“I think now might be a great time…” Larkin said.
“Almost,” said Gonry, aiming carefully. “Ease!”
The enemy tank filled his sights. Gonry squeezed the trigger spoon.
Trailing a fat wake of white smoke, the rocket barked off from his launcher and missed the advancing tank entirely. It went off so wild, anyone would have thought Gonry was working for the enemy.
“What the feth was that?” Criid screamed.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” Gonry exclaimed. “I thought—I wanted—I—”
“Down!” Larkin snapped.
A banging, rattling noise cut the stormy air. The charging tank was firing its hard point cannon.
Gonry reached down for his satchel of rockets and his head vanished. Criid was facing him as it happened, and it seemed like one of Vad’s conjuring tricks. A puff of red, and bang, no head. Gonry’s headless body slowly fell away and hit the ground.
Something hard hit her in the mouth and also in the right cheek. Criid fell over. Larkin grabbed her and picked her up.
“Was I hit?” she slurred through split and bleeding lips.
“You’re all right.” Larkin said. “You’ll live. Skull shrapnel.”
Pieces of Gonry’s exploded skull had struck her. She shook her head, grateful that Larkin was holding her upright, and looked down at Gonry. A high-calibre shell had atomised his head and painted blood on everything in a five metre radius.
Dazed, unsteady, she bent down and dragged the tread fether off Gonry’s corpse. The strap caught and Larkin had to help her.
“Load me,” she said.
“Tona—”
“Load me!”
Larkin ripped open the satchel and slammed a fresh rocket home in the back of the tube.
“Go!”
She swung it up onto her shoulder.
“Ease!” she yelled.
The beast was just ten metres away, thundering on. Caff had taught her all the tricks. Aim low, because the rocket will lift on its initial burst of propellant. Keep steady, because a tube doesn’t aim like a rifle. Aim for seams, like the turret/body seam. Maximize that piercing shell head, and all the spalling you can get.
It was as if he was standing beside her, coaching her.
She fired.
The swishing rocket struck the top of the beast’s turret, spun off and exploded in the air.
Criid suddenly forgave Gonry entirely. This wasn’t half as easy as it seemed, or as Caffran made it look.
“Load me!”
“Feth, Tona!” Larkin replied. “I want to be running. Bros has the right idea.”
Criid looked around. Brostin, tanks slung over his wide shoulders, was thumping up the hill into the hamlet.
“Just load me!” she said.
Larkin slotted another shell into the tube.
“Ease!”
Criid fired. A wide blossom of hot fire ripped across the beast’s hull. It jerked to a halt. Flames rippled and flickered off its bodywork. A strange, mewling, sobbing sound came up from its engines. It began to roll backwards.
Then its main gun fired. The first shell it lobbed went right over Cayfer. The second hit the top of the mill and disintegrated it. The spinning vanes tore out of the structure and crashed down into the yard, turning and fragmenting as they rolled like a giant wheel into the outbuildings. The third round blew out the lower stages of the mill tower.
Wounded, hurt, the beast sat back and fired on the hamlet of Cayfer until it was reduced to smoking rubble.
* * * * *
X
In the distance behind them, in the failing daylight, the beast’s gun was demolishing Cayfer. Gaunt’s section scurried away through the grasslands towards the woods.
As they closed on their destination, they saw how scabby and thin the trees were. Poisons had stunted the wood. The Ghosts advanced, spread wide and moving slow, into a wasteland of parched, twisted trees and invader grass.
Behind them, a bright fire lit the encroaching night as the hamlet died.
The daylight was really fading when they reached the rendezvous point. They waited for an hour, and suddenly Mkoll rose, his gun aimed.
Two figures detached themselves from the enclosing darkness and came forward. They were thin, scrawny dressed in rags, bearing las weapons strapped together with tape and cord.
“Gaunt,” Gaunt said. “Daystar?”
The men stopped and stared at him. They lowered their rifles.
“My name is Dacre,” said one, extending his hand.
Gaunt took it. He could feel the bones. He could feel how thin it was.
“Gereon resists.”
“Just about,” said Dacre. “Is this really it?”
“Yes,” said Gaunt.
