Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  ‘On! On!’ Longfang yelled. Hawser realised they’d all been speaking Wurgen for the last ten minutes.

  The boarding ramp was opening. Light flooded into the green twilight gloom of the drop cabin. Heat came with it, roasting, fireball heat that Hawser could feel sucking into his lungs down the chimney of his throat like a backdraught, despite his armoured breather mask.

  ‘Great Terra!’ he coughed.

  The metal-on-metal squealing from outside was getting louder. They were moving. They were juddering and moving backwards.

  The whole Stormbird was sliding.

  Fleeting, jerking silhouettes loomed across the fire-bright gap of the open ramp in front of him. The Wolves, deploying. He could hear them howling.

  No, it wasn’t howling. It was the wet leopard-growl, amplified: the resonating, deep-chest purr of a megafauna predator. It was a paralysing, infrasonic panther-snarl throbbing and then surging up from the specially adapted larynxes of apex carnivores.

  He followed them out into the light and the searing heat. Some of them brushed against him as they charged out down the ramp, knocking him aside, spinning him. He had no idea what he should be doing. A giant plasteel hand grabbed him by the scruff of his suit and his feet dangled off the ramp for a second.

  ‘Stay with me!’ Longfang growled in Wurgen.

  Hawser followed the old priest as he lumbered forwards. He focussed in on the details of Longfang’s armour, as he had done when instructed to follow Bear. Bear’s armour had been simple compared to Longfang’s, but then Bear was an ill-tempered youngster beside the veteran priest. His grey armour had been more modestly adorned and decorated.

  Longfang’s case of armour was old, a work of art that owed its richness to both the armourer and the etcher. It was covered in runic symbols, some of which had been picked out in brass, or gold leaf, or glossy red enamel. Apotropaic eyes had been scratched, emphatically, into the shoulder guards. Besides the huge, gossamer-white pelt, Longfang was draped with skeins of beads, strings of charms, small trophies, and clattering amulets.

  They came out from under the Stormbird’s shadow into the glare of a chemical firestorm. The Stormbirds had set down on a series of ornate platforms extending from monumental, fluted towers half encased in the surrounding ice-mantle. Great portions of the towers and their more massive neighbouring structures were ablaze. The wall of heat was oppressive. Light-rich flames boiled and tumbled up the ice chasm towards the top of the pit, drawn as if up a flue. Frequently oxygenated by sources Hawser couldn’t identify, the firestorms swelled and flared, rushing white-hot and spitting out clouds of molten sparks and incendiary cinders that blizzarded into the depths below. Hawser realised some of the vertical firestorms were bigger than cities he had spent whole chunks of his life living in. His mind could barely cope with the scale. He found himself focussing on single sparks, drifting silently in the air in front of him, as large close up as the firestorms were far away. To hold focus on a single, drifting spark was to hold on to a precious moment of sane tranquillity.

  The air was full of sparks. There was also a strange smell, more than decay and burning. It was the smell of some synthetic substance that should never have been exposed to heat.

  Portions of the pit’s upright city were collapsing into the yawning gulf below. Wars were happening on different levels. Hawser could see Imperial Army troops drop-landing on platforms above him, lit up by enemy fire as they swung in towards leaf-shaped platforms. To the west of his position, and slightly below, a tide of Expedition drop-troops assaulted across the spans of three or four intact inter-tower bridges, as gun-cutters and blitz ships swept in over them and raked the facades of the ancient citadels.

  Longfang’s packs were driving in across the ornate platforms towards imposing, sullen mansions. The polished, orange material tiling the mansions and the platform surface was pitted and scorched. Everything was orange. The world was orange. It was partly the firestorm, and partly the ubiquitous material that the Quietude constructed everything from.

  Again, for a split-second pang, Hawser was reminded of Vasiliy. To think she was a world and a life ago now was not even ironic.

