First and Only

  When her words about the Ghosts had come true, two years earlier, he had been chilled and had spent several sleepless nights remembering her prophecies. He’d taken command of the worldless wretches of Tanith and then one of the troop, Mad Larkin, it was asserted, had dubbed them Gaunt’s Ghosts. He’d tried to put that down to coincidence, but ever since, he’d watched for other fragments of the Night of Truths to emerge.

  Cut them and you will be free, she had said. Do not kill them.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Rawne.

  ‘We have mines and grenades a plenty,’ Zoren said. ‘Let’s blow it.’

  Do not kill them.

  Gaunt shook his head. ‘No! This is what the Shriven have been preparing, some vast ritual using the stones, some industrial magic. That’s what has preoccupied them, that’s what they’ve tried to distract us from. Blowing part of their ceremonial ring would be a mistake. There’s no telling what foul power we might unleash. No, we have to break the link…’

  Cut them and you will be free.

  Gaunt got to his feet and pulled on his cap again. ‘Major Rawne, load as many hand carts as you can find with Shriven warheads, prime them for short fuse and prepare to send them up on the elevator on my cue. We’ll choke the emplacements upstairs with their own weapons. Colonel Zoren, I want as many of your men as you can spare – or more specifi-cally, their armour.’

  The major and the colonel looked at him blankly.

  ‘Now?’ he added sharply. They leapt to their feet.

  GAUNT LED THE way up the ramp towards the menhir. It smoked with energy and his skin prickled uncomfortably. Chaos energy smelled that way, like a tangy stench of cooked blood and electricity. None of them dared look down at the twisted, solidified mound below them.

  ‘What are we doing?’ Zoren asked by his side, clearly distressed about being this close to the unutterable.

  ‘We’re breaking the chain. We want to disrupt the circle without blowing it.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Inside information,’ Gaunt said, trying hard to grin. ‘Trust me. Let’s short this out.’

  The Vitrians by his side moved forward at a nod from their commander. Tentatively, they approached the huge stone and started to lash their jackets around the smooth surface. Zoren had collected the mica armoured jackets of more than fifty of his men. Now he fused them together as neat as a surgeon with a melta on the lowest setting. Gingerly the Vitrians wrapped the makeshift mica cloak around the stone, using meltas borrowed from the Tanith like industrial staplers to lock it into place over the stone.

  ‘It’s not working,’ Zoren said.

  It wasn’t. After a few moments more, the glass beads of the Vitrian armour began to sweat and run, melting off the stone, leaving the fabric base layers until they too ignited and burned.

  Gaunt turned away, his disheartened mind churning.

  ‘What now?’ Zoren asked, dispiritedly.

  Cut them and you will be free.

  Gaunt snapped his fingers. ‘We don’t blow them! We realign them. That’s how we cut the circle.’

  Gaunt called up Tolus, Lukas and Bragg. ‘Get charges set in the supporting mound. Don’t target the stone itself. Blow it so it falls away or drops.’

  ‘The mound…’ Lukas stammered.

  ‘Yes, trooper, the mound,’ Gaunt repeated. ‘The dead can’t hurt you. Do it!’

  Reluctantly, the Ghosts went to work.

  Gaunt tapped his microbead intercom. ‘Rawne, send those warheads up.’

  ‘Acknowledged.’

  A ‘sir’ wouldn’t kill him, Gaunt thought.

  At the elevator head, the troops under Rawne’s command thundered trolleys of warheads into the car.

  ‘Shush!’ a Vitrian said suddenly. They stopped. A pause – then they all heard the clanking, the distant tinny thumps. Rawne swung up his lasgun and moved into the elevator assembly. He pulled the lever that opened the upper inspection hatch.

  Above him, the great lift shaft yawned like a beast’s throat.

  He stared up into the darkness, trying to resolve the detail.

  The darkness was moving. Shriven were descending, clawing like bat-things down the sheer sides of the shaftway.

  Terror punched Rawne’s heart. He slammed the hatch and screamed out, ‘They’re coming!’

  The intercom lines went wild with reports as sentries reported hammerings at the sealed hatches and entrance-ways all around. Hundreds of fists, thousands of fists.

