Kingsblade

by Andy Clark

  Danial snarled, lost now to the angry roar of his Knight and the pounding blood in his temples. Taking three ground-shaking strides, he rammed the whirling teeth of his chainsword into the enemy Knight’s thermal cannon, right at the joint between weapon and arm. Hydraulic supports and coolant cables were torn apart as Danial’s blade ripped through the arm. He hauled the weapon back, sparks raining down as the Chimaeros Errant’s cannon dropped like deadweight. His enemy reeled, suddenly off balance, and Danial barged in with Oath’s armoured shoulder guard. The Chimaeros Knight lurched sickeningly beyond its tipping point. Frantically his foe tried to get a foot down, but his Knight’s agility was not great enough. The Knight Errant toppled sideways and crashed to the ground. The fallen war machine convulsed with explosions. Leaving it for dead, Danial stepped Oath around the shuddering war engine and on into the compound.

  The assault was going well. Only Sire Percivane’s Firestorm was damaged. The machine’s generator housing had taken a hit, causing a chain overload that had burned out half its heat-sinks and forced the Knight into an emergency shutdown. Firestorm would walk again, given a few minutes for its machine-spirit to calm its choler. Danial could hear Sire Percivane now over the vox, chanting prayers to appease the spirit of his steed.

  By comparison, the enemy had been annihilated. Nine Chimaeros Knights had been unseated. Their steeds lay strewn beyond the breaches, too damaged to fight or else wrecked altogether.

  Danial looked out now across the compound itself, a vast open space stencilled with gothic slogans and coloured guidance lines. It was dotted with wire-fenced buildings and smaller defence lines, and showed battle-damage. Three surviving enemy Knights stood half a mile ahead, near the feet of the fortress. They looked to have taken no part in the fighting, instead standing and waiting with their shields raised.

  ‘None of those is my father’s machine,’ said Luk bitterly. ‘The bastard isn’t here.’

  ‘Then let’s finish them off and be done with it,’ urged Markos.

  ‘But what are they doing?’ asked Lady Suset. ‘Why aren’t they attacking? Or retreating, for that matter?’

  ‘Hold fire,’ ordered Danial, slowing Oath to a walk. ‘The Code dictates we at least give them a chance to surrender. And live Knights can give us information that the dead can’t.’

  ‘These traitors don’t get to surrender, lad,’ growled Markos. ‘Give the order. Let us finish them off.’

  ‘No, wait,’ said Suset. ‘I’m reading those strange energy signatures again… What does that Gallant have in its gauntlet?’

  The Knights’ weapons were lowered, as were their auto-pennants, in the gesture for surrender. However, the Gallant was holding its thunderstrike gauntlet out before it, the fingers curled half-closed and the palm turned upwards. It reminded Danial of the time Luk had found a tygertail moth when they were squirelings, and held the fragile creature out for him to see.

  Slowly, the war machine’s fist opened. A dishevelled figure was revealed, clinging to the Knight’s servo-driven fingers, suspended thirty feet off the ground with her fine robes torn and her hair flying in the wind.

  ‘Alicia,’ gasped Luk.

  Luk’s heart lurched at the sight of Alicia. Gerraint’s consort had borne Luk into this world, and though the Code forbade him from calling a consort from a disgraced house his mother, she was precisely that. Now, in his apparent madness, it seemed that his father was prepared to throw Alicia’s life away as casually as his son’s.

  ‘What on earth is this?’ said Markos in a tone of disgust. ‘These traitors must really be getting desperate.’

  Alicia looked terrified. She was shouting something as she clung perilously to the Knight’s finger, but Luk couldn’t make out her words.

  ‘We have to, Da,’ he urged. ‘I can’t lose them both on this damn world.’

  ‘Knights,’ said Danial. ‘Shroud your weapons and hold fire. Advance quarter pace, draw up fifty yards distance. Gustev, no bravado from your men please, sire. Markos, hold ten Knights back at the breach and watch for enemy stragglers.’

  ‘Be careful, lad,’ warned Markos. ‘Don’t let those traitors get the drop on us just because they’ve a hostage in hand.’

  ‘We will not risk the death of an innocent woman, sire,’ replied Danial, and despite the panic that gripped him, Luk heard a note of steel in his friend’s voice that hadn’t been there before.

  Luk twitched his haptic gauntlets and blink-clicked a sequence of runes in his retinal display. Sword of Heroes purred around him as it gradually bled power from its weapon systems, drawing it back into reserve capacitors somewhere in its mechanical heart.

