“Your men hold,” he said, indicating their gloom-shrouded opponents above them. “Mine draw out,” he added, pointing first towards the archway and then to Regara, Culcis and his own banner bearer, “We run.”
“That’s suicide for your men, captain,” Culcis informed him needlessly.
“Sacrifice is part of Kauth way, Volpone. Hold, draw out, run,” he repeated.
Even Regara nodded this time.
“Very well,” he said, “Corporals Speers and Drado too.”
“Yes, sir.” Culcis beckoned the two aides over as Hauke was relaying orders to his men. The fight had reached an impasse for now, both sides unable to lay any meaningful fire into the other. It at least allowed the Volpone/Kauth coalition to formulate their plan.
In a few minutes it was done and the kill-team was gathered together to make a dash for the archway.
“Just because the savages are offering themselves up on a plate to these bastards, doesn’t mean they won’t shoot at us,” said Regara.
Culcis nodded.
“Quick and quiet,” the major added. “No delays, even if someone falls, even if I fall. Understand, lieutenant? Whatever’s beyond that archway, we must be ready for it.”
Culcis nodded again, slower this time.
Regara gave the signal to Hauke that they were ready.
An ear-piercing shriek scythed out of Hauke’s mouth and the order was given.
Suppressing fire lanced from the Volpone as they expended what was left of their hellguns to keep the ambushers at bay. At the same time, the Longstriders exploded into the open, moving back down the defile as if in retreat, guns blazing. Meanwhile, the kill-team led by Regara was running.
Culcis felt the patter of solid shot glancing off his bowl helm but kept moving. Shots tore up the earth around them, pranged off jutting stones and ricocheted from the walls. The incoming fire was light. The Kauth had done their work well. Culcis was only glad he didn’t have to turn and see them slain.
The kill-team breached the archway intact and found themselves in an expansive chamber.
It was like descending into some visceral hell-realm.
Walls like incarnadine flesh shone slick with blood. They were ribbed, too, like meat. The stink of it was strong. It was emanating from a deep reservoir in the centre of the room. Squatting over it was a vast and tortured machine. Twisted and spiked, it was a thing utterly unlike any engine Culcis had ever seen. The machine was some kind of drilling platform, part metal, part organic. It had four pseudo-fangs plunged deep into the earth, pumping and siphoning a clear liquid into the bloody morass.
It took Culcis a few seconds to realise the Tongues of Tcharesh had tapped into the promethium wells that veined the region in tributaries of vital fuel. Except now, the fuel was vital in the most literal way. It was alive, sentient and tainted by blood sacrifice.
Further machines were visible in silhouette beyond this first infernal engine, dormant but foreshadows of the insurgents’ plan yet to come.
The very thing the Crusade reserve was meant to be protecting was the very thing driving them insane. The red rime of their jackets, the ruddy sand underfoot—the entire Sagorrah camp was tainted by the promethium-blood. Bad enough if an encampment of nearly a million Guardsmen was turned—Culcis paled at the consequences if the fuel was allowed to infect the rest of the Crusade forces. And the architect of that depravity was close by.
Crouched by the edge of the pool, a slain Guardsman in her talon-like clutches, was what used to be a woman. She was hideous. Even her presence felt anathema to Culcis, as if she shouldn’t even be. A dirty, blood-flecked smock covered her frail, bony limbs. She was withered and wretched like a corpse. Her lank hair was grey and matted with dark stains. Ranks of teeth stood in blackened nubs as she grinned at him.
Something hard and cold clutched at the lieutenant’s chest and he forced it down through sheer effort of will.
“Stay close!” warned Hauke, indicating the banner.
Culcis, even the other Volpone, obeyed. As he neared the scrap of cloth, the lieutenant felt the discomfort from the witch’s presence ebb.
“Emperor have mercy…” he heard Drado mutter.
Speers made the sign of the aquila. The corporal’s hands were shaking. Regara’s mouth was drawn in a taut line.
The witch was not alone. A beast of a soldier, too broad and tall not to have been genhanced, was standing a few metres from the witch at the edge of the machine. His hard armour was dark and he wore a grotesk to hide his graven features.
