Prospero Burns

Thirteen

I name myself Ahmad Ibn Rustah, skjald of Tra, and I bring to this hearth the account of the Vlka Fenryka’s raid upon Prospero, as is my calling.

Many voices can be heard in mine, many memories, for as skjald of Tra I have done my duty, the duty given to me by Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot, Jarl of Tra and, before him, Gedrath Gedrathsa, Jarl of Tra, to gather all the stories the men of Tra have, and make memories out of them so that they can be retold, over and again, until wyrd decides when my thread must be cut.

You who gather here at the hearthside, you who listen to me by the firelight, and sip your mjod, and wait for your part of the account to be recited, you will need to forgive me. This is my story too, and I am inside it, my voice and my memories, and I cannot be taken out. For I name myself also, Kasper Hawser, visitor to Fenris, comrade of the Sixth, pawn of the Fifteenth, witness, outsider.

The account of Prospero is several things. We all know that. Foremost, it is a testament to the courage and loyalty of the Sixth Astartes. It is the story of a duty performed without hesitation or equivocation. The Allfather told the Rout what task he needed them to do, and it was done. No one will ever hear this account and question the devotion of the Vlka Fenryka.

It is also a lament. This was a sad necessity regretted by all. It gave no pleasure to perform it, not even the reward of glory. The prosecution of a fellow Legion, even when it is done so successfully, is no easy thing to square in a man’s mind. This has ever been the burden of the Wolves of the Sixth Astartes that their calling as the Allfather’s chosen hunters places a solemn burden of responsibility on their shoulders greater than any endured by other Legions. There is no shame in admitting this is an account of sorrow, a mournful thing. It is an account we could happily wash away from our memories and wish undone.

Prospero burned. The Wolves of Fenris fell upon it, and it blazed up brightly, and died into the darkness. Though strong in many arts of war and lorefare, the brotherhood of Tizca could not withstand the murder-make. Bloody was the fighting, savage and unholy. Only one result was ever likely. No one survives the coming of the Wolves, not even the Crimson King and his Thousand Sons.

We know the conclusion. We know how it ends. We know that Magnus fled, broken, with the last surviving scraps of his once noble force, and, in fleeing, proved beyond any doubt the extent of his necromantic talents. Only the darkest magics allowed him to escape the field of war alive.

There is one part of the account you do not know, however, and it is my part, and I will tell it once.

Here and now.

There was drumming; the anti-music of a sending off. I had been given armour, thrall-armour, to wear under my pelt and reinforce the knotwork leather that had become my everyday garment. I had my axe, and a displacer field unit, and I had been given a short-form laspistol of excellent manufacture. I believe it had come from Jarl Ogvai’s weaponarium. The weapon was old, but in pristine condition. It had been disassembled and reassembled many times to keep its component parts clean and serviceable. During its life, which had been longer than mine, the hand grip had been removed, perhaps due to wear, and replaced with a simple shaped piece of radapple wood that fitted around the frame’s handle-spur. On the faces of the wooden grip, the symbol of Ur was inlaid in gold wire. The weapon had once been the property of an officer in the Defence Corps of the great, doomed Catheric city-project of Ur. Aun Helwintr, proud rune priest, had selected it for me, knowing the account I had made of my own past, and my connection, as a child, to the Ur labour communes.

‘Ur was one of many grand and admirable schemes to achieve a finer future for mankind,’ Helwintr told me when he presented me with the weapon. ‘It failed, just as many of them failed, but its spirit was great, and its intention beyond fault. I give this to you to remind you of that spirit. What we do today, however bloody, is done with the same intent. Unification. Salvation. The betterment of man.’

I could not argue with his words. Toil and blood, effort and hardship, these were payments worth making in return for a greater future. Ideals were never won cheaply, whether the cost was the raising of one dream city or the razing of another.

My only doubt, and I confess doubt lurked in my heart, was that Ur had any significance for me at all. I had lived my life assuming it did. I had lived my life trusting the solidity of my identity and my memories. Now I trusted nothing. I heard a clavier playing. I saw a toy horse made of wood. I watched the dawn rising over Terra, and turned from a window port to see a face I could not recall. Eyes without features. Features without eyes. Pieces on an old game board. An athame, softly glowing in the darkness like a blade of ice.

I took the weapon anyway.

Nidhoggur’s carrier decks were swarming. Hoists conveyed drop-ships overhead to the catapult ramps. Munition trains clattered across the deck grilles. Smoke as white and fine as summer cloud filled the embarkation space to thigh level, because so many transatmospheric drive units were test firing and venting. Under the brilliant light-banks of the ceiling rigs, it felt as though we were gods of Uppland, walking abroad in the heavenscape, masters of creation and destruction. We could hear the rapid hammer and air-gun stutter of the armourers making their last minute adjustments. Wyrd was being forged here.

I was placed with Jormungndr Two-blade’s pack. Bear was amongst them, and Godsmote and Aeska and Helwintr. Every member of the pack kept their eyes on me, watching to see if I would fall down and roll back my eyes, and froth at the lips and plead for mercy in the voice of the Crimson King.

I never did. He never chose to speak through me.

The Wolf King had brought the entire Sixth to sanction Prospero. A full Legion to punish a full Legion. The fleet components that had assembled at Thardia translated to three further assembly points, gathering strength as they went. Amongst them were forces of the Silent Sisterhood and the Custodes, bequeathed by the Allfather himself to strengthen our cause.

