Marks of Chaos

by James Wallis

  A steam tank. One of the eight remaining machines built by Leonardo da Miragliano, now kept and lovingly maintained by the Imperial Engineering School. Karl had only heard of them, he had never seen one: they were too important to see action in most of the Empire’s battles. They were symbols of the Empire’s power, its superiority, the sheer hopelessness of trying to stand against it. They were terrifying.

  It approached down the street at the speed of a trotting horse, the great wheels under its iron skirt rumbling over the cobbles. Clouds of smoke and steam emanated from the furnace and boiler at its rear. Its cannon was pointed directly at them.

  Someone in Altdorf wanted to make sure the crusaders weren’t just killed, they were to be crushed and destroyed.

  Karl began to back away from it, towards the ranks of pikemen. Huss, Valten and Gottschalk followed. The square was quiet; even the wounded were silenced by their awe.

  “Raise the pikes,” Gottschalk instructed.

  No movement from the ranks, though the iron tips of the weapons were wavering like twigs in wind. The Conqueror rolled implacably onwards. It was almost into the square.

  “Raise your pikes, for Sigmar’s sake!” There was an edge of panic to his voice.

  “Let us through!” Huss roared above the hissing and rumbling of the advancing steam tank. A few men raised their pikes then, uncertain, lowered them again. There was no way through. As Karl had planned, the pikemen had formed a solid wall of defence—altogether too solid, and the men behind it were too scared to move aside to let them through to safety.

  The steam tank eased into the square, its unseen driver steering carefully through the narrow street entrance from the north. At marching speed it rolled across the cobblestones and across the bodies of the fallen: soldier and crusader, living and dead alike. Those who lay in front of it scrabbled to pull their shattered bodies out of its path. Some of them were successful. There were crunches, screams, spurts of blood.

  It stopped with a sharp hiss and a jet of steam, around thirty feet from the wall of pikes, the steam cannon at its front pointing at the barricade, and at Karl, Huss, Val-ten and Gottschalk. They were trapped: if they ventured out from where they stood the crossbowmen would be able to pick them off; if they stayed here the tank’s hidden crew would blow them to smithereens, or crush them under its wheels.

  The tank moved slightly, half a foot forward on one wheel, turning. Aiming the cannon, Karl guessed, and he stepped sideways. The steel tips of the pikes behind him were shaking, but the men stayed where they were, firm in defence. For the only time in his life Karl regretted having trained them so well.

  With a roar Valten sprang across the square at the machine, the hammer of Saint Botolphus whirling in his hands. It was an act of desperate bravery. A useless one.

  The tank’s cannon crashed, gouting steam in scalding, blinding clouds, ripping a path through the pike-wall as its missile smashed men backwards and apart. A moment later Karl heard its wheels begin to clank across the cobbles again, towards him.

  The clouds of steam dissipated, divided by the approaching nose of the tank as it moved towards the shattered remains of the pike-wall. Some of the crusaders moved in to fill the breach but it was too late: their brothers were dropping their weapons and running back down the street towards Hermannstrasse. The shot had killed maybe seven or eight of the tight-packed ranks; another thirty or forty had fled. At least they had an escape route now.

  Except they would have the Conqueror at their backs.

  Running was not the way to win this. Running had almost ended the crusade at Rottfurt. Running had caused the death of the Fifth Reiklanders at Castle Lossnitz. There was another way, and suddenly he knew what it was.

  “Raise pikes!” Karl yelled, and again: “Raise pikes! To me!”

  Startled faces raised to look at him. Two men seemed to recognise him and moved to his side of the street, holding their weapons vertical. They looked panicked, but glad of any kind of authority.

  “Yes! Faster! All of you!” The tank was approaching. Men pressed themselves back against the walls of the street to avoid it. More joined Karl, looking at him expectantly.

  “Pikes down!” he ordered. They lowered them to the usual fifteen-degree position, as if to repel a charge.

  “No! Down! Weapons on the ground! Lay them flat!” They obeyed.

