[Gaunt's Ghosts 07] - Sabbat Martyr

  The blast blew the upper part of the pool steps into fragments. It barely damaged Karess, but it pitched him off his feet The brute machine crashed backwards into the pool, sheeting water up into the air.

  Ghosts ran forward from cover to drag Gaunt up onto the pool’s edge Coughing, Gaunt gazed back at the seething frenzy of water where the infuriated Karess was attempting to right himself.

  “Brostin! Lubba!” Gaunt spluttered. “Boil the bastard!”

  Five Tanith flame-troops ran to the edge of the pool and hosed the water with liquid fire. In the enclosed stone chamber, the heat was immense. Steam gouted up. They continued to hose… Brostin, Lubba, Dremmond, Lyse, Neskon… churning the water into a scalding, bubbling froth.

  Karess’ armoured hull was proof against just about anything, but Gaunt’s sword had sliced a hole in it. Boiling water squirted in, into his casing, broiling the living vestige inside. Karess sank, his hull lights dimmed, and went out.

  Brostin and his brethren ceased fire and raised their burner-guns. The air was sweltering hot and thick with steam and smoke. Blood coated almost every surface of the ancient chamber.

  At terrible cost, the last of the nine had been stopped.

  In his cell, much further up in Old Hive, Agun Soric felt a sudden rush of relief. He lay back on his cot, his heart pounding. Then he felt something twitch in the pocket of his jacket.

  “There were times,” Sabbat said quietly, “when I did not think we would get this far.”

  He didn’t know what to say. She seemed to be speaking as if there was some chance of victory remaining. “Lugo has a ship,” he said. “I doubt very much if it will survive an escape run, but he wants you aboard it.”

  “Do you?”

  Gaunt shook his head. “I think there are few chances of you surviving this war, my Saint, and Lugo’s ship is not one of them. Mkoll has suggested an escape on foot through the rear of the city basin, into the Southern Ramparts. It would be hard, but you and a small force might remain alive out there, hidden.”

  “While you keep Innokenti busy with a final stand here?”

  “No one else is going to do it. Biagi’s dead, Kaldenbach as good as. Lugo’s too far gone with fear.”

  Gaunt and the Bead sat alone in a debate chamber of the Herodian Officiate, on the ninth level of Old Hive. Despite the monolithic build of the city tower around them, they could feel the vibration of warfare tearing through the lowest districts.

  “Ibram?” she smiled. “Did you suppose I had no purpose to play here?”

  “If you have a purpose, Sabbat, it is beyond my grasp. I have never understood why you chose to come to Herodor. You’re too valuable — to us and to the archenemy. You could have swept our forces to victory on Morlond. Here, you’ve trapped yourself, for no gain at all. The only ones you’ve served by coming here are the forces of Chaos. Your death will boost their morale for years to come.”

  “You understand risk, Ibram. Tell me, is it better to risk a little for an easy victory, or everything for a great one?”

  Gaunt laughed sadly. “I can’t see the p—”

  “If I had gone to Morlond, Ibram, I would indeed have assured a fast victory there. But the Crusade would have been lost. Macaroth has overstretched himself. Innokenti’s flank attack now bites deep into the Khan Group. The Warmaster and I would have achieved victory on Morlond, only to see the forces behind us destroyed by counter-attack. We would have been cut off, and exterminated.”

  “So you go to the Khan Group instead? Without any significant forces?”

  “How important is Herodor, Ibram?”

  “Compared to the major Khan worlds, and the main population centres? It’s worth is zero.”

  “So why is the Magister himself… and such a large portion of his host… bothering with it?”

  Gaunt shrugged. “Because you’re here.”

  She nodded. “Innokenti could have won the war outright for Chaos with one merciless thrust up through the Khan flank. We did not have the forces available to stop him. But it occurred to me we could distract him entirely and make him waste vital time on a pointless invasion of a worthless world.”

  “You… you used yourself as bait?”

  “You said yourself, I’m too valuable. To us and the archenemy. Innokenti could not ignore me.” She reached into her cloak and produced a data-slate. “This was received via the astropaths a few minutes before we sealed the hive gates. I intended to announce it at the ceremony in the balneary, but we were interrupted.”

