PART FIVE

THE EMPYREAN

One

GAUNT HAD BEEN talking to Fereyd. They had sat by a fueldrum fire in the splintered shadows of a residence in the demilitarised zone of Pashen Nine-Sixty’s largest city. Fer-eyd was disguised as a farm boss, in the thick, red-wool robes common to many on Pashen, and he was talking obliquely about spy work, just the sort of half-complete, enticing remarks he liked to tease his commissar friend with. An unlikely pair, the commissar and the Imperial spy; one tall and lean and blond, the other compact and dark. Thrown together by the circumstances of combat, they were bonded and loyal despite the differences of their backgrounds and duties.

Fereyd’s intelligence unit, working the city-farms of Pashen in deep cover, had revealed the foul Chaos cult – and the heretic Navy officers in their thrall. A disastrous fleet action, brought in too hastily in response to Fereyd’s discovery, had led to open war on the planet itself and the deployment of the Guard. Chance had led Gaunt’s Hyrkans to the raid which had rescued Fereyd from the hands of the Pashen traitors. Together, Gaunt and Fereyd had unveiled and executed the Traitor Baron Sylag.

They were talking about loyalty and treachery, and Fer-eyd was saying how the vigilance of the Emperor’s spy networks was the only thing that kept the private ambitions of various senior officers in check. But it was difficult for Gaunt to follow Fereyd’s words because his face kept changing. Sometimes he was Oktar, and then, in the flame-light, his face would become that of Dercius or Gaunt’s father.

With a grunt, Gaunt realised he was dreaming, bade his friend goodbye and, dissatisfied, he awoke.

The air was unpleasantly stuffy and stale. His room was small, with a low, curved ceiling and inset lighting plates that he had turned down to their lowest setting before retiring. He got up and pulled on his clothes, scattered where he had left them: breeches, dress shirt, boots, a short leather field-jacket with a high collar embossed with interlocked Imperial eagles. Firearm-screening fields meant there was no bolt pistol in his holster on the door hook, but he took his Tanith knife.

He opened the door-hatch and stepped out into the long, dark space of the companionway. The air here was hot and stifling too, but it moved, wafted by the circulation systems under the black metal grille of the floor.

A walk would do him good.

It was night cycle, and the deck lamps were low. There was the ever-present murmur of the vast power plants and the resulting micro-vibration in every metal surface, even the air itself.

Gaunt walked for fifteen minutes or more in the silent passageways of the great structure, meeting no one. At a confluence of passageways, he entered the main spinal lift and keyed his pass-code into the rune-pad on the wall. There was an electronic moan as cycles set, and a three-second chant sung by non-human throats to signal the start of the lift. The indicator light flicked slowly up twenty bas-relief glass runes on the polished brass board.

Another burst of that soft artificial choir. The doors opened.

Gaunt stepped out into the Glass Bay. A dome of transparent, hyper-dense silica a hundred metres in radius, it was the most serene place the structure offered. Beyond the glass, a magnificent, troubling vista swirled, filtered by special dampening fields. Darkness, striated light, blistering strands and filaments of colours he wasn’t sure he could put a name to, bands of light and dark shifting past at an inhuman rate.

The Empyrean. Warp space. The dimension beyond reality through which this structure, the Mass Cargo Conveyance Absalom, now moved.

He had first seen the Absalom through the thick, tinted ports of the shuttle that had brought him up to meet it in orbit. He was in awe of it. One of the ancient transport-ships of the Adeptus Mechanicus, a veteran vessel. The Tech-Lords of Mars had sent a massive retinue to aid the disaster at Fortis, and now in gratitude for the liberation they subordinated their vessels to the Imperial Guard. It was an honour to travel on the Absalom, Gaunt well knew. To be conveyed by the mysterious, secret carriers of the God-Machine cult.

From the shuttle, he’d seen sixteen solid kilometres of grey architecture, like a raked, streamlined cathedral, with the tiny lights of the troop transports flickering in and out of its open belly-mouth. The crenellated surfaces and towers of the mighty Mechanicus ship were rich with bas-relief gargoyles, out of whose wide, fanged mouths the turrets of the sentry guns traversed and swung. Green interior light shone from the thousands of slit windows. The pilot tug, obese and blackened with the scorch marks of its multiple attitude thrusters, bellied in the slow solar tides ahead of the transport vessel.

Gaunt’s flagship, the great frigate Navarre, had been seconded for picket duties to the Nubila Reach so Gaunt had chosen to travel with his men on the Absalom. He missed the long, sleek, waspish lines of the Navarre, and he missed the crew, especially Executive Officer Kreff, who had tried so hard to accommodate the commissar and his unruly men.

The Absalom was a different breed of beast, a behemoth. Its echoing bulk capacity allowed it to carry nine full regiments, including the Tanith, four divisions of the Jantine Patricians, and at least three mechanised battalions, including their many tanks and armoured transport vehicles.

Fat lift ships had hefted the numerous war machines up into the hold from the depots on Pyrites.

Now they were en route – a six-day jump to a cluster of war-worlds called the Menazoid Clasp, the next defined line of battle in the Sabbat Worlds campaign. Gaunt hoped for deployment with the Ghosts into the main assault on Menazoid Sigma, the capital planet, where a large force of Chaos was holding the line against a heavy Imperial advance.

But there was also Menazoid Epsilon, the remote, dark deathworld at the edge of the Clasp. Gaunt knew that War-master Macaroth’s planning staff were assessing the impact of that world. He knew some regimental units would be deployed to take it.

No one wanted Epsilon. No one wanted to die.

He looked up into the festering, fluctuating light of the Empyrean beyond the glass and uttered a silent prayer to the Most Blessed Emperor: spare us from Epsilon.

Other, even gloomier thoughts clouded his mind. Like the infernal, invaluable crystal that had come into his hands on Pyrites. Its very presence, its unlockable secret, burned in the back of his mind like a melta-gun wound. No further word had come from Fereyd, no signal, not even a hint of what was expected of him. Was he to be a courier – and if so, for how long? How would he know who to trust the precious jewel to when the time came? Was something else wanted from him? Had some further, vital instruction failed to reach him? Their long friendship aside, Gaunt cursed the memory of Fereyd. This kind of complication was unwelcome on top of the demands of his commissarial duties.

He resolved to guard the crystal. Carry it, until Fereyd told him otherwise. But still, he fretted that the matter was of the highest importance, and time was somehow slipping away.

He crossed to the knurled rail at the edge of the bay and leaned heavily on it. The enormity of the warp shuffled and spasmed in front of him, milky tendrils of proto-matter licking like ribbons of fluid mist against the outside of the glass. The Glass Bay was one of three Immaterium Observatories on the Absalom, allowing the navigators and the clerics of the Astrographicus Division visual access to the void around. In the centre of the bay’s deck, on a vast platform mechanism of oiled cogs and toothed gears, giant sensorium scopes, aura-imagifiers and luminosity evaluators cycled and turned, regarding the maelstrom, charting, cogitating, assessing and transmitting the assembled data via chattering relays and humming crystal stacks to the main bridge eight kilometres away at the top of the Absalom’s tallest command spire.

The observatories were not forbidden areas, but their spaces were not recommended for those new to space crossings. It was said that if the glass wasn’t shielded, the view could derange and twist the minds of even hardened astrographers. The elevator’s choral chime had been intended to warn Gaunt of this. But he had seen the Empyrean before, countless times on his voyages. It no longer scared him. And, filtered in this way, he found the fluctuations of the warp somehow easeful, as if its cataclysmic turmoil allowed his own mind to rest. He could think here.

Around the edge of the dome, the names of militant commanders, lord-generals and master admirals were etched into the polished ironwork of the sill in a roll of honour. Under each name was a short legend indicating the theatres of their victories. Some names he knew, from the history texts and the required reading at the schola back on Ignatius. Some, their inscriptions old and faded, were unknown, ten centuries dead. He worked his way around the edge of the dome, reading the plaques. It took him almost half a circuit before he found the name of the one he had actually known personally: Warmaster Slaydo, Macaroth’s predecessor, dead at the infamous triumph of Balhaut in the tenth year of this crusade through the Sab-bat Worlds.

Gaunt glanced around from his study. The elevator doors at the top of the transit shaft hissed open and he caught once more a snatch of the chanted warning chime. A figure stepped onto the deck: a Navy rating, carrying a small instrument kit. The rating looked across at the lone figure by the rail for a moment and then turned away and disappeared from view behind the lift assembly. An inspection patrol, Gaunt decided absently.

He turned back to the inscriptions and read Slaydo’s plaque again. He remembered Balhaut, the firestorms that swept the night away and took the forces of Chaos with it. He and his beloved Hyrkans had been at the centre of it, in the mudlakes, struggling through the brimstone atmosphere under the weight of their heavy rebreathers. Slaydo had taken credit for that famous win, rightly enough as warmaster, but in sweat and blood it had been Gaunt’s. His finest hour, and he had Slaydo’s deathbed decoration to prove it.

He could hear the grind of the enemy assault carriers even now, striding on their long, hydraulic legs through the mud, peppering the air with sharp needle blasts of blood-red light, washing death and fire towards his men. A physical memory of the tension and fatigue ran down his spine, the superhuman effort with which he and his best fire-teams had stormed the Oligarchy Gate ahead of even the glorious forces of the Adeptus Astartes, driving a wedge of las-fire and grenade bursts through the overlapping plates of the enemy’s buttress screens.

He saw Tanhause making his lucky shot, still talked about in the barracks of the Hyrkan: a single las-bolt that penetrated a foul, demented Chaos dreadnought through the visor-slit, detonating the power systems within. He saw Veitch taking six of the foe with his bayonet when his last power cell ran dry.

He saw the Tower of the Plutocrat combust and fall under the sustained Hyrkan fire.

He saw the faces of the unnumbered dead, rising from the mud, from the flames.

He opened his eyes and the visions fled. The Empyrean lashed and blossomed in front of him, unknowable. He was about to turn and return to his quarters.

But there was a blade at his throat.

Two

THERE WAS NO sense of anyone behind him – no shadow, no heat, no sound or smell of breath. It was as if the cold sharpness under his chin had arrived there unaccompanied. He knew at once he was at the mercy of a formidable opponent.

But that alone gave him a flicker of confidence. If the blade’s owner had simply wanted him dead, then he would already be dead and none the wiser. There was something that made him more useful alive. And he was fairly certain what that was.

‘What do you want?’ he asked calmly.

‘No games,’ a voice said from behind him. The tone was low and even, not a whisper but of a level that was somehow softer and lower still. The pressure of the cold blade increased against the skin of his neck fractionally. ‘You are reckoned to be an intelligent man. Dispense with the delaying tactics.’

Gaunt nodded carefully. If he was going to live even a minute more, he had to play this precisely right.

‘This isn’t the way to solve this, Brochuss,’ he said carefully.

There was a pause. ‘What?’

‘Now who’s playing games? I know what this is about. I’m sorry you and your Patrician comrades lost face on Pyrites. Lost a few teeth too, I’ll bet. But this won’t help.’

‘Don’t be a fool! You’ve got this wrong! This isn’t about some stupid regimental rivalry!’

‘I have?’

‘Think hard, fool! Think why this might really be happening! I want you to understand why you are about to die!’ The weight of the blade against his throat shifted slightly. It didn’t lessen its pressure, but there was a momentary alteration in the angle. Gaunt knew his comments had misdirected his adversary for a heartbeat.

His only chance. He struck backwards hard with his right elbow, simultaneously pulling back from the blade and raising his left hand to fend it off. The knife cut through his cuff, but he pulled clear as his assailant reeled from the elbow jab.

Gaunt had barely turned when the other countered, striking high. They fell together, limbs twisting to gain a positive hold. The wayward blade ripped Gaunt’s jacket open down the seam of the left sleeve.

Gaunt forced the centre of balance over and threw a sideways punch with his right fist that knocked his assailant off him. A moment later the commissar was on his feet, drawing the silver Tanith blade from his belt.

He saw his opponent for the first time. The Navy rating, a short, lean man of indeterminate age. There was something strange about him. The way his mouth was set in a determined grimace while his wide eyes seemed to be… pleading? The rating flipped up onto his feet with a scissor of his back and legs, and coiled around in a hunched, offensive posture, the knife held blade-uppermost in his right hand.

How could a deck rating know moves like that? Gaunt worried. The practiced movements, the perfect balance, the silent resolve – all betrayed a specialist killer, an adept at the arts of stealth and assassination. But close up, Gaunt saw the man was just an engineer, his naval uniform a little tight around a belly going to fat. Was it just a disguise? The rank pins, insignia and the coded identity seal mandatory for all crew personnel all seemed real.

The blade was short and leaf-shaped, shorter than the rubberised grip it protruded from. There was a series of geometric holes in the body of the blade itself, reducing the overall weight whilst retaining the structural strength. And it plainly wasn’t metal; it was matte blue, ceramic, invisible to the ship’s weapon-scan fields.

Gaunt stared into the other’s unblinking eyes, searching for recognition or contact. The gaze which met him was a desperate, piteous look, as if from something trapped inside the menacing body.

