The World Engine

by Ben Counter

  None of them were courageous or powerful enough to take on Heqiroth directly. But an outside force might destroy Heqiroth and leave the throne empty, and the dynasties of Borsis were ready.

  The Astral Knights were just such an outside force. Amhrad had ordered the assassination of Heqiroth as soon as Sarakos had named the ruler of Borsis and the rescued slaves had told the Astral Knights where to find the overlord. Zahiros had access both to assault units and the gunship Damoclean, and was himself a master swordsman capable as anyone of dealing the killing blow in person. For these reasons Amhrad had given Assault-Captain Zahiros the task of destroying Heqiroth, and turning inevitable defeat on Borsis into a chance of a magnificent victory.

  Zahiros knew it would not be easy. Heqiroth was paranoid, the slaves said, and surrounded himself with lychguard protectors at all times. But Zahiros had never faced an enemy in person he had not defeated, and fully intended to skewer Heqiroth on his power sword. His battle-brothers could deal with the lychguard. All Zahiros needed was one good strike.

  ‘Into the fray, brethren! Onward! Onward!’

  Zahiros led the charge himself, leaping over the heads of the necron warriors propelled by his jump pack. The necrons had ambushed the Astral Knights as they travelled through the dark twisted steel of the palace complex’s heart – or at least, they had tried to.

  Zahiros crashed into the rearmost necron warriors. One he almost crushed beneath him as he landed. He lashed out with his power blade, angling the edge down at the last moment as he had been taught in the fencing halls of Obsidia. The necron tried to duck the blade and instead put its neck right into the path of the sword’s edge. The power field flashed as the blade sliced the warrior’s head off.

  The dozen or so necron warriors were slow and inefficient when faced with the fury of the Astral Knights counter-charge. But they were just the first obstacle between the Astral Knights and the throne room of Overlord Heqiroth.

  Behind the necron warriors, directing them, was another tech-construct that stood half as tall again. Its body might have resembled those of the skeletal warriors, but was clad in plates of bronze and steel, stained and pitted with age and battle. Its armour was inlaid with patterns of purple, sea green and gold. It stood upright, not hunched, the image of necron pride and arrogance. In one hand it carried a cross between an axe and a sword, the long curved blade running the length of the haft. Greenish energy crackled across the hieroglyphics inscribed on the blade. In its other was a shield almost as tall as the necron itself. The shield’s interlocking plates shimmered with their own energy field that bled off into a blue-green haze.

  At the sight of Zahiros, it slammed its sword against its shield three times. Zahiros knew a ritual challenge when he saw one – no matter what the tongue, no matter what particular gesture it used, it was impossible to mistake the desire to single out the most powerful foe on the battlefield.

  ‘I will do you a great honour!’ said Zahiros, pointing his own sword at the necron. ‘And hang your head in the trophy hall!’

  The two were from species separated by millennia and light years, but they understood each other perfectly.

  A necron warrior tried to tackle Zahiros, but one of Squad Daharna skewered it through the spine with his chainsword and Zahiros shrugged it off. The palace might as well have been empty save for Zahiros and what he assumed was a lychguard, the elite guardians of the necron royalty.

  Zahiros opened up a burst of jet exhaust and rocketed into the lychguard, striking with more speed and weight than the construct had expected. It raised its shield just in time and the power field around it buffeted Zahiros away, swatting him against the jagged steel of the wall. He rolled away from the power blade as it scythed down at him and swung out with the edge of his storm shield.

  The weapons of the two duellists mirrored one another, power blade and shield. It could not have been more perfect. Zahiros imagined every movement embroidered in a banner of House Kelvanah and carried by his family’s daughters at the head of the summer hunt, or rendered in a mosaic on the floor of the audience chamber.

  The shield caught the lychguard in the shin, knocking it onto its knees. Zahiros rose up behind it and sliced down with his power sword. The lychguard met the blade with its own and a crackling white light filled the chamber, strobing from the meeting of the two power blades as their energy fields fought.