  Gaunt took the slate and read it. The text had been deciphered from a very high level encryption. In a final, bloody push, Macaroth’s forces had taken Morlond. Urlock Gaur was in frantic retreat. It would take time, but Imperial divisions could now be spared to bolster the defences of the Khan Group against Innokenti’s attack.

  An attack that despite every advantage, had stalled at Herodor.

  “By the Golden Throne…!” Gaunt sighed, astonished.

  “We may yet die here, Ibram. But we will have died in the name of victory.”

  “Thanks be to the Emperor,” he said.

  She rose to her feet. “And if I am to perish here, I would like to make it count for as much as possible. Milo?”

  Milo had been waiting in the chamber’s anteroom. He hurried in and bowed to her before saluting Gaunt.

  “The time has come,” she said. “My message?”

  “I took it to tac logis command. They have it loaded into the Civitas public address system. Just say the word.”

  “Now, Milo.”

  He adjusted his micro-bead and sent a quick voice command.

  The pict message was brief. She had recorded it straight to camera, speaking quickly and clearly. Every operational public address screen, comm monitor and view plate in the Civitas broadcast it, and the vocal strand boomed out of all the vox horns and speakers still wired into the city systems. It lasted about fifty seconds. Tac logis set it to a looping repeat. For hours, it could be seen and heard throughout the Civitas Beati, by friend and foe alike.

  The broadcast told of the great victory at Morlond. It defiantly declared that Innokenti’s murderous gamble had failed. It dared him to flee before the wrath of the God-Emperor overtook him for the brutalities he had heaped upon Herodor. The final words were as follows:

  “All living souls of men still in this city, all people of the Civitas left alive, know this. With overwhelming forces, the monster Innokenti has crushed us physically, but he cannot crush our spirit. Our sacrifice has ensured great victory. Do not die in fear and hiding. Make the price of your lives dear. The Emperor of Mankind has room for all in his Imperial army.”

  They came from the agridomes at first. The archenemy’s ground assault had ignored the western agri-sectors in its efforts to concentrate on the main hives. Blood Pact field observers on the invader’s western flank suddenly saw figures pouring from the agridomes in their thousands.

  Children of the Beati. The pilgrim mass.

  Despite the losses they had suffered in the short but ferocious war so far, they still numbered in their hundreds of thousands. The giant agridomes had offered them shelter when the city started to fall. They were men and women who had come to Herodor without really knowing why, except that the Beati had called them.

  And now she called them again, directly, through the broadcast.

  Some had captured enemy weapons, or PDF ordnance, some had horticultural implements or broken pipes or staves of wood. Some had nothing but their own bare hands.

  Thousands of them died, miserably outclassed by the weapons and equipment of the enemy host. But they did not falter for a moment.

  An hour after they first appeared to unleash their holy rage into the Magister’s legions, similar tides began to flow from hive tower one and hive tower three, and from public shelters and basements through the Guild Slope and the low town.

  The Civitas Beati, crushed almost to death by Enok Innokenti, turned like a mortally wounded animal in a
trap and bit out at the hunter.

  Agun Soric hammered his fists against the door of his cell. His hands were bloody and swollen from his efforts, and left smears of blood on the steel.

  “Please!” he yelled. “Please! You have to let me out! I need to warn her! I need to warn her!”

  No one answered. At this late hour, with the city falling, there was in truth no one left on duty in the detention block to hear him anyway.

  He screamed and hammered again, tears coursing down his craggy face.

  The open shell case, and its fold of blue paper, lay on the cot behind him.

  FOURTEEN

  SABBAT MARTYR

  “Know him for what he truly is. A killer.”

  —message written in Soric’s hand

  For the first hour or so of the fight, Anton Alphant had used a pistol looted from an enemy corpse, but then they’d found a PDF carrier abandoned at the side of one of the approach streets to hive tower one, and they’d recovered half a dozen lasrifles from it.

  It had a wire stock instead of the pressed metal one he’d been used to in his Guard days, but apart from that it was shockingly familiar.

