Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

Then Fith saw the Balt gothi, Hunur. A wyrmboat had just brought him in, and hersirs were carrying him to the beach. He stood up tall on their cupped palms, such a tall skinny bastard, waving his bear’s arm blade at Uppland above. The storm light, yellow and frosty as the sky closed down, glinted off the gothi’s piercings and silver torc. His mantle of seabird feathers streamed out in the air behind him, white like early snow.

He was screaming. He was howling toxic curses into the thundering wind, calling on the spirits of the air and the wights of the Underverse and all the daemons of Hel to come forth and extinguish the bad star. Fith felt a prickle on his skin that was more than the battering sleet.

The sight of the gothi spurred the Hradcana on, that and the sound of his screams. They surged again, and Fith knew this would be the worst rush yet. The shock of impact drove the three Ascommani back a step. Two axes hooked into Fith’s shield and dragged it down. A third broke its rim. Fith hacked his own axe into a Hradcana skull, then levered it out of the collapsing dead weight and swung it again. The poll of it broke a helmet’s cheek guard and cracked the rim of an

eye socket. Fith could no longer cover Brom’s flank.

Brom was mindless with fatigue and pain. He was jeering and lunging with his axe, but there was no strength or skill left in his arm.

Fith heard Lern shouting at Brom to keep his eyes up. Lern was laying in with his wight-loaned sword. He knew to use the tip and not the edge in a crush-fight, jabbing it in at belt height, skinning ribs and gouging hips and rupturing bellies. The blade was good, with a keen point that pinged through the rings of a man’s shirt and speared the meat beneath.

Then one of the Hradcana got a shield in the way, and Lern’s sword punched clean through it, almost to the length of a man’s forearm. It punched clean through and the blade stuck fast in the tight-grained wood. Lern tried to pull it out, but the shield man pulled back and dragged Lern out of line. The Hradcana took him and cut his thread: four or five enemy swords stabbing into him repeatedly, rehearsing the lesson in sword-work that Lern had delivered.

He disappeared under their feet, and the surge rolled over him. Brom was on his knees. He wasn’t really aware of where he was any more. Fith had both hands clamped around the throat of his axe, and both sets of knuckles were dripping red.

The surge rolled back and parted, and the Balt gothi approached. Balt hersirs were still carrying him in a cradle of hands. He aimed the bear blade-bone at Fith and for a moment it felt like the two of them were alone on the sleet-battered beach.

The gothi started speaking. He started speaking magic words to forge a spell that would blast Fith off the beach. The men around him, Hradcana and Balt alike, covered their eyes or ears. The hersirs holding Hunur up began to weep, because their hands were busy and they could not block his words out.

Fith didn’t know the meaning of the words, and didn’t want to. He tightened his grip around the throat of his axe. He wondered if he could reach the gothi and bury the smile of it in his pierced face before the Hradcana and the Balt cut him down, or the gothi’s magic turned his bones to melt-water.

‘Enough.’

Fith glanced over his shoulder. The Upplander, crumpled in the lee of a wet-black boulder, his mangled legs twisted under him, had spoken. He was looking up at Fith.

Fith could see he was trembling. His heat was pouring out of his mouth in steaming clouds. Sleet pelted them both, and settled in small white clumps in the Upplander’s matted hair.

‘What?’ Fith asked.

‘I’ve heard enough,’ the Upplander said.

Fith sighed. ‘Have you? Have you, indeed? So now you want the mercy of my axe, now we’ve come to this? You couldn’t have asked the favour earlier, before–’

‘No, no!’ the Upplander snapped. Every word was an effort, and he was clearly frustrated to have to say anything more than was absolutely necessary.

‘I said,’ he replied, ‘I’ve heard enough. I’ve heard enough of that shaman’s ravings. My translator’s sampled enough, and it’s built a workable grammatical base.’

Fith shook his head, not understanding.

‘Help me up,’ the Upplander ordered.

Fith hoisted the Upplander a little more upright. The barest movement caused the Upplander to grimace in pain. The pulverised bones in his legs ground together. Tears welled in his eyes and froze on his lower lashes.

‘All right, all right,’ he said. He adjusted the little translator device woven into his quilted collar.

He began to speak. A huge voice, tinny and harsh, boomed out of the device in his collar. Fith recoiled at the sound of it. The voice boomed out words just like the words the gothi was yelling at them.

The gothi scrambled down out of his hersirs’ hands and stopped shouting. He stared at Fith and the Upplander. There was terror on his twitching face. The Hradcana and the Balt edged backwards, uneasy and unsettled.

‘What did you say?’ Fith asked in the silence as the sleet billowed around them.

‘I used his words back at him,’ said the Upplander. ‘I told him I’d bring a daemon out of the storm if they didn’t back off. If they’re afraid of me because they think I’m a bad star, I might as well act like one.’

The gothi was gabbling at his warriors, trying to spur them in again to finish the matter, but they were really reluctant to move. The gothi was losing his temper. He kept staring at Fith and the Upplander with the same, terrified look as before. So were a lot of the men.

Then Fith realised that none of them were looking at him or the Upplander after all.

They were looking past him. They were looking out at the ice field, out at the still sea, out at the Hel-storm that was screaming in and staining the sky black. Fith turned, the wind in his hair and the sleet in his face, to see the storm approaching. It was a low, racing blackness, like blood swirling through water. The snow and sleet that formed its bow-wave hazed the air like dust. Ice splintered up from the surface of the frozen sea, whirling away like petals in its vortex. Bars of lightning stabbed from the skirts and the belly of the storm like jagged, blinding lances, and smote the sea crust.

There was something in the storm. There was something just ahead of it, staying ahead of it, pounding out of the sleet-blur towards them.

It was a man. It was a huge man, a shadow on the ice, running towards them, running across the sea, out-running the storm.

The Upplander’s bad star magic had brought a daemon down to punish them all.

*

Hunur screamed. His hersirs had been bewildered for a moment, but they snapped to attention at the squeal of his voice, and loaded their bows. Fith threw himself flat as the first salvo of arrows loosed at the approaching daemon. The men were firing at will, spitting iron-head darts into the air as though they hoped to pin the storm to the sky.

The daemon struck. He came in off the sea at the tip of the storm in great bounding strides. Fith could hear the ice crunch under each pounding step. Furs and a ragged robe fluttered out behind him. He leapt up into the beach rocks, turned the bound into a sure-footed hop that propelled him off one of the largest boulders and up into the air, arms outstretched. This soaring leap took him clean over Fith and the Upplander. Fith ducked again. He saw the great axe uplifted in the daemon’s right hand. The air was thatched with black arrows.

The daemon hung for a second in the mayhem of sleet, arms wide against the black sky like wings, robes trailing like torn sails. The host of Balt and Hradcana below him tilted back from him in fear, like corn stalks sloped by the wind.