Anarch

Twenty: Blood for Blood

Gaunt and Baskevyl bounded up the undercroft steps with Blenner trailing behind them.

‘Grae!’ Gaunt yelled.

Colonel Grae and his complement of Urdeshi field troops were milling in the lamplit hallway, clutching their weapons and looking up in dismay at the sounds of destruction rumbling through the palace above them.

‘What is this, my lord?’ Grae asked.

‘Another one,’ said Gaunt. ‘Another woe machine. Stronger than the first. Is the palace evacuated?’

Grae shook his head.

‘We’d barely begun,’ he said. ‘The power has only just been restor–’

Gaunt pushed past him. ‘Where’s the warmaster?’

‘I don’t know,’ Grae called, hurrying after him. ‘I think, still on site.’

‘Dammit, Barthol,’ Gaunt murmured. He looked at Grae. ‘And the Beati?’

‘Taken above,’ said Grae. ‘The medicae have her–’

‘It’s loose in the palace,’ said Gaunt. ‘Up there. Hunting for every target it can find. It’ll be seeking out Macaroth, the Saint… that’s its purpose.’

‘How do we stop it, my lord?’ Grae asked.

Gaunt was already running up the steps into the main hall of the wing.

‘I don’t know if we do,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen it.’

‘It’s an abomination,’ Baskevyl said to Grae. He shrugged at the intelligence officer. ‘This night has been long enough, I think.’

‘Don’t go up there!’ Blenner wailed from behind them. ‘Fething hide!’

‘The best we can hope is to slow it down,’ Gaunt told Grae. ‘Buy any time we can to get Macaroth and the Beati clear.’

‘And you, sir, surely?’ said Grae.

‘Where did my daughter go?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Quartered with the Saint,’ said Grae. ‘The chapel. That’s where she was taken. All the survivors–’

Gaunt looked down the steps at the Urdeshi troops.

‘All of you, with me,’ he said.

‘You heard the Lord Executor!’ Baskevyl yelled.

They swept into the main hallway, Baskevyl forming the Urdeshi into firing lines at Gaunt’s heels. Grae and Blenner ran after them. Broken glass littered the floor. Gaunt could smell burning. He could hear the rip and chatter of gunfire, and then the answering wail of a blade on a whetting wheel.

Palace staff stumbled past in the opposite direction, fleeing, panicked. Some were injured and bleeding.

‘Don’t go that way!’ one man yelled.

‘Get clear! Get out!’ Gaunt told him as he ran past. Gaunt didn’t break stride. Sword in one hand, bolt pistol in the other, he stormed down the long hall towards the source of the uproar.

He slowed as he felt the ground beginning to shake.

The wall ahead disintegrated in a shower of stone and dust. The woe machine revealed itself, a floating octahedron of grating, sliding blades locked around an inner glow.

It came towards them slowly, shrieking its metal-on-metal cry.

Three of the Urdeshi dropped their weapons and fled.

‘Line! Line!’ Gaunt yelled.

‘Keep that line!’ Baskevyl bawled at the Urdeshi. The troops formed up, clattering their weapons to their shoulders, aiming.

‘Grenades ready!’ Gaunt yelled.

He heard the troopers slot and lock their under-barrel launchers.

‘Hold!’ Gaunt ordered.

The woe machine purred closer. The blades at the tip of its form began to spin and open out, blooming like a barbed flower, yellow light shining out of it.

‘Dalin!’ Gaunt called out. He hoped there’d be a response, some vestigial flicker of recognition as there had been before.

But he doubted it.

And none came. The wailing note simply began to rise into a squeal of wet fingers on glass.

‘Commence fire!’ Gaunt ordered. Eyes narrowed, he began to blast at the cloud of whirling blades with his bolt pistol. Either side of him, the Urdeshi opened up, training rapid, accurate fire from their las­rifles. Baskevyl ripped bursts of full auto from his own rifle, and Grae blazed with his service pistol. Blenner, a few steps behind him, stood empty-handed, gazing at the advancing horror.