  Night, wild with firestorms and a monumental roar of war, had engulfed the Civitas, and Alphant found himself caught up in the bloodiest fighting he had ever known, his former days of soldiering included. He did his best to try and make sense of the street combat and to guide the pilgrim forces with him through.

  There was no formal structure to the pilgrim army. It was essentially a gigantic mob. But the Beati had come to them in the agridomes, drawing men like Alphant out of the crowd, and telling the pilgrims to look to them for leadership. Most already did. Sabbat had unerringly picked on those people who had some military background, or on men or women who had already become the natural leaders of pilgrim bands.

  They had no plan as such… except to throw themselves against the enemy. Alphant tried to rally his part of the zealot tide towards Old Hive, where the Beati was said to be under siege.

  Her life was all that mattered.

  Etrodai had never known Him so deranged by rage. The Magister’s fury was so great that Etrodai even feared for his own life. Howling, a blinding sphere of crackling corposant around Him, Enok Innokenti drove the Retinue and three of the Blood Pact’s veteran death-brigades into the bowels of Old Hive, through hallways and gallery levels shattered by fighting and littered with the bodies of the slain.

  Hatchway by hatchway, hall by hall, they ground into the failing defences of the tower city. At the forefront, Etrodai swept his changeling blade through PDF troopers, Imperial Guardsmen and frantic civilian fighters.

  Over a hundred thousand Blood Pact soldiers, along with armoured vehicles, were now inside Old Hive, spreading like wildfire through the lower levels. Hundreds of thousands more massed outside in the ruins of the high town as the city burned behind them.

  There were reports of counter attacks to the flank, but Etrodai was sure they couldn’t be right There were no other Imperial forces here on Herodor to stage such attacks.

  The saint’s defiant broadcast had driven the Magister to His pitch of rage. He wanted her. He would kill her Himself.

  Her life was all that mattered.

  Just before midnight, a death brigade managed to mine two central power generators in the sub-ground levels of Old Hive, mainly in an effort to shut off the continued broadcasts of the saint’s message, which so maddened their master. The blast tore out two hive levels, and caused a great internal collapse that killed thousands. Power was cut on eighteen city levels above Where the slaughter raged in the lower levels, the halls and hive thoroughfares became like infernal caves, lit only by flames and the flash of weapons fire. Fires burned out of control with the suppression systems cut, and smoke collected in the uncirculating airspaces.

  Innokenti and his vanguard swept through it all, lit by the glittering fires of his psyker malice and by the lethal ribbons of energy that were his blood-rage made manifest. The invaders surged in behind them.

  In the cell block high above, darkness fell. Soric hoarse and exhausted, waited for the secondary systems to kick in, but none did.

  He wedged his hands against the cell door and started to pull at it. If the power had comprehensively failed, then the mag-locks would have failed too.

  The door refused to budge. He tried again, snorting with effort, and at last the steel plate began to slide back in its groove. Soric pulled until he could get his bloodied fingers into the gap and grab more purchase.

  He slid the cell door open and staggered out. The cell dock was dark. Stumbling and groping, he made his way out and down into an assembly yard. The main gates of the detention unit were open. Outside, the hive thoroughfare was pitch black and abandoned. He felt a rumbling from below, distant. The air was stale and smelled of smoke. Through the big riser vents in the thoroughfare he could hear noises echoing upwards through the vast structure of the hive.

  Sounds of carnage and destruction, sounds of death.

  Soric limped down the empty hallway in search of a stairwell.

  The Magister’s arrival on the Great Concourse, a vast public space on the ninth level of Old Hive, was announced by the stalk-tanks that came blasting up the three great ashlar staircases that ascended from the transit terminals and ornamental gardens below. Such was the scale of the staircases, the war machines were able to climb five or six abreast, with Retinue and Blood Pact troopers rushing on foot in their wake, firing up at the Imperials dug in around the ornate basalt rails of the concourse level. The vast space was three hive levels deep, and the massive glass pendant lights that hung from the arched roof had been dark since the power failure. Great windows thirty metres high overlooked the staircases and lit the concourse with the glow of the burning city outside.

