“Yes you are.”
Lightning struck a tree nearby, causing Bluebloods to run yelping for cover. The detonation was like a slap in the face for Gaunt. His mind cleared, sober.
“Don’t play your mind tricks with me, inquisitor,” he snarled.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do. Twisting a feeling of jealousy in me against Corbec. And the images you were broadcasting, feth is one of the Tanith tree-gods. Not some barbaric euphemism. I’ll work with you, but not for you.”
Lilith smiled solemnly and held up her hands. “Fair point I’m sorry, Gaunt. I’m used to making allies where I can’t find them, using my powers to twist wills to my purpose. I suppose it’s strange for me to have a willing comrade.”
“Such is the way of the inquisitor. And I thought the commissar’s path was lonely.”
She stared into his eyes and another smile lit her pale face. Gaunt wondered if this was another of her guiles, but it seemed genuine.
“We both need to find and conquer the source of this,” Gaunt told her, gesturing up at the storm. “We both want victory here. You’ll find me a much more able ally if I am in full command of my powers, rather then spellbound by you.”
She nodded. “We both want victory here,” she said, repeating him. “But that’s not all I want,” she added, mysteriously.
Gaunt was about to pick her up on it when she shivered, pushing back her cowl and running a hand through her fine hair. The commissar-colonel realised how strained she looked.
“This storm… it’s really hard for you, isn’t it?”
“I’m at my limit, Ibram. The warp is all around me, tugging at my mind. I’m sorry about before. Desperation.”
Gaunt stepped towards her, ushering her towards Mkoll. “You said you liked to make allies where you couldn’t find them. Why so hard on Gilbear?”
She grinned. “He loves it. Are you kidding? A powerful woman ordering him around. He wants me so bad he’d die for me.”
Now Gaunt grinned. “You’re a scary woman, Inquisitor Lilith.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“Just promise you won’t use such base tactics on me.”
“I promise,” she said. “I don’t think I need to.” Gaunt suddenly became aware of how long he had been looking into her eyes. He broke the gaze. “Let’s talk to Mkoll.”
“Let me.”
“No,” he corrected. “Let us.”
Gilbear walked the picket in the slicing rain. Invisible amphibians croaked and rattled in the wet gloom. By a fold of trees, watching the left flank, he found two Tanith Ghosts occupied in trying to light smokes from a damp tinder box.
Gilbear pounced at them, kicking one in the gut and punching the other over onto his back.
“What is this?” He seethed. “Are you watching the flank? No? You’re too busy lighting up and joking!”
One of the men protested and Gilbear kicked him again. In the face, the ribs, the kidneys as he went down. He kept kicking.
“There’s a universe of hate out there, and you can’t be bothered to watch for it!”
The other Ghost had risen to defend his fallen, balled-up comrade, and Gilbear turned on him, punching him out, then laying in with the boot.
A big hand caught the Blueblood major by the shoulder.
“There’s a universe of hate waiting in here too,” Corbec said.
He dropped Gilbear with a headbutt that split the Blueblood’s forehead. Then Corbec whaled in with two hard punches to the mouth and chest. The latter was deflected by the carapace segments.
Gilbear sprawled in the mud, pulling Corbec down on him in a threshing frenzy.
“You want me, Ghost? You got me!” he growled.
“Not before time,” Corbec agreed, snapping Gilbear’s head backwards with his fist. “It’s been a long while coming. That was for Cluggan, rest his soul.”
Gilbear folded his legs up and propelled Corbec headlong over him with a kick. The big Ghost slammed down against a tree stump, upside down, the sharp stump-ends raking his back.
Now Gilbear was on his feet, fists balled. Corbec leapt up to meet him, throwing off his cape, fury in his eyes. They edged around the muddy clearing in the slanting rain, water washing off them and sluicing the blood from their wounds. Punch and counter-punch, followed by bellow and charge. The two beaten Ghosts were up on their feet, cheering and jeering. Others, Ghosts and Bluebloods both, congregated in a ring as the two officers battled by lightning flash.
