Prospero Burns

Nine

For all of the forty-week voyage, he considered those twelve minutes.

Their work done, Tra left the 40th Expedition to stamp out the ashes of the Olamic Quietude, a miserable effort of funereal cleansing that would eventually take three years, and effectively end the 40th Expedition’s exploration. Tra had been summoned to its next operation. Hawser was not told what it was. He did not ask. He did not expect to be told.

What he did expect was censure for the death of Heoroth Longfang. He felt the loss was essentially down to him and, adding the fact of Longfang’s high status as a veteran, he didn’t hold out much hope for a continuing relationship with the Vlka Fenryka.

Or, indeed, with breathing.

No censure was made. As the ship got under way, the company just gathered quietly to make its respects. Hawser was given simple instructions.

‘They’ll each come to you,’ Bear told him. ‘Learn their accounts.’

‘Who will?’ Hawser asked.

‘All of them,’ Bear replied, as if it was a stupid question.

‘Was that a stupid question?’ asked Hawser.

‘You have no other kind,’ replied Bear. ‘Learn their accounts.’

They came to him, all right. Every single member of Tra, one at a time, or in small groups. They came to Hawser and they told him the stories they had of Heoroth Longfang.

There were a lot of them. Some were multiple versions of the same event, retold by different witnesses. Some were contradictory. Some were short. Some were long and ungainly. Some were funny. Some were scary. Most were fearsome and bloody. Many recounted incidents when Longfang had saved the storyteller’s life, or taught the storyteller a valuable wisdom. There were expressions of gratitude, and respect and appreciation.

Hawser listened to them all and he learned them all, relying on all his eidetic tricks and Conservatory training. By the end of the process, he had committed four hundred and thirty-two discrete accounts of the rune priest to memory.

Some of the stories had been given to him flat and expressionless, matter-of-fact. Others had been related grimly by men moved over the loss. Some had been told to him by men who were plainly poor storytellers, and he’d had to go back several times and quiz the teller to make sense of what he was being told. Some had crucial elements missed out accidentally due to enthusiasm. Some were just tangled messes he’d had to unpick. Some were stories related with mirth, remembering Longfang with considerable affection. In such cases, the process of conveying the stories to Hawser was often interrupted as the tellers struggled to stop laughing so they could finish their accounts.

All the while, listening to the stories with a serious or smiling aspect as was appropriate, Hawser thought of the twelve minutes. Heoroth Longfang had stayed with him for twelve minutes, talking, finishing his story, sharing his truth. Twelve minutes from his bio-track flatlining. Twelve minutes of postmortem survival.

Heoroth Longfang had stolen twelve minutes from the Underverse’s tally-stick for a reason. To keep him safe? To show Hawser something? To prove something?

Once the stories were his, the sending away began. Longfang’s body, held in a stasis casket, would be shipped back to Fenris to be burned out on the ice fields of Asaheim, at some high point overlooking the forest migration trails of the saeneyti where the old priest had liked to hunt, but this was another kind of letting go. The company gathered in one of the ship’s main chambers to feast in memory of Longfang for as many days and nights as Hawser’s account lasted.

Godsmote had shown Hawser some pity. He had warned him to rehearse well, to practise dramatic recitation, to space the stories out so that smaller reflections were worked in between longer epics. He told the skjald that, under no circumstance, should he hurry along. Long rests should be built in, long rests of ten hours or more. These periods of reflection also prolonged the event. The recitations would be done in Juvjk, the hearth-cant, because that was one of the solemn and sacred uses of the hearth-cant. Wurgen terminology could only be used for technical embellishment.

Tra was using a warship called Nidhoggur. Hawser did not imagine that the warships of the Vlka Fenryka resembled the ships of other Legions Astartes except, perhaps, in their basic construction. Hawser had not seen other Astartes warships, but he’d travelled on several Imperial Fleet vessels, and Nidhoggur was a strange craft by comparison. He got the impression that the Vlka Fenryka regarded both their starships and their transatmospherics as boats, and the void simply an extension of the gale-wracked oceans of their home world. Interior spaces had been finished with bone, polished ivory and wood, like the inside of the Aett. It was a Unification Era cruiser that had been progressively altered and adorned until most of its old identity had been lost, and a great deal of new identity imposed.

Environmental controls were set several points down from Imperial standard, so Nidhoggur was darker and colder than any vessel he’d travelled on before. Too much warmth, Hawser was reminded as he shivered in a corner of the living spaces, made a man sluggish. Too much light, and a man’s vision grew blunt. A lamplit dusk prevailed in most of the deck spaces.

The chamber employed for the sending off was a hold space that was left unused except for such events. Only a member of the Vlka Fenryka as venerable as Longfang deserved such a ceremonial farewell.