The full force of the Sixth was something I did not believe needed strengthening. There is not an Astartes in the Imperium who can out-match a warrior of the Rout, one to one, and we held a significant numerical superiority. Much is said of Prospero’s noble Spireguard, and other auxiliary contingents, but the only true consideration was Astartes numbers, and Magnus the Red’s Legion was small compared to the Vlka Fenryka.

However, there was an ugly mood of caution amongst the Sixth. The Crimson King’s edge derived from maleficarum, the very root of the entire dispute. Now it came down to a bare fight, he would show his sharpest claws. No matter that we had ten or a hundred or even a thousand times his Thousand Sons, magic could level any fight. All the pack leaders agreed, loath as they were to admit it out loud, that the Silent Sisterhood might make the difference between triumph or destruction. Only they, Allfather willing, might cancel out or dilute the sorcery of Magnus and his disciple-sons.

There was fear. You could feel it in the thralls at least, and in the support forces. I do not think an Astartes can feel fear, not fear as a man knows it. Trepidation, perhaps. But I knew that the Rout always craved stories of maleficarum, because it was the only thing they couldn’t kill, and thus the only thing that lent their lives even a thrill of apprehension.

We were slamming out of the immaterium into the face of maleficarum.

I felt fear. Fear was in my heart. I put on my mask to scare it away.

I had finished my Rout-mask and leatherware during the passage from Thardia to the target system. Aeska Brokenlip had lent me some general advice, and both Orcir and Erthung Redhand had shown me knotwork designs that I chose to copy. I chose to make the mask with the stylised antlers of a bull saeneyti spreading out from the bridge of the nose to form the brow ridges. I did this in honour of the memory of Ulvurul Heoroth, called Longfang, who sleeps upon the red snow. I stained my mask and all my leather gear black, and added the circumpunct, the mark of aversion, to the centre of the mask’s forehead. With its warding eye, and flaring bull antlers and snarling lips, the mask’s threat would drive off all but the darkest maleficarum.

The men of Tra armed for the onslaught. This was a murder-make, and they had come to cut threads, and they wore all the faces that Death needed to wear to get the task done. Blades and boltguns predominated, of course: the true, trusted weapons of the Vlka Fenryka were their primary resource. But all the jarls had opened their weaponariums, and Ogvai had shared out devices amongst men in his company who were willing and skilled to operate them. I was not the only soul that day to have received a weapon from the hoard as a gift.

Some Wolves had enhancements that turned their armoured gauntlets into huge wrecking fists, or even industrial talons. Others prepared enormous melta-weapons with armoured feeder cables, ornately engraved lascannons, or colossal assault cannons with rotating barrels that seemed barely man-portable.

On the repeater screens up in the rafters of the embarkation deck between the Stormbirds hung like game in a larder, the forward-scan images of ghostly, utopian Prospero grew steadily larger.

On the final night, a dream came to me. It was the dream I had been having since I left Terra, the dream I no longer trust. It purports to be a memory, but it is laced with deceit. I know that I stayed aboard the superorbital plate Lemurya during the last months before my departure. I leased a luxury suite on the underside of the plate. That much is real. I know that the prolonged exposure to artificial gravity made me feel tired and unrefreshed.

I remember that golden light sliced into my chamber around the window shutter every morning, gilding everything, giving the room a soft, burnished feel.

I remember there was always an electronic chime before the hour five alarm.

I had gone to Lemurya to void-acclimate before transferring to the ship on which I had arranged passage. I had also gone there to avoid people. I was hell-bent on taking my sabbatical, on freeing myself from the chains of Terra, and I did not need well meaning souls like Vasiliy trying to convince me otherwise.

Of course, now I realise that the circumstances were not quite as I understood them. My situation with the Conservatory was not as untenable and unappreciated as I had thought. These facts I have had from exemplary sources.

I do not think I was in my right mind. I was being influenced even then. Indeed, perhaps the manipulation long pre-dated that moment. The urge to leave Terra had been put into me. So had the urge to experience Fenris. Honestly, brothers, tell me, what man who is afraid of wolves goes to face his fear by voyaging to a planet of wolves? It is nonsense. I was not, forgive me, even especially interested in Fenrisian culture.

The fascination was put into me too.

The other reason I spent time on the superorbital was to visit the biomech clinics. Some instinct, or implanted instinct, had warned me that Fenris was not a place where a man could make notes or keep written records. I had therefore undertaken an elective procedure to replace my right eye with an augmetic copy that was also an optical recording device. My real eye, surgically removed, is being held in stasis in the clinic’s organ banks, ready to be replanted on my return.

Sometimes I wonder what dreams it is seeing.

My recurring dream finds me waking in my room as the hour five alarm rings. It is the day of the scheduled implant surgery. I am old, older than I am now in every respect except years. My body is weary. I rise and limp to the window, and press the stud to open the shutter. It rises into its frame recess with a low hum, allowing golden light to flood in. I look out and drink in the view. I have done this every morning of my stay, because I know these may be the last chances I get to see such a magnificent view with my own eyes. My real eyes.

On that last night before Prospero, the dream had been embellished. I do not believe any new elements had been added, I just think that I had stepped through the dream so many times, I was noticing things in finer and finer detail.

Through the half-open doors of the closet, I glimpsed a toy horse made of wood standing on top of the foot locker. I could hear clavier music playing from a neighbouring room. I could smell fresh-pressed radapple juice. On a shelf in the corner, my Prix Daumarl sat in its pretty little casket beside an old Ossetian prayer box. By the window, a regicide set lay open on a small table. From the look of the pieces, the game was just two or three moves away from its end.