They circled, slowly. Gaunt kept his body angled and low as he had learned in bayonet drill with the Hyrkans. But he held the Tanith blade loosely in his right hand with the blade descending from the fist and tilted in towards his body. He’d watched the odd style the Ghosts had used in knife drill with interest, and one long week in transit aboard the Navarre, he had got Corbec to train him in the nuances. The method made good use of the weight and length of the Tanith war-knife. He kept his left hand up to block, not with a warding open palm as the Hyrkans had practised (and as his opponent now adopted) but in a fist, knuckles outward. ‘Better to stop a blade with your hand than your throat,’ Tanhause had told him, years before. ‘Better the blade cracks off your knuckles than opens a smile in your palm,’ Corbec had finessed more recently.

‘You want me dead?’ Gaunt hissed.

‘That was not my primary objective. Where is the crystal?’ Gaunt started as the man replied. Though the mouth moved, the voice was not coming from it. The lip movements barely synched with the words. He’d seen that before somewhere, years ago. It looked like… possession. Gaunt bristled as fear ran down his back. More than the fear of mortal combat. The fear of witchcraft. Of psykers.

‘A commissar-colonel won’t be easily missed,’ Gaunt managed.

The rating shrugged stiffly as if to indicate the infinite raging vastness beyond the glass dome. ‘No one is so important he won’t be missed out here. Not even the war-master himself.’

They had circled three times now. ‘Where is the crystal?’ the rating asked again.

‘What crystal?’

‘The one you acquired in Cracia City,’ returned the killer in that floating, unmatched voice. ‘Give it up now, and we can forget this meeting ever took place.’

‘Who sent you?’

‘Nothing in the known systems would make me answer that question.’

‘I have no crystal. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘A lie.’

‘Even if it was, would I be so foolish to carry anything with me?’

‘I’ve searched your quarters twice. It’s not there. You must have it. Did you swallow it? Dissection is not beyond me.’

Gaunt was about to reply when the rating suddenly stamped forward, circling his blade in a sweep that missed the commissar’s shoulder by a hair’s breadth. Gaunt was about to feint and counter when the blade swept back in a reverse of the slice. The touch of a stud on the grip had caused the ceramic blade to retract with a pneumatic hiss and re-extend through the flat pommel of the grip, reversing the angle. The tip sheared through his blocking left forearm and sprayed blood across the deck.

Gaunt leapt backwards with an angry curse, but the rating followed through relentlessly, reversing his blade again so it poked up forward of his punching fist. Gaunt blocked it with an improvised turn of his knife and kicked out at the attacker, catching his left knee with his boot tip.

The man backed off but the circling did not recommence. This was unlike the sparring in bayonet training, the endless measuring and dancing, the occasional clash and jab. The man rallied immediately after each feint, each deflection, and struck in once more, clicking his blade up and down out of the grip to wrong-foot Gaunt, sometimes striking with an upwards blow on the first stroke and thumbing the blade downwards to rake on the return.

Gaunt survived eight, nine, ten potentially lethal passes, thanks only to his speed and the attacker’s unfamiliarity with the curious Tanith blade technique.

They clashed again, and this time Gaunt jabbed not with his knife but with his warding left hand, directly at the man’s weapon. The blade cut a stinging gash in his knuckles, but he slipped in under the knife and grabbed the man by the right wrist. They clenched, Gaunt driving forwards with his superior size and height. The man’s left hand found his throat and clamped it in an iron grip. Gaunt gagged, choking, his vision swimming as his neck muscles fought against the tightening grip.

Desperately, he slammed the man backwards into the guard rail. The rating thumbed his blade catch again and the reversing tongue of ceramic stabbed down into Gaunt’s wrist. In return he plunged his own knife hard through the tricep of the arm holding his throat.

They broke, reeling away from each other, blood spurting from the stab wounds in their arms and hands. Gaunt was panting and short of breath from the pain, but the man made no sound. As if he felt no pain, or as if pain was no hindrance to him.

The rating came at him again, and Gaunt swung low to block, but at the last moment, the man tossed the ceramic blade from his right hand to his left, the blade reversing itself through the grip in mid air so that what had started as an upwards strike from the right turned into a downward stab from the left. The blade dug into the meat of Gaunt’s right shoulder, deadened only by the padding and leather of his jacket. White-hot pain lanced down his right side, crushing his ribs and the breath inside them.

The blade slid free cleanly and blood drizzled after it. The hot warmth was coursing down the inside of his sleeve and slickening his grip on the knife handle. It dripped off his knuckles and the silver blade. If he kept bleeding at that rate, even if he could hold off his assailant, he knew he would not survive much longer.

The rating crossed his guard again, switching hands like a juggler, to the right and then back to the left, reversing the blade direction with each return. He feinted, sliced in low at Gaunt’s belly with a left-hand pass and then pushed himself at the commissar.

Gaunt stabbed in to meet the low cut, and caught the point of his silver blade through one of the perforations in the ceramic blade.

Instinctively, he wrenched his blade back and levered at the point of contact. A second later, the ceramic tech-knife whirled away across the Glass Bay and skittered out of sight over the cold floor. Suddenly disarmed, the rating hesitated for a heartbeat and Gaunt rammed his Tanith knife up and in, puncturing the man’s torso and cracking his sternum.

The rating reeled away sharply, sucking for air as his lungs failed. The silver knife was stuck fast in his chest. Thin blood jetted from the wound and gurgled from his slack mouth. He hit the deck, knees first, then fell flat in his face, his torso propped up like a tent on the hard metal prong of the knife.

Gaunt stumbled back against the rail, gasping hoarsely, his body shaking and burning pain jeering at him. He wiped a bloody hand across his clammy, ashen face and gazed down at the rating’s body as it lay on the floor in a pool of scarlet fluid.

He sank to the deck, trembling and weak. A laugh, half chuckle, half sob broke from him. When next he saw Colm Corbec, he would buy him the biggest–

The rating got up again.

The man wriggled back on his knees, rippling the pool of blood around him, and then swung his body up straight, arms swaying limp at his sides. Kneeling, he slowly turned his head to face the prone, dismayed Gaunt. His face was blank, and his eyes were no longer pleading and trapped. They were gone, in fact. A fierce green light raged inside his skull, making his eyes pupilless slits of lime fire. His mouth lolled open and a similar glow shone out, back-lighting his teeth. With one simple, direct motion, he pulled the Tanith knife out of his chest. There was no more blood, just a shaft of bright green light poking from the wound.

With a sigh of finality, Gaunt knew that the psychic puppetry was continuing. The man, who had been a helpless thrall of the psyker magic when he first attacked, was now reanimated by abominable sorcery.

It would function long enough to win the fight.

It would kill him.

Gaunt battled with his senses to keep awake, to get up, to run. He was blacking out.

The rating swayed towards him, like a zumbay from the old myths of the nondead, eyes shining, expression blank, the Tanith blade that had killed him clutched in his claw of a hand.

The dead thing raised the knife to strike.

Three

TWO LAS-SHOTS slammed it sideways. Another tight pair broke it open along the rib cage, venting an incandescent halo of bright psychic energy. A fifth shot to the head dropped the thing like it had been struck in the ear with a sledgehammer.

Colm Corbec, the laspistol in his hand, stalked across the deck of the Glass Bay and stood looking down at the charred and smouldering shape on the floor, a shape that had self-ignited and was spilling vaporous green energies as it ate itself up.

Somewhere, the weapons interdiction alarm started wailing.

Using the rail for support, Gaunt was almost on his feet again by the time Corbec reached him.

‘Easy there, commissar…’

Gaunt waved him off, aware of the way his blood was still freely dribbling onto the deck.

‘Your timing…’ he grunted, ‘is perfect… colonel.’

Corbec grimly gestured over his shoulder. Gaunt turned to look where he pointed. Brin Milo stood by the elevator assembly, looking flushed and fierce.

‘The lad had a dream,’ Corbec said, refusing to be ignored and looping his arm under his commander’s shoulder. ‘Came to me at once when he couldn’t find you in your quarters.’

Milo crossed to them. ‘The wounds need attention,’ he said.

‘We’ll get him to the apothecarium,’ Corbec began.

‘No,’ Milo said firmly and, despite the pain, Gaunt almost laughed at the sudden authority his junior aide directed at the shaggy brute who was the company commander. ‘Back to our barrack decks. Use our own medics. I don’t think the commissar wants this incident to become a matter for official inquiry.’

Corbec looked at the boy curiously but Gaunt nodded. In his experience, there was no point fighting the boy’s gift for judgement.

Milo never intruded into the commissar’s privacy, but he seemed to understand instinctively Gaunt’s intentions and wishes. Gaunt could not keep secrets from the boy, but he trusted him – and valued his insight beyond measure.

Gaunt looked at Corbec. ‘Brin’s right. There’s more to this… I’ll explain later, but I want the ship hierarchy kept out of it until we know who to trust.’

The weapons alarm continued to sound.

‘In that case, we better get out of here–’ Corbec began.

He was cut off by the elevator shutters gliding open with a breathy hiss and a choral exhalation. Six Imperial Navy troopers in fibre-weave shipboard armour and low-brimmed helmets exited in a pack and dropped to their knees, covering the trio with compact stubguns. One barked curt orders into his helmet vox-link. An officer emerged from the elevator in their wake. Like them, his uniform was emerald with silver piping, the colours of the Segmentum Pacificus Fleet, but he was not armoured like his detail. He was tall, a little overweight and his puffy flesh was unhealthily pale.

A career spacer, thought Corbec. Probably hasn’t stood on real soil in decades.

The officer stared at them: the shaggy Guard miscreant with his unauthorised laspistol; the injured, bloody man leaning against him and bleeding on the deck; the rangy, strange-eyed boy.

He pursed his lips, spoke quietly into his own vox-link and then touched a stud on the facilitator wand he carried, waving it absently into the air around him. The alarm shut off mid-whine.

‘I am Warrant Officer Lekulanzi. It is my responsibility to oversee the security of this vessel on behalf of Lord Captain Grasticus. I take a dim view of illicit weapons on this holy craft, though I always expect Imperial Guard scum to try something. I look with even greater displeasure on the use of said weapons.’

‘Now, this is not how it loo–’ Corbec began, moving forward with a reassuring smile. Six stubgun muzzles swung their attention directly at him. The detail’s weapons were short-line, pump-action models designed for shipboard use.

The glass shards and wire twists wadded into each shell would roar out in a tightly packed cone of micro-shrapnel, entirely capable of shredding a man at close range. But unlike a lasgun or a bolter, there was no danger of them puncturing the outer hull.

‘No hasty movements. No eager explanations.’ Lekulanzi stared at them. ‘Questions will be answered in due time, under the formal process of your interrogation. You are aware that the firing of a prohibited weapon on a transport vessel of the Adeptus Mechanicus is an offence punishable by court martial. Surrender your weapon.’

Corbec handed his laspistol to the trooper who rose smartly to take it from him.

‘This is stupid,’ Gaunt said abruptly. The guns turned their attention to him. ‘Do you know who I am, Lekulanzi?’

The warrant officer tensed as his name was used without formal title. He narrowed his flesh-hooded eyes.

Gaunt hauled himself forward and stood free of Corbec’s support. ‘I am Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt.’

Warrant Officer Lekulanzi froze. Without the coat, the cap, the badges of authority, Gaunt looked like any lowborn Guard officer.

‘Come here,’ Gaunt told him. The man hesitated, then crossed to Gaunt, whispering a low order into his vox-link. The guard detail immediately rose from their knees, snapped to attention and slung their weapons.

‘That’s better…’ Corbec smiled.

Gaunt placed a hand on Lekulanzi’s shoulder, and the officer stiffened with outrage. Gaunt was pointing to something on the deck, a charred, greenish slick or stain, oily and lumpy. ‘Do you know what that is?’

Lekulanzi shook his head.

‘It’s the remains of an assassin who set upon me here. The weapon’s discharge was my First Officer saving my life. I will formally caution him for concealing a firearm aboard, strictly against standing orders.’

Gaunt smiled to see a tiny bead of nervous perspiration begin to streak Lekulanzi’s pallid brow.

‘He was one of yours, Lekulanzi. A rating. But he was in the sway of others, dark forces that beguiled and drove him like a toy. You don’t like illicit weapons on your ship, eh? How about illicit psykers?’

Some of the security troopers muttered and made warding gestures. Lekulanzi stammered. ‘But who… who would want to kill you, sir?’

‘I am a soldier. A successful soldier,’ Gaunt smiled coldly. ‘I make enemies all the time.’

He gestured down at the remains. ‘Have this analysed. Then have it purged. Make sure no foul, unholy taint has touched this precious ship. Report any findings directly to me, no matter how insignificant. Once my wounds have been treated, I will report to Lord Captain Grasticus personally and submit a full account.’

Lekulanzi was lost for words.

With Corbec supporting him, Gaunt left the Glass Bay. At the elevator doors, Lekulanzi caught the hard look in the boy’s eyes. He shuddered.

In the elevator, Milo turned to Gaunt. ‘His eyes were like a snake’s. He is not trustworthy.’

Gaunt nodded. He had changed his mind. Just minutes before, he had reconciled himself to acting as Fereyd’s courier, guardian to the crystal. But now things had changed. He wouldn’t sit by idly waiting. He would act with purpose. He would enter the game, and find out the rules and learn how to win.

And that would mean learning the contents of the crystal.