The hold reminded Hawser of a slice of urban underhive, a piece of favela wasteland from the slums of an old-Terra city. It was dirty and littered, and twilight-dark. Most of the surfaces of the place were blackened with soot. Piles of loose cables, insulation, broken metal spars, ceiling liners and tangled wire suggested that the space had been either vandalised or customised over the years, perhaps both.

Combustible material was dragged in, heaped up, and lit under the scorched vents of the hold’s extractor ducts. Eye-watering smoke filled the chamber. On this deck level, Hawser presumed, the ship’s emergency detection and containment systems had been disabled, or had long since fried out.

He sat by a wall, watching the ceremony take shape. Over time, sitting exactly where he now sat, others had worried away at the wall by the jumping firelight. The ivory panelling lining most of the hold was covered in intricate, hand-done knotwork, the same ancient weave pattern that marked the Rout’s weapons and armour, especially their leatherware. He felt the surface with his fingertips in the shadows, touching where one pattern ended and another took up, blade marks as distinctive as handwriting or voices. He realised how old Nidhoggur was. Two hundred, maybe even two hundred and fifty years old. He thought of the Vlka Fenryka as a well established order, with old and honoured traditions, but this vessel had come out of the fitters’ yards before the Sixth Legion Astartes had even left Terra and been rehoused on bleak Fenris. Hawser had committed most of his life to the search for history, and here it was right under his fingertips. He knew the scale of history, but he’d never really thought about its varying intensities. The long, slow tracts of stability, the abiding Ages of Technology, like endless hot summers, were bland and uneventful compared to the furious two centuries Niddhoggur had witnessed. The remaking of mankind’s fortunes. The rebuilding of mankind’s estate. Would any ship ever last so long or see so much of that which mattered?

Tra assembled. The men came dressed in their pelts and their leatherwork. They were shadows with beast faces, shades with knotwork masks. Hawser could smell the petroleum reek of mjod, mjod in copious quantities. Thralls in horned head-dresses and long, ragged cloaks of patchwork hide moved through the assembling company with drink to fill and refill each lanx. They brought red meat too; panniers of it to stoke the accelerated metabolisms of the Astartes.

Drums were sounding. There was no unifying rhythm. It seemed to be more a matter of pride for a man to be belligerently out of tempo with the neighbouring beats. Playing along with crude pipes and trumpets, made from bone and animal horn, the drums were designed to make noise, a kind of assaulting anti-music. Some of the drums were hoops of wood or bone, or even heated and bent tusk that had been covered in tight skins. Others were giant fish scales, or plates of hammered metal that Hawser eventually realised were pieces of armour taken as trophies from enemies. These hardskin drums made battering rows like cymbals or sistra.

In no order of seniority, and apparently casually, the men came up to the main fires and placed offerings in the ash spill. Hawser saw them leave beads or small trophies, claws and fish teeth, small graven figures shaped from bones and wax, and shell cases etched with knotwork scratches and plumed with seabird feathers. When they left a gift, they took a handful of ash and, removing their leather masks or their entire headgear in some cases, marked their faces with smudges of grey. Najot Threader, his head covered in a tight leather mask that crowned in two vast, winter-black antlers, stood by the fires and watched the men make their marks. He spoke to some, stopping them, a hand on their shoulders, making marks of his own sometimes with ash or red paste on their brows or on their cheekbones under their eyes.

‘What do I give?’ Hawser asked.

Fith Godsmote was sitting beside him, gnawing at a handful of raw meat. Hawser could smell the blood, a pervasive metal stink that was turning his stomach.

‘You’ve got your account to give, so that’s enough,’ Godsmote said. ‘But you should go and get marked by the priest.’

‘I’ve got this feeling,’ said Hawser.

‘What?’ asked Oje from the other side of him.

‘This whole thing is going to end up with me ceremonially offered up in Longfang’s memory.’

‘Hjolda!’ Oje laughed. ‘That’s an idea that would please some!’

‘It’s not how it works,’ said Godsmote, wiping his mouth, ‘but I could have a word with the jarl if you like.’

Hawser scowled at him.

‘You think we blame you for Longfang?’ Godsmote asked.

Hawser nodded.

‘That’s not how it works,’ Godsmote repeated. ‘Wyrd sometimes takes and sometimes gives. Some things seem more important than others when they’re not. Other things, they seem less important than others, when in fact they’re the most important things of all. You didn’t take Longfang from us. It was his time to go. And you’ve brought things to the Rout that they’re grateful for.’

‘Such as?’

Godsmote shrugged.

‘Me,’ he said.

‘You’ve got a pretty high opinion of yourself, Fith of the Ascommani,’ said Hawser.

