25 For 25

by Various

  A shot kicked up the ground ahead of him. More of the greenskins were running from between the buildings that surrounded the mine. Were they acting as scouts for their larger cousins? The creature that missed its shot at Brael was almost cut in half by Tombek’s looted cleaver, held parallel with the ground and swung forward to strike while on the run.

  Brael clubbed another greenskin down with the butt of his pistol, now held clumsily in his injured hand. In his good hand he held his own cleaver, which he brought down on the creature as it lay half-stunned at his feet. The larger greenskins were objects of awe as well as hatred, but these smaller animals made Brael’s skin crawl.

  He turned as something flashed by his cheek: a rust-flecked, serrated blade, wielded by another of the little monstrosities. Suddenly there seemed to be hordes of them, despite the covering fire from Freytha and the others, who were picking off a greenskin with every shot.

  Brael brought his knee up into the creature’s chest, knocking it back a step, before swinging his cleaver into the chittering, red-eyed mask of its face.

  Above the killing ground, the wheel had come to a stop.

  Kleeve was closest to the wheelhouse. Bleeding from a ragged cut to his arm inflicted by the last greenskin he had killed, knocking it to the ground with the pommel of his broad-bladed sword and then stamping on its skull until he felt the bone crack. He was only a stride from gaining the wheelhouse door and, a short way beyond it, the shaft and the lift cage. The explosive charge Brael had handed to him from the downed flying machine hung at his belt. There would be more of the smaller greenskins inside, he was sure, but by then it would be too late. They wouldn’t be able to stop him using the bomb.

  Dropping the sword, Kleeve pulled the bomb from his belt and made ready to pull the cord that hung from the bottom of its long handle. This would prime the charge. He would throw it into the cage the moment he was through the wheelhouse door.

  ‘For Mallax!’ he shouted. ‘For–’

  He didn’t hear the familiar ratcheting cough because the first burst of gunfire at such close range reduced his entire upper body to little more than a red mist. The hand holding the unprimed bomb, severed at the elbow, hit the ground heavily. The greenskin filled the wheelhouse doorway, howled something incomprehensible and sprayed the killing ground with indiscriminate fire, killing as many of its smaller kin as Agrans who suddenly cut this way and that in search of cover.

  Costes fell awkwardly, his left knee shot from under him. The pain was indescribable, but he managed to unhook the charge that he carried and hurl it to where Perror crouched behind a pile of centuries-old slag. Perror caught the charge, laid it at his feet, then made as if to run towards Costes.

  ‘Wrong way!’ Costes shouted through gritted teeth. He jabbed a finger towards the wheelhouse, where two more of the larger greenskins had stepped into view. Thinking back to his journey in the cramped cage, he wondered how many of the beasts, packed in with their oversized weaponry, could make the trip to the surface at once.

  For a heartbeat, Perror looked undecided. Then he nodded, picked up Costes’s charge, primed it and stood to throw it towards the wheelhouse. It was still in the air when he unhooked his own bomb, primed it and threw it in the wake of the first.

  One of the beasts at the wheelhouse door reacted quickly to the movement to its flank, bisecting Perror with a long burst from its machine-rifle. The bombs, however, were already in flight.

  The double detonation became a triple concussion as Perror’s bombs set off Kleeve’s dropped charge, filling the wheelhouse with smoke and littering the ground around the doorway with lumps of bleeding alien meat. One of the greenskins – the furthest from where Perror threw the charges – was still twitching, its one remaining eye glowering and livid. Karel, who had seen most of his company die in the mines, drove the wide hunting knife that was all that remained of his previous life deep into the red socket.

  Karel was still bent over the no-longer twitching corpse when, bellowing its rage and bleeding from a dozen minor shrapnel wounds, a fourth greenskin emerged from the smoke that hung across the shattered and sagging wheelhouse doorway.

  A volley of sharp reports rang out, like fire crackers at a harvest festival. The greenskin took a step back, surprised by the musket balls that ricocheted off its breastplate, and slapped at the two bullets that found bare skin. It roared its defiance to the snipers it couldn’t see, then took a step towards Karel, who took a corresponding step back. The hunting knife in the Mundaxian’s hand looked absurdly puny when compared to the broad-bladed axe wielded by the beast that stalked towards him.

