Anarch

Eighteen: In the Slow Hours

As a younger man, a mere colonel in the Calahad Brigade, Barthol Van Voytz had acquired a distrust of the night that had never left him. He was not afraid of the dark, and like any good soldier he knew that darkness could be an ally and a weapon. And back then, there had been a concrete reason. During the gruelling campaign through the Fenlock Forest, night had been the most dangerous time. The Drukhari butchers had always struck between sunset and sunrise. Ninety per cent of Calahad casualties had been taken after dark.

But it was the night itself. A part of it, specifically. Past middle night, there was always a period of particular blackness, with dawn just a hope. It was the worst time. He called it the slow hours. It was a time when a man might feel most lost, his very mortality at its most vulnerable. A man, say a young colonel, might fret away those creeping hours, awaiting almost certain attack, knowing his men were at their coldest and slowest ebb, aching for the dawn. A man might dwell upon the darkness, knowing it promised only ill. A man might have far too long to contemplate his own small soul, his human weakness, and the meaningless measure of his little life.

Standing in the war room of the Urdeshic Palace, that young colonel now just an old pict in a regimental archive, Van Voytz knew the slow hours were upon him again. The power had been down for over an hour. Fear clung to every surface. The palace, perhaps the most impregnable stronghold on Urdesh, was wide open. Eltath was under attack, and there was some unknown danger here, even here, inside the fortress.

And no solid data. They were blind, deaf and dumb. The shields had fallen. A grave moment for any commander to handle, but fate had decreed it should happen now. Past middle night, with sunrise still too far away: that particular heavy, slow and silent chapter of the night that took too long and was no friend of man.

He’d never checked – he was sure some rubricator or archivist could compile the data if he asked – but Van Voytz was sure that the Astra Militarum had lost more battles in the slow hours than at any other point in the diurnal cycle.

Lamps had been lit in the five storey chamber, candles in tin boxes. For all their sophistication, they had been reduced to candles in boxes. Personnel moved with stablights, conversing in low voices, working at repairs. The hall’s great windows were just paler blocks of darkness.

‘Any word?’ he said to Kazader.

‘Nothing from below, my lord,’ Kazader replied. ‘Last I heard, the Lord Executor, via Colonel Grae, requested full troop support to the undercroft.’

‘Which I approved,’ said Van Voytz.

‘Indeed, my lord,’ said Kazader, ‘but there is conflict. To maintain effective watch-security on the palace and precinct, we cannot afford to move companies from the walls or–’

‘Dammit, man. What about the evacuation?’

‘It continues as best we are able. Again, it is slow, of course, in these conditions.’

‘The warmaster?’

‘I have not had word, my lord.’

‘Has Urienz got him off-site or not?’ Van Voytz asked.

‘I’ll despatch a runner to find out.’

‘Do that. Kazader?’

‘Sir?’

‘Has any support been sent to the Lord Executor?’

‘Orders have been posted, my lord. With respect, I stress again that under these circumstances, it takes a while for men to be redeployed, and sufficient cover maintained along the bastion–’

‘How much has been sent?’

‘I believe Colonel Grae has three platoons of Urdeshi with him, sir.’

‘That all? I gave the damn order almost an hour ago, Kazader.’

‘My lord, as I explained–’

‘Screw your excuses,’ Van Voytz growled. ‘I’m a lord militant general, Kazader. I have theatre command here! I give an order, I expect–’

He fell silent. He could see Kazader’s expression in the candlelight. It was contrite, attentive. But it said Look around, you old fool, you have command over shit.

‘My lord?’ an adept called out.

‘Yes?’

‘We’re ready to test again.’

‘Do it.’

Van Voytz heard orders being relayed, and the clatter of main connectors locking into place. There was a pause, then a deep, bass-note thump of power engaging.

The glass tables of the strategium stations underlit with a flicker. The light throbbed, as unsteady as the candle flames, then stations lit up, followed by the main monitors, repeater screens and sub-consoles. The war room lights came back on at emergency levels. Cogitators began to chatter as operative systems refreshed and rebooted, and backed-up data began to scroll up the screens at an alarming rate, as though some information dam had broken.

There was a ragged cheer and some small applause from the war room staff.

‘Decorum! To your stations!’ Van Voytz yelled. ‘City reports to me in two minutes! I want an active read of Eltath security, and tactical appraisals in five. Vox?’

‘Systems up but limited, my lord.’

‘Live links to all company and division HQs in the Eltath theatre as soon as possible,’ Van Voytz demanded. ‘I want Zarakppan too, priority, and get me the fleet!’

The vox station coordinators hurried to obey.

‘Eltath overview on strategium one, please!’ Van Voytz ordered.

