PART SIX

MENAZOID EPSILON

One

NO ONE WANTED Epsilon. No one wanted to die.

Colonel-Commissar Gaunt recalled his own deliberations in the Glass Bay of the Absalom with a rueful grin. He remembered how he had prayed his Ghosts would be selected for the main offensive on the main planet, Menazoid Sigma. How things change, he laughed to himself. How he would have scoffed back then in the Glass Bay if he had been told he would deliberately choose this action.

Well, choose was perhaps too strong a word. Luck, and invisible hands, had been at work. When the Absalom had put in at one of the huge beachhead hexathedrals strung out like beads across the Menazoid Clasp, there had been a bewildering mass of regiments and armoured units assembling to deploy at the Menazoid target zones. Most of the regimental officers had been petitioning for the glory of advancing on Sigma, and Warmaster Macaroth’s tactical counsel had been inundated with proposals and counter-proposals as to the disposition of the Imperial armies. Gaunt had thought of the way that Fereyd, the unseen Fereyd and his network of operatives, had arranged for the Vitrians to support him on the Absalom. With no direct means of communication, he trusted that they would observe him again and where possible facilitate his needs, tacitly understanding them to be part of the mutual scheme.

So he had sent signals to the tactical division announcing that he believed his Ghosts, with their well-recognised stealth and scout attributes, would be appropriate for the Epsilon assault.

Perhaps it was chance. Perhaps it was because no other regiment had volunteered. Perhaps it was that Fereyd and his network had noted the request and manipulated silently behind the scenes to ensure that it happened. Perhaps it was that the conspiring enemy faction, rebuffed in their attempts to extract the secrets of the crystal from him, had decided the only way to reveal the truth was to let him have his way and follow him. Perhaps he was leading them to the trophy they so desired.

It mattered little. After a week and a half of levy organisation, resupply and tactical processing at the hexathedrals, the Ghosts had been selected to participate in the assault on Menazoid Epsilon, advancing before an armoured host of forty thousand vehicles from the Lattarii Gundogs, Ketzok 17th, Samothrace 4th, 5th and 15th, Borkellid Hellhounds, Cadian Armoured 3rd and Sarpoy Mechanised Cavalry. With the Tanith First in the field would be eight Mordian and four Pragar regiments, the Afghali Ravagers 1st and 3rd, six battalions of Oudinot Irregulars – and the Vitrian Dragoons.

The inclusion of the Vitrians gave Gaunt confidence that deployment decisions had been influenced by friendly minds.

The fact that the Jantine Patricians were also part of the first wave, and that Lord General Dravere was in overall charge of the Epsilon theatre, made him think otherwise.

How much of it was engineered by Fereyd’s hand; how much by the opposing cartel? How much was sheer happenstance? Only time would tell. Time… and slaughter.

The lord general’s strategists had planned out six dispersal sites for the main landing along a hundred and twenty kilometre belt of lowlands adjacent to a hill range designated Shrine Target Primaris on all field charts and signals. Four more dispersal sites were spread across a massive salt basin below Shrine Target Secundus, a line of steeple-cliffs fifteen hundred kilometres to the west, and three more were placed to assault Shrine Target Tertius on a wide oceanic peninsula two thousand kilometres to the south.

The waves of landing ships came in under cover of predawn light, tinting the dark undersides of the clouds red with their burners and attitude thrusters. As the sun came up, pale and weak, the lightening sky was thick with ships… the heavyweight troop-carriers, glossy like beetles, the smaller munitions and supply lifters moving in pairs and trios, the quick, cross-cutting threads of fighter escort and ground cover. Some orbital bombardment – jagging fire-ripples of orbit-to-surface missiles and the occasional careful stamp of a massive beam weapon – softened the empty highlands above the seething dispersal fields.

Down in the turmoil, men and machines marshalled out of black ships into the dawn light. Troops components formed columns or waiting groups, and armour units ground forward, making their own roads along the lowlands, assembling into packs and advance lines on the churned, rolling grasses. The air was thick with exhaust fumes, the growl of tank engines, the roar of ship-thrusters and the crackle of vox-chatter. Platoon strength retinues set dispersal camps, lit fires, or were seconded to help erect the blast-tents of the field hospitals and communication centres. Engineer units dug fortifications and defence baffles. Munitorium supply details broke out the crates from the material ships, and distributed assault equipment to collection parties from each assembling platoon. Amid the hue and cry, the Ministorum priesthood moved solemnly through their flock, chanting, blessing, swinging incense burners and singing unceasing hymns of valour and protection.

Gaunt came down the bow-ramp of his drop-ship into the early morning air and onto a wide mud-plain of track-chewed earth. The noise, the vibration, the petrochemical smell, was intense and fierce. Lights flashed all around, from campfires and hooded lanterns, from vehicle headlights, from the winking hazard lamps of landing ships or the flicking torch-poles of dispersal officers directing disembarking troop columns or packs of off-loading vehicles.

He looked up at the highland slopes beyond: wide, rising hills thick with dry, ochre bracken. Beyond them was the suggestion of crags and steeper summits: the Target Primaris. There, if the Vermilion-level data was honest, lay the hopes and dreams of Lord High Militant General Dravere and his lackeys. And the destiny of Ibram Gaunt and his Ghosts too.

Further down the field, Devourer drop-ships slackened their metal jaws and disgorged the infantry. The Ghosts came out blinking, in platoon formation, gazing out at the rolling ochre-clad hills and the low, puffy cloud cover. Gaunt moved them up and out, under direction of the marshals, onto the rise that was their first staging post. Clearing the exhaust smog which choked the dispersal site, they got their first taste of Menazoid Epsilon. It was dry and cool, with a cutting wind and a permeating scent of honeysuckle. At first, the sweet, cold smell was pleasing and strange, but after a few breaths it became cloying and nauseating.

Gaunt signalled his disposition and quickly received the command to advance as per the sealed battle orders. The Ghosts moved forward, rising up through the bracken, leaving countless trodden trails in their wake. The growth was hip-high and fragile as ash, and the troopers were encumbered by tripping roots and wiry sedge weeds.

Gaunt led them to the crest of the hill and then turned the regiment west, as he had been ordered. Two kilometres back below them, on the busy dispersal field, burners flared and several of the massive drop-ships rose, swinging low above the hillside, shuddering the air and billowing up a storm of bracken fibres as they lifted almost impossibly into the cloudy sky.

Three kilometres distant, Gaunt could see through his scope two regiments of Mordian Iron Guard forming up as they advanced from their landing points. Another two kilometres beyond them, the Vitrian Dragoons were advancing from their first staging. The rolling hilly landscape was alive with troops, clusters of black dots marching up from the blasted acres of the dispersal site, forward through the scrub.

By mid-morning, the parallel-advancing regiments of Imperial Guard armour and infantry were pushing like fingers through the bracken and scree-marked slopes of the highlands. At the dispersal sites now left far behind, ships were still ferrying components of the vast assault down from orbit. Thruster-roar rolled like faraway thunder around the sleeve of hills.

They began to see the towers: forty-metre tall, irregular piles of jagged rock rising out of the bracken every five hundred metres or so. Gaunt quickly passed the news on to command, and heard similar reports on the vox-caster’s cross-channel traffic. There were lines of these towers all across the highland landscape. They looked like they had been piled from flat slabs, wide at the base, narrowing as they rose and then wider and flat again at the top. They were all crumbling, mossy, haphazard, and in places time had tumbled some of their number over in wide spreads of broken stone, half-hidden amidst the bracken.

Gaunt wasn’t sure if they were natural outcrops, their spacing and linear form seemed to suggest otherwise. He was disheartened as he remembered the singular lack of data on Epsilon that had been available at the orbital preparatory briefings.

‘Possibly a shrine world’ had been the best the Intelligence cadre had had to offer. ‘The surface of the planet is covered in inexplicable stone structures, arranged in lines that converge on the main areas of ruins – the targets Primaris, Secundus and Tertius.’

Gaunt sent Mkoll’s scouting platoon ahead, around the breast of the hill through a line of mouldering towers and into the valley beyond. He flipped out the data-slate which he had secreted in his storm-coat pocket for two days and consulted the crystal’s data.

Calling up Trooper Rafflan, he took the speaker-horn from the field-caster on his back and relayed further orders. His units would scout ahead and the Mordians, advancing in their wake, would lay behind until he signalled. It was now local noon.

Turning back to his men, Gaunt saw Major Rawne nearby, standing in a grim hunch, his lasgun hanging limply in his hands.

Gaunt had all but refused to allow Rawne to join them, but the hexathedral medics had pronounced him fit. He was a shadow of his former self since the torture by the Jantine and that mysterious robed monster which Larkin had shot. Gaunt missed the waspish, barbed attitude that had made Rawne a dangerous ally – and a good squad leader.

Feygor, his adjutant, was here too, his life owed to Dor-den. Feygor was a loose cannon now, an angry man with an axe to grind. He’d railed against the Jantine in the barracks and cursed that they were sharing this expedition. Gaunt feared what might happen if the Ghosts and the Jantine crossed on Epsilon, particularly without Rawne sharp enough to keep his adjutant in line.

What will happen will happen, Gaunt decided, hearing Fereyd’s counsel in his head. He checked his boltgun for luck and was about to turn and tell Milo to play up when the shivering notes of a march spilled from the chanters of the Tanith pipes and echoed across the curl of the valley.

They were here. Now they would do this.

Two

LORD GENERAL DRAVERE’S Command Leviathan, a vast armoured, trundling fortress the size of a small city, crawled forward across the loamy soil of the lowland slope overlooking one of the main dispersal sites for the Primaris target.

At its heart, Dravere swung around in his leather command g-hammock. He was in a good mood. Thanks to his urgent requests, Warmaster Macaroth had personally instructed him to the command of the Epsilon offensive. The fool! Here lay the secret which the freak-beast Heldane had told him of on Fortis Binary. The reward. The prize that would win him everything.

Dravere had spent two days reviewing the available data on Menazoid Epsilon before the drop. Little more than a moon compared to its vast partner Sigma, it was reckoned to be a shrine world to the Dark Powers. Vast, mouldering structures of inexplicable ancient design dominated the northern uplands, arranged in patterns that could only be appreciated from high orbit. The vast bulk of the Chaos legions arrayed against them had dug in to defend their cities on the primary world, but intelligence reports had picked up hints of an unknown mass of defence established here. It was clear that, though there was no obvious wealth or value to the moon-world, the foe regarded it as significant. Why else would they have risked splitting their forces?

Dravere had heard talk of simply obliterating Epsilon from orbit, but had fiercely vetoed the Navy plan. He wanted Epsilon taken on the ground, so that they might capture and examine whatever it was here the enemy held in such regard. That was the authorised explanation for this assault.

Dravere knew more. He knew that the fact the rebellious Gaunt had requested this theatre alone made it significant. Dravere readied himself. He knew how to use manpower. He had based his career upon it. He would use Gaunt now. The commissar had not given up the priceless data, so they would instead use Gaunt to lead them to it.

Dravere pulled on a lever to rotate his command hammock, speed-reading the deposition reports from the repeater plates that hung around his station. He linked in with the command globes of Marshal Sendak and Marshal Tarantine, who were overseeing the assaults on target locations Secundus and Tertius respectively. They reported their dispersal complete and their forces in advance. No contact with any enemy thus far.

The afternoon was half gone, and the first day with it. Dravere was unhappy that fighting had not yet begun at any of the three battle fronts, but he was gratified in the knowledge that he had supervised the landing of an expeditionary force of this size, divided between three targets, in less than a single day. He knew of few Imperial Guard commanders who could have done the same in treble that time.

He selected other plates and surveyed the disposition of the army under his direct command, the Primaris invasion. The infantry regiments were down and advancing strongly from the dispersal sites, and the motorised armour were disembarking from their landing craft into the lower valleys. He was pushing on three prongs to encircle the ancient mountainside structures of Shrine Target Primaris, fanning his armour out to support three infantry advances, led by the Mordian to the west, the Lattarii to the east and the Tanith to the south. So far there had been no sign of an enemy to engage. No sign at all, in fact, that there were anything other than Imperium forces alive on Epsilon.

Dravere took up a stylus and inscribed a short message on a data-slate to Colonel Flense of the Jantine. Flense would be his eyes and ears on the ground, tailing the Tanith Ghosts and standing ready to intercede. Gaunt’s advance was the only one he was interested in.

Dravere coded the message in Jantine combat-cant and broadcast it to the Patricians on a stammered vox-burst. Flense would not fail him.

He sat back in his harness and allowed a smile to cross his thin lips. He knew this gambit would cost him, but he had lives enough to pay. The lives of the fifty thousand infantry under his command here on Epsilon. He considered them a down-payment on his apotheosis.

He decided to take the opportunity to rest and meditate.

THE SECOND DAY was dawning when he returned to his command-hammock, and overviewed the intelligence from the night. All of his units had advanced as expected until dark and then established watch-camps and stagings. At first light, they were moving again. The night had brought no sign of the foe, nor had Dravere expected such news. His staff would have roused him immediately at the first shot fired.

Chatter and industry filled the command globe beyond the circular guard rail surrounding his hammock-pit. Navy officers and Munitorium aides mixed with Guard tactical officials and members of his own staff, manning the artifi-cers and codifiers, processing, analysing and charting movement on the huge hololithic deployment map, a three-dimensional light-shape projecting down from the domed roof.

A sudden call rang through the deck: ‘Marshal Tarantine reports his Cadian and Afghali units have engaged. Heavy fighting now at Shrine Target Tertius!’

First blood, Dravere thought, at last. Red indicator runes flashed on the continental deployment map. Stains of telltale brown and crimson shone out to delineate firefight spread and range at the Tertius location. Enemy positions flashed into life as they were assessed, appearing as aggressive little yellow stars.

He issued more orders, bringing the heavy artillery and tanks around to begin bombardment to cover Tarantine’s line. Two more heavy fighting zones erupted on the map, as the Secundus push suddenly ground hard into hidden enemy emplacements. A counter-bombardment opened up from the enemy forces. More stains, more yellow stars. Dravere kept one eye fixed on the jinking signals that flagged the swift Tanith advance, with Mordian, Jantine and Vitrian columns at its heels. The Primaris assault was unopposed so far.

‘It begins, lord,’ a voice said to his left. Dravere looked up into the face of Imperial Tactician Wheyland. Whey-land was a grizzled, bald man with a commanding frame and piercing eyes. He wore the black and red-braid uniform of Macaroth’s tactical advisors, but Dravere had known who the man really was when he first met him. A spy, a watcher, an observer, sent by Macaroth to supervise Dravere’s efforts.

‘Your assessment, Wheyland?’ Dravere said smoothly.

The tactician scrutinised the deployment map. ‘We expected fierce resistance. I anticipate they have more than this up their sleeves.’

‘Nothing yet here at Primaris. We expected this to be the worst, didn’t we?’

‘Indeed.’ Wheyland seemed oblivious to Dravere’s sarcasm. ‘Not yet, but it will come. If this is the Shrine World we fear it to be, their defence will be more indomitable and fanatical than we can imagine. Do not advance your forces too swiftly, lord general, or you will render them vulnerable and over-extended.’

Dravere wished he could tell the tactician exactly what he thought of his advice, but Wheyland was part of Mac-aroth’s military aristocracy and an insult would be counter-productive. He wanted to shout: I’ve dispersed this invasion faster and more efficiently than any commander in the fleet and you dare advise me to slow? But he simply nodded, biting his tongue for now.

Wheyland sat on the guard rail and sighed reflectively. ‘It’s been a long time for us, eh, Hechtor?’

Dravere looked at him crossly. ‘Long time? What do you mean?’

Wheyland smiled at him. ‘The heat of combat? We were both footsloggers once. Last action I saw was against the accursed eldar on Ondermanx, twenty years past. Now we’re data-slate watchers, plate-pushers. Command is an honourable venture, but sometimes I miss the sweat and toil of combat.’

Dravere licked his lips at the delicious thought which had just come to him. ‘I can use any able-bodied, willing fighting man, Wheyland. Do you want to get out there?’

Wheyland looked startled for a moment, then grinned suddenly, getting up. ‘I never refuse such an opportunity. The combat technique of this much-celebrated Tanith regiment fascinates me. I’m sure the tactical counsel could incorporate many new ideas from close observation of their stealth methods. With your permission, I’d gladly join them.’

You’re so damn transparent, Dravere thought sullenly. You want to see for yourself, don’t you? But he also knew he couldn’t argue. To deny an Imperial tactician now might risk compromising his plan. I can deal with you later, he decided.

‘Would you care to deploy in the field as an observer? I could always use an eye on the ground.’

‘With your permission,’ Wheyland said, making to leave. ‘I’ll take a Chimera from the reserve and move up the line. I have a detail of bodyguards who can act as a fire-team squad. Naturally, I’ll report all findings to you.’

‘Naturally,’ Dravere agreed humourlessly. ‘I’ll enter your identifier on the chart. Your battle code will be what?’

Wheyland seemed to think for a moment. ‘How about my old unit call sign? Eagleshard.’

Dravere noted it and passed the details to his aide. ‘Good hunting… tactician,’ he said as the man left the command dome.

Three

GAUNT LOOKED UP from the inscription that Communications Officer Rafflan had made of the intercepted vox-burst. ‘

Mean anything to you, sir?’ he asked. ‘I logged it yester day afternoon.’

Gaunt nodded. It was a message in Jantine combat-cant. Watchful of Macaroth’s agencies, he had instructed Rafflan to keep his vox-cast unit open to listen for all battlefield traffic. The message was from Dravere to Flense: a direct order to shadow the Ghosts. Gaunt rubbed his chin. Slowly, the enemies were showing their hand.

He looked ahead, up the high mountain pass, choked with bracken, and its lines of slumping towers. He was tempted to send Rawne back down the slope to mine the way in advance of the Jantine at their heels, but when all was said and done, they were on the same side. Word had come that the fighting had opened at the other two target sites, heavy and bloody.

There was no telling what they would encounter up ahead in the thin altitude. He dared not drive back the units which might be the only forces to support the Tanith in a direct action.

Gaunt pulled a note-pad from the pocket of his storm-coat and consulted several pages that Colonel Zoren had written. Carefully, with uncertainty, he composed a message in the Vitrian battlefield language, using the code-words Zoren had told him. Then he had Rafflan send it.

‘Speaking in tongues, sir?’ the vox-officer laughed, ironically using the Tanith’s own war-dialect that Gaunt had made sure he had learned early on. Many of the regiments used their own languages or codes for internal messages. On the battlefield, secrecy was imperative in vox-commands. And Dravere couldn’t know Gaunt had a working knowledge of Jantine combat-cant.

Gaunt called up Sergeant Blane. ‘Take the seventh platoon and function as a rearguard,’ he told Blane directly.

‘You’re expecting a hindquarters strike, then?’ asked Blane, puzzled. ‘Mkoll’s scouts have covered the hill line. The enemy won’t be sneaking round on us.’