  You’re Freeblade now, lad came a bitter whisper from his throne, the voice of his old great uncle Osraek. You’ve no reason to obey the orders of the dracon whelp. Other voices spilled over and around Osraek’s, some urging caution, others action. Luk gritted his teeth and shut them all out.

  ‘I won’t do anything to endanger her,’ he muttered to himself, and to his ghosts. ‘But the moment those bastards release her…’ Energy bloomed through his thermal cannon again for a moment, a sympathetic response to his anger, and Luk hurriedly bled it away. His heart thumped sickeningly in his chest as he walked his Knight forward and brought it to a stop on Danial’s left. Sire Sylvest drew up to Luk’s right, and one by one the other Knights took their places in the line. Soon, a long, curved battle-line of loyalist Knights stood facing the three Chimaeros steeds across the rain-lashed compound. Pennants snapped in the wind. Lightning flickered fitfully overhead.

  ‘Knights of House Chimaeros,’ began Danial through his vox-amplifiers. ‘I declare you traitors to the Emperor of Mankind, and to Adrastapol. Surrender now. Do not tarnish your honour further by harming a defenceless woman.’

  Static hissed across the vox. Luk tried to control his pounding heart.

  ‘No,’ came the amplified reply from the Knight Gallant’s pilot. Sire Hectour, Luk thought distractedly. He’d drunk mead with this man, played regicide. Now, the Freeblade barely recognised his voice. Hectour had never sounded so cruel. ‘You are no High King, draconspawn. Neither was your coward father. The crown belongs to Gerraint Tan Chimaeros. You will offer us your surrender, now, or watch the consort die.’

  Luk blinked. This was why his father had turned upon his own family? The crown?

  Angrily, he played his auspex across the enemy Knights, looking for some weakness to exploit, some clever way to turn the situation around. He could see nothing. As a lad he’d loved the tales of Sire Adrastapol, the dashing Knight of the Mountains who always upheld the Code, always won the maiden fair, and always saved the day. Luk had believed on some level that piloting his own Knight in battle would be that way. The reality – watching helpless, as a traitor of his own House threatened to crush his mother to death before his eyes – was a bitter draught to swallow.

  ‘Danial,’ came Sire Markos’ voice across the vox, ‘I know she was your father’s friend, but…’

  ‘I’m not an idiot, Sire Markos,’ responded Danial frostily.

  ‘I can knock out the Gallant’s brachial actuators, cut the power to his gauntlet,’ urged Sire Olric from his Crusader, Draconsflame. ‘Let me take a shot, my liege.’

  ‘The risk’s too great,’ replied Luk, his voice desperate. ‘She could be killed.’

  ‘Let me challenge him,’ urged Grandmarshal Gustev. ‘Settle it with the Code.’

  ‘I think they’ve abandoned the Code, grandmarshal,’ replied Danial. ‘Hold.’

  ‘What do we do, King Danial?’ asked Sylvest Dar Draconis nervously. ‘I don’t think they’re going to wait forever.’

  As if to reinforce the young Knight’s words, the lumens on the three Chimaeros Knights flashed through the gloom, and their leader spoke again.

  ‘Now, your highness,’ said Sire Hectour, and Luk thought again how strange he sounded. ‘What is your decision?’

  Luk looked at Alicia, clinging to her captor’s ironclad hand, her
raven hair plastered to her face. To see such terror on the face of one always so composed and reassuring terrified Luk in turn.

  ‘Da,’ he voxed on a private channel, ‘please…’

  ‘This gesture of defiance earns you nothing,’ said Danial. ‘You know I cannot surrender, and you know I will not let you leave this place alive if you harm the consort. Killing her would be an act of idiotic spite that would gain you nothing but a swift and painful death. End this now and I give you my word, you will be taken as captives of war, and treated with honour.’

  ‘Come on,’ whispered Luk, desperately willing the Chimaeros Knights to comply. ‘Come on, please, this is insane. Just let her go, you idiots. Don’t make him choose.’

  The Chimaeros Knights stood silent and unmoving, and Luk dared to hope for a peaceful resolution. He flexed his haptic gauntlets nervously, rolled his shoulders against the padded metal of his throne, and offered up a silent prayer to the Emperor.

  At some unspoken command, Sire Hectour opened the digits of his gauntlet. The consort’s look of fear vanished, and slowly she stood up on the Knight’s palm. Alicia ignored the wind and rain as she drew herself up imperiously and stared at the loyalist Knights.