  The Conqueror rattled closer, steam around its wheels, its pace that of a slow walk. If it stopped and fired again they were dead men, or if it drove straight at them. But he hoped they would seem defenceless, weaponless, and it would pass them by. Its crew were not monsters. They would not kill innocent men.

  He hoped.

  The shadow of the tank’s shields passed over the first of the abandoned pikes. There was a sound of splintering wood as the front wheels crushed the ash shaft to splinters. It was almost at them.

  It began to turn in their direction. To crush them against the wall.

  “Grab your pikes and lift!” Karl yelled as he bent to grab a pikeshaft that lay at his feet, raising it up, the far end of the long weapon still under the tank. The others followed. Did he have enough men? Enough leverage? Would the wooden poles take the weight?

  Together he and the remains of the defenders forced their pikes further under the Conqueror, straining to lift the shafts and lever the steam tank up with it. From the side of his eye he saw other pikemen, realising what was happening, come to join them. He saw Huss and Valten grab up dropped weapons to lend their strength, taking positions along the tank’s right flank, and using the pikes as levers to lift the huge bulk of the tank.

  Twenty crusaders, men of Sigmar, strove to overturn the symbol of the Empire’s might.

  For a long moment it seemed they had no hope. Then Karl heard a scraping noise, like a knife-grinder’s spinning whetstone against metal, and realised the tank’s wheel was spinning wildly against the cobbles, a fraction of an inch above them. He redoubled his efforts. The shoulder where he had taken the crossbow bolt ached like fire, and he could feel the blood running down his back; he took the strain with his left arm and felt the muscles under his skin bulge and tighten like rope-cord.

  The metal skirt of the tank rose slowly off the ground, sliding sideways against the wood poles as it tried to reverse away, but other pikes had wedged the wheels in position. The tank’s right wheel spun uselessly. The turret on top swivelled, trying to bring itself to bear on the force of crusaders, but it was already pointing over their heads and could not adjust. Faintly, above the rattling of the Conqueror’s machinery, he could hear somebody inside its metal body screaming orders.

  The right side was a foot off the ground. Two feet. Clouds of steam jetted from broken pipes. Three feet. The higher it rose, the harder it was to bring it higher. Some men pushed their pikes further under the body, getting extra leverage that way; others moved their hands down the shaft of their weapons, shortening the lever.

  Huss’ pike cracked in two. He dropped it, looking around for a second, finding nothing. Then he moved right in, up to the body of the tank, took the lower rim of its armour in his hands and began lifting it bodily. His muscles bulged with the strain so hard that their outlines were visible pressed against the sleeves of his robes.

  Valten joined him; then a crusader, then another, and more. With a final heave the metal carcass of the Conqueror lifted, balanced for a second on the rim of its left wheels, and toppled over onto its left side with a ringing crash and the screech of plate-metal bending and shearing. The Empire’s pride lay beaten and broken.

  Karl gazed at Huss with silent eyes, the enormity of what they had done too great for words. The moment stretched. In the distance, shouts of astonishment and cries of horror began to fill the air. Valten straightened up, rubbing oil and soot from his hands, and picked up his hammer from where he had dropped it.

  “Better get out of here,” he said.

  “We better had,” Karl said. “You’ve got an appointment.” He flexed his aching right arm,
feeling the bolt in his shoulder rip into his tissue with every movement, and stared down the street, toward the bulk of the crusaders, who had retreated at the first sign of trouble in the temple square. It looked to him as if they were being herded or corralled, probably by the remaining Reiksguard. And there were agents from the Chaos cults mingling with them. It would be difficult to go that way and remain safe, or even to know that their passage would not be blocked again.

  The grinding, wheezing and hissing of the steam tank was punctuated with a heavy clang as the turret-hatch opened. Two pikemen reached in and hauled the tank’s commander out. His face was as red as his jacket, the white bar of his wide moustache quivering. He raised his hands in the universal gesture of surrender.

