Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

Sometimes the Upplander’s dreams picked him up and carried him outside the cave. They took him up to some high vantage where there were only stars overhead, in a roof of velvet blue, and sunlit lands below, a tapestry of worlds, all sewn together, all the worlds in creation, like the inlaid board of a great game. And on that board, epic histories played out for him. Nations and empires, creeds and races, rising and falling, bonding and fighting, forming alliances, making war. He witnessed unifications, annihilations, reformations, annexations, invasions, expansions, enlightenments. He saw it all from his lofty vantage, a seat so high and precarious that sometimes he had to cling on to the throne’s golden arms for fear of falling.

Sometimes his dreams swept him back inside himself, into his own flesh, into his own blood, and there, at a microscopic level, he observed the universe of his own body as it disassembled atom from atom, his essence sampled down to the smallest genetic packet, like light sifted and split into its component colours by a subtle lens. He felt he was being dismantled, working part from working part, like an old timepiece, and every last piece of the damaskeened movement laid out for repair. He felt like a biological sample: a laboratory animal, belly slit and pegged open, its organs removed one by one like the gears of a pocket watch; like an insect, pinned and minutely sectioned for a glass slide to learn what made it tick.

When his dreams took him back to the cave, where the therianthrope shadows sat muttering in the fire-light, he often felt as if he had been put back together in an altogether different order. If he was an old timepiece, then his dismantled movement had been rearranged, and some parts cleaned or modified, or replaced, and then his mainspring and his escapement, his going train and his balance wheel, and all his tiny levers and pins had been put back together in some inventive new sequence, and his cover screwed shut so that no one could see how he had been re-engineered.

And when he was back in the cave, he thought about the cave itself. Warm, secure, deep in the black rock, out of the storm. But had he been taken back there for his own protection? Or had he been taken back there for safekeeping until the man-shapes around the fire got hungry?

*

The strangest and most infrequent dreams of all were of the coldest, deepest part of the cave, where a voice spoke to him.

In this place, there was only blackness cut by a cold, blue glow. The air smelled sterile, like rock in a dry polar highland that lacked any water to form ice. It was far away from the soft warmth and the firelight of the cave, far away from the fraternity of murmuring voices and the smell of smouldering resin. The Upplander’s limbs felt leaden there, as though he had swallowed ice, as though cold liquid metal ran in his veins and weighed him down. Even his thoughts were slow and viscous.

He fought against the arctic slowness, afraid to let it pull him down into dreamless sleep and death. The best he could muster felt like a feeble twitch of his heavy limbs.

‘Be still!’

That was the first thing the voice said to him. It was so sudden and unexpected, he froze.

‘Be still!’ the voice repeated. It was a deep, hollow voice, a whisper that carried the force of thunder. It wasn’t particularly human. It sounded as if it had been fashioned out of the bleating, droning notes of an old signal horn. Each syllable and vowel sound was simply the same low, reverberative noise sampled and tonally adjusted.

‘Be still. Stop your twitching and your wriggling.’

‘Where am I?’ the Upplander asked.

‘In the dark,’ the voice replied. It sounded further away, a ram’s horn braying on a lonely cliff.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

There was a silence. Then the voice came again, directly behind the Upplander’s right ear, as if the speaker had circled him.

‘You don’t have to understand the dark. That’s the thing about the dark, it doesn’t need to be understood. It’s just the dark. It is what it is.’

‘But what am I doing here?’ he asked.

When the voice answered, it had receded. It came as a rumble from somewhere ahead of him, like the sound of a wind moaning through empty caves. It said, ‘You’re here to be. You’re here to dream the dreams, that’s all. So just dream the dreams. They’ll help pass the time. Dream the dreams. Stop your twitching and your wriggling. It’s disturbing me.’

The Upplander hesitated. He didn’t like the threat of anger in the voice.

‘I don’t like it here,’ he ventured at length.

‘None of us like it here!’ the voice boomed, right in the Upplander’s left ear. He let out an involuntary squeak of terror. Not only was the voice loud and close and angry, but there was a wet leopard-growl in its thunder.

‘None of us like it here,’ the voice repeated, calmer now, circling him in the darkness. ‘None of us chose to be here. We miss the firelight. We miss the sunlight. We’ve dreamed all the dreams they give us a hundred times over, a thousand times. We know them off by heart. We don’t choose the dark.’

There was a long pause.

‘The dark chooses us.’

‘Who are you?’ the Upplander asked.

‘I was called Cormek,’ the voice said. ‘Cormek Dod.’

‘How long have you been here, Cormek Dod?’

Pause, then a rumble. ‘I forget.’

‘How long have I been here?’

‘I don’t even know who you are,’ the voice replied. ‘Just be still, and shut up your racket, and stop disturbing me.’

*

Then the Upplander woke up, and he was still on the metal stretcher Bear had strapped him to.

The stretcher was swaying slightly, suspended. The Upplander’s vision swam into focus and he looked up, up at the chains rising from the four corners of the stretcher. They all met at a central ring, and became a single, thicker length of chain. The main chain, dark and oiled, extended up and away, into the oppressive twilight of the vast roof space above him. It felt like a cave, an enormous cave, but it wasn’t the dream-cave where the animal-men had murmured by the firelight, and it wasn’t the deep, cold cave with the blue glow either.

Everything was in shadow, in a twilight of a greenish cast. From what he could make out in the half-light, the cave was a vast space, like the nave of a cathedral, or the belly-hold of a voidship. And it wasn’t actually a cave, because the structural angles and edges were too straight and regular.

The Upplander couldn’t turn his head or move his limbs, but he was relieved to find that he was no longer in pain. There was not even a vestigial nag of discomfort from his torso or his shattered legs.

His relief was rather eclipsed by the anxiety he felt at his new situation: trapped and pinned, strapped down, unable to twist his head to see anything but the black roof space above. A dull, drowsy weight on his heart made him feel sluggish and leaden, as if he’d taken a tranquiliser or a sleeping draught. He blinked, wishing he could rub the grit out of his eyes, wishing the stretcher would stop swinging.

A swaying length of thick chain ran back down out of the darkness at an oblique angle to the central chain supporting him, and from its rhythmic jolts, it seemed clear that he was being hoisted up into the vaulted roof of the cathedral. The links clattered through an invisible block high above him.

He stopped ascending. The stretcher wobbled for a moment, and then swung hard to his left, out across the room, drawn with such force it started to rotate. Then the chain began to rattle back up in fits and starts, and the stretcher began to descend. The taut chains securing the four corners of the stretcher shuddered with every downward jerk.