  Gaunt cursed, feeling the panic rising in his men. Trapped, entombed, the infernal enemy seeping in from all sides. Speakers mounted on walls and consoles all around squawked into life, and a rasping voice, echoing and overlaying itself from a hundred places, spat inhuman gibberish into the chambers.

  ‘Shut that off!’ Gaunt yelled at Feygor.

  Feygor scrabbled desperately at the controls. ‘I can’t!’ he cried.

  A hatchway to the east exploded inwards with a shower of sparks. Men screamed. Lasfire began to chatter. A little to the north, another doorway blew inwards in a flaming gout and more Shriven began to battle their way inwards.

  Gaunt turned to Corbec. The man was pale. Gaunt tried to think, but the rasping, reverberating snarls of the speakers clogged his mind. With a bark, he raised his pistol and blasted the nearest speaker set off the wall.

  He turned to Corbec. ‘Start the retreat. As many as we dare to keep the covering fire.’

  Corbec nodded and hurried off. Gaunt opened his intercom to wide band. ‘Gaunt to all units! Commence withdrawal, maximum retreating resistance!’ He sprinted down through the mayhem into the megalith chamber, knocked back for a second by the noxious stench of the place. Lukas, Tolus and Bragg were just emerging, their arms, chests and knees caked with black, tarry goo. They were all ashen and hollow-eyed.

  ‘It’s done,’ Tolus said.

  ‘Then blow it! Move out!’ Gaunt cried, pushing and shoving his stumbling men out of the cavern. ‘Rawne!’ ‘Almost there!’ Rawne replied from over at the elevator.

  He and the Ghost next to him looked up sharply as they heard a thump from the liftcar roof above them. Cursing, Rawne pushed the final trolley of shells into the elevator bay.

  ‘Back! Back!’ Rawne shouted to his men. He hit the riser stud of the elevator and it began to lift up the shaft towards the Shriven emplacements high above. They heard impacts and shrieks as it pulverised the Shriven coming down the shaft.

  The Ghosts and Vitrians with Rawne were running for their lives. Somewhere far above, their payload arrived – and detonated hard enough to shake the ground and sprinkle earth and rock chips down from the cavern roof. Lamp arrays swung like pendulums.

  Gaunt felt it all going off above them, and it strengthened his resolve. He was moving towards the maglev tunnel in the middle of a tumble of guardsmen, almost pushing the dazed Bragg by force of will. Shriven fire burned their way. A Ghost dropped, mid-flight. Others turned, knelt, returned fire. Las-fire glittered back and forth.

  Behind them all, in the megalith chamber, the charges planted by Domor’s team exploded. Its support blown away, the great crackling stone teetered and then slumped down into the pit. The speakers went silent.

  Total silence. The Shriven firing had stopped. Those that had penetrated the chamber were prostrate, whimpering.

  The only sound was the thumping footfalls and gasping breaths of the fleeing guardsmen.

  Then a rumbling started. Incandescent green fire flashed and rippled out of the monolith chamber. Without warning the stained glass view-ports of the control room exploded inwards. The ground rippled, ruptured; concrete churned like an angry sea.

  ‘Get out! Get out now!’ bellowed Ibram Gaunt.

  Eleven

  THE SHELLING FALTERED, then stopped. Caffran and Zogat paused as they trudged back across the deadscape and looked back.

  ‘Feth take me!’ Caffran said. ‘They’ve finally–’

  The hills beyond the Shriven lines exploded. The vas
t shockwave threw them both to the ground. The hills splintered and puffed up dust and fire, swelling for a moment before collapsing into themselves.

  ‘Emperor’s throne!’ Zogat said as he helped the young Tanith trooper up. They looked back at the mushroom cloud lifting from the sunken hills.

  ‘Hah!’ Caffran said. ‘Someone just won something!’

  IN THE VILLA, Lord High Militant General Dravere put down his cup and watched with faint curiosity as it rattled on the cart. He walked stiffly to the veranda rail and looked through the scope, though he hardly needed it. A bell-shaped cloud of ochre smoke boiled up over the horizon where the Shriven stronghold had once been. Lightning flared in the sky. The vox-caster speaker in the corner of the room wailed and then went dead. Secondary explosions, munitions probably, began to explode along the Shriven lines, blasting the heart out of everything they held.

  Dravere coughed, straightened and turned to his adjutant. ‘Prepare my transport for embarkation. It seems we’re done here.’

