Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

one out of his cloak, flames licking around his fingers.

He brought something up from his side, something metal and heavy that had been strapped there. It was a box with a handle. Fith didn’t know what it was for. All he knew was it was some daemonic device. The daemon pointed it at the Balt wyrmboats.

The box made a noise like a hundred thunderbolts overlapping. The sound was so loud, so sudden, so alien, it made Fith jerk in surprise. Gouting flashes of fire bearded the front of the daemon’s curious box, blinking and flickering as fast as the rattling thunder-roar.

The nearest Balt wyrmboat shivered, and then disintegrated. Its hull shredded and flew apart, reduced to wood chips and pulp and spinning nails. The mast and the quarter rigs exploded. The figurehead splintered. The men on board atomised in puffs of red drizzle.

The wyrmboat behind it began to shred too, and then the boat beyond that. The daemon kept his roaring lightning-box aimed at the boats, and invisible hands of annihilation demolished the craft drawn up along the ice-line. A thick brume of wood-fibre and blood-mist boiled off the destruction into the wind. Then the pitch bottles that had yet to be thrown exploded.

The inferno was intense. Despite the storm, Fith could feel the heat of it on his face. The line of boats lit off, like the fire graves of great heroes at a boat burial. Ash and sparks zoomed crazily like fireflies. The wind took hold of the thick black smoke coming off the burning, and carried it out across the sea almost horizontally like a bar of rolling fog.

The daemon’s lightning-box stopped roaring. He lowered it and looked up the beach at the gothi. Hunur was a shrunken, defeated figure, his shoulders slack, his arms down. A few Hradcana and Balt were fleeing past him up the rock slope, seeking the far side of the islet.

The daemon raised his lightning-box and pointed it at the gothi. He made it flash and bark just once, and the gothi’s head and shoulders vanished in an abrupt pink cloud. What remained of Hunur snapped back off the rock, as if snatched from behind.

The daemon walked down to the ice-line. The intense heat of the burning boats had liquefied the sea ice along the shore, creating a molten pool of viscous water that was greedily swallowing the boat wrecks down into the darkness in a veil of angry steam. The iron-edged smell of the ocean was released to the air for the first time that year.

The daemon knelt down, scooped water up in the cup of his massive right hand, and splashed it over his face. The soot streaked on his cheeks and brow. He rose again, and began to walk back up the beach towards Fith.

The hrosshvalur rose without much warning: just a blow of sour bubbles in the turbulent melt-pool and a sudden froth of red algae. Like all of the great sea things, its diet had been constrained by the ice all winter long, and it was rapaciously hungry. The burning boats had opened the sea to the air, and their cloudy ruins had brought down quantities of meat and blood to flavour the frigid water with an intoxicating allure. The hrosshvalur may have been leagues away when it got the taste; one particle of human blood in a trillion cubic litres of salt water. Its massive tail flukes had closed the distance in a few beats.

The daemon heard the liquid rush of its emergence, and turned to look. The melt-pool was barely big enough to fit the sea thing. Its scaled flanks and claw-toed flippers broke the ice wider, and it bellied up onto the beach, jaws wide and eager at the scent of blood. The flesh inside its mouth was gleaming white, like mother of pearl, and there was a painful stink of ammonia. Its teeth were like spears of ragged yellow coral. It brought its shuddering, snorting bulk up onto the shingle, and boomed out its brash, bass cry, the sound you sometimes heard at night, on the open water, through the planks of the hull. Smaller mushveli , yapping and writhing like worms, followed it up out of the melt-hole, equally agitated by the promise of meat. The hrosshvalur drove them aside, snapping the neck of one that got too close, and then wolfing it down whole in two or three jerking gulps. It levered its body across the shingle on its massive, wrinkled flippers.

The daemon crossed in front of the giant killer. He knew that its appetite was as bottomless as the North Ocean, especially since the turning of spring. It would not stop until it had picked the aett islet clean of anything remotely edible.

The daemon plucked his axe out of the ice-cake shingle. He pulled it up with his hand clasped high under the shoulder, and then he let the handle slip down through his loose grip, pulled by the head weight, until he had it by the optimum lever point between belly and throat. He ran at the ocean monster.

It blew its jaws out at him in a blast of rancid ammonia. The jaws hinged out so wide they formed a tooth-fringed opening like a chapel cave. The maw was so big that a full crew of men could have carried a wyrmboat into it on their shoulders. Then its secondary jaws extended too, driven by the undulating elastic of the throat muscles, bristling with spine teeth made of translucent cartilage. The spine teeth, some longer than a grown man’s leg, flipped up out of the gum recesses like the blades of a folding knife, each one as transparent as glacial ice and dewed with drops of mucus. The hrosshvalur lunged at the charging daemon, the vast tonnage of its bulk grinding and scraping off the beach stones.

The daemon brought his axe down and cut through the lower, primary jaw between the biter-teeth at the front, splitting the jaw like a hull split along its keel. Noxious white froth boiled out of the wound, as if the hrosshvalur had steam for blood. Whooping, it tried to turn its injured head away. The daemon knocked his axe into the side of its skull, so that the blade went through the thick scale plate to its entire depth. Then he put it in again, directly below one of the glassy, staring eyes that were the size of a chieftain’s shield.

The ocean monster boomed, and spewed out a great torrent of rank effluvium. The daemon kept hacking until there was a bubbling pink slit where the hrosshvalur’s head met its neck. The beach underneath them was awash with stinking milky fluid. The slit puckered and dribbled as air gusted out of it. The beast wasn’t dead, but it was mortally stricken. The yapping mushveli began to eat it alive. The daemon left it to die, and walked towards Fith.

The Upplander had been awake to see most of the spectacle. He watched the daemon’s approach. Close to, they could see the plated form of the daemon’s decorated grey armour under his scorched robes and furs. They could see the corded brown lines tattooed into his face, down the line of his nose, across the planes of the cheek and around the eyes. They could smell him, a scent like an animal, but clean, the heady pheromone musk of an alpha dog.

They could see his fangs.

‘You are Ahmad Ibn Rustah?’ the daemon said.

The Upplander paused while his translator dealt with the words.

‘Yes,’ the Upplander replied. He shuddered with cold and pain. It was a miracle he was still conscious.

‘And you are?’ he asked.

The daemon said his name. The translator worked quickly.

‘Bear?’ asked the Upplander. ‘You’re called Bear?’

The daemon shrugged.

‘Why are you here?’ asked the Upplander.

‘There was an error,’ said the daemon. The purring growl was never far from the edges of his voice. ‘An oversight. I made the error, so now I make amends. I will take you out of this place.’

‘These men too,’ said the Upplander.

The daemon looked at Fith and Brom. Brom was unconscious against a rock, dusted with pellets of hail. The blood seeping from his wounds had frozen. Fith was just staring at the daemon. There was still blood on the handle of his axe.