‘I don’t mean it like that,’ said Godsmote. ‘But I’m useful, a useful arm. I’ve done good work for the jarl and the Rout. I wouldn’t be here unless I was meant to be here. But I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t fallen out of Uppland that spring.’

‘So I wasn’t such a bad star for you, then?’

‘Neither of us would be here unless we were supposed to be here,’ said Godsmote. ‘You see what I’m saying?’

‘I still feel I’m here on sufferance,’ said Hawser.

‘What does that mean?’ asked Godsmote.

‘I feel I’m tolerated because there’s not a lot else you can do with me.’

‘Oh, there were plenty of things we could have done with you,’ said Oje matter-of-factly as he bit into some meat.

‘Ignore him,’ said Godsmote. ‘Look, they’re closing the bounds so we can begin. Go up now and show us the value of a skjald, and you’ll know you’re not with us under sufferance.’

At the exits and entrances of the hold space, members of Tra were using plasteel hand-axes to strike marks of aversion into the hatch sills and door frames, duplicating the device Hawser had seen Bear make on the graving dock. The area was now contained and access from the outside forbidden until the ceremony was played out. The anti-music noise rose to a peak, and then stopped.

Hawser approached the flames.

Najot Threader, wolf priest, loomed over him like a bull saeneyti, his antlered head backlit by the fire. Despite the crackling blaze and the throat-closing smoke, Hawser felt cold. He pulled the fur that Bitur Bercaw gave him close around his throat and shivered inside his clammy bodyglove. Someone, the priest perhaps, had thrown seedcases and dried leaves on the fire, and they were burning with an unpleasantly sweet aroma.

‘Name yourself,’ said Najot Threader.

‘Ahmad Ibn Rustah, skjald of Tra,’ Hawser replied.

‘And what do you bring to the fireside?’

‘The account of Ulvurul Heoroth, called Longfang, as is my calling,’ said Hawser.

The priest nodded, and marked Hawser’s cheeks with grey paste. Then he leaned forwards with a small straw made from a hollow fish bone. Hawser closed his eyes just in time as Najot Threader used the straw to blow a spray of black paint across his eyes.

His tear ducts stinging, Hawser turned to face the company, circling the main fire as boldly as he felt able. He was trying to control his breathing, trying to remember to pace himself and project his voice. His throat was dry.

With a gesture of confidence and command, he held out a hand. One of the thralls obediently handed him a lanx, and Hawser drank without even checking to see if it was mjod. It wasn’t. The thralls were aware of his biological limits and careful not to cripple him by accident.

Hawser took another sip of watered-down wine, rinsed it around his gums, and handed back the drinking bowl.

‘The first account,’ he said, ‘is the story of Olafer.’

Olafer rose from his place amongst one group and nodded, raising his lanx. There was a ragged cheer.

‘On Prokofief,’ Hawser began, ‘forty great years ago, Olafer and Longfang fought against the greenskins. Bitter winter, dark sea, black islands where the greenskins massed in numbers like the shingle on a beach. A hard fight. Anyone who was there will remember it. On the first day…’

Some parts of the account were greeted with roaring enthusiasm, others with grim silence. Some provoked laughter and others barks of sorrow or regret. Hawser warmed to his task, and began to recognise which of his techniques worked well and which seemed to impress the least.

His only real mis-step came when he described some fallen enemies in one account as ‘finally succumbing to the worms in the soil’.

Someone stopped him. It was Ogvai.

The jarl held up a ring-heavy hand. His look of confusion was accentuated by the heavy piercing in his lower lip.

‘What is that word?’ he asked.

Hawser established that the word ‘worms’ wasn’t known to any of the Wolves. Somehow, he’d slipped out of Juvjk and fallen back on his Low Gothic vocabulary.

It was strange, because he knew the Juvjk word for worms perfectly well.

‘Ah,’ said Ogvai, nodding and sitting back. ‘I understand now. Why didn’t you say so?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Hawser. ‘I have travelled a long way, and picked up as many words as I have stories.’

‘Continue,’ Ogvai instructed.

He continued. He built in the rests he’d been advised to incorporate, and slept for a few hours at a time as the men drank mjod, and talked. Sometimes, the drumming and the anti-music would start up again, and some of the men would dance a sort of furious anti-dance, a wild, heedless, ecstatic frenzy that looked as if they had been possessed or suffered a mass psychogenic chorea. It grew so warm in the chamber that Hawser began to go to the fireside without his pelt when he was called.

It was a test of endurance. He ate what the thralls brought him, and drank copiously to maintain his fluid levels. The stories, even the shortest and most incomplete tales, seemed to crawl by, etching out Longfang’s lifespan slowly, like careful knotwork. Four hundred and thirty-two stories took time to tell properly.