  The pistol that Brael had scooped up from where its smaller greenskin owner dropped it, fingers snapping open when a shot from Brael’s own looted pistol punched through its skull from front to back, made a deeper sound. The huge greenskin jolted backwards, hand raised to its face, before dropping to its knees.

  Tombek was already running towards it, having kicked away from the smaller greenskin that had been dancing around him, trying to gut him with a long, hooked blade. The greenskin was wearing a helmet that covered the back of its neck, so Tombek had only one good target to aim for.

  As if on cue, the creature took its hand from its face. One side of its huge shovel jaw was a leaking mess. Tombek cocked his arm and picked up speed.

  The greenskin saw Tombek coming but had no time to react. The cleaver blade struck beneath its chin, severing its windpipe and lodging amidst the dense muscles of its thick neck. The blade also hit a vein, sending thick ichor jetting over Tombek as he jinked to one side to avoid any reflex counter attack from the dying beast.

  ‘Gods, is that it?’ Lollak’s question hung in the air. Brael suddenly realised that there seemed to be nothing left to fight: the ground before the wheelhouse door was scattered with green corpses of different sizes. Any of the smaller creatures that were still alive must have ducked back into the cover from which they had come. Were they naturally cowardly creatures, unlike their bloodthirsty cousins?

  Hearing a now familiar creaking from overhead, Brael looked up. The wheel was turning again.

  ‘Tombek! Lollak! With me!’ Brael barked. ‘The rest of you, cover our backs.’ Brael sprinted for the wheelhouse door, pistol left in the dirt, cleaver held ready to parry the attack he expected to meet him as he jumped through the doorway.

  The small greenskin at the winch controls was badly wounded, its body peppered with shrapnel. Another of the creatures lay face-up and blank-eyed a short way off. Seeing Brael, the wounded creature had time to utter a single shriek before its headless corpse dropped where it stood, hand still clutching the winch control lever. The head, propelled by the force of Brael’s blow, bounced as far as the other green body before coming to rest.

  Brael gripped the lever and pulled back, bringing the cage to a stop somewhere in the shaft below. In the sudden quiet that replaced the sound of the heavy lift chain feeding down the shaft, Brael could hear voices – guttural, animal voices – echoing up from the depths.

  ‘How many of them are down there?’ Lollak wondered out loud. He and Tombek had moved to the open pit-shaft gate. Both had unhooked the last of the flying machine’s bombs that hung from their belts.

  ‘And how did they get there?’ Tombek added. ‘Kobar brought the gallery down upon their heads. If they have engines that can drill through that...’ His speculation trailed off. Perhaps the greenskins had found another route to the shaft, but Brael doubted it. Mab had spent years studying the layout of the mine and she had been sure that there was only one tunnel, which meant the invaders had tunnelled through the mountain of rock Kobar had dislodged in less than a day.

  ‘We haven’t got a hope, have we?’ asked Lollak, as if realising this for the first time.

  ‘Not if they get to the surface,’ Brael replied. Tombek nodded and primed his bomb. Lollak made to do likewise.

  ‘Save yours,’ Brael said. ‘I’ve a sense we’ll need it.’

  They sprinted from
the wheelhouse while the bomb was still falling. The remainder of the company, none of whom was without at least a minor wound, followed their example, racing towards the buildings in which the snipers crouched.

  The explosion was muffled, almost lost in the sound of heavy artillery still pounding the walls. It was followed, however, by a much larger concussion that rippled through the ground beneath their feet. Turning back towards the wheelhouse, they saw the tower on which the wheel sat begin to fall in on itself. One girder at a time it began, then faster, like a leaf being crumpled in the palm of a closing hand.

  Then suddenly it was gone, dropping out of sight in a cloud of black smoke and soot, taking much of the wheelhouse’s roof and walls with it on its way down the mineshaft.

  ‘They must have been carrying some bombs of their own,’ muttered Karel.

  ‘That was one of their own bombs,’ Tombek added. Brael was astonished to see the large, melancholic Vinaran smile beneath the second skin of filth, blood and alien ichor that they all wore.