‘Not the given enemy,’ Gaunt said. ‘I want you watching for the Jantine who are following us up. Our code word will be “Ghostmaker”. Given from me to you, or you back to me, it will indicate the Jantine have made a move. I don’t want to be fighting our own… but it may come to that. When you hear the word, do not shrink from the deed. If you signal me, I will send everything back to support you. As far as I am concerned, the Jantine are as much our foe as the things that dwell up here.’

‘Understood,’ Blane said, looking darkly at his commander. Corbec had briefed the senior men well after Gaunt’s unlocking of the crystal. They knew what was at stake, and were keeping the thought both paramount and away from their men, who had enough to concern them. Gaunt had a particular respect for the gruff, workmanlike Blane. He was as gifted and loyal an officer as Corbec, Mkoll or Lerod, but he was also dependable and solid. Almost despite himself, Gaunt found himself offering Blane his hand.

They shook. Blane realised the weight of the duty, the potentially terrible demands.

‘Emperor go with you, sir,’ he said, as he broke the grip and turned to retreat down the bracken slope.

‘And may He watch over you,’ Gaunt returned.

Nearby, Milo saw the quiet exchange. He shook spit from the chanters of his Tanith pipes and prepared to play again. This is it, he thought. The commissar expects the worst.

Sergeant Mkoll’s scouts were returning from the higher ground. Gaunt joined them to hear their report.

‘I think it’s best if you see it yourself,’ Mkoll said simply and gestured back at the heights.

Gaunt spread the fire-teams of three platoons along the width of the valley slope and then moved forward with Mkoll’s scout unit. By now, all of the Ghosts had rubbed the absorbent fabric of their stealth cloaks with handfuls of ochre bracken and dusted them so that they blended into the ground cover. Gaunt smiled as Mkoll scolded the commissar’s less than Tanith-like abilities, and scrupulously damped down the colour of Gaunt’s cloak with a scrub of ashy bracken. Gaunt removed his cap and edged forward, trying to hang the cloak around him as deftly as the Tanith scout. Behind them, there were two thousand Ghosts on the bracken-thick mountainside, but their commanding officer could see none of them.

He reached the rise, and borrowed Mkoll’s scope as they bellied down in the fern and the dust.

He hardly needed the scope. The rise they were ascending dropped away and a cliff face rose vertical ahead of them, looking like it was ten thousand metres tall. The milky-blue granite face was carved into steps like a ziggurat, a vast steepled formation of weather-worn storeys, rows of archways and slumped blocks. Gaunt knew that this was his first look at Shrine Target Primaris. Other than that, he had no idea what it was. A burial place, a temple, a dead hive? It simply smacked of evil, of the darkness. A vile corruption seeped up from every pore of the rockface, every dark alcove and pillared recess.

‘I don’t like the look of it,’ Mkoll said flatly.

Gaunt smiled grimly and consulted his own data-slate. ‘Neither do I. We don’t want to approach it directly. We need to sweep around to the left and follow the valley line.’ Gaunt scoped down to the left. The carved granite structure extended away beyond the curve of the vale and several of the stalking lines of towers marched up the bracken slopes to meet it, as if they were feelers spread out from the immense shrine itself. Beyond and higher, he could now see towers of blue granite in the clouds: spires, steeples and buttresses. This was just the outskirts of an ancient necropolis, a city long dead that had been raised by inhuman hands before the start of recorded time.

The honeysuckle scent in the air was becoming a stench. Vox-level chatter over the microbead in his ear told him that his men were starting to succumb to a vague, indefinable nausea.

‘You want to go left?’ Mkoll asked. ‘But that’s not in accord with the order of battle.’

‘I know.’

‘The lord general will be furious if we divert from the given advance.’

‘I have my own orders,’ Gaunt said, tapping his data-slate.

‘And the Emperor love you for your loyalty!’ Mkoll shook his head. ‘Sir, we were told to assault this… this place directly.’

‘And we will, Mkoll – just not here.’

Mkoll nodded. ‘How far down?’

‘A kilometre or two. The crystal spoke of a dome. Find it for me.’

‘Gladly,’ Mkoll said. ‘You know that if we alter our advance it will give the Jantine dogs more reason to come for us.’

‘I know,’ Gaunt said. More than ever he appreciated the way his senior officers had accommodated the truth of their endeavour. They knew what was at stake and what the real dangers were.

Mkoll and Corporal Baru led the advancing Ghosts along the top of the valley, just under the crest, and past the threatening, tower-haunted steppes of the graven hillside.

Scout Trooper Thark was the first to spot it. He voxed back to the command group: a dome, a massive, bulbous dome swelling from the living rock of the cliff face, impossibly carved from granite.

Gaunt moved up to see it for himself. It was like some vast stone onion, a thousand metres in diameter, sunk into the stepped rock wall around it, the surface inscribed with billions of obscure sigils and marks.

Thark was also the first to die. A storm of autocannon rounds whipped up the slope, exploding bracken into dust, spitting up soil and punching him into four or five bloody parts. At the cue, other weapon placements in the steppe alcoves of the facing cliff opened fire, raining las-fire, bullets and curls of plasma down at the Ghosts.

The answering fire laced a spider’s web of las-light, tracer lines and firewash between the sides of the valley.

The dying began.

Four

MARSHAL GOHL SENDAK, the so-called Ravager of Genestock Gamma, had abandoned his Command Leviathan to lead his forces from the front. He rode a Leman Russ battle-tank of the Borkellid regiments, heading a fast-moving armoured phalanx that was smashing its way across the rocky escarpments below the weathered stone structures of Shrine Target Secundus.

Laying down a ceaseless barrage, they broke through two lines of crumbling curtain walls and into the lower perimeters of the shrine structure itself. Wide, rubble-strewn slopes faced them, dotted with the lines of those infernal towers. Sendak voxed to the Oudinot infantry at his tail and urged them to follow him in. Fire as heavy as he had ever known blazed down from the archways and alcoves facing them

Sendak felt a dry stinging in his nose, and snorted it away. That damn honeysuckle odour, it was beginning to get to him like it was getting to his men.

He felt a wetness heavy his moustache and wiped it. Fresh blood smeared his grey-cloth sleeve. There was more in his mouth and he spat, his ears throbbing. Looking around in the green-lit interior of the tank, he saw all the crew were suffering spontaneous nose-bleeds, or were retching and hacking blood.

There was a vibration singing in the air: low, lazy, ugly.

Sendak swung the tank’s periscope around to scan the scene outside. Something was happening to the lines of towers which flanked them on either side. They were glowing, fulminating with rich curls of vivid damask energy. Mist was columnating around the old stones.

‘Blood of the Emperor!’ Sendak growled, his teeth and lips stained red with his own dark blood.

Outside, in the space of a human heartbeat, two things happened. The lines of towers, just ragged rows of stone spines a moment before, exploded into life and became a fence, a raging energy field forty metres tall. Lashing and fizzling lines of force whipped and crackled from tower to tower like giant, supernatural barbed wire. Each tower connected blue and white brambles of curling energy with its neighbour. Any man or machine caught in the line between towers was, in two heartbeats, burned or exploded or ripped into pieces. The rest were penned between the sudden barriers, hemmed in and unable to turn or flank.

As the energy wires ignited between the previously dormant stone stacks, something else happened on the flat tops of each tower. In puffs of pinkish, coloured gas, figures appeared on each tower platform.

Teleported into place by sciences too dark and heretical for a sane mind to understand, these squads of soldiers instantly deployed heavy weapons on tripods and laid down fire on the penned aggressors beneath them. The Chaos forces were thin, wasted beings in translucent shrouds and scowling masks made of bone. They manned tripod-mounted lascannons, melta-guns and other more arcane field weapons with hands bandaged in soiled strips of plastic. Amongst them were their corrupt commanders, quasi-mechanical Chaos Marines, Obliterators.

Sendak screamed orders, trying to turn his advance in the chaos. Two tanks to his right swung blindly round into the nearest energy fence and were obliterated, exploding in huge clouds of flame as their munitions went off. Another tank was riddled with fire from the tops of the two nearest towers.

Sendak suddenly found the enemy had heavy weapon emplacements stretching back along the tower-lines around, between and behind his entire column.

He almost admired the tactic, but the technology was beyond him, and his eyes were so clouded and swimming with the blood-pain in his sinuses he could barely think.

He grabbed the vox-caster horn and fumbled for the command channel. ‘It’s worse than we feared! They are luring us in and using unholy science to bracket us and cut us to pieces! Inform all assault forces! The towers are death! The towers are death!’

A cannon round punched through the turret and exploded Sendak and his gunner. The severed vox-horn clattered across the deck, still clutched by the marshal’s severed hand. A second later, the tank flipped over as a frag-rocket blew out its starboard track, skirt and wheelbase. As it landed, turret-down, in the mud, it detonated from within, blowing apart the Leman Russ next to it.

Behind the decimated tanks, the Oudinot were fleeing.

But there was nowhere to flee to.

Five

EVERY OPENING IN the stepped structure which rose above the Tanith Ghosts along the far side of the cliff around that gross, inscribed dome seemed to be spitting fire. Las-fire, bolter rounds, the heavier sparks of cannon fire, and other exotic bursts, odd bullets that buzzed like insects and flew slowly and lazily.

Corbec ran the line of the platoons which had reached the crest, his great rich voice bawling them into cover and return-fire stances.

There was little natural cover up here except the natural curl of the hill brow, and odd arrangements of ancient stones which poked like rotten, discoloured teeth from the bracken.

‘Dash! Down! Crawl! Look!’ Corbec bellowed, repeating the training chant they had first heard on the Founding Fields of lost Tanith. ‘Take your sight and aim! Spraying and praying is not good enough!’

Down the crest, near Lerod’s command position, Bragg opened up with the rocket launcher, swiftly followed by Melyr and several other heavy weapons troopers. Tank-busting missiles whooped across the gully into the crumbling stone facade of the tumbled structure, blowing gouts of stone and masonry out in belches of flame.

On hands and knees, Gaunt regrouped with Corbec under the lip of the hill. The barrage of shots whistled over their heads and the honeysuckle stench was augmented by the choking scent of ignited bracken.

‘We have to get across!’ Gaunt yelled to Corbec over the firing of ten thousand sidearms and the scream of rockets.

‘Love to oblige!’ returned Corbec ruefully, gesturing at the scene. Gaunt showed him the data-slate and they compared it to the edifice beyond, gingerly keeping low for fear of the whinnying shot.

‘It isn’t going to happen,’ Corbec said. ‘We’ll never get inside against a frontal opposition like this!’

Gaunt knew he was right. He turned back to the slate. The data they had downloaded from the crystal was complex and in many places completely impenetrable. It had been written, or at least translated, from old code notations, and there was as much obscure about it as there was comprehensible. Some more of it made sense now – now Gaunt had the chance to compare the information with the actual location. One whole part seemed particularly clear.

‘Hold things here,’ he ordered Corbec curtly and rolled back from the lip, gaining his feet in the steep bracken and hurrying down the slope they had advanced up.

He found the tower quickly enough, one of the jagged, mouldering stone formations, a little way down the slope. He pulled bracken away from the base and uncovered the top of an old, decaying shaft he hoped – knew – would be there. He crouched at the mouth and gazed down into the inky depths of the drop beneath.

Gaunt tapped his microbead to open the line, and then ordered up personnel to withdraw to his position: Mkoll, Baru, Larkin, Bragg, Rawne, Dorden, Domor, Caffran.

They assembled quickly, eyeing the black shaft suspiciously.

‘Our back door,’ Gaunt told them. ‘According to the old data, this sink leads down some way and then into the catacombs beneath the shrine structure. We’ll need ropes, pins, a hammer.’

‘Who’ll be going in there?’ Rawne asked curtly.

‘All of us… me first,’ Gaunt told him.

Gaunt beaded to Corbec and instructed him to marshal the main Tanith levies and sustain fire against the facade of the structure.

He stripped off his storm-coat and cloak, and slung his chainsword over his back. Mkoll had tapped plasteel rooter pins into the stonework at the top of the shaft and played a length of cable around them and down into the darkness.

Gaunt racked the slide of his bolt pistol and holstered it again. ‘Let’s go,’ he said, wrapping the cord around his waist and sliding into the hole.

Mkoll grabbed his arm to stop him as Trooper Vench hurried down the slope from the combat-ridge, calling out. Gaunt slid back out of the cavity and took the data-slate from Vench as he stumbled up to them.

‘Message from Sergeant Blane,’ Vench gasped. ‘There’s a Chimera coming up the low pass, sending signals that it desires to join with us.’

Gaunt frowned. It made no sense. He studied the slate’s transcript. ‘Sergeant Blane wants to know if he should let them through,’ Vench added. ‘They’re identifying themselves as a detail of tactical observers from the warmaster’s counsel. They use the code-name “Eagleshard”.’

Gaunt froze as if he had been shot. ‘Sacred Feth!’ he spat.

The men murmured and eyed each other. It was a pretty pass when the commissar used a Tanith oath.

‘Stay here,’ Gaunt told the insurgence party and unlashed the rope, heading downhill at the double. ‘Tell Rafflan to signal Blane!’ he yelled back at Vench. ‘Let them through!’

Six

THE CHIMERA, its hull armour matt-green and showing no other markings than the Imperial crest, rumbled up the slope from Blane’s picket and slewed sidelong on a shelf of hillside, chewing bracken under its treads. Gaunt scrambled down to meet it, warier than he had ever been in his life.

The side hatch opened with a metallic clunk and three troopers leapt out, lasguns held ready. They wore combat armour in the red and black liveries of the Imperial Crusade staff, elite bodyguard troops for the officer cadre. Reflective visor masks hid their faces. A taller, heftier figure in identical battle dress joined them and stood, hands on hips, surveying the scene as Gaunt approached.

The figure slid back his visor and then pulled the helmet off. Gaunt didn’t recognise him… until he factored in a few years, some added muscle and the shaven head.

‘Eagleshard,’ Gaunt said.

‘Eagleshard,’ responded the figure. ‘Ibram!’

Gaunt shook his old friend’s hand. ‘What do I call you?’

‘I’m Imperial Tactician Wheyland here, but my boys are trustworthy,’ the big man said, gesturing to the troopers, who now relaxed their spread. ‘You can call me by the name you know.’

‘Fereyd…’

‘So, Ibram… bring me up to speed.’

‘I can do better. I can take you to the prize.’

* * *

THE STONE CHIMNEY was deep and narrow. Gaunt half-climbed, half-rappelled down the flue, his toes and hands seeking purchase in the mouldering stonework. He tried to imagine what this place had been at the time of its construction: perhaps a city, a living place built into and around the cliff. This flue was probably the remains of an air-duct or ventilator, dropping down to Emperor-knew-what beneath.

Gaunt’s feet found the rock floor at the base, and he straightened up, loosening the ropes so that the others could join him. It smelled of sweaty damp down here, and the tunnel he was in was low and jagged.

‘Lasgun!’ came a call from above. The weapon dropped down the flue and Gaunt caught it neatly, immediately igniting the lamp-pack which Dorden had webbed to the top of the barrel with surgical tape. He played the light over the dirty, low walls, his finger on the trigger. Above him came the sounds of others scrambling down the ragged chimney.

It took thirty minutes for the rest to join him. They all held lasguns with webbed-on lamps, except Dorden, who was unarmed but carried a torch, and Bragg, who hefted a massive autocannon. Bragg had enjoyed the hardest descent; bulky and uncoordinated, he had struggled in the flue and begun to panic.

Larkin was moaning about death and claustrophobia, young Caffran was clearly alarmed, Dorden was sour and defeatist, Baru was scornful of them all and Rawne was silent and surly. Gaunt smiled to himself. He had selected them well. They were all exhibiting their angst and worries up front. Nothing would linger to come out later. But between them, they encompassed the best stealth, marksmanship, firepower, medical ability and bravery the Tanith First-and-Only had to offer.

All of them seemed wary of the Imperial tactician and his trooper bodyguard which the commissar had suddenly decided to invite along. The troopers were tough, silent types who had scaled the chimney with professional ease. They stuck close to their leader, limpet-like, guns ready.

The party moved down the passage, stooping under outcrops and sags of rock and twisted stone. Their lamps cut obscure shadows and light from the uneven surfaces.

After two hundred careful steps and another twenty minutes, they emerged into a dripping, glistening cavern where the ancient rock walls were calcified and sheened with mineral moisture. Ahead of them, their lamps picked out an archway of perfectly fitted, dressed stone.

Gaunt raised his weapon and flicked the lamp as an indicator.

‘After me,’ he said.

Seven

‘HE WANTS TO see you, sir,’ the aide said.

Lord General Dravere didn’t want to hear. He was still staring at the repeater plates which hung in front of him, showing the total, desperate carnage that had befallen Marshal Sendak’s advance on Target Secundus. Even now, plates were fizzing out to blankness or growing dim and fading. He had never expected this. It was… It was not possible.

‘Sir?’ the aide said again.

‘Can you not see this is a crisis moment, you idiot?’ Dravere raged, swinging around and buffeting some of the floating plates out of his way. ‘We’re being murdered on the second front! I need time to counter-plan! I need the tactical staff here now!’

‘I will assemble them at once,’ the aide said, speaking slowly, as if he was scared of a thing far greater than the raging commander. ‘However, the inquisitor insists.’

Dravere hesitated, and then released the toggle of his harness and slid out of the hammock. He didn’t like fear, but fear was what now burned in his chest. He crossed the command globe to the exit shutter and turned briefly to order his second-in-command to take over and assemble the advice of the tactical staff as it came in.

‘Signal whatever remains of Sendak’s force to withdraw to staging ground A11-23. Alert the other forces to the danger of the towers. I want assessments and counter-strategies by the time I return.’

A brass ladder led down into the isolation sphere buried in the belly of the command globe.

Dravere entered the dimly-lit chamber. It smelled of incense and disinfectant. There was a pulse tone from the medical diagnosticators, and pale steam rose from the plastic sheeting tented over the cot in the centre of the room. Medical staff in cowled red scrubs left silently as soon as he appeared.

‘You wanted to see me, Inquisitor Heldane?’ Dravere began.

Heldane moved under the loose semi-transparent flaps of the tent. Dravere got a glimpse of tubes and pipes, draining fluid from the ghastly rent in the man’s neck, and of the ragged wound in the side of his head, which was encased in a swaddling package of bandage, plastic wrap and metal braces.

‘It is before us, my Lord Hechtor,’ Heldane said, his voice a rasping whisper from vox-relays at his bedside. ‘The prize is close. I sense it through my pawn.’

‘What do we do?’

‘We move with all stamina. Advance the Jantine. I will guide them in after Gaunt. This is no time for weakness or subtlety. We must strike.’

Eight

DEATH FLURRIED DOWN over the Tanith ranks from the stepped arches of the necropolis. A blizzard of las-shot showered down, along with the arcing stings of arcane electrical weapons. The air hummed, too, with the whine of the slower metal projectile-casters the enemy were using. Barb-like bullets, slow-moving enough to be seen, buzzed down at them like glittering hornets. Where they hit flesh, they did untold explosive damage. Corbec saw men rupture and come apart as the barbed rounds hit. Others were maimed by shrapnel as the vile shells hit stone or metal beside them and shattered.