  She spoke and, impossibly, they all heard her. The consort’s voice spilled through the Adrastapolian vox channels, warm and assured. His mother was amused, Luk realised in growing confusion.

  ‘I suppose that really was too much to hope for,’ said Alicia Kar Manticos, smiling ruefully. ‘The complete surrender of the new High King and all his Knights, for the life of one consort? Arrogance on my part, I fear, but I thought perhaps I might be able to save you.’

  ‘Lady Alicia.’ Danial’s voice sounded uncertain. ‘What is this?’

  ‘Mother,’ blurted Luk, unable to restrain himself. ‘Did they hurt you?’

  The consort raised one hand in a placating gesture. She seemed perfectly balanced upon her perch, impervious to the wind that whipped at her, and Luk felt as though his confusion and fear would suffocate him if something didn’t make sense soon.

  ‘I am unharmed, Luk,’ she said, and her voice reassured him despite everything, on some instinctive level. ‘In fact, I am very well. Unlike you, it seems. A Freeblade? Oh my boy, I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for all of this, really. You deserved better. But I knew that you didn’t have it in you to turn against your friend and his House, and your father has always trusted my judgement.’

  Luk recoiled in his throne as if slapped. He shook his head unconsciously.

  ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No, not you too, Emperor please, not you too…’

  But Alicia was still talking, to Danial now as though she had dismissed Luk altogether.

  ‘To answer your question, Danial, this is justice for House Chimaeros. We have taken back the crown, and we shall take back our world, from you and from the rotting corpse that you worship.’

  ‘Heresy!’ cried Sire Olric through his vox amplifier, even as a chorus of disbelief and anger swelled across the Adrastapolian vox.

  ‘A fool’s word for truth,’ said Alicia, her voice cutting through the loyalists’ outrage. ‘The god that I worship, that I have always worshipped, is one of knowledge and wisdom, not ignorance and fear. You are all here by his will, and I am sorry Danial, Luk, truly I am, my poor boys, but it is by his will that you shall all now die. A sacrifice is due. The pretender’s line must end, so that House Chimaeros can rule unopposed. As it always should have been.’

  Luk felt like he couldn’t breathe. This couldn’t be his mother talking. She had gone mad. Or perhaps he had. Perhaps the Becoming had broken his mind, and he was hallucinating all of this in some dank cell…

  Dimly, Luk heard Danial issue the order to open fire. And then the ghosts of his throne were there, whispering into his mind and urging him to reclaim his honour by doing the unthinkable. The traitors must die.

  All of them.

  Explosions and searing energy beams engulfed the traitors, and the Freeblade’s optic dampers kicked in for a moment, dulling his view. Luk blinked the filters away, peering through the smoke and rain, needing to see the damage done despite the horror he felt. Yet as the wind clawed the blast-fumes to tatters, the three Chimaeros Knights stood unharmed, shielded by a shimmering wall of blue flame as Alicia marshalled the same unnatural energies across her outstretched hands.

  ‘Witch!’ roared Gustev Tan Minotos, storming forwards. His Crusader, Thunderhymn, unleashed every weapon, hammering the consort’s unnatural shield. Sorcery, thought Luk, nauseously. Give it its true name.

  Luk watched in disbelief as missiles wisped to steam and bullets turned to clouds of flittering moths. Alicia, her beautiful features set in a cold mask, uttered a string of strange words. Her voice rang across the compound like a tolling bell.

  Whirling energies surrounded Alicia, and she rose aloft amidst the howling vortex. Her tattered robes whipped madly around her, and her eyes shone with blue light. The consort swept her hands together, and from them leapt a searing beam of blue and purple energy. It stabbed straight through Grandmarshal Gustev’s shield, sending fat sparks raining down as it blew out the Knight’s ion generator and struck his steed straight in its helm.

  ‘Emperor protect me!’ cried Gustev over the vox as a rippling shockwave raced across the Thunderhymn’s armoured hull. Where the energies touched, Gustev’s steed underwent an impossible transmutation, changing from adamantium and plasteel into twisted flesh and jagged bone. Fang-filled mouths yawned wide in bulging meat, vomiting streams of lurid fire. Rubbery tentacles and spars of bone burst from the steed’s hull in sprays of gore. Eyes rose like blisters across the mutating Knight’s hull, rolling madly as Gustev’s horrified screams filled the vox. As more and more of the Knight turned from metal to biological matter, the whole vast heap collapsed under its own weight. It spilled out as a spreading pool of rubbery flesh and twitching, flailing appendages, many of which bore monstrous approximations of the grandmarshal’s tortured face. Gustev screamed on for several seconds more, before his voice degenerated into a glottal roar and vanished from the vox altogether.