  Zahiros and the lychguard were thrown back a step by the force of the discharging fields. ‘I hope you can understand me,’ snarled Zahiros. ‘What I do to you, we will do to all your kind. We are humankind, and our gift is extinction.’

  The necron’s face was a skull of tarnished steel with a single hieroglyph on its forehead. The featureless lower half split open and the halves hinged aside to reveal a set of overlapping mandible plates. From its robotic mouth the lychguard spat a series of grating syllables in the necron tongue. Again, Zahiros did not have to speak the language to know what it said.

  I am going to kill you, human.

  Zahiros lunged first, the power sword knocked aside by the lychguard’s shield. The lychguard’s return stroke almost took the top of Zahiros’s head off but he pivoted to the side out of its arc and struck again with his shield. The lower edge of the shield hit the lychguard square in the face this time and the power field hurled it to the floor.

  Zahiros leapt onto it. The last lesson a swordsman learns is to abandon the sword when another form of offence will lead to victory. He dropped with his knee onto the lychguard’s sword arm, trusting in the full weight of his body and armour to pin it to the floor. It would only need to stay trapped for a moment.

  Zahiros knocked the lychguard’s shield aside with his own. The lychguard’s shield was larger than Zahiros’s and covered it almost from eyes to floor – but this close that was a hindrance, not an asset. It could not wrest the huge shield in front of it again as Zahiros reversed his grip on his sword with a well-practised motion and stabbed the point down.

  Disarm, then despatch.

  The power sword’s point sheared into the lychguard’s shoulder, underneath the edge of its shoulder guard. Steel gave less easily than muscle and bone, but it gave. The power field cracked like a series of gunshots and the lychguard’s sword arm was severed.

  Zahiros rolled off the necron. It staggered to its feet bleeding sparks and lubricant from the stump of its shoulder. It swung at him with its shield but it was clumsy and Zahiros easily stepped out of the way.

  He could toy with it now. He could use every technique he had in his arsenal, running through the drills etched into his memory in the courtyard of his family’s summer mansion, and afterwards in the duelling halls of the Astral Knights fortress. And he did for a few seconds, changing guard to spin out of the way of the shield and slice a chunk off the lychguard’s chest armour. He punctured the scale-like plates over its abdomen, which on a human opponent would be a particularly cruel killing blow, puncturing the abdominal wall to void the entrails.

  It was enough.

  Zahiros ducked forwards. The shield came around a moment too late. He stabbed the power sword into the necron’s throat and forced it through the armour plates covering its upper chest. The power field cracked and flickered as the blade tore through and finally the head was completely severed.

  The lychguard did not fall. Rather, it shut down. Its remaining arm fell to its side and it became as still as one of the statues littering the streets of Borsis.

  Zahiros glanced behind him. The Astral Knights had despatched most of the necron warriors and were finishing off the last handful. One of Squad Ehranth had suffered a vicious-looking gauss wound that had penetrated deep into his side, but it looked like he could still fight. As Zahiros watched, Ehranth himself picked up one of the necron warriors, hefted it into the air and brought it down head-first against his knee guard, shattering its metal skull. The remaining warriors did not last much longer. />
  The Astral Knights had not tried to intervene in Zahiros’s duel. They knew how these things were to be done.

  ‘Mala!’ shouted Zahiros. The slave picked her way forward through the fallen necrons. ‘How much further?’

  ‘Not far,’ said Mala. ‘We are nearly there. My lord would sometimes attend secret talks with Overlord Heqiroth, and used a hidden entrance to the throne room. It lies just ahead.’

  ‘Good,’ said Zahiros. ‘Brothers, onwards!’

  Before leading them on, Zahiros paused to pick up the lychguard’s severed head. He had promised it a place in the Astral Knights’ trophy hall, and House Kelvanah kept its promises.

  Through the winding darkness, the Astral Knights came to a great arch of blackened steel. This part of the palace complex was supposed to look ancient and forgotten, with corrosion creeping along its walls and filthy rust-stained pools gathering on the floor. Mala led Zahiros and his men around blind turns and switchbacks until they reached the archway, which seemed to frame nothing but a blank expanse of stained metal.