A barbed round dug into the turf near Corbec’s foxhole cover and became inert.

The colonel flicked it out with his knife-point and studied it – a bulb of dull metal with forward-pointing, overlaid leaves of razor-sharp alloy. The blackened, fused remains of a glass cartridge at the base showed its method of propulsion. Shot from simple tube-launchers, Corbec decided, the propellant igniting as the firing pin shattered the glass capsule. He turned it over in one hand, protected by the edge of his stealth cape. Evil and ingenious, the barb’s leaves were scored to ease impact-shatter – either against a hard surface to produce a cloud of shrapnel, or against bone as it chewed through tissue to effect the worst wounds possible. The leaves were slightly spiralled too, suggesting that the launcher’s rifling set them spinning as they fired. Corbec decided he had never seen a more savage, calculated, more grotesque instrument of death and pain.

He sighed as the firestorm raged above him. Still no word had come from the commissar’s infiltration team, and only Corbec’s knowledge of Gaunt’s secret agenda allayed his fears at the high-risk tactic.

Corbec contacted his platoon leaders and had them edge the men forward along the facing lip, winning any inch they could. He had close on two thousand lasguns and heavier weapons raking the front of the pile, and the alcove-lined facade was shattering, slumping and collapsing under the fusillade. But the return fire was as intense as ever.

Trooper Mahan, communications officer for Corbec’s own platoon command, crouched in the foxhole beside him, talking constantly into the voice-horn of his heavy vox-set, relaying and processing battle-reports from all the units. Mahan suddenly leaned back, grabbed the colonel by a cuff and dragged him close, pushing the headset against his ear.

‘…are death! The towers are death!’ Corbec heard.

He shot a stare at Mahan, who was encoding the infor mation on his data-slate.

‘Target Secundus is routed,’ Mahan said grimly, scribing as he spoke and relaying the data in stuttered code-bursts through the handset of the vox-caster. ‘Sendak is dead… Feth, it sounds like they’re all dead. Dravere is signalling a total withdrawal. The towers–’

Corbec grabbed the slate and studied the scrolling text Mahan was direct-receiving from High Command. There were flickering, indistinct images captured from Sendak’s last transmission. He saw the towers erupt into life, laying down their destructive fences, saw the forces of the enemy manifest on the tower tops.

Instinctively, he looked up at the towers nearest them. If it happened here, they would suffer a similar fate.

Even as he formed the thought, a ragged flurry of frenzied reports flooded the comm-lines. The towers had ignited at Target Tertius too. Marshal Tarantine had received enough warning from the Secundus advance to protect the advance of his forces, but still he was suffering heavy losses. They were generally intact, but their assault was stymied.

‘Sacred Feth!’ Corbec hissed, heating the air with his curse. He keyed his microbead to open traffic and bellowed an order.

‘Any Ghosts within twenty metres of a tower! Use any and all available munitions to destroy those towers! Do it, for the love of us all!’

Answering links jabbered back at him and he had to shout to be heard. ‘Now, you fething idiots!’ he bawled.

Two hundred metres away, a little way down a slope in the hill, Sergeant Varl’s platoon reacted fastest, turning their rocket launchers on the nearest two towers and toppling them in earthy crumps of dirt and flame. Folore and Lerod’s platoon’s quickly followed suit to the left of Corbec’s position. Seven or more of the towers were demolished in the near vicinity. Sergeant Curral’s platoon, guarding the rear of the main defence, set to blasting towers further down the slope with their missile launchers. Stone dust and burnt bracken fibres drifted in the scorched air.

There was a report from Sergeant Hasker, whose platoon had lost all of its heavy weapon troops in the first exchange. Hasker was sending men up close to the towers in his sector to mine them with grenade strings and tube bombs.

By Corbec’s side, Mahan was about to say something, but stopped short in surprise, suddenly wiping fresh blood from his upper lip. Corbec felt the hot dribble in his own nose too, and sensed the sickly tingle in the air.

‘Oh–’ he began.

Mahan shook his head, trying to clear it, blood streaming from his nose. Suddenly he convulsed as catastrophic static noise blasted through his headset to burst his eardrums. He winced up in pain, crying out and tearing at his ear pieces.

He rose too far. A barbed round found him as he exposed his head and shoulders over the cover, and tore everything above his waist into bloody spatters. The comms unit on his back exploded. Corbec was drenched in bloody matter and took a sidelong deflection of shrapnel in the ribs, a piece of the barbed round that had fractured on impact with Mahan’s sternum.

Corbec slumped, gasping. The pain was hideous. The broken leaf of metal had gone deep between his ribs and he knew it had ruptured something inside him. Blood pooled in the bracken roots beneath him.

Fighting the agony, he looked up. The air-sting and the nosebleeds could only mean one thing – and Corbec had fought through enough theatres against Chaos to know the cursed signs.

The Primaris target had activated its towers.

Almost doubled up, clutching his side with bloodstained fingers, Corbec looked down the length of the assault line. His warning had come just in time. The Ghosts had demolished enough of the towers to break the chains. Fetid white energy billowed out of the necropolis, swirling in grasping tendrils that whipped forward to find the relay towers that were no longer there. Corbec’s orders had cut the insidious counter-defences of the enemy.

Unable to link with the tower relays, the abysmal energy launched from the necropolis wavered and then boiled backwards into the city. In an instant, the enemy’s own thwarted weapons did more damage to the city façade than Corbec’s regiment could have managed in a month of sustained fire. Entire plateaux of stone work exploded and collapsed as the untrained energy snapped back into the dead city. Granite shards blasted outwards in choking fireballs, and sections of the edifice slipped away like collapsing ice-shelves, baring tunnelled rock faces beneath.

Down the Tanith line, Hasker’s platoon had not been so lucky. Their mining efforts were only partially complete when the defence grid activated. The better part of fifty men, Dorain Hasker with them, were caught in the searing energy-fence and burned.

But Hasker had his revenge at the last, as the tower energy set off his munitions. The whole slope shuddered at the simultaneous report. Crackling towers dissolved in sheets of flame and great explosions of earth and stone. The feedback there was far greater. The flickering, blazing fence wound back on itself as the towers collapsed, lashing back into the necropolis and scourging a new ravine out of the mountainside.

As if stunned, or mortally crippled, the enemy gunfire trailed away and died.

Corbec rolled in the belly of the foxhole, awash with his own blood, and Mahan’s. He pulled a compress from his field kit and slapped it over the wound in his side, and then gulped down a handful of fat counter-pain tablets from his medical pouch with three swigs from his water flask while reciting a portion of the Litany for Merciful Healing.

More than the recommended dose, he knew. His vision swam, and then he felt a strength return as the pain dulled. His ribs and his chest throbbed, but he felt almost alive again. Alive enough to function, though at the back of his mind he knew it was no more than a bravura curtain call.

There were eight tablets left in his kit. He put them in his pocket for easy access. A week’s worth of dose, and he’d use it in an hour if he had to. He would fight until pain and death clawed through the analgesic barriers and stopped him.

He hefted himself up, recovered his lasgun and keyed his microbead.

‘Corbec to all the Ghosts of Tanith… now we advance!’

Nine

OVER THE VALE beyond them, Colonel Draker Flense and his Patrician units saw the flicker of explosions that backlit the hills and underlit the clouds. Night was falling. The concussion of distant explosions, too loud and large for any Guard ground-based weaponry, stung the air around them.

Trooper Defraytes, Flense’s vox-officer, stood to attention by him and held out the handset plate on which the assimilated data of Command flickered like an endless litany.

Flense read it, standing quite still in the dusk, amid the bracken and the soft flutter of evening moths.

The Tanith had met fierce opposition, but thanks to the warnings from the other target sites, they had broken the Chaos defence grid and blasted the opposition. Those thunderclaps still rolling off the far hills were the sounds of their victory.

‘Sir?’ Defraytes said, holding out his data slate. A battle-coded relay from Dravere was forming itself across the matt screen in dull runes.

Flense took it, pressing his signet ring against the reader plate so that it would decode. The knurled face of the ring turned and stabbed a stream of light into the slate’s code-socket. Magenta clearance, for his eyes only.

The message was remarkably direct and certain.

Flense allowed himself a moment to smile. He turned to his men, all six thousand of them spread in double file swirls down the scarp.

Nearby, Major Brochuss stared at his commander under hooded lids.

Flense keyed his microbead.

‘Warriors of Jant Normanidus Prime, the order has come. Evidence has now proved to our esteemed commander Lord General Dravere that the Colonel-Commissar Gaunt is infected with the taint of Chaos, as are his so-called Ghosts. They, and they alone, have passed through the defences of Chaos which have halted Marshal Sendak and Marshal Tarantine. They are marked with the badge of evil. Lord General Dravere has granted us the privilege of punishing them.’

There was a murmur in the ranks, and an edgy eagerness.

Flense cleared his throat. ‘We will take the scarp and fall upon the Tanith from behind. No longer think of them as allies, or even human. They are stained with the foul blackness of our eternal foe. We will engage them – and we will exterminate them.’

Flense cut his link and turned to face the top of the scarp. He flicked his hand to order the advance and knew without question that they would follow.

Ten

THE LIGHT DIED.

Gaunt tore the lamp pack off the muzzle of his lasgun and tossed it away. Dorden was at his side, handing him another.

‘Eight left,’ the elderly medic said, holding out a roll of surgical tape to help Gaunt wrap the lamp in place.

Neither of them wanted to talk about the darkness down here. A Guard-issue lamp-pack was meant to last six hundred hours. In less than two, they had exhausted the best part of twenty between them. It was as if the dark down in the underworld of the necropolis ate up the light. Gaunt shuddered. If this place could leach power from energetic sources like lamp-packs, he dared not think what it might be doing to their human frames.

They still edged forward: first the scouts, Mkoll and Baru, silent and almost invisible in the directionless dark, then Larkin and Gaunt. Gaunt noticed that Larkin was sporting some ancient firing piece instead of his lasgun, a long-limber rifle of exotic design. He had been told this was the weapon Larkin had used to take down the Inquisitor Heldane, and so it was now his lucky weapon. There was no time to chastise the man for superstitious foolishness. Gaunt knew Larkin’s mental balance hung by a thread as it was. He simply hoped that, come a firefight, the strange weapon would have a cycle rate commensurate to the las-gun.

Behind them came Rawne, Domor and Caffran, all with lamp pack-equipped lasguns at the ready. Domor had his sweeper set slung on his shoulder too, if the need came to scan for mines. Dorden followed, unarmed, and then Bragg with his massive autocannon. Behind them came Fereyd, with his anonymous, still visored troops as their rearguard.

Gaunt called a halt while the scouts took fresh bearings and inspected the tunnels ahead. Fereyd moved over to him.

‘Been a long time, Bram,’ he said in a smooth voice that was almost a whisper.

He doesn’t want the men to hear, thought Gaunt. He doesn’t know how much I’ve told them. He doesn’t even know what I know.

‘Aye, a long time,’ Gaunt replied, tugging the straps of his rifle sling tighter and casting a glance in the low lamplight at Fereyd’s unreadable face. ‘And now barely time for a greeting and we’re in it again.’

‘Like Pashen.’

‘Like Pashen,’ Gaunt nodded with a phantom smile. ‘We do always seem to make things up as we go along.’

Fereyd shook his head. ‘Not this time. This is too big. It makes Pashen Nine-Sixty look like a blank-round exercise. Truth is, Bram, we’ve been working together on this for months, had you but realised it.’

‘Without direct word from you, it was hard to know anything. First I knew was Pyrites, when you volunteered me as custodian for the damn crystal.’

‘You objected?’

‘No,’ Gaunt said, tight and mean. ‘I’d never shirk from service to the Throne, not even dirty clandestine shadow-play like this. But that was quite a task you dropped in my lap.’

Fereyd smiled. ‘I knew you were up to it. I needed someone I could trust. Someone there…’

‘Someone who was part of the intricate web of friends and confidantes you have nurtured wherever you go?’

‘Hard words, Ibram. I thought we were friends.’

‘We are. You know your friends, Fereyd. You made them yourself.’

There was a silence.

‘So tell me… from the beginning.’ Gaunt raised a questioning eyebrow.

Fereyd shrugged. ‘You know it all, don’t you?’

‘I’ve had gobbets of it, piecemeal… bits and scraps, educated guesses, intuitions. I’d like to hear it clean.’

Fereyd put down his lasgun, drew off his gloves and flexed his knuckles. The gesture made Gaunt smile. There was nothing about this man, this Tactician Wheyland, that remotely resembled the Fereyd he’d known on the city farms of Pashen Nine-Sixty, such was the spy’s mastery of disguise. But now that little gesture, an idiosyncrasy even careful disguise couldn’t mask. It reassured the commissar.

‘It is standard Imperial practice for a warmaster to establish a covert network to observe all of his command. Macaroth is cautious, a son of the Emperor in instinct. And glory knows, he’s got a lot of shadows to fear. Slaydo’s choice wasn’t popular. Many resent him, Dravere most of all. Power corrupts, and the temptation of power corrupts even more. Men are just men, and they are fallible. I’ve been part of the network assigned by Macaroth to keep watch and check on his Crusade’s officers. Dravere is a proud man, Bram, he will not suffer this slight.’

‘You’ve said as much before. Hell, I’ve even paraphrased you to my men.’

‘You’ve told your men?’ Fereyd asked quickly, with a sharp look.

‘My officers. Just enough to make sure they are with me, just enough to give them an edge if it matters. Fact is, I’ve probably told them all I know, which is precious little. The prize, the Vermilion trophy… that’s what has changed everything, isn’t it?’

‘Of course. Even with regiments loyal to him, Dravere could never hope to turn on our beloved warmaster. But if he had something else, some great advantage, something Macaroth didn’t have…’

‘Like a weapon.’

‘Like a great, great weapon. Eight months ago, part of my network on Talsicant first got a hint that Dravere’s own covert agencies had stumbled upon a rumour of some great prize. We don’t know how, or where… we can only imagine the efforts and sacrifices made by his operatives to locate and recover the data. But they did. A priceless nugget of ancient, Vermilion level secrets snatched from some distant, abominable reach of space and conveyed from psyker to psyker, agent to agent, back to the Lord High Militant General. It couldn’t be sent openly, of course, or Macaroth would have intercepted it. Nor was it possible to send it directly, as it was being carried out of hostile space, far from Imperial control. On the last leg of its journey, transmitted from the Nubila Reach to Pyrites, we managed to track it and intercept it, diverting it from Dravere’s agents. That was when it fell into your hands.’

‘And the general’s minions have been desperate to retrieve it ever since.’

Fereyd nodded. ‘In anticipation of its acquisition, Dravere has set great wheels in motion. He knew its import, and the location it referred to. With it now in our hands – just – we couldn’t allow it to fall back into Dravere’s grasp. But we were not positioned strongly or closely enough to recover it. It was decided – I decided, in fact – that our best choice was to let you run with it, in the hope that you would get to it for us before the Lord General and his coterie of allies.’

‘You have terrifying faith in my abilities, Fereyd. I’m just a footslogger, a commander of infantry.’

‘You know you’re more than that. A loyal hero of unimpeachable character, resourceful, ruthless… one of Warmaster Slaydo’s chosen few, a man on whom the limelight of fame fell full enough to make it difficult for Dravere to move against you directly.’

Gaunt laughed. ‘If the attempts to kill me and my men recently weren’t direct, I hate to think what direct means!’

Fereyd caught his old friend with a piercing look. ‘But you did it! You made it this far! You’re on top of the situation, close to the prize, just as I knew you would! We did everything we could, behind the scenes, to facilitate your positioning and give you assistance. The deployment of the Tanith in the frontline here was no accident. And I’m just thankful I was able to manipulate my own cover as part of the Tactical Counsel to get close enough to join you now.’

‘Well, we’re here now, right enough, and the prize is in our grasp…’ Gaunt began, hefting up his rifle again and preparing to move.

‘May I see the crystal, Bram? Maybe it’s time I read its contents too… if we’re to work together on this.’

Gaunt swung round and gazed at Fereyd in slow realisation. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

‘Know?’

‘You don’t know what it is we’re here risking our lives for?’

‘You thought I did? Even Macaroth and his allies don’t know for sure. All any of us are certain of is that it is something that could make Dravere the man to overthrow the Crusade’s High Command. As far as I know, you’re the only person who’s decoded it. Only you know – you and the men you’ve chosen to share it with.’

Gaunt began to laugh. The laughter rolled along the low stone tunnel and made all the men look round in surprise.

‘I’ll tell you then, Fereyd, and it’s as bad as you fear–’

Mkoll’s hard whistle rang down the space and cut them all silent.

Gaunt spun around, raising his rifle and looked ahead into the blackness, his fresh lamp-pack already dimmer. Something moved ahead of him in the darkness. A scrabbling sound.

A barbed round hummed lazily out of nowhere, missing the flinching Larkin by a whisker and exploding against the stone wall of the corridor. Domor started screaming as Caffran held him. Shrapnel had taken his eyes and his face was a mask of flowing blood.

Gaunt seared five shots off into the darkness, and heard the chatter of Bragg’s autocannon starting up behind him. The party took up firing positions along the rough-hewn walls of the tunnel.

Now the endgame, Gaunt thought.

Eleven

THE MEDICS, trailing their long red scrubs like priests’ robes, their faces masked by gauze, moved silently around the isolation sphere in the belly of the Leviathan. They reset diagnosticators and other gently pulsing machines, muttering low intonations of healing invocations.

Heldane knew they were the best medics in the Segmen-tum Pacificus fleet. Dravere had transferred a dozen of his private medical staff to Heldane when he learned of the inquisitor’s injury. It mattered little, Heldane knew as a certainty. He was dying. The rifle round, fired at such close range, had destroyed his neck, left shoulder and collarbone, left cheek and throat. Without the supporting web of the medical bay and the Emperor’s grace, he would already be cold.

He eased back in his long-frame cot, as far as the tubes and regulator pipes piercing his neck and chest would allow. Beyond the plastic sheeting of his sterile tent, he could see the winking, pumping mechanisms on their brass trolleys and racks that were keeping him alive. He could see the dark fluids of his own body cycling in and out of centrifuge scrubs, squirting down ridged plastic tubes supported by aluminium frames.

Every twenty seconds, a delicate silvered scorpion-form device screwed into the bones of his face bathed his open wound with a mist of disinfectant spray from its hooked tail. Soothing smoke rose from incense burners around the bed.

He looked up through the plastic veil at the ceiling of the sphere, lucidly examining the zigzag, black-and white inlay of the roof-pattern. With his mind, the wonderful mind that could pace out the measures of unreal space and stay sane in the full light of the Immaterium, he considered the overlaid pattern, the interlocking chevrons of ivory and obsidian. The nature of eternity lay in their pattern. He unlocked it, psychically striding beyond his ruined physicality, penetrating the abstract realms of lightness and darkness, the governing switches on which all reality was triggered.