  “Beaten by a bunch of priests,” Karl heard him mutter. “Might as well shoot meself now.”

  “We would not wish that,” Huss said. “We came in peace.”

  “But war came with you,” the officer said. “Look at all this. Just look at it.”

  Karl looked at it. It lay, steaming and leaking on the cobbles like a harpooned whale, the paint and gilt on its armoured plates scratched by the many pikes that had turned it over. “How many crew do you have on board?” he asked.

  The commander stiffened. “Name, rank and Imperial lineage only,” he said.

  “We can find out easily enough,” Karl said. “Close the hatch, let them steam to death, then count the bodies.”

  “Some priests you are. There are two others,” the officer said. “A driver and a gunner, though I think his hip broke when you pushed us over.”

  Karl studied the tank. “You and you,” he said, pointing to pikemen, “get the other crew out. You four, persuade the crusaders to form up around us, a circle, so people can’t see what we’re doing. The rest of you, let’s get this thing back on its wheels.”

  * * *

  The interior of the Conqueror was very cramped. Hot pipes and sharp edges pressed against legs and torsos. The steel wheels, built for traversing battlefields, juddered over the cobbles of the streets and the metal floor transmitted every vibration into the bones of the four occupants. Steam jetted from fractured joints in the copper pipes, making the place unbearably hot. The only light came from the rows of high horizontal slits that ringed the front of the cabin in a semi-circle, and at the rear a brass lantern swung from a hook just in front of the bulk of the combined furnace and boiler that powered the vehicle. Apart from the vibration, there was little sensation of forward movement.

  Karl leaned towards the driver, crouched over the wide spokes of the tank’s helm, his Imperial engineer’s uniform dark with soot and grease. “How fast are we going?” he shouted.

  “About twelve miles an hour,” the man shouted back.

  It seemed incredible: to be capable of such speeds without a horse. Karl pushed his way past Valten, bent and peered through one of the observation slits. They were already half-way down Hermannstrasse, with crusaders, soldiers and citizens alike pressing themselves to the walls on either side to get out of the path of the iron behemoth. If there were cultists, renegade wizards, or mutant creatures of Chaos concealed among their numbers, they did not make their presence felt.

  They had righted the steam tank without too much difficulty, and despite the protestations of the commander they had commandeered it, taking the driver with them. Karl, Huss and Valten had clambered in through the turret into the tiny cabin and had found places alongside the man. Gottschalk had been left with orders to reform what was left of the pikemen, rendezvous with the Hammers of Sigmar and make their way slowly west towards the Grand Theogonist’s palace. They were the diversion, while the tank drove straight for the palace.

  The unspoken part of the plan, acknowledged only in glances between the three men squeezed together next to the driver, was that with luck the forces of Altdorf would not suspect that their steam tank had been hijacked, and that the Conqueror would move faster through the streets than the news would.

  Karl glanced at Valten in the half-light, and once again wondered if this man truly was Sigmar reborn. He could fight with the fury of his namesake, that much Karl had witnessed, but there was much more to being a god-emperor than that. The men respected him and he took easily to command, but he had not been able to rally the pikemen in the square outside Saint Botolphus’, and he was no diplomat.

  But he had recognised the hammer of Saint Botolphus as a holy item, a sacred and blessed relic of the Sigmarite faith. Surely that was evidence? Or maybe he had simply recognised it as a better weapon than the one he was carrying.

  Well, Karl thought, the final decision lay with the Emperor, and the Grand Theogonist. His opinion did not matter, one way or the other. But it worried him that he did not know how he felt about the man beside him.

  “How far to the palace gates?” Huss shouted above the clanking of the gears and the incessant rumbling of the wheels.

  The driver took a hand off the helm and pointed ahead. “We turn into Ragansweg where you can see, then two hundred yards down.” The steam tank lurched and he grabbed the helm back, twisting it to get them back on course.

  “A problem?” Karl yelled.

  “The front bearings are loose,” the driver shouted back. “She’s tricky to steer.”

  “Will we make it?”

