Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘D’har voi vehen kha,’ the V’heduak beside him said, and laughed.

  Holofurnace nodded. He knew none of the words. He made a laughing sound and hoped it would be enough.

  There. There was Milo. He was moving down one of the staircases, slipping through the crowd. Holofurnace watched. Unnoticed by those around him, Milo paused to re-strap his boot. Just a feint. Holofurnace saw him quickly, furtively slide a small object under the lip of the stall. A mine. Milo rose again. He threaded his way on down the steps.

  Good boy.

  The Snake scanned the throng. There. And there was Mkoll. Down on the floor beside the dais, moving through the gathering, pausing, looking out into the Oratory as he fished a hand behind his back and anchored a mine to a dais post. Right in plain sight, but no one saw. Mkoll moved with confidence, as if he was supposed to be there.

  Mkoll looked up. He’d spotted Holofurnace across the packed chamber. A hunter’s sharp eyes. No chance to sign or signal. Just an exchanged nod.

  ‘Voi vehtah sahk!’ the V’heduak beside him exclaimed, nudging him.

  ‘Kha,’ Holofurnace said.

  He’d lost sight of Mkoll. There was Milo again, though. Three-quarters of the way down the stairs. Another casual stoop to adjust his boot. A quick pass, sleight-of-hand. Another mine set, locked in the shadows of a stair riser. Milo rose again. Holofurnace tracked him as he edged into a lower stall. There was Mkoll too. They jostled through the press until they were side by side.

  The main doors shut. The excubitor guards stepped to the rail. One pushed in just metres from Holofurnace, a terrible ghoul with stub-horns, taller than any Adeptus Astartes, his ornate lance held proud and straight.

  There was a figure on the dais suddenly. The buzzing whispers grew louder.

  Sek was here.

  A hush fell. They watched him take his place.

  ‘Oh, Throne,’ Milo whispered.

  Mkoll said nothing.

  Fifty metres from them, and higher up, Mazho gazed in silent horror. This wasn’t the thing he had glimpsed through the madness of the vortex at Oureppan. It was worse.

  A skeletal giant, its skin a mummified and flaking brown stretched taut and paper-thin around its bones. A ragged robe, decayed from centuries in a tomb. A crown of iron spikes. No lower jaw, just a yawning void.

  Mazho sank deeper into the numb depths of terror. He tried to mumble a penitential prayer, but he couldn’t remember any of the words.

  Holofurnace watched too. From the high rail, he saw his enemy in person for the first time. He considered the sheer bulk of the Anarch, the ungodly mass, a lumbering daemon that hauled itself into place. It was female in aspect, throat, shoulders and hunched back fledged in iridescent plumage. A carrion bird’s beak, big as a power-claw, snapped and yawned to reveal the blue, rasping dagger of its tongue. A spiked silver crown formed a band above its dozens of glittering eyes. Neon-yellow pupils flashed and shone. It spread its arms, its daemon wings. It possessed a terrible beauty that speared Holofurnace’s heart like a cold blade.

  He could not look away.

  Brin Milo shivered as he watched the magister take his place. Sek was just as he had seen him, the glaring demiurge that had haunted his dreams since the vortex. Upright, strong, with the power and build of an Astartes warrior, clad in black and yellow silks. His head was a bald mass of scar tissue. Black thorns grew from the gnarled flesh of his scalp, surrounding the top of his head like a spiked crown. The tubes and pipes of augmetic support systems knotted the back of his head and neck like vines. His face was a steel mask, sutured in place, a visage of cruel angles and sharp lines. Filthy light shone from the eye slits and the yawning, down-turned mouth. A chrome vox-mic, the tannoy speaker from some battle-engine, was fixed to his chest-plate and positioned so that the caged disc was set in front of his mouth.

  Sek was about to speak.

  Mkoll gazed, eyes narrowed, his gorge rising. This was the foe at last, barely six metres away. All that power, all that authority, invested in such a wretched thing. It came as little surprise. Mkoll thought of Macaroth. For all that great Macaroth was warmaster, commander of crusading hosts, they said he was just a man too, an ordinary man of flesh and blood, of weaknesses and flaws, just another mortal who happened to wield the greatest authority in the sector.

