Anarch - Dan Abnett

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘I’m not?’ he asked.

  Domor adjusted his optics.

  ‘I’m reading light down there. Right where the bird flew. Outside light. Throne, it can smell fresh air.’

  ‘Are you joking?’ asked Fazekiel.

  ‘No,’ said Domor. He set off, striding urgently down the hallway. They followed him.

  ‘See?’ he called back. ‘Do you see this?’

  There was light ahead. A pale shaft of light slanting down.

  ‘It’s the steps!’ Domor yelled. ‘It’s the fething steps.’

  They caught up with him. There was no sign of the eagle, but ahead was a broad flight of stone steps. It was, without doubt, the entry steps that connected the undercroft with the upper levels. Thin light shone down from above.

  Domor grinned at them, then gave Zweil a hug.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘The Emperor was watching us after all.’

  ‘A little faith, Shoggy,’ said Zweil, leading Fazekiel up the steps after Domor. ‘I told you, boy. A little faith, I said.’

  Merity glanced at Meryn.

  ‘I hope he wasn’t watching you,’ she said.

  ‘Movement, sir!’ the Urdeshi trooper called out. ‘More survivors coming up!’

  Grae pushed his way to the front of the Urdeshi detachment covering the undercroft door. Domor appeared, leading the others the last of the way.

  They looked around, blinking in the light, staring at the armed and armoured soldiers surrounding them. Power was still out in the entire palace, but Grae had set up portable light rigs with battery cells to bathe the doorway area.

  ‘How many of you?’ asked Grae.

  ‘Five, sir,’ Domor replied.

  ‘Tanith?’ Grae asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Trooper Zent?’ Grae said to a subordinate. ‘Get their names then escort them to the medicae area.’

  He looked back at Domor’s bedraggled party.

  ‘Did you see anybody else down there. Anything?’

  ‘It’s a warp incursion, sir,’ said Fazekiel. ‘Something’s loose.’

  ‘We are aware of that, commissar,’ replied Grae. ‘Are you Fazekiel? It was your amber alert that got us mobilised in the first place.’

  ‘What’s happening up here, sir?’ asked Domor.

  ‘Power’s down,’ said Grae. ‘We think it’s a result of the incursion. Come on, let’s move you clear and get you seen to.’

  ‘How many others got out?’ asked Merity.

  Grae looked at her.

  ‘Are you Merity Chass?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘That’s a blessing at least,’ said Grae. ‘How did you find your way out?’

  ‘We stuck together,’ said Meryn. ‘Just saw it through and looked for an exit.’

  Merity glared at him. She was too tired to qualify his reply.

  ‘Good job, captain,’ said Grae. ‘I’m sure the Lord Executor will commend you for seeing his daughter safe.’

  ‘I asked how many got out,’ Merity said.

  ‘About thirty so far,’ said Grae. ‘Mainly retinue, badly traumatised. I hear it’s grim down there.’

  ‘Grim as hell, sir,’ said Meryn.

  ‘Where is my father?’ asked Merity.

  Grae glanced at the doorway.

  ‘He’s gone in to eradicate the threat,’ he replied. ‘The Beati is with him.’

  ‘That’s a mistake,’ said Merity. ‘It’s… you have no idea. It’s a horrifying destructive force. You should be closing the area off and purging it. Or sending in a battalion strength of heavy troops.’

  ‘Our resources are limited,’ said Grae. ‘The palace is defenceless. All systems are down and the Archenemy is striking at the city. As soon as you’re checked out, you’ll be joining the evacuation.’

  ‘I’d prefer to stay, sir,’ said Merity.

  ‘Not a choice you get to make,’ said Grae. ‘Even the warmaster is being moved clear.’

  They were led up two floors, through palace hallways lit only by emergency lanterns. In the night outside, heavy rain beat against the windows. It was strange not to be able to hear the constant fizzle of the palace void shields.