The last of all would be the account of Longfang’s death, a tale that combined Hawser’s memories with those of Jormungndr Two-blade. Hawser knew he would be tired by the time he reached it.

He also knew he had to make it the best of all.

It was still a long way off, with over sixty stories left to tell, when Ogvai rose to his feet. They had stopped to rest. Aeska shook Hawser awake. The drumming was quietening down from another frenzied bout, and dancers were slumping to the deck, laughing and reaching out for mjod.

‘What’s happening?’ Hawser asked.

‘Part of the sending off is the choosing of the next,’ said Aeska.

There were several men in Tra who were alleged to have the sight like Longfang. They also served in priest-like capacities, and one would be selected to fulfil Longfang’s senior role.

They came forwards and knelt in a circle around Ogvai. The jarl’s centre-parted hair fell straight on either side of his face like black-water cataracts. He was stripped to the waist. He tilted his head back and reached out his hands, flexing the huge muscles of his arms, his shoulders and his neck. Grey ash had been smeared on his snow-white flesh. Like Hawser, Ogvai had black paint across his eyes.

In his right hand, he held a ceremonial blade. An athame.

The jarl started to speak, intoning in turn the virtues of each candidate.

Hawser wasn’t listening. The athame, the pose with the arms outstretched, it violently reminded him of the figure in the Lutetian Bibliotech, a story that had been locked in his head for decades, a story he had only brought out again for Heoroth Longfang.

He stared at the athame.

It wasn’t just similar. Kasper Hawser was an expert in these things. He knew about types and styles. This wasn’t a misidentification based on similarity.

It was precisely the same blade.

He rose to his feet.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Godsmote.

‘Sit down, skjald,’ said Oje. ‘It’s not your turn.’

‘How is that the same?’ asked Hawser, staring at the ceremony.

‘How is what the same?’ asked Aeska, annoyed.

‘Sit down and shut up,’ growled another Wolf.

‘How is that blade the same?’ Hawser asked, pointing.

‘Sit down,’ said Godsmote. ‘Hjolda! I’ll smite you myself if you don’t sit down!’

Ogvai had made his choice. The other candidates bowed their faces down to the deck to acknowledge the authority of the decision. The chosen man rose to his feet to face the jarl.

Tra’s new rune priest was young, one of the younger candidates. Aun Helwintr had earned his name because his long hair was as white as deep season snow, despite his age. The leatherwork of his mask was so dark it was almost black, and he wore the pelt of a tawny animal. He was known for his strange, distant manner, his odd bearing, and his habit of getting into impetuous fights that he miraculously survived. Wyrd gathered inside Aun Helwintr in a way that Ogvai wanted to harness.

Some rite was about to take place. Hawser felt the silence close in. He believed himself to be the cause of it.

That was not the case. The Wolves had turned to look towards one of the chamber hatches, golden eyes baleful in the firelight.

A group of thralls stood there, escorting a terrified-looking member of Niddhoggur’s bridge crew. They had entered despite the marks of aversion at the doorways.

Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot swapped the athame into his left hand and picked up his war axe. He strode across the hold space to dismember them for their violation.

Halfway across the deck, he stopped and checked himself. Only an idiot would ignore a mark and break in on such a private ceremony.

Only an idiot, or a man with a message so important that it couldn’t wait.

‘So you liked the account?’ Hawser asked. ‘It amused you? It distracted you?’

‘It was amusing enough,’ said Longfang. ‘It wasn’t your best.’

‘I can assure you it was,’ said Hawser.

Longfang shook his head. Droplets of blood flecked from his beard.

‘No, you’ll learn better ones,’ he said. ‘Far better ones. And even now, it’s not the best you know.’

‘It’s the most unnerving thing that happened to me in my old life,’ said Hawser with some defiance. ‘It has the most… maleficarum.’

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Longfang. ‘In your heart, you know better. You’re denying yourself.’

Hawser woke with a start. For a terrible, rushing moment, he thought he was back in the Bibliotech, or out on the ice fields with Longfang, or even in the burning courtyard of the Quietude’s sundered city.

But it was all a dream. He lay back, calming down, trying to slow his panicked breathing, his bolting heart. Just a dream. Just a dream.

Hawser settled back onto his bed. He felt tired and unrefreshed, as if his sleep had been sour, or sedative assisted. His limbs ached. Sustained artificial gravity always did that to him.

Golden light was knifing into his chamber around the window shutter, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

There was an electronic chime.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘Ser Hawser? It is your hour five alarm,’ said a softly modulated servitor voice.