‘Compiling data composite now, sir.’

‘Shield status?’

‘We have power to the war room and battery defences, my lord,’ replied an adept. ‘Power supply will be restored to the rest of the palace in twenty minutes, barring further interrupts. Estimate void shields to power in forty-seven minutes.’

‘Make it thirty,’ snapped Van Voytz. He cracked his knuckles. Now they were in the game again.

‘Circulate the formal evacuation order,’ he said. ‘All stations.’ The power-break had gagged the order digitally. So far, he’d only been able to have it circulated by word of mouth and paper flimsy. ‘I want a progress report in three.’

He paused, and scratched his cheek, thinking.

‘Request you confirm that,’ said Marshal Tzara. ‘You wish evacuation to proceed?’

‘Yes,’ said Van Voytz.

‘Then you still believe the situation in the undercroft–’

‘The power died for a reason, Marshal,’ he replied. ‘It wasn’t a random bloody fault.’

‘We don’t know anything,’ she said calmly.

‘Exactly,’ he replied. ‘Except we do, because Gaunt told us that shit was happening.’

He glanced at Kazader, and then back to the Keyzon Marshal.

‘Marshal Tzara?’

‘My lord general?’

‘I’m committing theatre control to you as of now. You have my orders and my objectives. Follow them.’

‘With discretion?’ asked Tzara.

‘With the dedication of a Throne-damn bloodhound,’ he replied. Then he nodded. ‘You have discretion, of course, Tzara,’ he said, ‘but use it sparingly. Are we understood?’

‘Perfectly, lord general.’

He straightened formally, and made the sign of the aquila.

‘I commit theatre command to you at this time,’ he said. ‘Let it be so recorded.’

She returned the salute.

‘I accept and receive this duty,’ she replied. ‘Let it be so recorded.’

Van Voytz turned to Kazader.

‘Get your storm troops, colonel,’ he said. ‘You’re with me. And find me a damn gun.’

‘Is that lights?’ asked Hark.

The wardroom they had been taken to was lit with small lamps and candles, but its large windows looked out across the Hexagonal Court towards the main keep.

Inquisitor Laksheema was standing at the windows, staring out. She was a tall, slender phantom in the twilight.

‘I believe so,’ she replied. ‘It looks as though they have restored power to the main keep.’

‘That’s something, then,’ he replied. ‘Felt like we were sitting here with our pants down.’

‘Something you often do, Commissar Hark?’ she asked.

‘I’m a soldier, mam,’ he replied. ‘We get up to all sorts.’

Hark was lying back on a couch. A Keyzon corpsman had just finished swabbing and stitching the gashes on his throat and face, and now had turned to the stump of his augmetic and was sealing the shredded wires with a fusing wand.

Laksheema had refused any treatment. Her robes were torn, and the burnished, ornate augmetics of her face and body were grazed and scratched. When the orderlies had come to her, she told them that she was not in any pain and they should attend those who were.

Hark wondered if she had any significant organic parts, anything that could feel pain. Feel anything.

She was pacing before the windows. The digital weapons inlaid in the golden cuff of her left wrist had been destroyed in the ordeal. She kept adjusting the still-functional ones built over her right wrist like an elaborate golden bangle.

She crossed to the doorway of the adjoining room and watched the Urdeshi surgeons working by candlelight to repair the grievous wounds Sancto had received. The Scion had long since slipped from consciousness. He’d been laid out on a dining table, and the floor around it was littered with parts of his body gear and blood-soaked surgical towels.

She observed impassively for a moment, then walked back through the wardroom and stepped out into the corridor.

Hark glanced at the corpsman.

‘Enough,’ he said.

‘Sir?’

‘You gonna re-fit me with an arm tonight?’

‘Sir, I’m just a–’

‘Thought so,’ said Hark. He got up off the couch, and tossed aside the surgical smock that had been draped across him. ‘Thanks for your duty,’ he said to the corpsman.

Hark walked out into the hall. He was sore as hell. Every joint. He couldn’t have been more thoroughly bruised if Brostin had come at him with a mallet. The arm he didn’t mourn. The augmeticists would fix him a new one. His plasma pistol, though. It had been a beauty. He’d miss that.

He sighed. There were many more important things to miss and mourn.

The corridor was wood-panelled and grand. Old paintings hung in gilt frames, though it was impossible to see what they depicted. Layers of age-darkened varnish and the weak glow of the lamps in the hall conspired to make them impenetrable. There was almost a warmth to the hall with its dark wood and dim yellow light. The Urdeshic Palace had been a fine, grand place once. He would not, he felt, remember it fondly.

