“Ours?” Merrt asked.
“Only Varl could be dumb enough to bring his platoon in front of ours, and he’s on the eastern limit. No. Let’s go.”
Corbec raised his gun to firing position, heard nine other safeties hum off. “For Tanith! For the Emperor! For us!” he bellowed.
Las-fire volleyed across the water of the lagoon and figures at the far end fell and started. Some dropped into the water, face down; others knelt for cover in the tree roots of the bank and returned fire. Laser shots echoed and returned across the water course. The lowest bolts cut furrows as they flew across the water. Others steamed as they hit the liquid or exploded sodden, decomposing bark.
Others hit flesh, or cut through armour, and figures tumbled down the far bank, sliding into the water or being arrested by root systems. Merrt made three priceless head shots before a stray return took him in the mouth and he dropped, face down and gurgling, into the ooze of the lagoon.
Corbec bellowed into his vox-bead that contact had been made and that he was engaging. Then he set his lasgun for full auto-fire and ploughed into the water, his finger clenching the trigger.
One for Merrt. Two. Three. Four. Not enough. Not even half enough.
“Second platoon has engaged!” Comms-Officer Raglon reported quickly to Gaunt.
“Ahead now!” Gaunt ordered, urging the men of First forward through the shin-deep water along the glade bed. His chainsword was in his hand and purring. They could hear the close shooting, harsher and more immediate than the distant thunder of the mysterious war they were approaching: Corbec’s platoon, fighting and firing. But the source was unspecified, remote. Gaunt damned the thickness and false echoes of the glades. Why was this place so impossibly confused?
Las-fire spat across the glades at the First platoon. Lowen fell, cut through and smouldering. Raglon went down too, a glancing burn to his cheek. Gaunt hauled the vox-caster man to his feet and threw him into cover behind a thick root branch.
“All right?”
“I’ll live,” returned the comms-officer, dabbing the bloody, scorched weal along the side of his face with a medicine swab.
The enemy fire was too heavy to charge against. Gaunt fell his platoon into cover and they began to return fire with drilled, careful precision. They loosed their las-rounds down the funnel of the glade, and the salvos that came back at them were loose and unfocused. Gaunt could see the position of the enemy from their muzzle flashes. They were badly placed and poorly spaced.
He ordered his men up, searching for a rousing command. None came but for: “First platoon… like you’re the First and Only! Kill them!”
It would do. It would do.
Third platoon froze, half at a hand gesture from Rawne, half at the sudden sounds of fighting from elsewhere in the glades. They settled in low, in the dark green shadows of the canopy, white eyes staring up from dark camo-paint at every ripple of sound. Feygor wiped a trickle of sweat off his cheek. Larkin tracked around with his custom rifle, hunting the trees around them with his night-scope. Wheln chewed at his lower lip, eyes darting. Caffran was poised like a statue, gun ready.
“To the left,” Rawne hissed, indicating with a finger, “fighting there. No further than two hundred metres.”
Just behind him, Milo jerked a thumb off to the right. “And to the right, sir. A little further off.” His voice was a whisper.
Feygor was about to silence the impudence with a fist, but Rawne raised a hand and nodded, listening. “Sharp ears, boy. He’s right. The echoes are confusing, but there is a second engagement.”
“All around us, then… What about our turn?” Feygor breathed.
Rawne could feel Feygor’s itching impatience. The waiting, the fething anticipation, was often harder than the fighting itself.
“We’ll find our fight soon enough.” Rawne slid out his silver dagger — given to him by Gaunt, Emperor damn his soul!—the blade dulled with fire-soot, and clipped it into the lugs under his lasgun’s muzzle. His men fixed their own knives as bayonets in response.
“Let’s keep the quiet and the surprise as long as we have it,” Rawne told them, and raised them to move on.
There was the sound of water, drizzling. The spitting noise almost blocked out the muffled fighting elsewhere. But not the distant heavy bombardment of the duelling armour.
Mkoll followed a lip of rocks, slick with black lichen, around the edge of a pool in deep shadow. A skein of water fell from a mossy outcrop thirty metres above, frothing the plunge pool. It was as humid and dark as a summer night in this dim place.
