It flicker-shifted again, just a few paces to the left, and sliced its sword around at him. Gaunt evaded, stumbling in his haste, rolling and then springing up in time to block the downward swing of the Chaos-tainted blade.
But this was not the same weapon. This was longer, straighter, incandescent with smoking green fire. A second Darkwatcher, shifting in to assist the first.
Without looking, Gaunt threw himself sideways, knowing the original fury was now behind him. Red energy sliced a gouge in the gleaming chrome deck.
He backed as they came at him together, both flickering in and out of reality. One was suddenly to his left, but Gaunt threw all his force behind a blocking strike that bounced the blade away. The other sliced in at him and caught Gaunt’s right shoulder.
There was no pain. A cold, nauseating numbness ached into his wounded limb.
Gaunt hurled himself forward in a tuck roll, avoiding two more slashes. He knew he had never been this outmatched before, not even face to face with howling World Eater Chaos Marines in the underworld of Fortis Binary or surrounded by the Iron Men in the crypts of Menazoid Epsilon. He should be dead already.
But something kept him alive. Partly his elevated battle-edge, partly his determination, but also, he was sure, Heironymo’s sword. It seemed to smell the shifting creatures and forewarn him — by a tingle — of their impossible movements.
Their shifting was localised, as if they were moving in and out of corporeal reality. Every time they became solid to strike, the sword twitched in his grip, moving him to block.
He ducked a scything arc of green energy and stabbed upwards, shearing one Darkwatcher’s head off in a flurry of blue sparks. Lambent, frosty smoke jetted out of its tall form as it collapsed in upon itself, flickering and fading. A inhuman scream rang around the bridge.
The other lunged at him, flickering into being right in his face, and though the powersword pulled at him, he wasn’t quick enough to avoid the deep gouge the red blade sliced in his left thigh.
Gaunt fell.
A spray of autocannon split the air above him. Bragg had made it to the edge of the platform and was blasting at the Darkwatcher on full auto. The thing shuddered under the impacts, flickering in and out of real-space, its chain cloak whipping as it turned to face the new attack. Kolea and Mkoll were there too, heaving up onto the edge of the chrome level, opening fire at the beast. A second later, Neskon, Haller, Flinn, Banda and a Volpone called Tonsk had also reached the edge of the platform. Sustained fire from all of them drove the raging Chaos-thing backwards — and targeted the other two that had manifested in the last few moments. Bragg’s unrelenting fire-cone gradually disintegrated the red-bladed Darkwatcher, which advanced on him, despite the colossal wash of bullets, before finally exploding a few flicker-steps from him.
One of the others, wielding a pike-axe which smoked with orange lightning, chopped Tonsk in two and severed Neskon’s left leg at the knee with one stroke. Haller snatched up the Blueblood’s fallen hellgun, pumped the under-barrel launcher and blew the thing’s head off with a rocket-grenade.
The others, supported by more of the strike force just making it to the platform, caught the remaining Darkwatcher in a crossfire. The thing shrieked and flickered, twisting in the las-hail.
Behind them, the remaining elements of Gaunt’s brigade fought a desperate rearguard at the Zoicans pouring into the command area from all around.
Gaunt clawed at one of the instrumentation towers at the edge of the platform and pulled himself to his feet. Hololithic screens projecting from the domed roof above showed fuzzy, amber-tinted views of the onslaught outside. The Spike, with its supporting armoured legions, had exploded in through the Curtain Wall just east of Sondar Gate, and the war machine’s vast batteries, presumably recrewed after Gaunt’s entry assault, targeted and demolished the Shield Pylon in a blaze of fire.
Sections of the huge structure crashed down across the Commercia, like a titanic tree being felled, wreathed in great washes of flame instead of foliage. Rather than being deactivated as before, the Shield collapsed, its massive energies unsecured and arcing out. The energy flare, designed to protect the city of Vervunhive, ripped the top ten levels off the Main Spine, and all the anchor stations around the city perimeter exploded.