Culcis knew Blood Pact when he saw it.
Drawing a serrated sabre, the soldier waved his retinue forwards—four men, all Tongues of Tcharesh elite like the Volpone had fought in the slum town square.
“Kill that witch,” Regara told him. “Speers and I will deal with the Blood Pact.”
The kill-team split into two, Regara and Speers going for the Blood Pact officer whilst the others, led by Culcis, tackled the witch. Percussive las-fire echoed behind them, the rest of the Volpone keeping the traitor forces at bay.
Two narrow pathways fed off from a platform immediately in front of the archway and led around the edges of the chamber towards the hideous lagoon. It was here that the two groups diverged.
Whickering las-fire, the beams an unwholesome red compared to the purity of Guard blue, snapped at the earth around the advancing Volpone and their allies. Racing down the right-hand channel, Culcis returned fire and lanced one of the Tongues of Tcharesh across the torso. The wretch staggered, grasping at the wound, and fell from the pathway into the bloody mess. He sank immediately, as if weighted down, as if something had… dragged him. The witch shrieked in delight. Another offering to the Ruinous Powers.
Drado caught a las-bolt to the knee before they’d reached the end of the pathway. He went on for a couple more steps before slamming against the wall, his face awash with agonised sweat.
No delays, the words of the major came back to Culcis, even if someone falls.
The lieutenant carried on. A lasgun shot, fired from the hip by Hauke, took a traitor in the throat, avenging Drado’s wounding.
Both her guardians down, the witch was left vulnerable. Or so Culcis believed.
Nothing could have been further from the truth.
He glanced across at Regara. He and Speers had dispatched the lackeys and were engaging the Blood Pact officer. Though Culcis only caught a snapshot, the fight was brutal and close-quarter. Speers had gone to his bayonet, whilst Regara drew his sword. Adamantine steel flashed against Chaos-infused iron. Only the fact it was two against one kept both the corporal and major alive for more than a few seconds. They were holding their own, but only just.
Culcis focussed on the witch. He was flanked by Hauke and his banner bearer. The two Longstriders had pulled ahead. The banner bearer took aim with his lasgun but never fired. The witch extended an emaciated claw in his direction as a fountain of blood erupted from the Kauth warrior’s mouth. The lasgun slipped from his nerveless fingers, falling uselessly to the ground. The banner bearer followed, tipping off the edge and plunging to his doom in the blood pool. Hauke reached for the banner itself before it joined him, snatching the weathered shaft like a lifeline, and dropping his weapon to do it.
Smiling, the witch advanced upon them both. She was preceded by an invisible veil of cold. Culcis felt daggers of ice puncturing his chest over and over. Needles of pain speared his forehead, and he clutched at it. Somewhere during this torture, he lost his pistol and fell to one knee.
“Emp—” he began, seeking benediction, when a froth of blood bubbled up from his throat. He choked then gagged. It was filling up his mouth and nose, a reservoir of vitae fattening his lungs with hot fluid.
Hauke was still moving, the banner clenched in his whitened fist giving him resolve. Culcis watched him draw his hatchet and close on the blood-soaked harridan. He swept the blade towards her head but incredibly she moved, far faster than any living thing should. Culcis couldn
’t be sure it wasn’t just the fact he was dying and had started to hallucinate, but she… blurred, as if sliding from one plane of existence into another and back again. A needle-like punch-blade had also materialised in her grimy claw. She thrust it gleefully into Hauke’s exposed neck. It went all the way through. The Longstrider captain lost his grip on the hatchet, before even realising what had happened and that he was dead, and crumpled into a heap. He shuddered once, the banner falling from his grasp, and was still.
She was near to him. Culcis could hear the witch’s ragged breathing. He caught an impression of her withered form through his blood-filmed eyes. He felt the needle-blade closing rather than saw it. But as the witch threw back her foul head in exultation, something rolled against the lieutenant’s clenched fist. As it touched him, his vision cleared, like a cloth wiped over glass, and some of his strength returned. Acting purely on instinct, Culcis seized the banner pole that had rolled down to him from Hauke’s dead hand and shoved it upwards into the witch.