  Debris, including chunks of fallen masonry of considerable size, landscaped the platform. What had this place once been, Hawser wondered as he ran forwards through the murderous heat and the winnowing sparks. The landing stage of a parliament hall? The platform of a defence station? The private jetty of an aristocratic residence? Did the residents once look out over the platform and admire the view of the glowing ice caves beneath, or was it just a functional cavity to them? Had there been beauty here, before Ogvai’s kill-shot? Deliberate beauty, or just the accidental marvel of the nature that only human eyes recognised? Did the beings of the Quietude have souls?

  He fancied perhaps they did. The platforms had ornate decorations worked into them, especially on their undersides, where they fanned out like ribbed lilies or acanthus leaves. Similarly, around the high, wide door spaces and side columns of the mansions they were attacking, there were simple lines of relief that suggested an aesthetic.

  Enemy fire licked at them, most of it gravity rifle shot that pulverised the platform surfaces into dust where it hit. He heard the unmistakable sound of bolters firing and saw Horune and the others ahead, bounding away across the tumbled slabs and crushed stonework. He made a mental note to improve his next story; he had no idea an Astartes could move so fast.

  The metal-on-metal shriek came again. He turned.

  The Stormbird that had brought them in was sliding backwards. Unlike the other Stormbirds in Longfang’s flight, which had touched down securely on other landing levels and were already cycling back up for take-off, this craft had been forced to use the lip of its target platform by an overhead collapse. That it had landed at all was a testament to the devotion of the flight crew.

  The weakened platform was shredding. The rear half of the Stormbird’s bulk was tipping off. The metal-on-metal shriek was the sound of the Stormbird’s landing claws as they tried to dig in and anchor on. The skids tore squealing gashes as they slipped backwards. The pilot was trying to fire mooring lines from under the nose. Each grapple rebounded from the polished orange tiles.

  A Stormbird was a large transatmospheric craft with a broad, threatening profile designed to menace. It was considerably more substantial in both mass and sheer craftsmanship than the bulk-produced landers like the Thunderhawk and the dropfalcon models that had been churned out of constructor factories as short-term, utilitarian solutions to the Crusade’s material demands. A Thunderhawk wasn’t designed to last: it was just a cheap, functional, template-pressed disposable.

  The Stormbirds were legacies of the Unification Wars on Terra, superb machines that were far more costly and time consuming to manufacture. Armadas of them were assembled for the Expansion, and only when the true scale of the Great Crusade became apparent was it realised that a cheap bulk supplement would be needed. They were not the sort of things that should look vulnerable or ungainly. They were lords of the air, soaring creatures that could dive from orbit straight down into the fires of hell, and survive.

  Yet this one was stricken. It was doomed. Its backwards slide was accelerating. Its nose was tipping up, and the angle of that inclination was increasing. Metal shrieked on metal until the landing claws began to tear free, lifted too high by the dipping tail. Hawser could clearly see the frantic, chalk-white faces of the flight crew through the tinted cockpit canopy as they fought to stabilise their situation. The engines suddenly started racing, and hurricanes of loose debris and grit swirled into the intakes as someone tried to throttle up and… what? Push the ship back onto the platform? Relaunch?

  The Stormbird tipped. Hawser saw it pass the point of no return. The boarding ramp was still down, and it looked for all the world like an open beak, like the ship was a fledgling bird, too damaged to fly, squawking in terror as it pitched from a nest.

  With a sudden, jarring lurch, it was gone, and the sh
redded lip of the platform was gone too. Hawser felt the deck quiver as the Stormbird let go.

  He mumbled something, something obscene and incoherent, unwilling to accept what he’d just seen. Part of his mind told him that the Stormbird would surely restart its engines as it fell and fly back up to them, magnificent and phoenix-like. Another part told him what a fool that made him.

  He realised Longfang was shouting at him. There was a far more immediate issue.

  The weight of the Stormbird, and the violent way it had quit its perch, had entirely undermined the integrity of the damaged platform.

  Everything they were standing on was giving way.

  He had once witnessed the explosive demolition of a stratified favela in Sud Merica. The slum hive, cleared of inhabitants and protesters by the Unification authority, was a towering ziggurat, a landfill mountain that had cast its shadow across a river basin for sixty generations. Hydroelectric projects would replace it and, during that work, Hawser and Murza would be granted access to explore the impossibly ancient foundations for relics of the Proto-Cruxian faith that was said to have persisted there like an isotope in the water table.