* * *

Four

‘BEST I CAN DO,’ murmured Dorden, the Ghosts’ chief medic, making a half-hearted gesture around him that implicated the whole of the regimental infirmary. The Ghosts’ infirmary was a suite of three low, corbel-vaulted rooms set as an annex to the barrack deck where the Tanith First were berthed. Its walls and roof were washed with a greenish off-white paint and the hard floors had been lined with scrubbed red stone tiles. On dull steel shelves in bays around the rooms were ranked fat, glass-stoppered bottles with yellowing paper labels, mostly full of treacly fluids, surgical pastes, dried powders and preparations, or organic field-swabs in clear, gluey suspensions. Racks of polished instruments sat in pull-out drawers and plastic waste bags, stale bedding and bandage rolls were packed into low, lidded boxes around the walls that doubled as seats. There was a murky autoclave on a brass trolley, two resuscitrex units with shiny iron paddles, and a side table with an apothecary’s scales, a diagnostic probe and a blood cleanser set on it. The air was musty and rank, and there were dark stains on the flooring.

‘We’re not over-equipped, as you can see,’ Dorden added breezily. He’d patched the commissar’s wounds with supplies from his own field kit, which sat open on one of the bench lockers. He hadn’t trusted the freshness or sterility of any of the materials provided by the infirmary.

Gaunt sat, stripped to the waist, on one of the low brass gurneys which lined the centre of the main chamber, its wheels locked into restraining lugs in the tiled floor. The gurney’s springs squeaked and moaned as Gaunt shifted his weight on the stained, stinking mattress.

Dorden had patched the wound in the commissar’s shoulder with sterile dressings, washed the whole limb in pungent blue sterilising gel and then pinched the mouth of the wound shut with bakelite suture clamps that looked like the heads of biting insects. Gaunt tried to flex his arm.

‘Don’t do that,’ Dorden said quickly. ‘I’d wrap it in false-flesh if I could find any, but besides, the wound should breathe. Honestly, you’d be better off in the main hospital ward.’

Gaunt shook his head. ‘You’ve done a fine job,’ he said. Dorden smiled. He didn’t want to press the commissar on the issue. Corbec had muttered something about keeping this private.

Dorden was a small man, older than most of the Ghosts, with a grey beard and warm eyes. He’d been a doctor on Tanith, running an extended practice through the farms and settlements of Beldane and the forest wilds of County Pryze.

He’d been drafted at the Founding to fulfil the Administratum’s requirements for regimental medical personnel. His wife had died a year before the Founding, his only son a trooper in the ninth platoon. His one daughter, her husband and their first born had perished in the flames of Tanith. He had left nothing behind in the embers of his homeworld except the memory of years of community service, a duty he now carried on for the good of the last men of Tanith.

He refused to carry a weapon, and thus was the only Ghost that Gaunt couldn’t rely on to fight… but Gaunt hardly cared. He had sixty or seventy men in his command who wouldn’t still be there but for Dorden.

‘I’ve checked for venom taint or fibre toxin. You’re lucky. The blade was clean. Cleaner than mine!’ Dorden chuckled and it made Gaunt smile. ‘Unusual…’ Dorden added and fell silent.

Gaunt raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’

‘I understood assassins liked to toxify their blades as insurance.’ Dorden said simply.

‘I never said it was an assassin.’

‘You didn’t have to. I may be a non-combatant. Feth, I may be an old fool, but I didn’t come down in the last barrage.’

‘Don’t trouble yourself with it, Dorden,’ Gaunt said, flexing his arm again against the medic’s advice. It stung, ached, throbbed. ‘You’ve worked your usual magic. Stay impartial. Don’t get drawn in.’

Dorden was scrubbing his suture clamp and wound probes in a bowl of filmy antiseptic oil. ‘Impartial? Do you know something, Ibram Gaunt?’

Gaunt blinked as if slapped. No one had spoken to him with such paternal authority since the last time he had been in the company of his Uncle Dercius. No… not the last time…

Dorden turned back, wiping the tools on sheets of white lint. ‘Forgive me, commissar. I– I’m speaking out of turn.’

‘Speak anyway, friend.’

Dorden jerked a lean thumb to indicate out beyond the archway into the barrack deck. ‘These are all I’ve got. The last pitiful scraps of Tanith genestock, my only link to the past and to the green, green world I loved. I’ll keep patching and mending and binding and sewing them back together until they’re all gone, or I’m gone, or the horizons of all known space have withered and died. And while you may not be Tanith, I know many of the men now treat you as such. Me, I’m not sure. Too much of the chulan about you, I’d say.’

‘Koolun?’

‘Chulan. Forgive me, slipping in to the old tongue. Outsider. Unknown. It doesn’t translate directly.’

‘I’m sure it doesn’t.’

‘It wasn’t an insult. You may not be Tanith-breed, but you’re for us every way. I think you care, Gaunt. Care about your Ghosts. I think you’ll do all in your power to see us right, to take us to glory, to take us to peace. That’s what I believe, every night when I lay down to rest, and every time a bombardment starts, or the drop-ships fall, or the boys go over the wire. That matters.’

Gaunt shrugged – and wished he hadn’t. ‘Does it?’

‘I’ve spoken to medics with other regiments. At the field hospital on Fortis, for instance. So many of them say their commissars don’t care a jot about their men. They see them as fodder for the guns. Is that how you see us?’

‘No.’

‘No, I thought not. So, that makes you rare indeed. Something worth hanging on to, for the good of these poor Ghosts. Feth, you may not be Tanith, but if assassins are starting to hunger for your blood, I start to care. For the Ghosts, I care.’

He fell silent.

‘Then I’ll remember not to leave you uninformed,’ Gaunt said, reaching for his undershirt.

‘I thank you for that. For a chulan, you’re a good man, Ibram Gaunt. Like the anroth back home.’

Gaunt froze. ‘What did you say?’

Dorden looked round at him sharply. ‘Anroth. I said anroth. It wasn’t an insult either.’

‘What does it mean?’

Dorden hesitated uneasily, unsettled by Gaunt’s hard gaze. ‘The anroth… well, household spirits. It’s a cradle-tale from Tanith. They used to say that the anroth were spirits from other worlds, beautiful worlds of order, who came to Tanith to watch over our families. It’s nothing. Just an old memory. A forest saying.’

‘Why does it matter, commissar?’ said a new voice.

Gaunt and Dorden looked around to see Milo sat on a bench seat near the door, watching them intently.

‘How long have you been there?’ Gaunt asked sharply, surprising himself with his anger.

‘A few minutes only. The anroth are part of Tanith lore. Like the drudfellad who ward the trees, and the nyrsis who watch over the streams and waters. Why would it alarm you so?’

‘I’ve heard the word before. Somewhere,’ Gaunt said, getting to his feet. ‘Who knows, a word like it? It doesn’t matter.’

He went to pull on his undershirt but realised it was ripped and bloody, and cast it aside. ‘Milo. Get me another from my quarters,’ he snapped.

Milo rose and handed Gaunt a fresh undershirt from his canvas pack. Dorden covered a grin. Gaunt faltered, nodded his thanks, and took the shirt.

Both Milo and the medical officer had noticed the multitude of scars which laced Gaunt’s broad, muscled torso, and had made no comment. How many theatres, how many fronts, how many life-or-death combats had it taken to accumulate so many marks of pain?

But as Gaunt stood, Dorden noticed the scar across Gaunt’s belly for the first time and gasped. The wound line was long and ancient, a grotesque braid of buckled scar-tissue.

‘Sacred Feth!’ Dorden said too loudly. ‘Where–’

Gaunt shook him off. ‘It’s old. Very old.’

Gaunt slipped on his undershirt and the wound was hidden. He pulled up his braces and reached for his tunic.

‘But how did you get such a–’

Gaunt looked at him sharply. ‘Enough.’

Gaunt buttoned his tunic and then put on the long leather coat which Milo was already holding for him. He set his cap on his head.

‘Are the officers ready?’ he asked.

Milo nodded. ‘As you ordered.’

With a nod to Dorden, Gaunt marched out of the infirmary.

Five

IT HAD CROSSED his mind to wonder who to trust. A few minutes’ thought had brought him to the realisation that he could trust them all, every one of the Ghosts from Colonel Corbec down to the lowliest of the troopers. His only qualm lay with the malcontent Rawne and his immediate group of cronies in the third platoon, men like Feygor.

Gaunt left the infirmary and walked down the short companionway into the barrack deck proper. Corbec was waiting.

Colm Corbec had been waiting for almost an hour. Alone in the antechamber of the infirmary, he had enjoyed plenty of time to fret about the things he hated most in the universe. First and last of them was space travel.

Corbec was the son of a machinesmith who had worked his living at a forge beneath a gable-barn on the first wide bend of the River Pryze. Most of his father’s work had come from log-handling machines: rasp-saws, timber-derricks, trak-sleds. Many times, as a boy, he’d shimmied down into the oily service trenches to hold the inspection lamp so his father could examine the knotted, dripping axles and stricken synchromesh of a twenty-wheeled flatbed, ailing under its cargo of young, wet wood from the mills up at Beldane or Sottress.

Growing up, he’d worked the reaper mills in Sottress and seen men lose fingers, hands and knees to the screaming band saws and circular razors. His lungs had clogged with saw mist and he had developed a hacking cough that lingered even now. Then he’d joined the militia of Tanith Magna on a dare and on top of a broken heart, and patrolled the sacred stretches of the Pryze County nalwood groves for poachers and smugglers.

It had been a right enough life. The loamy earth below, the trees above and the far starlight beyond the leaves. He’d come to understand the ways of the twisting forests, and the shifting nal-groves and clearings. He’d learned the knife, the stealth patterns and the joy of the hunt. He’d been happy. So long as the stars had been up there and the ground underfoot.

Now the ground was gone. Gone forever. The damp, piney scents of the forest soil, the rich sweetness of the leaf-mould, the soft depth of the nalspores as they drifted and accumulated. He’d sung songs up to the stars, taken their silent blessing, even cursed them. All so long as they were far away. He never thought he would travel in their midst.

Corbec was afraid of the crossings, as he knew many of his company were afraid, even now after so many of them. To leave soil, to leave land and sea and sky behind, to part the stars and crusade through the Immaterium. That was truly terrifying.

He knew the Absalom was a sturdy ship. He’d seen its vast bulk from the viewspaces of the dock-ship that had brought him aboard. But he had also seen the great timber barges of the mills founder, shudder and splinter in the hard water courses of the Beldane rapids. Ships sailed their ways, he knew, until the ways got too strong for them and gave them up.

He hated it all. The smell of the air, the coldness of the walls, the inconstancy of the artificial gravity, the perpetual constancy of the vibrating Empyrean drives. All of it. Only his concern for the commissar’s welfare had got him past his phobias onto the nightmare of the Glass Bay Observatory. Even then, he’d focussed his attention on Gaunt, the troopers, that idiot warrant officer – anything at all but the cavorting insanity beyond the glass.

He longed for soil underfoot. For real air. For breeze and rain and the hush of nodding branches.

‘Corbec?’

He snapped to attention as Gaunt approached. Milo was a little way behind the commissar.

‘Sir?’

‘Remember what I was telling you in the bar on Pyrites?’

‘Not precisely, sir… I… I was pretty far gone.’

Gaunt grinned. ‘Good. Then it will all come as a surprise to you too. Are the officers ready?’

Corbec nodded perfunctorily. ‘Except Major Rawne, as you ordered.’

Gaunt lifted his cap, smoothed his cropped hair back with his hands and replaced it squarely again.

‘A moment, and I’ll join you in the staff room.’

Gaunt marched away down the deck and entered the main billet of the barracks.

The Ghosts had been given barrack deck three, a vast honeycomb of long, dark vaults in which bunks were strung from chains in a herringbone pattern. Adjoining these sleeping vaults was a desolate recreation hall and a trio of padded exercise chambers. All forty surviving platoons, a little over two thousand Ghosts, were billeted here.

The smell of sweat, smoke and body heat rose from the bunk vaults. Rawne, Feygor and the rest of the third platoon were waiting for him on the slip-ramp. They had been training in the exercise chambers, and each one carried one of the shock-poles provided for combat practice. These neural stunners were the only weapons allowed to them during a crossing. They could fence with them, spar with them and even set them to long range discharge and target-shoot against the squeaking moving metal decoys in the badly-oiled automatic range.

Gaunt saluted Rawne. The men snapped to attention.

‘How do you read the barrack deck, major?’

Rawne faltered. ‘Commissar?’

‘Is it secure?’

‘There are eight deployment shafts and two to the dropship hangar, plus a number of serviceways.’

‘Take your men, spread out and guard them all. No one must get in or out of this barrack deck without my knowledge.’

Rawne looked faintly perplexed. ‘How do we hold any intruders off, commissar, given our lack of weapons?’

Gaunt took a shock-pole from Trooper Neff and then laid him out on the deck with a jolt to the belly.

‘Use these,’ Gaunt suggested. ‘Report to me every half hour. Report to me directly with the names of anyone who attempts access.’ Pausing for a moment to study Rawne’s face and make sure his instructions were clearly understood, Gaunt turned and walked back up the ramp.

‘What’s he up to?’ Feygor asked the major when Gaunt was out of earshot. Rawne shook his head. He would find out. Until he did, he had a sentry duty to organise.

Six

THE STAFF ROOM was an old briefing theatre next to the infir mary annex. Steps led down into a circular room, with three tiers of varnished wooden seats around the circumference and a lacquered black console in the centre on a dais. The console, squat and rounded like a polished mushroom, was an old tactical display unit, with a mirrored screen in its top which had once broadcast luminous three-dimensional hololithic forms into the air above it during strategy counsels. But it was old and broken; Gaunt used it as a seat.

