It was a less precise art. Teams of philia metallurgists and wiresmiths might take months or even years to properly machine the metal chassis of a wirewolf to perfection, inscribing it with the most precise runes and sigils, forging it just-so, so that it could best house the spirit it was designed to capture and harness.
Even with a sharp rite knife, a human body could not be modified so cleanly, especially not at short notice. As a vessel for the burning light of the High Powers, flesh was far too perishable compared to metal, even when the flesh was as devoted as Shorb’s. A wirewolf might last forty or perhaps even fifty minutes before burning out. Eyl had never seen a blood wolf last longer than sixteen.
The blood wolf was a one-use weapon, a flash-bang. It would burn Eyl’s beloved Shorb out and leave him nothing more than charred meat. The trick with a weapon like a blood wolf was to use it fast, and to use it well.
The trick was to use it for maximum effect.
Shorb had become a keening ghost. He was an energised, trembling shape, a shape that had once been a man, leaping and bounding, laughing and surging, like voltage freed from a shorting cable.
As Eyl hefted up his weapon and followed Shorb and the philia in through the gate, he knew that the blood wolf had little more than a few minutes left in it.
They would have to count.
An Imperial Guardsman ran towards Eyl through the hesitating snow, bewildered, his rifle half-raised.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded.
Eyl lifted his autorifle, and evacuated the Guardsman’s braincase in a brief, but considerable, pink shower.
‘We’ve come for the traitor,’ Eyl told the corpse steaming on the snow as he stepped over it.
The men of the philia spread out into the courtyards as they came through the gate. They moved firmly, with a purpose, passing over the bodies and bloodstains of the Imperials. They were wearing their grotesks, so their iron faces were frozen in silent howls and malign sneers. Their shooting was sporadic: a crackle of gunfire here or there whenever a target presented itself. Munitions were not unlimited. Imperial soldiers were mown from the wall tops and smashed off access staircases. Imrie, brandishing a heavy autorifle that was older than all the men of the philia put together, shot one of their few rifle grenades up through the slot of the guard tower behind the gate. The blast jolted the tower and squirted smoke out through its seams and gaps.
A siren started to wail. A few of the Imperials gathered their wits enough to begin returning fire. Las-bolts cracked and whined across the snowy yards. Three Imperials armed with carbines had grouped inside the entrance of the administration wing, and were shooting towards the gatehouse. Gnesh moved past Eyl, striding with insouciant ease like a man on a recreational stroll. He was the biggest man in the philia, tall and broad-backed, with a lumberhand’s shoulders, and a neck as wide as the skull that sat on it. He had taken the bipod off a heavy lasgun, and cinched the weapon over his right shoulder on a long strap so that he could shoot it from the hip. The chest-pumping pop of each discharge threw a javelin of light out through the smoke and the snow. Gnesh casually aimed at the administration wing. His shots punched a series of deep holes along the facing wall until they found the entrance and wrought catastrophic damage on the three Imperials. Then he aimed a couple more shots into the architrave, and collapsed the entrance onto their smouldering bodies.
Led by Kaylb Sirdar, the first element of the philia had reached the lobby of the main building. The blood wolf had already come through, and the wide marble floor was covered with a crust of glass from the doors, the chandeliers and the hoods of the glow-globes. Kaylb swung his element to the left, and headed towards where the witch had said the secure stairwells were located. An Imperial trooper and a man in a commissar’s long coat tried to fend them off, firing from the cover of some broken furniture. Kaylb killed them both. There was no time to waste, but Kaylb paused for long enough to read the marks their blood had made on the floor and walls. The prognostications were good.
Karhunan brought the second element into the main building through a large, side entrance that Imperial staff called the catering door. It had once given vittallers and suppliers access to the kitchens, in the days when Section had been a private residence. The old kitchens and larders had become a despatch office, a vox station, and a workroom for intelligencers, with access to the principal briefing chambers and the map room. Karhunan’s force met fierce resistance from a group of company officers and commissars who had been meeting in the workroom. Shouting for support, the Imperial men held the main hallway, armed only with the pistols and dress weapons they had been carrying that day. Behind them, groups of unarmed or non-combatant staff fled deeper into the building, away from the assault.
Malstrom took a light wound, the first injury suffered by the philia, but righted himself quickly. He ducked into the hastily abandoned despatch room to evade the determined small arms fire. Las-shots and hard rounds from the Imperial officers pinged and cracked off the inside of the catering door archway.
Karhunan heard Malstrom laugh.
‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What’s so amusing?’
Malstrom reappeared in the doorway of the despatch room. As one of the building’s watch points, the room had been supplied with an emergency weapons locker. Malstrom had smashed the lock with the butt of his carbine.
‘It’s as if the enemy is on our side,’ he told his sirdar. ‘They leave toys for us to play with.’
Malstrom had swung his carbine over his shoulder so that he could slap a shell into the clean, polished grenade launcher that he’d taken from the box.
‘Brace!’ Karhunan bellowed to the other men.
Malstrom leaned out of the doorway and fired the launcher. The fat grenade spat up the hallway, arcing high, smashed off a ceiling light, and began to tumble on its downwards path before detonating. The blast sent a scratchy, concussive clap of smoke and hard air up the hall.
‘Again?’ Malstrom growled. He had a satchel full of shells.
‘Do it again,’ Karhunan agreed.
Malstrom broke the fuming launcher on its hinge, and slapped a second grenade home. He clacked the stocky weapon shut with a snap of his wrist, and fired again.
Again, hard, hot air rasped back down the space. There was grit in it, pieces of glass and chips of stone, and it rattled down like hail.
The Imperials were broken. As the element advanced through the smoke, they found most of them dead, blackened and raw from the blasts. A few, deaf and blind, were convulsing or struggling feebly on their hands and knees. Karhunan and his men put a shot through the head of anyone still moving.
One of the commissars had got clear, dragging an injured colleague with him. When he saw Karhunan emerging through the smoke, he started to spit curses at him. He was yelling like an animal, fuelled by fear and hate. He let the colleague he was dragging flop to the floor, and brought up his pistol.
The gun barked twice. Karhunen felt the double impact, one hit right after the other, striking his right shoulder and the right-hand side of his mask. The collision turned him, twisting his body. Pain seared through his shoulder. His head was wrenched violently to the right. One round had gone through the meat of his shoulder, the other had glanced off the brow-ridge of his iron grotesk. The mask had smashed back into his face, breaking his cheek bone and tearing his lip across his upper teeth. Hot blood filled his mouth.
Karhunan smiled. He lifted his carbine and fired a burst on auto. The commissar jerked backwards, as if he’d been snatched off his feet by a sharp yank on a rope. He bounced off the wall behind him, and landed on his face.