Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

Fith smelled the wood-burn in the last instant of the wyrmboat’s life. The deck broke under him, and flipped him into the sleeting sky. Then he hit the ice with his face.

The wyrmboat had gone right over, and folded up into the rocks where the wind had driven it. Thrown clear, Fith slid face-down across the glazed sea, his throat full of ice and blood. He rotated, head and toe, as he slowly came to rest.

He raised his head. The ice beneath him was as dull and cold as the flat of a sword. His chest and face were one big aching bruise, and it felt like he had taken the smile of an axe in his breastbone, and another in his cheek.

He tried to get up. He felt as if he was too cracked to even breathe. Sucking air into his chest was like swallowing broken glass. Part of the wyrmboat’s mainsail, full of wind and trailing its lines, danced away along the shore of the islet like a gleeful phantom, like a capering wight with its arms out-flung.

Fith began to limp towards the ruin of the boat. A few arrows hissed overhead. Hradcana bowmen were scrambling down the rocks to reach the wreck. Hradcana red sails were closing in across the ice. Fith could hear the shriek of their bladed runners.

The ice in his path was scattered with debris. Here was a piece of mast, sheared off. There was part of the starboard rigger, torn off, its iron-shod skate stuck in the crazed ice like a giant’s arrow. Here was a section of spar. Fith picked it up, and hefted it as a weapon.

There was Guthox’s body. The wyrmboat had spilled it as it tumbled, and one of the riggers had sliced right over it, mashing it flat at the waist.

A Hradcana arrow whipped past Fith’s face. He didn’t flinch. He saw his axe lying near Guthox, and discarded the spar.

He picked up his axe.

Close beside the mangled ruin of the wyrmboat, Lern was dragging the Upplander’s corpse onto the shoreline rocks. Blood was streaming down one half of Lern’s face and soaking his whiskers. Fith began to limp faster to reach them.

When he left the ice and set foot on the ice-fused shingle, the Hradcana had come close enough for him to see their wild eyes and the white ash-glue coating their faces. They were so close that he could smell the stink of their ritual ointments. These were foul-smelling pastes their gothi had made, aversion remedies to keep the maleficarum at bay. The warriors had put aside their bows and taken up their axes and their swords. A bad omen had to be more than just killed. It had to be cut apart, hacked apart, dismembered and un-remembered. That was how you got magic to leave you alone.

Brom had got up to face them with his axe. Fith wondered how he was even standing any more. He limped to stand at Brom’s side.

One of the Hradcana was shouting out at them. It wasn’t a challenge or a threat, it was a ritual thing, a statement of intent, a declaration of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Fith knew that from the sing-song cadence of the words, rather than the words themselves. The warrior was using the Hradcana’s private tribal tongue, their wyrd-cant, which Fith did not speak.

‘This is onto you and onto your heads, in the day and the night, in the time of the moving sea and in the time of the still sea,’ the Upplander suddenly said out loud as Fith stepped past him. He wasn’t dead after all, though both of his legs had undoubtedly been broken in the crash. Lern, blood still pouring from his scalp, was trying to make him secure, but the Upplander was pushing away and trying to pull himself up onto a rock.

‘This is the wyrd that you have written for yourself by taking the disaster into your aett and deciding to protect it,’ the Upplander continued. He looked at Fith. ‘That’s what they’re saying. My translator is reading it. Do you understand them?’

Fith shook his head.

‘Why do they call me a disaster? What did I ever do?’

Fith shrugged.

A look of realisation suddenly crossed the Upplander’s drawn face. ‘Oh, it’s just the translator! It’s literal, just literal… “dis-aster”… bad star . They’re calling me Bad Star .’

Fith stood beside Brom and faced the Hradcana. The Hradcana warrior was finishing his declaration. Behind him, Fith could hear the Upplander translating the last of it.

The Hradcana rushed them.

Without shields, the two Ascommani took the charge. They put over-swings into the first row of faces, and under-swings into the second. Like the surge of the sea when the sea was wet, the Hradcana slipped back and came in again across the shingle. Brom split a man’s shoulder. Fith smashed a man’s jaw into mammocks and managed to wrest the man’s shield away from him. He punched the iron boss of it into the face of the next Hradcana who came looking for an opening, and broke the man’s nose-bone up into his skull. A big axe, a two-hander, swept at Brom, but Fith knocked it away with his captured shield, and Brom tore out the owner’s belly while his arms were still pushed up.

The next wave came, breaking on their shield. They had to take a few steps back each time. Red-sailed wyrmboats were grounding on the beach, and men were disembarking.

‘Do you think they’ve brought enough bodies?’ Brom asked. He was panting hard, and his face was bloodless with pain and effort, but there was still a laugh in his voice.

‘Nothing like enough,’ said Fith. ‘And nothing like enough threads, either.’

*

Lern left the Upplander in the rocks and came to stand beside them. He took a sword out of a dead man’s hand, thanked him for it, and hunched his back to face the surge.

The storm was behind them. It was shrieking in across the ice field, across the stilled sea, wailing like an Underverse chorus. Everything in the world that was loose was beginning to shake. The three Ascommani felt the grit of sleet hitting their necks and the backs of their heads. They heard the prickle of it pelting off their mail shirts.

The storm of men was in front of them. They were Hradcana, most of them, three or four score painted for murder, but there were Balt too, just arriving in their slower boats, slithering up the ice-cake beach in their eagerness.

It was a strange eagerness. It was born of desperation, the frantic wish to be free of a burden or a curse, to discharge an onerous duty and be done with it. There was no yelling, no war-shouts, no rousing bellow of comradeship and common purpose. They had no taste for it, or else fear had soured the words in their mouths.

They were chanting instead, steady and slow. They were reciting the rhymes of banishment and aversion they had learned around the aett hearth as children, the sharpened words, the strong words, the power words, the words with enough of a death-edge on them to keep bad stars at bay.

But the bad star was keeping them at bay too.

They were a great gang of men: hersirs, mostly, veterans, riggers, strong men with arms made thick from axe-work and backs made broad from the long oar. They crowded the beach: an army, bigger than any decent raiding party, as many faces as Fith had ever seen in one place. With a host like that, you could take a kingdom. You could conquer a chief’s whole territory.

All they had to do, these men, was kill three hersirs and a cripple. Three hersirs and a cripple with but one shield between them, stuck on a shingle spit in the cold empty, with nowhere left to run and nothing at their backs except the approaching enmity of the winter’s last, psychopathic storm.

Yet they were faltering. They were wary. There was no conviction in their surges. When they rushed in, they rushed in with fear in their eyes and hesitation in their blades. Each surge drove the Ascommani back closer to the ice, where standing steady and meeting a push would be impossible. But after half a dozen surges, Fith, Brom and Lern had knocked ten men down with red snow under them.