at the pict. Is it the box?’

Hawser studied the image again, and compared it to the various antique archive picts and reference drawings that Murza had arranged in a line across the desk.

‘It looks genuine,’ he said.

‘It looks beautiful is what it looks,’ smiled Murza. ‘But I do not want to get bitten like we did at Langdok. We have to be sure this is genuine. The bribes we’ve paid, the finder’s fees. There’ll be more, you can count on it. The local priesthood will have to be financially persuaded to look the other way.’

‘Really? You’d think they’d be grateful. We’re attempting to salvage their heritage before this war obliterates it. They must realise we’re attempting to save something they can’t?’

‘You know that this is much more complicated than that,’ replied Murza. ‘It’s a matter of faith. That much should be obvious to a good Catheric boy like you.’

Hawser didn’t rise to the bait. He’d never made an attempt to hide the tradition of belief he’d been raised to. All teaching at the commune that had been his first home had been Catheric, as had all the communes and camps serving the Ur project. A city built by and for the faithful. It was an appealing idea, one of an infinite number that had tried and failed to make sense of mankind’s lot after Old Night. Hawser had never been much of a believer himself, but he’d had great patience and respect for the ideas of men like Rector Uwe. In turn, Uwe had never presumed to impose his beliefs on Hawser. He’d supported Hawser’s ambition to attend a universitariate. Almost accidentally, in conversation with a faculty senior many years later, Hawser had discovered that he had been awarded his scholarship to Sardis principally on the basis of the letter Uwe had sent to the master of admissions.

Without Rector Uwe, Hawser would never have left the commune and Ur, and entered academia. But for his place at Sardis, Hawser would still have been at the commune when the predators, the human predators, had stolen in off the western slope radlands and put an end to the dream of Ur.

It was a salvation he still found uncomfortable, two decades later.

Hawser was interested in the tradition and histories of faith and religion, but it was hard in the modern age to believe in any god who had never bothered to prove his existence, when there was one who most profoundly had. It was said that the Emperor denied all efforts to label Him a god, or entitle Him with divinity, but there was no getting around the fact that, as He had risen to prominence on Terra, all the extant creeds and religions of the world had correspondingly dried up like parched watercourses in summer.

Murza now, he hid his beliefs. Hawser knew for a fact that Murza had also been raised Catheric. They’d discussed it sometimes. Catheric had a strand of Millenarianism in it. The proto-creeds that had given rise to it had believed in an end time, an apocalypse, during which a saviour would come to escort the righteous to safety. An apocalypse had come all right. It had been called Strife and Old Night. There had been no saviour. Some philosophers reasoned that mankind’s crimes and sins had been so great, redemption had been withheld. Salvation had been postponed indefinitely until mankind had atoned sufficiently, and only once that had happened would the prophecy be revisited.

That didn’t satisfy Hawser especially. No one knew, or could remember, what the human race might have done to displease god so spectacularly. It was, Hawser reasoned, hard to atone if you didn’t know what you were atoning for.

The other thing that made him uneasy was that the rise of the Emperor was seen by an increasing number of people as evidence that the postponement was over.

‘I’m sorry. It’s easy to mock religion,’ Murza said.

‘It is,’ Hawser agreed.

‘It’s easy to scorn it for being old-fashioned and inadequate. A heap of superstitious rubbish. We have science.’

‘We do.’

‘Science, and technology. We are so advanced, we have no need of spiritual faith.’

‘Are you going somewhere with this?’ Hawser asked.

‘We forget what religion offered us.’

‘Which is?’

‘Mystery.’

That was his argument. Mystery. All religions required a believer to have faith in something inexpressible. You had to be prepared to accept that there were things you could never know or understand, things you had to take on trust. The mystery at the heart of religion was not a mystery to be understood, it was a mystery to be cherished, because it was there to remind you of your scale in the cosmos. Science deplored such a view, because everything should be explicable, and that which was not was simply beneath contempt.

‘It’s no coincidence that so many old religions contained myths of forbidden truth, of dangerous knowledge. Things that man was not meant to know.’

Murza had a way of putting things. Hawser believed that Murza was considerably more scornful of the faith that had raised him than Hawser was, even though Murza believed and Hawser didn’t. At least Hawser had respect for Catherisism’s morality. Murza made a great show of treating anyone who professed a faith as an irredeemable idiot.

But he cared. Hawser knew that. Murza believed. The little sign of the crux he wore under his shirt, the genuflection he sometimes made when he thought no one was looking. There was an inkling of the spiritual about the sardonic Navid Murza, and he kept it alive to preserve his sense of mystery.

