Then it came to hand to hand, a frantic defence. But Rawne and Criid had begun to open fire with their lasguns and Caffran had pulled out his pistol.
An Infardi with a bayonet charged Rawne screaming, and Rawne blew his legs and belly out, but the momentum of the charge threw the body into the major and knocked him down.
He tried to scramble out from under the slippery, twitching body. Another Infardi appeared above him, swinging down with one of those wicked, twist-bladed local axes.
A headshot toppled him.
Rawne got up. The Infardi were dead and his squad was moving up. “Feygor?”
“Nice move, boss,” Feygor replied.
Rawne said nothing. He could see no point in mentioning that the sneak attack had been Caffran’s and Criid’s idea. “What’s the story?” he asked.
“Waed’s taken a scratch. He’s okay. But Bragg’s got a shoulder wound. We’ll need to vox up a team to stretcher him out.”
Rawne nodded. “Good headshot,” he added. “That bastard had the drop on me there.”
“Wasn’t me,” said Feygor, jerking a dirty thumb at Banda. The ex-loom girl grinned, patted her lasgun.
And winked.
“Well… Good shooting,” Rawne mumbled.
In a prayer yard east of the Universitariat precinct. Captain Ban Daur was controlling traffic when he heard the colonel-commissar calling his name.
Colonel Corbec’s second front push had woken up the Old Town, and civilians who had been hiding there in cellars and basements for the best part of three weeks were now fleeing the quarter en masse.
In the long narrow prayer yard, the tide of filthy, frightened bodies moved west in slow, choked patterns.
“Daur?”
Ban Daur turned and saluted Gaunt.
“There are thousands of them. It’s jamming up the east-west routes. I’ve been trying to redirect them into the basilica at the end of that street. We’ve got medical teams and aid workers from the city authorities and the Administratum down there.”
“Good.”
“There’s the problem.” Daur pointed to a row of stationary Hydra battery tractors from the Pardus unit drawn up against the far side of the yard. “With all these people, they can’t get through.”
Gaunt nodded. He sent Mkoll and a group of Tanith away into a nearby chapel and they returned with pews which they set up as saw-horses to channel the refugees away.
“Daur?”
“Sir!”
“Get down to this basilica. See if you can’t open up some of the buildings around it.”
“I was taking a squad into the Old Town, sir. Colonel Corbec has asked for more infantry team support in the commercia.”
Gaunt smiled. Daur meant market district, but he used a term from Vervunhive. “I’m sure he has, but the war will keep. You’re good with people, Ban. Get this working for me and then you can go get shot at.”
Daur nodded. He respected Gaunt beyond measure, but he wasn’t happy about this order. It seemed all too characteristic of the jobs he’d found himself doing since joining the Ghosts.
In truth, Daur felt empty and unfulfilled. The fight for Vervunhive had left him hollow and grim, and he’d joined the Tanith mainly because he couldn’t bear to stay in the shell of the hive he had called home. As a captain, he was the senior ranking Vervun Primary officer to join the Tanith, and as a result he’d been given a place in the regimental chain of command on a par with Major Rawne, as officer in charge of the Verghast contingent answering only to Corbec and Gaunt.
He didn’t like it. Such a role should have gone to a war hero like Kolea or Agun Soric, to one of the men who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps to earn the respect of the men in the scratch companies. The majority of the Verghastite men and women who had joined the Ghosts were workers turned warriors, not ex-military. They just didn’t have the sort of respect for a Vervun Primary captain they had for a hero like Gol Kolea.
But that wasn’t the way it was done in the guard, apparently. So Daur was caught in the middle, with a command role he didn’t like, giving orders to men who he knew should be his commanders, trying to keep the rivalry between Tanith and Verghastite under control, trying to win respect.
He wanted to fight. He wanted to badge himself with the sort of glory that would make the troops look up to him.
Instead, he found most of his days spent on squad details, deployment orders, refugee supervision. He could do that kind of thing well, and Gaunt knew it. So he was always the one Gaunt asked for when such tasks came up. It was as if Gaunt didn’t think about Ban Daur as a soldier. Just as a facilitator. An administrator. A people person.