Gilbear was a boxer, a heavyweight champion back on Volpone, with a stinging right hook and a terrifying capacity to take punishment. Corbec was a wrestler, Pryze County victor three years running, at the Logging Show. Gilbear bounced on spread legs, throwing humiliating punches. Corbec came in low, soaking them up, clawing his hands around Gilbear’s throat.
With a roar, Corbec drove in under the whistling fists and slammed Gilbear backwards through a break of trees. They tumbled together down a short incline into a creek bed swollen with storm water. The Ghost and Volpone audience hovered at the rim of the creek, looking down and chanting.
Gilbear rose first, black with the muddy water, and swung a punch. It kissed air. Corbec exploded up out of the flood, greased jet-black with liquid mud, and doubled Gilbear with a low punch to the gut, then sent him over in a spray of silver droplets with an upper cut to the chin.
Gilbear wasn’t done. He came back out of the water like a surfacing whale, as loud and vicious as the storm which quaked the sky above, and knocked Corbec back two, three steps with blow after blow. Corbec’s mouth was split open and his nose broken, flooding his beard with blood.
Corbec ducked in low, throwing punches before he shoulder-charged Gilbear off his feet. Corbec lurched the massive Blueblood backwards on his shoulder, legs dangling, then twisted and threw him over himself in a perfect wrestling move, slamming Gilbear down into the creek on his back. Corbec kicked him for good measure.
Trooper Alhac, a Blueblood, was pounding his hands together wildly until he realised his side had lost. He was about to turn his venom on the cheering Tanith beside him when the undergrowth to his left flickered.
Alhac froze. So did the Ghost he was about to strike.
Something black and abominable grew out of the jumping lights in the thicket.
Alhac died, cut into streaks of evaporating flesh. The Ghost beside him perished the same way a second later. Then another Blueblood, skinned in an instant. The other Ghosts and Bluebloods who had been cheering the fight from the creek edge fled in panic.
“Oh feth!” Corbec said, dripping with ooze, looking up.
“What?” asked Gilbear, rising beside him.
“That!”
The creature was like a dog, if a dog could be the size of a horse, if a horse could move as fast as a humming bird. A red, arched-backed quadruped with long, triple jointed limbs and a skin-less, blistered pelt. Its skull was huge and short, blunt, with the lower jaw extending beyond the upper, and multiple rows of triangular saw-teeth in each. It had no eyes. A warp creature, loosed from the storm and hunting for Chaos.
“Oh feth!” Corbec spat.
“Great Vulpo!” barked Gilbear.
The dog-thing leapt down into the creek and began to pound towards them. Corbec and Gilbear turned and ran as fast as they could through the root-twisted waterway. It was right behind them, baying.
The thing leapt on Gilbear and dragged him down, ripping at his carapace armour with its tusks. Strips of armaplas shredded off his shoulder panels. Gilbear cried out, helpless.
Corbec leapt astride the warp-beast, pulling its head back by the mane and plunging his Tanith dagger into its throat, foetid purple blood squirted from the wound and the thing opened its mouth to howl and squeal.
“Now, Blueblood! Now!” Corbec shouted, riding the beast, pulling its skull back.
Gilbear pulled a frag grenade from his belt and threw it straight into the beast’s mouth, right down its g
ullet past the wincing pink larynx.
Gilbear threw himself down and Corbec propelled himself clear.
The dog-thing exploded from within, showering both them and the creek bed with stinking meat.
Corbec pulled himself up out of the fluid muck at the bottom of the watercourse. He looked across at Gilbear, sat with his back against the creek wall, eyes straining.
“You all right?” Corbec gurgled.
Gilbear nodded.
“About time we called a truce, eh?”
Gilbear nodded again. They both got up, unsteady and filmed with mud and flecks of putrid meat. “A truce. Yes. A truce…” Gilbear was still stunned. “For now.”
“The ruin, sir, the one I glimpsed before. I found it again.” Mkoll’s voice was soft and brittle, his breath laboured. He sat on a fallen log, sipping alternately from a water canteen and a sacra flask that Bragg had manifested. He was bandaged and caked in mud. Gaunt crouched by him, listening carefully. Mkoll seemed a little spooked by Lilith, but she read this response quickly and held back so Gaunt could talk to his valued scout.
