Rawne nodded. He had one clip left for his pistol. He was already holding his warknife.
“Anyone with ammo left, send them back to defend the field station for as long as possible. There are men there we can’t move. Everyone else digs in. Tell them to spread out and go deep into the place. Find a corner, a nook, a hiding place, and stay there until something comes their way that they can kill.”
Obel saluted and turned to spread the instructions to his men.
“Beltayn!” Rawne roared. Below him, the vox-officers were packing up the last of the casters. “Get them all clear, now!” Rawne yelled.
“Yes, sir!”
“Kolea?”
“Rawne?” Kolea replied over the link. His signal was patchy, and washed out by lots of background noise.
“How does it stand?”
“Lost east four, five and seven. It’s hand to hand in the tunnels and getting worse. They’re pouring in. Any word from topside?”
“Negative,” said Rawne. The signals from Kamori and the other officers running the cliff repulse had gone ominously quiet about six minutes earlier.
Rawne looked up at the deep stone vault of the base chamber, the vast wooden staircase rising like a mature nalwood in its centre, its landings extending into the adjacent hallways on each level like branches. Ghosts were running in all directions, fleeing into the house, carrying packs of supplies, caster-sets and wounded comrades. They were heading for bolt-holes, for sub cellars and attics, for corridors and stairwells where they could make their final stands, alone or in small groups, stabbing their straight silvers in defiance at death as it overran the house at the end of the world. Whatever corner of Hinzerhaus they went to, Rawne hoped they would find endings to their lives that were as quick as they were brave. One thing was certain: none of them would find a way out.
There was no more time for reflection. The vocal roar of the enemy outside threatened to tear down the house all on its own.
Flames scoured into the base chamber from the tunnel. On the lower steps, Mkfeyd, Mosark and Vril were caught and engulfed. Their thrashing forms crashed backwards down the stairs. Flames caught at the wooden staircase and scorched the stained brown floor panels. An abandoned voxcaster caught light and blew up.
“Move!” Rawne yelled. “Move!”
Another belch of flame came rushing into the base chamber. Then the first of the Blood Pact flame-troopers appeared, sooty devils in heavy smocks wielding long firelances. Storm troops followed them, cracking shots up into the landings. Wooden steps splintered. Railings exploded like matchwood. Struck by las-fire, a Ghost plunged from an upper landing.
Rawne turned and fired his pistol at the invading figures. The last remaining troopers around him, Beltayn included, opened fire with their handguns as they retreated up the staircase. Rawne’s first shots clipped a flame-trooper, and he went over, his lance thrashing out of control like a fire-drake, scorching several warriors and forcing them back.
Blood Pact gunfire filled the air with ribbons and darts of light. Tokar, standing right beside Rawne, fell backwards, the top of his skull blown off. Folore collapsed on the first landing, almost cut in two by autofire. Pabst was hit so hard he smashed backwards through the landing rail and dropped out of sight.
“Get back! Back!” Rawne shouted. He scrambled back up the staircase towards the second landing, pushing men ahead of him. “Out of the chamber! Out of the chamber!”
Creach fell on his hands and knees, blood gushing from his mouth. Beltayn tried to pick him up and carry him on. A hail of shots cut them both down.
“Bastards!” Rawne bawled, and fired down into the advancing raiders. He reached Beltayn and Creach. The latter was dead. Beltayn had been hit in the side and thigh, and his uniform was soaked with blood. He blinked up at Rawne, his face peppered with blood spots.
“Something’s awry,” he said.
“You’ve been shot you silly bastard,” Rawne told him. He started to hoist Beltayn up.
“Major!” Rattundo yelled from a few steps higher. The Belladon was firing down over Rawne’s head.
Rawne swung round, Beltayn over his shoulder, and saw the Blood Pact storm troops thundering up the flight behind him. He shot the first one in the belly, and the second one in the hand and the forehead. The third fired his carbine from the hip. A round creased Rawne’s cheek with stunning force. Behind him, Rattundo took the full force of the burst and fell against the stair rail.