‘Thank you,’ said Hawser. He sat up. He was so stiff, so worn out. He hadn’t felt this bad for a long time. His leg was sore. Maybe there were painkillers in the drawer.

He limped to the window, and pressed the stud to open the shutter. It rose into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. He looked out. It was a hell of a view.

The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below him. He was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. He could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, he could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds, and, below, he could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one he was aboard, which was…

Lemurya. Yes, that was it. Lemurya. A luxury suite on the underside of the Lemuryan plate.

His eyes refocussed. He saw his own sunlit reflection in the thick glass of the window port. Old! So old! So old! How old was he? Eighty? Eighty years standard? He recoiled. This was wrong. On Fenris, they’d remade him, they’d—

Except he hadn’t been to Fenris yet. He hadn’t even left Terra.

Bathed in golden sunlight, he stared at his aghast reflection. He saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind him.

Terror constricted him.

‘How can you be here?’ he asked.

And woke.

The chamber was cold and dark, and he was on the deck under his pelt. He could feel the distant grumble of Nidhoggur’s drive. Nightmare sweat was cold on his gooseflesh.

No one had seen Ogvai since the interruption to the ceremony. Fith said that Tra had received an urgent notification and been retasked, but there was nothing concrete. As usual, Hawser didn’t expect to be told much. He waited a while to see if the ceremony would be resumed, but it was clear the moment had passed. The fires were allowed to go out, and the men of Tra dispersed. Hawser found most of them in the arming chambers, readying their weapons and their battlegear, or in the practice cages. Blades were being whetted so they held the best edge, armour was being polished and adjusted. Small refinements were being added, small trinkets or decorations. Beads and loops of teeth were being wired in place. Marks of aversion were being notched onto the tips of bolter rounds. In the harder gantry lighting of the arming chambers, Hawser reflected how much like flayed humans the Wolves looked in their leatherwork gear. The knotwork and straked pieces resembled sinews, tendons and sheets of muscle.

No one paid him any heed. His head bubbling with unhappy dreams and a sense that he had slept too long for his own good, he wandered back to the hold space.

The air smelled of cold smoke. He touched the marks of aversion on the door sills, felt the rough metal edges where they, like the others marked in place before them, had been defaced and robbed of potency.

Hawser wandered into the hold space, and stood for a while beside the smouldering heap of the main fire. He saw the glitter of the offerings the men had left in the grey ashes, and the stains of mjod splashed on the decking. He saw the discarded drums and sistra. Thralls had collected up all the lanx dishes and flasks. There were no signs of the ritual items used by either Najot Threader, the wolf priest, or Ogvai.

Go where you like.

That’s what Longfang had told him.

‘You’re a skjald. That’s the one great privilege and right of being what you are. No one in the Rout can bar you, or keep you at bay, or stop you from sticking your nose in.’

Hawser headed for the jarl’s chamber.

Ogvai occupied a stateroom near the core of the starship. If Nidhoggur was Tra’s lair, then the chamber was the darkness at the very back of the cave reserved for the alpha male. It was sparsely furnished, and screened with veils of metal link, like curtains of chainmail. Hawser’s Fenrisian eye found no trace of body heat in the chilly shadows, and his nose detected barely any pheromones in the pelts scattered around the deck.

Adjoining Ogvai’s sleeping chamber was a weaponarium. Most of the items and devices on display were trophies that the jarl had taken from vanquished foes. There were xenosform weapons whose form and function Hawser could barely imagine: staves, wands, fans, sceptres, small delicate machines. On other shelves and racks were arranged biological weapons: teeth, claws, spines, toe-hooks, mandibles, stingers. Some were preserved in jars of fluid suspension. Others were dried. A few were burnished, as if for use. Hawser paused for a moment to marvel at the grotesque size of some of the specimens. One sickle talon was as long as his arm. There was a quill as big as a harpoon. He tried to imagine the proportions of the creatures that had once been attached to them.

On other stands, firearms and blades were displayed. Hawser hunted along the lines of them until he found the collection of daggers and shorter blades.

There were several athames. Some were Fenrisian. The conservator in Hawser wished to hell he knew where Ogvai had come by the others. They were priceless relics from before the Age of Strife.

‘You could ask him.’

Hawser snapped around. Without hesitating, he had slipped one of the displayed athames off its hooks and aimed it at the shadow that had spoken.

‘It’s one of a number of questions you have for him, isn’t it?’

‘Show yourself,’ said Hawser.

Something took the athame out of his hand. Hawser felt a painful bump, and then he was being strangled, his feet kicking free in loose air.

He had been picked up and hung from the tip of the sickle talon by his pelt. The athame he had been brandishing was embedded in the wall, quivering. He tried to pull away the knot holding the pelt in place. It was hanging him. He couldn’t get his head free. His legs pinwheeled frantically.