  “She’s weathered worse.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Karl that a juggernaut of steel and steam like this could be female. There was something too cold, too implacable and relentless about its nature for the feminine. Then he thought of Brother Karin and reconsidered. She had taken on the outer trappings of a man, had hardened her heart and cut off all her emotions save for hate, but she was still a woman. Physically at least.

  Where was she today?

  The tank lurched again as the driver nursed it around a corner. “Theogonist’s palace, straight ahead,” he announced. On the other side of the cabin Huss bent to look out of an observation slit, banging his forehead on a bulkhead with a muttered oath.

  “There are people there,” he said. “In uniform.”

  “Guards?” Valten asked. “The Emperor is there. He would have guards.”

  “More Reiksguard,” Karl said, peering through the slit closest to him. “From their uniforms, they’re veterans.”

  “Pray they have orders to let us through,” Huss said.

  “How do they know it’s us?” Karl said. “We’re in a tank.”

  “Yes,” Huss said. “Wait. They’re moving aside.”

  They were, moving back to either side of the wide gate they had been guarding, their swords drawn. One man was left standing in the middle of the gateway. Short, stocky, balding. His robes were golden, embroidered with eldrich patterns, and his hands and mouth were moving in unmistakable movements. He was casting a spell.

  The driver didn’t veer. The steam tank kept straight on, towards the wizard a hundred yards in front of them.

  “Stop!” Karl’s mind whirled. What spell would the wizard be likely to cast? Which Gold College spells had the longest range? He didn’t know. He’d only been with the Untersuchung a few months; was going to complete his training when he returned from Marienburg. And when he came back from Marienburg they had all been dead.

  The driver wasn’t stopping. Maybe he didn’t realise what lay ahead. Maybe he thought the best strategy was to get closer. The Imperial armies often worked closely with the Empire’s wizards. He probably knew what he was doing.

  Karl peered through the slit. Was the figure ahead Kunstler? He was a magician in the Gold College, though it didn’t look like him. Thoughts raced through his mind. Why would a gold wizard be here? Routine procedure, guarding the Emperor—not outside the Grand Theogonist’s palace, surely, given the long-standing antipathy between religion and magic in the Empire. Then why? Had Kunstler, having learned of the change of plan from Martinus, sent one of his comrades here?

  Something struck him. What if Holger had been lying? What if Martinus had been loyal and had bee
n betrayed, or if he had intended to betray them but only to the witch hunters? What if someone else had taken the message to the Purple Hand cultists?

  What if Anders Holger was a member of the Purple Hand?

  The thought froze in his mind as through the observation slit he watched the figure at the gates shimmer momentarily with an aura of golden energy, and a gleaming arrow shot upwards from his outstretched hands, into the late morning air, out of sight. It reminded Karl for a second of the pike he had thrown to kill the crossbowman in Saint Botolphus’ Square. Then something struck the steam tank, knocking it sideways. The air thickened and metal plates screamed as they twisted against each other. The driver was screaming too.

  The steam tank rocked, regained its wheels and veered across the street. The driver had one hand up over his eyes. His hair was on fire. For a second Karl couldn’t work out how; then he realised the lamp had shattered and burning oil had been flung across the cabin. Spatters burned across the floor. Huss and Valten were braced against the bulkheads, trying not to be thrown around by the impact and the wild course of the vehicle.

  Something hit it again. The plating split, letting beams of daylight into the smoky interior. Something under the tank crunched hard, and an instant later everyone was flung forward as the tank came to a sudden jarring halt in a crash of masonry and chaos. The cabin began to fill with scalding steam, gushing in from a broken pipe, making it hard to breathe or see.

  “Out! Out!” Huss yelled, his hands scrabbling to release the turret. It came open in a squeal of bent hinges and Karl watched as he hauled his bulk out of the Conqueror, then dropped a hand back to help the next man out. Valten gestured to Karl.

  “No,” Karl said, shouting to be heard above the roaring steam. “I like it hot.”