The Empire Omnibus

by Chris Wraight, Nick Kyme, Darius Hinks

  ‘We’re going closer!’ cried Magnus to the handgunners Hildebrandt had gathered. ‘We just need to get near enough!’

  Some of the soldiers looked back at him as if he were mad. Others, inured to grim fatalism by long experience, picked up their guns and started to prime them for the attack.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Hildebrandt, pulling his sword from his sheath and grabbing hold of two of the blackpowder charges.

  ‘I know that machine,’ said Magnus, taking up his own blade. ‘The Blutschreiben’s already blasted half its armour off. If it gets a shot of its own away, then Messina’s a corpse. But he might have given us a way in.’

  The gunners were ready.

  ‘To me!’ cried Magnus, and charged down the slope to meet the lumbering machine. The men followed him, fanning out on either side. Hildebrandt brought up the rear, as slow as an ox and already breathing heavily.

  They descended into the heart of the battle. All pretence at ordered regiments and lines had been shattered by the arrival of Rathmor’s war machine. Soldiers, heedless of orders, were grappling with each other, running from the scene, or merely trying to make sense of what was going on. Like so many battles, it had descended into a confused mess.

  Magnus and the gunners kept together. Enemy troops in their way were knocked back with a volley of shots. The guns blazed, and swords flickered. Resistance was sporadic. All eyes were on the two war machines.

  Messina had brought his machine into dangerously close quarters. Magnus risked a quick look over at it. It was trundling ever closer towards Rathmor’s model, leaking oil, water, steam and smoke as it came. The first device was still crippled. Something had jarred with the drive mechanism, and three of its wheels spun uselessly. It lay heavily over to one side, and the choked wheeze of its steam engine was clearly audible.

  Then, something seemed to click. The infernal engine righted itself, swaying on its wheels heavily, before turning to face the onslaught of Messina. The Tilean was less than twenty yards distant. He looked feral, his face fixed in an exhilarated mask of triumph as he worked the controls. His machine was still reloading. The infernal engine took aim.

  ‘Merciful Verena…’ breathed Magnus, hardly daring to look.

  The guns fired. Rathmor’s damaged machine shuddered as its payload was discharged. One of its other wheels shattered. Iron panels were shed from its side like scales. The machine had been badly damaged, and it showed. The wooden interior of the device was exposed, as was its lone crewman.

  It mattered not. One shot was enough. The twin shells hammered into Messina’s lumbering contraption. Already frail, the structure simply exploded. With an echoing smash, the entire frame blasted apart, throwing beams, wheels, barrels and chains high into the air. The furnace ignited with a thunderous boom, immolating the surviving shell in a ball of flame. Men too close to the impact fell to the ground, clutching at their faces or frantically trying to douse the fires kindling on their clothes. A second resounding blast swept across the battlefield. The Blutschreiben was gone, almost as soon as it had arrived. A spiked wheel came rolling crazily from the carcass, bouncing over the uneven ground, before clattering over. Then nothing. There was no sign of Messina.

  Magnus turned his face away grimly. He had warned Hildebrandt it wasn’t safe. Now Messina had paid the price.

  ‘Keep going!’ he yelled, urging the gunners on. Despite the jostling press of men around them, they had carved a route into the heart of the enemy ranks. Soldiers on both sides were still sheltering from the falling debris. Rathmor’s monster was tantalisingly close.

  This was the chance. Heedless of the danger, Magnus flung himself forward. One of the death’s-head guards, turning slowly from the spectacle of the Blutschreiben’s demise, spotted him. He swung a halberd. Magnus ducked under it, still running, not stopping to engage him. A gun fired from behind him, and the halberdier fell to the ground, a neat hole scored in his helmet. The handgunners were still close, then.

  Only a few yards. The battered sides of the steam tank loomed up. Magnus could see the face of the man inside, white with fear, trying to bring it round. It was too late. The Blutschreiben had done its work. The armour hung from its flanks loosely, exposing the unprotected innards of the machine.

