Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

‘Who?’ asked Hawser.

‘Why are these civilians still here?’ a voice asked. It was deep and penetrating, and it had the hard edges of vox amplification. A figure had entered the chamber behind the Tupelov Lancers. Hawser wasn’t sure how it could have possibly walked in without anyone noticing.

It was an Astartes warrior.

By the pillars of Earth, an Astartes! The Emperor has sent the Astartes to finish this!

Hawser felt his chest tighten and his pulse sprint. He had never seen an Astartes in the flesh before. He hadn’t realised they were so big. The curvature of the armour plating was immense, oversized like the grave god statues behind him. The combination of the gloom and his goggles made it hard to resolve colour properly. The armour looked red: a bright, almost pale red, the colour of watered wine or oxygenated blood. A cloak of fine metal mesh shrouded the warrior’s left shoulder and torso. The helmet had a snout like a raven’s beak.

Hawser wondered what Legion the warrior belonged to. He couldn’t see any insignia properly. What was it that people were calling them these days, now that the bulk of all Astartes forces had deployed off Terra to spearhead the Great Crusade?

Space Marines . That was it. Space Marines. Like the square-jawed heroes of ha’penny picture books.

This was no square-jawed hero. This wasn’t even human. It was just an implacable thing, a giant twice the size of anybody else in the chamber. Hawser felt he ought to have been able to smell it: the soot on its plating, the machine oil in its complex joints, the perspiration trickling between its skin and its suit-liner.

But there was nothing. No trace, not even a hint of body heat. It was like the cold but immense blank of the void.

Hawser could not imagine anything that could stop it, let alone kill it.

‘I asked a question,’ the Astartes said.

‘We’re clearing them now, ser,’ stammered one of the Lancers.

‘Hurry,’ the Astartes replied.

The hussars started to herd the team towards the entrance. There were a few mumbles of protest, but nothing defiant. Everyone was too cowed by the appearance of the Astartes. The aug-lungs were wheezing and pumping more rapidly than before.

‘Please,’ said Hawser. He took a step towards the Astartes and held out the pass-pad. ‘Please, we’re licensed conservators. See?’

The hologram re-lit. The Astartes didn’t move.

‘Ser, this is a profound discovery. It is beyond value. It should be preserved for the benefit of future generations. My team has the expertise. The right equipment too. Please, ser.’

‘This area is not safe,’ said the Astartes. ‘You will remove yourselves.’

‘But ser–’

‘I have given you an order, civilian.’

‘Ser, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

‘The Fifteenth.’

The Fifteenth. So, the Thousand Sons.

‘What is your name?’

Hawser turned. The Tupelov Lancers had led most of the team out of the shrine, leaving only him behind. Two more Astartes, each as immense as the first, had manifested behind him. How could something that big move so stealthily?

‘What is your name?’ the new arrival repeated.

‘Hawser, ser. Kasper Hawser, conservator, assigned to–’

‘Is that a joke?’

‘What?’ asked Hawser. The other Astartes had spoken.

‘Is that supposed to be a joke?’

‘I don’t understand, ser.’

‘You told us your name. Was it supposed to be a joke? Is it some nickname?’

‘I don’t understand. That’s my name. Why would you think it’s a joke?’

‘Kasper Hawser? You don’t understand the reference?’

Hawser shook his head. ‘No one’s ever…’

The Astartes turned his beaked visor and glanced at his companions. Then he looked back down at Hawser.

‘Clear the area.’

Hawser nodded.

‘Once the security of this area can be guaranteed,’ said the Astartes, ‘your team may be permitted to resume its duties. You will evacuate to the safe zone and await notification.’

*

No notification ever came. Boeotia fell, and the Yeselti line came to an end. Sixteen months later, by then working on another project in Transcyberia, Hawser heard that conservator teams had finally been let into the Boeotian Lowlands.

There was no trace that any shrine had ever existed.

*

Fith wondered what kind of wight he would come back as. The kind that flashed and flickered under the pack ice? The kind you could sometimes see from a boat’s rail, running along in the shadow of the hull? The kind that mumbled and jittered outside an aett’s walls at night, lonely and friendless in the dark? The kind that sang a wailing windsong between the high ice peaks of a scarp on a late winter day?

Fith hoped it would be the darkest kind. The kind with the oil-black eyes and the slack-hanging mouth, the kind with rust and mould clogging the links of its shirt. The kind that clawed its way up from the Underverse using its fleshless hands as shovels, gnawed its way through the rock waste and permafrost, and then went walking at night.

Yes.

Walking until it reached Ironland and the hearth-aetts of the shit-breath Balt. Walking with a special axe in its hand, an axe forged in the Underverse from the bitter wrath of the restless and murdered, hammered out on god’s own anvil, and quenched in the bile and blood of the wronged and the unavenged. It would have a smile on it, a smile sparked on wyrd’s grindstone to a death-edge so keen it would slice a man’s soul from his flesh.

Then threads would be cut. Balt threads.

Fith hoped that would be the way. He wouldn’t mind leaving the Verse so much if there was an expectation of returning. He hoped the wights would let him do that. They could carry him away to the Underverse for all he cared, knocked down by a Balt maul or a Balt arrow, his own cut thread flapping after him in the gales of Hel, just so long as they let him return. Once he reached that unfamiliar shore, they had to remake him, build him back up out of his own raw pain, until he looked like a man, but was nothing more than an instrument, like an axe or a good blade, forged for one pure, singular purpose.

It wouldn’t be long before he found out.

Guthox had taken the tiller so that Lern could bind his rope-sawn fingers. The red sails were gaining on them, faster than the black sails of the Balt.

They had one chance left, in Fith’s opinion. A half-chance. One last arrow in wyrd’s quiver. If they cut north slightly, and ran through the top of Hradcana territory, they might make it to the ice desert beyond. The desert, well, that was death too, because it was a fatal place that no man or beast could live in, but that was a worry for later. They would make their own wyrd.

If they went to the desert, neither the Hradcana nor the Balt would follow. If they could get through a cut in the rock rampart the Hradcana called The Devil’s Tail , they’d be free and clear, free to die on their own terms, not hounded and knocked to Hel by a pack of soul-cursed murder-makers.

But it was a long run to The Devil’s Tail. Brom was too messed up to take a turn at the tiller, and even in rotation, the rest of them would be hard pressed to keep going. It was a run you’d break into four or five shorter runs, maybe sleeping out on the ice and cooking some food to rebuild your strength. To make it non-stop, that would be a feat of endurance, a labour so mighty the skjalds should sing about it.