The officers filed in: Corbec, Dorden, and then the platoon leaders, Meryn, Mkoll, Curral, Lerod, Hasker, Blane, Folore… thirty-nine men, all told. Last in was Varl, recently promoted. Milo closed the shutter hatch and perched at the back. The men sat in a semi-circle, facing their commander.

‘What’s going on, sir?’ Varl asked. Gaunt smiled slightly. As a newcomer to officer-level briefings, Varl was eager and forthright, and oblivious to the usually reserved protocols of staff discussions. I should have promoted him earlier, Gaunt thought wryly.

‘This is totally unofficial. Ghost business, but unofficial. I want to advise you of a situation so that you can be aware of it and act accordingly if the need arises. But it does not go beyond this chamber. Tell your men as much as they need to know to facilitate matters, but spare them the details.’

He had their attention now.

‘I won’t dress this up. As far as I know – and believe me, that’s no further than I could throw Bragg – there’s a power struggle going on. One that threatens to tear this whole Crusade to tatters.

‘You’ve all heard how much infighting went on after Warmaster Slaydo’s death. How many of the Lord High Militants wanted to take his place.’

‘And that weasel Macaroth got it,’ Corbec said with a rueful grin.

‘That’s Warmaster Weasel Macaroth, colonel,’ Gaunt corrected. He let the men chuckle. Good humour would make this easier. ‘Like him or not, he’s in charge now. And that makes it simple for us. Like me, you are all loyal to the Emperor, and therefore to Warmaster Macaroth. Slaydo chose him to be successor. Macaroth’s word is the word of the Golden Throne itself. He speaks with Imperium authority.’

Gaunt paused. The men watched him quizzically, as if they had missed the point of some joke.

‘But someone’s not happy about that, are they?’ Milo said dourly, from the back. The officers snapped around to stare at him and then turned back equally sharply as they heard the commissar laugh.

‘Indeed. There are probably many who resent his promotion over them. And one in particular we all know, if only by name. Lord Militant General Dravere. The very man who commands our section of the Crusade force.’

‘What are you saying, sir?’ Lerod asked with aghast disbelief. Lerod was a large, shaven-headed sergeant with an Imperial eagle tattoo on his temple. He had commanded the militia unit in Tanith Ultima, the Imperial shrine-city on the Ghost’s lost homeworld, and as a result he, along with the other troopers from Ultima, were the most devoted and resolute Imperial servants in the Tanith First. Gaunt knew that Lerod would be perhaps the most difficult to convince. ‘Are you suggesting that Lord General Dravere has renegade tendencies? That he is… disloyal? But he’s your direct superior, sir!’

‘Which is why this discussion is being held in private. If I’m right, who can we turn to?’

The men greeted this with uncomfortable silence.

Gaunt went on. ‘Dravere has never hidden the fact that he felt Slaydo snubbed him by appointing the younger Macaroth. It must rankle deeply to serve under an upstart who has been promoted past you. I am pretty certain that Dravere plans to usurp the warmaster.’

‘Let them fight for it!’ Varl spat, and others concurred. ‘What’s another dead officer – begging your pardon, sir.’

Gaunt smiled. ‘You echo my initial thoughts on the matter, sergeant. But think it through. If Dravere moves his own forces against Macaroth, it will weaken this entire endeavour. Weaken it at the very moment we should be consolidating for the push into new, more hostile territories. What good are we against the forces of the enemy if we’re battling with ourselves? If it came to it, we’d be wide open, weak… and ripe for slaughter. Dravere’s plans threaten the entire future of us all.’

Another heavy silence. Gaunt rubbed his lean chin. ‘If Dravere goes through with this, we could throw everything away. Everything we’ve won in the Sabbat Worlds these last ten years.’

Gaunt leaned forward. ‘There’s more. If I was going to usurp the warmaster, I’d want a whole lot more than a few loyal regiments with me. I’d want an edge.’

‘Is that what this is about?’ Lerod asked, now hanging on Gaunt’s words.

‘Of course it is. Dravere is after something. Something big. Something so big it will actually place him on an equal footing with the warmaster. Or even make him stronger. And that is where we pitiful few come into the picture.’

He paused for a moment. ‘When I was on Pyrites, I came into possession of this…’

Gaunt held up the crystal.

‘The information encrypted onto this crystal holds the key to it all. Dravere’s spy network was transmitting it back to him and it was intercepted.’

‘By who?’ Lerod asked.

‘By Macaroth’s loyal spy network, Imperial intelligence, working to undermine Dravere’s conspiracy. They are covert, vulnerable, few, but they are the only things working against the mechanism of Dravere’s ascendancy.’

‘Why you?’ Dorden asked quietly.

Gaunt paused. Even now, he could not tell them the real reason. That it was foretold. ‘I was there, and I was trusted. I don’t understand it all. An old friend of mine is part of the intelligence hub, and he contacted me to caretake this precious cargo. It seemed there was no one else on Pyrites close enough or trusted enough to do it.’

Varl shifted in his seat, scratching his shoulder implant. ‘So? What’s on it?’

‘I have no idea,’ Gaunt said. ‘It’s encoded.’

Lerod started to say something else, but Gaunt added, ‘It’s Vermilion level.’

There was a long pause, accompanied only by Blane’s long, impressed whistle.

‘Now do you see?’ Gaunt asked.

‘What do we do?’ Varl said dully.

‘We find out what’s on it. Then we decide.’

‘But how–’ Meryn began, but Gaunt held up a calming hand.

‘That’s my job, and I think I can do it. Easily, in fact. After that… well, that’s why I wanted you all in on this. Already, Dravere’s covert network has attempted to kill me and retrieve the crystal. Twice. Once on Pyrites and now here again on the ship. I need you with me, to guard this priceless thing, to keep the Lord Militant General’s spies from it. To cover me until I can see the way clear to the action we should take.’

Silence reigned in the staff room.

‘Are you with me?’ Gaunt asked.

The silence beat on, almost stifling. The officers exchanged furtive glances.

In the end, it was Lerod who spoke for them. Gaunt was particularly glad it was Lerod.

‘Do you have to ask, commissar?’ he said simply.

Gaunt smiled his thanks. He got up from the display unit and stepped off the dais as the men rose. ‘Let’s get to it. Rawne’s already setting patrols to keep this barrack deck secure. Support and bolster that effort. I want to feel confi-dent that the area of this ship given over to us is safe ground. Keep intruders out, or escort them directly to me. If the men question the precautions, tell them we think that those damn Patricians might try something to ease their grudge against us. Terra knows, that’s true enough, and there are over four times our number of Patricians aboard this vessel on the other barrack decks. And the Patricians are undoubtedly in Dravere’s pocket.

‘I also want the entire deck searched for hidden vox-relays and vista-lines. Hasker, Varl… use any men you know with technical aptitude to perform the sweep. They may be trying all manner of ways of spying on us. From this moment on, trust no one outside our regiment. No one. There is no way of telling who might be part of the conspiracy around us.’

The officers seemed eager but unsettled. Gaunt knew that this was strange work for regular soldiers. They filed out, faces grave.

Gaunt looked at the crystal in his hand. What are you hiding? he wondered.

* * *

Seven

GAUNT RETURNED TO his quarters with the silent Milo in tow. Corbec had set two Ghosts to guard the commissar’s private room. Gaunt sat at the cogitator set into a wall alcove, and began to explore the shipboard information he could access through the terminal. Lines of gently flickering amber text scrolled across the dark vista-plate. He was hoping for a personnel manifest, searching for names that might hint at the identity of those that opposed him. But the details were jumbled and incomplete. It wasn’t even clear which other regiments were actually aboard. The Patricians were listed, and a complement of mechanised units from the Bovanian Ninth. But Gaunt knew there must be at least two other regimental strengths aboard, and the listing was blank. He also tried to view the particulars of the Absalom’s officer cadre, and any other senior Imperial servants making the crossing with them, but those levels of data were locked by naval cipher veils, and Gaunt did not have the authority to penetrate them.

Technology, such as it was, was a sandbagged barricade keeping him out. He sat back in his chair and sighed. His shoulder was sore. The crystal lay on the console near his hand. It was time to try it. Time to try his guess. He’d been putting it off, in case it didn’t work really. He got up.

Milo had begun to snooze on a seat by the door and the sudden movement startled him.

‘Sir?’

Gaunt was on his feet, carelessly pulling his kitbag and luggage trunks from the wall locker.

‘Let’s hope the old man wasn’t lying!’ was all Gaunt said.

Which old man, Milo had no idea.

Gaunt rifled through his baggage. A silk-swathed dress uniform ended up on the floor. Books and data-slates spewed from pulled-open pouches.

Milo was fascinated for a moment. The commissar always packed his own effects, and Milo had never seen the few possessions Gaunt valued enough to carry with him. The boy glimpsed a bar of medals wound in tunic cloth; a larger, grand silver starburst rosette that fell from its velvet-lined case; a faded forage cap with Hyrkan insignia; a glass box of painkiller tablets; a dozen large, yellow slab-like teeth – ork teeth – drilled and threaded onto a cord; an antique scope in a wooden case; a worn buckle brush and a tin of silver polish; a tarot gaming deck which spilled out of its ivory box. The cards were stiff pasteboard, decorated with commemorative images of a liberation festival on somewhere called Gylatus Decimus. Milo bent to collect them up before Gaunt trampled them. They were clean and new, never used; the lid of the box was inscribed with the letters D. O.

Unheeding, Gaunt pulled handfuls of clothes out of his kitbag and flung them aside.

Milo grinned. He felt somehow privileged to see this stuff, as if the commissar had let him into his mind for a while.

Then something else bounced off the accumulating clutter on the deck and Milo paused. It was a toy battleship, rudely carved from a hunk of plastene. Enamel paint was flaking away, and some of the towers and gun turrets had broken off. Milo turned away. There was something painful about the toy, something that let him glimpse further into Ibram Gaunt’s private realm of loss than he wanted to go.

The feeling surprised him. He retreated a little, dropping some of the cards he had been shuffling back into their ivory box, and was glad of the excuse to busy himself picking them up.

Gaunt suddenly turned from the mess, a look of triumph in his eyes. He held up a tarnished, old signet ring between his fingers.

‘What you were looking for, commissar?’ Milo asked brightly, feeling a comment was expected.

‘Oh yes. Dear old Uncle Dercius, that bastard. Gave it me as a distraction that night–’ Gaunt stopped suddenly, thoughts clouding his face.

He sat down on the bunk next to Milo, glancing over and chuckling sadly as he saw the deck the boy was sorting. ‘Souvenirs. Hnh. Emperor knows why I keep them. Never glance at them for years and then they only dredge up black memories.’

He took the cards and rifled through them, holding up some to show Milo, laughing sourly as he did so, as if the Tanith youth could understand the reason for humour. One card showed a Hyrkan flag flying from some tower or other, another showed a heraldic design with an ork’s skull, another a moon struck by lightning from the beak of an Imperial eagle.

‘Seventy-two reasons to forget our noble victory in the Gylatus World Flock,’ he said mockingly.

‘And the ring?’ Milo asked.

Gaunt put the cards aside. He turned the milling on the signet mount and a short beam of light stabbed out of the ring. ‘Feth! Still power in the cell, after all this time!’

Milo smiled, uncertain.

‘It’s a decryption ring. Officer level. A key to let senior staff access private or veiled data. A general’s plaything. They used to be quite popular. This was issued to the commander-in-chief of the noble Jantine regiments, a lord of the very highest standing. And that old bastard gave it to a little boy on Manzipor.’

Gaunt dug the crystal out of his tunic pocket and held it over the ring’s beam. He glanced at Milo for a second. There was a surprisingly impish, youthful glee in Gaunt’s eyes that made Milo snort with laughter.

‘Here goes,’ Gaunt said. He slipped the base of the crystal onto the ring mount. It fitted perfectly and engaged with a tiny whirr. Locked in place, as if the stone was now set on the ring band like an outrageously showy gem, it was illuminated by the beam of light. The crystal glowed.

‘Come on, come on…’ Gaunt said.

Something started to form in the air a few centimetres above the ring, a pict-form, neon bright and lambent in the dimness of the cabin.

The tight, small holographic runes hanging in the air read: ‘Authority denied. This document may only be opened by Vermilion level decryption as set by order of Senthis, Administratum Elector, Pacificus calendar 403457.M41. Any attempts to tamper with this data-receptacle will result in memory wipe.’

Gaunt cursed and slipped the crystal off the mount, cancelling the ring’s beam. ‘Too old, too damn old! Feth, I thought I had it!’

‘I don’t understand, sir.’

‘The clearance levels remain the same, but they revise the codes required to read them at regular intervals. Dercius’s ring would certainly have opened a Vermilion text thirty years ago, but the sequences have been overwritten since then. I should have expected Dravere to have set his own confidence codes. Damn!’

Gaunt looked like he was going to continue cursing, but there was a sharp knock at the door of his quarters. Gaunt pocketed the crystal smartly and opened the door. Trooper Uan, one of the corridor sentries, looked in at him.

‘Sergeant Blane has brought visitors to you, sir. We’ve checked them for weapons, and they’re clean. Will you see them?’

Gaunt nodded, pulling on his cap and longcoat. He stepped out into the corridor. When he saw the identity of the visitors, Gaunt waved his men back and walked down to greet them.

It was Colonel Zoren, the Vitrian commander, and three of his officers.