  ‘For those who died in the passes,’ muttered Magnus, bitterly, tearing the leather from the blackpowder bomb in his hand.

  With all his remaining strength, he hurled the charge hard into the crippled tank. It lodged somewhere in the piping at the rear, deep within the remaining armoured shell and behind the pilot’s head. The man inside stared at it, unsure what to make of the innocuous-looking egg.

  Magnus turned away, only to see the gunners he’d brought with him either fleeing or slain. There were enemy soldiers all around. Hildebrandt had been tied up in combat some distance away and was bellowing with rage. The battle was closing back in around him. Magnus was alone, isolated and in the heart of the enemy ranks. Another of the machine’s strange bodyguards loomed up before him, halberd raised. The blade flashed in the morning light, ready for the downward blow.

  The charge went off. Magnus was hurled forward, his head slamming against the rock. His side exploded with pain where his stitches dragged along the harsh stone floor. He had a vague impression of men being thrown around like dolls, and heavy objects whistling over his prone body. A scorching wind rushed past him, hot as a furnace.

  His heart still hammering, Magnus looked up. The machine was gone, replaced by a crater of steaming, twisted metal. It shimmered with heat. Debris continued to fall, some of it heavy chunks of iron. Anyone within yards of the explosion had been knocked from their feet. Slowly, painfully, soldiers were hauling themselves up. Some lay still, blood seeping from their prone bodies. The explosion had caused carnage.

  Magnus shook his head, trying to clear the black, spinning shapes from his vision. Dimly, he was aware of the still form of the enemy halberdier by his side. The man had fallen on his weapon, and a long trail of blood ran like a stream over the stones.

  A shadow fell across him. Hildebrandt. The big man extended a hand. He was breathing heavily.

  ‘We have to get back,’ he gasped. ‘They’re regrouping.’

  Magnus nodded weakly, feeling himself being pulled upwards roughly. His side felt as if it was on fire, and a line of hot blood dripped into his eyes.

  Painfully, haltingly, barely aware of what was going on, he was dragged from the scene. Behind them, soldiers staggered back to take up their positions. Smoke drifted across the field from the source of the devastation. Trumpets blared from far away, a desperate attempt by the army commanders to marshal the troops again. They sounded thin and ineffectual after the echoing blasts from the tanks. The shock of the machines’ arrival had knocked all shape out of the formations, both attacker and defender. Only slowly was the gap filled by fresh troops. The newcomers tore into one another once more, cutting the dazed victims of the blasts down where they stood. Amid them all, the two wrecks smouldered, surrounded by dozens of the slain.

  As he was pulled away to safety, a dark thought entered Magnus’s head. He had been responsible for both dreadful war machines. They were his designs. Now two other men had taken them and used them for their own ends. One was Messina, who had died for his ambition. The other was Heinz-Willem Rathmor, a name from the distant past. Suddenly, Magnus understood. The guns, the cannons, the cunning artistry of the weapons. There had never been a better mind than Rathmor. Even his father had said so.

  ‘Tobias,’ gasped Magnus, feeling the pain in his side begin to ebb. ‘He’s here.’

  Hildebrandt finally halted, and set Magnus down against the charred ruin of a cannon housing. They had withdrawn behind their own lines. The battle still raged, but some way off.

  ‘So you said,’ replied the big man, collapsing heavily on the stones beside him. ‘I thought he’d died.’

&
nbsp; ‘So did I,’ said Magnus, and a shadow passed across his features. ‘If I’d known he were here, I might have told Grotius to stuff his commission.’

  He felt faint. He’d been hit on the head by something, and his vision was still blurred at the edges. Every bone throbbed.

  ‘Now that I know he’s here, though,’ Magnus said, his voice low, ‘there’s only one thing to do. I’m going to have to kill him.’

  Hildebrandt looked at him. His face was drained of blood, and he seemed exhausted.

  ‘Let it go, Magnus,’ he said, his eyes almost pleading. ‘There’s enough for us to worry about here without making this personal.’

