Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  Not quite Hark’s cup of caffeine.

  Down by the chapel door, in the shadows, he saw the orange coal of a lho-stick. Hark squinted. It was Meryn, leaning against the wall, smoking. The old ayatani’s blessings were clearly not his cup of caffeine either.

  Hark began to walk in Meryn’s direction. He was a cigar man, himself, but a shared smoke with a Guardsman was a bonding thing that often helped after a nasty go-around.

  But he stopped. Flyn Meryn wasn’t good company at the best of times. Hark walked the other way instead.

  Something stirred in the shadows above him and rasped. He glanced up, and saw the regiment’s mascot peering down at him. It was perched on a game trophy, the mounted skull of a creature that possessed the broadest and largest antlers he’d ever seen.

  ‘Rough night, bird,’ he said to the half-hidden eagle. It clacked its beak angrily. ‘I hear you,’ he replied, and wandered on. He flexed his hand. His one remaining hand. The bird had made him jump. He had reached instinctively for his weapon, but the arm he had reached with was just a phantom, and the holster empty. With his good hand, he felt under his coat to the back of his waistband, and found his hold-out weapon, a snub-nose laspistol in a leather buckle-on pouch. At least that was still there.

  Laksheema was standing at a doorway just ahead, staring in. He joined her.

  Through the open door, he saw Curth and several medicae aides attending to the Beati. She was laid out on a bed, straight and still, like a body ready for viewing.

  Captain Auerben was watching Curth work. She noticed Hark and the inquisitor at the door and came out to them.

  ‘She has not regained consciousness,’ she said. Her voice was just a croak. Hark had been told that Auerben had been hurt by a pyrochemical burst during the last Morlond campaign. It had scarred her face and burned her throat. Auerben paused, took an inhaler bulb from her pocket, and puffed it into her mouth to moisten her throat.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said.

  Hark shrugged. ‘Ana Curth knows what she’s doing,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure she does,’ said Auerben. ‘There are no significant injuries. It is extreme fatigue. A sapping of her will. I told her she was pushing too hard.’

  Auerben took another puff from the inhaler.

  ‘But the woe machine,’ she said. ‘It was a focus of ruinous power. It sapped her, and fed on her light. I fear it may take a long time for her to recover strength.’

  ‘We repair. We recharge,’ said Laksheema.

  ‘She means we heal,’ said Hark with a smile. ‘The Emperor protects. His grace will flow back into the Beati in time. She will be restored as she once was.’

  Auerben nodded. She went back into the room and resumed her vigil at the bedside.

  ‘The machine was a grim device,’ said Laksheema. ‘I am ever horrified by the limitless ingenuity of the Archenemy.’

  Hark nodded in agreement. ‘It may have been the worst thing I have ever encountered,’ he said. ‘You?’

  ‘I have faced daemons, commissar,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh, we’ve all faced daemons, inquisitor,’ he replied.

  She looked at him with a questioning frown.

  Hark grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve faced more powerful things, more dangerous things, though Throne knows that was hell. Without the Saint, we’d all be dead. The palace too.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Laksheema. ‘It was young. Not fully grown. But already a threat we could scarcely combat. Without her, it would have been enough. The palace lost, Eltath, Urdesh itself. The Anarch had victory there, for a moment. Total victory. If the woe machine hadn’t been checked, the crusade would have been crippled beyond recovery. The Sabbat Worlds would have fallen, and all our years of gain lost. Anakwanar Sek almost won tonight. Not just the battle, the war.’

  ‘It wasn’t just its power or its fury,’ said Hark. ‘It was the very feel of it. The shadow of the warp was in it, as strong as any warp spawn. It radiated fear, that’s the thing. It didn’t just inspire fear because of what it was. It generated it. It amplified it within us.’

  ‘Part of its arsenal,’ said Laksheema. ‘Woe machines are essentially mechanical instruments, but the heritor ingeniants have found the means to bind other elements. The warp. The human soul. Asphodel was a genius, you know? To take a killing machine and construct it with such intricate care it fitted inside a human shell. They call it reworking.’

  ‘Who do?’ asked Hark.

