25 For 25

by Various

  Brael could see their point. The Varks, it was claimed, was a relic of the days after the star gods’ departure, to be used by the children they left behind to speak with their parents, no matter how far away. Inside the Sanctum was the last of the devices somehow still capable of sending a message into the darkness beyond the sky, still calling out to the star gods, telling them that their children still awaited their return.

  If even half of the dogma was true, if whatever was kept behind the Sanctum doors – which were beginning to bow under the weight of the mob’s continued assault – had somehow been sending a message into the void all this time, then it may have acted like a beacon to draw the greenskins, who must be creatures from a void more terrible than the worst imaginings of man.

  ‘Stop!’ The priest had reached the crowd. ‘This is blasphemy! Now, more than ever, the Varks is our only–’

  A broad-shouldered man detached himself from the rear of the mob and hooked his fist into the side of the priest’s head. From the fluidity of the motion, Brael guessed he could have been a prizefighter before the war.

  The priest stumbled but didn’t fall. Seeing this, the broad-shouldered ex-fighter cocked his fist for a second, and no doubt more damaging, attack.

  ‘You!’ Brael shouted as he jogged the last few paces between them. ‘What’s your company? Why aren’t you at your post? If the greenskins come tonight, where will you say you were? In the temple, beating up a priest?’

  The ex-fighter paused, then lowered his fist. Several others looked round from the mob.

  ‘If the greenskins come tonight, it’ll be their fault!’ shouted one of them, jabbing an accusing finger at the priest. Most of the mob seemed to hear this and to shout their agreement.

  ‘Why should you care?’ shouted one of the mob. ‘I’ll bet your hand had all its fingers this time a year ago.’

  ‘My wife was a believer,’ Brael replied. He knew now that there was nothing he could do to stop them.

  ‘Then she was a fool and you were a bigger one for having her!’ declared the ex-fighter, before grabbing the priest by the front of his robe.

  Without thinking, Brael stepped forward and punched the big man in the side of the head, where the bone beneath the skin was thin. A year of fighting the greenskins had given him an eye for an opponent’s weak points and an understanding of the value of being the first to strike.

  The big man let go of the priest and staggered to the side. Brael saw that his knees were no longer steady and he advanced on him, fists cocked.

  The splintering crash of the door to the priests’ quarters, set to one side of the precinct, caused all heads to turn away from Brael and the ex-fighter, who had dropped to one knee and was pressing a hand to his bruised temple. A splinter group of five or six from the main mob pushed its furious way inside. The sounds of furniture being overturned and smashed began to emerge from behind the shuttered windows.

  ‘Come on, we should be in there!’ shouted someone in the middle of the mob outside the Sanctum. Ignoring Brael, they turned as one and began reapplying their weight to the tall doors. Something must have been broken during their last assault. With the sound of ancient hinges giving way and an exhalation of sweet, incense-laden air, the doors swung inwards.

  The mob rushed up the three low steps and through the doorway. The young priest, his nose still bleeding, ran after them. Brael looked down at the ex-fighter, then held out his hand. The big man regarded the hand for a heartbeat, then took it and eased himself to his feet.

  ‘Might was well see what they’ve been keeping in there all this time,’ Brael said. The sound of shouts, scuffles and breaking furniture came from the dim-lit space behind the open doors.

  ‘You know, I don’t think I give a damn any more,’ the ex-fighter replied. ‘Good luck when they come,’ he added then turned and began to make his way out of the precinct.

  ‘You too,’ said Brael, then he turned and followed the mob into the Sanctum.

  Apart from the heavy scent of incense and the less powerful illumination provided by oil lamps set in high brackets on the walls, the Sanctum looked very similar to the roofless precinct outside: more votive bowls atop plinths, a slightly larger trio of shrines set in a line across the middle of the space, and more priests braving the angry fists of the mob, desperate to save their treasures.