He was lifted down and thrown onto the deck, choking and gasping.

Aun Helwintr crouched down beside him, his elbows on his knees.

‘I don’t care who you are,’ said the new rune priest. ‘You don’t pull a blade on me.’

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Hawser coughed out, snidely.

‘You were looking for something, weren’t you?’ remarked Aun Helwintr. ‘You were looking for something and it’s not here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Your mind is loud, skjald.’

‘My what?’

Aun Helwintr gestured to the racks containing the daggers and athames.

‘It’s not here. The particular blade you were looking for.’

Helwintr’s skin was almost gelid blue under his mane of straight, white hair. His features were long and sharp, like a blade, and his eyes were edged in kohl. He looked amused, like some kind of cunning, dangerous boreal trickster-god.

Hawser stared up at the rune priest in quiet alarm. He could hear Aun Helwintr’s voice, but the priest’s lips were not moving.

‘The measure of your surprise, Ahmad Ibn Rustah,’ the rune priest murmured without using his mouth, ‘reflects the unconscious contempt you have for the Sixth Legion Astartes.’

‘Contempt? No—’

‘You cannot hide it. We are barbarians, arctic savages, gene-fixed and dressed up with war-tech, and sent off to do unseemly labour for our more cultured masters. It is a common belief.’

‘I never said that—’ Hawser protested.

‘Or even consciously thought it. But deep down inside you, there is a patronising sense of superiority. You are a civilised man, and you’ve come to study us, like a magos biologis observing some primitive tribe of throwbacks. We live like animals, and we follow shamans. And yet… Great Terra! Could it be that our shamans have real gifts? Genuine powers? Could it be that they are more than just bone-rattling, bead-jangling gothi, out of their heads on mushrooms, howling at the sky?’

‘Psionics,’ whispered Hawser.

‘Psionics,’ Aun Helwintr echoed, smiling. He used his real voice.

‘I had heard that some of the Legions actually had psyker contingents,’ said Hawser.

‘Most of them have,’ replied Helwintr.

‘But the occurrence is so very rare,’ Hawser said. ‘The mutation is a—’

‘The psyker mutation is a priceless asset to our species,’ said Helwintr. ‘Without it, we would be condemned to captivity on Terra. The Great Houses of the Navigators allow us to expand our reach. The astrotelepaths allow us to communicate over the gulfs. But caution must always be exercised. Control.’

‘Why?’

‘Because when you gaze out with your mind, you never know what will stare back.’

Hawser got up and faced the rune priest.

‘Was there a purpose to this demonstration, apart from scaring me?’ he asked.

‘The purpose was the fear,’ Helwintr replied. ‘Just for a second, you thought some kind of fell magic had swept you away. Some kind of maleficarum. You felt the same way that night, years ago, beside that cathedral corpse.’

Hawser looked at him sharply.

‘I can read the pin-sharp memory you shared with Longfang,’ Helwintr told him.

‘Are you saying,’ Hawser began, ‘are you saying that my colleague Navid Murza was a psyker, and I never knew it?’

‘You come from a society that accepts and uses psykers, skjald. On Old Terra, they walked amongst you on a daily basis. Did you recognise them all? On Fenris, could you tell a ranting shaman from a man who truly has the sight?’

Hawser tightened his lips. He had no answer. Helwintr leaned closer, and stared down into Hawser’s eyes.

‘The truth of it all is that your colleague probably wasn’t a psyker. He had found a crude shortcut to something else. And that is the point. That is the lesson. Psyker ability is not a thing of itself. It allows us to draw on a greater power. It is just another path to that same something else. The best path. The safest path. Even then, it’s not without its pitfalls. If you’d care to, you may define maleficarum as any sorcery that is not performed under the most stringent application of psyker control.’

‘Just like that, you tell me I live in a universe of magic,’ said Hawser.

‘Just like that,’ agreed Helwintr. ‘Is it so hard to reconcile with all the other wonders and horrors?’

‘What about the knife?’ asked Hawser. ‘It was the knife.’

‘It was not the same,’ Helwintr replied. ‘But something wanted you to think it was. Something wanted you to think that the Sixth Legion Astartes had manipulated you and intervened in your life at some point in the past. Something wanted you to mistrust us and make us enemies.’

He took an athame off the stand and showed it to Hawser.

‘This is the blade Ogvai used,’ he said. ‘You recognise it well enough now, don’t you?’

‘Yes,’ said Hawser.

‘It was made to look like the one you remembered,’ said Helwintr. ‘Something got into your memories and altered them to turn you against us.’

Hawser swallowed.