Dacre nodded, and other figures emerged from the shadows. Some of them were Sleepwalkers.
Eszrah stepped forwards to greet them eagerly. They pulled back, reluctant.
“Unkynde,” announced one of them. Gaunt winced.
“Follow us,” Dacre said. “There’s something you have to see.”
In silence, the section followed Dacre for two hours through the dimming woodland. Behind them, thunder rumbled and the funeral pyre of Cayfer lit the sky.
They entered a dark tract of woodland. The trees there were especially bent and deformed. Dead leaves covered the dark ground.
“I was told you should see this,” Dacre said simply.
“Told by whom?” Gaunt asked..
Dacre didn’t answer. He was pointing towards a cairn of rocks.
Gaunt stepped towards it. Mkoll was beside him.
The stones had been piled up in a makeshift manner, but the purpose was clear, even in the dying light. It was a tomb, a barrow for the fallen.
“Oh, great Throne above me,” Mkoll whispered.
He had seen the inscription. It was cut into a block in the middle of the heap.
“Feth,” Gaunt murmured as he read what Mkoll had seen.
The inscription was simple.
MkVenner.
GRINDER
I
“The thing is about nightmares,” Fourbox said, “the thing is, is that they end. Sooner or later, eventually, they end. But this doesn’t, you see? So I don’t see how you can keep saying this is a nightmare, because it’s nothing like a nightmare. When you wake up from a nightmare, the nightmare’s over, and there’s a whole rush of relief, but not here. There’s no relief here. It’s just non-stop.”
“Perhaps we haven’t woken up yet,” said Lovely.
Fourbox seized on this. “Now that’s a good point!” he exclaimed. He was almost, as if this was possible, cheery. “Maybe we haven’t. Maybe the waking up is yet to happen.”
Dalin was pretty convinced he knew what was yet to happen. The river of meat was going to strike the wall of iron for the third time in ten hours. Something would give. If the last two occasions were anything to go by, it would be the meat.
“Perhaps we haven’t…” Fourbox said, significantly. War changed men, so it was said. It had changed Fourbox into a philosopher, just not a terribly good one. Dalin wanted to tell him, frankly, what an idiot he was, but his voice was wedged up inside him like a jammed round, unable to clear.
The thing about nightmares, in Dalin’s opinion, was neither the unpleasantness nor the relief of waking, though both were component parts. The thing about nightmares for him were the tiny, little bits of surreal or mundane nonsense that laced through them and rendered the horror all the more horrible. He’d once had a nightmare where he and his sister were being chased by a chair that was going to eat them. He’d been very young at the time, and very scared of the chair and its shuffling legs. But what had made the nightmare truly terrifying was that, all the way through, Aleksa, a nice woman from the followers on the strength who looked after them sometimes, kept appearing, smiling, and asking, “Have you tied your shoelaces?” She’d had a drowsy, fidgeting hen tucked under her right arm.
If his
current situation could be properly called a nightmare, the elements were certainly in place. They were assaulting the giant bulwark in the company of hundreds of thousands of Guardsmen. They were moving forwards, under a sky of flame, under increasing fire, in a flood of bodies, across the bridges and up the trench approaches, towards the gates.
They were running, without cover, into death, with only the flimsy odds of their great numbers to protect them.
Fourbox, all the while, was having a conversation about whether or not the circumstances were like a nightmare.
On the first two assaults at the mighty bulwark, AT 137 hadn’t even come close to the front of the charge. Carried along in the midst of the press, they had surged towards the gateways and then been drawn back by the tidal retreat. Many of the dead came back with them, held upright by the density of bodies, and only falling, hundreds of metres from where they had died, once the pressure eased and the spacing increased.
The great surge was building momentum to rush forwards for the third time. They were beginning to press together. A tangle of shouts rose from the moving troops and became one loud, commingled howl.
The whole scene was lit by flames. As they came out onto one of the great bridges, Dalin saw the thousands of faces around him tinged with gold, and down below them, another wide bridge crossing at a deeper level, streaming with golden faces. Other bridges stood to his left and right, heaving with moving troops. Far beneath, in the approach trenches, thousands more. Aircraft and lancing rockets swept in over his head, jewelled with light.