Several doors along was the entrance to the prayer chapel where most of the Tanith survivors were being ministered to. He could hear Zweil, leading them in a deliverance blessing.

Not quite Hark’s cup of caffeine.

Down by the chapel door, in the shadows, he saw the orange coal of a lho-stick. Hark squinted. It was Meryn, leaning against the wall, smoking. The old ayatani’s blessings were clearly not his cup of caffeine either.

Hark began to walk in Meryn’s direction. He was a cigar man, himself, but a shared smoke with a Guardsman was a bonding thing that often helped after a nasty go-around.

But he stopped. Flyn Meryn wasn’t good company at the best of times. Hark walked the other way instead.

Something stirred in the shadows above him and rasped. He glanced up, and saw the regiment’s mascot peering down at him. It was perched on a game trophy, the mounted skull of a creature that possessed the broadest and largest antlers he’d ever seen.

‘Rough night, bird,’ he said to the half-hidden eagle. It clacked its beak angrily. ‘I hear you,’ he replied, and wandered on. He flexed his hand. His one remaining hand. The bird had made him jump. He had reached instinctively for his weapon, but the arm he had reached with was just a phantom, and the holster empty. With his good hand, he felt under his coat to the back of his waistband, and found his hold-out weapon, a snub-nose laspistol in a leather buckle-on pouch. At least that was still there.

Laksheema was standing at a doorway just ahead, staring in. He joined her.

Through the open door, he saw Curth and several medicae aides attending to the Beati. She was laid out on a bed, straight and still, like a body ready for viewing.

Captain Auerben was watching Curth work. She noticed Hark and the inquisitor at the door and came out to them.

‘She has not regained consciousness,’ she said. Her voice was just a croak. Hark had been told that Auerben had been hurt by a pyrochemical burst during the last Morlond campaign. It had scarred her face and burned her throat. Auerben paused, took an inhaler bulb from her pocket, and puffed it into her mouth to moisten her throat.

‘Excuse me,’ she said.

Hark shrugged. ‘Ana Curth knows what she’s doing,’ he said.

‘I’m sure she does,’ said Auerben. ‘There are no significant injuries. It is extreme fatigue. A sapping of her will. I told her she was pushing too hard.’

Auerben took another puff from the inhaler.

‘But the woe machine,’ she said. ‘It was a focus of ruinous power. It sapped her, and fed on her light. I fear it may take a long time for her to recover strength.’

‘We repair. We recharge,’ said Laksheema.

‘She means we heal,’ said Hark with a smile. ‘The Emperor protects. His grace will flow back into the Beati in time. She will be restored as she once was.’

Auerben nodded. She went back into the room and resumed her vigil at the bedside.

‘The machine was a grim device,’ said Laksheema. ‘I am ever horrified by the limitless ingenuity of the Archenemy.’

Hark nodded in agreement. ‘It may have been the worst thing I have ever encountered,’ he said. ‘You?’

‘I have faced daemons, commissar,’ she replied.

‘Oh, we’ve all faced daemons, inquisitor,’ he replied.

She looked at him with a questioning frown.

Hark grinned. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve faced more powerful things, more dangerous things, though Throne knows that was hell. Without the Saint, we’d all be dead. The palace too.’

‘Indeed,’ said Laksheema. ‘It was young. Not fully grown. But already a threat we could scarcely combat. Without her, it would have been enough. The palace lost, Eltath, Urdesh itself. The Anarch had victory there, for a moment. Total victory. If the woe machine hadn’t been checked, the crusade would have been crippled beyond recovery. The Sabbat Worlds would have fallen, and all our years of gain lost. Anakwanar Sek almost won tonight. Not just the battle, the war.’

‘It wasn’t just its power or its fury,’ said Hark. ‘It was the very feel of it. The shadow of the warp was in it, as strong as any warp spawn. It radiated fear, that’s the thing. It didn’t just inspire fear because of what it was. It generated it. It amplified it within us.’

‘Part of its arsenal,’ said Laksheema. ‘Woe machines are essentially mechanical instruments, but the heritor ingeniants have found the means to bind other elements. The warp. The human soul. Asphodel was a genius, you know? To take a killing machine and construct it with such intricate care it fitted inside a human shell. They call it reworking.’

‘Who do?’ asked Hark.

‘The Heritors of the Archonate. Alloying human and warp and machine into one material. Fusing them, and giving them the capacity of shift.’

‘Like a ship?’ he asked.

‘No, like a lycanthrope, Hark. A shape-changer, the transmutation of form. Deceit and guile and disguise, they are weapons of warfare we utilise. And such things are second nature to the warp. But the reworked take that to an obscene level. Of course, change is a primary aspect of the Four, a fundamental property of the Way-Changer, the dark un-god of sorcerous transition.’