Rawne fired again, but his pistol was finally dead. With a bellow of fury, he hurled it at the storm trooper and bounced the heavy sidearm off the man’s face with enough force to knock him over.
Hands grabbed at Rawne and Beltayn from behind. Rerval, Nehn and Garond dragged them back up the staircase to the third landing. Bonin and Leyr, both of them firing a laspistol in each hand, hammered shots down the steps to cover them.
They made it into a side hallway and began to head in the direction of the field station. Nehn and Rerval took Beltayn from Rawne and carried him between them. The rattle of gunfire rolled after them, interspersed with the crump of grenades and the rasp of flamers. The air filled with the stench of burning.
They’re going to burn the place down around us, Rawne thought, burn us like rats. And all that’ll be left of us will be dry skulls in a dusty valley.
“Keep going,” Corbec said.
Rawne stopped and turned.
“Come the feth on, major!” Bonin yelled. “What are you waiting for?”
Rawne stared into Corbec’s twinkling eyes.
“You’re just a ghost, he said.
“No such thing as just a Ghost,” Corbec replied.
Then Corbec wasn’t there. Las-bolts whipped along the hallway past Rawne. He started to run after the others. Blood Pact storm troopers thundered down the hallway behind him, yelling and firing.
Rawne saw Daur, Haller and Caober ahead of him. They were facing him, blocking the hallway.
“Back!” Rawne yelled as he closed on them. “Get back!”
“Get down,” Daur replied.
* * * * *
IV
The parked vehicles at the edge of the encampment went up in a satisfyingly dramatic whoosh of flame. In the seconds that followed, the site went into a frenzy. Enemy troopers and support crews ran in all directions, shouting and assembling extinguisher gear. The glare from the blazing vehicles lit the whole camp and threw long, leaping shadows. A fourth vehicle caught fire as flames raced along the fuel-soaked dust.
In all the commotion, few of the rushing enemy personnel noticed that some of them were falling down. Iron darts shot silently from the shadows. A trooper fell on his face. A mechanic with a hose tumbled onto his side. A junior officer flopped back into the side-screen of a tent.
Eszrah kept moving. Weaving from point of cover to point of cover, he fired his quarrels one at a time and made every one count. Where possible, he reclaimed his darts, wrenching them out of dead flesh, and slotted them back into his reynbow’s barrel. He ran past a large tent, pausing briefly to fire two bolts through the backlit canvas. The silhouetted men inside convulsed and went sprawling.
Eszrah kicked over braziers as he went, rolling the sparking, sputtering cans onto ground sheets and into the hems of tents where the spilled coals ignited the canvas. A warrior with a trench axe came barrelling out of one tent, and took a wild swing at the Nihtgane. Eszrah thumped a quarrel into his sternum at point-blank range.
Eszrah ran on. Behind him, another large blast split the night.
Mkoll was employing the first of his tube charges. He took out a storage tent with it and then ran on in the direction of the vox mast. Every time an enemy figure appeared in his path, he fired snapshots from the hip, knocking them down. A few rounds of fire came his way as the enemy began to gather their wits.
Mkoll ducked behind a row of tents. At each one, he slit the back sheet open with his bayonet and shot at anyone inside. Halfway through this surgical, methodical exercise, Blood Pac
t troopers appeared at the end of the tent row and opened fire on him.
Las-rounds zipped past him. Mkoll leapt into a tent through the slit he had just ripped. Inside, an officer with a gruesome mass of scar-tissue for a face was reaching for his bolt pistol. Mkoll broke his head with the butt of his rifle and kept running. More las-rounds scorched indiscriminately through the flapping canvas wall behind him.
He came out through the front of the tent. A hard round hit him in the left shoulder and knocked him over. Mkoll rolled and raked off a quick burst of fire on auto that did for the pair of enemy troopers rushing at him.
He got up again. Several tents were alight. Random shouting and blurts of gunfire echoed around the camp. He heard pursuers crashing in through the tent behind him, and tossed his grenade in through the flaps. There was a flash and the sides of the tent bulged and tore. Smoke gusted out through the rips.