The sustained fire flickered and danced across the woe machine: the fiery bursts of Gaunt’s heavy shots, the flash and spark of the assault weapon barrage. Spinning black blades shattered, and were instantly replaced.

The woe machine started to spit blades. The razored darts pulsed from its rotating central mass almost silently. An Urdeshi screamed and dropped, a blade skewering his thigh. Another toppled back with a blade transfixing his head. Grae grunted and slammed against the wall, a leaf of black metal embedded in his shoulder. Gaunt felt one slice through the meat of his upper arm as it whizzed past. He put three more bolt-rounds into the thing’s cycling maw.

‘Fall back, slow!’ Gaunt ordered. ‘Draw it this way! Maintain fire!’

They took a step back, then two, weapons blazing. The woe machine stirred forwards. In unison, all the blades on the front half of its form scissored around to point at them. It was about to loose them en masse in a pelting hail of knives that would murder the entire squad line.

Gaunt saw figures moving behind the woe machine at the far end of the hall. He heard a firm, clear voice calling for squad discipline.

Van Voytz. Kazader. A damn company of Urdesh Heavy Infantry. Storm troops. The notorious 17th.

Gaunt’s micro-bead crackled.

‘Get your arses out of the line of fire if you please, Lord Executor,’ Van Voytz said.

‘Cover, now!’ Gaunt yelled. His men scattered, heading for doorways and side rooms. Two of them dragged the trooper with the skewered leg clear. Baskevyl had to grab Blenner and almost lift him out of the way.

The storm troops began their blitz. Their methods were not subtle. Hellgun fire. Rotator cannons. Support las on man-portable rigs. The heavily armoured shock troops advanced down the long hall, demolishing the floor, the ceiling, the plasterwork, the panelling; pinning the woe machine in a kill-storm of destruction, a focused barrage that had seen the 17th drive through Archenemy lines, fortified positions, and even light armour opposition.

Churning black blades broke and shattered. The light inside the woe machine flickered, straining. It recoiled, stung hard, and with one rushing clatter, the sound of a thousand swords being drawn at once, it switched the angle of all its blades to face the steadily advancing Urdeshi.

‘Heard you needed some support,’ Gaunt heard Van Voytz chuckle over the link.

‘Appreciated, lord general,’ he replied.

‘Down payment on my debt, Bram,’ said Van Voytz. ‘For Jago–’

‘Just kill it, Barthol,’ said Gaunt.

The woe machine began to spur forwards to meet the oncoming storm troops. The Urdeshi didn’t waver. One step after another, resolute, they marched at it, burning through their ammunition to blow it apart.

‘Grenades!’ Gaunt called out. ‘Give it grenades while its focus is drawn!’

Grae’s Urdeshi Light swung out of their meagre cover. Their under-barrel launchers popped with hollow thumps. Krak grenades, arced in with practised skill, dropped on and around the Heritor’s weapon.

The blasts came rapidly, an overlapping ripple of hard concussions. Troopers at both ends of the long hall rocked back as the shockwaves pummelled them. A cluster of fireballs pounded through the space occupied by the woe machine, choking the hall with surging flames.

The woe machine shrieked. Its geometric rotations disintegrated, cohesion lost. Blades whirled out of alignment, crossing, colliding, snapping against one another.

The pattern broke. Black metal fragments spun out of the fire-wash like the vanes of a rupturing turbine engine. Stray blades augured into the walls, the floor and straight up into the ceiling. Most stuck fast, buried like arrows in the stone.

The woe machine had become unwound, thrown apart by its own cycling motion.

‘Again!’ Gaunt yelled. The Urdeshi around him re-slotted and locked. They raised their weapons to fire and deliver extinction.

But the woe machine was not dead. Its circling ribbon of blades, some broken or chipped, rose out of the flames in a strained and elongated figure-eight noose, looping out wide like a thrown lasso.

It was enraged. It was hurt. It wanted to flee.

It took the shortest route.

It went through the storm troops.