  The demolition had brought the vast structure down like an avalanche, folding level into level, collapsing storey into storey like riffle-shuffled playing cards. He had been astonished by the seismic violence of the destruction, and by the overwhelming noise. Most of all, he had been staggered by the quantity of dust exhaled by such annihilation.

  The platform went the same way. It disintegrated, letting the rubble and massive fragments fallen from the city above slide off into the gulf. Noise was vibration and vibration noise, and there was no division between them, and both of them were a visual blur. Orange tiles and support beams exploded and shattered in clouds of dust like flour.

  Hawser ran towards the mansions. His future fell away behind him in the pit in a raging landslip. The ground steepened in front of him, and he realised he was running uphill. An elephantine block of stone, part of some city structure demolished far above, slithered towards him. Its impact had undoubtedly contributed to the platform’s fundamental weakness.

  As it rushed down at him, he leapt up the face of it, hurling himself before it could turn him into a long red smear. He landed on the top of it, a hard, awkward landing that badly bruised his hip and ankle, but held on, his hands wrapped around the stub of a shattered finial.

  The block kept sliding. Righting himself, he leapt again, clearing the slab and coming down on the other side, on the slope of the expiring platform. He scrabbled up, loose rocks pinging off his shoulders and his face mask. One hit so hard it crazed the left-hand eyepiece, and stunned him.

  The noise of the tumult reached a peak. Blind, scrambling, he ran into something and found it was a wall.

  ‘Sit down. Sit down!’ a voice snarled in Wurgen. ‘You’re safe there, skjald.’

  He could barely see. Most of the platform had gone, leaving a jagged strand of rockcrete stuck through with severed rib beams and shorting power lines. The destruction had exhaled so much dust into the air that there was a strange, farinaceous haze.

  Hawser was hunkered right up against the foot of one of the mansion walls, spared from the fathomless drop by a ragged shelf of surviving platform no more than two metres broad at its most generous. Wolves were crouched with him, their pelts and armour dusted with yellow powder.

  ‘Are you alive?’ the Wolf beside him asked. Hawser didn’t know his name. The Wolf had eschewed his full plate helm for a knotwork leather protector that had entwined furrows in the shape of Fenrisian sea-orms forming the nasal guard and the heavy brows.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

  ‘You sure?’ asked Serpent-mask. ‘I see fear in that wrong eye of yours, and we don’t want fear tripping us up.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Hawser snapped. ‘What’s your name? I want to make certain my account of this day records your concern for me.’

  Serpent-mask shrugged.

  ‘Jormungndr,’ he said. ‘Called the Two-bladed Serpent. You insult me, skjald, that you haven’t heard of the famous Two-blade.’

  ‘I have,’ Hawser lied quickly. ‘But I have been shaken by that tangle with death, and I was slow to recognise the trait marks on your face guard.’

  Jormungndr Two-blade nodded, as if this was acceptable.

  ‘Follow,’ he said.

  Svessl had blown a way into the nearest of the structures Hawser thought of as mansions.

  They passed through a gatehouse into a courtyard beyond. In amongst the debris of rubble, he saw the first of the enemy dead: graciles and robusts, and also other smaller forms new to him. The pale yellow dust, sifting in the air, stuck to the spattered pools of purple Quietude blood.

  The Wolves were surging into the courtyard and splitting in all directions. Cloisters and inner entrances beckoned. Hawser, uncertain which way to go, heard enemy fire, and then answering blasts of bolter shot. The gunning bolters, often one at first and then joined by an emphatic chorus as multiple weapons were brought to bear on an identified target, had a distinctive metallic grinding note behind their deep shot-boom, like a bitter aftertaste.

  He could hear other sounds, deeper, bigger sounds. They were the vast, echoing, booming noises of the unstable cities, creaking and swaying, uttering their slow and monumental death knell out across the immense gulf of the impact pit.

