Anarch - Dan Abnett Read online

Structures resembling siege towers had extended out from the docks, bridging the gap and linking ship to shore. As the agriboat passed beneath one, Mkoll could see the internal hoists lifting freight up to the access levels, and crews of stevedores and servitors hauling the loads across the bridge-spans overhead into the ship’s open airgates. Small lift ships and lighters droned like flies, shuttling between the cruiser’s gaping belly holds and the shoreline landing platforms. One flew overhead, running lights flashing, wings angled for low-flight mode, and the agriboat rocked in the wake of its thrusters.

  The agriboat’s engines started to mutter a new note, and the vessel began to slide sideways towards the waiting docks. Other boats in the small fleet slowed and moved in with it. There were dock crews, servitors and soldiers waiting on the quay.

  Mkoll heard chattering. It was in his head, a constant hissing, like a thousand soft whispers.

  Olort looked at him, noticing his reaction.

  ‘He speaks to us all,’ he said, ‘to all and to every.’

  Mkoll grimaced slightly. The psionic background drone would take some getting used to. It felt like fingernails scratching at his eardrums and the lining of his sinuses.

  He was here. Close by.

  They were moving in to dock. At the prow of the boat, men were standing ready to catch and throw the mooring lines.

  ‘I don’t know how you expect to–’ Olort began.

  ‘You have urgent business to attend to, damogaur,’ Mkoll replied.

  ‘Business?’ asked Olort.

  ‘Reports. Statements of deployment. You’ll be inventive. We’ll move directly through the crowd and get in.’

  Olort sighed. He looked at Mkoll with an almost kindly smile.

  ‘This is the end. You realise that? Whatever plans you were nursing, they end here. You have delivered yourself. Your own choice. You are here and this is it. There is no escape, and no opportunity for any course of action except surrender.’

  Mkoll didn’t reply.

  ‘Come,’ said Olort. ‘Submit now. I’ll take you in directly, and deliver you. It’ll be a feather in my cap, but it will make things easier for you. I’ll see to that. We have an understanding, don’t we? You’ve spared me. I’ll spare you.’

  ‘Spare me?’

  ‘Spare you the worst. You’re a trophy. You have value, and for that reason, you will be treated with care.’

  ‘And accept induction?’

  ‘If you choose so. I appreciate you may not be able to bring yourself to that. But you are enkil vahakan, Ghost. Special status will be afforded you.’

  Mkoll looked at him.

  ‘Give me the blade,’ said Olort.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re a prisoner already,’ said Olort. He shrugged. ‘Look around. You have entered the heart of us. You have placed yourself in our bastion and in our midst. Your identity will not remain hidden for long. There is no escape. Give me the knife, and I will make things go as well for you as they can.’

  The agriboat rocked against the quayside, grinding against the sacking bumpers. Men shouted instructions, hauled on cables, and jumped the gap to tie up. The boat’s engines coughed into reverse.

  ‘You have urgent business to attend to,’ Mkoll said.

  Olort’s face fell. ‘A knife at my back? You think that will get you in here? That will keep you alive?’

  ‘It’s worked so far.’

  ‘I am but one life–’

  ‘But you don’t want to lose it. I’m sure you would die in the name of your lord. Cry out, and bring them all down on my throat. But you want to live, damogaur. You’d rather live. I see that in you. You see purpose and personal glory in this, and all the while that chance exists, you’ll keep your mouth shut. So… you and your sirdar have urgent business to attend to.’

  The agriboat had scraped to a halt, and sat rocking. The troops aboard began to clamber out, passing up packs and folded support weapons, and reaching out for proffered hands. Packsons barked orders and got the shackled prisoners on their feet.

  Mkoll let Olort feel the solidity of the blade at the base of his spine.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he whispered.

  Olort moved forwards.

  ‘Make way here!’ he called. ‘I have urgent business to attend to!’