  Ranged along the sidewalls were sets of shelves, each of them bearing a number of decorated and carved boxes. Members of the mob swept the boxes from the shelves – their lids popped open or splintered when they hit the floor, ejecting the objects they had held for generations: pieces of metal bearing strange designs; a hollow metal finger from the statue of a giant; scraps of cloth. Rubbish being treated as relics. Some of the intruders waved the relics in the faces of the priests, before stamping them to dust or hurling them through the air.

  Brael moved through the space, ignoring the sounds of breaking bowls, shattering plinths and the shouts and cries of mob and priests alike. This is where that priest brought his son, while he and Vika waited in the precinct. Bron was here once.

  But where was the so-called ‘Holy Varks’? Did the priest just cool his heels in here for a while, then return to the precinct, hand Bron back to his mother and accept a handful of coins in tribute? Was the Varks a joke, a moneymaking scheme that had lasted down the ages?

  The Sanctum building was four-sided, its roof stepped. The space within, however, was different, Brael noticed. From the outside, the four sides were of equal length. From within, he saw, the walls to the left and right were shorter – almost half the length they should have been.

  A glance at the roof above him confirmed his suspicion: the rear wall met the stepped slope of the ceiling at a higher point than the front or sidewalls. The rear wall, upon which hung an ancient, ragged banner whose design appeared to be that of a two-headed bird, wings spread, concealed another space.

  Brael stepped up to the rear wall and cautiously drew aside the hanging. Despite its obvious age the fabric felt soft beneath his fingers, as if it were the product of a finer loom than had ever weaved cloth on this world. Behind the hanging was a door, its upper half a decorative grille.

  Brael’s cleaver sheared away the old lock and, letting the banner swing back into place behind him, he stepped cautiously into the room beyond.

  ‘In the star gods’ name begone!’ The priest that flew at him must have been older than Brella had been when she finally passed away. He flapped weak, liver-spotted hands at Brael, who brushed him away as carefully as possible. Old knees gave way and the priest slumped to the floor, keening in an almost child-like voice.

  ‘Our only hope!’ the old priest wailed. ‘Our only hope!’

  Another priest – this one about Brael’s age – rushed to the old man’s aid. Brael didn’t notice. He was staring at the Varks.

  The web of wires and metal supports almost filled the otherwise bare space, reaching from wall to wall and from floor to the ceiling, which was barely visible in the weak yellow light given out by the three of four oil lamps that sat in niches in the walls. A low hum and a vibration that Brael felt in his breast gave him the sense that something living might be sitting within the web, drawing life along the cables and wires, which seemed to pulse with an almost imperceptible beat.

  The delicate sound of well-oiled wheels turning in the darkness above drew Brael’s attention upwards. Weak yellow lamplight caught the moving edges of a complex arrangements of cogs and gears. Thick, brass rods, their lengths turning and shining a dull, golden colour in the lamplight, reached down from the shadows to complex, geared connections with thinner rods of the same substance. These thinner rods then reached out to linkages with the web of hair-thin wires amongst which the Varks seemed to crouch, like a patient, hungry spider. Somehow, Brael was sure, the rotating rods fed power to the humming wires, which in their turn fed the pulsing, throbbing machine that beat in the room like an ancient mechanical heart.

  Brael pressed a thumb to his t
emple as the beat seemed to seep into his skull. Behind him, the younger priest eased the still-keening elder to his feet.

  ‘The Varks is our only hope,’ the old priest wailed. ‘As it was in the beginning, as it has been throughout our generations of solitude, so it is now.’

  Brael spared a glance in the priests’ direction. Satisfied that they were unlikely to try to eject him a second time, he took a step deeper into the room. The vibration in his chest intensified slightly, as did the pressure in his head. Looking at the dizzying construction of metal and wire that crossed and re-crossed the room induced a sense of vertigo, which Brael countered by focussing on one hair-thin wire that ran taut just above his head. He reached up towards it.

  ‘NO!’ The young priest’s voice carried enough genuine fear that Brael paused before his fingers brushed the wire. ‘The balance is delicate. One unbidden vibration will cause another and another...’