  Hawser found himself walking slowly through the mansion zone, crossing from courtyard into cloister and back again. He felt immune to the battle that rang around him, incidental, close by, but not near enough to trouble him. Sparks sailed like stars through the dusty air. He stepped from the shadows of the covered walkways into the bright orange glare of the open courts, where the light of firestorms cast shadows of him, long and lean across the tiled ground.

  He looked at his shadow, so distorted and extended, so longshanked and shifting in the flamelight. The pelt Bitur Bercaw had given him on the night he awakened in the Aett was still around his shoulders. He wore it at all times. The grey wolf pelt lent his spectral shadow a strangely hunched neck and shaggy back.

  Much of the mansion complex’s infrastructure had been ripped out. He saw walls and ceilings where flush, polished panels had been torn out, revealing curiously organic layers of machinery. The purpose of the sub-layer systems was not apparent. They seemed to be complex arrangements, patterns that were both circuits and organic valves, power cables and blood vessels intertwined. Smouldering energy fumes wept out of torn and dangling tubes. Unidentifiable fluids dribbled from ruptured ducts.

  He looked around. He looked up. The spavined city rose above him as if it was trying to claw its way out of its icy grave. Tracers of weapons fire, like bright lattices, criss-crossed the smoke-streaked air. Heavy weapon beams scored destructive lines several kilometres long across the darkness of the pit, projected by assault craft on attack runs. Where they touched, the city structures dissolved in walls of light and threw out arches of burning gas like solar flares. Flurries of missiles, visible from their exhaust flares alone, raced like schools of comets, spat out by gunships too dark to be seen in the smoke. At roof-level, to his left, two distant Warlord Titans were leading the Army in towards a bastion gate across a horizon formed by an inter-tower bridge. Clouds of tiny munition impacts billowed around their inexorable figures like fireflies at dusk.

  He heard the deep, booming, background instability of the cities again. It sounded like a bell tolling in the core of the planet.

  A sharper sound made him start. Concussion slapped him. Directly overhead, a formation of bulk landers was attempting to deliver platoons of Outremars onto upper platforms that jutted out like theatre balconies. One had been hit by ground fire. It had exploded in a staggering welter of flame and whizzing debris. The landers in formation with it attempted to steer out of the blast wash. One clipped another and they both had to pull off the drop target hard, engines protesting. A third was struck soundly along its flank by projectile debris from the lost
unit. It shivered, mortally wounded. Black smoke began to gout from its port-side engines. It tried to get nose-up. It tried to get close enough to the platform to drop its ramp and let its cargo of soldiers deploy.

  It hit the platform instead. The planing impact tore the underside away, peeling it off like the lid of a tin can. As the main hull began to disintegrate and the four engines exploded in a quick, fiery series, it began to rain bodies.

  The Outremar troopers spilled by the wreck fell on the mansion complex, helpless, tumbling, flailing. Some were already dead. Some were still screaming when they made impact. They hit roofs, terraces, the canopies of cloisters, the open tiles of the courtyards. They glanced off sloping walls and made multiple further impacts before rolling to a halt. Burning debris rained down with them. Some of the bodies were on fire, or partially dismembered. Some struck with such force, blood spatter went five or six metres up the face of walls. Others landed whole and lay as if asleep.

  Staring up, mesmerised by the human hail, it took Hawser a moment to register that there was every possibility he might be struck by some of the falling bodies. One came rushing down at him and he flinched to his left. It hit the tiled courtyard ground with a noise like smashing eggs and snapping celery. He looked down at the anatomically impossible position it had chosen to rest in for the remainder of eternity.

  Another body impacted a few metres to his right like a bag of blood bursting. Hawser backed away. He looked up again in time to see a whirling piece of burning machine debris dropping towards him, end over end.

  He ran. He made it to the cover of the nearest cloistered area as the wreckage struck. Then a human body smacked into the awning roof above him, splitting as it shattered orange tiles and produced a vile trickle of blood that pattered down onto the ground. He ran again, and sought greater sanctuary in the more substantial archway of the mansion proper.