‘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.