  Magnus spat on the ground contemptuously. The spittle was laced with blood.

  ‘You know me better than that,’ he said, and his voice had a kernel of steel. ‘Whatever else happens here, I’m going back in there. And when I do, I’ll track him down. He’ll know soon enough there’s an Ironblood in Scharnhorst’s army. I want him to know it. I want him to be afraid. He ought to be. I’m coming for him.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  ‘So turns the path of war. The foolish commander is the one who trusts too deeply in his tools. Your wizards may falter, your artillery may misfire. Only one thing remains trustworthy, even when all else fails. The spirit of vengeance in men. When all other things desert you, rely on the capacity for hatred. That quality alone is what a wise commander cultivates in his soldiers, and no great battle has been won without it.’

  Grand Marshal of the Reiksguard Kurt Helborg

  Memoirs, Vol. XII

  Rathmor stormed down the corridor. History was repeating itself. Once again, he felt the kind of anger and frustration that comes from a sudden bereavement. He had never really cared for the loss of men he had known in life, nor even that of members of his own family. Esselman’s entire army could be slain, and he would feel little emotion. But his machines, they were something else. Rathmor had an emotional attachment to each of them, from the lowliest barrel to the mightiest steam-powered monster of destruction.

  The infernal machine had gone, laid low by the unlikeliest of chances. There should have been nothing in the enemy arsenal capable of piercing its armour. Even the luckiest of shots from a standard artillery piece should have been repelled with ease. But then the Blutschreiben had arrived. Against all hope, like a nightmare out of the past, a mere skeleton of what it could have been, the machine had appeared. Ironblood’s machine.

  Rathmor spat on the ground as he walked, heedless of the running men around him and the gongs echoing deep within the vaults of the fortress. Magnus Ironblood had come back. This put a whole new complexion to the campaign, and one that Rathmor didn’t like.

  They had been together in Nuln, the two brightest students of their generation. Ironblood had always been too cautious, but his mind was brilliant. Rathmor had taken up the mantle of creation for both of them. He had no illustrious father to dog his every move. He could indulge the wilder flights of his imagination with freedom. The pair of them, with Ironblood’s rigour and Rathmor’s powers of creation, had been an unbeatable team. Everything came easily, everything was enjoyable. After only a year at the colleges, poring over manuals of battlefield gunnery and the principles of the new sciences, their instructors were running out of things to teach them. The whisper had gone round that one of them would become Master of the College one day. The only question was which. Would the Ironblood name rise to even higher positions of honour and esteem? Or would the outsider, the hunched genius from Ostland, take the ultimate prize?

  Rathmor felt his stomach clench inside him. Even to think of those days brought bile rising in his gorge. They were a long way off, those years of toil and humiliation, but the memory was still raw. The wounds had not healed.

  The irony was that it had been Ironblood, usually so plodding and careful, who had created the Blutschreiben. Working alone and in secret, he had studied the forbidden drawings of the steam tank of da Miragliano. The secret of the massive war machines had long been lost, and even the most basic aspects of their maintenance had become a dark art in the fraternity. Only the sketches remained, recondite and incomplete.

  That wasn’t good enough for Magnus. Back then, he had believed engineering was the salvation of the Empire, that all problems were soluble. So he had spent long candle-lit hours in the deeps of the ancient library, squirrelling out facts from barely legible tomes. His reputation had granted his access to vaults normally hidden from students, and he’d amassed a huge stash of wondrous material. Rathmor could still remember the feelings of excitement when he’d seen them. A mobile gunnery platform, virtually invulnerable, powered by steam and hydraulics, capable of destroying almost any target with ease. The Blutschreiben was a marvel. Almost on a par with the steam tank itself. It promised to revolutionise the art of war and turn the Empire into the most powerful force in the entire world.

