The memory of his previous encounter with a glyf came back to him. He remembered biting Landerson’s palm. He remembered fear.
He wasn’t frightened now. Not now. Because now he understood the symbols that crackled in the air before him. He understood what they meant. He couldn’t think of a human word that meant the same thing, but that didn’t matter.
He understood.
Acreson was closest to Lefivre. As Bonin and Rawne dragged the thrashing Feygor back down the muddy street, Acreson ran forward, waving at Cirk to get the others clear.
Acreson’s own imago jerked and tightened. He felt it fidget in the flesh of his arm. He loathed the grub with every atom of his body, but now he counted on it, and counted on his decision not to have it removed. It consented him for night and day. Maybe it would appease the glyf and distract it from poor, unconsented Lefivre.
Acreson slammed into Lefivre, knocking him to the ground. Averting his eyes from the trembling light-form, Acreson raised his arm and exposed his imago.
The sight of it seemed to still the glyf s crackling noises for a second. Was it backing off? Had he diverted it?
There was a hard sound, like a stick breaking. Acreson gasped. Time seemed to slow down. He felt a hot pain in his belly, as if a white-hot skewer had been rammed through it. Then he felt his feet leave the ground. He was flying…
Flying backwards. Impact recoil snapped through his body like a whip-crack. For one long, silent moment, Acreson saw glittering drops of blood drift lazily up into the air before him.
His own blood.
Acreson hit the ground hard in a concussive blur of pain and sudden real-time. The las-lock bolt had blown clean through his belly and thrown him three metres backwards. Down the narrow street, summoned by the glyf, a pack of excubitors was running forward, weapons raised. Several more bolts stung down the street. Prone, rigid with pain, Acreson watched them flash over him.
“Oh. God. Emperor,” he sighed.
Its work done, the glyf was already drifting away across the low rooftops, as if bored with the game. Calling the alarm, the excubitors ran on. A carnyx horn blasted, echoing across the dismal streets of Wheathead.
The mission team was already running. Cirk and Criid led the way, with Bonin and Rawne close behind, struggling with Feygor. Lock-bolts ripped around them.
Thirty metres behind them, Lefivre got to his feet puzzled and dazed. He felt as if he were waking from a deep sleep. What the hell was going on? He couldn’t remember.
Nearby, Acreson lay on his back, twitching. The man’s belly was a crater of gore. Darts of light crisped through the air.
Lefivre turned. He saw the excubitors charging towards him. By some freak of fate, they had not yet managed to hit him.
Instinct took over. PDF ranger programme training. Lefivre calmly pulled the shoddy old autorifle out from under his ragged clothing and opened fire.
His jury-rigged silencer snorted like a pressure cooker valve. Lefivre’s first shots killed the two excubitors leading the charge stone dead, blowing them over onto their backs. He winged a third and then hit another in the forehead as he raked his cone of fire across the street.
The excubitors dived for cover. A las-lock bolt took off Lefivre’s right earlobe and another dug a searing gouge through his left shoulder. Lefivre emptied the last of his magazine and dropped two more of the skeletal foe facedown in the mud.
Change clip. He had to change clip. His hands fumbled, dropping the empty, reaching into his belt back. A passing bolt lased off his left shin and burst the meat of his calf.
Swaying, Lefivre found a fresh magazine and rammed it home.
Autofire licked down the street. At first, Lefivre thought it must be him, but then he saw Acreson. The man had sat up, his legs crooked under him, and he was blasting with his assault weapon. The man’s hands, belly and lap were soaked with blood. Ghastly black and purple spools of entrail were pushing out of Acreson’s exploded stomach.
“For the God-Emperor of Mankind!” Lefivre screamed. “For Gereon! For Gereon!” He opened fire again. The two resistance fighters hailed their fire down the narrow street. Several more excubitors toppled and died. The rest were driven back, trying to reload their slow, single-shot light muskets.
Lefivre ran to Acreson.
“Come on!”
Acreson looked up at him. Blood leaked from the corners of his mouth. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
“Yes, you are. Yes, you are!”
