An alarm sounded and a red light on the ceiling began to flash.
“What’s that?” asked Swaythe.
“What the feth is that?” Twenzet demanded.
The cargo officer looked around. Criid saw fear in the eyes behind the large tinted visor.
“We—” he began.
There was a loud, stunning thump. The Valk lurched and dropped sharply. Part of the cargo section flooring blew in, and sparks ripped up in a flurry. The alarm note changed to a much more urgent shrill.
“Hold on!” the cargo officer cried.
A second explosion shook the airframe, a vicious bang that blinded them for a second. Hot metal shards whizzed around the compartment. One streaking nugget punched clean through the cargo officer’s chest.
He let go of the handrail and fell out of the side hatch, his limp body instantly snatched away by the savage slipstream.
Smoke filled the compartment and rushed out through the hatches. Someone was screaming. The alarm shrieked.
The Valkyrie began to vibrate. The engines started to emit a terrible, labouring noise. Its nose tipped down and it fell into a steep dive, a dive that it would never pull out of.
Mach—
There is something that must be done, a matter of honour for the regiment. It is the sword, I mean. It must be got back.
I have gone to get it. I know I have no orders to do so, but I have a moral duty. In conscience, I could not disappear without any word. I ask you to tell them where I’ve gone and what I plan to do. I hope they will understand the purpose of my actions.
The Emperor protect you.
Your friend,
Oan.
—Personal correspondence, Tanith 1st, fifth month, 778.
NINETEEN
The Deada Waeg
I
North of the Banzie Altids, and the curtain of rock encasing Hinzerhaus, the badlands stretched out for a million square kilometres. The badlands were a trackless waste, a mosaic of inhospitable terrains: zones of dust, plains of wind-blown scree and boulder rubble, dry salt licks, and gleaming basins of air-polished calcites that shone bone-white in the sun. In open areas, the dust had collected in great seas of rippled grey dunes, punctuated every few hundred kilometres by jagged crags that sprouted from the desert floor, forming lonely outcrops and mesas surrounded by islands of jumbled stones.
It was a place to be lost in. Despite the passage of the sun, and the lay of the land, there seemed to be no reliable directions. It was a landscape of dry hell, scoured by the constant, angry wind and bleached by the hard light.
Mkoll woke. Two days out in the wastes had taught him that the middle part of the day was no time to move about in the badlands, so he had chosen that period to rest, curling up in the lea of an outcrop boulder. Early morning, late afternoon and night were the best times for travel.
Something had woken him. Gun ready, he swept the rocks, fearing he had been discovered by a passing patrol or scout party. There was no one around in the crag, no sign of activity. The dunes beyond the outcrop were empty.
He looked south.
Despite the dust haze, Mkoll could see the saw-edged ramparts of the Banzie Altids a dozen kilometres behind him. A pall of dark smoke was rising from the mountains, the blaze plume of some catastrophic explosion.
Mkoll turned away. He took a sip of water, ate half a ration bar, and tried not to think about what might have produced the smoke.
He had learned to stay focused. The decisions he had made, the course he had taken, they were hard things to reconcile. Mkoll was a man of infinite and honest loyalty. He knew that the moment he started thinking about the comrades he had left behind would be the moment he turned and started the long trek back to rejoin them. So he shut such thoughts out.
That wasn’t difficult to do. Out in the wastes, every scrap of a man’s concentration went on survival. You had to pick every footstep carefully to avoid sand falls and dust-choked holes. In places, the surface regolith was so fine and powdery, it could swallow you whole in seconds. You had to read the loose rocks in the scree fields so as not to twist or snap an ankle. You had to watch the wind, and learn its clues so you could get into cover before it rose and carried you away like a dead leaf, or shredded the flesh off your bones with a dust storm. You had to pace your water consumption and avoid excess exposure to the hard sun. Every waking moment was filled up with deliberate, calculated activity.