  ‘The Heritors of the Archonate. Alloying human and warp and machine into one material. Fusing them, and giving them the capacity of shift.’

  ‘Like a ship?’ he asked.

  ‘No, like a lycanthrope, Hark. A shape-changer, the transmutation of form. Deceit and guile and disguise, they are weapons of warfare we utilise. And such things are second nature to the warp. But the reworked take that to an obscene level. Of course, change is a primary aspect of the Four, a fundamental property of the Way-Changer, the dark un-god of sorcerous transition.’

  ‘You’re very knowledgeable,’ he remarked.

  ‘Years of study,’ she replied.

  ‘How many years?’

  Laksheema favoured him with her cold smile.

  ‘It is impolite to ask a lady her age,’ she said.

  ‘You’re no lady,’ he said.

  ‘Also impolite.’

  ‘I mean you’re beyond human, inquisitor. Reworked – is that the word? – in your own way. Like me. Though I am crudely wrought compared to you. How old do you feel?’

  ‘Viktor,’ she replied, ‘I barely feel at all, and I haven’t for a very long time.’

  He was about to reply when a wind blew down the hallway, fluttering all the candles and lamps.

  They turned.

  ‘What was that?’ he asked. She didn’t answer. A second later, they heard a scream. It came from far away, deep in the core of the palace, but it was so loud and piercing that it made the walls tremble.

  It wasn’t a human scream.

  Hark found he had his hold-out weapon in his hand. The fear had returned. The fear that had drowned him in the undercroft had soaked him again in a heartbeat.

  ‘Feth,’ he said. ‘What was that?’

  Laksheema looked at him.

  ‘Do you feel that?’ she asked.

  He nodded. ‘Right through the heart of me,’ he said. ‘Just–’

  ‘Terror,’ she said. ‘There is another one. There is another woe machine here.’

  Light shuddered. Shadows twisted. Gol Kolea looked at his son in surprise. That scream he had uttered…

  Dalin Criid looked back at him, blinking fast.

  ‘Dalin?’ said Gol.

  ‘No. No. No no no–’ Dalin moaned.

  ‘Dalin!’

  ‘How could I not know this?’ Dalin asked. ‘Never. Never knew.’

  Gol let go of Dalin’s shoulders. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered. ‘Oh no.’

  ‘She was my sister,’ said Dalin.

  Dalin Criid hinged open. His flesh peeled and folded like the rind of a fruit, his bones twisting like weeds. A subspace lattice bulged, stripping organics back into the immaterium and folding sentient inorganics out into real space in their place. He split down a centre line from the crown of his head and turned inside out with a snap like a switchblade.

  He became a cloud of interlacing knives, each one vibrating and slicing as it moved. The blades, all black metal, moved in flawless formation, cycling and shifting in intricate, synchronised patterns, first a rippling figure of eight, then more complex hyperbolic formations obscenely alien to Euclidian geometry. The whirring blades flashed in abstract conic orbits around a central hub of dazzling yellow neon light, like a miniature sun.

  Gaunt stared in disbelief. He reached for his bolt pistol, his hand shaking.

  Vaynom
Blenner stumbled backwards with eyes like saucers, and fell down hard.

  ‘Oh, Throne,’ gasped Baskevyl. ‘Gol! Gol!’

  Still on his knees, Gol Kolea looked up at the whirring cloud of blades. His hands came up in front of his face instinctively to ward it off, then he lowered them. He stared directly into the neon light.

  ‘Dalin,’ he said, as if calling a child home after dark. ‘I won’t let you go alone. I’ll walk into hell–’

  The cycling blades slowed, as if confused. They stopped, hanging still for a second, then slowly began to cycle in the opposite direction. Their pattern altered, returning to the simple, lemniscate orbit.

  Then the figure-eight ploughed forward, and Gol Kolea was gone.

  Baskevyl screamed his friend’s name, but there was nothing left to answer him except a billowing mist of blood.

  Gaunt’s bolt pistol boomed. Explosive rounds tore into the glowing cloud of blades. Blade teeth shattered like glass as the rounds detonated like solar flares around the little burning neon sun. Fresh blades slid out of subspace to replace the broken ones, joining the perfect, rushing synchronicity of the revolving pattern.

