“Try to stay with us. We’ve got to close this artery and cross the bridge.”
“Before nightfall.”
“Exactly,” she replied.
“Let’s get this done, then,” he said. “I want to talk to the flamers.”
XIV
The flame troopers gathered around him. Brostin, Dremmond, Lubba, Lyse, Nitorri and the rest. They stank of promethium fuel, their stock in trade.
“Where the Throne are your flamers?” Gaunt asked.
“We left them outside,” said Lubba.
“Outside?” Gaunt asked.
“Lubba meant back on the track over there, sir,” Dremmond said quickly. He nudged Lubba with a heavy, grubby arm. “Idiot.”
“Our tanks are being topped up just now,” said Brostin, with a broad grin. “We’re all ready to go. You give the word.”
“You understand the objectives?” asked Gaunt.
“Why don’t you run through them, just for us?” Dremmond suggested.
“Haven’t the company leaders briefed you?” asked Gaunt.
“Of course they have,” said Brostin.
“Immaculately,” said Lyse.
“We just, uhm, like to hear it from you in person, sir,” said Brostin.
Gaunt chuckled. “Very well. We have to get across this bridge by nightfall. Ten units of blood. Blood Pact. You’ve got to cauterise this artery right now.”
“Artery?” asked Lubba.
“This river.” Lubba nodded.
“Not a problem,” said Brostin. He took out a lho-stick.
“Not here!” Curth called out.
“I’m not going to light it, doc,” Brostin protested.
“They’d see the spark,” said Gaunt.
“Who’s that, sir?” asked Brostin, sucking on his un-lit lho-stick.
“The Blood Pact down on the river.”
“Oh, absolutely,” Brostin replied. “That’s why I’m being careful. We’re ready to go as soon as you want.”
“Then get to it,” said Gaunt. “And Brostin?”
“Sir?”
“Say hello to Mister Yellow for me.”
XV
The iron star throbbed. The bridge waited. It seemed all too close to nightfall.
Gaunt adjusted his cap, brim first, checked the load of his bolt pistol, and drew out his power sword, the famous blade of Hieronymo Sondar. It purred as he switched it on.
He rose up, the mud squelching around his boots.
“First and Only!” he yelled.
Whistles blew, and line officers called out orders for readiness. “Straight silver!” Gaunt instructed. Clicks and clatters sounded down the Ghost formation as the Tanith fixed their warknives to their bayonet lugs.
“Flamers advance!” Gaunt called.
The flame-troopers climbed up out of the forward dug-outs they’d crawled to. As they rose, their tanks thumped, and spears of liquid flame spat down across the river’s edge. On their hastily constructed siege platforms, the Blood Pact troopers screamed as inferno engulfed them.
Mortar charges, carried over the dead river on pontoons, began to catch off and explode. Bodies and fragments of splintered wood were hurled up into the air on ferocious spurts of fire.
“Advance!” Gaunt ordered, and the line officers repeated the call. He began running. Sword raised, he slipped and slithered in the mire. He heard the Ghosts behind him, the crack and fizzle of lasrifles, the roar of voices.
Enemy fire began to whip his way. It was so bright and quick, it hurt his eyes.
“Keep on them!” he yelled.
“Steady, Ibram,” Curth warned.
“Get into cover, medicae!” he shouted at her.
“I’m staying right with you,” Curth whispered.
He ploughed on into the billowing smoke. The air smelled of fyceline, blood and slime. Stray shells whumped in and kicked up mud that spattered across him. Blast concussions made the smoke eddy and swirl in curious patterns, like ripples on water. The noise was overwhelming.
He saw shapes moving towards him in the smoke ahead. Blood Pact troopers loomed into view, charging up from the river to meet them. Feral sounds and inhuman heresies issued from the screaming mouth-slits of their iron masks.
Grim human trophies, like finger bones and ears, jangled from their webbing and their munition belts.
Some of the Blood Pact carried lasrifles, with bayonets fixed. Others brandished spears or billhooks, or spiked hammers made for trench fighting. Their howls rose in intensity as they caught their first glimpse of the Imperial troops.