The powersword loose in his hand, Gaunt searched the instrumentation around him for some system he could recognise. It had been built by the tech-wrights of Ferrozoica, so its essential patterns were Imperial, but the markings and format were wretched and alien.
Gaunt staggered across to the next tower and resumed his search. He found what appeared to be a vox-terminal and a pict-link displayer. But nothing else he could understand.
Behind him, the last Darkwatcher exploded, taking Trooper Flinn with it.
The third tower. Halfway down, what could only be a data-slate reader with a universal hub: standard Imperial fitting.
Gaunt felt himself sag, his leg wound pulling at him. Blood from his shoulder wound soaked his sleeve and dripped off his hand.
“Gaunt!” yelled Kolea, at his side, supporting him. Mkoll was there too, and Genx, Gherran and Domor.
“Let me see to your wounds!” Gherran was yelling.
“No t-time!”
“Let him help you, Gaunt!” Kolea growled, trying to keep the struggling commissar upright. “Let me—”
“No!” Gaunt shook the big miner off. If this was the final act, it would be his.
He pulled the ticking, chuckling amulet from his pocket and fitted its link ports to the reader’s hub.
It engaged, purred and turned twice like a kodoc beetle burying its abdomen in the sand.
The lighting and instrument power in the command section shorted on and off two, three, four times. A mechanical wailing of tortured, over-raced turbines welled up from the vast machine pits below them. The chatter cut short. Then the lights went out altogether.
Sudden, total darkness; sudden quiet. In the stillness, the groans of the dying and wounded; the bright, brief crackle and fizz of torn cables. A flash of las-fire.
Gaunt’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom. The heart of the Spike was dead. Smoke wafted, full of the rich, animal smells of war. Men stirred, blinking.
The force field in the centre of the platform had vanished.
A huge form, dark like a shadow, crouched where the field had been. It rose, unfurled, grew larger. In the half-light, Gaunt saw the richly embroidered silk of a vast cape spilling away from the figure as it stood. He saw an immense, metal-gloved hand reach out and beckon to him. He saw the shivering flame-light throw into relief a long, smooth armour-cowl split by narrow eye-slits. The cowl fanned up and out into massive, hooked steeples of polished horn.
Heritor Asphodel, Chaos warlord, daemon-thing, fuelled by his dark gods in the Warp, standing fully six metres tall, lunged at the human worms who strove to defeat him. He made no sound. Darkness, which he seemed to wear and pull around him like a great cloak, sucked through the air as it moved with him.
Kolea buried his axe-rake in the Heritor’s flank. A second later, he was flying sideways across the platform, most of his ribs shattered.
Firing and making two hits, Mkoll was knocked sideways, his shoulder broken.
Domor’s lasgun exploded in his hands, blowing him up, back and off the platform.
Gherran was lacerated by an ebbing fold of darkness, sharp as a billion blades. His blood made a mist that drenched Gaunt.
Genx was pulverised by the concussive force of the daemon’s fist as he tried to reload his weapon and fire.
Gaunt met Asphodel head on. He slammed the blazing blue spike of the powersword into and through the monstrosity’s chest.
At the same moment, the massive bolt pistol clenched in the Heritor’s left hand shot Gaunt through the heart.
NINETEEN
MOURNING GLORY
“With this act we have richly denied the Darkness and made trophies of its creatures. A dark lord is dead. So, this holy crusa
de, blessed by the Emperor, is advanced with glory.”
—Warmaster Macaroth, at Verghast
They came like ghosts at dusk. Phantom forms, impossibly large, underlit by the dying sun as they settled down through the smoke-filthy upper atmosphere of Verghast. Warships, bulk troop transports, the might of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, the pride of the Segmentum Pacificus Navy.
It was the fiftieth day. Learning via the Astropathicus that Vervunhive faced not an inconsequential rival hive but a hunted Chaos commander, Macaroth had made best speed for Verghast, arriving after twenty-seven days of urgent transit through the warp.
The hazy sky was full of metal and looked like it should fall. The awesome power of the Imperium was there for every Verghastite to see: ten thousand ships, some the size of cities, some bloated like ornate oceanic turtles, some slender and serrated like airborne cathedrals.