Her cackling turned to screaming horror when she saw the banner pole jutting from her torso. Culcis roared, as much to banish his fear as to focus his anger, and thrust deeper.
“Hell-bitch, die!”
Convulsing once, the witch was done, her power extinguished.
Culcis braced the pole and snapped it off halfway, leaving the harridan impaled. He salvaged the end with the blessed cloth before kicking the witch into the promethium morass with his boot.
“Major!” he cried, aiming his recovered hellpistol across the hideous blood-filled chasm where the machine was pumping like a grotesque heart.
Culcis fired, and Regara ducked, opening himself to attack. Speers was already down and not moving.
The shot took the Blood Pact in the shoulder. It wasn’t fatal but the sudden change in position, the attempted death blow when Regara had opened himself up, put him off balance. The major thrust upwards with his power sword. The Blood Pact officer’s riposte and parry were a fraction too late and the humming blade sank into his chest. Regara wrenched it free, forcing the traitor to stagger and pitch backwards. The major didn’t give him time to recover. He cut the bastard’s head off with one swipe.
“Nearly done,” bellowed a weary Regara across the crimson gulf. He went into his webbing to retrieve a pair of krak grenades. The entire kill-team was carrying them. Culcis had made it as far as the machine already and was mag-locking his explosives to the engine’s superstructure.
“Prime them for a ninety-second delay,” Regara told him when they met up where the two pathways converged.
Culcis nodded, working at the detonation stud to give them the ninety seconds to effect an escape. He’d ripped the scrap of cloth off the pole completely now and stuffed it in one of his combat pouches.
Both men bolted from the chamber. Regara had Speers slung over his shoulder like a meat sack; Drado clung to Culcis as the two of them hobbled out urgently.
Back into the narrow defile and the Volpone were finishing off the ambushers. At the witch’s death, most of the traitors had fled or cast themselves over the edge. Her hold upon the insurgents had been strong, so her demise sent psychological shockwaves through her puppets.
The Volpone had reached halfway down when an explosion shook the caves. An incendiary flare erupted behind them in a bright orange bloom as the promethium lagoon went up in conflagration. The rest of the way upwards was frantic. In his panic to escape the sundered caves, Culcis caught their flight in flashes only. Smoke wreathed his world, together with the stink of burning. Darkness smothered his thoughts and senses.
Then there was light and the oppressive heat of the desert sun.
“Vox,” snapped Regara when they were out. Several of the men were rolling onto the sand, their minds and bodies near exhaustion.
The major took the receiver cup as it was offered and raised the Munitorum bastion.
A flustered, anxious Ossika answered.
“It’s done,” Regara told him. “The insurgents are finished.”
“Emperor’s mercy,” breathed Ossika. Culcis was standing close and could overhear the conversation clearly. It sounded like the Munitorum clerk was crying.
“The fuel, Ossika,” said Regara. “It’s in the fuel. That’s what’s turning the men. It has to be destroyed.” Ossika didn’t sound so sure. “What? All of it?”
“Every damned drop.”
“No, no, no, no. That fuel is for the Crusade. It’s the war effort. Do you know how much—?”
Regara cut him off. “It’s tainted, man. A million Guard turned to Chaos, it doesn’t bear thinking about.”
“But we can’t… we… I need authority. Can’t just destroy it.”
“Do it,” Regara told him in no uncertain terms. “Do it, or I will come over there and do it myself, orders be damned.”
“I can’t, major. I simply can’t. It’s not protocol, it’s not—”
Regara severed the link, slamming the receiver cup back in its holder. “We need the gunships,” he muttered, partly to Culcis, partly to himself. Then louder, “Get them up. We march for Sagorrah.”
The Volpone had to run through the encampments. They were just under thirty men but at least the presence of the Kauth’s banner seemed to keep the belligerence felt towards them by the other regiments to a minimum. Widespread fighting had broken out. There were even firing exchanges. Sagorrah had descended into hell.