‘You’re very knowledgeable,’ he remarked.

‘Years of study,’ she replied.

‘How many years?’

Laksheema favoured him with her cold smile.

‘It is impolite to ask a lady her age,’ she said.

‘You’re no lady,’ he said.

‘Also impolite.’

‘I mean you’re beyond human, inquisitor. Reworked – is that the word? – in your own way. Like me. Though I am crudely wrought compared to you. How old do you feel?’

‘Viktor,’ she replied, ‘I barely feel at all, and I haven’t for a very long time.’

He was about to reply when a wind blew down the hallway, fluttering all the candles and lamps.

They turned.

‘What was that?’ he asked. She didn’t answer. A second later, they heard a scream. It came from far away, deep in the core of the palace, but it was so loud and piercing that it made the walls tremble.

It wasn’t a human scream.

Hark found he had his hold-out weapon in his hand. The fear had returned. The fear that had drowned him in the undercroft had soaked him again in a heartbeat.

‘Feth,’ he said. ‘What was that?’

Laksheema looked at him.

‘Do you feel that?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Right through the heart of me,’ he said. ‘Just–’

‘Terror,’ she said. ‘There is another one. There is another woe machine here.’

Light shuddered. Shadows twisted. Gol Kolea looked at his son in surprise. That scream he had uttered…

Dalin Criid looked back at him, blinking fast.

‘Dalin?’ said Gol.

‘No. No. No no no–’ Dalin moaned.

‘Dalin!’

‘How could I not know this?’ Dalin asked. ‘Never. Never knew.’

Gol let go of Dalin’s shoulders. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered. ‘Oh no.’

‘She was my sister,’ said Dalin.

Dalin Criid hinged open. His flesh peeled and folded like the rind of a fruit, his bones twisting like weeds. A subspace lattice bulged, stripping organics back into the immaterium and folding sentient inorganics out into real space in their place. He split down a centre line from the crown of his head and turned inside out with a snap like a switchblade.

He became a cloud of interlacing knives, each one vibrating and slicing as it moved. The blades, all black metal, moved in flawless formation, cycling and shifting in intricate, synchronised patterns, first a rippling figure of eight, then more complex hyperbolic formations obscenely alien to Euclidian geometry. The whirring blades flashed in abstract conic orbits around a central hub of dazzling yellow neon light, like a miniature sun.

Gaunt stared in disbelief. He reached for his bolt pistol, his hand shaking.

Vaynom Blenner stumbled backwards with eyes like saucers, and fell down hard.

‘Oh, Throne,’ gasped Baskevyl. ‘Gol! Gol!’

Still on his knees, Gol Kolea looked up at the whirring cloud of blades. His hands came up in front of his face instinctively to ward it off, then he lowered them. He stared directly into the neon light.

‘Dalin,’ he said, as if calling a child home after dark. ‘I won’t let you go alone. I’ll walk into hell–’

The cycling blades slowed, as if confused. They stopped, hanging still for a second, then slowly began to cycle in the opposite direction. Their pattern altered, returning to the simple, lemniscate orbit.

Then the figure-eight ploughed forward, and Gol Kolea was gone.

Baskevyl screamed his friend’s name, but there was nothing left to answer him except a billowing mist of blood.

Gaunt’s bolt pistol boomed. Explosive rounds tore into the glowing cloud of blades. Blade teeth shattered like glass as the rounds detonated like solar flares around the little burning neon sun. Fresh blades slid out of subspace to replace the broken ones, joining the perfect, rushing synchronicity of the revolving pattern.

The woe machine rose up, and turned towards them. Its neon sun-heart was throbbing hatred. Its noise was the whoosh of sword-strikes, the shearing snip of scissors, the steel-on-stone wail of a sharpening wheel. Terror radiated from it like heat.

Blenner was thrashing and twisting in a paroxysm of fear, shrieking and clutching his head.

‘Get back, Bask,’ Gaunt warned.

The woe machine drifted towards them. It elongated vertically, its rushing figure-eight extending taller and thinner, its inner sun stretching into an oval.

Gaunt faced it, forcing the lid down on his terror. He couldn’t fight it. There was nowhere to run. The wind whipping from it tugged at his coat. It smelled of hot metal and burned blood.

Gol’s words, Gol’s last words, had made it hesitate. Something human was still in it. Something that had been unwittingly human for so long, it couldn’t shed the habit as easily as it had shed its disguise.

‘Trooper Dalin!’ Gaunt yelled. ‘Trooper Dalin, stand easy!’

