[Gaunt''s Ghosts 08] - Traitor General

  “I agree,” Desolane said. “It was inspirational.”

  “It was stunning,” said Mabbon. “So, you see, when you ask for the most trustworthy, I’m stumped because I don’t know who to choose. The Sons of Sek adore General Sturm. They almost worship him. And they would die to keep him safe.”

  “The general will be delighted to hear it,” said Desolane.

  “Isn’t that him, up there on the landing?” Mabbon asked.

  Sturm was still where Desolane had left him. He was talking animatedly, recounting some new-remembered detail to the lexigrapher.

  “It is. He’s been wandering the halls of the bastion all day, remembering.”

  “Remembering what?” Mabbon Etogaur asked.

  “As far as I can tell,” said Desolane, “everything.”

  The bastion was enormous. In the dying light, it seemed to be part of the giant mountain range that surrounded it, discernible only because of the thousands of window lights that speckled its flanks. It was built as a towering central donjon, flanked by two smaller towers that sat like broad shoulders against the main keep. There was an upper courtyard, ringed by a bulwark wall, and then a lower ground, encircled by a massive curtain wall.

  As they got closer, they could see the defence batteries along both wall circles, enough to see off a brigade-strength attack with the slightest effort. Aircraft were coming in towards the landing fields inside the inner bulwark, their running lights winking in the cold mountain air. Deathships, shuttles, lavish transporters. The cream of the archenemy hierarchy was coming to the glowering bastion tonight.

  The single approach road ran up through the deep valley below the bastion, winding around hard turns. There was frost on the road, and only a thin barricade rail defended the sheer drop on one side of the track. A gorge loomed below, so deep its floor was lost in inky shadows.

  The wheels of the heavy cargo-10 slithered.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” she said. The hooded driver nodded.

  The approach road itself was busy with traffic. Troop transporters, freighters, armoured cars, and the more splendid motor carriages of the ordinals arriving by land, all of them heading up towards the fortress. A tailback was forming at the checkpoints below the main gate as excubitors and Occupation troopers checked each arriving vehicle.

  They slowed down, joining the queue. The transport’s big engine sputtered and coughed.

  “Don’t you dare let it die!” she snapped.

  “Enough, will you?”

  She glanced in the door mirror. Already more vehicles had bunched up behind them, waiting in line.

  “Heads up,” the driver said.

  Two excubitors, their breath steaming from their speaking grilles, were crunching back down the line of waiting vehicles, barking orders.

  “Voi shet! Ahenna barat voir! Mej! Mej!”

  “What is this?” the driver asked.

  “They want us to pull over. To the side there. We have to make room.”

  “Ahenna barat voir! Mej! Avar voi squen? Mej!”

  “Pull it over! Come on! They want us all to make space for something.”

  “Trying, all right?” the driver complained. This heap of junk is… junk.” He revved the engine and hauled on the heavy wheel, pulling the massive truck over against the cliff side of the road. Ahead of them, and behind, under the shouted orders of the excubitors, the rest of the line was doing the same.

  They waited. After a minute or two, a huge transport with four outriders as escort purred past. It was waved on towards the checkpoint and entered the main gates without stopping.

  “That was somebody very important,” she said.

  “Remind me to find out who so I can kill them later,” the driver said.

  The line began to move again, crawling forward. “Keep cool. Just keep cool,” she said. “Just do what I tell you and leave the talking to me.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?” the driver asked.

  “Kiss your arse goodbye,” she said.

  It took another ten minutes for them to reach the head of the queue. The guards at the outer checkpoint were inspecting every arrival. She saw that at least three transports had been pulled off the side of the checkpoint and were being searched. The crews of the transporters were waiting in the cold, their hands on their heads, weapons aimed at them and fetch-hounds pulling at their leashes to attack.

  “If that happens to us…” the driver whispered.

  “It won’t,” she said, “because we’re going to do this right. Right, here we go.”