Baskevyl gazed in horror as the armoured men began to drop. Like wooden skittles slammed down in one strike, they rocked and fell, every one of them cut through a dozen times. Blood squirted from deep, scalpel-clean wounds, or poured out between the joints of their ballistic plate.

Screaming, its circling blades wide-spaced and overtaxed, the woe machine cut a hole through the end of the long hall and vanished.

Gaunt, Baskevyl and some of Grae’s Urdeshi hurried through the long stretch of scorched and burning devastation to reach the 17th’s half of the hall.

The storm troops lay in a carpet of bodies across the wide floor. Few of them were intact. Gaunt stepped over severed limbs and heavy weapons cut cleanly in two. There was blood underfoot, a broad pool of it, and speckles of blood-spatter covered the white-washed walls on either side.

Kazader was dead, his left arm split at the wrist and bicep. Half of his face was simply missing.

Van Voytz was still alive when Gaunt reached him.

He was on his back, staring at the ceiling. Gaunt could see his wounds were not survivable. Van Voytz was aspirating blood, bright red drops that dappled his cheeks and chin like a freckled birth mark.

Gaunt knelt down.

‘Barthol–’

Van Voytz blinked, unable to focus. He groaned, blood gurgling in his throat like phlegm.

‘Am I dead, Bram?’ he mumbled.

‘You are, my lord.’

‘Well… shit,’ Van Voytz said, his voice drowning and bubbling. ‘That’s payment in full, then. Eh? Blood for blood.’

‘Stay still, Barthol. We’ll fetch a chaplain. An ayatani or–’

‘I don’t need absolution, Gaunt,’ Van Voytz gurgled. He was still ­staring blindly at the ceiling. ‘Made my peace, long since. Just loyalty to prove, if late in the day.’

‘You had nothing to prove, lord general.’

‘Hnh. Late in the day. Always so dark at this hour. I knew, when it came for me, it would come in the slow hours–’

A slackness softened his face and body, the rigidity of pain released by the oblivion.

He was gone.

The night was wretchedly black.

In the small watch room of the Plade Parish vapour mill, the night watchman dozed across his console, stirring every now and then to wipe drool from his mouth. A single lamp burned, his only comfort. Rain beat against the room’s broad window ports, a blur of streaming water.

Nade Oysten appeared at the window, soaked through and out of breath. She yelled at him. He didn’t stir. The watch room was sealed and soundproof against the thunder of the mill when its turbines cycled every two hours.

She beat on the glass, yelling, hands flat and frantic. Her mouth moved silently. The thick glass just flexed slightly in its frame.

The watchman dreamed on.

Oysten tried the door, yanking at it, screaming silent profanities. It was locked.

She stepped back, defeated, and stared through the windows for a moment at the slumbering man. The rain had washed Rawne’s blood off her face.

She raised her cut-down riot gun, reached into her bag of shells, and loaded a breaching round. She stepped back, almost vanishing from view.

The big flash was silent.

The damage was not. The window in the door blew in with a smash like a dozen lead-crystal decanters hitting a stone floor. The metal door ruptured in its frame, and buckled, its handle and lock torn out in one lump that sailed clear across the room.

The watchman hurtled awake, yelping, blinking and confused.

Oysten kicked open the ruined door and stepped in out of the rain.

She glared at him.

‘Wha– wha–’ he stammered.

‘You have a fething vox somewhere, you idle fething ball-bag,’ she said. ‘Where the feth is it?’

The sun had risen thirty minutes ago, though it was still an hour before dawn half a world away in Eltath.

Orchidel Island, a flat rock of wind-swept salt-scrub and gritty beaches, lay at the southern end of the Faroppan archipelago. Few came there. It was a long way from the volcanic systems that fired Urdesh’s precious forges.

Once in a while, agriboats passed by, heading for the rich, offshore blooms in the southern ocean during the late summer algae season.

It was not late summer. No boat had passed by in six months.

The sky was clear, a soft grey-green. No cloud. Visibility out ten kilo­metres across the breakwaters. The waves rolled in along the broad shingle beach, hushing on the stones as it had done since the world was born.