I stepped to the window, waiting to see the reflection of the face of the figure standing just behind me. I waited for the terror to constrict me.

I waited to ask, ‘How can you be here?’

I turned, hoping the face would be another detail I could resolve in greater clarity than before.

All I glimpsed before I woke were eyes. They were eyes without features, and they blazed like marks of aversion.

We had anticipated resistance. Of course we had. For all our confidence and innate superiority, for all our show of terrible force, we did not expect to be unopposed. Never let it be said that the Thousand Sons of Prospero were not great warriors. They were Astartes! That fact alone puts them on a different order of being. During the Great Crusade, we had respected them as brothers and comrades in arms, and now we respected them as mortal foes. Even without their warlock sorcery, they were to be taken seriously.

Moreover, Prospero was their home world. A Legion is always strongest at its base. The fortress homes of the Allfather’s eighteen Legions Astartes are the most formidable and impregnable sites in the new Imperium.

As the sanction fleet burned in towards Prospero like a massed, migrating pod of hrossvalur, it became evident that the planet had not lit its defences. The grids were down from outer orbital to close surface. Individual cities were screened, but that was standard operation and not a response to the approaching threat. There were signs that civilian ships had fled or were fleeing the planet and the system in considerable numbers.

Some of the escaping vessels were overtaken and boarded. Their crews and passengers were taken captive and interrogated by the rune priests, so that every useful scrap of information could be gathered. Later, I heard that one such ship, the Cypria Selene, was carrying Imperial remembrancers who had been posted to Prospero to observe the Fifteenth Astartes. One of them, I was told, was an old man described as ‘the Scribe of Magnus’.

I would like to have met them, and spoken with them. I would dearly like to have listened to their accounts, and heard the voice of the other side. I did not get the opportunity. I only learned of their presence long after the day was done, and their ultimate fates are unknown to me.

Two-blade conjectured that the Crimson King had capitulated. Magnus the Red had not signalled surrender, but he had seen the error of his actions and the disgrace he had brought upon the Fifteenth Astartes, so he had sent the innocents away and thrown his defences wide open in order to accept his fate with humility, as a guilty man places his exposed neck upon the headsman’s block. If true, this spoke to great remorse and contrition on Magnus’s part. Two-blade ventured that the action would be over in hours.

But Ogvai gainsayed him. With wise counsel, the jarl reminded us all that witchcraft had brought this sentence of doom upon Prospero and the Crimson King. It was likely that he had defences, raised and ready, lethal and primed, that were maleficarum and invisible to our sensors.

We waited. The high-resolution image of Prospero was so large that it filled the repeater screens. We began to feel the slight artificial gravity tugs of orbital corrections.

An hour later, the main lights on the embarkation deck began to dim for periods of several seconds at a time.

‘What’s doing that?’ I asked Aeska Brokenlip.

‘The main batteries are drawing power,’ he replied. ‘We have begun the orbital bombardment.’

When the time came for the drop, I think I was dozing, or daydreaming. I had been thinking about the commune where I had grown up, the tent fields on the desert highlands, the long room, the teaching desks in the library annex, the bedtime stories of wolves to keep us in our place.

Godsmote nudged me.

‘We’re ready,’ he said.

The drums were thundering. We boarded our Stormbird. As skjald, I had the right to go where I wanted, and choose any accelerator seat I liked, but I took one of the spares at the back of the cabin and not one of the numerical ranks. I would not insult my brothers by breaking their cohort.

Each seat’s arrestor cage locked down with a pneumatic hiss. We checked our restraints. Thralls and servitors secured bulkier weapons to the overhead racks or the magnetic stowage plates, and then scurried clear as the ramp began to rise. The entire airframe was already rattling with pent-up main-engine fury, and the burner roar almost drowned out the screaming vox-chatter of pilots, ground crew and deck supervisors.

Then the lights went as red as blood, and the sirens howled like carnyx horns, and the hydraulic bolts fired like lightning stones, and acceleration hit us like a warhammer blow.

One after another, our Stormbirds spat out of Nidhoggur’s belly like tracer rounds from a basket magazine. In the sky around us, a score of other ships discharged their cargoes in similar fashion.

I looked at Godsmote.

‘We are all bad stars now,’ I said.

The hearth-fire still burns brightly. There is still meat on your plate and mjod in your lanx, and I still have more of this account to tell.

So then, on Prospero, many great years ago, we fought against the Traitor Fifteenth. A hard fight. The hardest. The most bitter in the history of the Vlka Fenryka. Firestorms, burning air, crystal cities where the Thousand Sons waited for us with flame-light reflecting off their casement glass. Anyone who was there will remember it. No one who was there could forget it.

We descended through flames. We speared down past orbital defence platforms ablaze from end to end, great rigs that had been crippled before they could take a shot. They burned as they tumbled and rolled away in slow, decaying orbits, spilling out trails of debris or shorting out great blossoms of reactor energy.

Below, the world burned too. The fleet’s bombardment had torched Prospero, and ignited the atmosphere. Spiral patterns of soot and particulated debris thousands of leagues across cycled like hurricanes. Giant columns of plasma energy had roasted all vegetation and wildlife, and turned the seas into scalding banks of steam and toxic gas. Vast las bombardments from the heavy batteries had evaporated river deltas and flash-thawed ice-caps. Kinetic munitions and gravity bombs had fallen like Helwinter hail, and planted new forests of bright liquid flame that sprouted and grew, spread and died back, all in a few minutes. Shoals of targeted missiles, silver-swift as midsummer fish running from a catcher’s net, delivered warheads that blasted the soil into the sky and thickened the air into poisonous soup. Magma bombs and atomics, the godhammers, had altered the geography itself. Mountains had been levelled, plains split, valleys thrown up into new hills of rubble and spoil. Prospero’s crust had fractured. We saw the throbbing, glowing tracks of its mortal wounds, brand new canyons of fire that split entire continents. This was the grand alchemy of war. Heat and light, and energy and fission had transformed water into steam, rock into dust, sand into glass, bone into gas. Swirling mushroom clouds, as tall as our Aett on Fenris, punctuated the horizon we rushed towards.

