They came on and on, marching in time to their drums and their phlegmy chanting. Their green and brown banners so like and yet so unlike Macharius’s own Lion banner fluttered above them. They held their weapons at the ready and fired as they marched, not stopping until they were cut down. Their shooting was not particularly accurate, but it did not have to be – there was a lot of it.
I propped myself against a sandbag and lined up the shotgun where I could reach it. I was not planning on using it until the heretics were very close. I raised my lasgun and fired it, simply snapping off shots. The heretics seemed better trained than the last bunch, who had been mere cannon fodder. These took advantage of cover, threw themselves down in shell-holes and gave covering fire to some of their comrades as they advanced.
They were advancing along a broad front. We no longer had choke points on Skeleton Ridge and Plague Hill and there was no chance of catching this bunch in a trap.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up and saw Lieutenant Creasey. A frown was chiselled on his craggy brow. ‘Word has just come in from headquarters. We’re to begin withdrawing.’
‘Me and the lads are to be rearguard,’ I said. I could see it coming and it suited my mood. I felt as if I was dying anyway and I wanted to take a few more of the heretics with me.
He shook his head. ‘You’re to lead the first squads out.’
I wondered how this decision had been achieved. I even considered arguing the toss for a second but then I nodded. There was no point asking who would be commanding the rearguard. I could tell from the expression on his face. ‘Good luck, sir,’ I said.
‘Thank you, sergeant,’ he replied. I saluted and lurched along the line, tapping the men from my unit on the shoulder. Anton and Ivan tagged along at my heels as if they feared I would fall and wanted to be in a position to catch me. Anton somehow even managed to get his head under my shoulder and was half carrying me along.
‘Let go of me,’ I said, my words only slurring a little. ‘I can walk.’
He shrugged and stepped away. I took a couple of steps and fell on my face. Ivan reached out with his bionic limb to help me up. ‘That went well,’ I said, but I made no objections when they kept supporting me.
We began to make our way back through the trench system, while the sound of fighting reached a crescendo behind us.
Seven
The trenches showed signs of the fighting. There were piles of decomposing flesh and greenish slime scattered through them. There were many fallen men in the uniforms of the Grosslanders and the Lion Guard as well.
I raised my head and looked up. In the distance I could see the fortress line that blocked the way into Niflgard. The city was our drop-point and landing site. That circle of fortifications was the foundation against which our trench system rested, and it stretched out from there. The fortresses themselves seemed almost invincible, great ceramite cliffs bristling with weapons. I say almost only because in my long career as an Imperial infantryman I have learned that there is no such thing as an untakeable fortress. Any defensive position can fall if the attacker is clever enough or well enough armed or ruthless enough or has enough bodies to expend. Or preferably some combination of all of those factors.
I wondered if we were going to be driven back all the way to the chain of fortresses in that towering wall, to have to give up all the ground we had taken at such a cost in blood and lacerated flesh.
‘No,’ said Anton, and it was then I realised I had spoken aloud. ‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘How are you going to stop it?’ I asked. He gave me a look that was obviously intended to say shut up there are people listening, but I was too feverish to pay much attention to it.
‘I won’t. Macharius will.’
I nodded. It was touching to see the faith that Anton still had in Macharius. I told him so. He looked at me as if I were an idiot. That made me laugh. He was the idiot, everyone knew that.
He grimaced and said, ‘Right you are,’ and I realised I had spoken aloud once again. I knew I was babbling now, but I could not seem to stop myself. I began to tell Anton about all the little daemons I had seen, riding in raindrops, animating the corpses. His eyes narrowed. The scar on his forehead squirmed. ‘Daemons,’ I said. ‘Just like that big one on Karsk. The Angel of Fire. Some bloody angel.’
His hand clamped over the filter hole of my rebreather and I realised he was trying to shut me up, by covering my mouth. It was just like the idiot to do something like that. He was going to shut me up all right – by stopping me breathing. I told him so but my words came out as a kind of muffled grunt.