  ‘This is the Varks?’ Brael asked. ‘This child’s puzzle? My wife believed... I was told that the Varks was a beacon.’ Brael was surprised by a sudden rush of anger. Vika had been duped into believing this nonsense could somehow speak to the stars. He thought briefly of not waiting for the young priest to answer, of just grabbing a handful of the wires and tearing the fragile construction to pieces.

  ‘It is a beacon,’ the priest replied. ‘Can’t you feel it?’ He placed a hand against his chest. ‘It’s not a beacon as you might imagine – a fire atop a hill or the sound of a horn. Its signal passes invisibly through flesh and stone. It reaches up past the sky and out towards the stars. The web that fills this room provides it sustenance and serves to augment the signal, send it further into the void. The Holy Varks sits at the centre – as it should. There.’

  Talking about the Varks had calmed the young priest; even the old man had stopped wailing. Brael squinted through the yellow gloom in the direction in which the young man was pointing. Through the web of intersecting wires he saw it: a metal box, no larger than the baskets that fruit-pickers would wear on their backs at harvest-time. Its surface glowed dully in the light, showing irregular patches of what might have been its original colour or the discoloration of the ages. Above the plinth on which it sat, the wires came together, twisting around each other as they swooped down towards it, becoming a single, tightly-wound cable before plunging into a socket set into its top. A single red light pulsed beside the machined collar that reinforced the connection.

  ‘That speaks to the stars?’ Brael was incredulous. ‘I don’t know who’s the more ridiculous: you one-eyed clowns or the idiots that blame you for bringing the greenskins down on us.’

  Brael strode towards the door. His head had begun to pound and he wanted to be out of here, out of this room, away from the buzzing in his head and the humming in his chest, out of the temple, away from everything that had somehow achieved the impossible, everything that had made Vika look foolish in his eyes.

  The door burst open when Brael was still several steps from it. The old priest turned and he let out a screech when he saw the intruders pushing through from the outer chamber.

  ‘Our only hope!’ he wailed again. One of the first through the door broke his jaw then slammed him aside. As he fell, one of his legs broke with the sound of a snapping branch.

  ‘No!’ The younger priest held up his hands in a doomed attempt to halt the tide that just broke over him. He was punched to the ground, where he was kicked and stamped on almost in passing by everyone else who pushed through the door.

  The mere presence of so many people in the room at one time had already begun to affect the network of wires that supported the Varks. The pulsation had become more noticeable, wires began to give off notes of differing pitches as they rubbed against each other or against the thicker metal frame from which they hung. The vibration in Brael’s chest had changed, too. It had become irregular, like the broken rhythm he had felt in the chests of farm animals before the moment of their death.

  ‘This is the Varks?’ a thin, bald man asked Brael, who by now had pushed his way through the crowd and was about to leave the room. Brael just nodded. Then he heard it: the high-pitched snap of a tightly stretched wire giving way.

  ‘One unbidden vibration will cause another and another...’ Brael recalled the younger priest’s words as the room was filled with the sound of snapping wires and crashes as sections of the frame were hurled to the floor. The rioters were not going to wait and see if one snapped wire was all it took. The network of wires and cables had already begun to sag around them as they tore at its fabric. Cables and struts fell from the shadows that obscured the ceiling, hitting those below. This only intensified their anger, which had already been stoked up by the destruction of the relics in the outer chamber.

  The older priest’s voice rose above the cacophony of the Vark’s destruction once more: a single, ululating note of despair. Something about the sound made Brael’s stomach roll over. Brushing past the bald man, he ducked out of the room.

  Most of the priests had abandoned the outer chamber. Those that were left were tending to the more badly injured, then helping them to their feet and heading for the main doors. When they saw Brael walking quickly through the chamber, they hastily stepped aside, not wanting to provoke another attack.

  Brael ignored them. His stomach hadn’t stopped churning and the ache behind his eyes was getting worse. He wanted to be away from the temple before he threw up.