The ride was not smooth. No power dive from a low anchored carrier ever is. We dropped straight, like stooping hawks, and only levelled out when the surface was right under us. As our nose came up, fighting like a great ocean orm on a hook, the gravity force was huge. The Stormbird shook as if it was intent on shredding to pieces. Then we were level and hugging the topography. Our pilots did not stint on speed. The craft continued to quake. We bellied and bounced as the terrain shifted, and banked hard at every squeal of the collision alarms.

Some of our drop-boats did not survive the experience. Some failed to recover from their dive approaches. Two that I know of were destroyed when they collided and tore the wings off one another. By then, of course, the warriors of Prospero had finally begun to respond. Battery fire was coming up from the main city. Inbound boats were blown out of the air, exploding outright or veering wildly away like burning moths. Wyrd’s hand was on us. Threads were being cut. We—

Brother, what? I said we were like stooping hawks. Hawks. You know the word, surely? Ah. Ah, I see what has happened. Sometimes, in my excitement, in my enthusiasm for the drama of the account, I lapse back into my old ways, and use a word of Low Gothic instead of Juvjk. It is a habit of mine that I have never left behind, the last traces of the language I spoke in my previous life. I ask your pardon. I did not mean to interrupt the tale.

The first thing I did when I set foot on Prospero was kill a man.

This is an important part of my personal account, for until that day, I had never cut a thread. No, not ever. I am a skjald, not a warrior, but that day, that dark day, I was determined I would be more than a helpless observer. On the home world of the Olamic Quietude, men had given of themselves to protect me during the fighting. I did not want to be a burden of that sort again. I had asked for weapons and armour so I could protect myself, and on Prospero I intended to do more than that, and fight with my brothers as the need arose. The wolf priests built my arms and back strong for just such a purpose, after all.

The Stormbird carrying us, its lifters howling, settled us down with a hard slam on a space of flat rockcrete below some derrick or manufacturing facility in the industrial quarters of Tizca, Prospero’s glorious city of cities. Even now, brothers, even now it is gone, the idea of Tizca will persist down the ages like Roma and Aleksandrya and Memphys as one of the great cities of mankind. It was and is a Carthage, a L’Undone, an Atlantys even, its thread burned and cut, its towers fallen, its rubble long since ploughed under, yet persisting in the memory of our race. It had been planned and raised as a magnificent open city, with beautiful acres of parkland and urban gardens spacing out the vast towers of glass and the crystal ziggurats. Their sheer glass faces reflected either the sun, so they radiated light like mirrors, or the bruise-blue sky, so they became part of heaven. At night, they were reflecting bowls for the stars, perfect scrying surfaces in which the constellations could be watched as they performed their ritual choreography. There were busy quarters of bustling streets and squares, of fine markets and elegant public spaces, especially leading down towards the harbour.

We set down in one of the vast city’s less glamorous wards, one of the necessary, functional sectors, and even here there was splendour. Buildings of the most mundane and unremarkable function were clad in glass, or raised to be crowned with majestic finials or spires. Tizca’s basic functions of trade and produce-handling, cargo transfer, manufacturing, provision and distribution were all contained by a mask of aesthetic perfection where most cities wear such crude organs around their skirts away from the sites of civic refinement.

When we arrived, the mask was already knocked away. The hammering shock of the bombardment, as well as several munition strikes, had shattered most of the glass off the buildings around us, exposing their superstructures and girderwork. Some burned furiously. The air wobbled with heat distortion. The open spaces and loading yards were littered with mirror shards, like beaches of polished glass shingle, and every last fragment reflected back a version of the flames so they twinkled and flashed like trillions of fireflies. Each step we took as we bounded from the Stormbird’s ramp crunched. Penetrating warheads had blown titanic holes in the rockcrete ground, revealing some of the service tunnels below, the hidden network of arteries that invisibly maintained the city’s needs.

Other Stormbirds shrieked overhead, so low it felt we could reach up and touch them. Some set down on nearby sites. The daylight had turned an odd, murky colour, a violet hue that suggested the blue sky had contracted some kind of disease. Smoke moved in the wind, swirling and spinning, reducing our visibility. All I could smell was burning. All I could hear was howling: transatmospheric engines howling, infernos howling, voices howling.

Then I began to hear, behind the howling, the distant thump of bombs and the nearby bang of bolter fire.

We entered the derrick tower, a multi-levelled manufacturing plant that had been skinned of its glass cladding. Fire squirmed in its upper levels, silhouetting the black ribs of the girders against bright orange. Low down, where we were, the fire cast hectic, jumping shadows. The Wolves did not hesitate. They ploughed in, hunting targets, dividing to quarter the area. Godsmote and Aeska were the first two to mount the metal-mesh stairs up to the second level, where a railed hoist platform connected to a larger gantry over some kind of machine bay. I ran with them. I jumped as I heard the sudden, shocking retort of bolters discharging underneath us as our comrades met the first resistance. Aeska yelled something and began firing at a walkway on the level above us. His mass-reactive rounds bit chunks out of the decking and the rail. I saw human bodies fall into the flames far below. I realised we were being shot at.