“What is it?” asked Gaunt.
Mkoll shrugged. “No idea. Big, old, fortified. It’s on top of a mound that I don’t think is natural. Too regular. All I know is, the enemy are surrounding it thicker than sap-flies round a glucose trap.”
Gaunt felt a tingle of alarm. Not only did he know precisely what Mkoll meant, he had a brief, vivid mental flash of the long-bodied insects themselves, swarming around a beaker of glistening fluid on a woodsman’s hut-stoop. Insects native to Tanith. Insects he had never seen.
“Numbers?” he pressed on.
“I didn’t take a headcount,” Mkoll muttered dryly. “I was a little busy, fens of thousands is my guess. Maybe more, beyond my line of sight. The terrain was hilly, thick cover. There could have been hundreds of thousands up there.”
“What are they after?” Gaunt wondered out loud.
“I think we have to find out,” Lilith said quietly.
Gaunt rose and looked round at the inquisitor, her face in shadow from her cowl. “Before we explore the insanity of sending sixty men up against a possible force of hundreds of thousands, may I remind you that we can’t even find this place? Our locators and auspex are screwed, my scouts can’t tell one direction from another, feth, Mkoll’s my best, and he admits he only found it again by accident.”
Lilith nodded. “There is a deep level of misdirection and concealment in this storm. I don’t know the answer.”
“I could lead you there again,” Mkoll said darkly from behind them.
Gaunt turned to look at him. “You could? You claimed it was elusive before.”
Mkoll rose shakily to his feet. “That was then. I don’t know… I just feel I could find it again now. Something in my bones. It would be like… like finding my way home again.”
Gaunt looked at Lilith. “Let’s try,” she said. “Mkoll seems confident and I trust him like you do. If opposition gets too hot, we can pull out again.”
Gaunt nodded. He was about to call up Raglon and issue new orders to advance when the dull crump of a frag grenade rolled through the storm. A few moments later, lasguns and hellguns were firing, sporadic, the distinctive crack of laser fire overlapping the higher shriek of hell-shots. Gaunt scrambled down the bank, pulling out his chainsword, shouting for reports.
Sergeant Lerod was directing the men in the east flank of the picket. “Lerod?”
“Sir! There are things coming out of the storm, sir! Brutes! Creatures!”
Gaunt peered out into the dark jungle, and saw scuttling monstrosities being born out of tendrils of lightning. There was a sickening whiff of Chaos. Blueblood and Tanith guns blew the things apart as they came close.
“Warp creatures,” Lilith hissed, appearing by his side. “Manifestations of this unholy storm. Mindless, but lethal.”
Corbec staggered up, looking very much the worse for wear. He was ordering the west flank of the picket to loop back closer to the centre.
“What happened to you?” Gaunt asked sharply, seeing an equally bedraggled Gilbear moving in with a fire-team of Bluebloods.
“Bit of a fight,” Corbec said. “Some fething thing came out of the dark.”
Gaunt didn’t want to know any more. This was no time for fierce reprimands. He had to keep the whole unit tight and together. He keyed his micro-bead. “Gaunt to brigade. We’re advancing, double time. Spearhead formation. Tanith First platoon and half the Volpone unit at the point. Take your direction from Scout-Trooper Mkoll. Everyone else, watch the flanks and the rear. Inquisitor Lilith instructs that warp-spawn could appear around or among us at any time. Don’t hesitate; shoot. Sergeant Lerod, take a six-man drill and guard the back of the formation. All commanders acknowledge understanding of these orders and signal readiness.”
A chatter of responses came back swiftly. Raglon, monitoring them with the vox-caster, nodded to Gaunt that all the brigade had signalled in.
Gaunt hadn’t finished. The devoted Tanith had made his commissarial duties easy these last few years. But now they were in thick, spooked, and the company was mixed with troopers he didn’t know or even trust. Morale, discipline — the watchwords of the commissariat. He thought back to his training at the Schola Progenium, to his field apprenticeship as a cadet under Oktar. He took the speaker horn of the vox-set from Raglon.