  A prayer chapel had been converted into a medical post. By lamplight, medicae staff were checking all survivors brought in. Most of the survivors were sitting in the chapel pews, silent and huddled, staring and exhausted. Merity saw women from the retinue and a few children. Their clothes were dark with dried bloodstains. Nearby, Beltayn and Trooper Perday stood with Bonin, Yerolemew and Luhan, waiting for news. Domor and Zweil went over to them immediately. Merity saw Domor and Beltayn talking with animated urgency. Bonin, Luhan and the sergeant major moved with the dull, blank stupor of the profoundly combat-shocked.

  Urdeshi corpsmen led Merity and Fazekiel aside for examination. Meryn just sat down on a pew, refusing attention.

  The corpsman with Merity went to take her carbine away. She shook her head.

  ‘I want to keep it,’ she said.

  She sat patiently on a metal stool while a palace medicae checked her eyes with a light and took her pulse. An eerie calm settled her, the empty void that followed protracted stress. Her hearing became ­muffled and everything seemed like a dream: the hollow faces of the silent survivors, the low murmur of voices, the clink of medical equipment in chrome trays, the flutter of candles, the wink of light on the gold leaf adorning the old frescoes on the chapel ceiling.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

  Fazekiel was sitting on a stool beside her while an orderly took her resting pulse.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘You got me out of there,’ said Merity.

  ‘Not really,’ said Fazekiel. ‘Father Zweil was right. You kept it together.’

  ‘I just… I didn’t want to die,’ said Merity.

  She glanced at Fazekiel. The commissar was letting the orderly remove her coat.

  ‘You kept it together better than me,’ Fazakiel said. ‘That thing, that noise… it’s haunted me since Low Keen. I can’t explain. Domor and I, Blenner too. We all heard it there and I think it made us–’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Vulnerable. More susceptible to fear. I don’t know. I know I’ve never been that scared before. I know I shouldn’t have been that scared. That lost. I–’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Merity. ‘You didn’t break like that bastard Meryn.’

  They looked across the chapel at Meryn, sitting alone, a brooding look on his face as he stared at nothing.

  ‘I think he saw more than us,’ said Fazekiel.

  ‘Maybe,’ Merity said.

  She looked at Fazekiel.

  ‘It’s not important now. Throne knows, it’s trivial. But when this is done, you need to talk to him,’ she said.

  ‘To Meryn?’

  Merity shrugged. ‘About the incident. I couldn’t say down there because he was with you. You kept asking. But that’s why I came to find you. I remembered hearing him speaking to Dalin just outside the shower block. Just before it happened.’

  ‘You think Meryn was involved?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Merity. ‘He almost admitted it to me in the undercroft. He warned me to keep my mouth shut.’

  Fazekiel nodded.

  ‘I’ll break him,’ she said. ‘I’ll end his career. Once he’s confessed, it’ll be sanction for him.’

  Meryn sat alone. On the far side of the chapel, Merity Chass sat with Fazekiel, orderlies bustling around them. They were talking.

  That’s how you get treated, he thought. That’s the privilege right there. The daughter of the Lord Executor. So fething special. People give thanks to see she’s survived.

  She was nothing. Just a high-hive aristo bitch, born into wealth and power. She knew nothing about re
al life, and certainly nothing about soldiering.

  Meryn did. He’d been a Ghost since Tanith. He’d come all that way, watching his own back because no other bastard would. He had the skills. He’d learned them along the way. How to fight to survive. How to defeat an enemy that was going to kill you. How to use a blade.

  And, thanks to the damaged bastards they’d brought in after Vervunhive, how to read lips.

  He watched them. Merity Chass and Luna Fazekiel.

  He watched them talk.

  Gaunt held on to Curth’s arm and dragged her through the darkness. The air was freezing and howling around them, and the water in the chamber was thrashing, like waves driven by an ocean gale.

  They could hardly see. The bad shadow was everywhere, lashing out tendrils of hideous fractal darkness, folding light into void-blackness along sharp, straight edges.

  Gaunt hauled her against one of the chamber’s stone columns and lashed out into the elemental fury. Whatever his power blade struck, it caused a huge spray of sparks, as though he had shoved the sword of Hieronymo Sondar into a grinding lathe.

  There were flashes in the churning darkness. Weapons discharging. Over the shriek of the bone saw, Gaunt heard the rasp of Hark’s plasma gun, and the rapid snap-roar of hellguns. The Scions.