I saw men on the same platform level as us, men in crimson coats and silver helmets. They had golden braid frogging on their coats, as though they had dressed for a parade in the sun. Some had sabres in their hands, drawn and ready. All of them were blasting with lasweapons.

Godsmote roared and ran at some, his axe raised. I saw one of the red-coated figures burst as a bolt from Aeska’s gun struck him. Smoke from the fires above us suddenly gusted down as the wind direction changed, and fogged my location, blinding me for a moment.

As the smoke sucked back out, I felt a dull concussion from the front, then another. Two las-rounds had struck my displacer field, and been dissipated in crackling balls of energy. The shooter was directly ahead of me, six spans away, beside the gantry rail. He was a young man, handsome, regal in his gold-frogged red coat and his silver helm. He was aiming his lasweapon and yelling at me. He fired again, and the shot crackled off my body-shield.

The pistol from Ur was in my right hand. I didn’t even think about it. My reaction was instinctive, but made swift and effective by the training I received from Godsmote. I fired back and killed him.

The only thing that betrayed my novice status, the only thing that gave me away as a combat virgin, was the fact that I employed overkill. Godsmote had taught me to aim and shoot. I could pull a gun and hit a target at twenty spans. My first shot went into his chest and would have been entirely sufficient. But he was shooting at me, and he’d have killed me already had it not been for the displacer field, so I kept the trigger squeezed.

The pistol from Ur put three more rounds into his belly, and the sheer force of impact doubled him up so the next two shots punched into the side of his neck and the top of his head. He fell against the rail, and then collapsed in a sort of sitting position, all very suddenly and untidily. I kept waiting for him to fall down completely and stretch out dead on the deck, but he did not. He remained tangled and contorted, half-raised by the rail behind him.

I stepped towards him. My shots had killed him three or four times over. Blood from the rupturing torso wounds was streaming out of his corpse and spattering down through the deck grille into the darkness below. There was a huge, scorched puncture mark in the crown of his polished silver helmet as though a blacksmith had hammered a sooty augur through it. A steam of blood vapour wafted out of it from his cooked braincase.

I expected his expression to register something. Anger, perhaps, defiance, or full on hatred for me. I expected at least a rictus of agony, or even a look of sadness or dismay.

There was nothing. His face was slack. Not one hint of a vital emotion could be read. I have come to learn since that is the case with the faces of the dead. We find no messages or legacies there, no final communication. Life departs, and the face sinks. As the thread is cut, the tension goes, and only the untended ruin of absence remains.

The soldiers in red coats were the Prosperine Spireguard. Their noble and well-appointed regiments were the domestic defence forces. They were as finely drilled and effective as any elite division of the Imperial Army.

They looked too civilised and decorative to bear the brunt of the Wolves’ assault. They looked like men confounded by disruption to some formal colours ceremony. They looked as if they ought to be running away.

They did not run away. Let us agree on their courage and make it part of this account. They met the Sixth Astartes, the most efficient and ruthless killing machine in the entire arsenal of the Imperium, and did not give ground. They faced demented, barbarian giants that looked like feral caricatures of Astartes, and did not break. They had been ordered to defend Tizca, and they did not falter from that order.

And so they died. This is what happens when loyalty meets loyalty. Neither side was going to leave its grim and onerous duty undone, and so destruction of at least one was assured.

The Spireguard had ballistic armour woven into their distinctive red coats, but this could not withstand the mass-reactive devastation of bolter rounds. Some carried displacer fields or riot shields, but neither could cope with the withering ferocity of autocannons. Their silvered helms, some plumed, all alloyed from plasteel, were unable to block the slicing edge of axes or frostblades. Their gun-carriages and fighting vehicles were well plated and, in some cases, shielded, but all crumpled into mangled wreckage when struck by shoulder-launched missiles or conversion beamers, or burned like corpse-boxes on funeral pyres when caught by heavy flamers or melta effects. Jarl Ogvai, so several brothers attest, faced one gun-carriage down as if it was a saeneyti calf that he intended to wrestle to the ground and hog-tie. He gutted it with his power claws, shredding metal like scraps of foil. He split its casing wide open and then filled its interior with bolter fire that pulped the crew.

The devastation was heartbreaking. The ground, as we advanced, was littered with the tattered and disfigured dead. Blade weapons had sectioned some, heat weapons had blackened and fused others. The marks of bolter impacts had left huge wounds that looked like deep bitemark craters in radapples. For their part, the Spireguards’ lasguns and autoweapons barely scratched the marauding Rout. Minor injuries were taken. Only crew-served weapons and fighting vehicles offered any genuine hazard. Once the Sixth’s armoured support began their advance, clanking and clattering up from the steam-haze of the seafront zones where their heavy landers had come in, even that small hope was extinguished. Predators and Land Raiders, grey as granite and just as monolithic, crushed through buildings in the lower town, levelled structures and demolished towers. Their tracks cut new roads into the city’s streetplan, death roads of pulverised rubble. Their weapons selected and annihilated anything that crossed their range.

Dark shapes ran with them and around them, bounding along the new-made death roads into the fire of combat. They looked like wolves, or the shadows of wolves at least. I am not sure if they were real, or just the product of my imagination. The smoke was treacherous, and played many tricks.

I have never known my Rout brothers as savage as they were that day, nor have I ever known them so grim. There is a strange lightness to them in most times of war, an execution yard humour that allows them to bond and endure, and to laugh wyrd in the face. It is almost a glee, a relish, the eagerness of a duty well done. Even during the war with the Olamic Quietude I saw it: the caustic jokes, the barracking, the acid comments, the bleak, phlegmatic mindset.