The bulwark wall rose up hundreds of metres above them. Its flamer towers were the main source of the blazing orange light, but the wall was dotted with gunloops and emplacements that were crackling with gunfire. It looked as if the giant wall was ablaze in a million places, but it was the fire that the wall was sending at them. Blue and white las bolts showered like sparks. Tracer fire wound and clung like climbing ivy. Shells airburst in flowers of smoke that trailed fingers of burning debris beneath them like the strings of jellyfish. The exhaust trails of rockets left arcs from ground to wall, or wall to ground, each lingering trace describing some aspiration of ascent, like the diagram of a proposed attack drawn in smoke. The great structure of the wall itself glowed amber, and looked as if its heavy battlements and bas-relief emblems had been plated in copper and bronze.
A nightmare was something you woke up from, but this was a horror he was waking up to. Every minute since the drop ship had launched had been a minute too long, every horror a horror too much, every effort an effort too far. This, this senseless mass effort to dash bodies against a solid wall, over and over again, exceeded everything. He heard Sobile shouting, “Forwards!” Sobile said it as if it were obvious, as if there was no choice. Logic screamed that forwards was the last way they should be going.
II
Shots seared down into their ranks almost vertically from high above. Teaser died. So did Bugears and Trask. Mumbles caught fire, became a screaming torch, and ignited the men around him in his thrashing despair. A Binar close beside Dalin had the top two-thirds of his head demolished, right down to the lower lip and jaw, and then stayed beside him, lolling back and forth, propped up by the crush around them. Ledderman died slowly, shot twice, unable to drop back. Boots, and then Frisky, both disappeared under foot. Corporal Traben was hit in the eye and died with smoke coming out of his half-open mouth.
The great gates were looming ahead, as heavy and immovable as a dwarf star. The front of the streaming charge was striking them, breaking around them like a wave against a quayside. Cascades of fire poured down from upper crenellations: wide, spattering torrents of burning promethium.
The Guardsmen were struggling uphill. They were stumbling and struggling up a ramp that was built out of corpses. Its steep slope, stacked against the gates by those that had come before and died already. It was so ridiculous, that Dalin wanted to scream and laugh. This was not the proud warfare his parents had raised him to admire and expect. This was nonsensical behaviour, quite without merit or point. Dalin felt a huge hatred for Sobile, in as much as Sobile embodied the insane Guard mindset that had brought them all to this astonishing futility. Climb a mountain of bodies under heavy fire to a dead end.
Why would we do that, sir?
Because the Emperor tells you to.
Dalin’s foot slipped on a leg or an arm. He clawed at those jostling around him to stay upright, as they in turn clawed at him. Clothing tore. Bruises overlaid bruises which overlaid bruises. Elbows and gun-stocks and knees and helmet rims knocked into him. There was a stink of fear-sweat, bile-breath, dirt and offal, and ordure.
Because the Emperor tells you to.
Dalin wondered, in a moment of sacrilegious epiphany, if he was the first Guardsman ever to wish the God-Emperor dead. It wasn’t Sobile he felt hatred for, or the commanders, it was the lord above all others that they served. He wanted to kill the Emperor for this. He wanted to slay the God-Emperor for driving humanity out across this bloodstained galaxy.
It was a liberating thought. Pain and fear helped him to slough off a lifetime of loyalty and conditioning, and think the unthinkable. War had carried him past the end of all that was rational and showed him the empty imbecility of the stars.
Unless…
Dalin slipped, and rose again, and slipped once more.
Unless…
Unless he’d been made to think that way by this place. Perhaps it was no epiphany, but rather the malign touch of the Ruinous Powers. He had been steeped in Gereon’s taint for some time. Perhaps he had been led astray.
The idea made him gag in self-doubt and revulsion. Out loud—though no one could hear him over the outrage of war—he begged and prayed to be forgiven. The pain and the anger of his ordeal had made him wish harm on the God-Emperor, nothing more!
A moment’s weakness, not a taint. Not a taint. Please, Golden Throne, not a taint!