Mkoll heard movement, a skittering of rocks high above at the top of the falls. Cover was scant, so without hesitation he slid off the lip of stone into the water, sinking down to his neck, his lasgun held up in one hand at ear level, just above the surface. With fluid precision, he glided under the shadow of the rock, moving behind the churning froth of the cataract.
Shadows moved along the top of the rock above him. Fifteen, perhaps twenty warriors. He caught their scent: the spicy, foul reek of something barely human. He heard low, clipped voices crackle back and forth via helmet intercoms, speaking a language that he was thankful he could not understand. Mkoll felt his guts vice involuntarily. It wasn’t fear of the enemy, or of death; it was fear of what the enemy was. Their nature. Their abomination.
The water seemed glass-cold around him. His limbs were deadening. But hot sweat leaked down his face. Then they were gone.
Mkoll waited a full two minutes until he was sure. Then he crawled up out of the water and padded off silently in the direction from which his enemy had come.
Seventh platoon came out of a deep grove into sudden sunlight and even more sudden gunfire. Three of Sergeant Lerod’s men were down before he had time to order form and counter. Enemy fire stripped the trees all around, pulverising bark and foliage into sap mist and splinters. The enemy had at least two stub guns and a dozen las-weapons in cover on the far side of the narrow creek.
Lerod bellowed orders in the whistling flashes of the exchange, moving backwards and firing from the hip on auto. Two of his men had made good cover and were returning hard. Others fought for places with him. T’argin, the vox-operator, was hit twice in the back and fell sideways, his twitching corpse held upright, like a puppet, in a drapery of moss-creepers.
A las-round stung Lerod’s thigh. He knelt helplessly, then dropped to his belly in desperation, blasting up into the trees. His wild fire hit something — a weapon power-pack, perhaps — and a seething sheet of flame rushed out of the far creek bank, stripping and felling trees and tossing out two blackened bodies which cartwheeled in the air and fell into the creek bed. Pin-pointing Lerod as the source of this little victory, the unseen stubbers traversed and sent stitching lines of firepower down the earth trail where he sprawled.
He saw them in a split second: the twin lines of ferocious tracers etching their way across the loam to slice him into the ground. There was nothing he could do… no time. He closed his eyes.
Lerod opened them again. By some miracle, both lines of fire had missed him, passing either side of his prone form.
He began to laugh at the craziness of it and rolled into the cover of trees a few metres to the left, exhorting his surviving company with renewed vigour to give back and give hard. He felt jubilant, like he had on the founding fields below Tanith Magna, before the Toss. He had never thought he would have that feeling again.
With bitter resentment, Corbec pulled the Second back from the lagoon where they were stymied. They were outgunned and partly circled. The Tanith fell back, quickly and silently into the trees, leaving tripwires and tube rounds in their wake.
A quick vox-exchange brought the Second round alongside the first platoon and Gaunt himself, holding the line of a wide creek.
“Thick as flies!” Corbec yelled to Gaunt as his men reinforced the first. “Big numbers of them, determined too!”
Gaunt nodded, directing his men forward a metre at a time trying to
out-mark and topple the enemy possession of the fat-bank.
Explosions crackled through the trees in the direction of Corbec’s retreat as the advancing foe tripped the first of the mines. Gaunt cursed. This terrain was meant to give the Ghosts the advantage with their stealth skills, but the enemy was everywhere, as if milling and confused. And though that meant they were not working to a cohesive plan, it also meant the larger enemy force was splintered, unpredictable and all around them.
Raglon was firing from cover and Gaunt ducked in behind him, waving Corbec over. Corbec sprinted across the open ground, his tunic and face splattered with pulverised leaf flecks and sap. He looked like the Old Man of the Woods in the traditional least of Leaves, back home on Tanith, whe—
Gaunt froze, startled and confused. Back home on Tanith! What tricks was his mind playing now? He’d never heard of any Feast of the Leaves, yet it had seemed to bob up from his memory as a truth. For a moment, he could even smell the sugared nal-fruit as they roasted in their charcoal ovens.