  Anakwanar Sek was just a man. An old man, run to fat, of average height and sloping build. His robes were filthy and lacquered with grease. His hands were cased in shining silver gauntlets, clawed and segmented masterpieces of antique armour that he had stolen from some corpse, and wore to boast he was a figure of great importance. He looked like a gutter-gang vagabond who had chosen to wear ill-fitting, polished, regal boots he’d looted from the body of a high-hive noble. His body twitched with a palsy. His skin was scabbed and diseased. Mkoll couldn’t see his face because Sek, with one ostentatiously gloved hand, was holding up a cracked porcelain mask on a slender stick. The top of the stick was fashioned into a golden hand that wrapped across the mask’s mouth. Some twitching darkness lurked behind the serene mask.

  Just a man. Just a vile old man. Mkoll could kill that.

  The ceaseless chattering of the lekt quire increased. A buffet of psyker force welling out across the Oratory. Everyone winced, all of the Sekkite seniors and four Imperial interlopers lurking amongst them.

  ‘Let my voice drown out all others,’ the lekts hissed in unison. Now the constant, scratching whispers wove together into one set of words.

  ‘Anarch I am. Anarch of all,’ the lekts sang.

  The host roared, shaking their fists, saluting, fingers to their lips.

  ‘All that was set in place has come to its conclusion,’ the quire hissed as the roars died back. ‘This night and the next day. My hours. My awaited moment, long foreseen. Those who hold the key of victory will pass to me what has always been mine.’

  ‘He’s saying,’ Mkoll whispered, ‘…he’s saying the enkil vahakan, “those who hold the key of victory”…’

  ‘I understand,’ Milo whispered back, unable to tear his gaze from the dais. ‘I understand what he’s saying.’

  ‘But he’s speaking in the Sekkite tongue…’ Mkoll hissed.

  ‘No, he’s not.’ Milo replied. ‘I understand every word. He’s declaring victory.’

  The unclean voices of lekts swelled in exultation.

  ‘I have sent the blessed reworked,’ they announced.

  The host roared again. ‘Qimurah! Qimurah! Qimurah!’

  ‘The blessed reworked, all eight times eight, have slipped like a skzerret’s blade into the heart of the foe,’ the lekts chorused. ‘By dawn, they will be returned to the sound of my voice. They will bring the Enkil Vehk, the key that was shamelessly stolen from me. This will be the victory I have pursued. The key will open the way. The key will sunder the stars. No one, no corpse-emperor, no Throne warrior, no false angel, no… not even any bold magir or preening Gaur… will stand in the fury of my wrath. The Archonate will prevail, reworked in glory. Anarch I am.’

  The host roared again. A chant began. ‘Sek! Sek! Sek! Sek!’

  Mazho saw the mummified titan raise a tattered hand for silence. Holofurnace saw an ethereal wing sweep for order. Milo flinched as the demiurge lifted his fist, compelling attention. Mkoll saw a silver gauntlet gesture, bidding them to indulge him a moment more.

  ‘For the plague of Terra is beheaded this night,’ the lekts proclaimed. ‘While the blessed reworked perform their holy ministry, I have unleashed woe upon the place called Eltath. The Herit ver Tenebal Mor. The Heritor’s bad shadow falls across the ground. The enkil vahakan will perish, all. All their chieftains. All their warlords. The crusaders of the corpse-prophet, so long a plague upon our realm, will be emasculated. Their order lost. Their authority annihilated. By dawn, this will be finished. The plague of Terra will break, as a fever breaks, lost and leaderless,
and from tomorrow they will scatter, hopeless and afeared, into the farthest stars, and we will drive them before us, shattered, humiliated and put to rout.’

  The host howled. The Sekkite Sons drummed on the handrails. They turned to one another in raptures, clasping hands and embracing.

  Mazho gasped as the damogaur beside him turned, yelling, and hugged him.

  ‘Dahak enkil voi sahh, magir!’ the officer shouted in his ear. Mazho could smell his sweat, the stink of his breath.

  ‘Dahak enkil?’ the man asked, breaking the embrace and looking at Mazho, puzzled. ‘Dahak enkil voi?’ Mazho could barely hear him over the chanting. He didn’t understand the words anyway. He turned aside, pretending he was eager to congratulate the man to his left.