  ‘Where now?’ Lollak asked. The snipers had left their posts and were stepping warily into sight, scanning the area with their musket barrels. Brael smiled when he saw Freytha emerge from the doorway of the warehouse in front of which they had assembled. Seeing Brael, Freytha smiled back.

  Hearing Lollak’s question, all eyes turned to Brael.

  ‘Wherever we’ll do the most good, I suppose,’ he said, unable to think of a better answer. For a moment, the hopelessness of their situation threatened to overwhelm him. No matter where they went, the final outcome would be the same: annihilation.

  ‘We should move, in case the noise attracts a larger force. We don’t want to get trapped here.’ He forced himself to think constructively. ‘Can you move?’ he asked Costes, who was being supported by two men whose names Brael couldn’t recall – they had joined his company after the first action in the mine. Costes nodded tightly, but his pain was writ large across his face. His shattered knee had been wrapped in strips torn from someone’s tunic, but the wound was still bleeding freely.

  ‘When I can’t go any further, just leave me with one of those,’ Costes said through a rictus of pain, indicating the remaining charges carried by Brael and Lollak.

  Brael smiled and nodded. He was about to give the order to move out when the front of a nearby warehouse dissolved in a cloud of ancient brick dust and flying debris. Brael’s men scattered, some diving to the ground for cover, others ducking back inside nearby doorways.

  Kneeling in a firing position in the doorway she had only just stepped out of, Freytha aimed down the long barrel of her musket at the cloud of dust that still hung in the gap where the warehouse wall had been. Something was stepping into sight. Something big. Something that roared with the same oil-clogged voice as the greenskins’ wheeled war machines.

  It was built like a man – two arms, two legs, a barrel-shaped body it would take two men to reach around, standing half as tall again as Tombek, the tallest man in Brael’s company. Instead of flesh, its hide was of beaten metal plates riveted together in a haphazard manner and daubed with coarsely-executed tribal markings of the kind that adorned all the invaders’ machines and other weapons.

  And it was not alone.

  Two more of the roaring metal creatures flanked the first. In place of one arm, one of the flanking creatures had what appeared to be a double-barrelled cannon, while the other’s left arm ended at the wrist, where a circular blade had been attached. This blade was spinning in a blur of serrated teeth. Each of the machines’ remaining arms ended as did both arms of the first, in heavy pincer jaws.

  Freytha steadied her aim, then fired at the long slit which ran across the front of the machine on the left of the trio. Her shot ricocheted off the plate metal. Alerted to her presence, the machine turned, coughing plumes of black smoke from the engine it wore bolted to its back like a heavy pack, and brought its cannon to bear.

  Freytha was already on the move when the doorway in which she had sheltered dissolved. Tracing a zigzag path she found cover behind one of the piles of slag that dotted the area around the mine. The war machine adjusted its aim as it marched towards Brael’s scattered company in ragged formation with its fellows. Brael’s men now began vainly to pepper its hide with gunfire from muskets and looted greenskin pistols.

  Seeing the cannon swing towards the pile of ancient, solidified muck behind which Freytha had dived, Brael jumped to his feet, priming his charge as he did so. But he threw quickly and misjudged the distance. It exploded harmlessly off to one side of its target. The juggernaut’s cannon fired again, reducing the slagheap to a crater.

  ‘Pull back!’ Brael yelled. ‘Pull back!’ The machines had moved apart, looking to encircle at least some of the men. The cannon fired again – claiming the lives of two recruits from the mine – and again, this time vaporising a militiaman Fellick had rescued during the retreat from Grellax. After each shot, it needed only a heartbeat’s pause before it could fire again.

  The pitch of the circular blade’s whine changed as it carved through the broad wooden doors of a warehouse into which Brael had seen another of his company flee. The blade withdrew and the pincer-hand reached in. It was greeted by a short scream, suddenly cut off. The pincer shone wetly when it was withdrawn from the doorway.