But not on Prospero. The task was too dark, too thankless. Nothing could lighten the burden of what they were about, so they lost themselves in the fury of their actions. In some ways, this made Prospero’s punishment all the more extreme and unholy. Not only was no quarter offered, no quarter was even considered. Teeth were only bared in wet leopard-snarls of rage and hatred, not in menacing grins. The only words uttered were curses and condemnations. Golden, black-pinned eyes darkened with resolve and hardened with duress. Blood begat blood. Slaughter begat slaughter. Fire fed fire, and in that fuelled frenzy, a planet perished, a society bled out, and a wound was torn in the flank of the Imperium that would never heal.

The Rout of the Vlka Fenryka did everything that was asked of them, without question or dubiety. They were not in the wrong. They were the perfect warriors, the perfect executioners, precisely as they were engineered and bred to be. They were the Emperor’s sanction. This account, my account, absolves them of all blame and celebrates their trueheartedness.

It must also reflect one other thing. This account must reflect one other, secret thing. Hear it, and decide what must be done, even if what must be done is slit my throat and cut my thread so I can never recite this account again.

The day blurs in my memory. An experience of such extreme intensity, of such violence and unending cacophony, will always do that. Moments conflate, events knock into one another and overlap.

I remember I was in a park, or what was left of some public garden. All the vegetation was burning. There was a small shrine structure, which had taken an indirect hit and was bleeding smoke into the violet air. We had entered from the east, with crossfire coming at us. I had temporarily turned off my displacer field because it was beginning to lose its charge.

Then we met the Thousand Sons for the first time.

Something had made them hold back. It was not fear. Perhaps they could not stomach the heresy of a fight against their Astartes kin. Perhaps it was some kind of tactical ploy intended to achieve an advantage.

Perhaps it was restraint. As though accepting their punishment, they had not opposed our initial advance, but, like the Spireguard, they ultimately found they could not stand by and watch their city burn.

They were resplendent in gold-edged red, their helmets marked with the distinctive nasal crest of their Legion. Though in form and armour and stature they were equivalent to the warriors of the Sixth, they could not have been more different. They moved differently. The Wolves bounded and sprang; they seemed to glide and stride. The Wolves were head-down and fast moving; they were upright and measured. The Wolves were howling; they were silent.

I was standing in the middle of the burning lawns as the lines of rival Astartes first engaged, wild grey shapes hurling themselves at gold and red centurions. The noise was like a thunderclap. It was the slap of great masses crashing together, like the clashing rocks of myth, but there was a ringing peal to it as well. It sounded like the voice of the monstrous storms that sheer altitude sometimes detonated outside the high places of the Aett on Fenris.

This was how battles must have looked when only gods and their demigod offspring walked upon Terra. Humanoid giants in regal armour, some dark and pelt-clad like sky deities of boreal Aesir, some golden and haughty like scholar gods of Faeronik Aegypt. Immense blows were landed by warriors of either side: men were smashed off their feet, or cut apart, bodies were rotated hard, heads snapped around. Fenrisian blades hammered into Prosperine armour, Prosperine force burned back into Fenrisian plate. The line faltered in both directions as it compensated for the force of collision. Then it seemed as though the carnivorous lust of the Vlka Fenryka would entirely overwhelm the warriors of the Fifteenth.

That was the moment we started to die, my brothers. That is the moment we started to die in any significant numbers. The Thousand Sons unleashed their maleficarum, the poison in their veins.

Electrical discharge leapt from staffs and fingertips. Radiant filth, like the unlight of the warp, spilled out of eye slits and speared from warding palms. Wolves were torn apart by the touch of their battle magic, or thrown back, mangled and scorched. Some were petrified into smouldering attitudes of excruciation. Their weapons charged with sorcerous power, fuming with helsmoke and sick light, the accursed traitors launched into our assaulting ranks.

Threads were cut in swathes, like scythed corn. Threads were more than cut. Some were torched back along their lengths, so that men did not merely die; the lives they had led before their deaths burned away into forgetfulness. Some were left as smears of blood, or haphazardly butchered carcasses. Some were pulled limb from limb by invisible wights and the sprites of the air. Some were left as nothing but heaped white bones and scads of blackened armour.

Oje died there, turned inside out by a warlock’s gesture. I saw Svessl too, split in two by an invisible blade. His blood came out of him with great, explosive force, like liquid from a pressurised cask. Hekken: cooked inside his armour. Orm Ormssen: exsanguinated. Vossul: blinded and pulped. Lycas Snowpelt: gutted and decapitated. Bane Fel: engulfed in a cold blue fire that consumed him but would not go out. Sfen Saarl: withered to a vile powder. Aerdor: transmogrified into a twisted, steaming, inhuman stump.

Too many. Too many! The accounts needed for all their sendings off would last for months. The kindling needed for all their funeral pyres would exhaust an entire great year’s supply.

I felt vindication, for the maleficarum of the Thousand Sons was everything it had been accused of being. Our prosecution was legitimised. But I felt fear, for I did not believe we would win or even live. For all our fury, for all our might as warriors, we would be exterminated, proving that the Thousand Sons of Prospero were monsters and warlocks.

I did the one thing a skjald should not do. I looked away. I averted my gaze so that I did not have to witness the fall of the Rout.