‘Well met, commissar,’ Zoren said curtly. He and his men were dressed in ochre fatigues and soft caps.

‘I didn’t realise you Vitrians were aboard,’ Gaunt said.

‘Last minute change. We were bound for the Japhet but there was a problem with the boarding tubes. They rerouted us here. The regiments scheduled for the Absalom took our places on the Japhet once the technical problems were solved. My platoons have been given the barrack decks aft of here.’

‘It’s good to see you, colonel.’

Zoren nodded, but there was something he was holding back, Gaunt sensed. ‘When I learned we were sharing the same transport as the Tanith, I thought perhaps an interaction would be appropriate. We have a mutual victory to celebrate. But–’

‘But?’

Zoren dropped his voice. ‘I was attacked in my quarters this morning. A man dressed in unmarked Navy overalls was searching my belongings. He rounded on me when I came in. There was a struggle. He escaped.’

Gaunt felt his anger return. ‘Go on.’

‘He was looking for something. Something he thought I might have, something he had failed to find elsewhere. I thought I should tell you directly.’

Milo, Uan and everyone in the corridor, including Zoren himself, was surprised when Gaunt grabbed the Vitrian colonel by the front of his tunic and dragged him into his quarters.

Gaunt slammed the door shut after them.

Alone in the room, Gaunt turned on Zoren, who looked hurt but somehow not surprised.

‘That was a terribly well-informed statement, colonel.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Start making sense, Zoren, or I’ll forget our friendship.’

‘No need for unpleasantness, Gaunt. I know more than you imagine and, I assure you, I am a friend.’

‘Of whom?’

‘Of you, of the Throne of Terra, and of a mutual acquaintance. I know him as Bel Torthute. You know him as Fereyd.’

Eight

‘IT’S…’ COLONEL Draker Flense began. ‘It’s a lot to think about.’

He was answered by a snigger that did nothing to calm his nerves. The snigger came from a tall, hooded shape at the rear of the room, a figure silhouetted against a window of stained glass imagery which was lit by the flashes and glints of the Immaterium.

‘You’re a soldier, Flense. I don’t believe thinking is part of the job description.’

Flense bit back on a sharp answer. He was afraid, terribly afraid of the man in the multi-coloured shadows of the window. He shifted uneasily, dying for a breath of fresh air, his throat parched. The chamber was thick with the smoke from the obscura water-pipe on its slate plinth by the steps to the window. The nectar-sweet opiate smoke swirled around him and stole all humidity from the air. His mind was slack and torpid from breathing it in.

Warrant Officer Lekulanzi, stood by the door, and the three shrouded astropaths grouped in a huddle in the shadows to his left didn’t seem to mind. The astropaths were a law unto themselves, and Flense had recognised the pallor of an obscura addict in Lekulanzi’s face the moment the warrant officer had arrived at his quarters to summon him. Flense had led an assault into an addict-hive on Poscol years before. He had never forgotten the sweet stench, nor the pallor of the half-hearted resistance.

The figure at the windows stepped slowly down to face him. Flense, two metres tall without his jackboots, found himself looking up into the darkness of the cowl.

‘Well, colonel?’ whispered the voice inside the hood.

‘I– I don’t really understand what is expected of me, my lord.’

Inquisitor Golesh Constantine Pheppos Heldane sniggered again. He reached up with his ring-heavy fingers and turned back his cowl. Flense blinked. Heldane’s face was high and long, like some equine beast. His wet, sneering mouth was full of blunt teeth and his eyes were round and dark. Fluid tubes and fibre-wires laced his long, sloped skull like hair braids. His huge skull was hairless, but Flense could see the matted fur that coated his neck and throat. He was human, but his features had been surgically altered to inspire terror and obedience in those he… studied. At least, Flense hoped it was a surgical alteration.

‘You seem uneasy, colonel. Is it the circumstance, or my words?’

Flense found himself floundering for speech again. ‘I’ve never been admitted to a sacrosanctorium before, lord,’ he began.

Heldane extended his arms wide – too wide for anything but a skeletal giant like Heldane, Flense shuddered – to encompass the chamber. Those present were standing in one of the Absalom’s astropath sanctums, a chamber screened from all intrusion. The walls were null-field dead spaces designed to shut out both the material world and the screaming void of the Immaterium. Sound-proofed, psyker-proofed, wire-proofed, these inviolable cocoons were dedicated and reserved for the astropathic retinue alone. They were prohibited by Imperial law. Only a direct invitation could admit a blunt human such as Flense.

Blunt. Flense didn’t like the word, and hadn’t been aware of it until Lekulanzi had used it.

Blunt. A psyker’s word for the non-psychic. Blunt. Flense wished by the Ray of Hope he could be elsewhere. Any elsewhere.

‘You are discomforting my cousins,’ Heldane said to Flense, indicating the three astropaths, who were fidgeting and murmuring. ‘They sense your reluctance to be here. They sense their stigma.’

‘I have no prejudices, inquisitor.’

‘Yes, you have. I can taste them. You detest mind-seers. You despise the gift of the astropath. You are a blunt, Flense. A sense-dead moron. Shall I show you what you are missing?’

Flense shook. ‘No need, inquisitor!’

‘Just a touch? Be a sport.’ Heldane sniggered, droplets of spittle flecking off his thick teeth.

Flense shuddered. Heldane turned his gaze away slowly and then snapped back suddenly. Impossible light flooded into Flense’s skull. For one second, he saw eternity. He saw the angles of space, the way they intersected with time. He saw the tides of the Empyrean, and the wasted fringes of the Immaterium, the fluid spasms of the warp. He saw his mother, his sister, both long dead. He saw light and darkness and nothingness. He saw colours without name. He saw the birth torments of the gen-estealer whose blood would scar his face. He saw himself on the drill-field of the Schola on Primagenitor. He saw an explosion of blood. Familiar blood. He started to cry. He saw bones buried in rich, black mud. He realised they, too, were his own. He looked into the sockets. He saw maggots. He screamed. He vomited. He saw a red-dark sky and an impossible number of suns. He saw a star overload and collapse. He saw–

Too much.

Draker Flense fell to the floor of the sacrosanctorium, soiled himself and started to whimper.

‘I’m glad we’ve got that straight,’ Inquisitor Heldane said. He raised his cowl again. ‘Let me start over. I serve Dravere, as you do. For him, I will bend the stars. For him, I will torch planets. For him, I will master the unmasterable.’

Flense moaned.

‘Get up. And listen to me. The most priceless artefact in space awaits our lord in the Menazoid Clasp. Its description and circumstance lies with the Commissar Gaunt. We will obtain that secret. I have already expended precious energies trying to reach it. This Gaunt is… resourceful. You will allow yourself to be used in this matter. You and the Patricians. You already have a feud with them.’

‘Not this… not this…’ Flense rasped from the floor.

‘Dravere spoke highly of you. Do you remember what he said?’

‘N– no…’

Heldane’s voice changed and became a perfect copy of Dravere’s. ‘If you win this for me, Flense, I’ll not forget it. There are great possibilities in my future, if I am not tied here. I would share them with you.’

‘Now is the time, Flense,’ Heldane said in his own voice once more. ‘Share in the possibilities. Help me to acquire what my Lord Dravere demands. There will be a place for you, a place in glory. A place at the side of the new war-master.’

‘Please!’ Flense cried. He could hear the astropaths laughing at him.

‘Are you still undecided?’ Heldane asked. He stepped towards the curled, foetal colonel. ‘Another look?’ he suggested.

Flense began to shriek.

Nine

‘THEY’RE EXCLUDING US,’ Feygor said out of the silence.

Rawne snapped an angry glance round at his adjutant, but he knew what the lean man meant. It had been four hours since the rest of the officers had been called into their meeting with Gaunt. How convenient that he and his platoon had been excluded. Of course, if what Corbec said was true and there was trouble aboard, a good picket was essential. But in the natural order of things, it should have been Folore’s platoon, the sixteenth, who took first shift.

Rawne grunted a response and led his team of five men down to the junction with the next corridor. They’d swept this area six times since they had begun. Just draughty hull-spaces, dark corners, empty stores, dusty floors and locked hatches. He checked the time. A radio message from Lerod twenty minutes earlier had informed him that the shift change would take place on the next hour. He ached. He knew the men with him were tired and cold and in need of stove-warmth, caffeine, relaxation. By extension, all of his platoon, all fifty of them spread out patrolling the perimeter of the Ghosts’ barrack deck in squads of five, would be demoralised and hungry too.

Rawne thought, as he often did, of Gaunt. Of Gaunt’s motives. From the start, back at the bloody hour of the Founding itself, he had shown no loyalty to the commissar. It had astonished him when Gaunt had raised him to major and given him the tertiary command of the regiment. He’d laughed at it at first, then qualified that laughter by imagining Gaunt had recognised his leadership qualities. Sometime later, Feygor, the only man in the regiment he thought of as a friend, and then only barely, had reminded him of the old saying: ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.’

There was no escape from the Guard, so Rawne had got on with making the best of his job. But he always wondered at Gaunt. If he’d been the colonel-commissar, with a danger like himself at his heels, he’d have called up a firing squad long since.

Ahead, Trooper Lonegin was checking the locks on a storage bin. Rawne scanned the length of the corridor they had just advanced through.

Feygor watched his commander slyly. Rawne had been good to him – and they had worked together in the militia of Tanith Attica before the Founding. Quite a tasty racket they had running there until the fething Imperium rolled up and ruined it. Feygor was the bastard son of a black marketeer, and only his sharp mind and formidable physical ability had got him a place in the militia, and then the Imperial Guard. Rawne’s background had been select. He didn’t talk about it much, but Feygor knew enough to know that that Rawne’s family had been rich, merchants, local politicians, local lords. Rawne had always had money, stipends from his father’s empire of timber mills. But as the third son, he was never going to be the one to inherit the fortune. The militia service – and the opportunities for self advancement – had been the best option.

Feygor didn’t trust Rawne. Feygor didn’t trust anyone. But he never thought of the major as evil. Just… bitter. Bitterness was what had ruined him, bitterness was what had scalded his nature early on.

Like Feygor, the men of Rawne’s platoon were the misfits and troublemakers of the surviving Tanith. They gravitated towards Rawne, seeing him as a natural leader, the man who would make the best chances for them. During the draft process, Rawne had selected most of them for his own squads.

One day, Feygor thought, one day Rawne will kill Gaunt and take his place. Gaunt, Corbec, any who opposed. Rawne will kill Gaunt. Or Gaunt will kill Rawne. Whatever, there will be a reckoning. Some said Rawne had already tried.

Feygor was about to suggest they double back into the storerooms to the left when Trooper Lonegin cried out and span across the deck, hit by something from behind. He curled, convulsing, on the grill-walkway and Feygor could clearly see the short boot-knife jutting from the man’s ribs where it had impacted.

Rawne was already yelling when the attackers emerged around them from all asides. Ten men, dressed in the work uniforms of the Purpure Patricians. They had knives, stakes, clubs made from bunk-legs. A frenzy of close-quarter brutality exploded in the narrow confines of the hallway.

Trooper Colhn was smashed into a wall by a blow to the head and sank without a murmur before he could even turn. Trooper Freul struck one attacker hard with his shock-pole and knocked him over in a cascade of sparks before three knife jabs from as many assailants ripped into him and dropped him in a bloody mass. Feygor could see two of the Patricians clubbing the wounded, helpless Lonegin repeatedly.

Feygor hurled his shock pole at the nearest Patrician, blasting him backwards and burning through the belly of his uniform with the discharge, and then pulled out his silver Tanith blade. He screamed an obscenity and hurled forward, ripping open a throat with his first attack. With a savage turn, using the moves that had won him respect in the backstreets of Tanith Attica, he wheeled, kicked the legs out from under another and took a knife-wielding hand off at the wrist.

‘Rawne! Rawne!’ he bellowed, fumbling for his radio bead. He was hit from behind. Stunned, he took two more strikes and dropped, rolling. Feet kicked into him. Something that felt white hot dug into his chest. He bellowed with pain and rage. The sound was diffused by the gout of blood in his mouth.

Rawne struck down one with his pole, wheeling and blocking. He cursed them with every oath in his vocabulary. A blade ripped open his tunic and spilled blood from a long, raw scratch. A heavy blow struck his temple and he went over, vision fogging.

The major tried to move but his body wouldn’t respond. The cold grille of the deck pushed into his cheek and his slack mouth. Wet warmth ran down his neck. His unfo-cussed eyes looked up at the bulky Patrician who stood over him, a long-armed wrench raised ready to pulp his skull.

‘Stay your hand, Brochuss!’ a voice said. The wrench lowered, reluctantly.

Immobile, Rawne wished he could see more. Another figure replaced the shape of his wrench-swinging attacker. Rawne’s eyes were dim and filmy. He wished he could see clearly. The man who stooped by him looked like an offi-cer.

Colonel Flense hunkered down beside Rawne, looking sadly at the blood matting the hair and the twisted spread of the limbs.

‘See the badge, Brochuss?’ Flense said. ‘He’s the major, Rawne. Don’t kill him. Not yet, at least.’

Ten

‘HOW DO YOU know him?’ Gaunt demanded.

Colonel Zoren made a slight, shrugging gesture, the typically unemphatic body language of the Vitrians. ‘Likely the same way you do. A chance encounter, a carefully established measure of trust, an informal working relationship during a crisis.’