It was mystery that propelled Murza and Hawser on their expeditions to recover priceless relics of data from the world’s shattered corners. Rescued data unlocked the mysteries that Old Night had burned into the tissue of mankind’s collective knowledge like lesions.

Sometimes it was mystery that sent them after spiritual relics too. Prayer boxes in Ossetia, for example. Neither of them believed in the faith that had constructed the boxes, or the sacred virtue of the things they were supposed to contain. But they both believed in the importance of the mystery the items had represented to past generations, and thus their value to human culture.

The prayer boxes had kept faith alive in this cindered part of Terra through the Age of Strife. There was very little chance they contained any data of actual, practical value. But a study of their nature and the way they had been crafted and preserved could reveal a great deal about human thought, and human codes, and the way man thought about his place in a cosmos where science was increasingly proving to be inimical.

There was a noise outside in the street, and Vasiliy stepped in out of the sunlight.

‘Ah, captain,’ said Murza. ‘We were about to send for you.’

‘Ready to advance?’ Vasiliy asked.

‘Yes, up through Old Town to a rendezvous point,’ said Hawser.

‘Our contact has come up with the goods,’ Murza added.

The captain looked reluctant. ‘I’m concerned about your welfare. In the last hour, this whole region has become very active. I’m getting reports of actions with N Brigade forces all down the valley as far as Hive-Roznyka. Moving through Old Town will make you very exposed.’

‘My dear Captain Vasiliy, Kas and I have absolute faith in you and your troops.’

Vasiliy grinned and shrugged. She was a good looking woman in her mid-thirties, and the plating and ballistic padding of the Lombardi Hort battlegear did not entirely disguise the more feminine highlights of her form. Her right elbow was leaning on the chrome ’chetter strap hung from her shoulder. Sunlight glinted off the armoured links of the ammo feed that ran between weapon and backpack. A giant slide-visor of tinted yellow plastek came down over her eyes like an aviator’s headcan. Hawser knew its inner surface was flickering with eyeline displays and target graphics. He knew it because he’d asked her to let him try it on once. She’d grinned, and buckled the strap tight under his chin, and explained what all the cursors and tags meant. In truth, he’d only done it so he could see her whole face. She had great eyes.

In the street, the Hort forces were moving up. Vox officers scurried like beetles with their heavy carapace sets and long, swaying antennae. Troopers prepped ’chetters and melters, and set off in fire-teams. The sunlight winked off their yellow slide-visors.

A modest sub-hive dominated the hill’s summit, punctured and dilapidated by fighting. In its foothills, the outskirts known as Old Town, much more ancient street patterns and urban growths fanned out like root mass from a tree trunk. Hawser could hear shelling away to the south, and rockets occasionally whooped and squealed as they spat off overhead.

Hawser and Murza had spent three months in the region, tracking down the prayer boxes through a long and complex series of contacts and intermediaries. The boxes were said to contain the relics of venerated individuals from the Pre-Strife Era, part of a local tradition of Proto-Cruxic worship. Some contained old packets of scripture on paper or old-format disk too. Murza was especially excited about the translation possibilities.

So far, they’d recovered two boxes. Today, they hoped, they’d get the third and best example before the brutal inter-hive warfare finally forced them to quit the region. The item was owned and guarded by a small, underground coven of believers, who had kept it safe for six centuries, but picture records made by an antiquarian ninety years earlier attested to its outstanding significance. The antiquarian’s records also spoke of considerable scriptural material.

‘You do as I say,’ Vasiliy told them, as she did every morning when she led them out into the open.

They moved through the town under escort.

‘Can you hear music?’ Hawser asked.

‘No, but I do hear it’s your birthday,’ said Vasiliy, by way of reply.

Hawser blushed. ‘I don’t have a birthday. I mean, I only have a rough idea what day I was born on.’

‘It says it’s your birthday on your bio-file.’

‘You looked me up,’ said Hawser.

She feigned disinterest. ‘I’m in charge. I need to know these things.’

‘Well, captain, the date on my bio-file is the birthday I was given by the man who raised me. I was a foundling. It’s as good a birthday as any.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘So why do you need to know?’ he asked.

‘It just occurred to me that tonight, when this business is done, we could raise a glass to celebrate.’

‘What a fine idea,’ said Hawser.

‘I thought so,’ she agreed. ‘Forty, huh?’