The rotation speed slowed and became irregular. The pattern deformed, some blades drifting out of alignment. The light of the neon sun dimmed slightly, wavering in intensity.

‘That’s an order, Trooper Dalin!’ Gaunt barked.

The figure-eight collapsed. All the blades re-formed into a simple pattern, a single circle orbiting the sun-heart. Gaunt could feel it struggling. The waves of fear were overlapping waves of confusion and panic. It was fighting with itself. The very ingenuity of its design, human fused with warp-machine, was battling with itself.

‘Trooper Dalin!’ Gaunt cried again.

The circle of spinning blades shifted position, rotating in a plane around the little sun until all the tips were pointing away from the three men and directly up at the ceiling. The blades sat like a spiked crown around their neon heart.

Then their rate-of-cycle increased dramatically. The woe machine rose and ripped into the ceiling, slicing through the ancient stone as though it was soft fat. The wailing woe machine gouged up into the ceiling, and vanished from view.

Dislodged blocks tumbled onto the chamber floor. The undercroft ceiling began to split and collapse, the integrity of its ancient vault sheared through.

‘Out! Out!’ Gaunt yelled to Baskevyl. The path to the exit and the stairs was no longer blocked. They grabbed the screaming Blenner and stumbled towards the door as the ceiling crashed in behind them.

The palace was shaking. All around, men and women called out in alarm and panic. Candle flames jerked and fluttered. Some went out in wafts of grey smoke. The lamps rattled on their hooks. Old paintings quivered in their frames. The psyber-eagle squawked as dust sifted from the jittering antlers it had settled on.

Objects on table tops trembled and shifted position. Glasses smashed. Medical trays skipped, dislodged and spilled to the floor. Cracks and splits appeared in the ancient floor tiles.

Hark and Laksheema rushed back into the wardroom where they had been treated. The Keyzon corpsman was staring out of the tall windows in amazement. They joined him, gazing down into the broad yard of the Hexagonal Court. The space was torchlit – burning tapers fixed in iron brackets. A company of Helixid troopers were loading packs into two Valkyrie carriers that had set down as part of the evacuation effort.

Hark and Laksheema could hear the men shouting, looking around frantically in an effort to comprehend the source of the shaking.

‘Is… is it an earthquake?’ asked the corpsman. ‘Is it the volcanics?’

‘No,’ said Hark. He could hear the wailing. The high-pitched metal squeal was getting louder by the second.

The woe machine reached ground level. Its whirring blades erupted through the flagstones of the Hexagonal Court, spitting splinters of stone in all directions. Some of the Helixid troops died immediately, cut down by the whizzing slivers.

Others were caught in the cloud of blades as it rose from the ruptured stone floor and expanded, blades flattening into a horizontal dish around the burning heart. The men vanished in puffs of blood vapour, or fell like parts of a broken puzzle, cut in sections.

The tail boom of one Valkyrie was lopped clean off, leaving bare metal stumps and sparking cables. The severed tail fins were hurled like a toy across the court, and punched in the wall and windows of a ground floor chamber. The other carrier, its ramp still down, tried to throttle up and lift clear. The blades shredded one side of it clean away, leaving the Valkyrie excised in cross-section. Its straining engines ignited, and it exploded in a savage fireball.

Hark slammed Laksheema down and away from the windows as the concussion blast blew them in. A blizzard of broken glass burst across the room. The corpsman stayed standing for almost ten seconds, blinded, flayed back to the bone from the thighs up. He fell sideways like a discarded kit-bag.

Down below, the woe machine had formed a new shape – a war shape, a woe shape, an octahedron four metres across made of sliding, slithering blades, the neon light glowing inside the lattice shell. The few Helixid troopers who hadn’t died or fled fired on it. The woe machine rushed at them, las-rounds pinging off its blades, one tip dilating to form a spinning, sucking maw.

Hark got up, broken glass cascading off him, and rushed to the door. Behind him, Laksheema struggled to her feet.

‘Out!’ Hark bellowed into the hallway. ‘Out now! Woe machine!’

Terrified staff and personnel began to scramble from the rooms all along the hall. The air itself was vibrating. An ancient painting of Throne-alone-knows-what fell off the wall with a crash as its ancient string snapped. Its gilt frame shattered.

Auerben appeared, people shoving past her. She looked at Hark.

‘We can’t move her,’ she said. ‘We can’t.’

By the chapel door, Meryn shrank back against the old wood panels as though he was willing the palace wall to swallow him up.

He could hear the killing, the screams. He could smell the blood.

There was going to be another slaughter. And it was going to make the first one pale into insignificance.

He started to laugh, unable to stop himself, because there was nothing funny left in the world.