  They made their way along the pier, and Mkoll stayed close to the damogaur. The whole structure had a cake of algae on it, hard-set from years of growth. It was pink, purple and ochre. The crowds were tight. At every side, packsons stood in loose groups, some resting, some swapping stories. A few had knelt down in what little space was available to offer prayers and observations. Sekkite officers and grotesque excubitors moved through the masses, marshalling the arrivals, and despatching them in ragged columns up the wharf to holding areas. Gangs of prisoners were being led away. Mkoll counted more than sixty captured men unloaded from the boats. How many more had already been brought to their doom?

  The great horns roared above them. A cargo-lifter skimmed by, its shadow flickering in the searchlight beams.

  ‘Keep moving,’ Mkoll whispered.

  A sirdar with a data-slate approached them. He threw a cursory salute to Olort with a quick hand to his mouth, a reflex gesture that to Mkoll had begun to read as blowing a kiss. The Tanith found the cultural mis-connect of the gesture unsettling. The sirdar and Olort exchanged a few words. The enemy tongue was fast and hard to follow, but Mkoll heard the phrase ‘urgent business’ more than once. The sirdar nodded, and pointed in the direction of the stilted buildings overhanging the wharf.

  The scratching whispers in Mkoll’s skull continued.

  From the rail of the dock, he saw a rockcrete foreshore where Sons of Sek with flamer packs were torching piles of what looked like undergrowth. Thick clouds of black smoke billowed from the burning heaps. The smell was pungent and sweet.

  ‘What are they doing?’ Mkoll asked.

  Olort answered, using a word Mkoll didn’t know. There was no time to question further. They crossed a busy yard and entered the nearest building.

  The place was old. Lumen-globe lamps hung from chains anchored to the ceiling. It was part modular build and partly carved from the rock wall. Industrial meltas had been used to fuse the rock and modular plate together. The hallway space was big, and echoed with voices and the tramp of feet.

  The walls of the hallway were lined with engravings, tall and narrow. The place, Mkoll guessed, had been a centre of clave administration. The engravings displayed the Urdeshi loyalty to Terra in the form of images of the God-Emperor, but they reflected the interests of Urdesh. Here was the Emperor in the aspect of a sea god, coiling with scaled tentacles, and here he rose from the Urdeshi deeps in a vast bloom of algae. On another panel, he was festooned with weapon-pods, triumphing the product of the forge’s war-foundries. On another, he was so augmeticised with cyber implants he resembled a Titan war engine with a single, human eye. Slogans had been daubed in yellow paint under each image, utterances of the Archenemy. But the images themselves had not been defaced.

  ‘Why have these not been torn down?’ Mkoll asked Olort.

  Olort seemed surprised. ‘They show him as he is,’ he replied. ‘Why would we break those?’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘The Urdeshi know the deeper truths,’ said Olort. ‘They are kin to us. They understand the fluidity. You cannot stand upon a border line for generations and not see both sides.’

  Olort glanced up at one of the images. ‘See him there, not as a false emperor surrounded by saints. He is shown as the machine, as the mutation, a force of war. He has always been a creature of the deep warp, warped like us. You know him only as you want to see him.’

  Olort made a gesture of respect to the engravings.

  ‘You worship him?’ Mkoll asked.

  ‘Nen, we respect,’ replied Olort.
‘He is no god, nor is he an emperor. But a prophet? Kha. Yes. He has seen the enlightenments of the Eight Powers and witnessed the truth of the warp. Ghost, your kind… they follow blindly. They see what they want to see. The Holy Lord, blessed of all, defying the darkness. But he stands in the darkness, beyond the curtain of death, fed by the warp and changed by it. He is a brother to us, a brother we must sadly fight to subdue until he renounces his insurrection.’

  Olort looked at him.

  ‘You know nothing of this?’ he asked.

  ‘It makes no sense.’

  ‘This is because of your breeding. The indoctrination of your heretical culture. Do you… not know why we fight?’

  ‘You fight to annihilate.’

  Olort shook his head sadly.

  ‘You are a man of war, Ghost,’ he said. ‘You have spent your whole life, I’d wager, serving your Throne in the field of battle. And you have never stopped to wonder what those you fight believe in? What our cause is?’

  Mkoll didn’t reply.