  There was a large crowd in the temple precinct. Brael presumed they had been drawn here by news of the riot. They were not, he noticed looking towards the Sanctum doors, through which he had just stepped. They were looking up at the night sky. Some were pointing. Others were muttering. No one seemed very happy at what they saw.

  When he looked up, Brael saw that he sky was on fire. Lights fell through the inky blackness, drawing short, burning trails behind them. With a shock that was like a punch in the chest, he was standing in his yard with his son again. In a moment, his wife would emerge from the farmhouse and they would stand together, watching the display. There was no war, no invasion. No one had died. There was just a nagging ache at the back of his skull.

  ‘Gods of harvest and home, no more!’ wailed one woman. The man beside her put an arm around her and drew her to him. Others took up her lament.

  ‘This is your doing!’ A priest cried hoarsely. Dragging his gaze from the falling lights, Brael saw that it was the young man with the broken nose he had met outside the precinct.

  ‘You and your kind have defiled the temple, destroyed the Holy Varks and have brought more misery upon us all. Look!’ He jabbed a shaking finger skywards. ‘Our damnation is confirmed! Our only hope is gone!’

  And not one voice was raised against him.

  PART THREE

  The keys to the defence of Mallax were threefold:

  Time. Mallax was able to organise its defences in the year it took for the invaders to reach it. The manner in which the more northerly cities fell was analysed through the interrogation of survivors, collated by the city’s Librarium staff and incorporated into the defence plans.

  Manpower. Mallax appears to have been the defenders’ ultimate fallback option almost from the moment they raised the citizen militias to augment the small standing armies maintained by the city barons. During the first six months of the invasion, those moving to Mallax were refugees – the very young, the very old and women with families. In the latter half of the invasion, fighters retreating from shattered cities and towns or from battlefield routs made directly for Mallax. By the time the assault began, the city’s population had increased by a factor of four.

  Technology. Mallax’s guardians had made an effort to preserve its heritage, albeit obscured by myth and preserved in fragmented and debased forms (cross-ref. 663/159 – A. Mechanicus Archivum: manufactoria processes; ballistic archaeotech). The weapons held in museum storage were made ready for the attack that was sure to come. Treatises on siege warfare were unearthed from vaults beneath the L
ibrarium and their High Gothic script pored and puzzled over.

  Further investigation has led to the conclusion that, though these preparations had a positive effect on the defenders’ morale, most were under no illusions as to how the final battle would be fought: street-by-street; hand-to-hand; to the death.

  – Extract: ‘Inquisitorial communiqué 747923486/aleph/Samax IV’ Author: Inquisitor Selene Infantus. M41,793

  The first warning was the sighting of black shadows chasing across the sky, long wings held rigid, too big to be birds. Then they dropped. Then the bombs fell. The attack had begun.

  The bombs beat an explosive tattoo in the city at Brael’s back. His company had moved up from their reserve post and now occupied a short stretch of the curving eastern wall. Piles of debris had augmented the ancient stone and steel battlements – scrap from the manufactories, lumps of masonry from buildings in the outer districts that had been demolished for the purpose. Incongruously, what could only have been an old bedstead jutted out from the detritus a short way west of their position.

  Beyond the skeletal shape of the bedstead could be seen the tall gatehouse towers of the heavily defended North Gate. Every other gate had been sealed. Only the North Gate might one day be opened to allow the population of Mallax – which probably now counted as the population of the whole of Agra – to leave the city.

  Looking along the curve of the wall, packed with armed men and women, weapons ready, their faces set and determined, it might be possible to believe they had a chance. But, when Brael looked out over the inner lip of the battlements’ walkway, he saw the plumes of dirt and smoke kicked up by each bomb’s explosion, he saw buildings crumble and he heard the cries of those trapped beneath the falling stones. As he looked over the city, he saw a manufactory’s roof disappear beneath the impact of another bomb. A cloud of industrial filth puffed out of the building’s windows and enveloped the district in which it sat. People would be choking in the streets, blinded by the thick, sooty cloud. Some might die, their throats fatally clogged.