Portions of the company began to move ahead towards the natural rock bridges and causeways that linked the plateau to the higher terrain.
Army regiments, swaddled in heavy coats and rebreathers against the cold, thin air, had moved up onto the plateau to meet them from the town of Kasheri in the lower gorge.
‘Kasheri is at compliance, sir,’ an officer told Loken, his voice muffled by his mask, his breathing pained and ragged. ‘The enemy has withdrawn to the high fortress.’
Loken nodded, gazing up at the bright crags looming in the white light. ‘We’ll take it from here,’ he said.
‘They’re well armed, sir,’ the officer warned. ‘Every time we’ve pushed to take the rock bridges, they’ve killed us with heavy cannon. We don’t think they have much in the way of numerical weight, but they have the advantage of position. It’s a slaughter ground, sir, and they have the cross-draw on us. We understand the insurgents are being led by an Invisible called Rykus or Ryker. We—’
‘We’ll take it from here,’ Loken repeated. ‘I don’t need to know the name of the enemy before I kill him.’
He turned. ‘Jubal. Vipus. Form up and move ahead!’
‘Just like that?’ the army officer asked sourly. ‘Six weeks we’ve been here, slogging it out, the body toll like you wouldn’t believe, and you—’
‘We’re Astartes,’ Loken said. ‘You’re relieved.’
The officer shook his head with a sad laugh. He muttered something under his breath.
Loken turned back and took a step towards the man, causing him to start in alarm. No man liked to see the stern eye-slits of a Luna Wolfs impassive visor turn to regard him.
‘What did you say?’ Loken asked.
‘I… I… nothing, sir.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said… “and the place is haunted”, sir.’
‘If you believe this place is haunted, my friend,’ Loken said, ‘then you are admitting to a belief in spirits and daemons.’
‘I’m not, sir! I’m really not!’
‘I should think not,’ Loken said. ‘We’re not barbarians.’
‘All I mean,’ said the soldier breathlessly, his face flushed and sweaty behind his breather mask, ‘is that there’s something about this place. These mountains. They’re called the Whisperheads, and I’ve spoken to some of the locals in Kasheri. The name’s old, sir. Really old. The locals believe that a man might hear voices out here, calling to him, when there’s no one around. It’s an old tale.’
‘Superstition. We know this world has temples and fanes. They are dark-age in their beliefs. Bringing light to that ignorance is part of why we’re here.’
‘So what are the voices, sir?’
‘What?’
‘Since we’ve been here, fighting our way up the valley, we’ve all heard them. I’ve heard them. Whispers. In the night, and sometimes in the bold brightness of day when there’s no one about, and on the vox too. Samus has been talking.’
Loken stared at the man. The oath of moment fixed to his shoulder plate fluttered in the mountain wind. ‘Who is Samus?’
‘Damned if I know,’ the officer shrugged. ‘All I know for certain is the whole vox net has been loopy these past few days. Voices on the line, all saying the same thing. A threat.’
‘They’re trying to scare us,’ Loken said.
‘Well, it worked then, didn’t it?’
LOKEN WALKED OUT across the plateau in the biting wind, between the parked stormbirds. Samus was muttering again, his voice a dry crackle in the background of Loken’s open link.
‘Samus. That’s the only name you’ll hear. I’m Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw upon your bones.’
Loken was forced to admit the enemy propaganda was good. It was unsettling in its mystery and its whisper. It had probably been highly effective in the past against other nations and cultures on Sixty-Three Nineteen. The ‘Emperor’ had most likely come to global power on the basis of malignant whispers and invisible warriors.
The Astartes of the true Emperor would not be gulled and unmanned by such simple tools.
Some of the Luna Wolves around him were standing still, listening to the mutter in their helm sets.
‘Ignore it,’ Loken told them. ‘It’s just a game. Let’s move in.’
Rassek’s lumbering Terminators approached the rock bridges, arches of granite and lava that linked the plateau to the fierce verticality of the peaks. These were natural spans left behind by the action of ancient glaciers.