Light interlocked with dark. It pleased him. He knew, as he had always known, that his place lay somehow in the slivered cracks of shadow between the contrasting white and black. He entered this space between, and it embraced him. He understood, as he was sure the Emperor himself did not understand, the miraculous division between the Light of mankind and the Darkness of the foe. It was a distinction so obvious and yet so overlooked. Like any true son of the Imperium of Man, he would fight with all his soul and vigour against the blackness, but he would not do so standing in the harshness of the pure white. There was a shadow between them, a greyness, that was his to inhabit. The Emperor, and his heir Macaroth, were oblivious to the distinction and that was what made them weak. Dravere saw it, and that is why Heldane bent his entire force of will to support the lord general. What did he care if the weapon they hunted for was made by, or polluted by, Chaos? It would still work against the Darkness.

If man was to survive, he must adjust his aspect and enter the shadow. Ninety years as an inquisitor had shown Heldane that much at least. The political and governing instincts of mankind had to shift away from the stale Throne of Earth. The blackness without was too deep, too negative for such complacency.

Despite his weakness, Heldane lazily read the blunt minds of the medics around him, as a man might flick through the pages of open books. He knew they feared him, knew that some found his inhuman form repulsive. One, a medic called Guylat, dared to regard him as an animal, a beast to be treated with caution. Heldane had been happy to work on Guylat’s prejudices, and from time to time he would slide into the man’s mind anonymously, fire a few of the synapses he found, and send the medic racing to the latrine rooms beyond the sphere with a loose bowel or a choking desire to vomit.

Usable minds. They were Heldane’s favourite tools.

He scanned out again, thumbing through blunt intelligences that frankly alarmed him with their simple limits. Two medics were talking softly by the door – out of earshot, they thought, from the patient in the bed. One supposed Heldane to be insane, such was the damage to his brain. The other concurred.

They were afraid of him. How delightful, Heldane chuckled.

He had exercised his mind enough. It was free and working. He could perform his task. He knitted his raking brow and summoned one of the medics. The medic came at once, unsure as to why he was lifting the edge of the plastic tent and approaching Heldane.

‘A mirror. I require a mirror,’ Heldane said through the larynx augmenters. The man nodded, swept back out of the tent, and returned in a moment with a round surgical mirror.

Heldane took hold of it with his right hand, the only limb that would still function. He dismissed the blunt with a curt thought and the medic went back to his work.

Heldane raised the mirror and looked into it, glimpsing the steepled line of his own skull, the grinning mouth, the bloody wound edges and medical instrumentation. He looked into the mirror.

Creating a pawn was not easy. It involved a complex focussing of pain and a training of response, so that the pawn-mind became as a lock shaped to fit Heldane’s psychic key. The process could be done rudely with the mind, but was better affected through surgery and the exquisite use of blades.

Heldane enjoyed his work. Through the correct application of pain and the subtle adjustment of mind response, he could fashion any man into a slave, a psychic puppet through whose ears and eyes he could sense – and through whose limbs he could act.

Heldane used the mirror to summon his pawn. He focused until the face appeared in the mirror, filmy and hazed. The pawn would do his bidding. The pawn would perform. Through the pawn, he would see everything. It was as good as being there himself. As he had promised Dravere, his pawn was with Gaunt now. He sensed everything the pawn could: the wet rock, the swallowing darkness, the exchange of fire.

He could see Gaunt, without his cap and storm-coat, dressed in a short leather jacket, blasting at the foe with his lasgun.

Gaunt.

Heldane reached out and took control of his pawn, enjoyed the rich seam of hatred for Ibram Gaunt that layered through his chosen pawn’s mind. That made things so much easier. Before he submitted to death, Heldane told himself, he would use his pawn to win the day. To win everything.

Twelve

RAWNE THREW HIMSELF flat as laser fire and barb-shells winnowed down the corridor. He raised his lasgun, hunting for a target. A flat pain, like a migraine headache, darted through his head, disturbing memories of sharp physical pain. In his mind, Rawne saw the beast, the arch-manipulator, the inquisitor, with his hooked blades and micro-surgery drills, leaning over him.

Heldane. The bastard’s name had been Heldane. His blades had opened Rawne’s body and unshackled his mind. And Heldane’s venomous, obscene mind had swept into the breach…

He shook his head and felt droplets of sweat flick away. Heldane be damned. He fired off a trio of shots into the darkness of the vault and silently thanked the mad sniper, Larkin, and his shot that had blasted Heldane apart. He had never thanked Larkin personally, of course. A man like him verbally acknowledge a peasant like Mad Larkin?

The infiltration team had all made cover, except for Baru who had lost a knee to a las-round and was fallen in the open, crawling and gasping.

Gaunt bellowed a command down the narrow tunnel and Bragg swept out of cover, thumping sizzling shots from his autocannon in a wide covering spread, which gave Gaunt and Mkoll time to drag Baru into shelter. Domor was still screaming, even as Caffran tried to bind his face wounds from the field kit.

Las-fire whickered along the passage around them, but Rawne feared the barbs more. Even missing or deflecting or ricocheting, they could do more damage. He squeezed off two hopeful shots, breathless for a target. Unease coiled in his mind, a faint, stained darkness that had been there since his torture at the hands of the lean giant, Heldane. He fought it off, but it refused to go away.

GAUNT SLID ACROSS to Domor, taking the shuddering man’s bloody hands in his own.

‘Easy, trooper! Easy, friend! It’s me, the commissar… I’ve come all the way from Tanith with you, and I won’t leave you to die!’

Domor stopped whimpering, biting on his lip. Gaunt saw that his face was an utter mess. His eyes were ruined and the flesh of his right check hung shredded and loose. Gaunt took the ribbons of bandage from Caffran and strapped the trooper’s head back together, winding the tape around his eyes in a tight blindfold. He hissed to Dorden, who was just finishing field-dressing Baru’s knee. The medical officer wriggled over under the sporadic fire. Gaunt had stripped Domor’s sleeve away from his forearm with a jerking cut of his blade and Dorden quickly sunk a dose of painkiller into the man’s bulging wrist veins.

Gaunt had seen death wounds before, and knew that Domor would not live long outside of a properly-equipped infirmary. The eye wounds were too deep, and already rusty smears of blood were seeping through the pale white bindings. Dorden shook his head sadly at Gaunt, and the commissar was glad Domor couldn’t see the unspoken verdict.

‘You’ll make it,’ Gaunt told him, ‘if I have to carry you myself!’

‘Leave me…’ Domor moaned.

‘Leave the trooper who hijacked the maglev train and led us to our victory battle on Fortis? We won a world with your help, Domor. I’d rather hack off an arm and leave that behind!’

‘You’re a good man,’ Domor said huskily, his breathing shallow, ‘for an anroth.’

Gaunt allowed himself a thin smile.

Behind him, Larkin sighted the ancient weapon he had adopted and dropped a faint figure in the darkness with a clean shot.

Fereyd’s troopers, supported by Rawne and Mkoll, fired las-rounds in a pulsing rhythm that battered into the unseen foe.

Then it fell suddenly quiet.

Together with one of Fereyd’s men, Mkoll, a shadow under his stealth cloak, edged forward. After a moment, he shouted back: ‘Clear!’

The party moved on, Caffran supporting the weakening Domor and Dorden helping the limping Baru. At a turn in the corridor, they picked their way between the fallen foe: eight dead humans, emaciated and covered in sores, dressed in transparent plastic body gloves, their faces hidden by snarling bone masks. They were inscribed with symbols: symbols that made their minds hurt; symbols of plague and invention. Gaunt made sure that the dead were stripped of all plasma ammo packs. Rawne slung his lasgun over his shoulder and lifted one of the barb-guns – a long, lance-tube weapon with a skate-like bayonet fixed underneath. He pulled a satchel of barb rounds off the slack arm of one of the corpses.

Gaunt didn’t comment. Right now, anything they could muster to their side was an advantage.

* * *

Thirteen

THE CITADEL HAD fallen silent. Smoke, some thin and pale, some boiling and black, vented from the jagged stone facade.

Breathlessly light-headed on painkillers, Colonel Colm Corbec led the first advance down into the steep, rubble-strewn ditch and up into the cliff-face of buildings. Silent, almost invisible waves of Tanith warriors crept down after him, picking their way into the ruins, lasguns ready.

Corbec had not sent any signals back to Command. This advance would be as unknown as he could manage. This would be the Ghosts alone, taking what ground they could before crying for help.

They edged through stone shattered and fused into black bubbles, crushing the ashen remains of the foe underfoot. The feedback of the fence weapons had done greater damage than Corbec could have imagined. He called up Varl’s platoon and sent them forward as scouts, using double the number of sweepers.

Corbec turned suddenly, to find Milo standing next to him.

‘No tunes now, I’d guess, sir,’ the boy said, his Tanith pipes slung safely under his arm.

‘Not yet,’ Corbec smiled thinly.

‘Are you all right, colonel?’

Corbec nodded, noticing for the first time there was the iron tang of blood in his mouth. He swallowed.

‘I’m fine…’ he said.

Fourteen

‘WHAT DO YOU make of that, sir?’ Trooper Laynem asked, passing the scope to his platoon sergeant, Blane. The seventh platoon of the Ghosts were, as per Gaunt’s instructions, hanging back to guard the back slopes of the rise over which the main force were advancing. Blane knew why; the commissar had made it plain. But he hadn’t found the right way to tell his men.

He squinted through the scope. Down the valley, massed formations of the Jantine Patricians were advancing up towards them, in fire-teams formed up in box-drill units. It was an attack dispersal. There could be no mistake.

Blane swung back into his bracken-edged foxhole and beckoned his comms officer, Symber. Blane’s face was drawn.

‘They… they look like they mean to attack us, sergeant,’ Laynem said in disbelief. ‘Have they got their orders scrambled?’

Blane shook his head. Gaunt had been over this and had seemed quite certain, but still Blane had fought to believe it. Guard assaulting Guard? It was… not something to even think about. He had obeyed the commissar’s directive, of course – it had been so quietly passionate and direct – but he still had not understood the enormity of the command. The Jantine were going to attack them. He took the speaker horn Symber offered.

‘Ghosts of the Seventh,’ he said simply, ‘form into defensive file along the slope and regard the Jantine advance. If they fire upon us, it is not a mistake. It is real. Know that the commissar himself warned me of this. Do not hesitate. I count on you all.’

As if on cue, the first blistering ripple of las-fire raked up over their heads from the Jantine lines.

Blane ordered his men to hold fire. They would wait for range. He swallowed. It was hard to believe. And an entire regiment of elite Jantine heavy infantry against his fifty men?

Las-fire cracked close to him. He took the speaker horn and made Symber select the commissar’s own channel.

He paused. The word hung like a cold, heavy marble in his dry mouth until he made himself say it.

‘Ghostmaker,’ he breathed.

Fifteen

DANK, CLAMMY DARKNESS dripped down around them. Gaunt moved his team along through the echoing chambers and caves of wet stone. Caffran led Domor by the hand and one of Fereyd’s elite and anonymous troopers assisted the limping Baru.

The place was lifeless except for the cockroaches which swarmed all around them. At first, there had been just one or two of the black-bodied vermin bugs, then hundreds, then thousands. Larkin had taken to stamping on them but gave up when they became too numerous. Now they were everywhere. The darkness all around the infiltration team murmured and shifted with beetles, coating the walls, the floor, the roof. The insistent chattering of the insects susurrated in the gloom, a low, crackling slithering from the shifting blanket of bodies instead of distinct, individual sounds.

Shuddering, the Tanith moved on, finally leaving the mass of beetles behind and heading into galleries that were octagonal in cross section, the walls made of glass blocks fused together. The glass, its surface a dark, crazed patina where the slow passage of time had abraded it, cast back strange translucent phantoms from their failing lights; sometimes sharp reflections, sometimes wispy glows and embers.

Mkoll’s sharp eyes saw shapes in the glass, indistinct relics of semi-molten bone set in the vitreous wall like flecks of grit in pearls… or the tan-flies he used to find set in hard, amber nodes of sap while scouting the nal-wood forests back home.

Mkoll, a youthful-looking fifty year old with a wiry frame and a salting of grey in his hair and beard, remembered the forests keenly for a moment. He remembered his wife, dead of canth-fever for twelve years now, and his sons who had timbered on the rivers rather than follow his profession and become woodsmen.

There was something about this place, this place he could never in all his life have imagined himself in all those years ago when his Eiloni still lived, that reminded him of the nal-forests.

Sometime after the First Founding, when the commissar had noted his background from the files and appointed him sergeant of the scouting platoon with Corbec’s blessing, he had sat and talked of the nal-wood to Gaunt. Commissar Gaunt had remarked to him that the unique shifting forests of Tanith had taught the Ghosts a valuable lesson in navigation. He conjectured that was what made them so sure and able when it came to reconnaissance and covert insertion.

Mkoll had never thought about it much before then, but the suggestion rang true. It had been second nature to him, an instinct thing, to find his way through the shifting trees, locating paths and tracks which came and went as the fibrous evergreens stalked the sun. It had been his life to track the cuchlain herds for pelts and horn, no matter how they used the nal to obscure themselves.

Mkoll was a hunter, utterly attuned to the facts of his environs, utterly aware of how to read solid truth from ephemerally-shifting inconsequence. Since Gaunt had first remarked upon this natural skill, a skill shared by all Tanith but distilled in him and the men of his platoon, he’d prided himself in never failing the task.

Yes, now he considered, there was something down here that reminded him very strongly of lost Tanith.

He signalled a halt. The Crusade Staff trooper which Tactician Wheyland – or Fereyd, as the commissar called him – had sent forward to accompany him glanced around. Probably asking an unvoiced question, but any expression was hidden by the reflective visor of his red and black armour. Mkoll inherently mistrusted the tactician and his men. There was just something about them. He disliked any man who hid his face and even when Wheyland had revealed himself, Mkoll had found little to trust there. In his imagination he heard Eiloni tut-tutting, scolding him for being a loner, slow to trust.

He blinked the memory of his wife away. He knew he was right. These elite bodyguard troops were certainly skilled; the trooper had moved along with him as silently and assuredly as the best in his platoon. But there was just something, like there was something about this place.

Gaunt moved up to join the head of the advance.

‘Mkoll?’ he asked, ignoring Wheyland’s trooper, who was standing stiffly to attention nearby.

‘Something’s wrong here,’ Mkoll said. He pointed left and right with a gesture. ‘The topography is, well, unreliable.’

Gaunt frowned. ‘Explain?’

Mkoll shrugged. Gaunt had made him privy to the unlocked data back on the Absalom, and Mkoll had studied and restudied the schematics carefully. He had felt privileged to be taken that close to the commissar’s private burden.

‘It’s all wrong, sir. We’re still on the right tack, and I’ll be fethed if I don’t get you there – but this is different.’

‘To the map I showed you?’

‘Yes… And worse, to the way it was five minutes ago. The structure is static enough,’ Mkoll slapped the glass-brick wall as emphasis, ‘but it’s like direction is altering indistinctly. Something is affecting the left and right, the up and down…’

‘I’ve noticed nothing,’ Wheyland’s trooper interrupted bluntly. ‘We should proceed. There is nothing wrong.’

Gaunt and Mkoll both shot him a flat look.

‘Perhaps it’s time I saw your map,’ a voice said from behind. Tactician Wheyland had approached, smiling gently. ‘And your data. We were… interrupted before.’

Gaunt felt a sudden hesitation. It was peculiar. He would trust Fereyd to the Eye of Terror and back, and he had shown the data to chosen men like Mkoll. But something was making him hold back.

‘Ibram? We’re in this together, aren’t we?’ Fereyd asked.

‘Of course,’ Gaunt said, pulling out the slate and drawing Fereyd aside. What in the Emperor’s name was he thinking? This was Fereyd. Fereyd! Mkoll was right: there was something down here, something that was even affecting his judgement.

Mkoll stood back, waiting. He eyed the Crusade trooper at his side. ‘I don’t even know your name,’ he said at last. ‘I’m called Mkoll.’

‘Cluthe, sergeant, Tactical Counsel war-staff.’

They nodded to each other. Can’t show me your fething face even now, Mkoll thought.

Back down the gallery, Domor was whimpering gently. Dorden inspecting his eyes again. Larkin hunted the shadows with his gun-muzzle.

Rawne was staring into the glass blocks of the wall with a hard-set face. ‘Those are bones in there,’ he said. ‘Feth, what manner of carnage melted bones into glass so it could be made into slabs for this place?’

‘What manner and how long ago?’ Dorden returned, rewinding Domor’s gauze.

‘Bones?’ Bragg asked, looking closer at what Rawne had indicated. He shuddered. ‘Feth this place for a bundle of nal-sticks!’

Behind them, Caffran hissed for quiet. He had been carrying the team’s compact vox-set ever since Domor had been injured, and had plugged the wire of his microbead earpiece into it to monitor the traffic. The set was nothing like as powerful as the heavy vox-casters carried by platoon comm-officers like Raglon and Mkann, and its limited range was stunted further by the depth of the rock they were under. But there was a signal: intermittent and on a repeating automatic vox-burst. The identifier was Tanith, and the platoon series code that of the Seventh. Blane’s men.

‘What is it, Caff?’ Larkin asked, his eyes sharp.

‘Trooper Caffran?’ Major Rawne questioned.

Caffran pushed past them both and hurried up the tunnel to where Gaunt stood with the Imperial tactician.

As he approached, he saw Wheyland gazing at the lit displays of Gaunt’s data-slate, his eyes wide.

‘This is… unbelievable!’ Fereyd breathed. ‘Everything we hoped for!’

Gaunt shot a sharp glance at him. ‘Hoped for?’

‘You know what I mean, Bram. Throne! That something like this could still exist… that it could be so close. We were right to chase this without hesitation. Dravere cannot be allowed to gain control of… of this.’

Fereyd paused, reviewing the data again, and looked back at the commissar. ‘This makes all the work, all the loss, all the effort… worthwhile. To know there really was a prize here worth fighting for. This proves we’re not wasting our time or jumping at ghosts – no offence to the present company.’ He said this with a diplomatic smile at Caffran as the trooper edged up closer.

Watching the tactical officer, Mkoll stiffened. Was it the fething place again, screwing with his mind? Or was there something about this grand Imperial tactician that even Gaunt hadn’t noticed?

‘Caffran?’ Gaunt said, turning to his make-do vox-officer.

Caffran handed him the foil from the field-caster that he had just printed out. ‘A signal from Sergeant Blane, sir. Very indistinct, very chopped. Took me a while to get it.’

‘It says “Ghostmaker”, sir.’

Gaunt screwed his eyes shut for a moment.

‘Bram?’

‘It’s nothing, Fereyd,’ Gaunt said to his old friend. ‘Just what I was expecting and hoped wouldn’t come to pass. Dravere is making his counter-move.’

Gaunt turned to Caffran. ‘Can we get a signal out?’ he asked, nodding to the voxer on its canvas sling over Caffran’s shoulder.

‘We can try fething hard and repeatedly,’ responded Caffran, and Gaunt and Mkoll both grinned. Caffran had borrowed the line from comms-officer Raglon, who had always used that retort when the channels were particularly bad.

