Gaunt knew the Tanith fought well, but he had never seen them discharge themselves so determinedly, so brilliantly. In his heart, he couldn’t believe that this was a simple response to his motivational speech. They were fighting for something, something deep in theirs hearts, something that would not be denied.
“For Tanith! For Tanith, bless her memory!” he heard Corbec yelling as he advanced.
The cry, as it was taken up by Ghosts all around him, prompted a deep, emotional response in Gaunt. It shocked him. They were indeed fighting for Tanith… not for some memory or for a sense of vengeance. They were fighting for the love of their homeworld, of the misty cities, the darkling woodlands, the majestic seas.
He knew this because he felt it too. He had spent all of a day on Tanith before the fall, and most of that inside the dim anterooms of the Elector’s palace at Tanith Magna. But it felt as if it had been his home, something he had grown to love through years of upbringing, something that was still attainable…
With Corbec and two other Ghosts, he was the first to reach a defence ditch on the lower slopes of the mound where superior numbers of Chaos filth were turning from their assault of the ruin to repel the hind attack. Gaunt led with his chainsword, slicing the enemy apart. It seemed like he was las-proof. All opposing shots went wild. The joy of Tanith sang in his heart.
He dropped into the ditch, cutting the first aggressor before him open down the middle, then swung the whining blade left to decapitate another. In his other hand, his bolt pistol blasted down the ditch, blowing the legs off two charging ghouls with fixed bayonets. His bolter clacked empty. Corbec was beside him, bellowing, blasting with his lasgun at figures who fell and squirmed and fled down the narrow defile. To the other side, Troopers Yael and Mktea fought hand to hand with silver daggers, passionate, furious. Beyond them, Bragg, blasting with his autocannon over the ditch top.
Gaunt threw his bolter and his sword aside and grabbed the firing handles of an enemy storm-bolter with a belt feed set into the lip of the ditch. The massive gun was set on flak-board, with wire tie-downs to prevent the tripod from skating. Gaunt thumbed the trigger and swept the shuddering gun left and right, decimating the ranks of enemy advancing up the hill above him.
He felt a hand on his arm. Lilith was beside him, her face pale, her eyes full of tears.
“What?” he barked, continuing to fire.
“Can’t you feel it? You’re swept up in the storm-magic too!”
He released his hands and the drum belt rattled round on auto-feed. “Magic?”
“The web of deceit I spoke of… it’s enflamed all your men, the Bluebloods too. It’s tearing at my mind! Gaunt…!”
Involuntarily, he held her. She pushed him off after a second. “I’m all right! All right!”
“Lilith!”
“Whatever… whoever… it is up there in the ruin, they’re preying on our emotions.”
“What do you mean?”
“I… I think they want all the help they can get, Gaunt! They’ve woven a psychic spell through the storm that makes us… makes us respond by touching our deepest desires! For your Ghosts, this is Tanith… a Tanith where it’s still possible to win and save the world! For the Bluebloods, it’s Ignix Majeure, where they lost after a desperate fight! But Ibram… it’s killing me! So strong, so powerful!”
Gaunt fought to catch his breath. “W-why me? Why Tanith?”
“What?” she asked, wiping her puffy eyes.
“I’m not Tanith, but the will inside me responded that way. Why aren’t I fighting for some great cause in my own life? Why have I been living and breathing Tanith in my waking dreams all this while?”
She smiled, simply and painfully, her perfect face lit by the fire-flashes around them. “Don’t you know it, Ibram? Tanith is your cause, no matter if you were born there or not. You’ve devoted your service and life to these men, to the memory of their world.
“The fate of Tanith consumes you, as it does them, and though you’re not a true son of the forests, this magic plays on your deepest urges! You’re a Ghost, Ibram Gaunt, whether you know it or not! You’re not just their master, you’re one of them!”
Gaunt pulled off his cap and wiped brow-sweat back into his cropped hair. He was panting, painfully high on adrenaline. “This is all false?” he began.
“We’re being used. Manipulated. Driven to fight by something that touches our deepest causes.”
“Then… in the Emperor’s name, if it helps us kill the Chaos scum, let’s not deny it! Let’s use it!” Gaunt cued his micro-bead and opened a channel to his force. “Sixty men against ten thousand! The stuff of legends! Push on! Push on, for Tanith and for Ignix Majeure! Take the slope and make for the ruin!”
At the head of his wave of Bluebloods, Gilbear heard the call and screamed into the night as he emptied yet another power-pack out through the glowing muzzle of his hellgun. The Volpone took the rise, scattering enemy before them.
Lerod, who now thought himself truly immortal, led his detachment up the mound, stampeding over the panicking, splintering waves of Chaos filth.
Corbec, with Bragg firing solid lines of destruction from his heavy weapon at his side, pushed the other Ghost band up between the prongs. To either side of the Imperial advance, a hundred thousand soldiers of the foe swarmed and regrouped. But the sixty or so Imperials cut a line up through them that wouldn’t be denied.
