Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

I knew where I was. I had reached the end of my dream.

My eyes refocussed. I saw my own sunlit reflection in the mirror of the window port. I saw the face of the other figure reflected in the glass, the figure standing just behind me.

Terror constricted me.

‘How can you be here?’ I asked.

I did not wake.

‘I have always been here,’ answered Horus Lupercal.

Fourteen

Looking Glass

He did not need to name himself. I had seen his proud likeness many times on posters and pict-casts, on souvenir medals and holo-portraits: Primarch, Warmaster, the beautiful one, the foremost of the first sons. He was a giant, like all of his brothers. The little sleepchamber of the superorbital suite barely contained the scale of him. He was wearing the striking, Imperial white-gold armour of his Legion. A single, staring eye was fashioned across the breastplate. It was surrounded by an eight-pointed star.

He smiled down at me, a reassuring smile, the smile bestowed by a wise father on a miscreant child.

‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

‘You were never supposed to, Kasper,’ he said. ‘You were only ever a playing piece on a board. But I have grown fond of you down the years, and I wanted to see you one last time before the game was over.’

‘We’ve never met before, my lord,’ I said. ‘I would have remembered.’

‘Would you? I doubt it,’ he replied.

‘Ser,’ I said. ‘I have been privy to warnings. Grave warnings. A threat upon your life. I was shown a weapon–’

‘This?’ he asked. He drew the Anathame from his belt. It shone with malign light, just as it had done in my un-memories . ‘It’s too late. A year or so from now, this blade will have done its work upon me. I will be finished, and I will be renewed.’

‘A year or so from now? How can you speak of time in such a topsy-turvy sense?’

He smiled again.

‘When this blade cuts my thread, Kasper, occulted gods will take me in their arms. They will warp me. My life will change from mortal order to immortal Chaos. I will defy the laws of the cosmos and the rules of creation. Look at the two of us here, standing in your past. Prospero burns in your present, Kasper, but neither of us is there.’

‘Why?’ I cried. ‘Why? What have you done? What madness have you wrought?’

‘I am clearing the board for the game to come,’ he said. ‘I am setting it out the way I want it. Two key obstacles to my ambitions are the Sons of Prospero and the Wolves of Fenris. The former is the only Legion that has lorecraft enough to hinder me magically; the latter is the only Legion dangerous enough to represent a genuine military threat. The Emperor’s sorcerers and the Emperor’s executioners. I have no wish to store up a fight with either for my future, so I have invested time and energy arranging events to turn them upon each other.’

I gazed at him in disbelief. He shrugged, ruefully.

‘I had hoped for more, if I am honest,’ he said. ‘Magnus is terribly misguided. His dabblings have brought him perilously close to damnation, and my father was right to restrain him. But he would never have toppled over the brink without this violent provocation. I had so wanted the Wolves and the Sons to annihilate each other here on Prospero, and remove themselves as threats at a stroke. But Magnus and Russ have remained true to character. Magnus, high-minded and pious, has accepted his punishment and been destroyed. Russ, relentless and brute-loyal, has not wavered in his appalling task. The Thousand Sons have been destroyed. The Wolves remain in play.’

He looked at me, and there was a glitter in his eye.

‘But in the fate of Magnus and his sons, there is compensation for me. Broken by defeat, they nevertheless come across to my side. As a consequence, I earn some redress against the fact that the Vlka Fenryka remain a stark and extant danger to me.’

‘No man can do this,’ I cried, shaking my head. ‘No man can orchestrate events on such a scale!’

‘No? Not with years of gamesmanship and manipulation? Not with the dissemination of secrets and lies? Ugly rumours of Magnus’s necromantic practices? Blunt questions about Russ’s psychopathic tactics? Plus, of course, the deliberate manufacture of a network of spies like you, Kasper, real spies and pawns to make both sides paranoid, to make both sides suspect the worst and prepare for reaction? I turned the very traits and habits of each Legion’s character into weapons of self-destruction.’

‘No!’ I insisted. ‘No man can do such a thing.’

‘Whoever said I was a man?’ he replied.

I backed away. I felt the cold glass of a window or a mirror against my back.

‘What are you really?’ I asked.

‘You know my name,’ he laughed.

‘That’s just a mask, isn’t it?’ I said, pointing at his face. ‘What are you really?’

‘Which mask would you prefer?’ he asked. He raised his hand to his face, and tore away the flesh. It split like the husk of a pea-pod, like fibrous vegetable matter, spilling sap like languid honey. The features of Horus Lupercal parted, and underneath them was the laughing face of Amon, Equerry to the Crimson King.

‘This one? The one you spoke to on Nikaea? The real Amon was far below at his primarch’s side.’

He dropped the shredded Horus face onto the deck. It landed with the splat of rotten fruit. Then he peeled the Amon face away too. Milky sap spurted out and spattered down his breastplate, drooling across the great staring eye. Now the sadly knowing features of my old colleague Navid Murza gazed at me.

‘Or this one?’

‘The real one,’ I said. ‘The real one. No mask, just your real face.’

‘You could not bear to look upon it,’ Navid said. ‘No one can behold the baleful light of the Primordial Annihilator and survive. Your sanity would be the last thing to burn up, Kasper. Oh, Kasper. I was not lying when I said I had grown fond of you. You were good to me. I am sorry for the life I have given you.’

‘What is the Primordial Annihilator, Navid?’ I asked. ‘What is it?’

‘The warp, Kasper,’ he said. ‘The warp. The warp is everything, and everything is the warp. Your Allfather thinks He can win a war against it where other, greater races have lost. He can’t. Mankind will be the warp’s finest victory.’

He took a step towards me. At his throat, I could see the glint of the Catheric crux he always wore. It was melting.

‘We got rid of our gods, Kas. Something was always going to take their place.’

His face was pleading. It was the face I had known for years, un-aged since the day he perished in Ossetia. He was no longer wearing the Warmaster’s armour. He was human-sized, and dressed in the soft, cream-felt robes of the Lutetian Bibliotech.

I knew, with painful certainty, that Navid Murza’s face had been the one I had turned around and seen that day, long ago, in my suite aboard the Lemuryan superorbital. His was the face that my dreams had blocked, the face my memories had refused to recover. This had been the trigger event: a man, dead for so long, come back to find me in a locked room to warp my mind with fear, reboot my memories, adjust my will and drive me to Fenris.

This was the ‘best piece’ of maleficarum, the one that Longfang knew I had.

‘So all this is for nothing?’ I whispered. ‘Prospero has burned, for nothing? Astartes has murdered Astartes, for nothing?’