  A FIRESTORM OF shockwave and flame passed over the armoured vehicles of Colonel Flense’s convoy. Once it had blown itself out, Flense scrambled out of the top hatch, looking towards the hills ahead of him, hills that were sliding down into themselves as secondary explosions went off.

  ‘No…’ he breathed, looking wide-eyed at the carnage.

  ‘No!’

  THEY HAD BEEN knocked flat by the shockwave, losing many in the flare of green flame that followed them up the tunnel. Then they were blundering through darkness and dust. There were moans, prayers, coughs.

  In the end it took almost five hours for them all to claw their way up and out of the darkness. Gaunt led the way up the tunnel himself. Finally the surviving Tanith and Vitrian units emerged, blinking, into the dying light of another day. Most flopped down, or staggered into the mud, sprawling, crying, laughing. Fatigue washed over them all.

  Gaunt sat down on a curl of mud and took off his cap. He started to laugh, months of tension sloughing off him in one easy tide. It was over. Whatever else, whatever the mopping up, Fortis was won.

  And that girl, damn whatever her name was, had been right.

  A MEMORY

  IGNATIUS CARDINAL,

  TWENTY-NINE YEARS

  EARLIER

  ‘WHAT…’ THE VOICE paused for a moment, in deep confusion. ‘What are you doing?’

  Scholar Blenner looked up from the draughty tiles of the long cloister where he was kneeling. There was another boy standing nearby, looking down at him in quizzical fascination. Blenner didn’t recognise him, though he was also wearing the sober black-twill uniform of the Schola Progenium.

  A new boy, Blenner presumed.

  ‘What do you think I’m doing?’ he asked tersely. ‘What does it look like I’m doing?’

  The boy was silent for a moment. He was tall and lean, and Blenner guessed him to be about twelve years old, no more than a year or two less than his own age. But there was something terribly old and horribly piercing about the gaze of those dark eyes.

  ‘It looks,’ the new boy said, ‘as if you’re polishing the spaces between the floor tiles in this cloister using only a buckle brush.’

  Blenner smirked humourlessly up at the boy and flourished the tiny brush in his grimy hand. It was a soft-bristle tool designed for buffing uniform buttons and fastenings. ‘Then I think you’ll find that you’ve answered your own question.’ He dipped the tiny brush back into the bowl of chilly water at his side and began to scrub again. ‘Now if you don’t mind, I have three sides of the quadrangle still to do.’

  The boy was silent for several minutes, but he didn’t leave. Blenner scrubbed at the tiles and could feel the stare burning into his neck. He looked up again. ‘Was there something else?’

  The boy nodded. ‘Why?’

  Blenner dropped the brush into the bowl and sat back on his knees, rubbing his numb hands. ‘I was reckless enough to use live rounds in the weapons training silos and somewhat – not to say completely – destroyed a target simulator. Deputy Master Flavius was not impressed.’

  ‘So this is punishment?’

  ‘This is punishment,’ Blenner agreed.

  ‘I’d better let you get on with it,’ the boy said thoughtfully. ‘I imagine I’m not even supposed to be talking to you.’

  He crossed to the open side of the cloister and looked out. The inner quadrangle of the ancient missionary school was paved with a stone mosaic of the two-headed Imperial eagle. The air was full of thin rain, cast down by the cold wind which whined down the stone colonnades. Above the cloister roofs rose the ornate halls and towers of the ancient building, its carved guttering and gargoyles worn almost featureless by a thousand years of erosion. Beyond the precinct of the Schola stood the skyline of the city itself, the capital of the mighty Cardinal World, Ignatius. Dominating the western horizon was the black bulk of the Ecclesiarch Palace, its slab-like towers over two kilometres tall, their uplink masts stabbing high into the cold, cyan sky.

  It seemed a damp, dark, cold place to live. Ibram Gaunt had been stung by its bone-deep chill from the moment he had stepped out of the shuttle which had conveyed him down to the landing fields from the frigate ship that had brought him here. From this cold world, the Ministorum ruled a segment of the galaxy with the iron hand of the Imperial faith. He had been told that it was a great honour for him to be enrolled in a schola progenium on Ignatius. Ibram had been taught to love the Emperor by his father, but somehow this honour didn’t feel like much compensation.