“I won’t pretend this will be easy. But it is vital. Vital to Imperial success on this world, vital perhaps to the entire Crusade. The enemy and their ambitions will be denied, if it takes every spark of our lives and every drop of our blood. We fight for the Emperor today, fight as if we were standing at his side as his chosen bodyguard. Protect the men to your left and right as if they were the Emperor himself. Do not slacken, do not falter. Victory awaits you, and if not victory, then the glory of a brave death in service to the Golden Throne of Terra. The Emperor will provide, if you are true. His hand guides us, his eyes watch over us, and even in death he will bring us to him and we shall sit in splendour at his side beyond the Eternity Gate.
“For Lost Tanith, for Mighty Volpone, for Imperial Earth… advance!”
Like a single, lithe entity, the brigade swept up the escarpment, pushing onwards into the jagged hills as the storm shook the world around them. Blueblood and Ghost moved in perfect, trained order together, all animosities set aside. Gaunt smiled as he observed the tight drilled formation of his own, and was suitably impressed that it was matched by the bulky Volpone elite. Every now and then, las-shots sang out from the vanguard as warp-things were sighted and dispatched.
Lilith moved with him. She slid a plasma pistol out from under her cloak and charged it with a flick of her black-gloved hands. “Good speech,” she grinned at him. “Got them motivated. Oktar trained you well.”
“You’ve checked up on me. My background.”
“I’m an inquisitor, Gaunt. What do you expect? I enquire.”
“And what are you really inquiring about here on Monthax?” he asked curtly.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m no psyker, but I read people well enough. This is about more than victory here, more than the successful prosecution of psyker-deviants in our forces. You have an agenda.”
She flashed a smile at him. “No mystery, Ibram. Back on the Sanctity, I told you. Bulledin had reported back to us because it was suspected some powerful psyker component might be at work here. We thought that it was the enemy itself, that we were in for a mind-war. But now, this ruin. The foe embark on an advance, ignoring us completely, and seem hell-bent on taking that place. You’ve got to wonder why. You’ve got to believe that there’s something very valuable up there.”
“Something that caused this storm?”
She shrugged. “Or something that made them cause this storm to cover their movement towards it. But I think your guess is probably more likely.”
“And that’s what you want?”
“It’s my duty, Ibram. And I don’t
think I need to explain that concept to one of the Imperium’s best commissars.”
“Don’t try distracting me with flattery. Give me some idea what you mean by ‘something valuable’.”
“Think back to Menazoid Epsilon. I told you, I checked your background thoroughly. As an inquisitor, I got to look at some very classified reports. You know what was at stake there.”
Gaunt was wary. “You’re talking about technology? Artefacts?”
She nodded. “It could be.”
“Ancient human? Alien?”
Lilith produced something from her pocket. “Mkoll found this. He dug it out of a tree stump at a battle site just before the storm hit. You tell me what you think it means.”
She held up the metal star with the sharpened points. Gaunt stared at it with dark comprehension.
“Now you know as much as I do.”
The brigade moved down a deep defile into a tree-sheltered vale that blocked the raging storm partially for the first time. Gaunt was becoming numb with the incessant wind and rain, and knew his men must be too. It was a blessed, temporary relief to move through the deep gorge with its almost cathedral-like arches of ancient cattails and clopeas, where rain arrested by the leaf canopy simply drooled down to the ground in long, slow, sappy streams. The storm raged, muffled, far above them.
Gaunt moved up to Mkoll at the point of the formation. “Still on track?”
Mkoll nodded. “Like I said, I couldn’t lose the trail now if I wanted to.”
“Like coming home, you said,” Gaunt reminded him. Mkoll closed his eyes and saw Eiloni just ahead, beckoning him back to the farmstead. She was whispering promises of a hot supper, and of rowdy boys ready for one of their father’s fireside tales before bed. “You have no idea, commissar.”
The advancing tide of Chaos warriors only stopped when the numbers of their dead choked the passageway.
Rawne ordered his platoon back and they hauled a set of double doors closed, barring them to seal the tunnel. Milo helped Wheln swing the doors shut, his fingers tracing the heraldic badge of the Tanith Elector inscribed on the heavy nal-wood panels. He blinked, and for a second saw taller, more slender doors of polished onyx, marked with alien runes he did not understand.