There were live hazards too. The Blood Pact was out in the wastes in force. Mkoll lay low when motorised patrols throbbed by in the distance. Twice, he’d hidden on top of a mesa and watched as a unit of troops and armour trundled by. The Blood Pact was moving south in considerable numbers. It wouldn’t be long before Hinzerhaus faced an assault on its northern ramparts again.
Mkoll checked his kit, cased his lasrifle and prepared to move off. He would have liked to stay put for another hour or two, but there was a faint smudge along the eastern horizon, a blur that rippled like heat haze. That was another dust storm, rising out of the deep heart of the badlands. Mkoll figured he had about ninety minutes before it hit, and ninety minutes would see him reach another lonely mesa just in sight to the north-west.
He started out, picking his way through the loose white boulders at the foot of the crag. His boots lifted powder as he left the rock line and began to walk out across the dust flats. A light wind was blowing, and little eddies of dust danced and scurried over the undulating dunes.
He glanced behind him and saw that the footsteps he had left were already filling in and vanishing.
That reminded him, uncomfortably, that there was something else he was trying not to think about.
II
He had miscalculated. He was only a few minutes out, but that was enough to doom him.
The dust storm, a dark band of racing cloud, began to overtake him while he was still a good half a kilometre from the mesa. The first few gusts tugged at him and made him stagger. The wind force was huge. He began to run, but the wind blew him over several times and rolled him across the dunes. As the storm bit down, he tried to crawl on his hands and knees.
The wind tore at his clothes. The dust particles stung his exposed skin and abraded it until it started to bleed. The light died as the roiling dust mass, two kilometres high, blotted out the sun.
There was no way he was going to reach the mesa. He couldn’t even see the mesa any more. He could barely breathe, there was so much dust in his mouth and nostrils. It blocked his ears until there was nothing audible except a dull, moaning sound.
Mkoll clawed his way over onto the leeward side of a large dune and began to dig with his hands, scooping out a hollow he could pull himself into and curl up. He used his own bodyweight to pin his camo cape into the depression, then dragged the loose, flapping side around to cocoon him. That shut out the dust and made a little, airless tent like a womb, where all he could hear was the howl of the gale and the frantic gasping of his own breath.
Trapped there, blind and half buried, he began to think about the things he had banished from his mind before. There was one thing he could not leave alone.
Oan Mkoll, master of scouts, was the best tracker in the regiment. His skills with spore and trace were company legend. No one could follow a path or a trail better than Mkoll, and no one had a keener natural sense of direction. His gifts in these areas, most of them self-taught techniques, seemed almost supernatural to many of his comrades.
Mkoll had no idea how he was tracking the Nihtgane. He knew he was, and he had the keenest sense he was closing on him, but he had no idea how.
This terrified him.
Jago was a tracker’s nightmare. The combination of dust and wind erased all traces of a man’s passing. It allowed for no footprints, no worn trail, and there was no undergrowth to read for marks. Scent was sometimes a useful tool, but on Jago the wind stole that away too.
Mkoll wasn’t sure what exactly it was that he was following. He just knew, somehow, knew as sure as he knew
night from day, that he was going the right way.
It was as if there was a road, a clearly defined route set out for him to follow.
It was as if someone or something was leading him.
In the two days since he’d set out, he had not questioned it for a moment, because he hadn’t wanted to think about it. He had climbed down the northern face of the fortress cliff and set off into the wastes without a moment’s consideration as to where Eszrah might have gone.
Caught in the lea of the dune, with the dust beginning to bury him, he had no choice but to dwell on it.
The thought that something unseen might be guiding him frightened Mkoll more than the prospect of a suffocating death.
III
The storm died after an hour, clearing as rapidly as it had come down. The light returned as the dust settled and the grey film drained out of the air. In its wake, the storm left a landscape of resculpted, remoulded dunes and an aching, barren silence.
A hole appeared in the slope of one dune, soft dust sucking down into a cavity, like sand in an hour glass. The hole broadened.
A hand reached out into the dry air.