Corpses, some of them reduced to desiccated mummies by the altitude, littered the plateau shelf and the rock bridges. The officer had not been lying. Hundreds of army troopers had been cut down in the various attempts to storm the high fortresses. The field of fire had been so intense, their comrades had not been able even to retrieve their bodies.
‘Advance!’ Loken ordered.
Raising their storm bolters, the Terminator squad began to crunch out across the rock bridges, dislodging white bone and rotten tunics with their immense feet. Gunfire greeted them immediately, blistering down from invisible positions up in the crags. The shots spanked and whined off the specialised armour. Heads set, the Terminators walked into it, shrugging it away, like men walking into a gale wind. What had kept the army at bay for weeks, and cost them dearly, merely tickled the Legion warriors.
This would be over quickly, Loken realised. He regretted the loyal blood that had been wasted needlessly. This had always been a job for the Astartes.
The front ranks of the Terminator squad, halfway across the bridges, began to fire. Bolters and inbuilt heavy weapon systems unloaded across the abyss, blitzing las shots and storms of explosive munitions at the upper slopes. Hidden positions and fortifications exploded, and limp, tangled bodies tumbled away into the chasm below in flurries of rock and ice.
‘Samus’ began his worrying again. ‘Samus. That’s the only name you’ll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus. I am Samus. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw upon your bones. Look out! Samus is here.’
‘Advance!’ Loken cried, ‘and please, someone, shut that bastard up!’
‘AND WHO’S SAMUS?’ Borodin Flora asked.
The remembrancers, with an escort of army troopers and servitors, had just disembarked from their lander into the bitter cold of a township called Kasheri. The cold mountains swooped up beyond them into the mist.
The area had been securely occupied by Varvarus’s troopers and war machines. The party stepped into the light, all of them giddy and breathless from the altitude. Keeler was calibrating her picter against the harsh glare, trying to slow her desperate breath-rate. She was annoyed. They’d set down in a safe zone, a long way back from the actual fighting area. There was nothing to see. They were being handled.
The town was a bleak outcrop of longhouses in a lower gorge below the peaks. It looked like it hadn’t changed much in centuries. There were opportunities for shots of rustic dwellings or parked army war machines, but nothing significant. The glaring light had a pure quality, though. There was a thin rain in it. Some of the servitors had been instructed to carry the remembrancers’ bags, but the rest were fighting to keep parasol canopies upright over the heads of the party in the crosswind. Keeler felt they all looked like some idle gang of aristos on a grand tour, exposing themselves not to risk but to some vague, stage-managed version of danger.
‘Where are the Astartes?’ she asked. ‘When do we approach the warzone?’
‘Never mind that,’ Flora interrupted. ‘Who is Samus?’
‘Samus?’ Sindermann asked, puzzled. He had walked a short distance away from the group beside the lander into a scrubby stretch of white grass and sand, from where he could overlook the misty depth of the rainswept gorge. He looked small, as if he was about to address the canyon as an audience.
‘I keep hearing it,’ Flora insisted, following him. He was having trouble catching
a breath. Flora wore an earplug so he could listen in to the military’s vox traffic.
‘I heard it too,’ said one of the protection squad soldiers from behind his fogged rebreather.
‘The vox has been playing up,’ said another.
‘All the way down to the surface,’ said the officer in charge. ‘Ignore it. Interference.’
‘I’ve been told it’s been happening for days here,’ Van Krasten said.
‘It’s nothing,’ said Sindermann. He looked pale and fragile, as if he might be about to faint from the airlessness.
‘The captain says it’s scare tactics,’ said one of the troopers.
‘The captain is surely right,’ said Sindermann. He took out his data-slate, and connected it to the fleet archive base. As an afterthought, he uncoupled his rebreather mask and set it to his face, sucking in oxygen from the compact tank strapped to his hip.
After a few moments’ consultation, he said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’
‘What is?’ asked Keeler.
‘Nothing. It’s nothing. The captain is right. Spread yourselves out, please, and look around. The soldiers here will be happy to answer any questions. Feel free to inspect the war machines.’