‘What could do that?’ he asked. ‘Who could do that?’

Helwintr shrugged, as though he didn’t care.

‘Perhaps it was whoever made sure you could speak Juvjk and Wurgen from the moment you arrived on Fenris,’ he said.

Aun Helwintr raised his left hand and beckoned, though Hawser was sure the gesture was unnecessary. Fith Godsmote disengaged his practice cage and jumped down to approach them.

It was extremely noisy in the training hall of Niddhoggur’s company deck. Godsmote’s cage was whining to a halt, but most of the others were still occupied, and their mechanised armatures of blades of target drones were emitting high pitched screams as they whirled around. On the open deck mats, Wolves in leatherwork armour sparred with each other using staves of bone.

Godsmote, like all of them, looked like a flayed human in his leatherware. His black-pinned gold eyes blazed inside the slits of his gleaming brown mask. He had been training with two axes, and he held on to them as he came over rather than racking them.

‘Priest?’ he said.

‘A duty for you,’ said Helwintr.

‘I serve,’ Godsmote nodded.

Helwintr glanced at Hawser.

‘Say to him what you said to me,’ the priest prompted.

‘I’ve never been a fighter,’ said Hawser.

Godsmote snorted.

‘This is known about you,’ he remarked, amused.

‘Can I finish?’ Hawser asked.

Godsmote shrugged.

‘I’ve never been a fighter, but the Vlka Fenryka have seen fit to rebuild me with great strength and speed. I have the physical capacity, but none of the skills.’

‘He wants to learn how to handle a weapon,’ said Helwintr.

‘Why?’ asked Godsmote. ‘He’s our skjald. We’ll protect him.’

‘If he wants to, it’s his choice,’ said Helwintr. ‘Tell yourself that part of our duty to protect him is teaching him to protect himself.’

Godsmote looked down at Hawser dubiously.

‘There’s no sense trying to teach you everything,’ he said. ‘We’ll pick one thing and focus on that.’

‘What do you suggest?’ asked Hawser.

The axe was a single-bladed weapon with an almost silvered finish to the plasteel head. Its haft was a touch under a metre long, and hand shaped from a piece of bone from Asaheim. The polished ivory possessed a yellow glow. Hawser wasn’t sure what kind of animal the bone had been taken from, but he had been told it was supple and pretty much unbreakable.

Unbreakable for his purposes, anyway.

The axe lived on his hip in a loop of plasteel that was held to his belt by a piece of leatherwork.

‘Don’t loiter,’ Bear warned him.

Hawser didn’t intend to, but he was sweating like a pig in the heat, and it was a considerable effort to keep up with the striding Astartes.

He was the only regular human amongst them; a slight figure dwarfed by the two dozen fully armoured Wolves thundering down the tunnel around him. The thralls and the regular human-sized servants were following them at a distance.

Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot led the party, his helm clamped under his arm. There was no orderly ranking to the group, but Aun Helwintr and Jormungndr Two-blade flanked the jarl, and Najot Threader and the other wolf priests seemed to glide along in the rear part of the group.

The Wolves were marching purposefully, as if Ogvai was in a hurry to be somewhere. After forty weeks of transit, Hawser wondered what could be so important it couldn’t have been undertaken with more circumspection. They had deployed from Nidhoggur the moment it achieved high anchor, which made it feel like an urgent combat drop, but it was clearly not that at all. They had come in blind, through terrifying atmospherics that had required instrumentation-only guidance, and eventually slid under a volcanic shelf and set down in deep, sheltered landing pits.

The local heat was immense. The rock around them was black and volcanic, and there was a bad-egg whiff of sulphur in the air. The air itself shimmered with a haze of heat. As he walked down the Stormbird’s ramp behind Godsmote, Hawser had felt an ear-pop sensation that suggested that vast, hidden atmosphere processors were waging a monumental war to maintain a viable environment.

This wasn’t a world designed to support life.

The landing pits, and the tunnels that led away from them into the core of the planet, had been clean cut on a massive scale, as if with industrial meltas. The tunnels sliced through the volcanic rock, leaving an unnaturally smooth surface like glass. There was a constant rumble of the storms outside, and the seismic growing pains of the young planet under their feet. Fiery light, undulating and seething, oozed through the glassy walls and floor of the tunnels, and lit their way. It was like being stoppered inside a glass bottle that had been cast into a bonfire. Hawser was disconcerted by an odd sense of the very old and the very new. The subterranean spaces were like ancient habitation cave sites he had investigated on many Conservatory expeditions during his life, yet these had been cut recently, by hand. There was an odd disconnection between the temporary and the permanent too: someone had commanded enough power and resources to bore holes and chambers out of the solid rock of a supervolcano, and to install a zone of safe environment on an inimical world, both of them monumental feats of physical engineering.

