Dan Abnett - Prospero Burns

‘Fith of the Ascommani!’ Horus bawled out. He had dug deeper into my memory and found a truer, older name for my friend and wolf-brother. At the merest breath of it, Godsmote was picked up and tossed across the hall. He slammed against the looking-glass wall four or five metres off the floor, cracked a huge sunburst pattern in its surface with his impact, and fell onto the ground beneath.

Horus straightened up and came for me. I shot at him until my cell was spent, and then threw the pistol aside and drew my axe. He knocked me down with a slap, tore off my displacer field unit, and wrenched my axe from my hands. His titanic hand was around my throat. My feet left the ground.

‘I had grown fond of you,’ he hissed in Navid Murza’s voice. ‘I even confessed as much. And you repay my indulgence with this abuse when you should have accepted the gift of a painless death that I was offering you. Now it certainly won’t be painless.’

‘I don’t care,’ I grunted back.

‘Oh, you will,’ he promised.

The gleaming, frostblade head of a Fenrisian axe flashed down between us and parted his arm at the elbow. I fell onto the floor with his severed forearm still clutching at my throat. His blood, or whatever foetid ichor passed for his blood, hosed at me.

‘Step back,’ said Bear, and put two more axe strokes into him. Horus bellowed Bear’s name, in rage and pain, but obtained no mastery of him. Bear’s axe continued to bite him. Just as had been the case when it wore the mask of Amon on Nikaea, the Primordial Annihilator could not subdue Bear with his name.

Bear had done terrible damage to the Horus-thing. One arm was off, the white-gold armour was rent open in a dozen bloody places, and there was a grisly cleft through the side of the Lupercal’s head. The brainpan had split open. The white bone of skull fragments protruded. Part of his cheek had torn away. The blood streaming out of him was forming a widening pool around his feet.

‘Skjald?’ Bear growled. ‘Run now.’

I got up. Bear settled his grip and prepared to face the next round. Twitching, the Horus-thing advanced, splashing one step after another through its sappy blood, leaving footprints of gore on the glass floor.

‘Run now,’ Bear urged me.

The Horus-thing accelerated. Bear bent low and put his back into the swing that greeted it. The blow didn’t land. Pain and anger seemed to amplify the Horus-thing’s power. It smashed Bear aside with a vicious sweep of its remaining arm, and then stooped and tried to rain blows down on the fallen Wolf. Bear rolled wildly to avoid them, escaping a pounding fist that cracked the floor in several places. With no time or opportunity to rise again, Bear slid around on his back, and hacked at the monster again, with his axe, left-handed.

The Horus-thing caught the axe-head this time. It caught it neatly in its huge, armoured paw, and locked its grip. Blood and oily fluid bubbled out of its mouth as it looked down at Bear and uttered some eldritch unword of Enuncia.

Balefire, the corposant that lights treetops and mastheads in the darkest winter nights, swirled down the axe from head to throat, wrapping it in greenish yellow flame, consuming it. The flames spread to Bear’s left hand and forearm, burning them away in a wild, incandescent flare. Bear howled. The Horus-thing was exacting punishment for his own missing arm. He was a predator, playing with his prey before the kill.

I snatched up my axe from the floor where it had landed. I did not hesitate. I got between them and struck off Bear’s left arm just below the elbow before the maleficarum could spread to the rest of him. He had saved me by severing a limb. I was determined to repay him, and repay him for the constant protection he had offered me, without comment, since our first meeting on the shore of the ice field, when I mistook him for a daemon.

I knew, now, what a daemon really looked like.

Bear rolled clear, clenching his teeth in pain. I tried to drag him back towards the hall’s portico. I confess I did not expect to have done much more than delay our ultimate demise.

By then, Aun Helwintr had felt the terrible forces that had been released in the temple precinct. Ominous in his pelt and his long black cloak, his white hair twisted and lacquered into horns, he stepped into the crystal hall behind us, forming with his hands the warding gestures that all rune priests are taught, the gestures of banishment and aversion. The Horus-thing vomited blood and recoiled, but its power dwarfed that of the imposing priest.

For this reason, Helwintr had not come to our aid alone.

One entire glass wall of the temple hall, on the right-hand side, blew in and shattered in a vast cascade of glass. A second later, the same thing happened to the left-hand side. Light and smoke from the killing grounds outside swirled in through the building’s ruptured frames. Parts of the roof glazing fell in and smashed.

A huge and heavy shape strode into the hall through the torn down right-hand wall. It was a biped, a construct five metres tall, squat but massive, thickly armoured with adamantium, badged in the colours of the Vlka Fenryka . On either side of its bulky main hull, weapon-pods cycled and target-locked.

A second Dreadnought entered through the gap blown in the left-hand side of the hall. It cycled its weapons. The constructs closed the distance a little, vicing the Horus-thing between their positions, driving it back towards the end of the hall. Each step they took shook the ground.

They opened fire in unison at some shared, mind-linked command. The tempest wrath of assault cannons and twin-linked lascannons macerated the Horus-thing. Flailing, it was blasted into fragments, into a haze of matter that spattered what little of the hall’s mirrored surface remained, and stained it like mould.

Something thrashed at the heart of the blast zone, something that took form as the humanoid figure of Horus was annihilated. Gale force winds and energies screamed out at us. The air filled with swarms of flies.

Something rose up, slowly, out of the molten fireball created by the Dreadnoughts’ barrage. It was hard to look at, hard to understand. It defied visual interpretation, like a dream that refuses to let you turn around and see its face.

It was tall and misshapen, a shadow cast by shadows. There was a suggestion of anatomy that was both utterly human and corrupted beyond any organic limit. Everything about it had been put together wrong, so that the sight of it dislocated the senses and depraved the mind. It was gristle and rancid meat, blisters and herniated intestines, ulcerated tongues and rotting teeth. It was blinking eyes that were as large as drinking bowls or clustered like the spawn of amphibians. It had horns, two huge, upcurved horns.

Everything in the room suddenly cast too many shadows. The clouds of flies grew thicker, trying to invade our eyes, our nostrils, our mouths, our wounds.

A voice said, ‘Oh, Aun Helwintr. You do not learn from your mistakes. You have brought mighty warriors to confront me and drive me out, but I know their names and thus have power over them. I name

them both. Patrekr the Great Fanged. Cormek Dod.’

‘I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,’ Helwintr replied. I was astonished to see that he was smiling. Figures streamed into the shattered hall behind him, and stepped in through the walls the Dreadnoughts had breached. A dozen Null Maidens. Two dozen. Their swords were drawn. Their leader, Jenetia Krole, raised her hand and pointed an accusing finger at the shadow-shape looming before us.

It let out a long and harrowing cry of anguish as it felt its power negated. The pariah gene shared by the members of the Silent Sisterhood blocked the puissance of its sorcery and banished its potent maleficarum. The wind immediately began to die back. The swarming flies fell dead, and piled on the ground in black drifts as thick as the heaps of fragmented glass.