  Luk fought down burning bile as revulsion turned his stomach. He and every other loyalist Knight stood frozen in horror at the impossibility of what they had just witnessed.

  ‘Do not mourn your comrade,’ Alicia told them in an overlapping cacophony of voices, delirious and sorrowful, triumphant and rapturous, human and daemonic. ‘He was lucky enough to feel the blessings of Tzeentch before his death.’

  Luk screamed and triggered his thermal cannon. The heat beam speared towards Alicia, but she wove aside from the blast and regarded him with an expression of disappointment and pity.

  ‘Mighty Tzeentch,’ she cried out to the screaming winds, ‘accept my sacrifice, and deliver your servants from harm.’

  Bolts of fire leapt from her hands as every loyalist Knight opened fire at once. Yet suddenly the traitors were gone, swallowed up by a geyser of pink fire that left nothing but empty air in its wake. Shells and missiles tore into the compound as Alicia’s storm of spell-fire struck the base of the precinct fortress. Blinding light overloaded sensoria, and a string of thunderous booms rolled across the compound.

  ‘Explosives,’ gasped Danial as he watched a string of fireballs roll outwards.

  Rather than fade away, the roar from the blasts built to a terrible rumble. The precinct fortress shuddered like a wounded animal, and vast cracks raced up its armoured flanks.

  ‘Get back!’ ordered Danial. ‘It’s coming down!’

  Luk wrenched at his Knight’s controls even as he poured power into its motive actuators. Around him the others wheeled ponderously and strode away from the crumbling fortress. The Freeblade could see through his autosenses that they would not get clear in time. The traitors had prepared their ambush well. They must have sapped the fortress expertly, for it was violently shaking itself apart as fresh explosions stitched across its foundations. With almighty thunderclaps, slabs of the building’s
cyclopean superstructure sheared away and began to fall.

  The ground shook beneath Sword of Heroes’ feet as Luk pounded towards the distant breaches in the wall. Ahead, Sire Markos and the rear-guard were already loping across the plains, away from danger. To his rear, Luk saw the writhing spawn that had once been Gustev lash out with suckers and pseudopods, grasping one of the Minotos Knights as they tried to flee. Gnashing tentacles fouled the Knight’s legs, and Sire Jeremial cried out in terror as his steed tripped and fell. Sparks flew as the Knight was dragged across the ground and reeled in by writhing tentacles. Gnashing maws split open in the abomination’s hide, bile pouring from them as they bit down on Jeremial’s steed. Then the first chunks of building crashed down, obliterating the Gustev-thing and its victim. Titanic masses of shattered architecture slammed into the ground, some as large as drop keeps. Luk saw severed walls, ragged doorways, the trailing remnants of tiled floors and sheared cables and flailing, hard-wired servitors. He saw gun racks and cogitators and corpses amongst the tumbling wreckage, cell bars and cyber-mastiffs, yet it was the tumbling boulders that held his attention.

  Luk elevated his shield, just in time for a tank-sized lump of rubble to crash against it. Blue light flared, and Sword of Heroes stumbled as it was almost driven to one knee, but with a scream of gyros and servo-motors the Knight kept going.

  Sylvest Dar Draconis was less fortunate, a plummeting spire cutting off his scream as it drove through his fleeing Knight, bursting from its abdominal plates to leave the war machine transfixed like a sparking, twitching corpse.

  Luk fed more power to his Knight’s actuators, its reactor thundering and its attitudinal alarms shrilling as he forced the machine to move as fast as it could. A boulder crashed down on his right, crushing a Knight of House Pegasson. Another hammered down to Luk’s rear, barely a pace behind his Knight’s heels. Through his sensorium he saw it toppling towards him, its shadow engulfing his Knight. Luk roared wordlessly as he forced his Knight to run faster. There was a titanic jolt as hundreds of tons of stone crashed against his shield, causing the cockpit lights to flicker and jolts of electricity to spit from overloaded systems. Somehow, by the Emperor’s grace, Sword of Heroes stayed on its feet, Luk crying out in triumph as he burst through the gateway and out onto the plains.