Acreson looked up at Lefivre strangely. “You don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what? Shut up and let me help you!”
“The glyf,” said Acreson. “You triggered the glyf.”
Lefivre hesitated. He remembered something, a light, a word. But not…
“I didn’t mean to do anything,” he said.
“I know,” said Acreson, blood bubbling around his lips. “Run.”
“But—”
“Run, Lefivre. Save yourself.”
The excubitors had suddenly stopped shooting. A clammy chill fell across the street. In the lingering quiet, the wind rose, and the carnyx horn started to boom again.
Down at the talix tree gibbet, ball lightning seethed into being, curling and licking around the axl-beam. The wired mannequins began to tremble and quiver.
“Dear God-Emperor who protects us all…” Acreson murmured. “We’ve woken them up.”
FIFTEEN
The excubitors scattered, wailing. Townsfolk and mourners fled for cover in a blind panic. Even the archenemy troopers, who had been mustering at the sudden alarm, now began to run. Some dropped their weapons.
There was a taste of ozone in the air. A dry, bald scent, like a heated wire. The clouds closed in over Wheathead, blooming fast like ink in water. Thunder boomed.
On the stark gibbet, the ball lightning frothed and bubbled, brighter than any sun. Warp-light shone out of it. The lightning mass sputtered and then began to drip down from the cross-beam like lava, like molten, white-hot rock, pouring down into the hollow metal puppets, filling them with light.
The wired puppets twitched as they filled. Metal segments ground against each other. Wires hummed like charged cables. The air temperature in Wheathead plunged. Frost powdered the roof tiles and the muddy streets became stiff with ice.
The wirewolves woke.
The glyf had summoned them. Arcane practices had made the space above the gibbet thin so that the immaterium could finger its way through the aether when the correct command came. Now the crude metal puppets, engineered to contain the energies of the warp and coalesce them, vibrated into life.
There were two of them. They took the form of men simply because the puppets had been fashioned to bottle them in that shape. Jerking spastically from their wires, they looked like ancient knights in full plate armour, illuminated from within by the brightest lanterns ever lit. The suspending wires shivered and sang, taut with power.
The puppet hosts had not been fashioned well. Just crude metal shoes, shin-guards, thigh plates, hauberks. Hungry radiance speared out through the gaps and chinks of joints and seams. The arm sections jerked. Light speared out through the helmet eyeslits as bright as a Land Raider’s stablights.
The arms of the puppets were unfinished. Shoulder plates, metal sections for upper and lower arms. They had no gloves or hands. The supporting wires suspended loose bouquets of razor-sharp steel blades from the forearm cuffs that tinkled together as the rising wind stirred them. Intending, controlled by governing magicks scratched into the armour, the baleful light sprouted from the wrists and made long, crackling claw shapes of solid light into which those blades became embedded like fingernails.
“Run!” gasped Acreson.
Lefivre took a step or two backwards on the suddenly brittle mud. His heels cracked panes of ice. He could not believe what he was seeing. He felt his bowels turn to water.
“Run, Lefivre! Run, for Throne’s sake!” Acreson pleaded.
The gib
bet wires, whining frantically like live telegraph lines, trembled and then snapped.
The wirewolves dropped from the gibbet.
Shedding ghastly light from every joint, they landed hard, then stood upright. Slowly. Very, very slowly.
The first one took a step. There was a sound like a tank’s tracks as it moved. The second one followed.
Grating metal noises, blistering power.
Their bright eyes, lancing like target beams, swept across the scene ahead of them. They began to snuffle, then whine.
Then they began to howl.
“Oh my God-Emperor…” Lefivre began.
The wirewolves started forward, moving faster than any man. A deathly chill surrounded them. Their blade fingers scraped and squealed against the stone walls as they slithered along, feeling their way down the village streets with lascivious caresses.
“Please… run,” Acreson repeated.
The howling was growing so much louder.