It was with some relief that they reached the Munitorum bastion alive and unscathed.
Regara and Culcis muscled their way past the few troops that Ossika had left that weren’t suffering the effects of the blood-fuel and found the Munitorum clerk at his desk.
“Major,” he warned, shuffling through paperwork, trying to find the correct documentation to sanction such a measure as destroying the fuel. “Major, you cannot do this.”
Sensing its master’s distress, the lexicanum-servitor came forwards from its shadowy perch to intercede. Culcis shot it with his hellpistol.
“Step aside,” he told Ossika, training the weapon on him.
“You cannot,” he repeated, eyeing the twitching lex-savant on the ground, but he was moving. “It’s not protocol.”
“Hang protocol,” snarled Regara, pushing the clerk out of the way so he could get to a long-range voxsponder set in a brass casing behind the desk.
He raised the commander of the Valkyrie fleet swiftly. A terse explanation followed, the conversation riddled by static.
“Burn it, burn it all,” the major concluded. His face was grim when he set the receiver down again and he turned it on Ossika. “Too late, now. Fire is coming to Sagorrah, and with it the salvation of thousands.”
From the hillside, below the ridge, a flame storm rippled the horizon line like a bright orange ocean. In the distance, the fifty-strong fleet of gunships were pulling away and making for higher orbit, the smoke of their missile contrails lingering in the air like a threat. The incendiary payloads had done their work, igniting the promethium wells and vanquishing the tainted fuel in a series of glorious explosions.
There would be ramifications, Culcis knew. Major Regara would shoulder them, despite the fact he had undoubtedly saved almost a million Guard soldiers in a single, decisive act. Only a man with Regara’s self-belief and arrogance could have even countenanced such a move. But it wasn’t bravura; it was necessity that drove him.
It had once been called Sagorrah Depot, but now the vast plain that burned below was simply a sea of fire. The flames rose high, caught by the wind, their edges blackening as the fuel cooked off and so too the poison that had afflicted so many.
In a valley behind where Culcis and Regara stood, the regiments who had survived gathered. Orders had been received from Macaroth himself; the Crusade reserve was mobilising for war and that included the Volpone 50th. Some would not return to glory, some had fallen. Culcis was determined they’d be remembered. He took the scrap of cloth from his equipment and tied it around the barrel of the lasgun he
was carrying. Planting the stock in the ground, he smiled as the ragged banner snapped on the breeze.
“What is that, lieutenant?” asked Regara, raising an eyebrow.
“Honour,” said Culcis simply. “Honour for the dead.”
The major, for his part, didn’t respond or object. He merely took in the view. The flames stretched for kilometres. It was as if the entire horizon burned.
Culcis joined him, feeling something jabbing him in the chest. He reached into his pocket and found the pair of cigars Hauke had given him in the slums. He’d completely forgotten about them. He offered one to Regara.
“Sir?”
The major took it after a short pause, nodding his thanks discreetly. An errant pool of burning promethium thrown out in the initial explosion provided Culcis with a light. He then used his own cigar to light the major’s and the two men smoked a toast. The fire, rising all the while, threw a lambent glow over them both. It was warming.
Culcis supped and raised his cigar, blowing out a smoky plume.
“To dogs in the sun, sir,” he said, his eyes filled with reflected flame.
“Dogs in the sun, lieutenant,” Regara replied.
Behind them, the first of the drop-ships were landing. The troops of Sagorrah were being re-appropriated across the planet to fresh fronts. War was calling.
Sandy Mitchell’s Ciaphas Cain novels are a source of constant pleasure for me, and proof that you can always find a new approach in a shared setting like 40k. They’re understated, subversive and very funny, and it delights me that the universe of Warhammer 40,000 can happily support a series that has humour at its heart.
“A Good Man” is also understated, and perhaps a little untrustworthy. It takes us back to Verghast, setting of the third Gaunt novel Necropolis, and we arrive just after the last of the fighting, in time to be lured into the shadows of the ruins of the wartorn hives, and inveigled by unscrupulous and unreliable individuals…
Dan Abnett
A GOOD MAN
Sandy Mitchell