  The first of the machines to come into view slammed a foot down beside a prone figure that lay face down, arms and legs splayed out. As the machine strode on, the body moved. From where Brael now crouched – behind an overturned goods wagon – he saw that it was Lollak. From beneath his body, he drew the last of the looted bombs. Easing himself quickly to his feet, he ran after the war machine that had passed him by.

  Brael fired a round at the machine’s eye-slit, anxious to keep it from noticing Lollak, who primed the charge and threw it with a delicate underarm action. It flew between the monstrosity’s articulated legs and landed directly beneath its body as it completed another step.

  Brael caught a glimpse of Lollak hurling himself to one side before the machine erupted. Fire gouted from the engine bolted to its back. Shards of twisted metal were torn free from its bodywork and sent spinning in all directions. Smoke boiled up, around and through its bodywork, emerging in a stream from the eye-slit. One leg was blown away and the machine keeled over, its engine screeching wildly for a moment longer before it too fell silent. Thick, foul-smelling oil began to pool around the inert carcass.

  There was no sign of Lollak.

  Brael ran past the still-burning metal corpse. Already the sickly-sweet odour of roasting meat hung in the air. Casting about, Brael spotted the prone figure, evidently thrown aside by the force of the blast. As before, Lollak’s arms and legs were flung out at odd angles. This time, however, he was not faking.

  Brael saw the mess made of one side of Lollak’s head by the blast and the rain of flying shrapnel: bloody torn skin, through which Brael glimpsed bone. Lollak’s eyes were open, the whites filled with blood and they bulged slightly from their sockets. Blood ran in a thick trail from his slack mouth.

  Suddenly, Brael felt very tired. More tired than he had felt since the war began. More tired than he had imagined it was possible to feel. It was over, he was suddenly sure: the war, his life, everything.

  The ground shook. Brael turned and saw one of the dead machine’s comrades stamping towards him. The spinning blade whined as the machine held it high, ready to bring it down upon him. He knew he should something – run, hide, counter-attack, anything – but, as time seemed to stretch and the screeching blade hung over him for a lifetime, he also knew that nothing he did would make the slightest difference.

  From somewhere high above him, Brael thought he heard another engine howl – another of the invaders’ war machines, he was sure. Then every hair on his body stood on end. His skin began to tingle and a thin metallic taste coated his mouth.

  And then the sun reached down from the sky and hurled the war machine aside.

  A burst of blue-white
brilliance dazzled Brael and a warm pulse of air seemed to pick him up and hurl him in the opposite direction. He landed heavily, then rolled instinctively to his feet. The torpidity that had seized him as he knelt over Lollak’s corpse was gone. Shaking his head and blinking away the blotchy after-images that clogged his vision, he reached for his belt, to find only an old hunting knife he had carried with him since he had left his farm. The looted pistol and greenskin cleaver were lost.

  The engine-howl he had heard was louder now, though the note was deeper, as if the mechanism were running more slowly. A figure landed heavily on armour-shod feet in the space where the greenskin war machine had stood. Like the invaders’ creation, it stood half as tall again as any man, its smooth hard skin decorated with symbols: crossed arrows, wings on the massive plates that covered its shoulders. Its skin was dark crimson, almost the colour of clotted blood, and though hard and unyielding as the skin of the invaders’ walking machines, its clean lines closely mirrored the shape of a man. It had a kind of sheen that reminded Brael of nothing so much as the glaze on fired pottery.

  The engine-whine came from a mechanism mounted high on the figure’s back and shoulders. Vanes within its two exhausts glowed white hot and the heat washed over Brael as he shook the last of the blotches from his sight. In one hand the figure held a sword, as long as a man’s arm and bearing a row of serrated teeth which, Brael was sure, could leap into blurring motion in a heartbeat. In its other hand, the figure held what looked like a breed of pistol. A slight blue-white glow danced around the weapon’s barrel.

  As if realising that it was being watched, the figure turned. Its mask-like face bore a pair of red, glowering eyes, reminding Brael of the bloody malevolence in the invaders’ gaze. On its chest were displayed a pair of spread wings that Brael had seen before: on the wall-hanging in the Sanctum of the Temple of the Holy Varks.

  With a shock that almost unmanned him, Brael realised that he was standing before of one of Vika’s beloved star gods.