An excubitor, caught in the open, fell to its knees before the oncoming wirewolves. One of them slashed at it with its claws of light and steel. The excubitor fell in a haze of violet light and came apart, torn into pieces. Smoke wafted from its sliced remains.
Lefivre started to run.
“What the feth is that noise?” Rawne cried.
“Ignore it. Ignore it!” Cirk jabbered. “We have to find cover and we have to find it now!”
Feygor had fallen again. Now Criid joined the effort to lift him.
“For Throne’s sake, come on!” Cirk yelled.
They were at the edge of the village now, the sky black above them. Hideous light shone from the narrow street they had just left.
“Head for the treeline!” Cirk ordered and they began to race across a bare field that sloped away from Wheat-head’s western edge.
“What the hell are you doing?” Landerson cried. We have to get out of here!”
“I have people down there,” Gaunt replied, shaking off the cell fighter’s grip.
“Not any more,” said Landerson. Trust me, sir. The wirewolves are loose now. If we run, we might make it out of here with our lives.”
Gaunt looked Landerson in the eye. He knew the man wasn’t lying. He had no idea what he was getting himself into. The mission was too important, too vital. Every one of his team was expendable. That’s what Van Voytz had stressed. All that mattered was getting to the prize.
Gaunt had believed that was acceptable at the time. But now, as his faith was put to the test, he realised it wasn’t. Rawne was down there. Feygor. Criid. Bonin.
Bonin. “Lucky” Bonin, who’d offered his life to take Heritor Asphodel on Verghast and survived to earn his nickname. One of Mkoll’s finest.
Criid, dear Tona, the punk-girl ganger, who’d come out of Vervunhive and become not only a Ghost but the First’s first female officer. She had Caffran’s heart. And then there were the children, of course…
Feygor. Gaunt owed nothing to Feygor except that he’d always been there and always fought like a brazen bastard.
And Rawne. His nemesis. His shadow. The man who would, Gaunt was sure, one day kill him more certainly than the forces of the archenemy.
But Rawne was Rawne. Without him, there would be no Tanith First. And now Corbec was dead and buried on distant Herodor, Rawne was the last remaining strand of that founding spirit that had been born years ago on Tanith.
Gaunt wasn’t going to lose that. He wasn’t going to lose any of them.
Feth take the mission.
“Mkoll!” he shouted. “Get the team up and moving. Get them clear. If I don’t come back, you know what we’ve come to this world to do and I trust you to get it done.”
Mkoll nodded. “I’ll do my job, sir. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you should be leaving us, sir.”
“Neither do I,” said Gaunt, “But I must. Rawne’s down there.”
“The man who you said never trusted you?”
Gaunt nodded. “Consider this my way of proving him wrong.”
Mkoll smiled. Then he raised his voice. “Varl! Brostin! Get the group moving! Turn south into the woods. No noise, you understand?”
Mkoll paused. “Mkvenner… go with the commander.”
“I don’t need—” Gaunt began.
“Ven’s going with you, sir. My instructions.”
Gaunt nodded. He’d already drawn his bolt pistols and was hurrying down the bank out of the trees.
“Bring him back, Ven,” Mkoll said.
Mkvenner nodded and turned to run after the Tanith’s colonel-commissar.
Mkoll hurried into the trees. “Move it! Move it now, you bastards! Come on!”
Lefivre had gone. Acreson, close to passing out from blood loss, maintained his sitting position and aimed his weapon down the street.
The wirewolves slithered and bounded towards him, keening. Acreson retched involuntarily at the sight of them. Wiping bile from his mouth, he opened fire.
The frantic bullets spanked off the armour of the nearest wolf, and where they hit solid light at the junction of limb armour, they melted into steam.
Acreson fired again, and again, until his clip was out.
“Oh Emperor Emperor Emperor…” he began.
The first wirewolf was on him. It sliced around with its savage claws. Acreson’s head flopped sideways, his neck almost severed. The claws bit deep and lightning seethed. A violet glow suffused the body of the cell fighter. In a second, Acreson was reduced to a skeleton, coated in blue-white ash, his exposed bones smoking.