  Major Udol, now ranking commander of the planetary forces, had assembled the last of his armour on the concourse, and their guns met the stalk-tanks as they came up from the steps. Shell blasts tore across the pavements, hurling stone slabs and men into the air. Pulse-lasers spat their pumping streams through the hellish gloom, ripping open the fronts of the buildings lining the concourse and shattering the huge obsidian sculptures that hung down from the roof. Class images of the aquila and other Imperial crests crashed down in avalanches of glass shards, exploding into fragments like falling ice.

  The Magister’s forces surged up onto the concourse.

  Gaunt had drawn up half the Tanith regiment and the last of the life company behind the armour for this stand. All remaining forces were occupied on other levels, meeting other invasions, but this, Gaunt knew, was the key.

  She had told him so. She had felt the wrath of Innokenti approaching.

  Udol’s armour rolled back slowly across the pavements, crunching over the vast heaps of broken glass, tiling as it went. They took heavy losses, but not a single stalk-tank made it more than twenty metres from the head of the steps. Udol’s gentle retreat was designed to lure a good portion of enemy infantry up onto the concourse, where there was no cover.

  “In the Emperor’s name… now!” Gaunt signalled, and his infantry strength emerged from around the sides of the huge public space, firing as it came The first fifty seconds were a blistering massacre The concourse lit up as bright as day with the las-weapon discharge. Hundreds of Blood Part and Retinue troopers were cut down or blown apart. Then the archenemy rallied, and the firefight began in earnest. Still the Imperials punished them.

  “Hold the line! Hold cover!” Gaunt ordered. His men had the full advantage of the buildings on either side of the pavements, and the still advancing enemy had nothing but open space.

  Gaunt saw a ripple of light at the top of the steps. Unearthly, malevolent light, crackling like lightning. In horror, he realised that the Beati and the life company had broken cover formation and were charging onto the concourse towards it. The Beati herself was lit up in a halo of green fire.

  Alone, despite that great power suffusing her, she would
die.

  “Ghosts of Tanith!” he yelled, raising his sword. “Charge!”

  Only on Balhaut, in that hell of war, had Gaunt known pitched fighting on such a great scale. Like seas dashing, the waves of soldiers tore into one another, stabbing and firing. Flamers roared. The force of the clash made the ancient concourse shake. Gaunt ran with his men, laspistol blasting in his left hand, power sword scything in his right. Within seconds, he had been hit twice, glancing shots to his body, and a half dozen tears had ripped through his clothes. The sword of Heironymo Sondar bit through Blood Pact veterans who lunged at him with fixed bayonets, and hacked open the dark blue armour of the Magister’s elite troopers, savage brutes with bulbous insectoid goggles.

  He tried to find the Saint. His face was wet with blood and his breath was rancid in his throat. The din around him was so immense he was deafened. Every second, every part of a second, he was striking and moving, dodging, stabbing, caught up at the heart of a combat melee so feral it seemed to be an echo from the barbaric wars of the past.

  He saw Rawne and Caffran for a moment blasting into the enemy as they ran forward. Feygor, kneeling over a fallen Ghost and firing on auto. Varl, Criid, Obel, Domor, Meryn, their men around them as they charged into the enemy mass. He saw Daur shoot a Blood Pact officer through the head. He saw Brostin spraying flamer-fire into a collapsing pack of Retinue troops. He saw straight silver and blood and courage.

  He saw men he’d known for almost seven years fight and die.

  The men and women of Verghast, true Ghosts all, stalwart and brave.

  The men of Tanith, staunchest warriors he’d ever known, who so surely deserved to live forever.

  Gaunt knew war was fickle, and seldom let a warrior choose his place of death. But this, this was enough. As good, as worthy, as honorable, as any he could have chosen.

  The flare of unholy radiance was close to him, and he hacked through closing ranks of Retinue soldiers to reach it. His pistol had gone. Only the charged blade of his sword remained. A las-round creased his cheek but he ignored the burning pain and took the head off a member of the Retinue, leaping forward into the lightning.