He had three tube-charges left. Enough for the vox mast, he thought.
The encampment’s main shelters, a pair of large prefabs, lay close to the mast, which was mounted on a lashed-down field carriage platform. Mkoll reasoned that while he was still alive, he could silence both the mast and the bastard issuing orders through it.
He ran towards the prefabs. As he ran, he realised, without a shred of doubt, that something was still urging him forwards. Something was telling him the prefabs were more important than anything else.
Eszrah was out of bolts. His last shot had slain a large mechanic who had tried to attack him with a sledgehammer. Eszrah dropped the reynbow and drew Gaunt’s sword. It felt clumsy and unfamiliar. Swords had never been part of his arsenal. Still running, he lit the blade and felt it throb with power. An enemy trooper emerged from behind a burning tent, and Eszrah cut him down without breaking stride. The blade went clean through the man’s torso. Two more troopers appeared, and one saw the partisan in time to squeeze off a shot with his rifle. The round ripped through Eszrah’s left side just above the waist. Before either of them could take another shot, he was into them, swinging the bright blade. The first slice cut a rifle in half and the second decapitated its owner. Eszrah shoulder barged the other man onto the ground and ran him through. As a swordsman, he made up in efficiency what he lacked in finesse.
Shots ripped past him. The air was full of streaming smoke. Eszrah slashed open the side of a tent, ran through it, and cut his way out of the far wall. The fully armed warrior standing on the other side turned in surprise and Eszrah chopped the blade down through the crown of his helmet. The blade slid out easily. The warrior, split in two to the breastbone, folded up in a heap. One more for the bludtoll.
Eszrah saw a large, prefab structure ahead of him. The wound in his side was bleeding profusely. He didn’t slow down. Slowing down just gave the enemy a better target.
He stormed into the prefab.
It was a long hut, a command space, filled with stowage chests, collapsible furniture and chart tables. Brass lamps hung from the support poles. A junior Blood Pact officer just inside the entrance turned in surprise to block the intruder, pulling his pistol out of its holster. Eszrah delivered a scything blow with both hands that sent the officer crashing backwards over a campaign chest. A second junior officer, yelling out in dismay, came at Eszrah with a punch-grip dagger and effectively ran onto Eszrah’s turning blade.
The encampment commander held the noble rank of damogaur. He had absolute control over eight sirdar brigades, and answered only to the etogaur of his consanguinity, and the Gaur who ruled above them all.
He was a being of massive stature. Men only advanced through the ranks of the Pact if they were capable of fighting off any rivals. He rose from his seat at the far end of the hut and faced Eszrah. His crimson battledress was reinforced with steel plates and adorned with gold frogging and hundreds of pillaged and defaced Imperial medals. His face was hidden behind a smiling grotesk of polished silver.
The damogaur reached for the nearest weapon. It was a huge, two-handed chainsword, a type popularly known in the Guard as an “eviscerator”.
Activating his weapon, the damogaur thundered down the hut, bellowing the challenge cry of his consanguinity.
Eszrah held his ground and brought the power sword up defensively.
In seconds, the partisan realised that while a good sword cuts well, a man with no proper schooling in bladecraft could never hope to best a formally trained swordsman.
Eszrah ap Niht had reached the end of the daeda waeg.
V
The lead vehicles of the Cadogus Fifty-Second mechanised squadron rocked to a halt, their engines running. Dust spumed around, glowing like smoke in the headlamps. An officer jumped down from the tailboard of a Salamander command vehicle and ran forward.
“Commissar Hark?”
“Yes,” Hark called back, limping into the glare of the headlights, shielding his eyes. He could see that the lead vehicles were just the tip of a significant armoured column.
“Colonel Bacler, third mech, Cadogus Fifty-Second. I didn’t think we’d find you alive.”
“You were looking for me?” Hark asked.
“We were advised your bird had come down in this vicinity, sir. Elikon Command diverted us this way in the hope of finding survivors.”
“I’ve got injured with me,” said Hark.
“Medics to the front!” Bacler yelled into his voice mic.