Daur snapped out of his reverie as shots rang out and the refugees around him scattered and screamed. Some of Mkoll’s makeshift saw-horses pitched over in the press. Daur looked around for a sniper, a gunman in the crowd…
One of the gun crew officers on the stationary Pardus vehicles was taking pot-shots with his pistol at the clusters of votive kites and flags that fluttered over the prayer yard. The flags and banners were secured on long tether-lines to brass rings along the temple wall. The officer was pinking at them for the entertainment of his crew.
“What the gak are you doing?” Daur shouted as he approached the Hydra mount. The men in their baggy tan fatigues and slouch caps looked down at him in puzzlement.
“You!” Daur yelled at the officer with the pistol in his hand. “You trying to cause a panic?”
The man shrugged. “Just passing the time Colonel Farris ordered us up to help assault the Citadel Hill, but we’re not getting anywhere, are we?”
“Get down here,” Daur ordered.
With a glance to his men, the officer bolstered his service pistol and climbed down from the tractor. He was taller than Daur, with pale, freckled skin and blond hair. Even his eyelashes were blond.
“Name?”
“Sergeant Denil Greer, Pardus Eighth Mobile Flak Company.”
“You got a brain, Greer, or do you get through life with only that sneer?”
“Sir.”
Gaunt approached and Greer lost some of his bluster. His sneer subsided.
“Everything in order, Captain Daur?”
“High spirits, commissar. Everything’s fine.”
Gaunt looked at Greer. “Listen to the captain and be respectful. Better he reprimands you than I do.”
“Sir.”
Gaunt moved away. Daur looked back at Greer. “Get your crews down and help us get these people off the road in an orderly fashion. You’ll move all the quicker that way.”
Greer saluted halfheartedly and called his men down off the parked vehicles. Mkoll and Daur quickly got them to work moving civilians off the thoroughfare.
Daur moved through the filthy crowd. No one made eye contact. He’d seen that shocked, war-wrecked, fatigued look before. He’d worn it himself at Vervunhive.
An old woman, stick-thin and frail, stumbled in the crowd and went over, spilling open a shawl full of possessions. No one stopped to help. The refugees plodded on around her, stepping over her reaching hands as she tried to recover her possessions.
Daur helped her up. She was as light as a bag of twigs. Her hair was shockingly white and pinned back against her skull.
“There,” he said. He stooped and picked up her few belongings: prayer candles, a small icon, some beads, an old picture of a young man.
He found she was looking at him with eyes filmed by age. None of them had found his eyes out like that.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice richly flavoured with antique Low Gothic. “But I don’t matter. We don’t matter. Only the saint.”
“What?”
“You’ll protect her, won’t you? I think you will.”
“Come on now, mother, let’s move you along.”
She pressed something into his hand. Daur looked down. It was a small figurine, made of silver, worn almost featureless.
“I can’t take this, it’s—”
> “Protect her. The Emperor would will it of you.”
She wouldn’t take the trinket back, damn her! He almost dropped it. When he looked round again, she had disappeared into the river of moving bodies.
Daur looked about, confused, searching the moving crowd. He thrust the trinket in his pocket. Nearby, waving refugees past him, Daur saw Mkoll. He started to ask the scout leader if he’d seen the old woman.
A woman fell against him. A man just ahead dropped to his knees suddenly Nearby in the crowd, someone burst in a puff of cooked blood.
Daur heard the shooting.
Not even twenty metres away, through the panicking crowd, he saw an Infardi gunman, shooting indiscriminately with a lasrifle. The killer had dragged back the dirty rags that had been concealing his green silk robes. He’d snuck in amid the refugee streams like a wolf coming through in the thick of a herd.
Daur drew his laspistol, but he was surrounded by jostling, screaming people. He heard the rifle firing again.
Daur fell over a body on the flagstones. He stumbled, looking through the running legs around him, catching sight of green silk.
The cultist’s gunfire brought down more of the shrieking people. It made a gap.
Clutching his laspistol two-handed, Daur fired and put three shots through the gunman’s torso; at almost exactly the same moment, Mkoll put a las-round through his skull from another angle.
