Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

If there were any Ascommani skjalds left alive.

Braced against the rail, Fith talked it over with Lern and Brom. All three of them were hoarse from the fight, from yelling hate back into the Balts’ faces.

Brom was in poor shape. There was no blood in his face, and his eyes had gone dim like dirty ice, as if his thread was fraying.

‘Do it,’ he said. ‘The Devil’s Tail. Do it. Let’s not give these bastards the satisfaction.’

Fith made his way to the bow, and knelt down beside the swaddled Upplander.

The Upplander was speaking.

‘What?’ asked Fith, leaning close. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Then he said,’ the Upplander hissed, ‘then he said I can see you. I can see right into your soul. That’s what he said. I can reflect your harm back at you and I can know what you know. Oh god, he was so arrogant. Typical Murza. Typical. The statues are priceless, Hawser, he said, but how valuable is something, do you suppose, that someone would protect with priceless statues ?’

‘I don’t know what you’re telling me,’ said Fith. ‘Is it a story? Is it something that happened in the past?’

Fith was afraid. He was afraid he was hearing sky magic, and he didn’t want any part of it.

The Upplander suddenly started and opened his eyes. He stared up at Fith in sheer terror for a second.

‘I was dreaming!’ he cried. ‘I was dreaming, and they were standing looking down at me.’

He blinked, and the reality of his situation flooded back and washed the nonsense of his fever dream away, and he sank and groaned.

‘It was so real,’ he whispered, mainly to himself. ‘Fifty fugging years ago if it was a day, and it felt like I was right back there. Do you ever have dreams like that? Dreams that unwrap fresh memories of things you’d forgotten you’d ever done? I was really there.’

Fith grunted.

‘And not here,’ the Upplander added dismally.

‘I’ve come to ask you, one last time, do you want the mercy of my axe?’ asked Fith.

‘What? No! I don’t want to die.’

‘Well, first thing, we all die. Second thing, you’re not going to get much say in the matter.’

‘Help me up,’ said the Upplander. Fith got him to his feet and propped him against the bow rail. The first pricking gobs of sleet were hitting their faces. Up ahead, the sky had risen up in a great, dark summit of cloud, a bruised stain like the colour of a throttled man’s face, and it was rolling in on the ice field.

It was a storm, coming in hard, flinging ice around the sky. Late in the winter for a storm that dark. Bad news, whichever way you looked at it. The rate it was coming, they weren’t going to get anywhere much before it blew in across them.

‘Where are we?’ the Upplander asked, squinting into the dazzle of the ice field rushing by.

‘We’re somewhere near the middle of shit-goes-our-luck,’ said Fith.

The Upplander clung onto the rail as the wyrmboat quaked across a rough strayke.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing.

They were coming up fast on one of the Hradcana’s remote northern aetts. It was just an outpost, a few shelters built on some crags that rose above the ice plain. The Hradcana used it to resupply and safe-harbour their fisher boats when the sea thawed out. It was uninhabited for months at a time.

A row of spears had been set tip-down in the sheet ice in front of the aett. They stood like a row of fence posts, six or seven of them. On the raised end of each spear-haft, a human head had been impaled.

The heads were turned to look out onto the ice field at them. Their eyes had been pinned open.

They were most likely the heads of criminals, or enemy captives, ritually decapitated for the purpose, but it was possible they were Hradcana, sacrificed in desperation because of the extremity of the maleficarum. Their eyes were open so they could see the evil coming and ward it off.

Fith spat and cursed. He dearly wished Iolo had been able to badge their faces with cast-out marks, to bounce the warding magic back. The wyrmboat had eyes on its prow, of course: the all-seeing sun-disc eyes of the sky god, painted bold and bright, and decorated with precious stones. All wyrmboats had them, so they could find their way, see off danger, and reflect an enemy’s magic.

Fith hoped it would be enough. The boat was a strong boat, an aett-chief’s boat, but it had run hard and it was tired, and Fith was worried that its eyes might not be powerful enough to turn the magic back anymore.

‘Gods of Aversion,’ the Upplander murmured, gazing at the staked heads. ‘Keep out. Stay away. I can see you.’

Fith wasn’t listening to him. He yelled back down the long, narrow deck at Guthox, signalling him to turn wide. The aett was inhabited. A second later, the spiked heads flashed by, and they were skating the inshore ice under the shadow of the crag.

Guthox cried out. They were still two or three decent bow shots from the islet, but someone was either gifted or favoured by the Underverse. An arrow had gone into him.

Now more struck, thakking into the hull or falling short and skipping across the ice. Fith could see archers on the rim of the islet crag, and others on the beach.

He raced back down the boat to Guthox. Lern and Brom were moving too.

It was a monstrously lucky shot, except for Guthox. The arrow had gone through the tight-ringed sleeve of his shirt, the meat of his left tricep, shaving the bone, and then through the sleeve again, and then the shirt proper, before punching into the hersir’s side between his ribs, effectively pinning his arm against his body. Guthox had immediately lost control of one of the quarter rudder ropes. The pain was immense. He had bitten through his tongue in an effort not to scream.

Two arrows were embedded in the deck boards beside them. Fith saw they had fish-scale tips: each head shaped and finished from a single, iron-hard scale from a deep water monster. They were barbed, like a backwards-slanted comb.

That was what had gone into Guthox. It would never come out.

Guthox spat blood and tried to turn the tiller. Brom and Lern were shouting at him, trying to take over, trying to snap the arrow shaft so they could free Guthox’s arm. Guthox was slipping away.

Another wave of arrows hit. One, perhaps, came straight from the same gifted or favoured archer. It hit Guthox in the side of the head, and ended his pain by cutting his thread.

Blood droplets and sleet stung their faces. Guthox fell away from the tiller and, though Brom and Lern sprang in, the wind became their steersman for a split-second.

That was all the time the wind needed, and it had no interest in sparing their lives.

Two

Dis-aster

The wind flung them into the rocks abutting the beach, and the wyrmboat shattered like a crockery jar. The impact was sustained, like a relentless series of hammer blows. The world vibrated and up-ended, and the shivering air filled with rock-grit and out-flung stones, along with sleet, with slivers of ice, and with raked splinters of deck-wood as sharp as darning needles. The maniacal wind tore the sails away, like a vicious child plucking the wings off a long-legged fly. The sail-cloth, so full of hard air that it was splitting, cracked as it flew free, and the halyards screamed as they fled through the blocks and sawed into the pins. There was a brief, sharp reek of smoke from unwetted wood as the rigging lines friction-burned their way through and away. Under tension, the escaping lines whirred and buzzed like bees.