I missed, therefore, the beginning of salvation. I missed the first glimpse of the Null Maidens pouring down the black heaps of burning rubble into the fight. Their blades were bright. Pulsing beads and beams of energy spat from their weapons. They uttered no war cry or challenge.

The blankness of them washed across the line. The rank clouds of maleficarum burned away, or blew aside like fog in a night wind. The warlocks of the Fifteenth choked on the abominable words of their conjurations. They gagged on the pestilential utterance of their spells. I saw them stagger back, clutching at their throats, pawing at the neck seals of their helms. I saw blood spurting and leaking through visor slits in stringy ropes. I saw arcane gestures and motions seize up and cripple hands into palsied, arthritic claws.

Seconds after they had stunned and disempowered the traitors of the Fifteenth with their insidious silence, the sister-warriors struck. They surged through the recoiled mass of Wolves and began to hack and slice with their longswords. Their assault was an odd mixture of frenzy and elegance. Every stroke, every cut, every turn was the skilled action of an elite swordfighter, yet it was driven along by a berserk mania, a hysterical orgy of wounding and killing.

The Wolves did not hold back either. Released from the hammerblow onslaught of magic, they set in beside the Sisters, matching them blow for blow and kill for kill. The war was physical again. It was kinetic, concussive, visceral and explosive. Blood lay like dew upon what was left of the grass, and hung in the air like a mist.

Custodes had appeared with the Null Maidens. Their golden forms gleamed amid the swirling scrum of fighting bodies. Released into battle from their normal, solemn duties, they were as unrestrained as any Wolf. The blades of their halberds were thirsty for blood—

Put drink in my lanx. I am thirsty too. My throat is dry from the urgency of this account. I want you to hear all of this. I want you to see it in your minds.

See? Do you see? Prospero burns.

We were driving them back towards the great glass pyramids of Tizca. Drop-pods rained down through the stained sky like meteor showers. The light was bad: not insufficient, I mean. The daylight had gone bad, like meat goes bad.

Tizca had been violated and deformed. Most of its street plan had been erased, and its buildings and monuments demolished. The landscape was a tangle of black rubble and debris, some of it heaped into steep mountains and ridges, some of it cratered by vast munition strikes. There were corpses everywhere, and in the craters and the gullies, blood had pooled. In places, it ran in gurgling brooks between broken pipes and shattered masonry. Pulped organic matter spattered amongst the debris was the only residue of some fallen souls.

Each phase of assault was another climb up another hill that had not been there an hour earlier. The rubble slopes were sooty and treacherous. The air was full of beams and pulsed lasers, of hard rounds and rockets and squealing missiles. There was an almost constant downpour of micro debris, and, with that, oily rain as the boiled oceans began to condense and fall back onto the persecuted land. War machines, soiled by smoke-wash, streaked by rainfall, rolled and clanked and strode through the rubble-wastes, their weapons banks flashing and spitting. Pneumatic cannons recoiled pugnaciously into their mounts as they discharged. Main turret weapons boomed like the voice of the Allfather. Flocks of whooping rockets flew together in search of roosts.

I was with Godsmote and Orcir. We scrambled up another ridge of jumbled wreckage. I was trying to keep up with their fierce rate of advance.

To the west of us, as we arrived at the summit, one of the great glass pyramids began to collapse, devoured by a languorously slow bloom of fiery light that swelled and expanded, and allowed the monumental structure to fall into its incandescent embrace.

There was howling in the air once more, the growing chorus of Wolves. Over the din of war and even the tumult of material collapse, the sacking of Prospero was dominated by that sound: part wail, part wet leopard-growl. We know ourselves, my brothers, as Astartes warriors, but I tell you this as an outsider. It is the most chilling sound in the cosmos. It is the primal noise that accompanies death. Nobody who hears it ever forgets it, and few who hear it ever survive. It heralds the approaching destruction, and gives notice that the time for any parlay or mercy is long gone. It is the sound of the sanction of the Sixth, the hunting call of the Space Wolves. It is the dread-sound of wyrdmakers. It turns the blood to ice and the gut to water. I do not believe, and I speak in all honesty, that the Thousand Sons, even though they were Astartes and therefore engineered to be free of fear, were not inspired to terror when they heard it.

You scare me, wolf-brothers. You scare everything.

As a prelude to my recurring dream, I often remember a conversation I had with Longfang. I had shared with him, at his request, an account of maleficarum, an event that had befallen me in my previous life, in the ancient city of Lutetia. Longfang told me it was a good tale, but it wasn’t my best. He told me I would learn better ones. He told me I already knew a better one, but I was simply denying it.

I’m not sure how he was certain of these things. Right then and there, with his thread breaking, I believe he could perceive time in ways that we cannot. I believe he was not bound by the thread of life and could, in those twelve minutes surrounding his death, look up and down its length, and know the elusive past and the inescapable future.

For the latter point, the account I was denying, I believe he meant the event-memory that forms the kernel of my recurring dream. The face I could never turn in time to see, the face at my shoulder, that was the truth he wanted me to admit. By the time I came to Prospero, I was desperate to free myself of the burden too.

I did, though in doing so, I merely replaced it with a greater one.

I ran with Tra, with the wolf-shadows in the smoke, across the ravished landscape. It was late in the day. The flame-light of the tortured world was keeping the encroaching gloom of evening at bay, but when night finally fell, as it must, I knew it would be eternal and no sunrise would ever dispel it.