  ‘I saw my master use this entrance many times,’ said Mala. ‘Hixos the Slave Lord. I dreamed of seeing him destroyed. I memorised the way so that perhaps I might steal through it alone and level some accusation about him to the overlord. It was a desperate plan. Yours is better.’

  Mala’s gnarled hands traced a hieroglyph on the wall. The lines lit up in glowing green. A thin line of light appeared around the inside edge of the archway as the door unlatched and was free to swing open.

  Zahiros signalled for the Astral Knights to line up at the archway. The assault squads of the Astral Knights considered themselves to hold the position of the greatest honour, for they were the first through the breach in the fortress wall or the airlock of the enemy spacecraft. This was the kind of fight they had trained a lifetime for, an all-out charge into the heart of their enemy. They needed no further direction to line up by the archway, ready to storm through it two abreast.

  Zahiros would be the first through. There was no question of that.

  Mala returned to the rear of the marching order, with Percicel and the other slaves. Eight slaves had made it this far. The stronger of them had been given combat knives by the Astral Knights – made for Space Marines, the combat knives were the size of swords in the slaves’ hands. Percicel handed Mala a decorative necron spear taken from a wall display.

  Sergeant Daharna held up an auspex scanner. Its screen bathed his face in flickering blueish light. He shook his head – it was reading nothing. That did not mean anything. It had read nothing moments before the lychguard and its necron warrior cohort ambushed them.

  Zahiros did not need to give an order. Both squads knew what was expected of them. He ran shoulder-first into the door and it boomed open before him.

  Fifty sets of narrow eye-lenses stared back at him, set into deep metal sockets. Fifty necrons filled the throne chamber of Overlord Heqiroth.

  Zahiros took stock of the new battlefield in the moment it took him to take his first step into the chamber. Half of the necrons were lychguard, some with sword and shield like the one he had fought at the ambush, others with two-handed scythes with blades that also thrummed with power fields.

  Others were similarly ornate but clad in old, dark bronze, with the coils of elaborate power circuits arching over their heads and shoulders. They carried tall staffs, each topped with a chunk of glowing crystal set into a fan of circuitry.

  The chamber was the base of a shaft that soared up to the pinnacle of a tower high above the centre of the palace complex. Endless mazes of hieroglyphics covered the walls and pulses of energy ran up and down through them. A raised block of age-blackened steel held up a throne composed of necron heads, a hundred of them at least, stacked up to form the seat, back and armrests.

  Two necrons stood beside the throne. One resembled the ancient bronze elites, but wore a cloak of segmented silver and carried a pair of matched power swords with blades of blue-edged obsidian. The panels of his armour were picked out in white, crazed like old ceramic.

  The second was a head taller than any other in the chamber, its extra height granted by the four legs that supported its massive and intricately decorated torso. A pair of huge shoulder guards flanked a head with five eyes set into its golden mask, each one with an eyepiece of a different colour. Within the gilded cage of its chest nestled a host of roosting scarabs, their carapaces inset with precious stones. It held a polished black orb in one hand and a staff that looked like a necron spinal column in the other. Its body was inset with panels of sea-green and purple, the colours of its dynasty. It was Heqiroth, Overlord of Borsis, and from it flowed all the power the dynasts of Borsis craved.

  It was the creature Zahiros had come here to kill.

  But it had known he was coming.

  Zahiros lept over the front rank of lychguard. Already the lychguard were charging at the Astral Knights rushing through the archway behind Zahiros. He had barely a second to think and form a plan. It would be simple – batter his way through the lychguard and the elites behind them, force Heqiroth to fight, and kill him. Not necessarily a good plan, but it was all he had.

  Zahiros crashed to the ground. One lychguard tried to impale him through the stomach with its two-handed warscythe. Zahiros grabbed its hand with his shield arm and wrenched it off-target, pulling the lychguard in close and shattering its metal face with the pommel of his power sword. The lychguard reeled and Zahiros cut down and away, feeling the power sword smashing through the lychguard’s leg. The lychguard toppled to the side and Zahiros moved on – he did not have the time to despatch the necron on the ground. He would trust his battle-brothers to finish the job.