Gaunt handed Caffran a pre-prepared message foil. A glance showed Caffran it wasn’t in Tanith battle-tongue, or Imperial Guard Central Cipher either.

He couldn’t read it, but he knew it was coded in Vitrian combat-cant.

Caffran fed the foil into the vox-set, let the machine read it and assemble it and then flicked the ‘send’ switch, marked by a glowing rune at the edge of the set’s compact fascia.

‘It’s gone.’

‘Repeat every three minutes, Caffran. And watch for an acknowledgement.’

Gaunt turned back to Fereyd. He took the data-slate map back from him smartly.

‘We advance,’ he told the Imperial tactician. ‘Tell your men,’ he nodded at the Crusade troopers, ‘to follow every instruction my scout gives, without question.’

With Mkoll in the front, the raiding party moved on.

A long way behind, back down the team, Major Rawne shuddered. The image of the monster Heldane had just flickered across his mind again. He felt the seeping blackness of Heldane’s touch and felt his surly consciousness wince.

Get out! His thoughts shrilled in his head. Get out!

Sixteen

IT WAS, Sergeant Blane decided, ironic.

The defence was as epic as any hallowed story of the Guard. Fifty men gainsaying the massed assault of almost a thousand. But no one would ever know. This story, of Guard against Guard, was too unpalatable for stories. The greatest act of the Tanith First-and-Only would be a record hushed up and unspoken of, even by High Command.

The Jantine units, supported by light artillery and heavy weapons in the valley depths, swung up around the rise Blane’s men commanded in a double curl, like the arms of a throat-torc, extending overlapping fans of las-fire in disciplined, double-burst shots. The rain of shots, nearly fifteen hundred every twenty seconds, spat over the Ghosts’ heads or thumped into the sloping soil, puffing up clods of smoky dust and igniting numerous brush fires through the cloaking bracken.

Sergeant Blane watched them from cover through his scope, his flesh prickling as he saw the horribly assured way they covered the ground and made advance. The warrior-caste of Jant were heavy troops, their silver and purple combat armour made for assault, rather than speed or stealth. They were storm-troopers, not skirmishers; the Tanith were the light, agile, stealthy ones. But for all that, the drilled brilliance of the Jantine was frightening. They used every ounce of skill and every stitch of cover to bring the long claw of their attack up and around to throttle the Ghosts’ seventh platoon.

Blane had fought the temptation to return fire when the Jantine first addressed them. They had nothing to match the range of the Jantine heavy weapons and Blane told himself that the las-fire fusillade was as much a psychological threat as anything.

His fifty men were deployed along the ridge line in a straggled stitch of natural foxholes that the Ghosts had augmented with entrenching tools and sacking made of stealth cloaks and sleeping rolls, lashed into bags and filled with dust and soil. Blane made his command instructions clear: fix blades, set weapons to single shot, hold fire and wait for his signal.

For the first ten minutes, their line was silent as las-fire crackled up at them and the air sifted with white smoke plumes and drifting dust. Light calibre field shells fluttered down, along with a few rocket-propelled grenades, most falling way short and creating new foxholes on the slope. Blane first thought they were aiming astray until he saw the pattern. The field guns were digging cover-holes and craters in the flank of the hillside for the Jantine infantry to advance into. Already, to his west, Jantine squads had crossed from their advance and dug in to a line of fresh shell-holes a hundred metres short of the Ghosts’ line. Immediately, the field guns adjusted their range and began digging the next line for advance.

Blane cursed the Jantine perfection. Commissar Gaunt had always said there were two foes most to be feared, the utterly feral and the utterly intelligent, and of the pair, the second were the worst. The Jantine were schooled and educated men who excelled at the intricacies of war. They were justly feared. Blane had, in fact heard stories of the Jantine Patricians even before he had entered the Guard. He could hear them singing now, the long, languid, low hymn of victory, harmonised by nearly a thousand rich male voices, beautiful, oppressive… demoralising. He shuddered.

‘That damn singing,’ Trooper Coline hissed beside him.

Blane agreed but said nothing. The first las-rounds were now crossing overhead and if the Jantine guns were reaching them it meant one reassuring fact: the Jantine were in range.

Blane tapped his microbead link, selecting the open command channel. He spoke in Tanith battle-cant: ‘Select targets carefully. Not a wasted shot now. Fire at will.’

The Ghosts opened fire. Streams of single-shot cover fire whipped down from their hidden positions into the advancing fans of the Jantine. In the first salvo alone, Blane saw ten or more of the Jantine jerk and fall. Their rate of fire increased. The wave punctured the Jantine ranks in three dozen places and made the incoming rain of fire hesitate and stutter.

The infantry duel began: two lines of dug-in troopers answering each other volley for volley up and down a steeply angled and thickly covered slope. The very air became warm and electric-dry with the ozone stench of las-fire. It was evenly pitched, with the Tanith enjoying the greater angle of coverage and the greater protection the hill afforded. But, unlike the Jantine, they were not resupplied every minute by lines of reinforcement.

Even firing off a well-placed round every six seconds, and scoring a kill one out of four shots, Blane felt they were helpless. They could not retreat, neither could they advance in a charge to use the ground to their advantage. Defeat one way, overwhelming death the other; the Ghosts could do nothing but hold their line and fight to the last.

The Jantine had more options, but the one they decided to use amazed Blane. After a full thirty minutes of fire exchange, the Patricians charged. En masse. Close on a thousand heavy troopers, bayonets fixed to muzzle-clips, rose as one from the bracken-choked foxholes and stormed up the slope towards his platoon.

It was an astonishing decision. Blane gasped and his first thought was that madness had gripped the Jantine command. And a sort of madness had, but one that would surely win the day. The fifty guns of the Ghosts had more targets then they could pick. Dozens, hundreds of Jantine never made it up the slope, their twitching thrashing or limp bodies collapsing brokenly into the ochre undergrowth. But there was no way Blane’s men could cut them all down before they reached the hill line.

‘Blood of the Emperor!’ spat Blane as he understood the tactic: superior numbers, total loyalty and an unquenchable thirst for victory. The Jantine commander had deployed his troops as expendable, using their sheer weight to soak up the Ghosts’ fire and overwhelm them.

Three hundred Jantine Patricians were dead before the charge made it into Tanith lines. Dead to the Tanith guns, the slope of the hill, the angles of death. But that still left close on seven hundred of them to meet head on in screaming waves at the ditch line of the slit-trenches.

SINGING THE ANCIENT war-hymn of Jant Normanidus, the Alto Credo, Major Brochuss led the assault over the Tanith Ghosts’ paltry defence line. A las-round punched through his cloth-armoured sleeve and scorched the flesh of one arm. He swung around, double-blasting the Ghost before him as teams of his soldiery came in behind him.

The Ghosts were nothing… and to tear into them like this was a joy that exorcised Brochuss’s own ghosts, ghosts which had been with him one way or another since the humiliation on Khedd, and which had been further reinforced on Fortis Binary and Pyrites. Anger, battle-joy, lust, rage – they thrilled through the powerful body of the Jantine Patrician.

The tempered steel of his bayonet slashed left and right, impaling and killing. Twice he had to fire his rifle pointblank to loosen a corpse stuck on his blade.

The nobility of his upbringing made him recognise the courage and fighting skill of the spidery black-clad men they crushed in this trench. They fought to the last, and with great skill. But they were light troops, dressed in thin fabrics, utterly unmatching the physical strength and resilience of his hard-armoured Jantine. His men had the discipline of the military academies of Jant in their blood, the fierce will to win. That was what made them Patricians, what made them as feared by others of the Imperial Guard as the Guards feared the Adeptus Astartes.

If Brochuss thought of the cost which had earned them the route to the top of the hill, it was only in terms of the victory hymns they would sing at the mass funerals. If it cost one or a thousand, victory was still victory – and a punishment victory over traitor scum like this was the most cherished of all. The Ghosts were vermin to be exterminated. Colonel Flense had been right to give the order to charge, even though he had seemed strangely pale and horrified when he had given it.

Victory was theirs.

SERGEANT BLANE CAUGHT the first Jantine over the lip of the ditch in the belly with his bayonet and threw him over his head as he rolled. The man screamed as he died. A second bayoneted Blane’s left thigh as he followed in and the sergeant bellowed in pain, swinging his lasgun so that the blade cut open the man’s throat under the armour of the helmet. Then Blane fired a single shot point blank into the writhing man’s face.

Coline shot two Jantine on the lip of the line and then fell under a hammer-blow of fixed blades. Fighting was now thick, face-to-face, close-quarter. Symber shot three of Coline’s killers before a loose las-shot took the top of his head off and dropped his twitching body into a narrow ditch already blocked by a dozen dead.

Killing another Jantine with a combination of bayonet thrust and rifle butt swipe, Blane saw the vox-caster spin from Symber’s dying grasp, and wished he had the time to grab it and send a signal to Gaunt or Corbec. But the top of the ridge was a seething mass of men, stabbing, striking, firing, dying, and there was no pace to give and no moment to spare. This was the heat of battle, white heat, hate heat, as it is often spoken of by soldiers but seldom seen.

Blane shot another Patrician dead through the chest at a range of two metres and then swung his blade around into the chin of another that lunged at him. Something hot and hard nudged him from behind. He looked down and saw the point of a Jantine bayonet pushing out through his chest, blood gouting around its steel sheen.

Snarling with glee, Major Brochuss fired his lasgun and let the shot blow the stumbling Ghost off his blade. Sergeant Blane fell on his face without a murmur.

Seventeen

IT WAS AS HOT as Milo had ever known it.

The main column of the Ghosts was slowly advancing though the tumbled stones of the necropolis, and had emerged into a long valley of ancient colonnades which rose on either hand in sun-blocking shadows. The valley, a natural rift in the mountain on either side of which the primitive architects had built towering formations of alcoves, was nearly eight kilometres long, and its floor, half a kilometre wide, was treacherous with the slumped stone work and rockfalls cast down from the high structures by slow time.

The energetic feedback of the defence grid had exploded ruinously in here as well and the fallen rocks, tarry-black and primeval, had soaked it up and were now radiating it out again. It was past sixty degrees down here, and dry-hot. Sweat streaked every Tanith man as he crept forward. Their black fatigues were heavy with damp and none except the scouts still wore cloaks.

Trooper Desta, advancing alongside Milo, hawked and spat at the gritty black flank of a nearby slab and tutted as his spittle fizzled and fried into evaporated nothingness.

Milo looked up. The gash of sky above the rift sides was pale and blue, and bespoke a fair summer’s day. Down here, the long shadows and rocky depth suggested a cool shelter. But the heat was overwhelming, worse than the jungle miasma of the tropical calderas on Caligula, worse than the humid reaches of Voltis, worse than anything he had ever known, even the parching hot-season of high summer at Tanith Magna.

The radiating rocks glowed in his mind, aching their way into his drying bones and sinuses. He longed for moisture. He teased himself with memories of Pyrites, where the stabbing wet-cold of the outer city reaches had seemed so painful. Would he was there now. He took out his water flask and sucked down a long slug of stale, blood-warm water.

A half-shadow fell across him. Colonel Corbec stayed his hand.

‘Not so fast. We need to ration in this heat and if you take it down too fast you’ll cramp and vomit. And sweat it out all the faster.’

Milo nodded, clasping his bottle. He could see how pale and drawn Corbec had become, his flesh pallid and wet in the deep shadows of the rift’s belly.

But there was more. More than the others were suffering. Pain.

‘You’re wounded, aren’t you, sir?’

Corbec glanced at Milo and shook his head.

‘I’m fine and bluff, lad. Yes, fine and bluff.’ Corbec laughed, but there was no strength in his voice. Milo clearly saw the puncture rip in the side of Corbec’s tunic which the colonel tried to hide.

Black fabric showed little, but Milo was sure that the wet patches on Corbec’s fatigues were not sweat, unlike the patches on the other men.

A cry came back down the rift from the scout units and a moment later something creaked on the wind.

Corbec howled an order and the Ghosts fanned out between the sweltering rock, rock that afforded them cover but which they dare not touch. The enemy was counterattacking.

They came at them down the valley, some on foot, most in the air. Dozens of small, missile-shaped airships, garish and fiercely-bright in colour and adorned with the grotesque symbols of Chaos, powered down the rift towards them, propellers thumping in their diesel-smoking nacelles, their belly-slung baskets, gondolas and platforms filled with armed warriors of Chaos. The swarm of airships drifted down across the Ghosts, raking the ground with fire.

Now it was all or nothing.

Eighteen

DRAVERE, HIS FACE angry and hollow-eyed, pushed aside the medics in the isolation sphere and yanked apart the plastic drapes veiling Inquisitor Heldane’s cot. The inquisitor gazed up at him from beneath the clamped medical support devices covering him with fathomlessly calm eyes.

‘Hechtor?’

Dravere flung a data-slate on the cot. The inquisitor’s one good hand carefully put down the small mirror he had been holding and took up the slate, keying the data-flow with his long-nailed thumb.

‘Madness!’ Dravere spat. ‘The Jantine have taken the rise and exterminated Gaunt’s rearguard, but Flense reports that the main Tanith unit has actually advanced into Target Primaris. What by the Throne do we do now? We’re losing more men to our own than to the foe, and I still require victory here! I’ll not face Macaroth for this!’

Heldane studied the slate’s information. ‘Other regiments are moving in. The Mordian here, the Vitrians… they’re close too. Let Gaunt’s Ghosts lead the assault on the Target as they have begun. Sacrifice them to open a wedge. Move the Patricians in behind to consolidate this and finish off the Ghosts. Your main forces should be ready to advance after them by then.’

Dravere took a deep breath. Tactically, the advice was sound. There was still a good opportunity to silence the Ghosts without witnesses and still effect a victory. ‘What of Gaunt?’

Heldane took up his mirror again and gazed into it. ‘He progresses well. My pawn is still at his side, primed to strike when I command it. Patience, Hechtor. We play games within games, and all are subservient to the intricate processes of war.’

He fell silent, resolving images in the distances of the mirror invisible to the lord general.

Dravere turned away. The inquisitor was still useful to him, but as soon as that usefulness ended he would not hesitate to remove him.

Gazing into the mirror, Heldane absently recognised the malicious thought in Dravere’s blunt intellect. Dravere utterly misunderstood his place in the drama. He thought himself a leader, a manipulator, a commander. But in truth, he was nothing more than another pawn – and just as expendable.

Nineteen

COLONEL FLENSE LED the Jantine Patricians down the great outer ditch and into the outskirts of the necropolis ruins, passing through the exploded steatite fragments and blackened corpses left by Corbec’s assault. Distantly, through the archways and stone channels they could hear gunfire. The Ghosts had plainly met more opposition inside.

The afternoon was lengthening, the paling sky striated with lingering bands of smoke from the fighting. Flense had six hundred and twelve men left, forty of that number so seriously injured they had been retreated to the field hospitals far back at the deployment fields. Fifty Tanith, fighting to the last, had taken over a third of his regiment. He felt bitterness so great that it all but consumed him. His hatred of Ibram Gaunt, and the rivalry with the Tanith First that it had bred, had been a burning frustration. Now when they actually had the chance to face them on the field, the Tanith skirmishers had fought above their weight and scored a huge victory, even in defeat.

He cared little now what happened. The other Ghosts could live or die. All he wanted was one thing: Gaunt. He sent a Magenta level communiqué to Dravere, expressing his simple wish.

The reply surprised and delighted him. Dravere instructed Flense to place his main force under Brochuss’s direct command to continue the advance into the Target Primaris. The battle orders were to neutralise the Ghosts and then prosecute a direct assault on the enemy itself. With luck, the Tanith would be crushed between the Jantine and the forces of Chaos.

But for Flense there was a separate order. Dravere had learned from the Inquisitor Heldane that Gaunt was personally leading an insertion team into the city from below. The entry point, a shaft beneath an outcrop of stones on the hillside, was identified and a route outlined. On Dravere’s personal orders, Flense was to lead a fire-team in after the commissar and destroy him.

Flense quietly conveyed the directive to Brochuss as they stood watching the men advance in three file lines up into the vast ancient necropolis. Brochuss was swollen with pride at this command opportunity. The big man turned to face his colonel with a battle-light firing his eyes. He drew off his glove and held out his hand to Flense. The colonel removed his own gauntlet and they shook, the thumb-clasping grip of brotherhood learned in the honour schools of Jant Normanidus.

‘Advance with hope, fight with luck, win with honour, Brochuss,’ Flense said.

‘Sheath your blade well, colonel,’ his second replied.

Flense turned, pulling his glove back on and tapping his microbead. ‘Troopers Herek, Stigand, Unjou, Avranche, Ebzan report to the colonel. Bring climbing rope.’

Flense took a lasrifle from one of the dead, blessed it silently to assuage the soul of its previous owner, and checked the ammo clips. Brochuss had two of his platoon gather spare lamp packs from the passing men. The rearguard platoon watched over Flense and his team as they made ready and descended into the shaft under the stones.

IN THE ISOLATION sphere of the command globe, Heldane sensed this manoeuvre. He hadn’t been inside the fool Flense’s mind for long enough to turn him, but he had left his mark there, and through that psychic window he could sense and feel so much already. Above all, he could feel Flense’s bitter hatred.

So, Dravere was trying a ploy of his own, playing his own man Flense into the intrigue, anxious to secure his own leverage. Aching with dull pain, Heldane knew he should be angry with the lord general. But there was no time, and he hadn’t the will power to spare for such luxuries. He would accommodate Dravere’s counter-ploy, and appropriate what elements of it he could use for his own devices. For mankind, for the grand scheme at hand, he would serve and manipulate and win the Vermilion treasure hidden beneath Target Primaris. Then, and only then, he would allow himself to die.

He swallowed his pain, blanked out the soft embrace of death. The pain was useful in one sense; just as it allowed him to co-opt the minds of blunt tools, so it gave his own mind focus. He could dwell upon his own deep agony and drive it on like a psychic scalpel to slit open the reserve of his pawn and make him function more ably.

He looked at the mirror again, the life-support machines around him thumping and wheezing. He saw how his hand trembled, and killed the shake with a stab of concentration.

He saw into the small mind of his pawn again, sensed the close, cold, airless space of the tunnels he moved through, far beneath the tumbling steatite of the necropolis. He branched out with his thoughts, seeing and feeling his way into the spaces ahead of his pawn. There was warmth there, intellect, pulsing blood.

Heldane tensed, and sent a jolt of warning to his pawn: ambush ahead!

Twenty

THEY HAD REACHED a long, low cistern of rock, pale-blue and glassy, which branched off ahead in four directions. Oily black water trickled and pooled down the centre of the sloping floor-space.

Rawne felt himself tense and falter. He reached out a hand to support himself against the gritty wall as a stabbing pain entered his head and clung like a great arachnid, biting into the bones of his face. His vision doubled, then swirled.