Macaroth unleashed his might on the planet below: six million Guardsmen, half a million tanks, squads drawn from three chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, two Titan Legions. Troop dropships, bulk machine-lifters and shuttles dropped in a swarm on the Hass valley. For a while, the sky did fall.
Mass destruction followed, lasting for five days, thought it was brutally one-sided. Heironymo’s amulet had done its work and cut the insidious chatter for all time. By the time the warmaster’s immense forces arrived, the Zoicans were already in total rout. Aimless and lost, they broke off the final assault. Many committed suicide or wandered blindly into the defenders’ fields of fire to be massacred. Millions of others woke as if from a dream and stumbled, without purpose or motive, back into the grasslands.
Under Grizmund’s command, the battered Imperial forces that had held Vervunhive for over a month reformed to drive the pitiful, bewildered invaders out. Narmenian and NorthCol tank brigades chased down and annihilated Zoican motorised units threading back across the grasslands towards their own hive. Guard infantry, co-ordinated by Colonel Corbec, Colonel Bulwar and Major Otte, utilising every troop-carrying machine they could raise, hunted out and slaughtered the fleeing troop elements in vast numbers. There was no question of mercy. Ferrozoica’s taint had to be expunged.
By the time Macaroth’s armada made orbit, the Zoicans had been driven back six hundred kilometres into the plains, leaving vehicles and equipment scattered and abandoned in their wake.
In the crippled hive itself, scratch companies slowly weeded out the last, feral pockets of Zoican resistance.
The warmaster followed up with unstinting vigour. He politely but determinedly requested the assistance of the Iron Snakes Space Marines to overtake and neutralise the fleeing enemy. His armoured brigades poured down the main highways and decimated everything that lived. Skeletal Titans, shrieking like wraiths, stalked the grassland horizons, incinerating the retreating foe.
On the fifty-fourth day, crusade warships torched Ferrozoica Hive from low orbit. The blinding flame-flare filled the southern horizon.
But by then, the fight was out of the Zoicans and had been since the thirty-seventh day. Without the hypnotic chatter to unify their cause and drive them on, they had crumbled. Imperial Fist Space Marines ceremonially destroyed the Spike and incinerated the Heritor’s corpse.
The final battle was one of humanitarian support. Intendant Banefail, along with the hive elders and noble houses, laboured to accommodate the millions of wounded and homeless. By day sixty, the true scale of the human cost was undeniable. Vervunhive was a necropolis: a city of the dead. Meeting with the surviving nobility, Macaroth signed the Dissolution Warrant that formally acknowledged Vervunhive’s extinction. The hive was dead. All population elements were to be absorbed by the Northern Collectives or shipped to Ghasthive and the Isthmus Steeples. Two new hives were to be founded, one ruled by a clique of noble houses under House Anko, the other a collective governed by Houses Chass and Rodyin. Names would come later. It would be generations until these municipal structures would begin to establish themselves, and it would be decades before the bulk of the dispossessed population could be given new, permanent homes.
Lord Anko, siting his new hive’s foundations higher up the Hass waters from dead Vervunhive, planned to exploit the prometheum reserves once controlled by Vannick. Lady Chass, the first woman to govern a collective on Vervunhive, set her foundation in the grasslands far to the south and turned to mining and servitor engineering. Their future rivalry and confrontation would be long and complex, but is not pertinent to this history.
At the time, an air of disillusion fell hard on the survivors of Vervunhive. Many felt they had given everything in defence of the city only to see the city abandoned anyway. When this mood was made known to the war-master, he spoke publicly about his decision and made law an Act of Consolation.
The warmaster’s staff faced a thousand duties as they tidied up the mess of the Vervunhive War. One of those was the prosecution of all those who had acted in a manner disloyal to the Emperor during that period of great hardship.
The reports of the Tanith Sergeant Varl, as logged by his commander, Gaunt, were sorted and processed by the Administratum during the latter stages of the purge. On day fifty-nine, prosecuting war-crime charges, Vervun Primary troops stormed the halls of Guild Worlin. Amchanduste Worlin was not to be found.