  The damogaur seized him by the shoulder and turned him back. He gripped Mazho by the chin-strap and tilted his head, peering in under the helmet’s brim at Mazho’s eyes.

  ‘Sp-ecta-kles?’ he said, not understanding.

  Up at the high rail, Holofurnace was trying to keep Colonel Mazho in sight through the forest of pumping fists and swaying banners. He glimpsed Mazho turning, a damogaur grabbing him by the face.

  It was time. He threw back the folds of his borrowed robes.

  ‘Sp-ecta-kles?’ the damogaur hissed into Mazho’s face. Angry understanding flushed his face.

  ‘Pheguth!’ he snarled.

  ‘Fourth Light Cinder Storm!’ Mazho replied, and punched his skzerret into the damogaur’s chest. For a moment, no one around him realised anything was wrong. The cheering was too intense. The damogaur slumped, held upright by the tight-packed bodies.

  Then gunfire ripped down from the equatorial walk.

  Holofurnace had swept out the heavy sentry gun and opened fire, feeding the belt with his left hand. Hot shell cases bounced off the startled Sekkites at the rail beside him. The shots raked down the steep tiered bank of the Oratory, the first bursts killing cheering Sons in the front two rows. The .20 was not a sophisticated gun and, despite his strength, Holofurnace was not assisted by the automatic balancing, levelling and aiming systems of his Astartes armour.

  He corrected by eye. His second and third bursts ripped across the dais.

  He saw the winged daemon stagger, its golden armour puncturing. Scraps of white feather billowed into the air. Parts of the guard rail and dais platform splintered in showers of bone shards.

  The massed cheering swelled and changed as one noise, becoming panic and howls of astonished horror.

  Milo saw the towering demiurge shudder and reel, blood bursting from his black and yellow robes. He swung up his carbine, and blasted point blank into the Sekkites to his right, brutally clearing a space in the stall, then turned and blazed on full auto at the dais.

  Mkoll vaulted the guardrail, the sirdar’s long-nosed autopistol in his hand, and landed on the bone steps. Men were already bolting from the stalls all around him in blind panic. He kicked a packson out of his way, sending the Sekkite tumbling down the stairs, and gunned down another two who came clawing for him. Then he ran down the steps towards the Oratory floor, firing as he went, zipping hard rounds across the ducking bodies in the stalls. He saw them hit. He saw the old man jerk as bullets smacked into his greasy robes. He saw blood. The porcelain mask slipped down. Mkoll glimpsed some vast and writhing maw where the old man’s face should have been. It yawned in pain and shock.

  Mazho tried to get his carbine raised clear. Everyone was shouting and screaming. The lekt quire screeched in agony.

  ‘For Urdesh!’ he yelled. ‘For Urdesh! Cinder Storm!’

  He tried to aim. The Sekkites in the stall fell on him from all sides, clawing and grappling. Mazho went down under the weight of them. A raging V’heduak wrenched the weapon from his hands. A packson hit him across the face so hard it broke his cheekbone and knocked his helmet askew. He lost his spectacles. The world became a blur of raining fists and screaming faces.

  He disappeared beneath the berserk mob. His bones cracked and snapped as they kicked at him, and stamped on his helpless form.

  The vicious, murderous beating jolted one of the ageing anchor mines. It went off, tripping the other two simultaneously.

  The combined blast tore out the mid-section of the stalls, billowing out in a fierce, searing firestorm. Those closest to Mazho, including his frenzied tormentors, were vaporised instantly. Others were thrown headlong into the air, tumbling and falling on the rows below. Chunks of cracked ivory scattered like kindling.

  The blast shook the entire Oratory. It rocked Holofurnace back. He had hosed almost all his ammunition at the dais. The feathered witch-thing had fallen to its knees, writhing, soaked in blood. Some of the quire were dead too, mown down in their seats by overshot.

  The crowd around him grabbed at him, tearing his robes. He shook them off. He swung a fist that broke a packson’s neck. He grabbed a clawing V’heduak chieftain by the throat and hurled him over the rail.

  ‘Ithaka!’ he roared, using the name of his homeworld as a curse of defiance. An excubitor lunged at him, swinging his power lance. Holofurnace jerked clear, and the lance’s long blade splintered the bone guardrail. He put the rest of his ammunition through the excubitor’s face, blowing the fiend’s skull apart.