Mkoll rose up out of his shallow grave, the dust streaming off him and fuming away into the breeze like smoke. He shook the clogging particles out of his sleeves and fatigues, and flapped out his cape. It took a few minutes to clean his brass goggles and wash out his mouth and nose. His throat was dry. His sinuses felt impacted. His vision was blurred, as if his corneas had been abraded.
He sat down and emptied his boots. The mesa he had been heading for, a crooked, flat-topped rock surrounded by an island of boulders, seemed ridiculously close. Mkoll re-laced his boots and was grateful he had chosen to carry his rifle cased. He looked south once more. The pall of smoke, smaller now, was still clearly visible.
He heard a pop.
He looked around sharply and heard two more. Pop pop, just small sounds, carried by the breeze. He got up and began to head towards the mesa.
More popping sounds reached him. They were coming from the other side of the outcrop. He slowed down and began to uncase his rifle. He sniffed the air. Motor oil, warm metal, unwashed bodies.
Mkoll stuffed the rifle case into his pack and ran into the boulder scree, head down. He moved from rock to rock, staying low, listening and sniffing.
Pop. Pop pop. Pop. Pop pop pop.
Gunshots, hollowed out by the wind. He checked his rifle cell and flicked off the safety.
It took five careful minutes to circle the mesa to the northern side. The sun was no longer overhead and he had shadows to play with, hard shadows cast by the boulders and the crag.
He ducked down at the first sight of movement, his back to a large rock. He pulled out his stick mirror and angled it for a look, taking care that it didn’t catch the sun.
In it, he glimpsed a Blood Pact warrior clambering through the rocks, rifle in hand. The brute was panting, and sweating so profusely that his stained jacket had dark half-moons under the arms. Mkoll could smell him, he was so close. He could smell the rancid sweat and the stale blood-filth the warrior had coloured his jacket with.
How many of them were there? He kept watching.
The warrior stopped, and called out something. An answering cry came back. The warrior raised his rifle and squeezed two shots off at the overhanging crag.
Mkoll drew his warknife.
The Blood Pact warrior got up on a large boulder and looked around. Four of his comrades were toiling up the scree slope in a wide line below him. Behind them, out on the dunes, a rusty half-track sat with its engine running. A patrol, on a routine sweep.
“Voi shett! K’heg ar rath gfo!” the warrior on the rock shouted. Three more warriors jumped down from the half-track, one of them an officer with a gilded grotesk.
“Borr ko’dah, voi!” the officer yelled, waving his pistol. The trio entered the rock line and followed the other troopers up into the slopes under the crag. One trooper remained behind aboard the half-track with the driver, manning a pintle-mounted cannon.
The warrior nearby jumped down off the rock and looked around for an easy path up through the scree. A hand circled his throat from behind and a blade slid up under his shoulder blade into his heart. He died without a sound.
Mkoll lowered the body silently. He wiped the blade on the warrior’s coat and helped himself to the cell clips in his webbing. He could hear the officer shouting down below.
Mkoll darted between the rocks, head low. He heard the crunch of boots nearby and froze. Another warrior clambered past, just a few metres away, calling out.
Mkoll crept forwards and finished the warrior as quickly and clinically as before.
A lasrifle started firing and Mkoll dropped, fearing he had been spotted. But the shots were zipping up at the crag, stitching puffs of dust across the bare rock.
There was a squall of pain and the firing ceased abruptly. Mkoll peered out and tried to see what was going on. The squad of Blood Pact warriors, urged on by their officer, was scrambling up through the rocks more urgently, and all of them had started firing up at the crag.
Mkoll put his knife away. There was no more time for subtlety.
He rested his rifle across a sloping rock and took aim. A Blood Pact trooper came into view, bounding from boulder to boulder. He rose up to fire his weapon and Mkoll took him out with a single shot. The trooper dropped back off the boulder.
