Prospero Burns

by Dan Abnett

  ‘Varangr!’ Skarssen called. His herald appeared from the ranks around the chamber walls.

  ‘Yes, Skarsi?’

  ‘Var, take Ibn Rustah and put him somewhere.’

  ‘Where, Skarsi?’

  ‘I think it was suggested earlier today that he should be put in the quiet room as soon as he made planetfall.’

  ‘Really, Skarsi? Really? The quiet room?’

  ‘Yes, Var!’ Skarssen snapped. He looked at Lord Gunn. ‘You have a problem with that?’ he asked.

  Lord Gunn shrugged and chuckled a little wet leopard-chuckle.

  ‘Valdor made a special point of asking us not to do anything provocative, but we don’t take our orders from him. What do you think, priest?’

  Wyrdmake gently bowed his head.

  ‘Whatever pleases my Lord Gunn,’ he said.

  ‘Very little ever pleases me, gothi,’ replied Lord Gunn. ‘Being here doesn’t please me. The nature of this council, the gravity of what’s at stake here, the infernal politicking and pussy-footing, none of it pleases me. However, sticking this little runt in the quiet room might amuse me for a short while.’

  All of the Wolves in the group laughed. Hawser shivered.

  ‘This way,’ said Varangr.

  Wyrdmake stopped Hawser as the herald of Fyf began to lead him away.

  ‘I am told you were with Longfang when his thread was cut.’

  ‘I was,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Don’t forget where he led you,’ said Wyrdmake. ‘He would have led you further, except he couldn’t follow.’

  Varangr led Hawser out of the chamber, and down a melta-cut tunnel towards the enigmatic ‘quiet room’. They had barely entered the tunnel when Hawser started to feel queasy.

  ‘Gets into your guts, doesn’t it?’ asked Varangr with relish. ‘Like a knife. No, a branding iron.’

  ‘What is that?’

  ‘It’s them,’ the herald replied, as if that explained everything. Tectonic booming echoed up through the tunnel floor, and luminous orange blossoms of lava lit up and flowed past the vitreous walls. Hawser felt unsteady, his head swimmy. He leant against the tunnel wall for support, not caring how painfully warm the glassy surface felt.

  ‘You’ll get used to it,’ said Varangr. ‘Don’t know what’s worse, the feeling of them, or the feeling of what they keep out.’

  At the end of the tunnel, there was a rough-notched mark of aversion staring out of the rock lintel.

  They passed by it, and Varangr led him out into a large, square chamber, smaller than the space that had housed the Fenrisian jarls. The floor was made of a rough, grey pyroclastic rock, though displays of volcanic firelight still shimmered through the glassy walls and ceiling to provide light. Six tall figures were sitting on bench blocks cut from the flaky grey rock. They rose to their feet as one the moment Varangr and Hawser entered and faced them.

  ‘Refreshments,’ Varangr said, gesturing at a tray that had been placed on a smaller grey block. On the tray were some dried field kit rations, a jug of tepid water, a flask of mjod and a lidded bowl. From the smell, Hawser could tell that the bowl contained fresh meat that had begun to turn in the sweltering heat.

  ‘Help yourself,’ Varangr said, and left.

  Hawser looked at the six figures facing him. They were tall, taller than him, and female, all dressed in ornate, high-collared war armour. The armour looked gold or hammered bronze in the firelight. Despite the heat, the females wore floor length cloaks of a rich, crimson fabric. Exquisite parchments, manuscripts and prayer strips hung from their belts and armour plates, attached by red wax seals and ribbons. Kasper Hawser could recite copious amounts of evidentiary research on the historical use and significance of prayer strips. He knew a great deal about the importance, the actual psychophysical potency, that primitive cultures had once invested in the written word. To many human civilisations in the past, prayers or wards or imprecations written down in some ritual fashion and pinned or otherwise attached to a person in a ceremonial manner were things of supernatural force. They protected the wearer. They were marks of aversion, or the means to vouchsafe good fortune. They were ways of making hoped-for futures become reality. They were charms for fending off bad things.