Gaunt rubbed his angular chin and shook his head. ‘If this conversation is going to get us anywhere, you’ll have to be more specific. If you honestly do appreciate the critical nature of this situation, you’ll understand why I need to be sure and certain of those around me.’

Zoren nodded. He turned, as if to survey the room, but the close confines of Gaunt’s quarters allowed for little contemplation. ‘It was during the Famine Wars on Idol-wilde, perhaps three standard years ago. My Dragoons were sent in as a peacekeeping presence in the main city-state, Kenadie. That was just before the food riots began in earnest and before the fall of the local government. The man you know as Fereyd was masquerading as a local grain broker called Bel Torthute, a trade-banker with a place on the Idolwilde Senate. His cover was perfect. I had no idea he was an off-world operative. No idea he wasn’t a native. He had the language, the customs, the gestures–’

‘I know how Fereyd works. Observational perfection is his speciality, and that mimicry thing.’

‘Then you’ll know his modus operandi too. To work with what he calls the “trustworthy salt” of the Imperium.’

Gaunt nodded, a half-smile curving his mouth.

‘To work in such environments, so alone, so vulnerable, our mutual friend needs to nurture the support of those elements of the Imperium he deems uncorrupted. Rooting out corruption and taint in Imperium-sponsored bureaucracies, he can’t trust the Administratum, the Ministorum, or any ranking officials who might be part of the conspiratorial infrastructure. He told me that he always found his best allies in the Guard in those circumstances, in men drafted into crisis flash-points, plain soldiery who like as not were newcomers to any such event, and thus not part of the problem. That is what he found in me and some of my officer cadre. It took him a long time and much careful investigation to trust me, and just as long to win my trust back. Eventually, in the midst of the food riots, we Vitrians were the only elements he could count on. The Famine Wars had been orchestrated by a government faction with ties into the Departmento Munitorium. They were able to field two regiments of Imperial Guard turned to their purpose. We defeated them.’

‘The Battle of Altatha. I have read some of the details. I had no idea Imperial corruption was behind the Famine Wars.’

Zoren smiled sadly. ‘Such information is often suppressed. For the good of morale. We parted company as allies. I never thought to meet him again.’

Gaunt sat down on his cot. He leaned his elbows onto his knees, deep in thought. ‘And now you have?’

‘I received a message, encrypted, during my disembarkation from shore leave on Pyrites. Shortly after that, a meeting.’

‘In person?’

Zoren shook his head. ‘An intermediary.’

‘And how did you know to trust this intermediary?’

‘He used certain identifiers. Code words Bel Torthute and I had developed and used on Idolwilde. Cipher syllables from Vitrian combat-cant that only he would have known the significance of. Torthute made a point of studying the cultural heritage of the Vitrian Byhata, our Art of War. Only he could have sent the message and couched it so.’

‘That’s Fereyd. So you are my ally? I have a feeling you know more about this situation than me, Zoren.’

Zoren watched the tall, powerful man sat on the cot, his chin resting on his hands. He’d come to admire him during the Fortis action, and Fereyd’s message had contained details specific to Gaunt. It was clear the Imperial covert agent trusted Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt more than almost anyone in the sector. More than myself, Zoren thought.

‘I know this much, Gaunt. A group of high-ranking conspirators in the Sabbat Worlds Crusade High Command is hunting for something precious. Something so vital they may be prepared to twist the overall purpose of the crusade to achieve it. The key that unlocks that something has been deflected out of their waiting hands and diverted to you for safekeeping, as you were the only one of Fereyd’s operatives in range to deal with it.’

Gaunt rose angrily. ‘I’m no one’s operative!’ he snarled.

Zoren waved him back with a deft apologetic gesture to the mouth that indicated a misprision with language. Gaunt reminded himself that Low Gothic was not the colonel’s first tongue. ‘A trusted partner,’ he corrected. ‘Fer-eyd has been careful to establish a wide, remote circle of friends on whom he can call at times like this. You were the only one able to intercept and safeguard the key on Pyrites. After some further manipulation, he made sure I was on the same transport as you to assist. How else do you think we Vitrians ended up on the Absalom so conveniently? I imagine Fereyd and his agents in the warmaster’s command staff risked great exposure arranging for us to be diverted to this ship. It would be about as overt an action as a covert dared.’

‘Did he tell you anything else, this intermediary?’ Gaunt said.

‘That I was to offer you all assistance, up to and beyond countermanding the direct orders of my superiors.’

There was a long quiet space as the enormity of this sunk in. ‘And then?’ Gaunt asked.

‘The instructions said that you would make the right choice. That Fereyd, unable to directly intercede here, would trust you to carry this forward until his network was able to involve itself again. That you would assess the situation and act accordingly.’

Gaunt laughed humourlessly. ‘But I know nothing! I don’t know what this is about, or where it’s going! This shadowplay isn’t what I’m good at!’

‘Because you’re a soldier?’

‘What?’

Zoren repeated it. ‘Because you’re a soldier? Like me, you deal in orders and commands and direct action. This doesn’t sit easy with any of us that Fereyd employs. Us “Imperial salt” may be trustworthy and able to be recruited to his cause, but we lack the sophistication to understand the war. This isn’t something we solve with flamers and fire-teams.’

Gaunt cursed Fereyd’s name. Zoren echoed him, and they both began to laugh.

‘Unless you can,’ Zoren said, suddenly serious.

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because he trusts you. Because you’re a colonel second and a commissar first, a political officer. And this war is all politics. Intrigue. We were both on Pyrites, Gaunt. Why did he divert the key to you and not me? Why am I here to help you, and not the other way around?’

Gaunt cursed Fereyd’s name again, but this time it was low and bitter.

He was about to speak again when there was a fierce hammering at the door to the quarters. Gaunt swept to his feet and pulled the door open. Corbec stood outside, his face flushed and fierce.

‘What?’ managed Gaunt.

‘You’d better come, sir. We’ve got three dead and another critical. The Jantine are playing for keeps.’

Eleven

CORBEC LED GAUNT, Zoren and a gaggle of others into the Infirmary annex where Dorden awaited them.

‘Colhn, Freul, Lonegin…’ Dorden said, gesturing to three shapes under sheets on the floor. ‘Feygor’s over there.’

Gaunt looked across at Rawne’s adjutant, who lay, sucking breath through a transparent pipe, on a gurney in the corner.

‘Puncture wound. Knife. Lungs are failing. Another hour unless I can get fresh equipment.’

‘Rawne?’ Gaunt asked.

Corbec edged forward. ‘Like I said, sir: no sign. It was hit and run. They must have taken him with them. But they left this to let us know.’

Corbec showed the commissar the Jantine cap badge. ‘Pinned it to Colhn’s forehead,’ he said with loathing.

Zoren was puzzled. ‘Why such an outward show of force?’

‘The Jantine are a part of all of this. But they also have a declared rivalry with the Ghosts. This comes to light, it’ll look like inter-regiment feuding. There’ll be reprimands, but it will cloud the true matter. They want to take credit… under cover of an open feud they can do anything they like.’

Gaunt realised they were all looking at him. His mind was racing. ‘So we do the same. Colm: maintain the perimeter patrols on this deck, double strength. But also organise a raid on the Jantine. Lead it yourself. Kill some for me.’

A great smile crossed Corbec’s face.

‘Let’s play along with their game and use it to our own ends. Doctor,’ he gestured to Dorden, ‘you’re going to get medical supplies with my authority now you have a critical case.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Dorden asked, wiping his hands on a gauze towel.

Gaunt was thinking hard. He needed a plan now, a second option now that Dercius’s ring had failed. He cursed his over-confidence in it. Now they had to start from scratch, both to safeguard themselves and to learn the crystal’s secrets. But Gaunt was determined now. He would see this through. He would take the fight to the enemy.

‘I need access to the bridge. To the captain himself. Colonel Zoren?’

‘Yes?’ Colonel Zoren moved up close to join Gaunt. He was entirely unprepared for the punch that laid him out, lip split and already bloody.

‘Report that,’ Gaunt said. His plan began to fall into place.

Twelve

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER Galen Gartell of the Jantine Patri cians turned slowly from his patient in the bright, clean medical bay of the Jantine barrack deck. He had been tending the man since he had been brought in: a lout, a barbarian. One of the Tanith, the stretcher bearers had told him.

The patient was a slim, powerful man with hard, angular good looks and a blue starburst tattoo over one eye. Currently the lean, handsome temple was disfigured by a bloody impact wound. ‘Keep him alive!’ Major Brochuss had hissed as he had helped to carry the man in.

Such damage… such a barbarian… Gartell had mused as he had begun work, cleaning and healing. He disliked using his skill on animals like this, but clearly his noble regiment had shown mercy to some raiding rival scum and were going to heal his wounds and send him off as a gesture of their benign superiority to the deck rats they were bunked with. The voice that made him turn was that of Colonel Flense. ‘Is he alive, doctor?’

‘Just. I don’t know why I should be saving a wretch like this, wasting valuable medical commodities.’

Flense hushed him and moved into the infirmary. A tall hooded figure followed him.

Gartell took a step back. The figure was well over two metres tall and there was a suggestion of smoke around him that fluctuated and masked his presence.

Who is this? Gartell wondered. And the shadow-cloak – only a formidable scion of the Imperium would have such a device.

‘What do you need?’ Flense asked, addressing the figure. It hovered forward, past Gartell and looked down at the patient.

‘Cranial clamps, a neural probe, perhaps some long, single-edged scalpels,’ it said in a hollow voice.

‘What?’ Gartell stammered. ‘What in the name of the Emperor are you about to do?’

‘Teach this thing. Teach it well,’ the figure replied, reaching out a huge, twisted hand to stroke the Ghost’s brow. The fingernails were hooked and brown, like claws.

Gartell felt anger rise. ‘I am chief medical officer here! No one performs any procedure in this infirmary without my–’

The hooded figure flicked its arm.

Galen Gartell suddenly found himself staring at his booted toes. It took the rest of his life for him to realise that something was wrong. Only when his headless body fell onto the deck next to him he realised that… his head… cut… bastard… no.

‘FLENSE? CLEAR THAT up, would you?’ Inquisitor Heldane asked, gesturing to the corpse at his feet with a swish of the blood-wet, long-bladed scalpel in his hands. He turned back to the patient.

‘Hello, Major Rawne,’ he crooned softly. ‘Let me show you your heart’s desire.’

* * *

Thirteen

RECLINING IN HIS leather upholstered command throne, Lord Captain Itumade Grasticus, commander of the Adeptus Mechanicus Mass Conveyance Absalom, raised his facilitator wand in a huge, baby-fat hand and gestured gently at one of the many hololithic plates which hovered around him on suspensor fields, bobbing gently like a cluster of buoys in an ebb-tide.

The matt, dark surface of the chosen plate blinked, and a slow swirl of amber runes played across it. Grasticus carefully noted the current warp-displacement of his vast ship, and then selected another plate to appraise himself of the engine tolerances.

Through reinforced metal cables that grew from the deck plates under his throne and clung like thick growths of creeper to the back of his chair, Grasticus felt his ship. The data-cables, many of them tagged with paper labels bearing codes or prayers, spilled over the headrest of his throne and entered his cranium, neck, spine and puffy cheeks through sutured bio-sockets. They fed him the sum total of the ship’s being, the structural integrity, the atmospheric levels, the very mood of the great spacecraft. Through them, he experienced the actions of every linked crewman and servitor aboard, and the distant rhythm of the engines set the pace of his own pulse.

Grasticus was immense. Three hundred kilos of loose meat hung from his great frame. He seldom left his throne, seldom ventured outside the quiet peace of his private strategium, an armoured dome at the heart of the busy bridge vault, set high on the command spire at the rear of the Absalom.

One hundred and thirty standard years before, when he had inherited this vessel from the late Lord Captain Ulbenid, he had been a tall, lean man. Indolence, and the addictive sympathy with the ship, had made him throne-bound. His body, as if sensing he was now one with such a vast machine, had slowed his metabolism and increased his mass, as if it wanted him to echo the swollen bulk of the Absalom. The conveyance vessels of the Adeptus Mechanicus were not like ships of the Imperial Navy. Immeasurably older and often much larger, they had been made to carry the engines of war from Mars to wherever they were needed. Their captains were more like the Princeps of great walking Titans, hardwired into the living machines through mind-impulse links. They were living ships.

Grasticus wanded another screen which allowed him direct observation of his beloved navigators, husks of men wired into their shrine, set in an alcove a few marble steps down from the main bridge. Their chanting voices sung him the Immaterium co-ordinates and their progress, forming them into a data-plainsong which resonated a pale harmony through his mind. He listened, understood, was reassured.

There was a slight course adjustment which he relayed to the senior helm officers. The Menazoid Clasp was now just two day-cycles away. The ether showed no signs of storm fronts or warp-pools, and the signal from the Astronomi-con beacon, whose psychic light guided all ships through the Empyrean, was clear and clean. Blessed are the songs of the Navis Nobilite, murmured Grasticus in his thick voice, pronouncing part of the Navis Blessing Creed, for from them shines the Ray of Hope that lights our Golden Path.

Grasticus frowned suddenly. There was an uproar outside his hardwired womb. Human voices raised in urgent conference. His flesh-heavy brow furrowed like sand-dunes slipping, and he wanded his throne to revolve to face the arched opening to the strategium.

‘Warrant Officer Lekulanzi,’ he said into his intercom horn, hanging on taut brass wires from the vaulted roof, ‘enter and explain this disturbance.’