‘Happy birthday me.’

‘You don’t look a day over thirty-nine.’

Hawser laughed.

‘When you two have stopped flirting,’ said Murza. His link had just received a pict-message from their contact. It was another image of the prayer box, its lid open. The image was of better quality than the previous one.

‘It’s as though he’s teasing us, tempting us,’ said Hawser.

‘He says the box is safe in the basement of a public hall about half a kilometre from here. It’s waiting for us. He’s agreed terms and a fee with the cult elders. They’re just glad the box can be removed to safety before war tears the city down.’

‘But they still want a fee,’ said Vasiliy.

‘That’s really for the contact, not the elders,’ said Hawser. ‘One hand washes the other.’

‘Can we move ahead?’ asked Murza sharply. ‘If we’re not outside in twenty minutes, they’re going to call the whole thing off.’

Vasiliy signalled the troop forwards again.

‘He’s impatient, isn’t he?’ she said to Hawser quietly, nodding at Murza up ahead.

‘He can be. He worries about missed opportunities.’

‘You don’t?’

‘That’s the difference between us,’ said Hawser. ‘I want to preserve knowledge – any knowledge – because any knowledge is better than none. Navid, well I think he’s hungry to find the knowledge that matters. The knowledge that will change the world.’

‘Change the world? How?’

‘I don’t know… by revealing some scientific truth we’d forgotten. By showing us some technological art we’d lost. By telling us the name of god.’

‘I’ll tell you how you change the world,’ she said. She fetched a creased pict-print out of her thigh pouch. A sunny day, a grinning teenager.

‘That’s my sister’s boy. Isak. Every male in my family gets the name Isak. It’s a tradition. She got to marry, and raise the kids. I got to have a career. Apart from living expenses, every penny I earn goes back to her, to the family. To Isak.’

Hawser looked at the picture and then handed it back to her.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I like your way more.’

They came around a street corner and saw the clavier.

It was sitting in the middle of the street, an upright model, missing its side panel. Someone had wheeled it out of one of the bombed-out buildings for no readily apparent reason other than that it had survived. An old man was standing at its keyboard, playing it. He had to hunch slightly to accommodate the length of his limbs and the lack of a stool. He’d been good once. His fingers were still nimble. Hawser tried to recognise the tune.

‘I told you I could hear music,’ he said.

‘Clear the street,’ Vasiliy voxed to her men.

‘Is that necessary?’ asked Hawser. ‘He’s not doing any harm.’

‘N Brigade members strap toxin bombs to children,’ she snapped back. ‘I am not going to take chances with an old man and a wooden box large enough to take a mini-nuke.’

‘Fair enough.’

The old man looked up and smiled as the troops approached him. He called out a greeting, and changed what he was playing mid-bar. The tune became, unmistakably, the March of Unity.

‘Cheeky old bastard,’ muttered Murza. Vasiliy’s men surrounded the old man and began to gently persuade him away from his music-making. The march missed a few notes, added a few dud ones. The old man was laughing. The March of Unity became a jaunty music hall melody

‘So, your birthday,’ said Murza, turning to Hawser.

‘You’ve never remembered before.’

‘You’ve never been forty before,’ said Murza. He reached into his coat. ‘I got you this. It’s just a trinket.’

The music stopped. The Hort troopers had finally got the old man to step away from the clavier. His foot came off the forte pedal. There was a metallic whir, like the counterweight wind of a clock movement, as the firing plate of the nano-mine inside the clavier engaged.

In less time than it takes a man’s heart to beat its final beat, the clavier vanished, and the old man disappeared, and the troopers surrounding him puffed into vapour like cotton seed heads, and the surface of the street peeled away in a blizzard of cobblestones, and the buildings on either side of the road shredded, and Murza left the ground in the arms of the shockwave, and his blood got in Hawser’s eyes, and Hawser started to fly too, and all the secrets of the cosmos were illuminated for one brief moment as life and death converged.

Ogvai sent the Upplander away while he thought about his decision. Eventually, after what the Upplander calculated to be about forty or fifty hours, during which time he saw no one except the thrall who brought him a bowl of food, the warrior called Aeska appeared in his doorway, sent by the jarl.

‘Og says you can stay,’ he remarked, casually.

‘Will I… I mean, how does this work? Are there formalities? Are their patterns or style conventions for the stories I record?’

Aeska shrugged. ‘You’ve got eyes, haven’t you? Eyes, and a voice, and a memory? Then you’ve got everything you need.’