Yet Hawser had the distinct feeling that once the intended business here, whatever it was, was done, the whole site would be abandoned. It was purpose built. It was not beyond reason to presume that the lifelessness of the world was part of that purpose. Whatever that business, there was a chance it might turn ugly. Of course there was. An entire company of the Vlka Fenryka had been summoned to achieve it.

Whoever had ordered the construction of this environment, had wanted it done in a remote place where there was no danger anyone could get caught in the crossfire.

‘What is this place?’ Hawser asked, scrambling to keep up.

‘Quiet,’ Bear hissed.

‘Forty weeks! How much longer before you tell me anything?’

‘Quiet,’ Bear hissed, with greater emphasis.

‘I can’t tell the account if I don’t know the details,’ said Hawser, a little more loudly. ‘It’d be a poor story then, not at all fitting for Tra’s fireside.’

Ogvai came to a sudden halt, so sudden it almost took the fast moving group by surprise. Everyone stopped obediently. Ogvai turned, and glowered back through the figures at Hawser. Sweat was running down Hawser’s face in the heat. All the Wolves had mouths half-open, teeth bared, and were slightly panting, like dogs on a warm day.

‘What’s he saying?’ he growled.

‘I’m asking how I’m supposed to be a skjald if you don’t tell me anything, jarl,’ Hawser called back.

Ogvai looked at Aun Helwintr. The rune priest closed his eyes for a second, took a calming breath, and nodded.

Ogvai acknowledged the nod and turned back to Hawser.

‘This place is called Nikaea,’ he said.

They entered a great circular chamber, melta-cut from the bedrock. The surfaces of the room were like black glass shot with glittering mica, but still it reminded Hawser of the ivory-cased chambers of the Aett.

People were waiting for them. Warriors of the Sixth Legion Astartes had been posted around the perimeter, but they were not from Tra. Another company was present.

Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson, Jarl of Fyf, rose to his feet from a stone bench.

‘Og!’ he growled, and the two mighty jarls bear-hugged, banging their armoured chests against each other. Ogvai exchanged some rough sparring remarks with Skarssen and then turned to the other alpha wolf who had been sitting with the Jarl of Fyf.

‘Lord Gunn,’ Ogvai acknowledged with a tip of his head. The other warrior was older and bigger than either Skarssen and Ogvai. His beard was waxed into two, sharp, up-and-forward-curving tusks, and the left side of his face was inked with dark lines that resembled knotwork.

‘Who’s that?’ Hawser asked Godsmote.

‘Gunnar Gunnhilt, called Lord Gunn, Jarl of Onn,’ Godsmote replied.

‘He’s jarl of the First Company?’ Hawser asked.

Godsmote nodded.

Three companies. Three companies? What could be happening on this place Nikaea that demanded the presence of three companies of Wolves?

Lord Gunn pushed past Ogvai and confronted Hawser.

‘Is this the skjald?’ he asked. He took Hawser’s head between his huge hands and wrestled it back, stretching Hawser’s eyes wide to peer into them, and then pulled open Hawser’s jaw and leaned down to sniff Hawser’s breath, as though he was livestock.

He let go of Hawser and turned away.

‘Has it begun?’ asked Ogvai.

‘Yes,’ Skarssen replied, ‘but only in a preliminary way. They don’t know we’re here yet.’

‘I don’t want them to know,’ said Ohthere Wyrdmake. Wyrdmake was one of a number of rune priests who had been standing, silent, spectral and attentive, behind the seated jarls. They were all panting slightly, open-mouthed. The volcanic heat of the chamber didn’t seem to touch Skarssen’s priest. Even the diffuse, pulsating light of it on his face took a greenish cast, like cold fire. Wyrdmake looked at Aun Helwintr. Something passed between them.

‘I don’t want them to know,’ Wyrdmake repeated.

‘We’re here purely as a safety measure,’ said Lord Gunn. ‘Make that understood. We only reveal our strength if wyrd turns against us. If that happens, this becomes a no-quarter operation, where our only purpose is to secure the primary. Anything and everything that moves contrary to us under those circumstances gets a kill-stroke. Are we clear? I don’t care who it is. This is why we exist. Make sure that all in Tra know that—’

Wyrdmake cleared his throat.

‘Something to say, priest?’ Lord Gunn asked.

Wyrdmake nodded his head towards Hawser.

‘You said it was safe enough to talk,’ said Lord Gunn.

‘We’re as safe as we can be down here,’ Wyrdmake replied. ‘However, I don’t see the need to discuss Rout strategy in front of a skjald. He can wait somewhere.’

‘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.