He dropped the storm shield guarding the entry arch with a flick of his wand and Lekulanzi hurried in, looking alarmed. The warrant officer gazed up at the obese bulk in the hammock-like throne above him and toyed with compulsive agitation at the hem of his uniform and his own facilitator wand. He seldom saw the captain face to face.

‘Lord captain, a senior officer of the Imperial Guard petitions for audience with you. He wishes to make a formal complaint.’

‘An item of cargo wishes to complain?’ Grasticus said with slow wonder.

‘A passenger,’ Lekulanzi said, shuddering at the direct sound of the captain’s seldom-heard voice.

Grasticus brushed the correction aside as he always did. He wasn’t used to carrying humans. Compared to the beloved God-Machines it was his given task to convey, they seemed insignificant. But the humans had liberated Fortis Binary, and the Tech-Priests had sent him and his ship to assist them. It was a kind of gratitude, he supposed.

Grasticus disliked Lekulanzi. The whelp had been transferred to his command three months earlier on the orders of the Adeptus after Grasticus’s acting warrant officer was killed during a warp-storm. He doubted the man’s ability. He loathed his spare, fragile build.

‘Admit him,’ Grasticus said, diverted by the unusual event. It would make a change to speak to people. To use his mouth. To see a body and smell its warm, fleshy breath.

Colonel Zoren entered the strategium flanked by two Navy troopers with shotguns. The man’s face was marked by a bruise and a dressed cut.

‘Speak,’ said Grasticus.

‘Lord captain,’ the soldier began, uttering in the delicious accent-tones of a far-worlder. Grasticus hooded his eyes and smiled. The noise delighted him.

‘Colonel Zoren, Vitrian Dragoons. We have the privilege of transport on your great vessel. However, I wish to complain strongly about the lack of inter-barrack security. Feuding has begun with those uncouth barbarians, the Tanith. Their commanding officer struck me when I approached him to complain about several brawling incidents.’

Through his data-conduits, Grasticus felt the waft of the psychic truth-fields that layered and screened his strategium. The man was speaking honestly; the Tanith commander – a… Gaunt? – had indeed struck him. There were lower levels of inconsistency and falsehood registered by the fields, but Grasticus put that down to the man’s nervousness about approaching him directly.

‘This is a matter for my security aide, the warrant officer here. Shipboard manners and protocol are his domain. Do not trouble me with such irrelevancies.’

Zoren cast a look at the agitated Lekulanzi, who dearly wished to be elsewhere.

Before either could speak, a new figure marched directly into the strategium, a tall man in the long coat and cap of an Imperial commissar. The troopers turned their weapons on him reflexively but he did not even blink.

‘Lekulanzi is a fop. He is unable to perform his duties, let alone command peace on this ship. You must deal with it.’

The newcomer was astonishingly bold and direct. No formal address, no humble approach. Grasticus was impressed – and wrong-footed.

‘I am Gaunt,’ the newcomer said. ‘My Tanith barracks have been raided and attempts have been made on my own life. Three of my men are dead, another critical and another missing. I mistook Zoren and his men as the culprits, hence my assault on him. The guilty party is in fact the Jantine Regiment. I ask you now, directly, to confine them and put their commanding officers on report.’

Again, Grasticus felt a hint of deceit in the flow of the astropathic truth-fields, but once more he put this down to the disarming awe of being in his presence. Essentially, this Gaunt was reading as utterly truthful and shamelessly direct.

‘You have men dead?’ Grasticus asked, almost alarmed.

‘Three. More urgently, I require your authorisation to admit my medical officer to the stores of the Munitorium to obtain medical commodities to save my injured soldier.’

This insect is shaming me! In my own strategium! Grasticus thought with sudden revulsion.

His mind whirled and he shut out sixty percent of the data-flow entering his skull so he could concentrate. This was the first time in a dozen years he had to deal with a problem involving his cargo. Passengers! Passengers, that was what Lekulanzi had called them. Grasticus writhed gently in his throne. This was unseemly. This was insulting. This matter should have been contained long before now, before cargo was damaged, died, before complaints were brought to his feet.

He raised his facilitator wand and flicked it at a hovering plate. He would not lose face before these walking flesh-worms. He would show he was the captain, the lord captain, and that they all owed their safety and lives to him.

‘I have given your medical officer authority. He has my formal mark to expedite his access to the stores.’

Gaunt smiled ‘That’s a start. Now confine the Jantine and punish their officers.’

Grasticus was amazed. He raised himself up on his ham-like elbows to study Gaunt, hefting his upper body free of the leather for the first time in fifteen months. There was a squeak of sweat-wet leather and a scent of stale filth wafted into the air of the strategium.

‘I will not brook such insubordination,’ Grasticus hissed, his cotton-soft words spitting from the loose folds of spare flesh that surrounded his small, glistening mouth like curtains on a proscenium arch. ‘No one demands of me.’

‘That’s not good enough. Don’t belabour us with threats. We require action!’ This from Zoren now, stood side by side with the hawk-faced Gaunt. Grasticus reacted in surprise. He had thought the Vitrian more subdued, more deferential, but now he too challenged directly. ‘Contain the Jantine and curtail their feuding or you’ll have an uprising on your hands! Thousands of trained troopers, hungry for blood! More than your trooper details can handle!’ Zoren cast a contemptuous glance at the Navy escort.

‘Do you threaten me?’ Grasticus almost gasped. The very thought of it. ‘I will see you in chains for such a remark!’

‘Is that how you deal with things you don’t want to hear?’ Gaunt snapped, pushing aside a trooper to approach Grasticus’s throne. The trooper grappled with the larger commissar but Gaunt sent him sprawling with a deft swing of his arm.

‘Are you the commander of this vessel, or a weak, fat nothing who hides at its heart?’

Lekulanzi fell back against the wall of the strategium, aghast and hyperventilating. No one spoke to the lord captain like that! No one–

Grasticus writhed ever-upwards from his bed-throne, sweeping the hovering plates aside with his hands so that they parted and cowered at the edges of the chamber behind him. He glared down at the Guard officers, rage rippling through his vast mass.

‘Well?’ Gaunt said.

Grasticus began to bellow, raising his thick, swollen voice for the first time in years.

Zoren cast a nervous glance at Gaunt. Weren’t they pushing the lord captain too hard? Something in Gaunt’s calm reassured him. He remembered the elements of their plan and started to send his own jibes at the captain in tune with Gaunt’s.

Gaunt grinned inwardly. Now they had Grasticus’s entire attention.

Outside the strategium, on the lower levels of the high-roofed, cool-aired bridge vault, the senior helm officers looked up from their dark, oiled gears and levers, and exchanged wondering glances. The basso after-echo of their captain rolled out of the armoured dome. The lord captain was clearly so angry he had diverted his attention from most of the systems temporarily. This was unheard of, unprecedented.

A detachment of ship troopers milled cautiously outside the door-arch of the strategium. ‘Do we enter?’ rasped one through his helmet intercom. None of them felt like confronting the lord captain’s wrath.

They pitied the idiot Guard officers who had created this commotion.

Gaunt did not care. This was exactly what he had been after.

* * *

Fourteen

CHIEF MEDIC DORDEN led his party in through the armoured hatchway of the Munitorium depot deck. Flanking him, Caffran, Brin Milo and Bragg formed a motley honour guard of uneven height for the elderly medico.

They entered a wide bay that smelled of antiseptic and ionisation filters. The grey deck was dusted with clean sand. Dorden consulted his chronometer.

‘Cometh the hour…’ he said.

‘Come who?’ Bragg asked.

‘What I mean is, it’s now or never. We’ve given the commissar long enough. He should be with the captain now,’ Dorden said.

‘I still don’t get any of this,’ Bragg said, scratching his lantern jaw. ‘How’s this meant to work? What’s the old Ghostmaker trying to do?’

‘It’s called a diversion,’ Milo said quietly. ‘Don’t worry about the details, just play along and act dumb.’

‘Not a problem!’ Bragg announced, baffled by Caffran’s subsequent smirk.

Beyond metal cage doors at the end of the bay, three robed officials of the Munitorium were at work at low-set consoles. There were at least seven Navy troopers on watch around the place.

Dorden marched forward and rapped on the metal grille. ‘I need supplies!’ he called. ‘Hurry now; a man is dying!’

One of the Munitorium men got up from his console, leaving his cloak draped over the seat back. He was a short, bulky man with physical power under his khaki Munitorium tunic. Glossy, chrome servitor implants were stapled into his cheek, temple and throat. He disconnected a cable from his neck socket as he approached them.

Dorden thrust his data-slate under the man’s nose. ‘Requisition of medical supplies,’ he snapped.

The man viewed the slate. As he scrolled down the slate file, the troopers suddenly came to attention and grouped in the centre of the bay. Milo could hear the muffled back and forth of their helmet vox-casters. One of them turned to the Munitorium staff.

‘Trouble on the bridge!’ he said through his speaker, his voice tinny. ‘Bloody Guard are feuding again. We’ve been detailed down to the barrack decks to act as patrol.’

The Munitorium officer waved them off with his hand. ‘Whatever.’ The troopers exited, leaving just one watching the grille entry.

The Munitorium officer slid back the cage grille and let the four Ghosts inside. He eyed the slate before directing them down an aisle to the left. ‘Lord Captain Grasticus has issued you with clearance. Down there, chamber eleven. Get what you need. Just what you need. I’ll be checking the inventory on the way out. No analgesics without a signed chit from the warrant officer, no purloining.’

‘Feth you,’ Dorden said, snatching back the slate and beckoning the others after him. ‘We’ve got a life to save! Do you think we’d waste time trying to rustle some booty?’

The official turned away, disinterested. Dorden led the trio down the dark aisle, between racks of air-tanks, amphorae of wine and food crates stacked up to the high roof. They entered a junction bay in the dark depths of the storage holds, and through several hatches ahead saw the vast commodity stockpiles of the huge ship.

‘Medical supplies down there,’ Caffran said, noting the white marker tags on one of the hatch frames.

‘There’s a console,’ Milo said, pointing down another of the aisles into a dark hold. They could see the dull, distant green glow of a Munitorium artificer. Dorden glanced at his chronometer again. ‘Right, as we planned. Five minutes! Go!’

With Bragg at his heels, Dorden strode into the medical supply vault and started pulling bundles of sterile gauze, jars of counter-septic wash and packs of clean surgical tools off the black metal shelves. Bragg requisitioned a wheeled cargo trolley from an alcove near the door and followed him.

Milo and Caffran slunk down into the darker chamber, and the boy swung onto the low bench-seat in front of the console. He fumbled in his pocket and produced the memory tile that Gaunt had give him, gingerly fitting it into the slot on the desk-edge of the machine. Two teal-coloured lights winked and flashed as the artificer recognised the blank tile. His hands trembled. He tried to remember what the commissar had told him.

‘Will this work?’ Caffran asked, pulling out his blade and watching the door anxiously.

The Munitorium data banks were slaved directly to the ship’s main cogitator. Remembering Gaunt’s instructions piece by piece, Milo entered key search words via the ivory-toothed keyboard. The banks had full access to the ship’s information stockpile, including the security clearance Gaunt’s artificer lacked.

‘Hurry up, boy!’ Caffran snapped, edgy.

Milo ignored him, but that ‘boy’ nagged him and made him unhappy. His trembling fingers conducted his way across the worn keys into new levels of instruction that glowed in runic cursors on the flat plate of the console, just as the commissar had laid it out.

‘Here!’ Milo said suddenly, ‘I think…’ He awkwardly touched a rune-inscribed command key and the console hummed. Data began to download onto the blank tile. Gaunt would be proud. Milo had listened to his arcane ramblings about the use of machines well.

IN THE MEDICAL store, Dorden looked up from the cargo trolley he was filling and glanced once more at his chronometer. Bragg watched him, cautiously.

‘This is taking too fething long!’ Dorden said irritably.

‘I can go back–’ Bragg suggested.

‘No, we’ve not got everything yet,’ Dorden said, searching the racks for jars of pneumeno-thorax resin.

MILO’S FINGERS hovered over the keys. ‘We’ve got it!’ he exclaimed.

Caffran didn’t answer. Milo turned and saw Caffran frozen, the blunt nose of a deck-shotgun pressed to his temple. The Imperial Navy trooper said nothing, but nodded his helmet-clad head at Milo, indicating he should get up from the bench rapidly.

Milo rose, his hands where the trooper could see them.

‘That’s good,’ the trooper said through the dull resonator of his headset. He pointed the muzzle of his gun at where he wanted Milo to stand.

Caffran slammed back, jabbing his elbow at the trooper’s sternum, aiming for the solar plexus in one desperate move. The fibre-weave armour of the trooper’s uniform stopped the blow and he swung around, smashing Caffran into the wall-racks with an open hand.

Milo tried to move.

The shotgun fired, a wide burst of incandescent fury in the darkness.

Fifteen

AS THEY WAITED in the shadows, they noted that the Jantine had been issued with the finest barrack decks on the ship. The approach colonnade was a spacious embarkation hall, wide enough for the bulkiest of equipment. The glittering wall-burners cast long purple shadows across the tiles.

Two Jantine Patricians in full dress armour, training shock-poles held ready, patrolled the far end. They were exchanging inconsequential remarks when Larkin appeared down the colonnade, bumbling along as if he’d missed his way. They snapped round in disbelief and Larkin froze, a look of horror on his leathery, narrow face. With an oath, he turned and began to run back the way he had come.