  Even with his back turned, Ibram knew that the older, thicker-set boy scrubbing the tiles was now staring at him.

  ‘Do you now have a question?’ he asked without turning.

  ‘The usual,’ the punished boy said. ‘How did they die?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your mother, your father. They must be dead. You wouldn’t be here in the orphanage if they weren’t gone to glory.’

  ‘It’s the Schola Progenium, not an orphanage.’

  ‘Whatever. This hallowed establishment is a missionary school. Those who are sent here for education are the offspring of Imperial servants who have given their lives for the Golden Throne.

  ‘So how did they die?’

  Ibram Gaunt turned. ‘My mother died when I was born. My father was a colonel in the Imperial Guard. He was lost last autumn in an action against the orks on Kentaur.’

  Blenner stopped scrubbing and got up to join the other boy. ‘Sounds juicy!’ he began.

  ‘Juicy?’

  ‘Guard heroics and all that? So what happened?’

  Ibram Gaunt turned to regard him and Blenner flinched at the depth of the gaze. ‘Why are you so interested? How did your parents die to bring you here?’

  Blenner backed off a step. ‘My father was a Space Marine. He died killing a thousand daemons on Futhark. You’ll have heard of that noble victory, no doubt. My mother, when she knew he was dead, took her own life out of love.’

  ‘I see,’ Gaunt said slowly.

  ‘So?’ Blenner urged.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘How did he die? Your father?’

  ‘I don’t know. They won’t tell me.’

  Blenner paused. ‘Won’t tell you?’

  ‘Apparently it’s… classified.’

  The two boys said nothing for a moment, staring out at the rain which jagged down across the stone eagle.

  ‘Oh. My name’s Blenner, Vaynom Blenner,’ the older boy said, turning and sticking out a hand.

  Gaunt shook it. ‘Ibram Gaunt,’ he replied. ‘Maybe you should get back to your–’

  ‘Scholar Blenner! Are you shirking?’ a voice boomed down the cloister. Blenner dived back to his knees, scooping the buckle brush out of the bowl and scrubbing feverishly.

  A tall figure in flowing robes strode down the tiles towards them. He came to a halt over Blenner and stood looking down at him. ‘Every centimetre, scholar, every tile, every line of junction.’

  ‘Yes, deputy mast
er.’

  Deputy Master Flavius turned to face Gaunt. ‘You are scholar-elect Gaunt.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘Come with me, boy.’

  Ibram Gaunt followed the tall master as he paced away over the tiles. He turned back for a moment. Blenner was looking up, miming a throat-cut with his finger and sticking his tongue out in a choking gag.

  Young Ibram Gaunt laughed for the first time in a year.

  THE HIGH MASTER’S chamber was a cylinder of books, a veritable hive-city of racks lined with shelf after shelf of ancient tomes and data-slates. There was a curious cog trackway that spiralled up the inner walls of the chamber from the floor, a toothed brass mechanism whose purpose utterly baffled Ibram Gaunt.

  He stood in the centre of the room for four long minutes until High Master Boniface arrived.

  The high master was a powerfully-set man in his fifties – or at least he had been until the loss of his legs, left arm and half of his face. He sailed into the room on a wheeled brass chair that supported a suspension field generated by the three field-buoys built into the chair’s framework. His mutilated body moved, inertia-less, in the shimmering globe of power.

  ‘You are Ibram Gaunt?’ The voice was harsh, electronic.

  ‘I am, master,’ Gaunt said, snapping to attention as his uncle had trained him.

  ‘You are also lucky, boy,’ Boniface rasped, his voice curling out of a larynx enhancer. ‘The Schola Progenium Prime of Ignatius doesn’t take just anyone.’

  ‘I am aware of the honour, high master. General Dercius made it known to me when he proposed my admission.’

  The high master referred to a data-slate held upright in his suspension field, keying the device with his whirring, skeletal, artificial arm. ‘Dercius. Commander of the Jantine regiments. Your father’s immediate superior. I see. His recommendations for your placement here are on record.’

  ‘Uncle… I mean, General Dercius said you would look after me, now my father has gone.’

  Boniface froze, before swinging around to face Gaunt. His harshness had gone suddenly, and there was a look of – was it affection? – in his single eye.