Years later, painstakingly reconstructing the details of this assault from patchy data collected at the time, Imperial tacticians on London would be utterly unable to account for the success of the action. Even given the surprise nature of the assault, from the rear, there was no sense to the data. Simple statistics should have had Gaunt’s expeditionary force cut down to the last man, at most a half kilometre from the ruin. The tacticians would factor in charismatic leadership, tactical insight, luck… and still there was no mistake. Gaunt’s men should have been entirely slaughtered long before they reached the ruin.
But that was not the case. Gaunt drew his forces, without the loss of a single man, up to the walls of the ruin perhaps thirty minutes after they had first engaged the back of the enemy positions. They had cut through a legion of the foe who outnumbered them ten thousand to one, and attained a target area the enemy had been trying to force its way into for hours. They slew, approximately, two-point-four thousand soldiers of the enemy.
Eventually, after a prolonged analytical study, the tacticians would decide that the only explanation could be that there were no enemy units on the field that day. It was all an illusion. Gaunt had mounted an assault through open, undefended ground. Only then did the computations and the statistics and the possibilities match up.
None of them could admit that this wasn’t the case. And so, perhaps the greatest and most spectacular success of Macaroth’s great Crusade, out-classed and out-numbered but still successful, was deleted from the Imperial Annals as a phantom engagement. Such is the fate of true heroism.
There was a door: a tall, pointed arch of stone faced with stone, in the side of the smooth flank of the ruin. Gaunt grouped his force around it as relentless firepower strafed up at them from the muddled but regrouping legions of the enemy.
Gilbear intended to mine the door in the hope of blowing it open, though, as Corbec pointed out, the scorch marks on the stone facing seemed to indicate that the enemy had tried that more than once and failed.
They were about to argue the point some more when the door opened. Brin Milo stood there, looking out at them, flanked by Caffran and a spectacularly grim eldar warrior with a red plume set behind his white helmet.
The storm flashed above, still furious and wild.
“You’ve come this far,” Milo said. “Now let’s finish this.”
Sealed inside the onyx walls of the Way-Place, Gaunt and his force heard the low wailing of eldar mourners, remorsefully singing the last songs of closure.
Muon Nol faced Gaunt for a long while, until Gaunt saluted and held out
his hand.
“Ibram Gaunt.”
Nothing more need be said, Gaunt thought.
Muon Nol looked at the proffered hand, then slung Uliowye over his shoulder and clasped it.
He spoke, a bewildering slither of otherworldly language.
“You’ve just been formally worshipped as a fellow warrior,” Lilith said, stepping up. Muon Nol turned his huge gaze to look at her.
“I am Lilith, of the Imperial Inquisition,” she stated. Muon Nol, a head taller than even Gilbear, paused and nodded slowly.
Gaunt looked round sharply at the inquisitor. “We’re not getting anywhere fast,” he hissed. “Does anyone here speak eldar?”
“I do,” Lilith said, but Muon Nol spoke simultaneously.
“There is no need,” he said in melodiously accented Low Gothic. “I understand. You must follow me now. The farseer-lord awaits.”
“Fine…” Gaunt began.
Muon Nol stepped back. “No. Not you. The female.”
Lord Eon Kull felt the wash and burn of the Chaos hosts as they assaulted the ruin around him. Fuehain Falchior had begun to rattle in her rack again.
The door of the Inner Place slid open and Muon Nol entered, escorting a cowled human female, a hulking stormtrooper in grey and gold, and a human male in a long coat and cap.
Muon Nol bowed. Lilith did likewise. Gilbear and Gaunt remained upright.
Eon Kull spoke, perfectly using the clumsy low Gothic he had once wasted a brief year mastering.
“I am Eon Kull Farseer. My enchantments have brought you into this. I make no apologies. The Way must be closed to the Dark and I will use all my powers to accomplish that.”
Muon Nol took a step forward, gesturing to indicate Lilith. “My lord… this female is called Lilith, in the human tongue. Is that not a sign?”
“Of what?”
“Of purpose… lord?”
Eon Kull seemed about to answer, as if he too recognised the symbolic coincidence. But then he slumped against the side of his throne, blood leaking from under the seal of his helmet.
“My lord!”
Gaunt reached him first, pulling off the tall helm and cradling the pale skull of the worn-out, dying Eldar farseer in his gloved hands.
“I can send for medics… healers,” he began.
“No… n-no… no time. No purpose to it. I want to die, Gaunt human. The Way must be closed before Chaos can corrupt it.”
Holding Eon Kull, Gaunt looked up hopelessly at Lilith. She came and took his place, embracing the frail eldar’s head and body.
“That’s what the Chaos forces are here on Monthax for, isn’t it, farseer lord?”
“You speak truth. This Way has stood open for twenty-seven centuries. Now the enemy have found it and through it they will invade Dolthe craftworld. For the sake of Dolthe, for the living souls of the eldar, this Way must be closed. For this great purpose I have conjured you. For this great purpose, my aspect warriors have given their all and their last.”
“All of this… some trick of a stinking alien scumbag…” Gilbear growled.