Ten metres from the shore, the air blistered with a noise like spitting fat. For a few seconds, reality wrenched open and debris crashed out into the shallows. Smoke billowed with it. The scent of burning bone that the wind swiftly carried away. For a moment, the beach rang with the echoes of a distant, shrieking quire.

Then space closed again with a sledgehammer thump, an implosion of pressure so fierce, the sea beneath withdrew briefly, baring its bed of silt and algae-crusted stones.

Then rushed back in, and all was as it had been before.

A ragged figure stirred, half-swamped in the rolling waves. He crawled and clawed his way up the beach, the waves breaking around him in crossing plumes of foam.

Sek paused, panting, on his hands and knees, his feet in the water, blood trailing from his wheezing mouth onto the shingle. He was soaked through, engulfed in the pain of his wounds, and maimed by the violence of the translation. His power was reduced to an ember. It had taken everything to break away and escape to this remote and unregarded spot.

He crawled on, the shingle crunching and scattering under his hands. Clear of the water, he rose to his knees, reached back, and slowly drew out the power lance that skewered his torso. He gasped with the effort, and dropped the weapon on the beach beside him.

Out in the breakers, metres from the beach, Mkoll floated, rocked by the surging waves. He was gazing up at the sky. Daylight. A dawn. He knew he should move. That he had to move. He knew he had come there to finish something.

But his memory was vacant. He couldn’t remember anything. He had no idea why he was floating on his back in a cold sea, or how he had come to be there. His body was numb from the savage trauma of subspace bilocation, a process few mortals would ever choose to endure, even when armoured or cushioned by protective invocations.

He let the sea lift him and drop him, over-and-over, the soothing motion of the breakers.

Someone waded past him, staggering and splashing. A shadow blotted out the sky.

Milo reached down and clawed at Mkoll’s jacket, searching his pockets. He found the two grenades. One smoke, which he tossed aside.

One anti-personnel.

He gripped it, and waded ashore, teeth clenched, dazed and staggering. The Anarch was just ahead of him, crawling on his hands and knees. No demiurge now, no towering god. An old man in tattered robes, wounded in a dozen places, blood spotting the grey and green pebbles in a trail behind him.

Panting, unsteady, Milo reached him.

He grabbed Sek by the shoulder and threw him over, rolling him onto his back. The Anarch whined, and winced in pain.

He looked up at Brin Milo.

Milo stared down.

The old man had no face. Small eye sockets gazed up at the Tanith soldier. Beneath them, the rest of his face was a gaping hole. It was fringed with writhing, jointed claws like tiny human fingers. They twitched, holding the gaping mouth wide. Inside the maw was an endless blackness that the morning light could not illuminate. There was nothing in the blackness except the voice.

Enkil vahakan, it said.

The words buzzed at Milo’s ears, making him flinch.

‘You’ve said enough,’ Milo whispered. ‘You’ve spoken all you have to speak. It’s time for silence.’

He dropped astride the old man’s chest, pinning him to the loose shingle. Sek tried to fend him off, beating at him with his bare hands.

Milo fended the blows away. He clenched his fist around the grenade, thumbed out the pin, and stuffed his hand into the yawning maw.

Sek thrashed, choking. Milo held on, shoving his hand deeper.

Sek refused to submit. A surge of neon light lit his empty sockets. He hurled Milo off him.

Milo landed badly, rolling, spraying pebbles. The grenade flew out of his hand, and bounced across the shingle. He tried to scramble clear.

The grenade detonated. It threw up a cone of flame and rained shingle in all directions. Milo was half-caught by the blast and flung across the beach, dazed and limp.

He tried to rise, his ears ringing, his head spinning. He slumped down on his side.

Anakwanar Sek rose to his feet slowly. It took effort to get up. He clutched at his wounds, blood dribbling from the damage his foes had inflicted.

His maw-fingers twitched and fidgeted.

He had picked up the power lance. For a moment, he leaned on it, panting, using it like a staff to support his weary weight. He stared at the fallen warrior who had almost killed him. Milo wasn’t moving.