The phlegm was rasping in my lungs again. I felt as if I was choking and I was beginning to cough.
‘I think you’re suffocating him,’ Ivan said. His mechanical fingers removed Anton’s from the rebreather’s filter and I could breathe again, not quite normally, but I felt as if at least some oxygen was getting into my lungs.
‘You think you can stop babbling nonsense now?’ Anton asked.
‘It’s you that babbles nonsense,’ was my witty rejoinder, but I was starting to get some sense of the fact that there were things that he did not want me to say, and, even if he was Anton, there might be good reasons for me not saying them. Some of them were even supposed to be secrets, after all, and Inquisitor Drake among others would not like me spreading them.
I felt very tired. The sounds of violence had stopped behind us – no more shooting, no more screaming, no more explosions. It was peaceful, quiet and really rather nice, and I said so.
‘Damn,’ said Anton.
‘There’s no need for language like that,’ I informed him primly.
‘The fighting has stopped, Leo,’ he said. ‘That means the heretics have overcome our rearguard. You know what that means…’
‘They’ll be coming after us next. Typical heretics. They can never leave us alone.’
‘You two help me with the sergeant,’ Anton said. ‘We’re going to double-time it from here.’
‘Yes, corporal,’ they said.
They grabbed me by the legs and began to carry me forward through the trenches in the most undignified fashion. Behind us I could hear the heretics chanting again. It sounded as if they were giving thanks to their daemon god.
There were sounds of violence behind us again, much closer.
‘They’ve met some of our lads,’ Anton said. Obviously we were not the only people pulling back to the second line. Equally obviously somebody had decided to make a stand. It would not do much good against the overwhelming number of the enemy, but it might give us time to escape.
Anton was looking at Ivan. I could tell what he was thinking. He wanted to go back and get involved in the scrap. I shook my head. ‘Useless,’ I croaked, my mouth suddenly very dry again. ‘You won’t help. You’ll just get yourself killed alongside them. Macharius is going to need every man who can fight. Get back to the second line and find cover there.’
I was proud of myself for forcing out such a long and coherent sentence and I grinned. No one seemed pleased by my eloquence though. They scowled as if I had just told them to eat a great pile of corpse innards or take a swim in the latrine trench. They wanted to fight. Back there, comrades were fighting and dying and the sounds of that combat played on their nerves and damaged their image of themselves as fighting men.
I wanted to say they are dying so you can get back to the second line and fight another day but I resisted the urge. It would not have helped and, anyway, they could see the sense of it themselves, or if they couldn’t, nothing I could say would change things.
They picked themselves up and moved on. Behind us the sounds of combat told me that it would not be long before the battle came to us. The heretics were advancing fast.
‘It’s no use,’ Anton said. ‘We’re surrounded.’
I had blacked out for a moment and I had no idea what he was talking about. My leg felt as if someone had been pumping toxic sludge into it. A small daemon was beat
ing time on my forehead with a sledgehammer.
‘What?’ I said. It was not the most intelligent thing I could have said, but you try asking smart questions when you’re full of the latest plague on Loki. It took me a few moments to realise what he was talking about. The heretics had advanced unopposed on either side of us and it looked like they had made even better time. Of course, they were not slowed down by the walking wounded like we were.
‘Heretics ahead of us and on both sides, sergeant,’ said Ivan, managing a reasonable facsimile of respect for a superior on the battlefield. ‘We’re cut off from the second line.’
He sounded quite calm, but it was always difficult to pick out any emotions in his speech. Even before he lost half his face he was a cool one. I looked at Anton. He was sweating and a little pale. The scar was writhing on his forehead, which told me that he was at the very least tense.
‘We’ve been in worse situations,’ I said. I managed to sound calm, too, which was quite an achievement under the circumstances.