“It wasn’t survivors Elikon hoped you’d find, colonel,” said Hark. “We’re carrying critical documents in paper form.”
“I understand, commissar,” said Bacler. “Did any of it survive the crash?”
Teams of corpsmen were running forwards to help Criid and Twenzet. “Those kit bags with my people,” said Hark. “We managed to get that much out of the wreck.”
“My orders are to get it back to Elikon as fast as possible.”
“Carry on,” Hark told him. Bacler ordered some troopers to gather up the kit bags.
“What’s the state of things, colonel?” Hark asked.
Bacler shrugged. “In the balance. The Cadogus has slammed up the Altid passes and blocked the enemy in three zones. It’s tooth and nail in all of them. There’s a hell of a tank fight going on about six kilometres north of us. That’s where we were heading when the call to divert came in. This whole valley is crawling with rogue enemy units that have slipped past the main line. As you discovered.”
“What’s your strength?” Hark asked.
“Forty main, twenty-five light, plus a thousand troops in carriers and sanctioned support. It was the sanctioned support that saved you, you realise?”
“Yes,” said Hark. “I understood that’s what it was.”
“I’ll split the group up and send most of it on down the valley to the sharp end,” Bacler went on. “A fast, light section under my personal command will carry you and your documents back to Elikon.”
“Thank you,” said Hark. “What about Hinzerhaus?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know anything about that. I believe there was a relief section on its way there as of this morning, but I can’t confirm.”
Hark was silent for a while. He felt light-headed and unworthy. The chances were suddenly good he would get out of the zone alive. That didn’t feel right, not when the Ghosts… wouldn’t.
“Are you all right, commissar?” Bacler asked, frowning at him.
“Yes. I just remembered. It is with regret I have to inform you that your Major Berenson was killed in the line of duty.”
“Yes, that was a bloody shame,” Bacler replied.
Hark nodded towards the blackened shell of the Valkyrie on the slope behind them. “I wanted to pull him clear, but it was too late,” he said. Bacler looked at him oddly.
“Did I say something wrong, colonel?” Hark asked.
“Major Berenson was lost when his Valkyrie was brought down en route to Hinzerhaus five days ago,” said Bacler.
VI
Daur, Haller and Caober raised the weighty, antique weapons they w
ere holding and aimed them. Rawne threw himself flat against the hallway wall. The three men fired.
The wall guns made noises like the amplified shrieks of eagles. Each one spat a fat, continuous beam of white searing light. At the far end of the hallway, the beams struck the Blood Pact troopers charging them.
The enemy figures weren’t simply hit, they were destroyed. Bodies vaporised in clouds of atomised tissue. The streaming beams blew clean through the front rank, explosively dismembering them, and atomised the row behind.
The three men stopped firing and the beams vanished. “Reload!” Daur yelled. They opened the heavy locks of the old weapons, ejecting the spent, black pebbles inside, and dropped in glowing white lumps they’d taken from their pockets. The locks snapped shut. Rawne had scrambled in behind the three men.
“What the feth?” he stammered.
Stunned for a moment by the fury of the first strike against them, the Blood Pact were pressing their assault again, blasting wildly as they poured into the hallway.
“Fire!” Daur ordered.
The wall guns shrieked again. Bright beams flashed the length of the hall and bodies disintegrated in puffs of wet matter. The hallway air misted with blood particles.
Rawne leaned back against the brown satin wall, breathing hard. Behind the firing line, he saw dozens of other Ghosts from G Company moving forwards with wall guns in their hands. Other troopers, in paired teams, had fashioned slings out of their camo-capes and were lugging four or five wall guns at a time into the nearest stairwell like stretcher bearers. Guardsmen with water cans and cooking pots followed them. The pots were full of shining white pebbles.
“How did you get them to work?” Rawne asked.
Daur stepped out of the line and gestured for the nearest trooper to take his place. Merrt hurried forwards. 034TH hung on its sling over his shoulder. He took his place next to Caober and raised the massive wall gun in his hands.
Merit squeezed the trigger and felt the heavy, pleasing kick of the old weapon for the first time.