Rawne’s party fled Wheathead through the edges of the field, the sky swirling with dark clouds overhead.
“Run!” Rawne ordered. Cirk was already sprinting through the coarse grass. Criid and Bonin were struggling with Feygor.
Rawne took a tube-charge out of his jacket and plucked the det-tape upright between finger and thumb.
The howling was getting closer now. The sky looked like blood.
They were all going to die. Fact.
How well they did it was up to Rawne.
Screaming and firing his weapon, Lefivre reached the end of the street. Over the fence behind him, the lifeless fields rolled away to the woodline.
The first wirewolf lunged at him and he opened fire, emptying his clip into its chest. The kinetic force of the bullets drove it back.
But the second one had slithered up at Lefivre’s right hand. It didn’t strike. It reached out with its claws and the smoking blades sank into Lefivre’s shoulder.
He shuddered. His mouth opened in pain. A violet aura lit up around his body.
Then his flesh evaporated in a drizzle of blue dust and his blackened, cooked bones clattered onto the pathway.
SIXTEEN
Landerson was running through the gloomy trees. He was close to panic. Purchason and Plower were ahead of him, sprinting headlong. The Ghosts were—
Landerson skidded to a halt and fell over into the loam. He looked back. The Ghosts had stopped. They had stopped and they were arguing.
In the name of the Throne! Death is at our heels! What are you doing?
“You let him go? Alone?” Curth was yelling.
“I sent Ven with him…” Mkoll said.
“This isn’t right. We shouldn’t be running,” Beltayn announced.
“Thanks for sharing, trooper,” Mkoll growled. “Now move it.”
“You heard the sarge,” Brostin said. “Let’s go!”
“No,” said Larkin.
“Well then, feth you, Larks!” Brostin said, and began to run on anyway.
Mkoll looked at Varl, Curth, Larkin and Beltayn. “I’ve given you an order. Gaunt’s own order. Don’t do this. Not now.”
“My dear sir,” Curth hissed. “If not now, when?”
She turned, and started hurrying back through the undergrowth towards the village.
“Stop it! Stop it, woman! Ana!” Mkoll cried. No one had ever seen the master of scouts display such open emotion. It didn’t stop V
arl, Beltayn and Larkin from following her.
“Sorry, sir,” Beltayn called back over his shoulder. “He needs us. Something’s awry.”
“Stop where you are!” Mkoll shouted. He almost raised his weapon to aim at them, then he thought how ridiculous that would be. “Please!” he called. “Gaunt told us to go!”
The four Ghosts stopped and looked back at him. Beltayn stared at the forest floor, unwilling to catch Mkoll’s fierce gaze. Curth shrugged. Larkin kept looking back towards the village, listening to the howling that rang up the fields towards them.
Varl just smiled. “Sarge… since when did Ibram Gaunt go into a fight and not expect the Ghosts to be right behind him?”
“We have a mission here,” Mkoll began. “We have a duty. It’s important. We can’t just…”
His voice tailed away. “Feth, I’m not even convincing myself.”
He turned and looked at the departing form of Trooper Brostin heading away through the trees. “Brostin! Get back here! Now! For Tanith and for the Emperor, we’re going back! Move it, trooper!”
They turned, raised their weapons, and began to run back towards Wheathead.
“We’re what?” Brostin said. Panting, he set down his heavy cannon and looked back through the trees. “You’ve got to be fething kidding me…”
“You need a hand with that?” Landerson said, slipping through the undergrowth behind him.
“What?”
“The cannon. It’s awful heavy if we’re going back all that way.”
“Feth! You too? Has everyone gone fething mad?”
Landerson was sure they hadn’t. Once in a lifetime, an officer came along who was worth following. Call it love, call it respect, call it duty, it was something about the man that made you want to push yourself, right to the limit even in the face of horror. Ballerat had been that sort of man, Throne rest him. And Gaunt was that kind too. Landerson had seen the look in the faces of Varl and Curth, Beltayn and Larkin. That was all he had needed to know.