  The woe machine rose up, and turned towards them. Its neon sun-heart was throbbing hatred. Its noise was the whoosh of sword-strikes, the shearing snip of scissors, the steel-on-stone wail of a sharpening wheel. Terror radiated from it like heat.

  Blenner was thrashing and twisting in a paroxysm of fear, shrieking and clutching his head.

  ‘Get back, Bask,’ Gaunt warned.

  The woe machine drifted towards them. It elongated vertically, its rushing figure-eight extending taller and thinner, its inner sun stretching into an oval.

  Gaunt faced it, forcing the lid down on his terror. He couldn’t fight it. There was nowhere to run. The wind whipping from it tugged at his coat. It smelled of hot metal and burned blood.

  Gol’s words, Gol’s last words, had made it hesitate. Something human was still in it. Something that had been unwittingly human for so long, it couldn’t shed the habit as easily as it had shed its disguise.

  ‘Trooper Dalin!’ Gaunt yelled. ‘Trooper Dalin, stand easy!’

  The rotation speed slowed and became irregular. The pattern deformed, some blades drifting out of alignment. The light of the neon sun dimmed slightly, wavering in intensity.

  ‘That’s an order, Trooper Dalin!’ Gaunt barked.

  The figure-eight collapsed. All the blades re-formed into a simple pattern, a single circle orbiting the sun-heart. Gaunt could feel it struggling. The waves of fear were overlapping waves of confusion and panic. It was fighting with itself. The very ingenuity of its design, human fused with warp-machine, was battling with itself.

  ‘Trooper Dalin!’ Gaunt cried again.

  The circle of spinning blades shifted position, rotating in a plane around the little sun until all the tips were pointing away from the three men and directly up at the ceiling. The blades sat like a spiked crown around their neon heart.

  Then their rate-of-cycle increased dramatically. The woe machine rose and ripped into the ceiling, slicing through the ancient stone as though it was soft fat. The wailing woe machine gouged up into the ceiling, and vanished from view.

  Dislodged blocks tumbled onto the chamber floor. The undercroft ceiling began to split and collapse, the integrity of its ancient vault sheared through.

  ‘Out! Out!’ Gaunt yelled to Baskevyl. The path to the exit and the stairs was no longer blocked. They grabbed the screaming Blenner and stumbled towards the door as the ceiling crashed in behind them.

  The palace was shaking. All around, men and women called out in alarm and panic. Candle flames jerked and fluttered. Some went out in wafts of grey smoke. The lamps rattled on their hooks. Old paintings quivered in their frames. The psyber-eagle squawked as dust sifted from the jittering antlers it had settled on.

  Objects on table tops trembled and shifted position. Glasses smashed. Medical trays skipped, dislodged and spilled to the floor. Cracks and splits appeared in the ancient floor tiles.

  Hark and Laksheema rushed back into the wardroom where they had been treated. The Keyzon corpsman was staring out of the tall windows in amazement. They joined him, gazing down into the broad yard of the Hexagonal Court. The space was torchlit – burning tapers fixed in iron brackets. A company of Helixid troopers were loading packs into two Valkyrie carriers that had set down as part of the evacuation effort.

  Hark and Laksheema could hear the men shouting, looking around frantically in an effort to comprehend the source of the shaking.

  ‘Is… is it an earthquake?’ asked the corpsman. ‘Is it the volcanics?’

  ‘No,’ said Hark. He could hear the wailing. The high-pitched metal squeal was getting louder by the second.

  The woe machine reached ground level. Its whirring blades erupted through the flagstones of the Hexagonal Court, spitting splinters of stone in all directions. Some of the Helixid troops died immediately, cut down by the whizzing slivers.

  Others were caught in the cloud of blades as it rose from the ruptured stone floor and expanded, blades flattening into a horizontal dish around the burning heart. The men vanished in puffs of blood vapour, or fell like parts of a broken puzzle, cut in sections.

  The tail boom of one Valkyrie was lopped clean off, leaving bare metal stumps and sparking cables. The severed tail fins were hurled like a toy across the court, and punched in the wall and windows of a ground floor chamber. The other carrier, its ramp still down, tried to throttle up and lift clear. The blades shredded one side of it clean away, leaving the Valkyrie excised in cross-section. Its straining engines ignited, and it exploded in a savage fireball.