Gaunt launched himself forward, bringing down Muon Nol before the enraged eldar could splinter Gilbear to pieces with his shrieker cannon.
Gaunt got up off the aspect warrior and strode across the onyx room to face Gilbear.
“What? What did I say that was so bad?” Gilbear asked, a second before Gaunt’s fist laid him out unconscious on the flag stones.
“Ibram!” Gaunt turned as Lilith cried out. She was cradling Eon Kull in her arms. Gaunt rushed to her, with Muon Nol at his elbow, but there was no mistaking the signs.
Farseer Eon Kull, the Old One, was dead.
They placed his frail remains on the floor.
“We are lost, then,” Muon Nol said. “Without the farseer, we can no longer conjure the pacts with the warp and close the Web. Dolthe will die as surely as Farseer Eon Kull.”
“Lilith can do it,” Gaunt said suddenly.
Muon Nol and Lilith looked at him.
“I know you can, and I know you want to. That is why you’re here, Lilith.”
“What are you talking about, Ibram?” she said.
“You’re not the only one with pull, the only one who can chase records and dig out hushed files. I did my research on you as surely you did mine. Lilith Abfequarn… psyker, inquisitor, black notation rating.”
“God of Terra,” she smiled. “You’re good, Ibram.”
“You don’t know how good. The Black Ships singled you out when they found you. Daughter of a planetary governess whose world edged the stamping grounds of the eldar. She died in one of their raids. You swore… first to destroy them and then, as you grew, to understand the strange species that had robbed you so. And that’s why you wanted this mission: you craved a chance to contact your nemesis. You want this, Lilith.”
She sank and sat hard on the onyx floor beside Eon Kull’s corpse.
Muon Nol lifted her up. “You are Lileath. You can do what the farseer would have done. Close the gate, Lileath. Take us back to Dolthe forever.”
Lilith looked at Gaunt. Gaunt noticed for the last time how beautiful she was. “Do it… That is why you came.”
She took his shoulders, hugged him briefly and then pulled away to look into his face.
“It would have been interesting, commissar.”
“Fascinating, inquisitor. Now do your job.”
They said goodbye. Mkoll said goodbye to Liloni, Caffran said goodbye to Laria. The Ghosts said goodbye to Tanith and the Blueblood bade farewell to Ignix Majeure.
A cold light, hard as vacuum, bright as diamond, pierced the sky above the ruin, evaporating the storm in little more than a minute. Seventy-five percent of the astropaths aboard the Imperial fleet elements in orbit suffered catastrophic seizures and died. The others passed out. The psychic backwash of the event was felt light years away.
The spell ended as the Way finally closed. The eldar left Monthax forever, and took Lilith back to Dolthe craftworld with them. She closed the Way, as she had, perhaps, been born to do. Once the Way was shut, closely-targeted orbital bombardments incinerated the massed forces of the enemy.
The jungles of Monthax burned.
Once the bombardment stopped, Gaunt led his Ghosts and the Volpone unit back towards the line. The storm was dead and pale sunlight fell on them. The world around them was a wasted desert of baked mud and burned vegetation.
The only man Gaunt had lost in the final assault had been Lerod, taken by a remarkably lucky glancing shot off the roof of the eldar temple.
Ibram Gaunt slept for a day and half in his command cabin. His fatigue was total. He woke when Raglon brought him directives from Lord Militant General Bulledin, orchestrating the Imperial withdrawal from Monthax.
He put on his full dress uniform, adjusted his cap and went out into the smoky sunlight to oversee the Tanith as they packed up and prepared for evacuation. The vast troop transports cast flickering shadows across the lines as they came in, droning down from high orbit.
Gaunt could sense the feeling of the men: weariness, aches, the joy of a great victory somehow dulled and strange.
He found Milo, sat alone on the side steps of the abandoned infirmary, cleaning his lasgun. Gaunt sat down next to him.
“Odd the way things work out, isn’t it?” Milo said bluntly.
Gaunt nodded.
“I think it was a good thing, though.”
“What?”
“The eldar trick. Good for us. Good for the Ghosts.”
“Explain?” Gaunt asked.
“I know how I feel. I’ve heard the men talking too. This was Tanith again for us, for you too, I think. Deep down I think we all hate the fact we never got a chance to fight for Tanith. Some are blatant about it. Men like… like Major Rawne. Others can understand why we had to leave, why you ordered us out. But they don’t like it.”
He looked around at Gaunt.
“Just a mind trick maybe, but for a few hours there
forty or so of us got to fight for Tanith, got to fight for our world, got the chance to do what we’d always been cheated out of. It felt good. Even now I know it was a lie, it still feels good. It… exorcised a few ghosts.”
Gaunt smiled. The boy’s pun was awful, but he was right. The Ghosts of Tanith had laid their own ghosts to rest here. They would be stronger for it.
And so would he, he realised. They were his ghosts after all.
Gaunt’s Ghosts.
Scanning and basic
proofing by Red Dwarf,
formatting and additional
proofing by Undead.
Dan Abnett, [Gaunt's Ghosts 02] - Ghostmaker
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