He threw himself forwards, galvanised by some overriding impulse to purge himself and prove his loyalty.
“The Emperor protects! The Emperor protects!” Dalin yelled at the churning bodies packed in around him. The man beside him smiled, and seemed to agree, but the man beside him had no arms nor any back to his head.
Dalin turned, looking back across the faces, trying to see anyone from his unit. He glimpsed Fourbox, Ganiel, and Trenchfoot, although Trenchfoot was gone a second later in a flash of light. He saw Lovely and several others, further back, swept close to the side of the bridge.
“Come on! Forwards! Forwards!” he yelled.
A rocket or mortar bomb from the wall above hit the side of the bridge, shaking the entire structure. The limbs of some unfortunates caught directly in the blast flew through the air. A large section of the bridge’s guard wall collapsed, taking part of the roadway with it. Dozens of Guardsmen fell into space, tumbling down amongst burning fragments of stone. Dalin saw some land on the bustling bridge below, or rebound brokenly off that bridge’s rail and continue down into the abyss of the trench.
The pressure of bodies forced those on the outside off the side like a leak in a hose. Some tried to stop themselves falling by grabbing the troopers beside them. As the bridge crumbled further, groups of figures, clinging together, fell away, the first to fall dragging the last.
Dalin saw Lovely. She was screaming, reaching out to grab someone or something as she was dragged backwards by the frantic hands of those behind her.
He lost sight of her in the smoke, and never saw her again.
The press of the charge wrenched him forwards again, close into the killing zone of the gates where the flamers swept and washed, and the las bolts fell like torrential rain.
The world went white.
III
Sound returned first. A voice was yelling above a background world of noise. Then light and colour came back to him too.
“Get up and get forwards! Get up and get forwards, dogs! You morons! Get up and fight on in the Emperor’s name!”
Commissar Sobile was bellowing at the top of his lungs, his face flushed, his neck thick with veins, phlegm specking the corners of his mouth.
“Get up, you laggards! You wastrels! Fight on! Get up and repay the God-Emperor what you owe Him! Fight on!”
Dalin heard the lash crack. He got up, his head swimming, one of several men struggling to their feet from a smoking slope of dead and injured. He glanced around, unable to concentrate, unable to focus. What was different? What was—
They were inside the gate.
The immense bulk of the wall rose up over him, but the gates themselves had gone. What great force or accident had destroyed them, he had no idea. The impact had surely cast him down, and scattered his senses. The gates had fallen and, with them gone, the awful spoil heap of bodies that had built up against them had been released, and had gone tumbling and sliding forwards into the gatehouse like water from a broken dam, carrying the injured and unconscious alike with it. Dead men had borne him into the heart of K’ethdrac’att Shet Magir.
Storm parties of Guardsmen, most of them Krassian, were pouring in over the slumped heap of the dead. Dalin checked the load of his lasrifle and began to move ahead with them. Someone grabbed him by the arm.
“Fix your blade, scalp!” Kexie snarled at him, before releasing Dalin’s arm and rushing on. “Fix blades! Fix blades!”
Dalin drew his combat blade and attached it to the bayonet lug of his lasrifle. He ran forward with the rest. Visibility was hazy in the gatehouse, but greater radiance beckoned ahead of them.
They were running as they came out into the open. Some men were yelling unintelligible warcries. They burst from the smoky gloom onto a vast public square overlooked by threatening towers and skeletal steeples. The enemy awaited them in force.
Momentum carried him forwards, moving with the pack, but suddenly there were impacts all around: heavy, meaty thumps as men ran into obstacles. Bodies crashed into bodies as the charging Imperial line met with the surging rows of the enemy. Men tumbled and fell, slammed clean off their feet, crunched into the air by body-to-body blows. There were grunts and exhalations of effort, and grunts of pain. Shots fired, point blank, and, one by one, the men in the assaulting tide were halted by jarring collisions and crippling bodychecks. Shields and body-armour met. Bayonets jabbed and trench axes flashed. Dalin slammed into a figure in green, and punctured it with his bayonet, and the pressure of bodies behind him pushed him on. His bayonet tore free, and the enemy soldier disappeared underneath him. He was immediately into the next one.