It was like a warning… warning him that something ahead was…

The major screeched an inarticulate sound that made the others turn or drop in surprise. The noise had barely begun to echo back down the cistern when Wheyland was firing, raking the darkness ahead with his lasgun, bellowing deployment orders.

A volley of barbs and las-blasts spat back at them.

Gaunt dropped against a slumped rock as gunfire cracked and fizzed against the glassy walls over him. They almost walked into that! If it hadn’t been for Rawne’s warning and Fereyd’s rapid reaction… But how had Rawne known? He was well back in the file. How could he have seen anything that Mkoll’s sharp eyes, right at the front, had missed?

Fereyd was calling the shots at the moment but Gaunt didn’t resent the abuse of command. He trusted his friend’s tactical instinct and Fereyd was in a better position and line of sight to direct the tunnel fight. Gaunt clicked off his lamp pack to stop himself becoming a target and then swung his las-rifle up to sight and fire. Mkoll, Caffran, Baru and the tactician’s troopers were sustaining fire from their own weapons, and Larkin was using his exotic rifle to cover Bragg while he moved the hefty autocannon up into a position to fire. Dorden cowered with Domor.

Rawne bellied forward and fitted a barbed round to his stolen weapon. He rose, fingers feeling their way around the unfamiliar trigger grip, and blasted a buzzing barb up the throat of the passage. There was a crump and a scream. Rawne quickly reloaded and fired again, his shot snaking like a slow, heavy bee between the darting light-jags of the other men’s lasguns.

Larkin’s rifle fired repeatedly with its curious clap-blast double sound. Then Bragg opened up, shuddering the entire chamber with his heavy, rapid blasts. The close air was suddenly thick with cordite smoke and spent fycelene.

‘Cease fire! Cease!’ Gaunt yelled with a downward snap of his hand. Silence fell.

Heartbeats pounded for ten seconds, twenty, almost a minute, and then the charge came. The enemy swarmed down into the chamber, flooding out of two of the tunnel forks ahead.

Gaunt’s men waited, disciplined to know without order how long to pause. Then they opened up again: Rawne’s barb-gun, Bragg’s autocannon, Larkin’s carbine, the lasguns of Gaunt, Fereyd, Mkoll, Baru, Caffran, the three Crusade bodyguards. The cistern boxed the target for them. In ten seconds there were almost thirty dead foe bunched and crumpled in the narrow chamber, their bodies impeding the advance of those behind, making them easier targets.

Gaunt knelt in concealment, firing his lasgun over a steatite block with the drilled track-sight-fire-readdress pattern which he had trained into his men. He expected it of them and knew they expected no less in return. They were slaughtering the enemy, every carefully placed shot exploding through plastic body suits and masked visors. But there was no slowing of the tide. Gaunt began to wonder what would run out first: the flow of enemy, his team’s ammo or airspace in the cistern not filled with dead flesh.

Twenty-One

THEY EMERGED FROM the stifling shadows of the necropolis arches and into a vast interior valley of baking heat and warmth-radiating rock. Brochuss and his men blinked in the light, eyes tearing at the intense heat. The major snapped orders left and right, bringing his men up and thinning the file, extending in a wide front between the jumbled monoliths and splintered boulders. He kept as many of his soldiers in the sweeping overhanging shadows of the valley sides as he could.

Ahead, no more than two kilometres away, a great combat was taking place. Brochuss could see the las-fire flashing over and between the rocky outcrops of the valley basin, and the boiling smoke plumes of a pitched infantry battle were rising up into the pale light above the valley. He could hear laser blasts, the rasp of meltas, the occasional fizz of rockets, and knew that Colonel Corbec’s despicable Ghosts had engaged ahead. There were other sounds too: the whirr of motors, the buzz of barbs, the chatter of exotic repeater cannons. And the bellows and screams of men, a long, backwash of noise that ululated up and down the sound-box of the valley.

Brochuss tapped his microbead link. ‘A tricky play, my brave boys. We come upon the Tanith from the rear to crush them. But defend against the vermin they are engaging. Kill the Ghosts so we get to face the enemy ourselves. Face them and carry back the glory of victory to the ancestral towers of Jant Prime! Normanidus excelsius!’

Six hundred voices answered in a ripple of approval, uttering the syllables of the devotional creed, and the war hymn began spontaneously, echoing like the sonorous swell of an Ecclesiarchy litany from the rock faces around and above them, as if from the polished basalt of a great cathedral.

Most of the Patricians had raised their blast-cowls because of the heat, but now they snapped the visors back down in place, covering their faces with the diamond eye-slit visages of war. Their battle hymn moved to the channels of their microbeads, resounding in the ears of every man present.

Brochuss slid down his own blast-cowl so that the hymn swam in his earpiece and around the close, hot-metal confines of his battledress helmet. He turned to Trooper Pharant at his side and unslung his lasgun. Wordlessly, Pharant exchanged his heavy stubber and ammunition webbing for his commander’s rifle. He nodded solemnly at the honour; the commander would carry his heavy weapon into combat at the head of the Patricians, the Emperor’s Chosen.

Brochuss arranged the heavy webbing around his waist and shoulders with deft assistance from Pharant, settling the weighty pouches with their drum-ammo feeders against his back and thighs. Then he braced the huge stubber in his gloved fists, right hand around the trigger grip, the skeleton stock under his right armpit, his left hand holding the lateral brace so that he could sweep the barrel freely. His right thumb hit the switch that cycled the ammo-advance. The belt feed chattered fat, ugly cartridges into place and the water-cooled barrel began to steam and hiss gently.

Brochuss had advanced to the head of his phalanx when one of his rearguard voxed directly to him. ‘Troop units! Inbound to our rear!’

Brochuss turned. At first he saw nothing, then he detected faint movement against the milky-blue and charred blocks of the archway curtain behind them. Soldiers were coming through in their wake. Hundreds of them, almost invisible in the treacherous side-light of the valley. The body-armour they wore was reflective and shimmering. The Vitrians.

Brochuss smiled under his blast-cowl and prepared to signal the Vitrian commander. With the support of the Vitrian Dragoons, they could–

Las-fire erupted along the rear line of his regiment.

COLONEL ZOREN LED his men directly down onto the exposed and straggling line of the Jantine Patricians. They were upwards of six hundred in number and the Vitrians only four hundred, but he had them on the turn.

Gaunt’s message had been as per their agreement, though it was still the worst, most devastating message he had received in sixteen years as a fighting man. Their mutual enemies had shown their hands and now the success of the venture depended upon his loyalty. To Colonel-Commissar Gaunt. To the man called Fereyd, among other things. To the Emperor.

It went against all his schooling as an Imperial Guardsman, all his nature. It went against the intricate teachings of the Byhata. But still, the Byhata said there was honour in friendship, and friendship in valour. Loyalty and honour, the twinned fundamental aspects of the Vitrian Art of War.

Let Dravere have him shot, him and all four hundred of his men. This was not insubordination, nor was it insurrection. Gaunt had showed the colonel what was at stake. He had showed him the greater levels of loyalty and honour at stake on Menazoid Epsilon. He had been truer to the Emperor and truer to the teachings of the Byhata than Dravere could ever have been.

In a triple arrowhead formation, almost invisible in their glass armour, the Vitrian Dragoons punched into the hindquarters of Brochuss’s extended advance line; a tight, dense triple wedge where the Patricians were loose and extended. The Jantine had formed a lateral file to embrace the enemy, utterly useless for countering a rearguard sweep. So it said in the Byhata: book six, segment thirty-one, page four hundred and six.

The Patricians had greater strength, but their line was convex where it should have been concave. Zoren’s men tore them apart. Zoren had ordered his men to set las-weapons for maximum discharge. He hoped Colonel-Commissar Gaunt would forgive the extravagance, but the Jantine heavy troops wore notoriously thick armour.

The First Regiment of the Jantine Patricians, the so called Emperor’s Chosen, the Imperial Guard elite, were destroyed that late afternoon in the valley inside the necropolis of the Target Primaris. The noble forces of the Vitrian Dragoon’s Third, years later to be decorated and celebrated as one of the foremost Guard armies, took on their superior numbers and vanquished them in a pitched battle that lasted twenty-eight minutes and relied for the most part on tactical discretion.

MAJOR BROCHUSS denied the Vitrians for as long as he was able. Screaming in outrage and despair, he smashed back through his own ranks to confront the Vitrians with Pha-rant’s massive autocannon. It was in no way the death he had foreseen for himself, nor the death of his celebrated company.

He bellowed at his men, admonishing them for dying, kicking at corpses as they fell around him in a raging despair to get them to stand up again. In the end, Brochuss was overwhelmed by a stinging wash of anger that having come so far, fought so hard, he and his Patricians would be cheated.

Cheated of everything they deserved. Cheated of glory by this inglorious end. Cheated of life by lesser, weaker men who nevertheless had the resolve to fight courageously for what they believed in.

He was amongst the last to die, as the last few shells clattered out of his ammo drums, raining into the Vitrian advance as he squeezed the trigger of the smoking, hissing stubber on full rapid. Brochuss personally killed forty-four Vitrian Dragoons in the course of the Jantine First’s last stand. His autocannon was close to overheating when he was killed by a Vitrian sergeant called Zogat.

His armoured torso pulverised by Zogat’s marksmanship, Brochuss toppled into the flecked mica sand of the valley floor and his name, and bearing and manner and being, was utterly extinguished from the Imperial Record.

Twenty-Two

THEN BARU DIED. The filthy barbed round smelted into the rock-face behind him and ribboned him with its lethal backwash of shrapnel. He didn’t even have time to scream.

From his cover, seeing the death and regretting it desperately, Gaunt slid around and set his lasgun to full auto, bombarding the torrent of foe with a vivid cascade of phosphorescent bolts. He heard Rawne scream something unintelligible.

Baru, one of his finest, as good a scout and stealther as Mkoll, pride of the Tanith. Pulling back into cover to exchange ammo clips, Gaunt glanced back at the wet ruin that had been his favoured scout. Claws of misery dug into him. For the first time since Khedd, the commissar tasted the acrid futility of war. A soldier dies, and it is the responsibility of his commander to rise above the loss and focus. But Baru: sharp, witty Baru, a favourite of the men, the clown and joker, the invisible stealther, the truest of true. Gaunt found he could not look at the corpse, at the torn mess that had once been a man he called friend and whom he trusted beyond simple trust.

Around him, and he was oblivious to it, the other Guard soldiers blasted into the ranks of the enemy. Abruptly, as if turned off like a tap, the flow of charging cultists faltered and stopped. Larkin continued to pop away with his long-snouted carbine, and Rawne sent round after round of barb-heads into the dark. Then silence, darkness, except for the fizzle of ignited clothing and the seep of blood.

Fereyd’s voice lifted over them, urgent and strong, ‘They’re done! Advance!’

He’s too eager, thought Gaunt, too eager… and I’m the commander here. He rose from cover, seeing the other troopers scrambling up to follow Fereyd. ‘Hold!’ he barked.

They all turned to face him, Fereyd blinking in confusion.

‘We do this my way or not at all,’ Gaunt said sternly, crossing to Baru’s remains. He knelt over them, plucking the Tanith silver icon up and over his shirt collar, dangling it on the neck chain. In low words, echoed by Dorden, Larkin and Mkoll, he pronounced the funeral rites of the Tanith, one of the first things Milo had taught him. Rawne, Bragg and Caffran lowered their heads. Domor slumped in uneasy silence.

Gaunt stood from the corpse and tucked the chain-hooked charm away. He looked at Fereyd. The Imperial tactician had marshalled his men in a solemn honour guard, heads steepled low, behind the Tanith.

‘A good man, Bram; a true loss,’ Fereyd said with import.

‘You’ll never know,’ Gaunt said, snatching up his lasgun in a sudden turn and advancing into the thicket of enemy dead.

He turned. ‘Mkoll! With me! We’ll advance together!’

Mkoll hustled up to join him.

‘Fereyd, have your men watch our backs,’ Gaunt said.

Fereyd nodded his agreement and pulled his troopers back into the van of the advance. Now it went Gaunt and Mkoll, Bragg, Rawne and Larkin, Dorden with Domor, Caffran, Fereyd and his bodyguard.

They trod carefully over and between the fallen bodies of the foe and found the tunnel dipped steeply into a wider place. Light, like it was being emitted from the belly of a glowing insect, shone from the gloom ahead, outlining an arched doorway. They advanced, weapons ready, until they stood in its shadows.

‘We’re there,’ Mkoll said with finality.

Gaunt slipped his data-slate out of his pocket and thought to consult his portable geo-compass, but Mkoll’s instinct was far more reliable than the little purring dial. The commissar looked at the slate, winding the decoded information across the little plate with a touch of the thumb wheel.

‘The map calls this the Edicule – a shrine, a resting place. It’s the focus of the entire necropolis.’

‘And it’s where we’ll find this… thing?’ Mkoll asked darkly.

Gaunt nodded, and took a step into the lit archway. Beyond the crumbling black granite of the arch, a great vault stretched away, floor, walls and roof all fashioned from opalescent stone lit up by some unearthly green glow. Gaunt blinked, accustoming his eyes to the lambent sheen. Mkoll edged in behind him, then Rawne. Gaunt noticed how their breaths were steaming in the air. It was many degrees colder in the vault, the atmosphere damp and heavy. Gaunt clicked off his now redundant lamp pack.

‘It looks empty,’ Major Rawne said, looking about them. They all heard how small and muffled his voice sounded, distorted by the strange atmospherics of the room. Gaunt gestured at the far end wall, sixty metres away, where the thin scribing of a doorway was marked on the stone wall. A great rectangular door or doors, maybe fifteen metres high, set flush into the wall itself.

‘This is the outer approach chamber. The Edicule itself is beyond those doors.’

Rawne took a pace forward, but pulled up in surprise as Sergeant Mkoll placed an arresting hand on his arm.

‘Not so fast, eh?’ Mkoll nodded at the floor ahead of them. ‘These vaults have been teeming with the enemy, but the dust on that floor hasn’t been disturbed for decades, at least. And you see the patterning in the dust?’

Both Rawne and Gaunt stooped their heads to get an angle to see what Mkoll described. Catching the light right they could see almost invisible spirals and circles in the thick dust, like droplet ripples frozen in ash.

‘Your data said something about wards and prohibitions on the entrance to the Edicule. This area hasn’t been traversed in a long while, and I’d guess those patterns are imprints in the dust made by energies or force screens. Like a storm shield, maybe. We know the enemy here has some serious crap at their disposal.’

Gaunt scratched his cheek, thinking. Mkoll was right, and had been sharp-witted to remember the data notes at a moment where Gaunt was all for rushing ahead, so close was the prize. Somehow, Gaunt had expected gun emplacements, chain-fences, wire-strands – conventional wards and prohibitions. He caught Rawne’s eye, and saw the resentment burning there. Gaunt had still managed to exclude the major from the details he had shared with the other officers, and Rawne remained in the dark as to the nature of this insertion, if not its importance. Gaunt had only brought him along because of his ruthless expertise in tunnel fighting.

And because, after the business on the Absalom, he wanted to keep Rawne where he could see him. And, of course, there was…

Gaunt blinked off the thoughts. ‘Get me Domor’s sweeper set. I’ll sweep the room myself.’

‘I’ll do it, sir,’ a voice said from behind them. The others had edged into the chamber behind them, with Fereyd’s men watching the arch, though even they were clearly more interested in what lay ahead. Domor himself had spoken. He was standing by himself now, a little shaky but upright. Dorden’s high-dose pain-killers had given him a brief respite from pain and a temporary renewal of strength.

‘It should be me,’ Gaunt said softly, and Domor angled his blind face slightly to direct himself at the sound of the voice.

‘Oh no, sir, begging your pardon.’ Domor smiled below the swathe of eye-bandage. He tapped the sweeper set slung from his shoulder. ‘You know I’m the best sweeper in the unit… and it’s all a matter of listening to the pulse in the headset. I don’t need to see. This is my job.’

There was a long silence in which the dense air of the ancient vault seemed to buzz in their ears. Gaunt knew Domor was right about his skills, and moreover, he knew what Domor was really saying: I’m a ghost, sir, expendable.

Gaunt made his decision, not based on any notion of expendability. Here was a task Domor could do better than any of them, and if Gaunt could still make the man feel a useful part of the team, he would not crush the pride of a soldier already dying.

‘Do it. Maximum coverage, maximum caution. I’ll guide you by voice and we’ll string a line to you so we can pull you back.’

The look on what was left of Domor’s face was worth more than anything they could find beyond those doors, Gaunt thought.

Caffran stepped forward to attach a rope to Domor as Mkoll checked the test-settings on the sweeper set, and adjusted the headphones around Domor’s ears.

‘Gaunt, you’re joking!’ Fereyd snapped, pushing forward. His voice dropped to a hiss. ‘Are you seriously going to waste time with this charade? This is the most important thing any of us are ever going to do! Let one of my men do the sweep! Hell, I’ll do the sweep–’

‘Domor is sweeper officer. He’ll do it.’

‘But–’

‘He’ll do it, Fereyd.’

Domor began his crossing, moving in a straight line across the ancient floor, one step at a time. He stopped after each footfall to retune the clicking, pulsing sweeper, listening with experience-attuned ears to every hiss and murmur of the set. Caffran played out the line behind him. After a few yards, he edged to the right, then a little further on, jinked left again. His erratic path was perfectly recorded in the dust.

‘There are… cones of energy radiating from the floor at irregular intervals,’ Domor whispered over the microbead intercom. ‘Who knows what and for why, but I’m betting it wouldn’t be a good idea to interrupt one.’

Time wound on, achingly slow. Domor slowly, indirectly, approached the far side of the chamber.

‘Gaunt! The line! The fething line!’ Dorden said abruptly, pointing.

Gaunt immediately saw what the doctor was referring to. Domor was safely negotiating the invisible obstacles, but his safety line was trailing behind him in a far more economical course between the sweeper and his team. Any moment, and its dragging weight might intersect with an unseen energy cone.

‘Domor! Freeze!’ Gaunt snarled into the intercom. On the far side of the vault, Domor stopped dead. ‘Untie your safety line and let it drop,’ the commissar instructed him. Wordless, Domor complied, fumbling blindly to undo the slip-knot Caffran had tied. It would not come free. Domor tried to gather some slack from the line to ease the knot, and in jiggling it, shook the strap of the sweeper set off his shoulder. The rope came free and dropped, but the heavy sweeper slipped down his arm and his arm spasmed to hook it on his elbow. Domor caught the set, but the motion had pulled on the cord of his headset and plucked it off. The headset clattered onto the dusty floor about a metre from his feet.

Everyone on Gaunt’s side of the chamber flinched but nothing happened. Domor struggled with the set for a moment and returned it to his shoulder. ‘The headset? Where did it go?’ he asked over the microbead.

‘Don’t move. Stay still.’ Gaunt threw his lasgun to Rawne and as quickly as he dared followed Domor’s route in the dust across the chamber. He came up behind the frozen blind man, spoke low and reassuringly so as not to make Domor turn suddenly, then reached past him, crouching low, to scoop up the headset. He plugged the jack back into its socket and placed the ear-pieces back around Domor’s head.