  The fact that the women wore such adornments, like old Cruxian pilgrims, felt like the most spectacularly pagan thing Hawser had seen in a long time, and that was saying something given how long he’d lived with the Vlka Fenryka. The Fenrisians were tempered by the primitive climate of their planet. These females were coldly beguiling, their arms and armour the product of High Terran technology. Each one had a silver longsword, a powerblade of horrible beauty. The swords rested upright, tips to the floor between the women’s feet. Each female had her armoured wrists crossed on the pommel of her sword.

  None of the females wore a helmet, but the grilled throat guards of their golden armour rose up high, obscuring their mouths and the lower halves of their faces. Eyes without a nose or mouth, eyes above golden grilles. They reminded him of an old memory, faded and creased. A mouth, smiling, and eyes hidden.

  The eyes of each of the females were intense and unblinking. Their heads were shaved except for bound top knots of long hair.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked, wiping sweat off his brow. His skin had gone clammy.

  They didn’t reply. He didn’t want to look at them. It was the strangest thing. The swimmy, bilious feeling returned, far more unpleasantly than before. The females were fascinating, beautiful figures, but he did not want to regard them. He wanted to do anything but. The sight of them repelled him. The very fact of them made him recoil.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, turning away. ‘What are you?’

  No reply came. He heard the faintest metal scratch as a sword tip lifted away from pyroclastic rock floor. Still looking aside, Hawser drew his axe. It was a firm, fluid draw, just the way Godsmote had taught him: left hand under the head, thumb behind the shoulder, pulling to almost throw it clear of the plasteel belt-loop before letting it go, so he caught the haft around the belly with his right hand and clamped the throat with his left hand again, and there it was across his chest, ready to knock into someone.

  A voice rumbled something. A command. The voice was so deep, it sounded like an extension of the seismic turmoil beneath them.

  Hawser dared to raise his eye line. He maintained his grip on his axe, fully prepared to strike.

  The beautifully hideous, hideously beautiful females had encircled him. Their longswords were all aimed at him in double-handed grips. Any one of them could extinguish his life with a turn of her wrists.

  The voice rumbled again. It was louder this time: the throat-noise of an animal mixed with a volcanic detonation, the furious blast of the top coming off a mountain.

  As one, the females took a step back, all switching to a formal ‘rest’ position, with their swords raised at their right shoulders and no longer directly threatening. The voice muttered a third noise, a softer growl, and the females stepped back, breaking the circle around Hawser.

  Hawser moved clear of them, further into the chamber. He could see a dark shape ahead of him, a mass of shadows in the ruddy firelight. It was the source of the voice.

  Hawser could hear the soft, deep, quick panting of a big animal bothered by heat.

  The figure spoke. Hawser felt its voice vibrate his diaphragm. He felt terror through to his core, but, curiously, it was a clean, simple feeling, preferable to the revulsion the females had inspired.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Hawser said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying to me.’

  The voice trembled him again.

  ‘Ser, I can hear your words, but I don’t know the language,’ Hawser insisted.

  The figure stirred and looked directly at him. Hawser saw its face.

  ‘I was told you spoke the cants of the Vlka Fenryka,’ said Leman Russ.

  Ten

  Witness

  The Wolf King straightened up, like some elemental
giant rousing from its telluric slumber.

  ‘Juvjk. Wurgen,’ he said. ‘I was informed you spoke both fluently.’

  The distinctive wet leopard-growl of the Fenrisian Astartes haunted every syllable of his words. Hawser was mesmerised by the primarch’s size. Every physical dimension exceeded that of an Astartes. It was like meeting a god. It was as though one of the great and perfectly proportioned statues of classical antiquity, one scaled fifty or seventy-five per cent bigger than human standard, had come to life.

  ‘Well?’ asked Russ. ‘Or have you lost your command of Low Gothic too?’

  ‘Ser, I…’ Hawser began. ‘Ser… you’re speaking Low Gothic?’

  ‘I am now.’

  ‘Then I don’t know,’ said Hawser. He wished, desperately, his voice didn’t sound so pathetic and paper-thin. ‘I could speak both Juvjk and Wurgen before I was brought to this quiet room. Then again, I could speak neither of them until I came to Fenris, so make of that what you will.’

  The Wolf King pouted thoughtfully.