Sek stood up straight. He raised the lance, and spun it slowly with both hands in a skilled figure around his body that betrayed the weapon skills of his early years as a damogaur in the Archon’s host, four centuries past.

He brought the lance to his shoulder, haft up and back behind his head, blade tipped down, hands clasped and spaced for an expert down-strike.

This man would die first. He would be the first mark of Sek’s vengeance. Others would follow, one-by-one, then scores, then hundreds, then thousands, then millions.

He would make them pay for his defeat. He would make the corpse-prophet’s minions pay, until they wished that he had won at Urdesh so that suffering would not be multiplied a thousandfold upon their defiant kind.

He thrust.

A boot drove into his ribs, knocking him sideways and making him gasp with pain.

Another man had come.

Then two would die first.

Sek steadied himself and swung the lance.

Mkoll leapt back. The shingle squirmed under his boots. The lance blade lopped the air. Sek twisted and re-addressed, feet braced, looping the lance around to jab.

Mkoll danced clear. He dodged the next swing. He hunched low, a fighting stance, the skzerret in his hand. Not straight silver, but it would do.

Sek stamped forwards, scything the blade. He had speed and finesse for a wounded old man. He had strength.

Mkoll sidestepped. As Sek passed him, he slashed with the knife, and tore a deep gash along Sek’s upper arm.

Sek snarled. Mkoll felt the buzzing swarm into his ears. The Anarch lost the grip of one hand, blood weeping down his arm, but he kept his footing, and rotated the lance with frightening skill, spinning it in his right hand.

He lunged, then lunged again, forcing Mkoll backwards up the beach away from Milo’s prone form. He returned to a double-grip, blood-wet hands sliding on the lance’s haft. He speared at Mkoll.

Mkoll feinted right, avoiding the lethal strike. He punched in low with his left fist, cracking ribs, and as Sek hunched, followed with his right and slammed the dagger into the Anarch’s chest.

Sek flailed backwards. He dropped the lance. The air throbbed with the buzzing whisper of his cries. Mkoll came on, relentless, stabbing twice more with the serrated blade. Blood stippled his face as he pulled the blade out with each strike, ready to repeat it.

Sek fell on his back.

Swaying, Mkoll knelt down to finish the kill.

He ran the blade in where the heart should be. Sek shivered and convulsed.

His right hand snatched up, scattering pebbles, and clamped around Mkoll’s throat. Mkoll gasped, his air cut off. The Anarch squeezed. Frail neon light blazed in his dark orbits.

Sek would not die. He would not die.

Kater Holofurnace had been right all along.

Blades were never going to be enough. Anarch Sek was a magister. A man like Oan Mkoll, just a mortal man, was never going to carry enough punch to finish a monster like the Anarch.

Mkoll’s vision dimmed. Blood pounded in his head. The strangling grip around his throat tightened. His wet clothes clung to him. He felt a dead weight in his jacket pocket.

Unable to break the grip that was killing him, Mkoll let go of the knife and pulled the anchor mine out of his coat.

It was the last one remaining, the one they hadn’t used because its anchor pad was broken and refused to grip.

Mkoll had seen what Milo had tried to do. He rammed the anchor mine into Sek’s hissing maw.

Sek gagged. He let go. Mkoll scrambled backwards, kicking up stones, retching and gasping.

Sek writhed, choking, trying to disgorge the mine from his mouth. He sat up, and rolled onto his knees, kneeling for a moment, clawing at his mouth.

The mine went off.

Foul tissue and liquid sheeted in all directions.

Mkoll sat up, blinking away the blood in his eyes. Gore plastered him and the shingle in a two metre radius around the Anarch’s body.

Sek was still kneeling. His hands had flopped in his lap. He was gone from the shoulders up, smoke fuming from the massive blackened wound and a charred stump of protruding spine.

Mkoll raised his fingers to his lips and blew a goodbye kiss to mock the Sekkite salute.

The whispering had stopped.