  ‘Yoncy!’ Curth yelled in disbelief. ‘Yoncy!’

  ‘Hold on!’ Gaunt yelled back over the tumult.

  Sariadzi suddenly appeared, staggering through the crashing waves. His upper body had been slashed in a dozen places and all his fingers were missing. He tried to cling to them. Curth attempted to hold on to him and pull him close. He looked at them in desperation, pleading in his eyes, no words coming from his gaping mouth.

  The sharp edges of the darkness seized him from behind, jagged and piercing like negative lightning. It ripped him away from them. In the split second before he vanished from sight in the lofting spray, he disintegrated as though his entire body had been pushed through a mincer.

  Light suddenly bloomed through the chamber, a fierce golden glow that began in the heart of the place and flowed outwards. The tendrils of shadow retreated swiftly with an angry crackle.

  The surging water calmed to rocking waves.

  Gaunt looked around. He saw Hark two pillars away, leaning against the stone column for support. His leather coat was shredded, and his cap was gone. His augmetic arm had been torn off, leaving only a stump of sparking, torn biomech. With his one good arm, he clung onto Inquisitor Laksheema. She was limp and drenched in blood, and her augmetics, even her beautiful gold mask, were crazed and scratched as though they had been sand-blasted. Smoke was billowing from the golden cuff on her left wrist where intricate and powerful digital weapons had overloaded and burned out.

  There was no sign of Auerben or Daur, or any of the Scions, except Sancto, who was on his knees, the water up to his sternum. He was clutching his torso, bloody spittle drooling from his agonised mouth.

  The Saint was in the centre of the chamber, at the very heart of the light. It shone out of her. All around her, the frothing churning water had smoothed to a mirror stillness.

  She was locked in combat, her sword flashing as she swung two-handed into the beast attacking her.

  The woe machine.

  It was a shadow mass three times her size, a focus of darkness penned in by her radiance, but still lashing and rending with razor tendrils. It was hard to look at, and harder still to define: a cloud of knife-edged shadow that shifted and swam in supple, geometric patterns. It had a constantly changing texture, like rippling mirror scales, part absolute void, part iridescent black, like the wing-cases of some daemonic ­beetle. It was a storm of whirling, midnight-black thorns surrounding a super-dense core of immaterium darkness.

  But the worst part wasn’t the look of it, the churning, abstract nightmare. It was the feel of it. The intense quality of primal horror that radiated from it. The eager, inhuman malice of pure annihilation.

  It was Asphodel’s perfect vengeance weapon.

  It was the Anti-Saint.

  The Beati was covered in lacerations, blood streaming from a thousand knife cuts. Her clothing was shredded, and her breastplate and armour pitted and scoured. Her sword whirled in her hand, deflecting the oil-thick darkness that lashed and tore at her. Her sword was not especially large, nor was it particularly extraordinary. Just a standard, bulk-issue officer’s weapon.

  It was the force she imbued it with that counted. A crisp, green aura shone around the blade, and where it struck, the darkness burned. She was drawing on all her power, channelling from a distant and almighty source. The divine light pouring out of her had caged and contained the woe machine, at least temporarily. She thrust and stabbed to end its existence. A phantom shadow of wings, huge and made of emerald light, had sprouted from her back. A halo of bright light surrounded her head.

  ‘We have to help her,’ said Daur, appearing at Gaunt’s side. He was soaked to the skin, his uniform torn. He was covered in small wounds.

  Gaunt nodded.

  ‘She has it pinned,’ he said. ‘She’s contained its power.’

  He and Gaunt moved forward together.

  ‘Don’t be fething idiots!’ Curth yelled after them.

  Sancto saw them moving forward. He got up with a raw growl, clutching his hellgun with one hand and a terrible belly-wound with the other. Something had slashed clean through his body armour and almost gutted him.

  All three of them fired into the shadow assaulting the saint. It barely seemed to notice Daur’s shots or the blasts from Sancto’s weapon, but the explosive round from Gaunt’s bolt pistol blew a hole in it. Thorns spiralled away, like a swarm of insects driven from a nest.

  In seconds, the damage had re-formed, and the thorns had re-joined the main, whirling mass.