  ‘I think it confirms what Wyrdmake and the others have believed all along. You’ve been tampered with, Ahmad Ibn Rustah. At some point prior to your arrival on Fenris, some agency, probably a psyker, altered your mind.’

  ‘Aun Helwintr suggested as much to me, ser. It’s quite a thing to take in. If it’s true, then I can’t trust myself.’

  ‘Imagine how we feel.’

  Hawser stared at the Wolf King.

  ‘Why do you even tolerate me, then? I’m untrustworthy. I’m maleficarum.’

  ‘Oh, sit down,’ said the Wolf King. He held out a huge open hand and gestured to a stone bench beside him. ‘Sit down and we’ll talk about it.’

  The Wolf King was also seated on a stone bench. He had a deep silver lanx near to hand, brimming with mjod. His armour appeared almost black, as if it had been scorched and tarnished in a smithy, but Hawser felt that was just the way the gloom of the firelight played upon it. Under an open sky, he thought, it would be tempest grey.

  The armour was by far the heaviest and most marked power plate Hawser had ever seen. It dwarfed the formidable suits of the Terminators. It was notched and gouged, and the damage was as much decoration as the knotwork and tooled etching on the main plates. Around his shoulders, Russ wore a black wolf-skin. The pelt seemed to surround him and clothe him, like a forest beards a hillslope or a stormcloud smokes a peak. His face was shaved clean, and his skin was white like marble. Close to, Hawser could see light freckles on it. The Wolf King’s hair was long. Thick plaits of it hung down across his chest plate, weighted at the tips by polished stones. The rest of it was lacquered into a spiked mane. Hawser had heard many stories about the Wolf King from the men of Tra. They had all described his hair as red, or the colour of rust, or of molten copper. Hawser wasn’t so sure. To him, the Wolf King’s mane looked like bright blond hair stained in blood.

  Russ watched Hawser take his seat. He sipped from his lanx. He was panting still, through parted lips, like a large mammal made uncomfortable by the heat but unable to shed its fur.

  ‘This chamber has proved the tampering.’

  ‘They called it the quiet room,’ said Hawser. ‘Who are those females, ser?’

  He gestured towards the armoured figures waiting near the mouth of the chamber, but he could not bring himself to look at them.

  ‘Members of the Silent Sisterhood,’ Russ replied. ‘An ancient Terran order. Null Maidens, some call them.’

  ‘Why do I find them so… distressing?’

  Russ smiled. It was an odd expression. He had a long philtrum and a heavy lower lip. These, combined with the high, freckled cheekbones, made his mouth into something of a muzzle, and his smile into a threat display of teeth.

  ‘That’s their function… aside from the fact they fight like bastards. They’re blanks. Untouchables. Psyker-inert. Got the pariah gene in them. Nothing on Nikaea can see us or hear our minds while we’re in here with them. There are more of them stationed throughout these chambers, and their effect is general enough to cloak the presence of the Vlka Fenryka. But Gunn thought it a good idea if I stayed in here, in the heart of it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t want to upset my brother,’ replied Russ.

  ‘Why? What might he do?’ asked Hawser, swallowing hard. The question he’d really wanted to ask was, who is your brother?

  ‘Something stupid that we’d all regret for a damned long time,’ said Russ. ‘We’re just here to make sure he arrives at the right decision. And if he doesn’t, we’re here to make sure the repercussions of the wrong decision are restricted to a bare minimum.’

  ‘You’re talking about another primarch,’ said Hawser.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘You’re talking about taking arms against another primarch?’

  ‘Yes. If needs be. Funny, I always seem to get the dirty jobs.’

  The Wolf King rose to his feet and stretched.

  ‘The moment you came in here, ser,’ Russ said, mocking Hawser’s use of the honorific, ‘the scramble-your-guts sisters blocked whatever was playing with your head. I’d be very interested to know who was handling you.’

  ‘Handling?’

  ‘My dear Ahmad Ibn Rustah, wake up and see where you are. You’re a spy. A pawn in a very long game.’

  ‘A spy? I assure you, not willingly, ser! I—’

  ‘Oh, be quiet, little man!’ the Wolf King growled. The vibratory force alone sat Hawser back on his stone bench. ‘I know you’re not. We’ve spent a long time and a lot of effort testing you. We want to know what kind of spy you are: a basic intelligence gatherer, or something with a more insidious mission. We want to know who’s running you, and who sent you to infiltrate the Vlka Fenryka twenty years ago.’