The killer twisted and fell down onto the pink stones. Gleaming blood leaked out of him and threaded between the edges of the flags. There were bodies all around him.
“Sacred soul!” said Mkoll, moving through. Other Tanith troopers ran past, pushing through the crowd and heading for the north-east end of the yard. The vox-link buzzed and crackled.
More shooting, fierce exchanges, from the direction of the Old Town Road.
Daur and Mkoll pushed against the almost stampeding flow of refugees. At the north-east end of the prayer yard, a large sandstone pylon led through onto a long colonnade walk between temple rows. Ghosts were grouped in cover around the pylon, or were daring short runs down into the colonnade to shelter around the bases of black quartzite stelae spaced at regular intervals.
Gunfire, like a blizzard of tiny comets, churned up and down the colonnade. The long sacred walkway was littered with the bodies of native Hagians, sprawled out in twisted, undignified heaps.
More Ghosts ran up behind them, and some of the Pardus artillery men too, pistols drawn. Daur glimpsed Sergeant Greer.
“Go! Go left!” Mkoll yelled across at Daur, and immediately darted along from the arch towards the plinth of the nearest right-hand stelae. Four of his men gave him covering fire and a couple ran after him. Las-shots stitched across the walkway’s flags and smacked chippings off the ancient obelisk.
Daur moved left, feeling the heat of a close round across his neck. He almost fell into the shadows of the nearest obelisk plinth. Other Ghosts tumbled in with him: Lillo, Mkvan and another Tanith whose name he didn’t know. A Pardus crewman attempted to follow, but he was clipped in the knee and collapsed back into cover yelping.
Daur dared a look out and glimpsed green movement further down the colonnade. The heaviest fire seemed to be coming from a large building on the left side of the colonnade which Daur believed was a municipal census hall. “Left two hundred metres,” Daur barked into his link “I see it!” Mkoll replied from the other side of the colonnade. Daur watched as the scout leader and his fireteam tried to advance. Withering fire drove them back into cover.
Daur ran again, reaching the next obelisk plinth on the left side. Shots were suddenly coming across him from the right and he turned to see two Infardi straddling the sloping tiles of a building, raking shots down into the shadows of the street.
Daur fired back, hastily, dragging his lasrifle off his shoulder. Lillo and Nessa reached his position around the same time and joined his fire. They didn’t hit either of the Infardi but they drove them back off the roof out of sight. Broken tiles from the section of roof they had bombarded slithered off and crashed down onto the flagstones.
Mkvan reached their position too. The crossfire was intense, but they were a good twenty metres closer to the census hall than Mkoll’s fireteam.
“This way,” Daur said, making sure he signed the words as he did so. Nessa was an ex-hab worker turned guerilla and like a fair number of the Verghastite volunteers, she was profoundly deaf from enemy shelling at Vervunhive. Signed orders were a scratch company basic. She nodded she understood, her fine, elfin features set in a determined frown as she slid a fresh ammunition cell into the port of her sniper-pattern lasgun.
Running stooped and low, the quartet left the main colonnade and ventured through the airy cool and shadows of a hypostyle hall. This temple, and the next which they crossed into via a small columned passage, was empty: what decoration and ornament the faithful hadn’t taken and hidden prior to the invasion had been plundered by the Infardi during their occupation. Lamp braziers were overturned, and puddles of loose ash dotted the ceramic tiles of the floor. Splintered wood from broken furniture and prayer mats was scattered around. Along one east-facing wall, in a pool of sunlight cast by the hypostyle’s high windows, a row of buckets and piles of rags showed where local people had attempted to scrub the Infardi’s heathen blasphemies off the temple walls.
The four of them moved in pairs, providing bounding cover, two stationary and aiming while the other two swept forward to the next contact point.
The back of the second temple led into a subsidiary precinct that connected to the census hall. Here, the walls were faced in black grandiorite, but some Infardi hand had taken a sledgehammer to the ancient wall-carvings.
The Infardi had posted lookouts at the back of the census hall. Mkvan spotted them, and brought the Ghosts into cover as laser and solid shots cut into the arched doorway of the precinct and blew dusty holes in the ashlar.