Confusion seized the enemy squad. They’d all heard the shot and seen their comrade fall. They started shouting at one another and firing randomly. Mkoll rotated away from his firing position, scampered down a gap between two large stone blocks, and aimed again. He got a decent line on one of the remaining enemy troopers, but the man dropped out of sight as Mkoll fired and the shot went wide. Las-fire suddenly scuffed and pinged across Mkoll’s cover. He was pinned. They had an angle on him from two sides.
He slid down into the shadows and began to crawl. Shots slammed and thukked off the rocks above him. A deflected las-bolt whined past his face. Mkoll switched on his intervox and began to wind the tuning control. It took him about thirty seconds to find the channel the Blood Pact was using.
The officer’s hoarse barks filled his ears. He translated slowly. His fluency in the Archenemy tongue had diminished somewhat since the long stay on Gereon. Something about “…more than one fugitive. Find them both or I’ll…”
Some visceral threat followed that Mkoll was happy not to translate, as it involved trench axes and fingers.
“Voi shett d’kha jehlna, dooktath!” Mkoll voxed, and stood up. The officer and the three other troopers were all looking the other way. No surprise, considering someone had just told them “Look and take heed, there’s one of them behind you, you ignorant rectums!”, although rather more colloquially.
Mkoll shot the officer in the back of the head, retrained his aim, and killed one of the troopers too, before the officer had even hit the ground. The other two wheeled around and opened fire. One dropped, mysteriously, of his own accord, as if he had slipped over. Mkoll flattened the last one with a spray of shots.
The pintle-mounted cannon started to blast fire out across the rocks. The half-track’s engine was revving furiously, and black exhaust coughed out of the tail pipes, as if the driver was in a sudden hurry to leave.
Mkoll took aim. The range wasn’t good, but he was no slouch. He squeezed the trigger and held it down, pumping half a dozen shots at the half-track. The first few kissed the bodywork and bent the small shield plate fixed to a bracket around the cannon housing. The fifth or sixth bolt hit the gunner in the head and smacked him back out of the vehicle. The half-track jolted and started to move, its track sections squirming up clouds of dust as it turned. Mkoll stood up and raked the driver’s door and windshield with shots. The vehicle lurched, slewed on, and lurched again before coming to a halt. Its engine over-revved wildly as if a deadweight was pressing on the throttle. Then it stalled and the engine died away with an unhealthy clatter.
>
Silence. Mkoll picked his way through the rocks, checking the bodies of the dead and stealing their ammunition. He found one he hadn’t killed, though the manner of the warrior’s death was quite evident.
Mkoll stopped moving. Slowly, he raised his hands. He knew instinctively that someone was aiming a weapon at his back.
“Eszrah?” he whispered.
“Hwat seyathee, sidthe?” asked the voice behind him.
IV
Mkoll turned slowly. Eszrah ap Niht stood behind him, his reynbow aimed.
The Nihtgane was the colour of Jago. His clothing and the wode on his face had absorbed the pale grey of the bad rock somehow. Eszrah had employed some camouflage technique that Mkoll would have paid real money to learn.
“It’s me,” Mkoll said. “Histye.”
Eszrah nodded. “Histye, sidthe,” he acknowledged. His aim did not stir.
“You’ve always call me that,” Mkoll said. “I don’t understand your language the way Ven did. What does it mean?”
“Ghost,” Eszrah replied.
Mkoll smiled. “You don’t have to point that at me, soule,” he said.
“Cumenthee taek Eszrah backwey,” Eszrah replied, maintaining his aim.
“No,” said Mkoll.
“Cumenthee sidthe, cumenthee taek Eszrah bye Rawne his wyrd.”
“For Rawne? You think he ordered me to come and get you?” Mkoll shook his head. “No, soule, no, no. That’s not why I’m here.”
“No?” Eszrah echoed. “Seyathee no?”
“I’ve come for the sword,” Mkoll said, gently pointing to the weapon lashed to the partisan’s back. “It wasn’t yours to take, my friend. It belongs to the regiment.”
Eszrah slowly lowered the reynbow. “Eszrah’s ytis.”
“No, it isn’t.”