I had killed six men – two with my axe, four with my pistol. These are the ones I know of, clean kills in the dizzy incoherence of war. I had also helped to slay one of the Thousand Sons. He would have killed me, one to one. He had felled Two-blade in a bruising clash, and pinned him to the ground with the tongue of a fighting spear, which had gone through-and-through Two-blade’s hip and into the soil. Leaning on the spear to keep the brave Wolf down, he was drawing his bolt pistol to cut Two-blade’s thread.

I suppose he considered me of no consequence: a thrall, a less-than-Astartes thing blundering in the smoke. He reckoned without the Fenrisian strength the wolf priests had woven into my limbs when they re-engineered me. I cried out a battle curse in Wurgen, and sprang at him, putting the momentum of my running leap into a two-handed downstroke that buried the smile of my axe in the top of his skull. The attack left me rolling on the blood-mire of the earth. The Thousand Sons warrior lurched backwards off Two-blade, uttering some foul, gurgling sound. He let go of the fighting spear’s shaft and clawed at his scalp with his left hand, trying to grasp the blood-slick axe and wrench it out. I had not killed him. His helm had cushioned most of the blow. He swung around and aimed his bolt pistol at me, to punish me for the affront I had caused.

Two-blade pulled himself up, the spear still through him. He unpinned himself from the ground and came for the traitor foe from behind. He used his famous paired swords like shears and snipped off the warrior’s head. Blood jetted into the air. I had to brace my foot against the detached head to twist my axe free.

Jormungndr Two-blade dragged the spear out of himself, glanced at me, and continued on his way.

Some enemy resistance had collected in the glass precincts and annexes of one of the great pyramids. I wanted to see one of these places for myself. I wanted to see its fine decoration and soaring majesty before it was lost to the eyes of man.

Fine alabaster steps detailed with gold led up to a portico of glass and silver. The only thing that marred the entranceway was the stream of blood running down the fine steps from the sprawled body near the top. Orcir and Godsmote were ahead of me. The doors and walls and ceiling were vitreous mirrors. Shots had struck the mirroring in places, punching holes that were encircled by crazed lines and the talcum scurf of powdered glass. Inside, it was still, the horror without muffled and kept at bay. We could hear the distant rumble of the war, the patter of debris and rain on the high roof panes. Wisps of smoke drifted in the air like holy incense. The mirrored structure of the precinct hall trapped light and bathed us in an ethereal radiance. We slowed our surging advance down to a walking pace and cast our eyes around the glory of the interior. This was but an annex, a side chapel. What wonders must the pyramids contain? The conservator part of me, relic of my old lifetime, stirred within my breast, and urged me to examine the complex symbology of the designs wrought in the gold and silver frames of the looking-glass walls, and to record the delicate tracery of glyphs chased into the crystal.

We saw ourselves too, reflected in the gleaming surfaces: startled and uneasy, dark and hunched, barbaric intruders besmirched with gore, framed in the honeyed light. We were uninvited, invaders, like wild animals that had worried a fence post loose or leapt a boundary ditch and found their way into some civilised commune to desecrate and befoul the place, and scavenge for food, and kill.

Predators. We were predators. We were why walls were raised and watchfires lit at night.

Shots came at us down the length of the hall and broke our contemplation. They whipped past us, small bad stars. Some struck the floor and excavated sprays of pulverised stone. Some struck the mirror-walls and punched holes through them. The impacts made the glass walls shiver. The reflections of us hastening to cover wobbled and shuddered. We returned fire, positioned behind turned glass pillars and rows of silver statues. Some of the gunshots screaming at us were bolter rounds. Terrible bites were torn from the gleaming pillars. Silver figures lost their heads or limbs, or toppled from their plinths. I saw one of the Thousand Sons at the end of the hall, unloading his bolter at us. An aura surrounded him, as if he was wearing his own personal storm. Orcir swung from cover and let rip with his heavy bolter. The shots annihilated the traitor, and threw his torn corpse back into the mirrored wall behind him, which promptly shattered and came down in a deafening cascade of glass.

Orcir and Godsmote moved up. Enemy fire was still coming our way. From the gauge of it, we suspected Spireguard. I could hardly bear to see the incrementally increasing damage that was being done to the grand hall: the spreading cracks, the falling glass, the shot holes, the collapsing statuary, the destroyed detailing. Orcir fired his huge, underslung weapon again, clearing the way. I slipped to the left behind him, into the mouth of a side hallway, hoping to find better cover. My displacer field had still not recharged. The rate of gunfire suddenly increased again, and drove me back along the side hall. I lost sight of Godsmote and Orcir. Mirrors were around me. Looking glass, reflecting me. I pressed on, gun drawn, axe slung but ready, to the end of the side hall, and opened a glass door. There was a room beyond. I stepped through.

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

I stepped forwards, wary. There was an electronic chime.

‘Yes?’ I whispered.

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

‘Thank you,’ I replied. I was so stiff, so worn out. I hadn’t felt so bad for a long time. My leg was sore. I thought, maybe there are painkillers in the drawer.

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

The sun, source of the ethereal radiance, was just coming up over the hemisphere below me. Solar disc, circumpunct, it stared at me, an eye. I was looking straight down on Terra in all its magnificence. I could see the night side and the constellation pattern of hive lights in the darkness behind the chasing terminator, I could see the sunlit blue of oceans and the whipped-cream swirl of clouds and, below, I could see the glittering light points of the superorbital plate Rodinia gliding majestically under the one I was aboard.

I knew where I was. I had reached the end of my dream.

My eyes refocussed. I saw my own sunlit reflection in the mirror of the window port. I saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind me.

Terror constricted me.

‘How can you be here?’ I asked.

I did not wake.

‘I have always been here,’ answered Horus Lupercal.