  He carried on walking, oblivious to the commotion around him. He knew it wouldn’t be long now before the enemy was in the citadel. He didn’t care. With the destruction of the infernal machines, the way was now open. His plans lay in tatters. Another month, maybe two, and Anna-Louisa would have had her invincible army. Now it was wrecked, and by a man whom Rathmor thought had drifted into drunkenness and squalor. What was worse, the origin of his art was now at risk. Above all, even if von Kleister and her idiot general were slain, the secret in the depths of Morgramgar could not be discovered. There was too much at stake. He had to reach it before the invaders did.

  Rathmor descended stairwells quickly, heading down level after level, leaving the inhabited parts of the citadel behind him. It got darker. The corridors got narrower. Soon the noise of the great wheels in the forges was ringing in his ears. They carried on churning out weapons blithely, oblivious to the coming storm. The air became hotter as the furnaces neared. The anvils were empty. The channels of fire were untended. All hands had been rushed to the defence of the walls. He was alone in his underground kingdom.

  He looked up. Far away, high above the dark vaulted ceilings, the sounds of fighting filtered down. The invaders were inside. It would not be long now.

  Rathmor turned, and slipped down the secret ways only he knew. He could still salvage something from this mess. The book was still there, and his drawings were with it. If he was careful, he could emerge unscathed, ready to try his designs somewhere else. He was still young enough, and the Empire was full of disaffected nobles with money to spend. He just had to retrieve the important things, and evade the hunters for long enough.

  Deep down, though, he knew that there was only one man he needed to evade. Ironblood must surely know he was in Morgramgar by now. The design of his machines was unmistakeable, as good as a signature on a piece of parchment. And if Ironblood knew that Rathmor was here, then he’d be coming. Some crimes were too heinous to forget, and Rathmor knew that the passing years would have done nothing to heal the wounds.

  With trembling hands, he withdrew his pistol from his jacket, and began to nervously clean the mechanism. Before the battle was over, he knew he’d be called on to use it.

  Lukas looked up, feeling the blood trickle down from his forehead and mingle with sweat. For a moment, he could barely remember where he was or what he’d been doing. Then it all came flooding back. The blasted crater before him was still smoking heavily. It was hard to make out anything within its rim. There were a few iron struts, bent out of all shape and blackened from the fire. Most of the wooden shell of the machine had been completely destroyed. Here and there, strewn all over the battlefield, a few pieces of the larger beams smouldered. It had taken days to build, hours of work both day and night working from plans neither he nor Messina fully understood. To have got it working at all had been a miracle. All for nothing. It had barely lasted minutes on the field.

  Lukas pulled himself upwards, feeling his battered body protest. Though his memory of it was hazy, he coul
d recall running towards Messina, desperate to stop him advancing. Then the opposing war machine had fired, and the Tilean had gone. All his flamboyance, his artistry, his arrogance and charm, lost to the world forever with a single blast of the device’s guns. Messina had been exasperating at times. But he’d taken Lukas under his wing and given him a trade. Many fathers did less for their sons.

  Lukas felt his senses returning. There was no time to mourn. All across the field, soldiers were recovering from the twin blasts, shaking their heads and gingerly getting back to their feet. Those who had been further away were closing in fast, advancing across the pitted earth, intent on closing the temporary gap in the fighting.

  He clambered back up, legs shaky, and brushed himself down. He’d been hit on the head by something, and his left ankle was twisted and swollen. He’d been lucky, though. There were bodies on either side of him that still hadn’t moved. The death of the steam tanks had taken many dozens of troops with them, from both sides.

  Lukas looked around, and began to hobble back to the relative safety of his own lines. As he did so, he felt some strength return to his leg, and he picked up pace. The smoke was clearing, and the shouts of battle were rushing back in.

  As he stumbled onwards, he was overtaken by a ragged-looking group of men. Their uniforms were torn, and they carried a mix of halberds and shortswords. Lukas suddenly realised he was unarmed. His sword must have been knocked clear when the Blutschreiben had exploded. He raised his fists desperately, aware even through his panic how futile and stupid the gesture was.

  Then he saw the livery of Hochland, and a wave of relief washed over him.

  ‘What are you doing here, soldier?’ came a harsh voice from among them.