The remembrancers glanced at one another and began to disperse. Each one was followed by an obedient servitor with a parasol and a couple of grumpy soldiers.
‘We might as well not have come,’ Keeler said.
‘The mountains are splendid,’ Sark said.
‘Bugger the mountains. Other worlds have mountains. Listen.’
They listened. A deep, distant booming rolled down the gorge to them. The sound of a war happening somewhere else.
Keeler nodded in the direction of the noise. ‘That’s where we ought to be. I’m going to ask the iterator why we’re stuck here.’
‘Best of luck,’ said Sark.
Sindermann had walked away from the group to stand under the eaves of one of the mountain town’s crude longhouse dwellings. He continued to study his slate. The mountain wind nodded the tusks of dry grass sprouting from the white sand around his feet. Rain pattered down.
Keeler went over to him. Two soldiers and a servitor with a parasol began to follow her. She turned to face them.
‘Don’t bother,’ she said. They stopped in their tracks and allowed her to walk away, alone. By the time she reached the iterator, she was sucking on her own oxygen supply. Sindermann was entirely occupied with his data-slate. She held off with her complaint for a moment, curious.
‘There’s something wrong, isn’t there?’ she asked quietly.
‘No, not at all,’ Sindermann said.
‘You’ve found out what Samus is, haven’t you?’
He looked at her and smiled. ‘Yes. You’re very tenacious, Euphrati.’
‘Born that way. What is it, sir?’
Sindermann shrugged. ‘It’s silly,’ he said, showing her the screen of the data-slate. ‘The background history we’ve already been able to absorb from this world features the name Samus, and the Whisperheads. It seems this is a sacred place to the people of Sixty-Three Nineteen. A holy, haunted place, where the alleged barrier between reality and the spirit world is at its most permeable. This is intriguing. I am endlessly fascinated by the belief systems and superstitions of primitive worlds.’
‘What does your slate tell you, sir?’ Keeler asked.
‘It says… this is quite funny. I suppose it would be scary, if one actually believed in such things. It says that the Whisperheads are the one place on this world where the spirits walk and speak. It mentions Samus as chief of those spirits. Local, and very ancient, legend, tells how one of the emperors battled and restrained a nightmarish force of devilry here. The devil was called Samus. It is here in their myths, you see? We had one of our own, in the very antique days, called Seytan, or Tearmat. Samus is the equivalent.’
‘Samus is a spirit, then?’ Keeler whispered, feeling unpleasantly light-headed.
‘Yes. Why do you ask?’
‘Because,’ said Keeler, ‘I’ve heard him hissing at me since the moment we touched down. And I don’t have a vox.’
BEYOND THE ROCK-BRIDGES, the insurgents had raised shield walls of stone and metal. They had heavy cannons covering the gully approaches to their fortress, wired munition charges in the narrow defiles, electrified razor-wire, bolted storm-doors, barricades of rockcrete blocks and heavy iron poles. They had a few automated sentry devices, and the advantage of the sheer drop and unscalable ice all around. They had faith and their god on their side.
They had held off Varvarus’s regiments for six weeks.
They had no chance whatsoever.
Nothing they did even delayed the advance of the Luna Wolves. Shrugging off cannon rounds and the backwash of explosives, the Terminators wrenched their way through the shield walls, and blasted down the storm-doors. They crushed the spark of electric life out of the sentry drones with their mighty claws, and pushed down the heaped barricades with their shoulders. The company flooded in behind them, firing their weapons into the rising smoke.
The fortress itself had been built into the mountain peak. Some sections of roof and battlement were visible from outside, but most of the structure lay within, thickly armoured by hundreds of metres of rock. The Luna Wolves poured in through the fortified gates. Assault squads rose up the mountain face on their jump packs and settled like flocks of white birds on the exposed roofs, ripping them apart to gain entry and drop in from above. Explosions ripped out the interior chambers of the fortress, opening them to the air, and sending rafts of dislodged ice and rock crashing down into the gorge.