‘Let’s finish this,’ Gaunt said.

They moved on, close together, Gaunt letting Domor set the pace and direction. It took another four minutes to reach the doorway.

Gaunt signalled back at his team and instructed them to follow the pair of them over on the path Domor had made. He noticed that Fereyd was first in line, his face set with an urgent, impatient scowl.

As they came, Gaunt turned his attention back to the door. It was visible only by its seams in the rock, a marvellously smooth piece of precision engineering. Gaunt did what the data crystal had told him he should: he placed an open palm against the right hand edge of the door and exerted gentle pressure.

Silently, the twin, fifteen metre tall blocks of stone rolled back and opened. Beyond lay a huge chamber so brightly lit and gleaming it made Gaunt close his eyes and wince.

‘What? What do you see?’ Domor asked by his side.

‘I don’t know,’ Gaunt said, blinking, ‘but it’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.’

The others closed in behind them, looking up in astonishment, crossing the threshold of the Edicule behind Gaunt and the eager Fereyd. Rawne was the last inside.

Twenty-Three

INQUISITOR HELDANE allowed himself a gentle shudder of relief. His pawn was now inside the sacred Edicule of the Menazoid necropolis, and with him went Heldane’s senses and intellect. After all this time, all this effort, he was right there, channelled through blunt mortal instruments until his mind was engaging first hand with the most precious artefact in space.

The most precious, the most dangerous, the most limitless of possibilities. A means at last, with all confidence, to overthrow Macaroth and the stagnating Imperial rule he espoused. It would make Dravere warmaster, and Dravere would in turn be his instrument. All the while mankind fought the dark with light, he was doomed to eventual defeat. The grey, thought Heldane, the secret weapons of the grey, those things that the hard-liners of the Imperium were too afraid to use, the devices and possibilities that lay in the blurred moral fogs beyond the simple and the just. That is how he would lead mankind out of the dark and into true ascendancy, crushing the perverse alien menaces of the galaxy and all those loyal to the old ways alike.

Of course, if Dravere used this weapon and seized control of the Crusade, used it to push the campaign on to undreamed-of victory, then the High Lords of Terra would be bound to castigate him and declare him treasonous. But they wouldn’t know until it was done. And then, in the light of those victories, how could they gainsay his decision?

Some of the orderlies in the isolation bay began to notice the irregularities registering in the inquisitor’s bio-monitors and started forward to investigate. He sent them scurrying out of sight with a lash of his psyche.

Heldane took up the hand mirror again and gazed into it until his mind loosed once more and he was able to psychically dive into its reflective skin like a swimmer into a still pool.

Invisible, he surfaced amongst Gaunt’s wondering team in the Edicule. He turned the eyes of his pawn to take it all in: a cylindrical chamber a thousand metres high and five hundred in diameter, the walls fibrous and knotted with pipes and flutes and tubes of silver and chromium. Brilliant white light shafted down from far above. The floor underfoot was chased with silver, richly inscribed with impossibly complex algorithmic paradoxes, a thousand to a square metre. Heldane expanded his mind in a heartbeat and read them all… solved them all.

Bounding eagerly beyond this trifle, he looked around and focussed on the great structure which dominated the centre of the chamber. A machine, a vast device made of brilliant white ceramics, silver piping, chromium chambers.

A Standard Template Constructor. Intact.

The secrets of originating technology had been lost to mankind for so long. Since the Dark Ages, the Imperium, even the Adeptus Mechanicus could only manufacture things they had learned by recovering the processes of the ancient STC systems. From scraps and remnants of shattered STC systems on a thousand dead worlds, the Imperium had slowly relearned the secrets of construction, of tanks and machines and laser weapons. Every last fragment was priceless.

To find a dedicated Constructor intact was a find made once a generation, a find from which the entire Imperium benefited.

But to find one like this intact was surely without precedent. All of the speculation had been correct. Long ago, thousands of years before Chaos had overwhelmed it, Menazoid Epsilon had been an arsenal world, manufacturing the ultimate weapon known to those lost ages. The secrets of its process and purpose were contained within those million and half algorithms etched into the wide floor.

The Men of Iron. A rumour so old it was a myth, and myth from the oldest times, before the Age of Strife, from the Dark Age of Technology, when mankind had reached a state of glory as the masters of a techno-automatic Empire, the race that had perfected the Standard Template Construct. They created the Men of Iron, mechanical beings of power and sentience but no human soul. Heretical devices in the eyes of the Imperium. War with the self-aware Men of Iron had led to the fall of that distant Empire and, if the old, deeply arcane records Heldane had been privy to were correct, that was why the Imperium had outlawed any soulless mechanical intelligence. But as servants, implacable warriors – what could not be achieved with Men of Iron at your side?

And here, at the untouched heart of the ancient arsenal world, was the STC system to make such Men of Iron.

There was more! Heldane broadened his focus and took in the walls of the chamber for the first time. At floor level, all around, were alcoves screened by metal grilles. Behind them, as still and silent as terracotta statues guarding a royal tomb, stood phalanxes of Iron Men. Hundreds, hundreds of hundreds, ranked back in symmetrical rows into the shadows of the alcove. Each stood far taller than a man, faces like sightless skulls of burnished steel, the sinews and arteries of their bodies formed from cable and wire encased in anatomical plate-sections of lustreless alloy. They slept, waiting the command to awaken, waiting to receive orders, waiting to ignite the great device once more and multiply their forces again.

Heldane breathed hard to quell his excitement. He wound his senses back into his pawn and surveyed the gathered men.

GAUNT GAZED IN solemn wonder; the Ghosts were transfixed with awe and bafflement, the Crusade staff alert and eager to investigate. Gaunt turned to Dorden and ordered him to take Domor aside and let him rest. He told the other Ghosts to stand down and relax. Then he crossed to Fereyd, who was standing before the vast STC device, his helmet dangling by its chin-strap from his hand.

‘The prize, old friend,’ Fereyd said, without turning.

‘The prize. I hope it was worth it.’

Now Fereyd turned to look. ‘Do you have any idea what this is?’

‘Ever since I unlocked that crystal, you know that I have. I don’t pretend to understand the technology, but I know that’s an intact Standard Template weapons maker. And I know that’s as unheard of as a well-manicured ork.’

Fereyd laughed. ‘Sixty years ago on Geyluss Auspix, a rat-water world a long way from nothing in Pleigo Sutarnus, a team of Imperial scouts found an intact STC in the ruins of a pyramid city in a jungle basin. Intact. You know what it made? It was the Standard Template Constructor for a type of steel blade, an alloy of folded steel composite that was sharper and lighter and tougher than anything we’ve had before. Thirty whole Chapters of the great Astartes are now using blades of the new pattern. The scouts became heroes. I believe each was given a world of his own. It was regarded as the greatest technological advance of the century, the greatest discovery, the most perfect and valuable STC recovery in living memory.’

‘That made knives, Bram… knives, daggers, bayonets, swords. It made blades and it was the greatest discovery in memory. Compared to this… it’s less than nothing. Take one of those wonderful new blades and face me with the weapon this thing can make.’

‘I read the crystal before you did, Fereyd. I know what it can do. Iron Men; the old myth, one of the tales of the Great Old Wars.’

Fereyd grinned. ‘Then breathe in this moment, my friend. We’ve found the impossible here. A device to guarantee the ascendancy of man. What’s a stronger, lighter, sharper, better blade when you can overrun the homeworld of the man wielding it with a legion of deathless warriors? This is history, you know, alive in the air around us. This makes us the greatest of men. Don’t you feel it?’

Gaunt and Fereyd both turned slowly, surveying the silent ranks of metal beings waiting behind the grilles.

Gaunt hesitated. ‘I feel… only horror. To have fought and killed and sacrificed just to win a device that will do more of the same a thousandfold. This isn’t a prize, Fereyd. It is a curse.’

‘But you came looking for it? You knew what it was.’

‘I know my responsibilities, Fereyd. I dedicate my life to the service of the Imperium, and if a device like this exists then it’s my duty to secure it in the name of our beloved Emperor. And you gave me the job of finding it, after all.’

Fereyd set his helmet on the silver floor and began to unlace his gloves, shaking his head. ‘I love you like a brother, old friend, but sometimes you worry me. We share a discovery like this and you trot out some feeble moral line about lives? That’s called hypocrisy, you know. You’re a killer, slaved to the greatest killing engine in the known galaxy. That’s your work, your life, to end others. To destroy. And you do it with relish. Now we find something that will do it a billion times better than you, and you start to have qualms? What is it? Professional jealousy?’

Gaunt scratched his cheek, thoughtful. ‘You know me better. Don’t mock me. I’m surprised at your glee. I’ve known the Princeps of Imperial Titans who delight in their bloodshed, and who nevertheless regard the vast power at their disposal with caution. Give any man the power of a god, and you better hope he’s got the wisdom and morals of a god to match. There’s nothing feeble about my moral line. I value life. That is why I fight to protect it. I mourn every man I lose and every sacrifice I make. One life or a billion, they’re all lives.’

‘One life or a billion?’ Fereyd echoed. ‘It’s just a matter of proportion, of scale. Why slog in the mud with your men for months to win a world I can take with Iron Men… and not spill a drop of blood?’

‘Not a drop? Not ours, maybe. There is no greater heresy than the thinking machines of the Iron Age. Would you unleash such a heresy again? Would you trust these… things not to turn on us as they did before? It is the oldest of laws. Mankind must never again place his fate in the hands of his creations, no matter how clever. I trust flesh and blood, not iron.’

Gaunt found himself almost hypnotised by the row of dark eye-sockets behind the grille. These things were the future? He didn’t think so. The past, perhaps, a past better forgotten and denied.

How could any one wake them? How could anyone even think of making more and unleashing them against…

Against who? The enemy? Warmaster Macaroth and his retinue? This was how Dravere planned to usurp control of the Crusade? This was what it had all been about?

‘You’ve really taken your poor orphan Ghosts into your heart, haven’t you, Bram? The concern doesn’t suit you.’

‘Maybe I sympathise. Orphans stick with orphans.’

Fereyd walked away a few paces. ‘You’re not the man I knew, Ibram Gaunt. The Ghosts have softened you with their wailing and melancholy. You’re blind to the truly momentous possibilities here.’

‘You’re not, obviously. You said “I”.’

Fereyd stopped in his tracks and turned around. ‘What?’

‘“A world I can take without spilling a drop of blood.” Your words. You would use this, wouldn’t you? You’d use them.’ He gestured to the sleeping iron figures.

‘Better I than no one.’

‘Better no one. That’s why I came here. It’s why I thought you had come here too, or why you’d sent me.’

Fereyd’s face turned dark and ugly. ‘What are you blathering about?’

‘I’m here to destroy this thing so that no one can use it,’ said Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt.

He turned away from Fereyd’s frozen face and called to Caffran and Mkoll. ‘Unpack the tube charges,’ he instructed. ‘Put them where they count. Rawne knows demolition better than any. That’s why I brought him along. Get him to supervise. And signal Corbec, or whoever’s left up top. Tell them to pull out of the necropolis right now. I dare not imagine what will happen when we do this.’

IN THE ISOLATION sphere, Heldane froze and clenched the mirror so tightly that it cracked. Thin blood oozed out from under his hooked thumb. He had entirely underestimated this Gaunt, this blunt fool. Such power, such scope; if only he had been given the chance to work on Gaunt and make him the pawn.

Heldane swallowed. There was no time to waste now. The prize was in his grasp. No Imperial Guard nobody would thwart him now. Discretion and subterfuge went to the winds. He lanced his mind down into the blunt skull of his pawn, urging him to act and throw off the deceit. To kill them all, before this madman Gaunt could damage the holy relic and kill the Iron Men.

SAT AT THE EDGE of the Edicule chamber, checking his barblance with his back resting against the silver wall, Rawne shuddered and blood seeped down out of his nose, thick in his mouth. He felt the touch of the bastard monster Heldane more strongly than ever now, clawing at his skull, digging in his eyes like scorpion claws. His guts churned and trembling filled his limbs.

Major Rawne stumbled to his feet, sliding a barb-round into the lance-launcher and swinging it to bear.

Twenty-Four

WITH THE SUDDEN reinforcement of Zoren’s Vitrians, Corbec’s platoons pushed the Chaos elements back into the ruins of the necropolis, slaughtering as they went. The misshapen forces of madness were in rout.

Leaning on a boulder and wheezing at the pain flooding through his ribs, Corbec thought to order up a vox-caster and signal command that the victory was theirs, but Milo was suddenly at his side, holding a foil-print out from a vox-caster.

‘It’s the commissar,’ he said, ‘We have to get clear of the Target Primaris. Well clear.’

Corbec studied the film slip. ‘Feth! We spend all day getting in here…’

He waved Raglon over and pulled the speaker horn from the caster set on the man’s back.

‘This is Corbec of the Tanith First-and-Only to all Tanith and Vitrian officers. Word from Gaunt: pull back and out! I repeat, clear the necropolis area!’

Colonel Zoren’s voice floated across the speaker channel. ‘Has he done it, Corbec? Has he achieved the goal?’

‘He didn’t say, colonel,’ Corbec snapped in reply. ‘We’ve done this much on his word, let’s do the rest. Withdrawal plan five-ninety! We’ll cover and support your Dragoons in a layered fall back.’

‘Acknowledged.’

Replacing the horn, Corbec shuddered. The pain was almost more than he could bear and he had taken his last painkiller tab an hour before.

He returned to his men.

* * *

Twenty-Five

BRAGG CRIED OUT in sudden shock, his voice dwarfed by the vastness of the Edicule. Gaunt, walking towards Dorden and Domor by the doorway, spun around in surprise, to find Fereyd and his bodyguard raising their lasrifles to bear on the Ghosts.

For a split second, as Fereyd swung his gun to aim, Gaunt locked eyes with him. He saw nothing in those deep, black irises he recognised of old. Only hate and murder.

In a heartbeat…

Gaunt flung himself down as Fereyd’s first las-bolt cut through the air where his head had been.

Fereyd’s elite troopers began firing, winging Bragg and scattering the other Ghosts. Dorden threw himself flat over Domor’s yelling body.

Rawne sighted and fired the barb-lance.

The buzzing, horribly slow round crossed the bright space of the Edicule and hit Fereyd’s face on the bridge of the nose. Everything of Imperial Tactician Wheyland above the sternum explosively evaporated in a mist of blood and bone chips.

Larkin howled as he fell, shot through the forearm by a las-round from one of the elite troopers flanking the tactician.

Caffran and Mkoll, both sprawling, whipped around to return fire with their lasguns, toppling one of the bodyguards with a double hit neither could truly claim.

Gaunt rolled as he dived, pulling out his laspistol and bellowing curses as he swung and fired. Another of Fereyd’s troopers fell, blasted backwards by a trio of shots to his chest. He jerked back, arms and legs extended, and died.

Gaunt squeezed the trigger again, but his lasgun just retched and fizzed. The energy draining effect of the catacombs, which had sapped their lamp packs, had wasted ammo charges too. His weapon was spent.

The remaining bodyguard lurched forward to blast Gaunt, helpless on the floor – and dropped with a laser-blasted hole burnt clean through his skull. His body smashed back hard against the side of the STC machine and slid down, leaving a streak of blood down the chased silver facing. Gaunt scrambled around to look.

Clutching the bawling Domor to him, Dorden sat half-raised with Domor’s laspistol in his hand.

‘Needs must,’ the doctor said quietly, suddenly tossing the weapon aside like it was an insect which had stung him.

‘Great shot, doc,’ Larkin said, getting up, clutching his seared arm.

‘Only said I wouldn’t shoot, not that I couldn’t,’ Dorden said.

The Ghosts got back to their feet. Dorden hurried to treat the wounds Bragg and Larkin had received.

‘What’s that sound?’ Domor asked sharply. They all froze.

Gaunt looked at the great machine. Amber lights were flicking to life on a panel on its flank. In death, the last Crusader had been blown back against the main activation grid. Old technologies were grinding into life. Smoke, steam perhaps, vented from cowlings near the floor. Processes moved and turned and murmured in the device.

There was another noise too. A shuffling.

Gaunt turned slowly. Behind the dark grilles in the alcoves, metal limbs were beginning to flex and uncurl. As he watched, eyes lit up in dead sockets. Blue. Their light was blue, cold, eternal. Somehow, it was the most appalling colour Gaunt had ever seen. They were waking. As their creator awoke, they awoke too.

Gaunt stared at them for a long, breathless moment, his heart pounding. He looked at them until he had lost count of the igniting blue eyes. Some began to jerk forward and slam against the grilles, rattling and shaking them. Metal hands clawed at metal bars. There were voices now too. Chattering, just at the edge of hearing. Codes and protocols and streams of binary numbers. The Iron Men hummed as they woke.

Gaunt looked back at the STC. ‘Rawne!’

‘Sir?’

‘Destroy it! Now!’

Rawne looked at him, wiping the blood from his lip.

‘With respect, colonel-commissar… is this right? I mean – this thing could change the course of everything.’

Gaunt turned to look at Major Rawne, his eyes fiercely dark, his brow furrowed. ‘Do you want to see another world die, Rawne?’

The major shook his head.

‘Neither do I. This is the right thing to do. I… I have my reasons. And are you blind? Do you want to greet these sleepers as they awake?’

Rawne looked round. The cold blue stares seemed to stab into him too. He shuddered.

‘I’m on it!’ he said with sudden decisiveness and moved off, calling to Mkoll and Caffran to bring up the explosives.

Gaunt yelled after him. ‘These things are heresies, Rawne! Foul heresies! And if that wasn’t enough, they’ve been sleeping here on a Chaos-polluted world for thousands of years! Do any of us really want to find out how that’s altered their thinking?’

‘Feth!’ Dorden said, from nearby. ‘You mean this whole thing could be corrupted?’

‘You’d have to be the blindest fool in creation to want to find out, wouldn’t you?’ Gaunt replied.

He stared down at the remains of his friend Fereyd. ‘It wasn’t me who changed, was it?’ he murmured.

Twenty-Six

HELDANE WAS totally unprepared for the death of his pawn. It had been such a victory to identify and capture Mac-aroth’s little spy, and then such a privilege to work on him. It had taken a long time to turn Fereyd, a long time and lot of painful cutting. But the conceit had been so delicious: to take the greatest of the warmaster’s agents and turn him into a tool. Heldane had learned so much more through Fereyd than he would have through a lesser being. Duplicity, deceit, motive. To use one of the men the warmaster had been channelling to undermine him? It had been beautiful, perfect, daring.

In his final moments, Heldane wished he could have had time to finish with Rawne. There had been a likely mind, however blunt. But the Ghosts Corbec and Larkin had cheated him of that, and left Rawne merely aware of his influence rather than controlled by it.

It mattered little. Heldane had miscalculated. Impending death had slackened his judgement. He had put too much of himself into his pawn. The backlash when the pawn died was too much. He should have shielded his mind to the possible onrush of death-trauma. He had not.