  Heqiroth stepped up onto the throne, clambering to tower over the elites around him on his four massive segmented legs. He extended his spinal column staff and pointed to the melee breaking out in the centre of the throne room. His mask shifted, forming a mouth beneath the five eyes.

  ‘Obey!’ he yelled.

  His voice was a steel avalanche of noise, amplified to ring out over even the gunfire and the scream of chainblades through metal.

  Heqiroth had spoken in Imperial Gothic. He was not addressing the Astral Knights.

  Zahiros spun around. He fended off a swipe of a lychguard’s sword with his storm shield as the first slaves ran through the archway.

  Mala was among them, and Percicel. Mala’s face was creased with anger – even if she died the moment she entered the fray, it would be worth it just to aim a blow at the necrons. Percicel was terrified, but it was his duty to be there in the melee and lead his flock in person. But one of the other slaves stumbled across the threshold, eyes rolling back, foam suddenly flecking from his mouth.

  He was not alone. Half the slaves were the same. They set on the other slaves with sudden brutality. Mala was fast enough to see the maddened slaves coming and spun on her heel to skewer one through the shoulder with her spear. She forced the slave down to the floor, ripped the spear out and punched it through her opponent’s throat.

  It was as if the slaves had been programmed to turn on their fellow humans, with Heqiroth’s order as the trigger. That was probably how the Overlord of Borsis had learned the Astral Knights were coming for him.

  Zahiros could not worry about that for the moment. He ducked the sword of the nearest lychguard as Sergeant Ehranth charged in beside him, crashing into the lychguard with all his considerable weight. Zahiros left Ehranth wrestling the lychguard and continued on his path towards Heqiroth.

  The bronze-clad elites had not moved. They stood ranked up around their leader before the throne.

  ‘It’s the praetorians!’ yelled Mala across the throne room. ‘It’s the Judicator!’

  The leader of the elites, the Judicator, raised a skeletal hand. The praetorians levelled their staffs as one in Zahiros’s direction. He realised they were taking aim.r />
  Zahiros dropped to one knee and held up his storm shield. Rapid volleys of red and green fire streaked across the throne room and erupted around him. The ground about him was reduced to a mass of bubbling slag. The power field of his shield held for a second and then the shield itself was shredded into flecks of molten ceramite.

  He was still alive. The shield had deflected just enough. The armour on his left forearm was pocked and sizzling. He would not survive another volley.

  Zahiros gunned his jump pack again. If he cleared the ranks of praetorians, he could reach Heqiroth. It only needed one good blow from his power sword. As formidable as Heqiroth looked, a well-placed slash could take his head off, or a perfect thrust could pierce whatever vital components he carried in his chest. One second, one thought, one strike, and the battle for Borsis would be over.

  Tongues of white lightning licked up the walls. On a burst of thrumming power, the Judicator rose up to meet Zahiros as he fell towards Heqiroth. The Judicator slammed into Zahiros, intercepting him perfectly. The two landed in a heap but the Judicator was first onto its feet and grabbed Zahiros by the throat.

  The Judicator was far stronger than any necron Zahiros had faced. It swung him around and hurled him against the throne room wall.

  The wall collapsed under the impact. Zahiros fell through into a place of darkness and rust. Old combat instincts kicked in and he rolled onto his feet. He tried to raise his shield but realised he no longer had it, and gripped his power sword instead with both hands.

  Zahiros stood in a place of rusted finery. Once this place had been lavish, with huge necron masks looming from the walls and the vaults of the ceiling gilded so they resembled the inside of a golden ribcage. Sheets of interlinked metal pieces hung like tapestries, forming images of regal necrons ruling from temples and pyramids. Everything was covered in rust. Holes had opened up in the decoration to reveal the jagged steel of the palace underneath. Pale light fell through tears in the ceiling. The floor was crumbly under Zahiros’s feet.