  ‘We fight to bring you back,’ said Olort. ‘We fight to break your mindset and your blind beliefs. To make you see the truth and embrace it. Your prophet-lord has seen it, but he can no longer speak it, so your kind, they fight on according to ancient decrees and fossilised laws, things you believe are what he would have wanted. He is of us, and will be welcomed back to our bosom on such day as his followers finally lay down their swords and accept the warp-truth. Your faith in a man that was never a god has blinded you for ten millennia.’

  ‘No,’ said Mkoll simply.

  ‘This is the way of it,’ replied Olort. ‘You think we are the darkness. But you are the darkness. Your ignorance is a shadow on your eyes and a fog in your mind. We fight to deliver you from that. We fight, Ghost, to save you.’

  They moved on past administrative chambers where rubricators worked at cogitation systems, then out across a suspended walkway towards another stacked complex of cliff-side buildings.

  ‘You know this place?’ Mkoll asked.

  Olort nodded.

  ‘You’ve been here before?’

  ‘Twice, not for long.’

  ‘I want to find… information,’ said Mkoll. ‘Data on layout. Personnel locations. Those chambers back there–’

  Olort shook his head.

  ‘Just the old processing centres of the Urdesh dynasts,’ he replied.

  ‘There were people at work. Using the cogitators–’

  ‘They have finished stripping out the memory cores of the dynastic claves. A gathering of intelligence. Now those machines are simply being used to compose and circulate our litanies.’

  ‘Then, assuming your life depended on it–’ said Mkoll.

  ‘Which I know it does,’ Olort replied with some sarcasm.

  ‘Where would you go?’

  Olort pointed to the structures that lay ahead of them. ‘The record rooms,’ he said. ‘There we collate deployment details and pack data by hand. Machines cannot be trusted on this world.’

  ‘Lead me.’

  ‘What do you seek, Ghost? Do you cherish some plan, some great scheme, whereby a lone man with a knife can bring down this host? How long will you persist in such fantasies?’

  ‘Lead me. I know what I’m looking for. And to answer your question, until my life is over. The Emperor protects.’

  ‘Not here he doesn’t,’ said Olort. He shrugged. ‘Come, then.’

  They began to cross the walkway. Below, the water of a dock inlet gleamed like a rainbow where the floodlights caught the scum of spilled promethium lapping the surface.

  Packsons were coming the other way, hefting metal barrows laden with dead vegetation. More fodder for the bonfires on the rockcrete strand. As they passed, Mkoll saw what the vegetation was.

  Islumbine. It had been torn up in great quantities, leaf, flower, stem and root.

  ‘They’re taking it to burn it?’ Mkoll asked as the soldiers with the barrows moved past.

  ‘I told you this.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It is vergoht,’ Olort replied, using the unknown word again. ‘The flower of your Saint. It never grew here, not on Urdesh. It was not…’

  He hesitated, trying to find the correct word.

  ‘Native?’ asked Mkoll.

  Olort nodded. ‘Yet now it grows everywhere,’ he said. ‘Like weed. We cut it and it grows again. So we cut it and burn it.’

  ‘Why bother?’

  ‘Because it is her flower,’ Olort said. ‘It is a holy aspect of her heresy. We must purge it, for while it grows and flourishes, it means she is here.’

  ‘Sir?’ Oysten called. She held out the headphones of her vox-set.

  Rawne sniffed and trudged back to her, tugging his collar up against the incessant rain. He was soaked to the balls and his mood was foul. From down the wet, rubble-strewn street came sounds of sporadic gunfire. He hoped there’d be some killing left to do when he got there. He needed to take his mood out on something.

  He took the headset and pulled it on.

  ‘Rawne,’ he said. He looked at Oysten, who nodded. ‘Link is secure,’ he continued. ‘Speak.’

  The signal chattered and whined. A burst of static. Then a voice broke through.

  ‘–do you copy? Repeat, Colonel Rawne–’

  ‘Daur? That you?’

  ‘Affirmative, sir. This link is bad.’

  ‘Agreed. The weather. Tell me you’ve raised me to give a withdraw notice.’

  ‘Negative, sir. Sorry. I have new orders for you.’