  ‘That was my choice. I chose Fenris, out of academic interest and—’

  ‘No,’ said Leman Russ. ‘No, you didn’t. You think you did. You feel like you did, but it’s not true.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘It’s not true, and you’ll see that yourself in time.’

  The Wolf King sat down again, facing Hawser. He leaned in and stared into Hawser’s eyes. Hawser trembled. He wasn’t able not to.

  ‘People think the Sixth are just savages. But you’ve spent enough time among us to know that’s not true. We fight smart. We don’t just charge in howling, even if it looks like we do. We gather impeccable intelligence and we use it. We exploit any crack, any weakness. We are ruthless. We’re not stupid.’

  ‘I’ve been told this,’ said Hawser. ‘I’ve witnessed it with my own eyes. I’ve heard Jarl Ogvai repeat the lesson to the men of Tra.’

  ‘Jarl Ogvai knows how I like my Legion run. He would not have been named jarl otherwise. There are certain philosophies of war that I adhere to. Does that surprise you?’

  ‘No, ser.’

  ‘You may have been placed among us by an enemy, or a potential enemy,’ said the Wolf King. ‘Rather than just disposing of you as a threat, I’d like to use you. Are you willing to help me?’

  ‘I serve,’ said Hawser, blinking fast.

  ‘It might get your thread cut,’ rumbled Leman Russ through a smile, ‘but I want you to test the ice and see if you can’t get whoever sent you to show themselves.’

  Russ rose again.

  ‘Women!’ he shouted, and made a great beckoning gesture for the Sisters of Silence to follow them. All six moved in perfect coordination, and swung their longswords up to a shoulder guard position from the tip-down stance. Hawser heard six, quick simultaneous scratches of metal on rock.

  Russ took another swig of mjod, set his lanx aside, and lumbered out of the cavern through a melta-cut gap opposite the corridor Hawser had entered by. Following close behind him, Hawser had time to appreciate the size of the broadsword the Wolf King wore in a leatherwork and nacre scabbard across his back. He was struck by its beauty. It had the same hypnotic perfection as an approaching storm, or the gape of an apex predator a millisecond aw
ay from biting. The sword was bigger than him, taller. It would not have fitted into a coffin built for Kasper Hawser.

  The gold-plated female warriors fell in step around them as an honour guard, three on each side. Hawser felt his skin crawl at their proximity. He had not put his axe away since drawing it at the chamber mouth, and his hands white-knuckled around the warm bone grip. Sweat beaded on his face.

  The gap was short, and led down a series of crude, torch-cut steps into a soaring, lofty chamber. After the confines of the tunnels and the quiet room, its size took Hawser’s breath away. An immense bubble had once been trapped in the lava stream that had solidified to compose this part of the mountain. The floor had been levelled off with melta work, but the upper reaches of the cavern were naturally arched, mimicking a cathedral’s nave. Though the air was warm, there was a murmur in it, the echo of many voices dwarfed by a great space.

  The chamber had been set up as a command post. On top of the metal decking plates set up on the heat-levelled floor, portable power units were running cogitator sets and deep-gain vox-casters. There were lighting rigs and, Hawser noted, automated sentry guns and field generators at the outer exits. This was a strongpoint. The area had been made defensible. Solemn rows of Imperial banners and flags had been suspended down the length of the chamber from the ceiling, hanging limp and heavy in the heat. They were martial symbols and honour rolls, vast sheets of cloth and gold thread evidencing the dignity and import of the Imperium of Man. Here, even here in a rock-cut facility built for temporary purposes, it had been considered necessary to make such a display, as though the chamber was one of the great halls of the Royal Palace of Terra.

  A curious mix of personnel manned the command post. There were hundreds of humans and servitors at work. More of the silent sisters lurked around the corners of the vast space, lending their distressing absence to the location. At the bustling console positions, most of the personnel were uniformed officers of the Imperial Fleet and the Hegemonic Corps, though Hawser saw some Sixth Legion thralls along with liveried human servants from other institutions.