  They all fired again, repeated shots. Auerben stumbled up to join them, her hair matted with blood. She added her own shots to the fusillade.

  ‘It won’t die!’ she wailed.

  ‘It’s gonna die,’ Sancto snarled. ‘It took all my men. Took ’em all and shredded them!’

  The woe machine dropped back, still whirling and keening. The water under it rippled and seethed.

  The Saint stood her ground, panting. Her ghost wings were fading and flickering, as if the power sustaining them was ebbing. Blood dripped off her armour. They went to her side, but she flung a hand to warn them back.

  ‘It’s still strong,’ she gasped. ‘Impossibly strong. But it’s still not full-grown. It wants my power. It wants to feed on me, so it can fully form and then–’

  ‘Then?’ asked Sancto, fighting back his pain. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then it will do the Anarch’s bidding and raze this city and everything in it,’ said the Beati.

  She took a step forwards.

  ‘I won’t let that happen,’ she said.

  ‘Wait!’ Auerben yelped.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ said Gaunt.

  ‘That hardly matters,’ she said. ‘The Emperor is with me.’

  She took another step. The pitch of the woe machine’s keening intensified again, the sawing shriek filling the air. Its intricate, churning patterns of leaden darkness and polished black grew more fierce. It surged to meet her.

  A storm of heavy las-fire blocked it. Multiple weapons unloaded into it at full auto.

  Gaunt turned. Baskevyl and Kolea were advancing across the chamber, flanked by Dalin and the men from Baskevyl’s search squad. All of them were unleashing heavy, accurate suppression fire. Squad drill, close focus fire-team pattern. Twelve lasrifles emptying sustained destructive force into the abomination.

  The woe machine roiled backwards like an angry mass of flies. Baskevyl’s men were reloading as they came, switching out dead cells for fresh ones as they ran dry, maintaining the punishing fusillade.

  The woe machine retreate
d further. Darkness and fluid shadows spread out around the walls. Its thousands of individual, razor-sharp cutting teeth chipped and rattled against the ancient stone walls. The temperature dropped. They heard stone blocks scrape and grind as it threatened to warp the undercroft reality again.

  ‘Is it hurt?’ Gaunt asked.

  The Beati nodded.

  ‘Hold fire!’ Gaunt yelled to Baskevyl. ‘Let’s get in close. Save whatever you have left until we–’

  ‘What is it?’ Kolea asked.

  Gaunt looked at him. ‘I–’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I was wrong,’ Gaunt said to him. ‘I was wrong, Gol. I’m so sorry. It’s a woe machine. We brought it with us all the way from Vervunhive.’

  He could see Gol Kolea’s face twitch as he fought to control his reaction.

  ‘Yoncy?’ he asked very quietly.

  ‘It never was her, Gol,’ said the Beati. ‘She was never real.’

  Dalin uttered a slow moan of anguish. He dropped his rifle and fell to his knees in the flood.

  ‘That can’t be true,’ he mumbled. ‘That can’t be true. It can’t.’

  ‘That’s Yoncy?’ Kolea asked, his voice dull.

  ‘Oh, throne, Gol…’ Bask exclaimed, heartbroken.

  ‘That?’ Kolea said. He stepped forwards. Baskevyl tried to hold him back, but he shook his dear friend’s hand away.

  ‘The warp has tricked us all,’ said the Beati. ‘Lies are its first weapon–’

  ‘Feth that,’ said Kolea, staring at the seething mass of darkness. ‘I had a child. A child. I swore I’d–’

  He stepped closer.

  ‘I loved you, Yoncy,’ he said. ‘I would have done anything to… to…’

  The howl of the saw barked at him.

  ‘Yeah. You know me,’ said Kolea. ‘You were human long enough. You know me. Can you kill me? Your papa? Eh? I think the warp made you too human. There’s too much human in you still.’

  The razor storm shivered. Its frenzy decreased.

  ‘Yoncy?’ Kolea called. He held out his hand. ‘You come back now, you hear? Come back to me. Come back to papa.’

  The darkness shifted. Shadows folded, shearing and twisting into new patterns of darkness. A smaller shape formed. A vague human shape inside the buzzing cloud of thorns.