“What’s up, sir?” Corbec asked, trying to squeeze his bulk into the scant cover as las-rounds whipped around them.
Gaunt shook his head. “Nothing,” he pulled his data-slate from the pocket of his leather coat and plugged the short lead into the socket at the base of the vox-link on Raglon’s back. Then he tapped his clearance into the small board of rune-marked keys, and main battle-data began to display on his slate, direct from General Thoth’s Leviathan command base.
Gaunt selected an overall tactical view so he and Corbec could take in the state of the battle.
The Tanith were shown as a thin, vulnerable line, static and held along the main watercourse. To either side of them, heavier regiments and armoured units were making greater headway, but these too were slow and foundering. The Volpone were pushing from the east, with massive artillery support, but the Trynai Sixth and Sixteenth were pinned down and slowly being slaughtered.
“Teth, but it’s bad…” Corbec muttered. “This whole push is grinding to a halt.”
“We’ll have to see if we can improve matters,” Gaunt returned, solemn and occupied. He wound the dial to bring up a specific display of the Ghosts’ struggling advance. All of the platoons were essentially halted and most engaged in heavy fire. Lerod’s unit was taking the brunt of it. Rawne’s, Gaunt noticed, had so far failed to engage.
“Have they got the luck?” Corbec asked.
“Or are they not trying?” Gaunt said aloud.
The Third edged on, passing a deep hidden pool with a glittering waterfall that fell from a crop of mossy rock. Rawne split his platoon and moved them up either side of the water.
Feygor stooped to pick up something and showed it to the major. It was a cell from a lasgun, but not Imperial issue.
“They’ve been through here.”
“And we’ve missed them!” Rawne cursed. “Teth take this bastard jungle! We’re in amongst them and we can’t see them!”
On the far side of the pool, Milo paused and turned to Caffran. “Smell that?” he whispered.
Caffran frowned. “Mud? Filthy water? Pollen?”
“This jungle doesn’t smell like it did before. I can almost smell… nal-wood.” Milo rubbed his own nose, as if he distrusted it.
Caffran was about to laugh, but then realised that he smelled it too. It was astonishing, almost overwhelming in its nostalgia. The air indeed smelt of the rich conifers of Tanith. Now he thought about it, the trees and foliage around them seemed darker, much more like the wet-land forests of his lost home-world. Nothing like the stinking, seething jungle they had known since arriving on Monthax.
“This is crazy,” he said, reaching out and touching one of the familiar trees. Milo nodded. It was crazy — and scary too.
From the cover of some low, flowering bushes, busy with insects, Mkoll could see a clearing ahead. There had been brief, heavy fighting there not more than two hours before. The earth was churned up, trees burned back and splintered. Bodies smouldered on the ground.
He crept forward to look. The dead were Chaos soldiery heavily armed and armoured in quilted red fatigues and bare steel armoured sections. Their helmets were inscribed with such horrific symbols and figures he began to dry-heave until he looked away.
Others had fallen here too, but their bodies had been removed. No Imperial unit had got this far in. There was another force at play on Monthax. Mkoll looked at the wounds on the fallen. Here and there, a helmet or metal breast-plate had been punctured, not by an energy round or explosive shell, but by something sharp and clean which had punched right through composite metal. In a tree stump behind one corpse, Mkoll found a missile embedded, a wickedly sharp metal star with razor-edged points.
With a long, slow sigh that wheezed out of his helmet’s mouthpiece, the Old One sat back on the stone seat at the centre of the Inner Place.
Like a spider at the heart of a complex web, he reached out mentally and tested the strands of his net of deceit, the cloak of confusion he had spread out around him, leagues in every direction. It was serving its purpose for now. He studied the minds caught in his net: so very many of them cruel and brutish and overflowing with the poison of Chaos. And the others, the brief human sparks. The Imperials had engaged too, he realised, coming in to try their strength against the forces of Chaos as they moved. He saw bloody fighting. He saw primitive courage. Humans always surprised him that way. Such little life-spans, so furiously exhausted. Their valour would be almost admirable if it wasn’t so futile.