“They say he wants to see you,” Corbec said, leaning back against the sill of a vast stained-glass window in Medical Hall 67/mv.
“He can wait.”
“I’m sure he can,” Corbec grinned. “He’s only a warmaster.”
“Feth. They’re really abandoning the hive — after everything we did?”
“I think maybe because of everything we did. There’s not much left standing.”
Ibram Gaunt heaved himself upright on his cot. The pain of his shoulder and thigh wounds had long since faded, but the burning ache in his chest still plagued him. He coughed blood, for the third time since Corbec had arrived.
“You should probably lie still, sir,” Corbec ventured.
“Probably,” returned Gaunt. It was the sixty-second day. He had been unconscious for most of the previous month and had undergone repeated surgery to repair the wound Heritor Asphodel had dealt him. Gaunt still didn’t know — and never would — if it had been dumb luck or fate that had saved him. The Heritor’s bolt had hit him directly on the steel rose Lord Chass had made him wear. Though the collapsing petals had been driven into his chest, it was certain he would not have survived otherwise.
“You heard about the Act of Consolation?”
“I heard. What of it?”
“Well, sir, you wouldn’t believe the number of new Ghosts we’ve recruited.”
Under the terms of the Act of Consolation, any disillusioned Vervunhiver anxious to leave Verghast to find a new life was offered the possibility of training for a place in the Imperial Guard. Upwards of forty thousand elected to do so. Some made their choice of unit a condition of their acceptance.
Motor convoys carried them north with the regular army to board bulk carriers that had put in at Kannak Port. Sergeant Agun Soric oversaw the embarkation of his brave Irregulars. All of them were yet to be issued with their Tanith fatigues and camo-capes. Soric moved past the ship’s payload doors and greeted Sergeant Kolea, who had also joined up, along with most of his scratch company. Kolea was walking on crutches, his torso encased in mediplas bindings.
“We’ll never see it again,” said Soric.
“What?”
“Verghast. Take a last look.”
“Nothing here for me now anyway,” Kolea said. Under his breath, he uttered a last goodbye to his lost wife and beloved children.
Half a kilometre away, Bragg supervised the loading of other Ghosts. Many, like Domor and Mkoll, were walking wounded. Along with the soldiers came the inevitable wave of camp followers, lugging their possessions: clerks, cooks, armourers, mechanics, women.
Bragg caught sight of Caffran leading a girl and two children up the ramp. One was just a babe in arms. He noticed that the girl
, along with her piercings and surly look, wore the temporary badge of a Guard recruit. Another female trooper. Bad enough Kolea’s fighting women had been given a place. Larkin would have a seizure.
Jumping down from his transit truck, Ban Daur took a last, wistful look at the land around him. He felt like a lost soul given one last chance to haunt the place that had raised him.
That was appropriate. He wasn’t Captain Ban Daur of Vervun Primary anymore. He was a Ghost.
“I kept these for a long while,” Ana Curth said. She held out the dog tags that had been in the pocket of her apron since Veyveyr Gate. “I knew there would be no good time for you to see them, but maybe now…”
Dorden took the tags. He read them, sighing.
“Mikal Dorden. Infantryman. Yes, I… they told me…”
“I’m sorry, Dorden. Really I am.”
Dorden looked up from where he sat, his eyes wet with tears. “So am I. You know I was the only Ghost to have a relative in the Tanith regiment? My son. A fragile, last link to the world we lost. And now… that’s gone too.”
She held him to her as he shuddered and wept.
A door banged open and a guilder peered in at them. He was dressed in rich robes and had a driven intensity about his face.
“Whatever you’re looking for, it isn’t in here,” Curth told him, holding Dorden tightly.
“Surgeon Curth?”
“Yes? What?”
The guilder entered the swab-room. He smiled. “I was looking for, erm, Surgeon Curth and Medic Dorden.” He unfolded a scrap of vellum. “I had a request to talk to me… about that terrible incident at the carriage station weeks ago. God-Emperor, it was awful!”