  ‘I’ve just had new orders, Daur, from some arsewipe in Grizmund’s brigade. I don’t know what the feth is going on, but we’re locked in grunt work, street cleaning, and–’

  ‘These orders are direct from the Lord Executor, and they supersede all others.’

  Rawne wiped his mouth.

  ‘Why isn’t he talking to me himself?’ he asked.

  ‘Don’t be an arse. Because he’s the Lord Executor and he’s got shit on his plate. This is vital work, Rawne. I’m going to brief you, so get ready.’

  ‘Stand by,’ replied Rawne, waving a hand distractedly at Oysten. She jumped up and passed him a data-slate and stylus.

  ‘All right,’ said Rawne. ‘Go.’

  ‘First point. The Tanith First is now cleared at vermilion level. Copy that?’

  ‘I heard.’

  ‘Gaunt orders you to withdraw from the Old Town district, effective immediately. Pull everybody. Commandeer transports if you have to. Leave any wounded at field stations, or have them shipped to the palace.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘You have two targets, both inside Eltath limits. Orders are to secure both locations. Both are classified. Location one…’

  Rawne wrote the details down on the slate in company code, then read them back to make sure there were no mistakes.

  ‘Secure both sites,’ Daur said over the link. ‘The stones are at site one. Send the main force there. The pheguth is at site two. Smaller, mobile force there. Gaunt thought you’d want to handle that one yourself.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘You’ve got that clear?’

  ‘I have. What’s this shit about?’

  ‘I don’t know the half of it myself,’ Daur replied. ‘But this is direct from the top, coded special task deployment. I’m advising you to keep this to yourselves. You have waiver authority to pass where you need to pass, but don’t discuss the details with any other units.’

  ‘Are we compromised, Daur?’

  ‘We don’t know anything, Rawne. Situation is fluid. But this is special task deployment. Gaunt needs men he can trust to perform this, and you’re the only ones in reach.’

  There was a long pause. The rain pattered down.

  ‘The only ones period,’ Daur add
ed. ‘This is on us. The Ghosts are now a discretionary unit operating at the Lord Executor’s personal instruction.’

  ‘So… outside the Guard command structure?’

  ‘For the duration. Those two locations carry the highest confidence ratings. Update on this channel as you can. And don’t feth it up.’

  Rawne cleared his throat.

  ‘How deep are we in this, Ban?’ he asked.

  ‘Assume it’s the end of the world and your arse is on fire, then act accordingly,’ said Daur. ‘The Emperor protects–’

  ‘Feth he does. Rawne out.’

  Rawne stood for a moment reading back over the notes he’d made. Then he took off the headset and tossed it back to Oysten, who caught it neatly.

  ‘You weren’t planning on living forever were you?’ Rawne asked her.

  ‘Sir?’ his adjutant replied, puzzled.

  ‘Skip it. Call the Ghosts in. All of them. Disengage and fall back to my marker. Now.’

  Daur handed his headset back to Beltayn. Rain was lashing against the tall windows of the palace and the overhead lamps were flickering slightly, as if damp had got into the wiring.

  ‘They’re despatched,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll inform the Lord Executor,’ Beltayn replied.

  ‘That’ll have to wait,’ said Hark.

  They turned to look at him.

  ‘He’s got a greeting to make,’ said Hark.

  Gaunt led his small honour guard into the reception chamber. It was one of the finest rooms of the palace, its floor tiled, its pillars and cornices gilded. Mythical beasts of the ancient Cyberzoic Era ran rampant across the immense ceiling fresco, surrounding a luminous image of the God-Emperor, who they seemed to regard with a mix of appetite and dread. The God-Emperor looked down, sword raised, one mailed foot resting on the head of a vanquished and pliant cockatrice.

  Rows of company and brigade banners had been brought into the hall and set up along its length specifically for this moment. Many were still damp and dripping. At the far end, a large hydraulic hatch had been opened, allowing for a view out onto the exterior landing platform. Gaunt could feel the wind blowing down the length of the hall, and see the veil of heavy rain outside.

  He advanced. In step behind him were Kolea, Grae, Inquisitor Laksheema and the Tempestus squad.