Yet perhaps he could use that. To make allies was out of the question, but he could use all the time he could buy, and these determined Imperial humans, with their relentless urge to fight and win, could help him in that.
It was past time for him to play his last hand. He would work the humans, for what little good they could do, into that gambit. A final check now.
Muon Nol, Dire Avenger, master of the bodyguard, entered the Inner Place at the Old One’s mental summons. He held his great white-crested helm under one arm, the red plume crest perfect and trim, and his opalescent blue armour glittered with flecks of gold, like the heart of a cooling star. The braided tassels of his cape hung down to his waist, shrouding the weapons cinched tight to his back. His noble, ancient eyes studied the Old One. There was fatigue in his long, solemn face.
“Muon Nol: how goes the work?”
“The Way is open, lord.”
“And it must be closed. How much longer?”
Muon Nol looked down at the smooth stone floor where the shimmer of his blue armoured form was reflected. “All but the bodyguard have departed, lord. The Closing of the Way has now begun. It will be a little time yet before we are finished.”
“A little time for us, perhaps, Muon Nol. Not for the enemy. More than long enough for them, I fear. There is no time for proper closure now. We must sever.”
“Lord!”
The Old One held up his hand, the one that was bare of a glove. The sight of those ancient fingers, almost translucent with wasting age, silenced Muon Nol’s protests.
“It is not the way we wished it, Muon Nol. But it is all we can do now. Dolthe must be protected. I will now do as I told you and commit my final reserves to the last delaying tactics.”
Muon Nol dropped to his knees before the seated figure and lowered his head. “But that it should come to this, Lord Eon Kull!”
Eon Kull, the Old One, sat back with a half-smile. “I am this Way, Muon Nol. It has been my charge and duty all these measures of time. It and I are as one. If it must be shut now forever — and it must — it is only right that the book of my life shuts with it. It is appropriate and necessary. I do not see it as a failure or a loss. Neither should you. Lord Eon Kull closes his Way for the last time, for all time. Lord Eon Kull will pass away with it.”
Muon Nol raised his head. Were those tears in his dark eyes? Eon Kull considered that perhaps tears from his most faithful warrior were not out of place.
“Leave me now. Tell y
our guard to brace themselves for the mind-trauma. I will call you again when it is done, so that we may say farewell.”
the master of the bodyguard rose and began to turn.
“Muon Nol?”
“Lord?”
Eon Kull, the Old One, lifted his weapon from the rim of the stone seat. The dim light shone from the long, smooth barrel of the buanna, and twinkled on the inlay at the grip and shoulder guard, Uliowye, the Kiss of Sharp Stars. The weapon of a champion, precious and celebrated. In Eon Kull’s hands, it had won fabulous victories for Dolthe.
“Take this. Stand your place when the time comes and use it well.”
“Uliowye… I cannot, lord! She has always been yours!”
“Then she is mine to give, Muon Nol! Uliowye will not be happy to sleep through this great passing. She must kiss the foe at least once more.”
Muon Nol took the old shrieker cannon reverently. “She will not go silently, high lord. You do me a great honour.”
Eon Kull nodded and said no more, shushing Muon Nol away and out of the Inner Place. The Old One sat for a while longer, thinking of nothing but the silence to come. Then his mind woke again to the noisy hosts outside the walls, the minds milling and fighting and killing and dying in the deep jungle of Monthax around him.
Eon Kull rose and stepped down off the throne. He knelt on the cool floor of the Inner Place and unclasped the decorated purse at his belt. The contents clacked together. Eon Kull the warlock spilled them out onto the flagstones. Slivers of bone, each inscribed with a rune of power. Though this was a dim place, they shone like ice in the noon sun and he observed their pattern. Slowly, with his bare fingers, he slid them around, forming intricate conjunctions, pairing some slivers, placing other runes alone or in small piles. The arrangement was quite precise.
Eon Kull tensed as he felt the raw moaning of the warp. The psycho-reactive runes gave him access to the unbridled power of the warp-spaces, acting as keys to open the locks of his powerful mind to the warp outside.