He slowed as he felt the ground beginning to shake.
The wall ahead disintegrated in a shower of stone and dust. The woe machine revealed itself, a floating octahedron of grating, sliding blades locked around an inner glow.
It came towards them slowly, shrieking its metal-on-metal cry.
Three of the Urdeshi dropped their weapons and fled.
‘Line! Line!’ Gaunt yelled.
‘Keep that line!’ Baskevyl bawled at the Urdeshi. The troops formed up, clattering their weapons to their shoulders, aiming.
‘Grenades ready!’ Gaunt yelled.
He heard the troopers slot and lock their under-barrel launchers.
‘Hold!’ Gaunt ordered.
The woe machine purred closer. The blades at the tip of its form began to spin and open out, blooming like a barbed flower, yellow light shining out of it.
‘Dalin!’ Gaunt called out. He hoped there’d be a response, some vestigial flicker of recognition as there had been before.
But he doubted it.
And none came. The wailing note simply began to rise into a squeal of wet fingers on glass.
‘Commence fire!’ Gaunt ordered. Eyes narrowed, he began to blast at the cloud of whirling blades with his bolt pistol. Either side of him, the Urdeshi opened up, training rapid, accurate fire from their lasrifles. Baskevyl ripped bursts of full auto from his own rifle, and Grae blazed with his service pistol. Blenner, a few steps behind him, stood empty-handed, gazing at the advancing horror.
The sustained fire flickered and danced across the woe machine: the fiery bursts of Gaunt’s heavy shots, the flash and spark of the assault weapon barrage. Spinning black blades shattered, and were instantly replaced.
The woe machine started to spit blades. The razored darts pulsed from its rotating central mass almost silently. An Urdeshi screamed and dropped, a blade skewering his thigh. Another toppled back with a blade transfixing his head. Grae grunted and slammed against the wall, a leaf of black metal embedded in his shoulder. Gaunt felt one slice through the meat of his upper arm as it whizzed past. He put three more bolt-rounds into the thing’s cycling maw.
‘Fall back, slow!’ Gaunt ordered. ‘Draw it this way! Maintain fire!’
They took a step back, then two, weapons blazing. The woe machine stirred forwards. In unison, all the blades on the front half of its form scissored around to point at them. It was about to loose them en masse in a pelting hail of knives that would murder the entire squad line.
Gaunt saw figures moving behind the woe machine at the far end of the hall. He heard a firm, clear voice calling for squad discipline.
Van Voytz. Kazader. A damn company of Urdesh Heavy Infantry. Storm troops. The notorious 17th.
Gaunt’s micro-bead crackled.
‘Get your arses out of the line of fire if you please, Lord Executor,’ Van Voytz said.
‘Cover, now!’ Gaunt yelled. His men scattered, heading for doorways and side rooms. Two of them dragged the trooper with the skewered leg clear. Baskevyl had to grab Blenner and almost lift him out of the way.
The storm troops began their blitz. Their methods were not subtle. Hellgun fire. Rotator cannons. Support las on man-portable rigs. The heavily armoured shock troops advanced down the long hall, demolishing the floor, the ceiling, the plasterwork, the panelling; pinning the woe machine in a kill-storm of destruction, a focused barrage that had seen the 17th drive through Archenemy lines, fortified positions, and even light armour opposition.
Churning black blades broke and shattered. The light inside the woe machine flickered, straining. It recoiled, stung hard, and with one rushing clatter, the sound of a thousand swords being drawn at once, it switched the angle of all its blades to face the steadily advancing Urdeshi.
‘Heard you needed some support,’ Gaunt heard Van Voytz chuckle over the link.
‘Appreciated, lord general,’ he replied.
‘Down payment on my debt, Bram,’ said Van Voytz. ‘For Jago–’
‘Just kill it, Barthol,’ said Gaunt.
The woe machine began to spur forwards to meet the oncoming storm troops. The Urdeshi didn’t waver. One step after another, resolute, they marched at it, burning through their ammunition to blow it apart.
‘Grenades!’ Gaunt called out. ‘Give it grenades while its focus is drawn!’
Grae’s Urdeshi Light swung out of their meagre cover. Their under-barrel launchers popped with hollow thumps. Krak grenades, arced in with practised skill, dropped on and around the Heritor’s weapon.
The blasts came rapidly, an overlapping ripple of hard concussions. Troopers at both ends of the long hall rocked back as the shockwaves pummelled them. A cluster of fireballs pounded through the space occupied by the woe machine, choking the hall with surging flames.
The woe machine shrieked. Its geometric rotations disintegrated, cohesion lost. Blades whirled out of alignment, crossing, colliding, snapping against one another.
The pattern broke. Black metal fragments spun out of the fire-wash like the vanes of a rupturing turbine engine. Stray blades augured into the walls, the floor and straight up into the ceiling. Most stuck fast, buried like arrows in the stone.
The woe machine had become unwound, thrown apart by its own cycling motion.
‘Again!’ Gaunt yelled. The Urdeshi around him re-slotted and locked. They raised their weapons to fire and deliver extinction.
But the woe machine was not dead. Its circling ribbon of blades, some broken or chipped, rose out of the flames in a strained and elongated figure-eight noose, looping out wide like a thrown lasso.
It was enraged. It was hurt. It wanted to flee.
It took the shortest route.
It went through the storm troops.
Baskevyl gazed in horror as the armoured men began to drop. Like wooden skittles slammed down in one strike, they rocked and fell, every one of them cut through a dozen times. Blood squirted from deep, scalpel-clean wounds, or poured out between the joints of their ballistic plate.
Screaming, its circling blades wide-spaced and overtaxed, the woe machine cut a hole through the end of the long hall and vanished.
Gaunt, Baskevyl and some of Grae’s Urdeshi hurried through the long stretch of scorched and burning devastation to reach the 17th’s half of the hall.
The storm troops lay in a carpet of bodies across the wide floor. Few of them were intact. Gaunt stepped over severed limbs and heavy weapons cut cleanly in two. There was blood underfoot, a broad pool of it, and speckles of blood-spatter covered the white-washed walls on either side.
Kazader was dead, his left arm split at the wrist and bicep. Half of his face was simply missing.
Van Voytz was still alive when Gaunt reached him.
He was on his back, staring at the ceiling. Gaunt could see his wounds were not survivable. Van Voytz was aspirating blood, bright red drops that dappled his cheeks and chin like a freckled birth mark.
Gaunt knelt down.
‘Barthol–’
Van Voytz blinked, unable to focus. He groaned, blood gurgling in his throat like phlegm.
‘Am I dead, Bram?’ he mumbled.
‘You are, my lord.’
‘Well… shit,’ Van Voytz said, his voice drowning and bubbling. ‘That’s payment in full, then. Eh? Blood for blood.’
‘Stay still, Barthol. We’ll fetch a chaplain. An ayatani or–’
‘I don’t need absolution, Gaunt,’ Van Voytz gurgled. He was still staring blindly at the ceiling. ‘Made my peace, long since. Just loyalty to prove, if late in the day.’
‘You had nothing to prove, lord general.’
‘Hnh. Late in the day. Always so dark at this hour. I knew, when it came for me, it would come in the slow hours–’
A slackness softened his face and body, the rigidity of pain released by the oblivion.