‘Care to remind me of one?’ said Anton. ‘I’m having some difficulty remembering any at the moment.’
I took a deep breath. The truth was, at that moment, I was not too troubled at the prospect of imminent death. At least it would stop the daemon pounding on my head with its hammer. And I would not have to worry about losing my leg.
‘You sure they are ahead of us?’ I asked.
‘If they’re not, our own boys have changed uniforms and decided to shoot at us,’ said Anton. I could tell he was in the mood to be sarcastic. He often chose the most unhelpful times for that.
More clouds of the phosphorescent gas were drifting by. There was a slight breeze and it swirled like the mingled ghosts of all the countless dead who had fallen on the trench-scarred valleys and plains of Loki. There were times when I felt certain that it formed daemonic faces who leered down at me. I wondered if any of the others were seeing them or whether it was just me.
I tried to visualise the map of the trench system I carried in my head. With a huge effort I dragged it up from the illness-clogged sumps of my mind. ‘Try the left passage, down along Dead Man’s Trench,’ I said. ‘It’s narrow and it looks blocked but there’s a way through the wire if you are careful.’
‘Field engineers have probably fixed that,’ said Anton. He seemed only too pleased to be able to contradict me, the frakker.
‘Oh, that’s all right then,’ I said. ‘Let’s just wait here and die because you’re too lazy to go and check.’
‘Illness doesn’t make you any less mean-tempered,’ said Anton.
‘Head for Dead Man’s Trench,’ I said. ‘That’s an order.’
It was the last thing I managed to say for a while. The daemon faces in the mist were whispering to me and I could not quite make out what they were saying.
Dead Man’s Trench had not been repaired. It was long and narrow and for some obscure reason it had been blocked off by barbed wire. The wire was rusty and there were scores of skeletons caught up in it. Some of them wore our uniforms, some of them wore the enemy’s rags. None of them looked like they would ever march in a parade line again.
No one had used the trench for quite a while. It had a reputation for being haunted. Even grizzled veterans swore the spirits of the dead gathered there under the skull moon. Soldiers are prone to telling such horror stories, but there was something about the atmosphere of the place that made you believe the tales.
You could pick your way through the wire if you were careful. The dead men did not object, they just looked at you with big, empty eyes that asked why you were still alive and they weren’t. Today I noticed that there were lots of little daemons scuttling among them, clutching their fat bellies and laughing at me, at mortality, at the futility of life in general. It was strange that no one else saw them. They were ugly little critters with a curious humour in their mocking eyes.
We moved carefully through the trench, following the paths that Anton and Ivan knew were there, and we could hear the heretics chanting in the earthworks that ran parallel. We were in the worst sort of death-trap if any of them decided to walk through the gap between the lines. They could shoot down at us from the parapets and we were slowed by the barbed wire.
I could appreciate the danger in the lucid moments that I had when the daemons weren’t frolicking around me. It did not make me any happier. Anton and Ivan were taking turns supporting me and I did my best to guide my feet and not get myself snagged on the barbed wire. Just look at what had happened the last time I had done that.
The sound of combat still drifted over us. Sometimes the poisoned mists deadened it so that it sounded leagues away. At other times, it appeared to be coming from the next trench or even right by our ears. Our lads were putting up more resistance than had seemed possible at the start of our retreat.
My limbs felt like lead now and my uniform was soaked in sweat. The crust on my leg wound had broken and greenish stuff was leaking through. I wasn’t just worried about the fact that I had been infected with the corpse-walking disease, I became convinced of it. Those little daemons were pointing at me and laughing because they knew it, too.
I looked at Ivan through feverish eyes and said, ‘If I die, put a bullet through my head. I don’t want to come back like those deaders.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Anton, a little too cheerfully for my liking.
‘On second thoughts, Ivan, you do it. Wait until I kill the idiot boy first,’ I said.
‘The sergeant is hallucinating,’ Anton explained helpfully to the rest of our squad.