  Hark slammed Laksheema down and away from the windows as the concussion blast blew them in. A blizzard of broken glass burst across the room. The corpsman stayed standing for almost ten seconds, blinded, flayed back to the bone from the thighs up. He fell sideways like a discarded kit-bag.

  Down below, the woe machine had formed a new shape – a war shape, a woe shape, an octahedron four metres across made of sliding, slithering blades, the neon light glowing inside the lattice shell. The few Helixid troopers who hadn’t died or fled fired on it. The woe machine rushed at them, las-rounds pinging off its blades, one tip dilating to form a spinning, sucking maw.

  Hark got up, broken glass cascading off him, and rushed to the door. Behind him, Laksheema struggled to her feet.

  ‘Out!’ Hark bellowed into the hallway. ‘Out now! Woe machine!’

  Terrified staff and personnel began to scramble from the rooms all along the hall. The air itself was vibrating. An ancient painting of Throne-alone-knows-what fell off the wall with a crash as its ancient string snapped. Its gilt frame shattered.

  Auerben appeared, people shoving past her. She looked at Hark.

  ‘We can’t move her,’ she said. ‘We can’t.’

  By the chapel door, Meryn shrank back against the old wood panels as though he was willing the palace wall to swallow him up.

  He could hear the killing, the screams. He could smell the blood.

  There was going to be another slaughter. And it was going to make the first one pale into insignificance.

  He started to laugh, unable to stop himself, because there was nothing funny left in the world.

  Nineteen: Whose Voice Drowns Out All Others

  The hooded V’heduak magir strode down the companionway straight towards them.

  ‘Shit,’ Mkoll whispered to Brin and Mazho. ‘Let me do the talking.’

  He turned to face the magir, trying to frame the formal constructions of the Blood-fare caste.

  The V’heduak grinned down at him.

  ‘You bastard,’ Mkoll murmured.

  ‘I acquired a disguise,’ said Kater Holofurnace.

  ‘Clever,’ said Mkoll.

  ‘I was slowing you d
own,’ said the Snake. ‘Now we can move freely.

  ‘Where did you–?’ Mazho began.

  Holofurnace shook his head. ‘One of them was fool enough to walk away alone. They won’t find his corpse.’ He parted the edge of the robes slightly, and let them see the belt-fed .20.

  ‘We know where to go,’ said Milo. He had the fold of deck plans.

  Holofurnace nodded. ‘That show any weapons lockers?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mkoll. ‘But they’re secure and we–’

  Holofurnace held up a ring of notched metal bars.

  ‘The Blood-fare had keys,’ he said with a smile.

  Three packsons were guarding the strong room. They saluted, hands to mouths, as the V’heduak strode past them. He slotted his keys into the heavy door’s lock without comment.

  The packsons watched him for a moment.

  ‘Magir,’ said one tentatively. ‘The orders are to leave all weapon rooms locked and secure while–’

  Mkoll glared at them.

  ‘You question the magir’s authority, stool-worm?’ he asked.

  ‘No, sirdar. No. Your pardon.’

  Holofurnace pushed open the hefty door, and they went inside, pulling it shut behind them. The locker was small, the walls shelved and racked. A small metal bench stood in the centre of the room. The plans had showed there was a locker like it on almost every deck, stocked for the quick distribution of arms to the ship’s crew in the event of a boarding action.

  ‘Not much,’ murmured Holofurnace, glancing around. ‘It’s crude stuff. I was hoping for something with some punch. Plasma or cyclic.’

  ‘It’s just crew-issue small-arms,’ said Mazho. He stared at a rack of boarding hatchets.

  ‘Be selective,’ said Milo. ‘There’s reloads at least. Pack your pockets with cells.’

  ‘Think small and useful,’ said Mkoll. ‘Concealable.’

  ‘If we’re going to kill the devil in his own lair,’ said Holofurnace, ‘we need power.’ He looked at them. ‘He’s a magister. He won’t be human now, if he ever was.’