Fereyd suffered the most painful, hideous death imaginable. All of it crackled down the psychic link to Heldane. He felt every moment of Fereyd’s death. In it, he felt his own.

Heldane spasmed, burst asunder. Untameable psychic energies erupted out of his dead form, lashing outwards indiscriminately. Impact resounded on impact. Above in his command seat, Hechtor Dravere noticed the shuddering of the deck, and began to look around for the cause.

In a mushroom of light, the unleashed psychic energies of the dying inquisitor blew the entire Leviathan apart, atom from atom.

Twenty-Seven

‘WE’RE CLEAR!’ Rawne yelled as he sprinted across the chamber with Caffran next to him. Gaunt had marshalled the others at the doorway. By now, the huge machine was rumbling and the gas-venting was continuous.

‘Mkoll! Come on!’ Gaunt shouted.

On the far side of the chamber, a section of the ancient grille finally gave way. Iron Men stumbled forward out of their alcove, their metal feet crunching over the fallen grille sheet. All around, their companions rattled and shook at their pens, eyes burning like the blue-hot backwash of missile tubes, murmuring their sonorous hum.

The metal skeletons spilling out of the cage began to advance across the chamber, bleary and undirected. Mkoll, fixing the last set of charges to the side of the vibrating STC, looked round in horror at their jerking advance.

There was a sudden rush of noise beside him and a hatch aperture slid open in the side of the STC maker, voiding a great gout of steam. Caught in it, Mkoll fell to his knees, choking and gagging.

‘Mkoll!’

Kneeling with his back turned to the hot steam, the coughing Mkoll couldn’t see what was looming out of the swirling gas behind him.

A new-born Man of Iron. The first to be produced by the STC after its long slumber. As soon as it appeared, the others, those loosed and those still caged, began keening, in a long, continuous, piteous wail that was at once a human shriek and a rapid broadcast of machine code sequences.

There was something wrong with the new-born. It was malformed, grotesque compared to the perfect anatomical symmetry of the other Iron Men. A good head taller, it was hunched, blackened, one arm far longer than the other, draped and massive, the other hideously vestigial and twisted. Corrupt horns sprouted from its over-long skull and its eyes shone a deadened yellow. Oil like stringy pus wept from the eye sockets. It shambled, unsteady. Its exposed teeth and jaws clacked and mashed idiotically.

Dorden howled out something about Gaunt being right, but Gaunt was already moving and not listening. He dove across the chamber at full stretch and tackled the coughing Mkoll onto the floor a second before the newborn’s larger arm sliced through the space the stealther had previously occupied.

The respite was brief. Rolling off Mkoll and trying to pull him up, Gaunt saw the new-born turn to address them again, its jaw champing mindlessly. Behind it, in the reeking smoke of the hatchway, a second new-born was already emerging.

Two las-rounds punched into the new-born and made it stagger backwards. Caffran was trying his best, but the dully reflective carapace of the new-born shrugged off all but the kinetic force of the shots.

It struck at Gaunt and Mkoll again, but the commissar managed to roll himself and the scout out of the way. Its great metal claw sparked against the algorithm-inscribed floor, incising an alteration to the calculations that was permanent and insane.

Gaunt struggled to drag Mkoll away from the shambling metal thing, cursing out loud. In a second, Dorden and Bragg were with him, easing his efforts, pulling Mkoll upright.

The unexpected blow smashed Gaunt off his feet. The new-born had reached out a glancing blow and taken a chunk of cloth and flesh out of his back. How could it–

Gaunt rolled and looked up. The new-born’s massive forelimb had grown, articulating out on extending metallic callipers, forming new pistons and extruded pulleys as it morphed its mechanical structure.

The monstrous thing struck at him again. The commissar flopped left to dodge and then right to dodge again. The metal claw cracked into the floor on either side of him.

Rawne, Larkin and Caffran sprang in. Caffran tried to shoot at close range but Larkin got in his way, capering and shouting to distract the machine. A second later, Larkin was also sent flying by a backhanded swipe.

Rawne hadn’t had time to load another barbed round into his lance, so he used it like an axe, swinging the bayonet blade so that it reverberated against the creature’s iron skull. Cable-sinews sheared and the new-born’s head was knocked crooked.

The machine-being swung round with its massive fighting limb and smacked Rawne away, extending its reach to at least five metres. Gaunt dived across the floor and came up holding Rawne’s barb-lance. He scythed down with it and smashed the Iron Man’s limb off at the second elbow, cutting through the increasingly diminished girth of the extending limb. Then Gaunt plunged the weapon, point first, into the new-born’s face. The blade came free in an explosion of oil and ichor-like milky fluid.

The monstrosity fell back, cold and stiff, the light dying in its eyes.

By then, six new demented new-borns had spilled from the STC’s hatch. Behind them, forty or more of the Iron Men had burst from their cages and were thumping forward. The others rattled their pens and began to howl.

‘Now! Now we’re fething leaving!’ Gaunt yelled.

Twenty-Eight

IT HAD TAKEN THEM close on four hours to find and fight their way in; four hours from the bottom of the chimney shaft on the hillside to the doors of the Edicule. Now they had closed the doors on the shuffling blue-eyed metal nightmares and were ready to run. But even with the simple confidence of retracing their steps, Gaunt knew he had to factor in more time, so in the end he had Rawne set the tube-charge relays for four and three-quarter standard hours.

Already their progress back to the surface was flagging. Domor was getting weaker with each step, and though able-bodied, both Bragg and Larkin were slowing with the dull pain of their wounds from the firefight. Most of their weapons had been dumped, as the power cells were now dead. There was no point carrying the excess weight. Rawne’s barb-lance was still functioning and he led the way with Mkoll, whose lasrifle had about a dozen gradually dissipating shots left in its dying clip.

Dorden, Domor, and Larkin were unarmed except for blades. Larkin’s carbine, still functioning thanks to its mechanical function, was of no use to him with his wounded arm, so Gaunt had turned it over to Caffran to guard the rear. Bragg insisted on keeping his autocannon, but there was barely a drum left to it, and Gaunt wasn’t sure how well the injured trooper would manage it if it came to a fight.

Then there was the darkness of the tunnels, which Gaunt cursed himself for forgetting. All of their lamp packs were now dead, and as they moved away from the Edicule chambers into the darker sections of the labyrinth, they had to halt while Mkoll and Caffran scouted ahead to salvage cloth and wood from the bodies of the dead foe in the cistern approach. They fashioned two dozen makeshift torches, with cloth wadded around wooden staves and lance-poles, moistened with the pungent contents of Bragg’s last precious bottle of sacra liquor. Lit by the flickering flames, they moved on, passing gingerly through the cistern and beyond.

As they lumbered through the stinking mass of enemy corpses choking the cistern, Gaunt thought to search them for other weapons, mechanical weapons that were unaffected by the energy-drain. But the scent of meat had brought the insect swarms down the passage, and the twisted bodies were now a writhing, revolting mass of carrion.

There was no time. They pressed on. Gaunt tried not to think what wretchedness Mkoll and Caffran had suffered to scavenge the material for the torches.

The torches themselves burned quickly, and illuminated little but the immediate environs of the bearer. Gaunt felt fatigue growing in his limbs, realising now more than ever that the energy-leaching affected more than lamp packs and lasgun charges. If he was weary, he dreaded to think what Domor was like. Twice the commissar had to call a halt and regroup as Mkoll and Rawne got too far ahead of the struggling party.

How long had it been? His timepiece was dead. Gaunt began to wonder if the charges would even fire. Would their detonator circuits fizzle and die before they clicked over?

They reached a jagged turn in the ancient, sagging tunnels. They must have been moving now for close on three hours, he guessed. There was no sign of Mkoll and Rawne ahead. He lit another torch and looked back as Larkin and Bragg moved up together past him, sharing a torch.

‘Go on,’ he urged them, hoping this way was the right way. Without Mkoll’s sharp senses, he felt lost. Which turn was it? Larkin and Bragg, gifted with that uncanny Tanith sixth sense of direction themselves, seemed in no doubt. ‘Just move on and out. If you find Sergeant Mkoll or Major Rawne, tell them to keep moving too.’

The huge shadow of Bragg and his wiry companion nodded silently to him and soon their guttering light was lost in the tunnel ahead.

Gaunt waited. Where the feth were the others?

Minutes passed, lingering, creeping.

A light appeared. Caffran moved into sight, squinting out into the dark with Larkin’s carbine held ready.

‘Sir?’

‘Where’s Domor and the doctor?’ Gaunt asked.

Caffran looked puzzled. ‘I haven’t passed–’

‘You were the rearguard, trooper!’

‘I haven’t passed them, sir!’ Caffran barked.

Gaunt bunched a fist and rapped his own forehead with it. ‘Keep going. I’ll go back.’

‘I’ll go back with you, sir–’ Caffran began.

‘Go on!’ Gaunt snapped. ‘That’s an order, trooper! I’ll go back and look.’

Caffran hesitated. In the dim fire-flicker, Gaunt saw distress in the young man’s eyes.

‘You’ve done all I could have asked of you, Caffran. You and the others. First and Only, best of warriors. If I die in this pit, I’ll die happy knowing I got as many of you out as possible.’

He made to shake the man’s hand. But Caffran seemed overwhelmed by the gesture and moved away.

‘I’ll see you on the surface, commissar,’ Caffran said firmly.

Gaunt headed back down the funnel of rock. Caffran’s light remained stationary behind him, watching him until he was out of sight.

THE ROCKY TUNNEL was damp and stifling. There was no sign of Dorden or the wounded Domor. Gaunt opened his mouth to call out and then silenced himself. The blackness around him was too deep and dark for a voice. And by now, the awakened Iron Men could be lumbering down the tunnels, alert to any sound.

The passage veered to the left. Gaunt fought a feeling of panic. He didn’t seem to be retracing his steps at all. He must have lost a turn somewhere. Lost, a voice hissed in his mind. Fereyd’s voice? Dercius’s? Macaroth’s? You’re lost, you witless, compassionate fool!

His last torch sputtered and died. Darkness engulfed him. His eyes adjusted and he saw a pale glow far ahead. Gaunt moved towards it.

The tunnel, now crumbling underfoot even as it sloped away, led into a deep cavern, natural and rocky, lit by a greenish bioluminescent growth throbbing from fungus and lichens caking the ceiling and walls. It was a vast cavern full of shattered rock and dark pools. His foot slipped on loose pebbles and he struggled to catch himself. Almost invisible in the darkness, a bottomless abyss yawned to his right. A few steps on and he fumbled his way around the lip of another chasm. Black, oily fluid bubbled and popped in crater holes. Grotesque blind insects with dangling legs and huge fibrous wings whirred around in the semi-dark.

Domor lay on his side on a shelf of cool rock, still and silent. Gaunt crawled over to him. The trooper had been hit on the back of the head with a blunt instrument. He was alive, just, the blow adding immeasurably to the damage he had already suffered. A burned-out torch lay nearby, and there was a spilled medical kit, lying half-open, with rolls of bandages and flasks of disinfectant scattered around it.

‘Doctor?’ Gaunt called.

Dark shapes leapt down on him from either side. Fierce hands grappled him. He caught a glimpse of Jantine uniform as he fought back. The ambush was so sudden, it almost overwhelmed him, but he was tensed and ready for anything thanks to the warning signs of Domor and the medi-kit. He kicked out hard, breaking something within his assailant’s body, and then rolled free, slashing with his silver Tanith blade. A man yelped – and then screamed deeper and more fully as his staggering form mis-footed and tumbled into a chasm. But the others had him, striking and pummelling him hard. Three sets of hands, three men.

‘Enough! Ebzan, enough! He’s mine!’

Dazed, Gaunt was dragged upright by the three Patricians. Through fogged eyes, across the cavern, he saw Flense advancing, pushing Dorden before him, a lasgun to the pale old medic’s temple.

‘Gaunt.’

‘Flense! You fething madman! This isn’t the time!’

‘On the contrary, colonel-commissar, this is the time. At last the time… for you, for me. A reckoning.’

The three Jantine soldiers muscled Gaunt up to face Flense and his captive.

‘If it’s the prize you want, Flense, you’re too late. It’ll be gone by the time you get there,’ Gaunt hissed.

‘Prize? Prize?’ Flense smiled, his scar-tissue twitching. ‘I don’t care for that. Let Dravere care, or that monster Heldane. I spit upon their prize! You are all I have come for!’

‘I’m touched,’ Gaunt said and one of the men smacked him hard around the back of the head.

‘That’s enough, Avranche!’ Flense snapped. ‘Release him!’

Reluctantly, the three Jantine Patricians set him free and stood back. Head spinning, Gaunt straightened up to face Flense and Dorden.

‘Now we settle this matter of honour,’ Flense said.

Gaunt grinned disarmingly at Flense, without humour. ‘Matter of honour? Are we still on this? The Tanith-Jantine feud? You’re a perfect idiot, Flense, you know that?’

Flense grimaced, pushing the pistol tighter into the wincing forehead of Dorden. ‘Do you so mock the old debt? Do you want me to shoot this man before your very eyes?’

‘Mock on,’ Dorden murmured. ‘Better he shoot me than I listen to any more of his garbage.’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know the depth of the old wound, the old treachery,’ Flense said spitefully.

Gaunt sighed. ‘Dercius. You mean Dercius! Sacred Feth, but isn’t that done with? I know the Jantine have never liked admitting they had a coward on their spotless honour role, but this is taking things too far! Dercius, General Dercius, Emperor rot his filthy soul, left my father and his unit to die on Kentaur. He ran away and left them. When I executed Dercius on Khedd all those years ago, it was a battlefield punishment, as is my right to administer as an Imperial commissar!

‘He deserted his men, Flense! Throne of Earth, there’s not a regiment in the Guard that doesn’t have a black sheep, a wayward son! Dercius was the Jantine’s disgrace! That’s no reason to prolong a rivalry with me and my Ghosts! This mindless feuding has cost the lives of good men, on both sides! So what if we beat you to the punch on Fortis? So what of Pyrites and aboard the Absalom? You jackass Jantine don’t know when to stop, do you? You don’t know where honour ends and discipline begins!’

Flense shot Dorden in the side of the head and the medic’s body crumpled. Gaunt made to leap forward, incandescent with rage, but Flense raised the pistol to block him.

‘It’s an honour thing, all right,’ Flense spat, ‘but forget the Jantine and the Tanith. It’s an honour thing between you and me.’

‘What are you saying, Flense?’ growled Gaunt through his fury.

‘Your father, my father. I was the son of a dynasty on Jant Normanidus. The heir to a province and a wide estate. You sent my father to hell in disgrace and all my lands and titles were stripped from me. Even my family name. That went too. I was forced to battle my way up and into the service as a footslogger. Prove my worth, make my own name. My life has been one long, hellish struggle against infamy thanks to you.’

‘Your father?’ Gaunt echoed.

‘My father. Aldo Dercius.’

The truth of it resonated in Ibram Gaunt’s mind. He saw, truly understood now, how this could end no other way. He launched himself at Flense.

The pistol fired. Gaunt felt a stinging heat across his chest as he barrelled into the Patrician colonel. They rolled over on the rocks, sharp angles cutting into their flesh. Flense smashed the pistol butt into the side of Gaunt’s head.

Gaunt mashed his elbow sideways and felt ribs break. Flense yowled and clawed at the commissar, wrenching him over his head in a cartwheel flip. Gaunt landed on his back hard, struggled to rise and met Flense’s kick in the face. He slammed back over the rocks and loose pebbles, skittering stone fragments out from under him.

Flense leapt again, encountering Gaunt’s up-swinging boot as he dived forward, smashing the wind out of his chest. Flense fell on Gaunt; the Patrician’s hands clawed into his throat. Gaunt was aware of the chanting voices of the three Jantine soldiers watching, echoing Flense’s name.

As Flense tightened his grip and Gaunt choked, the chant changed from ‘Flense!’ to that family name that had been stripped from the colonel at the disgrace.

‘Dercius! Dercius! Dercius!’

Dercius. Uncle Dercius. Uncle fething Dercius…

Gaunt’s punch lifted Flense off him in a reeling spray of mouth blood. He rolled and ploughed into the Patrician colonel, throwing three, four, five well-met punches.

Flense recovered, kicked Gaunt headlong, and the commissar lay sprawled and helpless for a moment. Flense towered over him, a chunk of rock raised high in both hands to crush Gaunt’s head.

‘For my father!’ screamed Flense.

‘For mine!’ hissed Gaunt. His Tanith war-knife bit through the air and pinned the Patrician’s skull to the blackness for a second. With a mouthful of blood bubbling his scream, Flense teetered away backwards and fell with a slapping splash into a pool of black fluid.

His body shattered and aching, Gaunt lay back on the rock shelf. His men, he thought, they’ll…

There was the serial crack of an exotic carbine, a las-rifle and a barb-lance. Gaunt struggled up. Caffran, Rawne, Mkoll, Larkin and Bragg stalked into the cavern. The three Jantine lay dead in the gloom.

‘The surface… we’ve got to… ’ Gaunt coughed.

‘We’re going,’ Rawne said, as Bragg lifted the helpless form of Domor.

Gaunt stumbled across to Dorden. The medic was still alive. Drained of power by the cavern, Flense’s pistol had only grazed him, as it had only grazed Gaunt’s chest when he had thrown himself at Flense. Gaunt lifted Dorden in his arms. Caffran and Mkoll moved to help him, but Gaunt shrugged them off.

‘We haven’t got much time now. Let’s get out of here.’

Twenty-Nine

THE SUBSURFACE EXPLOSION ruptured most of the Target Primaris on Menazoid Epsilon and set it burning incandescently. Imperial forces pulled away from the vanquished moon and returned to their support ships in high orbit.

Gaunt received a communiqué from Warmaster Macaroth, thanking him for his efforts and applauding his success.

Gaunt screwed the foil up and threw it away. Bandaged and aching, he moved through the medical wing of the frigate Navarre, checking on his wounded… Domor, Dorden, Corbec, Larkin, Bragg, a hundred more…

As he passed Corbec’s cot, the grizzled colonel called him over in a hoarse, weak whisper.

‘Rawne told me you found the thing. Blew it up. How did you know?’

‘Corbec?’

‘How did you know what to do? Back on Pyrites, you told me the path would be hard. Even when we found out what we were looking for, you never said what you’d do when you found it. How did you decide?’

Gaunt smiled.

‘Because it was wrong. You don’t know what I saw down there, Colm. Men do insane things. Feth, if I’d been insane enough to try and harness what I found… if I’d succeeded… I could have made myself warmaster. Who knows, even emperor…’

‘Emperor Gaunt. Heh. Got a ring to it. Bit fething sacrilegious, though.’

Gaunt smiled. The feeling was unfamiliar. ‘The Vermilion secret of Epsilon was heretical and tainted by Chaos. Bad, whichever way you care to gloss it. But that’s not what really made me destroy it.’

Corbec hunkered up onto his elbows. ‘Kidding me? Why then?’

Ibram Gaunt put his head in his hands and sighed the sigh of someone released from a great burden. ‘Someone told me what to do, colonel. It was a long time ago…’