The two guards thundered after him with baying blood-cries. They’d gone ten metres before the shadows behind them unfolded and Ghosts emerged, dropping stealth cloaks and seizing them from behind. Mkoll, Baru, Varl and Corbec fell on the two Jantine, struck with shock-poles and Tanith blades, and dragged the fallen men into the darkness off the main hall.

‘Why am I always the fething bait?’ the returning Larkin asked, stopping by Corbec, who was wiping a trace of blood from the floor with the hem of his cape.

‘You’ve got that kind of face,’ Varl said, and Corbec smiled.

‘Look here!’ Baru called in a hiss from the end of the hall. They moved to join him and he grinned as he pulled his find from the corner of the archway the Jantine sentries had been watching. Guns! A battered old exotic bolt-action rifle with a long muzzle and ornately decorated stock, and a worn but serviceable pump stubgun with a bandolier strap of shells. Neither were regular issue Guard pieces, and both were much lower tech than Guard standard-pattern gear. Corbec knew what they were.

‘Souvenirs, spoils of war,’ he murmured, his hands running a check on the stubgun. All soldiers collected trophies like these, stuck them away in their kits to sell on, keep as mementoes, or simply use in a clinch. Corbec knew many of the Ghosts had their own… but they had dutifully handed them in with their issued weapons when they’d come aboard. He was not the least surprised that the Jantine had kept hold of their unrecorded weapons. The sentries had left them here as backup in case of an assault their shock-poles couldn’t handle.

Varl handed the rifle to Larkin. There was no question who should carry it.

The weight of a gun in his hands again seemed to calm the old sniper. He licked his almost lip-less mouth, which cut the leather of his face like a knife-slash. He’d been complaining incessantly since they had set out, unwilling to be part of a vendetta strike.

‘If they catch us, we’ll be for the firing squad! This ain’t right!’

Corbec had been firm, fully aware of how daring the mission was. ‘We’re in a regimental feud, Larks,’ he had said simply, ‘an honour thing. They killed Lonegin, Freul and Colhn. You think what they did to Feygor, and what they might be doing to the major. The commissar’s asked us to avenge the blood-wrong, and I for one am happy to oblige.’

Corbec hadn’t mentioned that he’d only selected Larkin because of his fine stealth abilities, nor had he made clear Gaunt’s real reason for the raid: distraction, misdirection – and, like the Jantine, to promote the notion that was really happening aboard the Absalom was a mindless soldier’s feud.

Now, checking the long gun, Larkin seemed to relax. His only eloquence was with a firearm. If he was going to break ship-law, then best do it full-measure, with a gun in his hands. And they all knew he was the best shot in the regiment.

They edged on into the Jantine barrack area. From down one long cross-hallway came the sounds of singing and carousing, from another, the clash of shock-poles in a training vault.

‘How far do we go with this?’ Mkoll whispered.

Corbec shrugged. ‘They killed three, wounded two. We should match that at least.’

He also had an urge to discover Rawne’s fate, and rescue him if they could. But he suspected the major was already long dead.

Mkoll, the commander of the scout platoon, was the best stealther they had.

With Baru at his side, the pair melted into the hall shadows and swept ahead.

The other three waited. There seemed to be something sporadic and ill-at-ease in the distant rhythm of the ship’s engines as they vibrated the deck. I hope we’re not running into some fething warp-madness, Corbec mused, then lightened up as he realised that it may be Gaunt’s work. He’d said he was going to distract and upset the captain.

Baru came back to them. ‘We’ve hit lucky, really lucky,’ he hissed. ‘You’d better see.’

Mkoll was waiting in cover in an archway around the next bend. Ahead was a lighted hatchway.

‘Infirmary,’ he whispered. ‘I went up close to the door. They’ve got Rawne in there.’

‘How many Jantine?’

‘Two troopers, an officer – a colonel – and someone else. Robed. I don’t like the look of him at all…’

A scream suddenly cut the air, sobbing down into a whimper. The five Ghosts stiffened. It had been Rawne’s voice.

Sixteen

THE NAVY TROOPER kicked Caffran’s fallen body hard and then swung his shotgun round to finish him. Weapon violation sirens were sounding shrilly in the close air of the Munitorium store. The trooper pumped the loader-grip and then was smashed sideways into the packing cartons to his left by a massive fist.

Bragg lifted the crumpled form of the dazed trooper and threw him ten metres down the vault-way. He landed hard, broken.

‘Brinny! Brinny boy!’ Bragg called anxiously over the siren. Milo raised himself up from under the artificer. The shot had exploded the vista-plate, just missing him. ‘I’m okay,’ he said.

Bragg got the dazed Caffran to his feet as Brin slid the tile from the artificer slot.

‘Go!’ he said, ‘Go!’

In under a minute, they had rejoined Dorden, helping him to push his laden trolley back out of the vault. By then, Munitorium officials and Navy troopers were rushing in through the cage.

Dorden was a master of nerve. ‘Thank Feth you’re here!’ he bellowed, his voice cracking. ‘There are Jantine in there, madmen! They attacked us! Your man engaged them, but I think they got him. Quickly! Quickly now!’

Most of the detail moved past at a run, racking weapons. One stayed, eyeing the Ghost party cautiously.

‘You’ll have to wait. We’re going to check this.’

Dorden strode forward, steely-calm now and held up his data-slate to show the man.

‘Does this mean anything to you? A direct authorisation from your captain? I’ve got a man dying back in my infirmary! I need these supplies! Do you want a death on your hands, because by Feth you’re–’

The trooper waved them on, and hurried after his comrades.

‘I thought this place was meant to be secure,’ Dorden spat at the Munitorium official as they pushed past him towards the exit.

They slammed the cart into a lift and slumped back against the walls as it began to rise.

‘Did you get it?’ Dorden asked, after a few deep breaths.

Milo nodded. ‘Think so.’

Caffran looked at the elderly doctor with a wide-eyed grin. ‘“There are Jantine in there, madmen! They attacked us! Your man engaged them, but I think they got him. Quickly!” What the feth was that all about?’

‘Inspired, I’d say,’ Bragg said.

‘Back home, I was a doctor… and also secretary of the County Pryze Citizens’ Players. My Prince Teygoth was highly regarded.’

Their relieved laughter began to fill the lift.

Seventeen

CORBEC’S REVENGE SQUAD was about to move when the deck vox-casters started to relay the scream of a weapons violation alert. The dull choral wails echoed down the hallway and ‘Alert’ runes began to blink above all of the archways.

The colonel pulled his men into cover as figures strode out of the infirmary, looking around. Squads of Jantine guards came up from both sides, milling around as vox-checks tried to ascertain the nature of the incident.

Corbec saw Flense and Brochuss, the Jantine senior offi-cers, and another man, a hugely tall and grotesque figure in shimmering, smoke-like robes who filled him with dread.

‘Weapons discharge on the Munitorium deck!’ a Jantine trooper with a vox-caster on his back reported. ‘The Navy details are closing to contain it… Sir, the channels are alive with cross-reports. They’re blaming it on the Jantine! They say we conducted a feud strike on Tanith-scum in the supply vaults!’

Flense cursed. ‘Gaunt! The devil’s trying to match our game!’ He turned to his men. ‘Brochuss! Secure the deck! Security detail with me!’

‘I’ll stay and finish my work,’ the robed figure said in a deep, liquid tone that quite chilled Corbec. As the various men moved off to comply with orders, the robed figure stopped Flense with a hand to his shoulder. Or rather, what seemed more like a long-fingered claw than a hand, Corbec noticed with a shudder.

‘This isn’t good, Flense,’ the figure breathed at the suddenly trembling colonel. ‘Use violence against a soldier like Gaunt and you can be assured he will use it back. And you seem to have underestimated his political abilities. I fear he has outplayed you. And if he has, you should fear for yourself.’

Flense shook himself free and hurried away. ‘I’ll deal with it!’ he snarled defensively over his shoulder. The robed figure watched him leave and then withdrew into the infirmary.

‘What do we do?’ Varl hissed.

‘Tell me we go back now,’ Larkin whispered urgently.

Another scream issued from the chamber beyond.

‘What do you think?’ Corbec asked.

Eighteen

SIRENS WAILED IN the normally tranquil strategium. Grasticus shifted in his cot-throne, wanding screens to him and cursing at the information he was reading.

Gaunt and Zoren exchanged glances.

I hope this confusion is the confusion we planned, Gaunt thought.

Grasticus rose up on his elbows and bawled at the quaking Lekulanzi. ‘Weapons fire on the Munitorium deck! My data says it’s Jantine feuders!’

‘Are any of mine hurt?’ Gaunt asked, pushing forward, urgent. ‘I told you the Jantine were out for blood–’

‘Shut up, commissar,’ the captain said with a suddenly sour look. His day had been disrupted enough. ‘The reports are unconfirmed. Get down there and see to it, warrant officer!’

Lekulanzi scurried out of the chamber. Grasticus turned back to the two Imperial Guard colonels.

‘This matter needs my undivided attention. I will summon you when we can speak further.’

Zoren and Gaunt nodded and backed out of the strategium smartly. Side by side they crossed the nave of the bridge, through the hubbub of bridge crew, and entered the lifts.

‘Is it working?’ Zoren asked as the doors closed and the choral chime sang out.

‘Pray by the Throne that it is,’ Gaunt said.

Nineteen

THEY TOOK THE infirmary in a textbook move.

The room was wide, long and low. The robed figure was bent over Rawne, who was strapped, screaming, to a gurney. A pair of Jantine troopers stood guard at the door. Corbec came in between them, ignoring them both as he dived into a roll, his shotgun raised up to fire. The robed figure turned, as if sensing the sudden intrusion. The shotgun blast blew him backwards into a stack of wheezing resuscitrex units.

The guards began to turn when Mkoll and Baru launched in on Corbec’s heels and knifed them both. Corbec rolled up onto his feet, slung his shotgun by the strap and grabbed Rawne.

‘Sacred Feth…’ he murmured, as he saw the head wound, and the insidious pattern of scalpel cuts across the major’s face, neck and stripped body. Rawne was slipping in and out of consciousness.

‘Come on, Rawne, come on!’ Corbec snapped, hauling the major up over his shoulder.

‘We have to move now!’ Mkoll bellowed, as secondary weapons violation sirens began to shrill. Corbec threw the shotgun over to him.

‘Take point! We shoot our way out if we have to!’

‘Colonel!’ Baru yelled. Weighed down by Rawne, Corbec couldn’t turn in time. The robed figure was clawing its way back onto its feet behind him. Its hood was thrown back, and they gasped to see the equine extension and bared teeth of the head. Fury boiled in the eyes of the man-monster, and violet-dark energy crackled around him.

Corbec felt the room temperature drop. Fething magic, was all he had time to think – before a shot took the man-monster’s throat clean away.

Larkin stood in the doorway, the old rifle raised in his hands. ‘Now we’re leaving, right?’ he said.

Twenty

GAUNT TOOK THE tile Milo held out for him. Then he shut the door of his quarters on the faces of the men crowded outside. Inside, Corbec, Zoren and Milo watched him carefully.

‘This had better be worth all that damn effort,’ Corbec said eventually, voicing what they all thought.

Gaunt nodded. The gamble had been immense. But for the Jantine’s bloodthirsty and brutal methods of pursuing their intrigue, they would never have got this far. The ship was still full of commotion. Adeptus Mechanicus security details clogged every corridor, conducting barrack searches. Rumour, accusation and threat rebounded from counter rumour, counter accusation and promise.

Gaunt knew his hands weren’t spotless in this, and he would make no attempt to hide that his men fought back against the Jantine in a feud. There would be reprimands, punishment details, rounds of questioning that would lead to nothing conclusive. But, like him, the Jantine would not take the matter beyond a simple regimental feud. And only he and those secret elements pitched against him would know precisely what had been at stake.

He slotted the tile into his artificer, and then set the crystal in the read-slot. He touched a few keys.

There was a pause.

‘It isn’t working,’ Zoren began.

It wasn’t. As far as Gaunt could tell, Milo had indeed downloaded the latest clearance ciphers via the Munitorium artificer, but still they would not open the crystal. In fact, he couldn’t even open the ciphers and set them to work.

Gaunt cursed.

‘What about the ring?’ Milo asked.

Gaunt paused, then fished Dercius’s ring from his pocket. He fitted that into the read-slot beside the one that held the crystal and activated it.

Old and too out of date to open the dedicated ciphers of the crystal, the ring was nevertheless standardised in its cryptography enough to authorise use of the downloaded codes. The vista-plate scrolled nonsense for a moment, as runic engram languages translated each other and overlaid data, transcribing and interpreting, rereading and re-setting. The crystal opened, spilling its contents up in a hololithic display which projected up off the vista-plate.

‘Oh Feth… what’s this mean?’ Corbec murmured, instantly overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he saw.

Milo and Gaunt were silent, as they read on for detail.

‘Schematics,’ Zoren said simply, an awed note in his voice.

Gaunt nodded. ‘By the Golden Throne, I don’t pretend to understand much of this, but from what I do… now I see why they were so keen to get it.’

Milo pointed to a side bar of the display. ‘A chart. A location. Where is that?’

Gaunt looked and nodded again, slowly. Things now made sense. Like why Fereyd had chosen him to be the bearer of the crystal. Things had just become a great deal harder than even he had feared.

‘Menazoid Epsilon,’ he breathed.