“Into them, break their backs,” Gaunt shouted. “The Emperor Protects!”
He didn’t falter in his stride. If anything, he ran faster, raising his bolt pistol to shoot, swinging his sword back. For a beautiful moment, the weariness left him. It just lifted off him. He felt as if he could take on the Archenemy single-handed. He felt the way he had done as a young man, with the whole galaxy before him.
He fired two shots and knocked down a pair of charging Blood Pact troopers, who went over as if they had been demolished by wrecking balls.
Then he was in amongst the rest. He swung the power sword, and the blade went clean through a throat. A billhook sang towards his face, and he chopped it away, and then drove the sword, point-first, through the billhook owner’s torso. Shapes whirled around him. This was the killing time—close combat, face to face, without quarter or compunction. Gaunt had tangled with the Archon’s Blood Pact often enough to know that they fought like wolves, and seldom relented. Many were hard-bred Imperial Guardsmen, who had defected, or who had been seduced away from the power of the Throne by the perversions of Chaos. The Blood Pact was one of the few forces in the Archenemy’s host with proper military training and discipline.
Ghosts slammed into the brawl around him, black shapes stabbing with glittering silver bayonets. Las weapons went off point blank, thumping bodies off their feet into the mire. Figures wrestled and grappled.
Gaunt shot another Blood Pact trooper, who was charging at him with a spear, and then ducked as a trench-mace came down to crush his skull. He kicked out the legs of the trooper with the mace and, as the man fell, Gaunt cleaved his sword through his shoulder blades and spine. Another came close, at Gaunt’s elbow, and Gaunt made a quick back-turn and rammed the pommel and grip of his sword into the man’s throat. The Blood Pact trooper stumbled backwards, choking, and Gaunt finished his work with a fencing master’s thrust. Two more hurled themselves at him. A rusty bayonet grazed Gaunt’s arm, ripping the sleeve of his stormcoat. He fired wildly, instinctively and, though wild, the bolt round blew a leg off at the hip. The other enemy trooper swung his billhook down, but Gaunt blocked it with his sword. The powered blade cut the billhook in half. Gaunt sliced his sword-arm backwards, and ran the blade in a slash across the man’s chest. Blood exploded from the massive wound. The trooper dropped to his knees, masked face tilted up at the sky, and Gaunt took his head off.
“Tell your heathen masters the Ghosts have come for them!” he yelled into the darkness.
Las bolts rained down through the smoke cover like incandescent drizzle, and made sucking, sizzling punctures in the mire. Gaunt heard the rasp and belch of flamers from nearby. Further off, mortars were grunting like bullfrogs at the river’s edge, and autocannons were rattling like infernal mill engines.
Gaunt looked around, trying to assess the fight, but the smoke was shrouding everything. All he could see was blurred figures mobbing in the half-light. Someone lobbed a star-shell into the sky, where it wobbled and bobbed like a second, brighter iron star, but it did nothing to improve visibility.
His blood was up. As he faced down and killed three more Archenemy troopers, Gaunt recognised the fury in his heart. It was the old fury, a courage and a determination he had begun to fear he’d lost. These last few years, it had started to feel as though its fire had died out, leaving nothing in his soul but dull embers.
Some gust of passion had breathed upon those coals and rek
indled the flames. With a measure of sadness, Gaunt realised that he only ever felt decently human when he was locked in the madhouse of battle. His dead soul blazed, and his dull limbs cast off their aches and pains. His mind became clear. His life, the very essence of his life as an Imperial soldier, was here, vital and vibrant in the insanity of combat.
Only on the razor-edge of life and death could he feel alive. Only in death could he live.
A Blood Pact officer, an etogaur, lunged out of the cinder-smog. He was a massive beast, with corded muscle bulging under his blood-stained coat. His grotesk was dirty gold. His huge greatsword was running with Imperial gore.
The etogaur growled as he looked around for another Guardsman to butcher.
“Over here, you son of a gak,” Gaunt roared.
XVI
Ana Curth bent over her patient. Battlefield medicine was not a precise art. Her scrubs were smeared with blood.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “His vitals are bright and strong, but he seems to be slipping away.”