‘Will do,’ muttered Ivan, words garbled by his metal jaw. I did not know whether he was talking about doing it before or after I got Anton. Either would suit me.
We were reaching the end of Dead Man’s Trench and there were definite sounds of fighting ahead. I clutched my shotgun tight.
‘He’s determined I won’t have it,’ Anton muttered. ‘He promised me it, too, ages ago, on Emperor’s Glory.’
‘Now’s not the time for that,’ said Ivan, obviously as disgusted by Anton’s thoughtlessness as I was.
‘I doubt there’s any ammunition left for it anyway,’ Anton said.
‘Enough for me to get you,’ I said.
Ivan held up a warning hand. The servo-motors whined as he flexed his mechanical fingers. The thunder of las-pulse and grenades sounded ahead of us along with the gurgling chants of the heretics and the whooping war-cry of the Grosslanders.
I did some swift calculations in my head. We could not have reached the second line yet, not unless I had fallen unconscious without realising. A quick look around told me that we were still at the end of Dead Man’s Trench. The skeletons still watched, but the daemons seemed to have gone into hiding. Only occasionally could I see one peeking its head over the parapet and winking at me. It seemed an almost friendly gesture, except that there was an all-consuming hunger in those bloodshot eyes and the teeth revealed by their grins were sharp as those of a needlefish.
‘Sounds like some of our boys are still holding out,’ I said.
‘Sounds like someone is counter-attacking,’ said Ivan. As he did so, he snapped off a shot because one of the heretics had noticed us and was announcing our arrival in his guttural language. At least that is what he seemed to be doing when Ivan’s shot took him in the mouth and burned out his tongue. He made an odd gobbling sound before he fell.
His companions did not take his death well. They turned on us and launched themselves in our direction, a human wave, bayonets fixed, weapons at the ready. Our lads were deploying out of the trench. Some of them had thrown themselves flat and were shooting, while their companions behind fired over their heads. It was the sort of thing that made the difference between veterans and inexperienced vat-bred troops. It bought us enough time to fight our way out from under the empty gaze of those skulls.
A moment later Ivan was charging forward, bionic arm smashing bones, pistol spitting death. The others were with him, weapons blazi
ng, lasgun butts cracking skulls and splintering bones. Anton stood beside me, sniper rifle tracking, and sent carefully timed shots into the melee. Every time his rifle roared an enemy fell.
I watched, barely able to stand upright, clutching my shotgun in what I hoped was a menacing fashion. Very few people will voluntarily charge a man with a loaded sawn-off if they notice it is there. You can’t exactly blame them for that.
For a moment, it looked as if Ivan’s mad rush was going to work and our boys were going to break through. It did not matter where at that exact moment. I think we all felt that smashing through the enemy line would represent some sort of victory. I certainly did. It was just one of those mad instants where you lose sight of the longer-term future and experience only the moment and its emotions.
Then I noticed the heretics pushing in from either side of the emplacement and realised that we were surrounded by an enormous number of the enemy. The only way out was back through Dead Man’s Trench and that was a death-trap. The wire would slow us down and we would be cut to pieces.
The melee began to turn as sheer weight of numbers started to tell. At least the enemy were not able to use their superior firepower in the enclosed space of the emplacement. They were more likely to hit their own men than ours. Of course, that did not stop some of them. They shot and their comrades paid the price, at least until their officers managed to convince them to stop doing it by the simple expedient of shooting the idiots who were firing.
It was not going to be long now, I could tell. There were thousands of them and only dozens of us. They were climbing over their own dead to get to us, chanting that horrible name in their horrible tongue. Every word seemed to be being forced out through a throatful of phlegm. My personal pet daemons had returned, knee-high to a heretic, waltzing and spinning atop the dead, licking bodies with their metre-long tongues, seeming to feast on the death and decay going on around them. Their stomachs swelled and bloated then deflated as they hiccupped and belched and farted.