  The belt was out. He brandished the sentry gun like a cudgel, cracking skulls and knocking Sekkites into the stalls below. Several las-rounds hit him in the lower back, shunting him forwards.

  Milo’s first mine went off, annihilating a section of staircase in a blizzard of fire and bone shrapnel. The second mine detonated an instant later, obliterating another section of the staircase further down, and rippling flames along two blocks of stalls. Sekkites staggered, blundering, blinded, their clothing on fire.

  The mine Mkoll had fixed to the dais fired, destroying half the spine railing and causing the entire platform to slump sideways. Upwashed flame boiled across the Anarch’s flailing figure.

  Mkoll was near the bottom of the staircase. The blast shock knocked him off his feet. A body fell across him. He struggled to get the dead weight off his legs.

  Milo saw Mkoll go down. He wanted to rain more fire at the Anarch, but Sekkites were rushing him from all sides. He switched furiously from target to target, chopping each one down as they came at him. Cinders and burning ash drifted around him like snow.

  The exterior mines went off in a quick, staggered, uneven series of muffled roars. The Oratory rattled in its socket. Men sprawled off their feet. Dislodged skulls rained down from the dome, shattering like pottery on the floor and stalls beneath. Flames surged up in a dozen places around the dais and the lower stalls.

  Gripping the rail, the Anarch hauled himself upright, braced against the drunken slope of the damaged dais. His maw uttered a roar of rage, and the remaining lekts echoed it in shrill chorus.

  He had been betrayed. Deceived. Wounded in his own sanctum. His victory would only matter if he survived to see it.

  Sek howled again. The uncouth noise of his voice drowned out every­thing around him. Some Sekkites simply fell dead, ears and brains pulped by the volume of his wrath.

  He tore off his silver gauntlets and bared his hands. He focused his magisterial powers, invoking the dark eminences of the outer warp that he served. The quire took up his supplication, chanting words and conjurations that pre-dated mankind. The Saint had wounded him at Oureppan, and drained his psykomantic potency. He channelled all he had left to preserve himself.

  The immaterium flexed, splitting the air around him. Foul winds sucked and screeched. Tendrils of yellow lightning flickered around his gesturing hands.

  He was opening a gate to flee. He was folding the curtain of the warp aside through willpower alone, gouging through the subspace membranes, and throwing wide a door to step through into safety.

  Milo saw reality bending around the demiurge. Another vortex. Smaller than the one at Oureppan that
Sek had opened to destroy the Beati, less controlled, less stable. But a doorway all the same. A way out.

  Milo yelled out, rushing forwards, hands grabbing at him from all sides, pulling him down.

  Mkoll ran towards the burning dais, emptying the last of his autopistol’s clip into the Anarch’s back. They had to stop him. That had been the point of everything. They had to kill him here, now, before he slipped away and became invisible and untraceable for another decade or more.

  Holofurnace punched a raving etogaur aside and grabbed the dead excubitor’s fallen power lance. Other excubitors were rushing at him, lances raised to strike.

  The lance was long and heavy, more a halberd than a spear. Its blade tip was as wide as a cleaver and as long as a tactical gladius. Its weight and balance were poor.

  But it was not so different from the wyrm-spears he had learned to handle back on Ithaka.

  He pulled it back, right arm crooked, left extended before him, the lance horizontal beside his face. He saw Mkoll, far below, skzerret in hand, clambering onto the dais to grab at the fleeing magister.

  The Tanith huntsman had been right. It had come down to straight silver at the last.

  To bare blades.

  Holofurnace let his fly. The cast was good. The shaft flew as true as a sea-lance. He saw it strike, slicing into the Anarch’s back, driving deep, cutting through, transfixing the daemon’s feathered torso.

  He saw the daemon stumble forwards. He saw the subspace gate shatter, unfurl and then collapse in a wash of obscene light.

  The excubitors fell on him, striking him down with hacking, butchering blows. He fought at them, clawing and punching. Their hands were on him, inhumanly strong, pinning him, gripping him. He could not break free.

  Holofurnace looked up, blood streaming down his face, and met the eyes of the excubitor who would end him.

  ‘Vahooth voi sehn!’ the excubitor screamed as he brought the lance blade down.

  ‘Ithaka!’ Holofurnace replied with the last breath he would ever take.