Dorden put his hand on her shoulder. “We’ve done all we can.”
“No.”
“Ana, we have hundreds of casualties to treat. Perhaps—”
“No,” she said, emphatically. “I’m not going to give up.”
“Look at his wounds,” Dorden said, nodding down at the stricken patient. “The Blood Pact has done its work as brutally as ever.”
“There’s still a chance,” she said, reaching for a clean scalpel. “There’s always a chance.”
XVII
The etogaur uttered some abominable battle-cry, and expertly whirled his greatsword around his head and shoulders in a display of strength. It was a powered blade, and its gleaming length crackled with indigo sparks, like thread veins of electricity.
Gaunt’s bolt pistol was spent. There was no time to reload. That suited him fine. He wanted this to be sword work.
The etogaur rushed him. Gaunt raised the sword of Hieronymo Sondar to parry the first swing, and managed to do so, but the sheer power of the heavy blade’s impact jarred his wrist and forced him to brace his stance. The etogaur was fast. He evidently knew sword-play, and he revealed a master’s finesse, even though he was wielding a monstrous, heavy blade designed for wholesale slaughter rather than duelling.
Gaunt blocked three more quick blows, turning his sword with a dextrous touch. The etogaur was using the sheer weight of his blade for momentum, swinging each blow into the next, changing his grip on the double-handed pommel to swoop and turn the greatsword around his body for maximum kill power.
The etogaur brought the greatsword around in a bodyline cut. Gaunt stopped it dead with a flat-blade parry, and then drove back, robbing the etogaur of swing momentum. With brute force, the etogaur hefted up his blade, and tried to swing again. His sword was twice as long as Gaunt’s. He had reach. He had power.
His boots sloshing in the mire, Gaunt out-paced him, and turned around his left flank. The etogaur tried to turn, but Gaunt drove in a slice that the etogaur barely parried away. He was wrong-footed, unbalanced.
As the etogaur tried to regain his poise and bring his greatsword up, Gaunt ripped his sword in. The weight of the blade cut through the greatsword’s grip. It cut through the etogaur’s right wrist, and severed all the digits of his left hand.
The etogaur uttered a bark of disbelief. He took a step backwards, blood squirting from his wrist stump and his dismembered hand. He stared at Gaunt through the eye-slits of his dirty gold mask, awaiting the finishing stroke.
Gaunt aimed his sword at the etogaur, tip first. “Run,” he said. “Run and tell them. The Ghosts of Tanith have come, and they will kill you all.”
The etogaur began to howl. He turned and stumbled away into the smoke, bleating out his distress and his terror.
Gaunt allowed himself a smile. He could feel tears of blood on his face.
Turning, he saw a Ghost nearby, beset by two Blood Pact troopers. He hurled himself into the brawl, and severed the spine of one of the Archenemy warriors with his sword. The beleaguered Ghost used the advantage to lance the other Blood Pact marauder with his bayonet.
“Are you in one piece?” Gaunt asked as the Ghost yanked his blade out of the corpse.
“I’m all right, sir,” the Ghost replied. Gaunt realised that it was Beltayn, his adjutant.
“Good to see you, Bel. How’re you holding up?”
“This is a pretty bad fix, sir, isn’t it?” said Beltayn. His face was ash-white.
“I’ll be fine, Bel.”
“I think, sir…”
“What?”
“Something’s awry.”
Gaunt laughed and gestured at the smoke, flames and corpses around them. “You figured that out all by yourself, did you?”
Beltayn shook his head.
“I mean, I’ve heard things on the vox,” he said. “We’ve broken their spirit here, but it sounds like they’ve got reinforcements moving in on our flank.”
“More Blood Pact?”
“No, sir. From the vox-bursts, it sounds like the Sons of Sek.”
Gaunt felt a chill. The Blood Pact were daemons enough. Their cohorts had been raised by the Archon with the specific intention of matching the Imperial Guard in the Sabbat Worlds theatre. Anakwanar Sek was the Archon’s most fearsome lieutenant commander. Inspired by the example of the Blood Pact, Sek had developed his own elite force. Gaunt had seen the Sons at work on… where was it… Gereon, that was it, Gereon. The Sons of Sek had appeared to be even more formidable than the Blood Pact. The Sons had an appetite for atrocity. The Ghosts had yet to enjoy the dubious pleasure of meeting them in full combat.