Nessa settled and aimed. She had a good angle and two single shots brought down a couple of the enemy gunmen. Daur smiled. The vaunted Tanith snipers like “Mad” Larkin and Rilke would have to guard their reputations against some of the Verghastite girls.
Daur and Mkvan ran forward through the archway, back into the bright sunlight, and tossed tube-charges in through the rear doors of the census hall. A row of small glass windows overlooking the alley blew out simultaneously and smoke and dust rolled back out of the doors.
The four Ghosts went in, knives fixed as bayonets, firing short bursts into the smoke. They came into the Infardi position from behind. The intense firefight began to split the airy interior of the census hall.
Daur’s strike immediately diluted the Infardi barrage from the front of the building, allowing the pinned forces in the colonnade ample chance to push in. Three fireteams of Ghosts, including Mkoll’s, circled in down the colonnade.
By then, Gaunt had moved up to the front line amongst the stelae. “Mkoll?”
“The front’s barricaded firmly, sir,” the scout leader reported over the link. “We’ve got their attention turned away from us… I think that’s Daur’s doing.”
Gaunt crouched behind a stelae and waved a signal down the line of crouching Ghosts ranged along the side of the colonnade. Trooper Brostin ran forward, the tanks of his flamer unit clanking.
“What kept you?” Gaunt asked.
“Probably all the shooting,” Brostin replied flippantly. The colonel-commissar indicated the census hall facade. “Wash it out, please.”
Brostin, a big man with ursine shoulders and a ragged, bushy moustache, who always reeked of promethium, hefted the flamer around and thumbed the firing toggle The tanks made a coughing gurgle and then retched a spear of liquid fire out at the census hall. The jet of flame arced downwards with yellow tongues and noxious black smoke curling off it like a mane.
Fire drizzled and trickled across the boarded front of the hall. Painted panels suddenly scorched black and caught fire. Paint peeled and beaded in the heat. The tie-beams over the
door burst into flames.
Brostin took a few steps forward and squirted flame directly in through some of the tight firing slits in the hall’s defences. Gaunt liked watching Brostin work. The burly trooper had an affinity with fire, an understanding of the way it ran and danced and leapt. He could make it work for him; he knew what would combust quickly and what slowly, what would burst in fierce incandescent flames and what would smoulder; he knew how to use wind and breeze to fan flames up into target dugouts. Brostin wasn’t just hosing an enemy emplacement with flames here he was artfully building an inferno.
According to Sergeant Varl, Brostin’s skill with fire came from his background as a firewatcher in Tanith Magna. Gaunt could believe this. It wasn’t what Trooper Larkin said, though. Larkin said Brostin was an ex-convict with a ten-year sentence for arson.
The fire, almost white, coiled up the hall front and caught the roof. A significant section of the front wall blew out into the street as fire touched off something volatile, perhaps an Infardi’s satchel of grenades. Another section guttered and fell in. Three green-dad men came out of the hall door mouth, firing las-weapons down the colonnade. The robes of one of the trio were burning. Ghost weapons opened up all around and the three toppled.
A couple of grenades flew from the burning hall and exploded in the middle of the street. Then two more Infardi tried to break out. Mkoll killed both within seconds of them appearing at the doorway.
Now, under Gaunt’s orders, the Ghosts were firing into the burning facade. A Pardus Hydra platform clanked down the centre of the colonnade, trailing a bunch of prayer-kite tails that had snagged on its barrels and aerial mount and rolled in beside Gaunt’s position.
Gaunt climbed up onto the plate behind the gunner and supervised as the NCO swung the four long snouts of the anti-aircraft autocannons down to horizontal.
“Target practice,” Gaunt told him.
The gunner tipped a salute and then tore the front of the census hall into burning scraps with his unforgiving firepower.
Inside, at the rear of the hall, Daur and his comrades were moving back the way they had come in. Thick black smoke boiled out from the main body of the hall. Daur, choking, could smell promethium and knew a flamer had been put to good work. Now there was a hell of a noise out front. Heavy fire, and not something man-portable.