The interior was a maze of wet-black rock tunnels and old tile work, through which the wind funnelled so sharply it seemed to be hyperventilating. The bodies of the slain lay everywhere, slumped and twisted, sprawled and broken. Stepping over them, Loken pitied them. Their culture had deceived them into this resistance, and the resistance had brought down the wrath of the Astartes on their heads. They had all but invited a catastrophic doom.
Terrible human screams echoed down the windy rock tunnels, punctuated by the door-slam bangs of bolter fire. Loken hadn’t even bothered to keep a tally of his kills. There was little glory in this, just duty. A surgical strike by the Emperor’s martial instruments.
Gunfire pinked off his armour, and he turned, without really thinking, and cut down his assailants. Two desperate men in mail shirts disintegrated under his fire and spattered across a wall. He couldn’t understand why they were still fighting. If they’d ventured a surrender, he would have accepted it.
‘That way,’ he ordered, and a squad moved up past him into the next series of chambers. As he followed them, a body on the floor at his feet stirred and moaned. The insurgent, smeared in his own blood and gravely wounded, looked up at Loken with glassy eyes. He whispered something.
Loken knelt down and cradled his enemy’s head in one massive hand. ‘What did you say?’
‘Bless me…’ the man whispered.
‘I can’t.’
‘Please, say a prayer and commend me to the gods.’
‘I can’t. There are no gods.’
‘Please… the otherworld will shun me if I die without a prayer.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Loken said, ‘You’re dying. That’s all there is.’
‘Help me…’ the man gasped.
‘Of course,’ Loken said. He drew his combat blade, the standard-issue short, stabbing sword, and activated the power cell. The grey blade glowed with force. Loken cut down and sharply back up again in the mercy stroke, and gently set the man’s detached head on the ground.
The next chamber was vast and irregular. Meltwater trickled down from the black ceiling, and formed spurs of glistening mineral, like silver whiskers, on the rocks it ran over. A pool had been cut in the centre of the chamber floor to collect the meltwater, probably as one of the fortress’s primary water reserves. The squad he had sent on had come to a halt around its lip.
&nbs
p; ‘Report,’ he said.
One of the Wolves looked round. ‘What is this, captain?’ he asked.
Loken stepped forward to join them and saw that a great number of bottles and glass flasks had been set around the pool, many of them in the path of the trickling feed from above. At first, he assumed they were there to collect the water, but there were other items too: coins, brooches, strange doll-like figures of clay and the head bones of small mammals and lizards. The spattering water fell across them, and had evidently done so for some time, for Loken could see that many of the bottles and other items were gleaming and distorted with mineral deposits. On the overhang of rock above the pool, ancient, eroded script had been chiselled. Loken couldn’t read the words, and realised he didn’t want to. There were symbols there that made him feel curiously uneasy.
‘It’s a fane,’ he said simply. ‘You know what these locals are like. They believe in spirits, and these are offerings.’
The men glanced at one another, not really understanding.
‘They believe in things that aren’t real?’ asked one.
‘They’ve been deceived,’ Loken said. ‘That’s why we’re here. Destroy this,’ he instructed, and turned away.
THE ASSAULT LASTED sixty-eight minutes, start to finish. By the end, the fastness was a smoking ruin, many sections of it blown wide to the fierce sunlight and mountain air. Not a single Luna Wolf had been lost. Not a single insurgent had survived.
‘How many?’ Loken asked Rassek.
‘They’re still counting bodies, captain,’ Rassek replied. ‘As it stands, nine hundred and seventy-two.’
In the course of the assault, something in the region of thirty meltwater fanes had been discovered in the labyrinthine fortress, pools surrounded by offerings. Loken ordered them all expunged.
‘They were guarding the last outpost of their faith,’ Nero Vipus remarked.
‘I suppose so,’ Loken replied.
‘You don’t like it, do you, Garvi?’ Vipus asked.
‘I hate to see men die for no reason. I hate to see men give their lives like this, for nothing. For a belief in nothing. It sickens me. This is what we were once, Nero. Zealots, spiritualists, believers in lies we’d made up ourselves. The Emperor showed us the path out of that madness.’