“Where’s Rawne?” asked Gaunt.
“I don’t know, sir,” Beltayn replied.
“Baskevyl, then? Daur? Kolea?”
“I can’t get them on the vox.”
“Get me Corbec, at least!”
Beltayn looked at him oddly.
“What?” asked Gaunt.
“Colonel Corbec, sir… he’s been dead these last five years.”
Gaunt paused. “Of course he has. Of course he has…”
“Sir?”
“Bel, we have to get this bridge secured before nightfall.” Beltayn looked up at the smoke cover overhead. “And when will that be, do you think?”
“I don’t know. We just have to get the bridge secured.”
“I don’t even know where the bridge is anymore,” said Beltayn.
“It’s over that way,” Gaunt replied, gesturing over his left shoulder. “It’s close. Bel, I need you to run back and rally the main force. I need you to find Rawne or Kolea and get them ready. Let them know we’re about to be flanked by the Sons. Tell them I’m gathering up the forward elements and heading for the bridge.”
“Is that wise, sir?” asked Beltayn.
“The bridge is our objective, Beltayn. We need to secure it. Tell Rawne I’m forming up every Ghost I can find and leading them towards the bridge approach. He’s got to cover our arses from a flank attack. Come on, Bel. It’s not rocket science!”
Beltayn nodded. He took up his las and turned to go. Then he paused, and offered Gaunt his hand.
“Bel?”
“In case we don’t meet again, sir,” said Beltayn. “I want you to know that it’s been an honour to serve.”
Gaunt took Beltayn’s hand. “It’s been an honour to serve with you, Dughan. But we will meet again.”
“We’d better,” said Beltayn, and ran off. Gaunt watched until his adjutant had vanished into the shrouding smoke. He turned, and continued to advance.
Blood Pact bodies littered the mud, some already sinking into its fathomless embrace. Gaunt thought he’d find Ghost platoons ahead, but there was no sign of them. They’d pushed in beside him. Where the feth had they vanished to?
He reloaded his bolt pistol as he trudged forwards. He could smell the river. The spinning, twisting smoke was eclipsing the sky. All sounds and signs of fighting had aba
ted.
His eyes started to hurt again. He couldn’t see far in the damned smoke.
Then he saw Nessa.
XVIII
Nessa Bourah was one of his finest snipers. She’d served through the Vervunhive siege as part of the people’s resistance, and joined the Ghosts at liberation.
Nessa had taken up a shooting pitch in a muddy foxhole on the river bank, and was scoping for a target. Saturation bombing during the battle of Vervunhive had rendered her profoundly deaf. Without a spotter, she was entirely unaware of the Blood Pact trooper closing in behind her, machete raised.
Gaunt raised his bolt pistol, sighted it, and blew the Blood Pacter’s head off. Nessa jumped in surprise as the body crashed down beside her. She turned and raised her long-las.
It’s me, Gaunt signed.
Nessa lowered her rifle.
“You took me by surprise,” she said, in her delicious, slightly nasal accent.
“Not as much as he would have,” Gaunt suggested.
She touched his chin, and turned his face towards her.
“So I can see,” she demanded. “So I can see your mouth!”
Sorry, he signed.
He got down in the foxhole beside her, making sure she could see his face.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
Nessa shook her head. “I haven’t seen anyone. It’s quiet.”
“Something’s wrong,” he said.
“What?”
Something’s wrong, he signed. He’d made a point of learning the art after Vervunhive. Nessa wasn’t the only deaf trooper in his regiment. Many of them, like Nessa, had eschewed augmetics, favouring the strength of silence in war.
“We should be very quiet,” she agreed.
If we should be quiet, why aren’t you signing to me? he signed.
“I’m deaf. I can read your signing,” she said. “How would you read mine?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
Nessa reached out a hand and ran her finger along his cheek, circling his right eye.