  They rolled to a halt at the lowered bar. Occupation troopers strolled out to slowly surround the truck. She saw a lascannon emplacement to her left, the barrels trained on their cab. Three excubitors came forward, one of them wrangling a pair of snarling fetch-hounds.

  She lowered the window as the lead excubitor came up.

  “Voi shet? Hakra atarsa?”

  “Consented, magir. I am consented.”

  The excubitor switched his speaker to translate.

  “What are you?”

  “Delivery, magir. From Gornell. Foodstuffs. We have to get them into the kitchens before they spoil. The ordinals will be most displeased if their meat is rotten and—”

  “Shut up,” the excubitor said. “You talk too much, consented.”

  “Yes, magir.”

  The excubitor with the dogs was walking them round the vehicle. They barked and snuffled.

  “Stigma?” the excubitor by the cab asked.

  She turned her cheek and showed him.

  “Display to me your consent!” it demanded.

  She rolled up her sleeve and held her arm out of the cab window.

  “Eletraa kyh drowk!” the excubitor said to its companions.

  “Chee ataah drowk,” the other replied. It drew the long metal tester from its belt, and placed the cup over her imago. She stiffened as the thing in her arm twisted and seethed. Rune lights on the tester lit up.

  “Fehet gahesh,” the excubitor told its companion.

  “You may proceed, interceded one,” the first excubitor said.

  She nodded to the driver who started to put the vehicle in gear. But the barrier did not raise.

  “Wait!” the excubitor commanded.

  The pair of fetch-hounds were agitated, growling and sniffing around the back gate of the cargo-10. The hound-master shouted a few words, and the excubitor answered.

  Then it looked back up into the cab at her. “The hounds have smelled something. We must search your transport. Back up and park over there.”

  “Of course they’ve smelled something, magir,” she said quickly. “The cargo is raw meat. Steaks and brisket, also some chops and four whole grox. They smell blood. It’s a wonder they haven’t broken down the hatch.”

  The excubitor thought about it. It turned and shouted something she didn’t catch to the hound-master. An answer came back.

  “You may proceed,” the excubitor said.

  A nod, and the barrier swung up.

  “Thank you, magir,” she said.

  The truck gunned forward, up the slope and in under the towering arch of the main gate.

  Inside there was a noisy jumble of vehicles, all with lamps blazing. The night shadow behind the curtain wall was especially dark. Excubitors with lighted poles directed traffic to the appropriate destinations. She leaned out of the cab, told her business to one of the excubitors, and was given instructions.

  She sat back and closed the window. “To the right. Up there, where those lowbeds are going.”

  “Right,” the driver replied.

  They approached the inner bulwark, and entered it by one of several smaller gatehouses. Inside, directly below the massive walls of the bastion itself now, they drove into a smaller courtyard that served the loading docks of the kitchens.

  “Pull over there. There, behind those other trucks. Get us in tight, against the yard wall.”

  The driver nodded and obeyed. He pulled the car
go-10 to a halt and switched off the engine. They both let out long sighs of relief.

  Varl sat back from the wheel and pulled down his hood. He grinned at Cirk.

  “That was tight,” he said.

  “I know,” she replied.

  “Fething tight. For a moment there—”

  “I know,” she repeated.

  “You were great,” Varl said. Talked up a storm to those bastards. Were you born a liar, or does it just come naturally?”

  “We haven’t even begun, trooper,” Cirk said.

  “Yeah, but that was a rush. I could kiss you.”

  “Don’t,” she said.

  Varl did anyway.

  Cirk smiled. “Let’s get on,” she said, and rapped her fists against the partition wall behind them.

  In the container section of the transport, bloody carcasses swung from hooks and the finest cuts of meat were stacked in trays, wrapped in grease-paper. The stifling air stank of blood.

  Gaunt heard the knock.

  “Let’s get ready,” he told the Ghosts. They got up, gathering their kit, and filed down towards the rear doors.

  “All right?” Gaunt asked Landerson.

  The cell fighter was carrying a brand new autorifle Noth’s people had supplied.

  “Sir,” he said. “I want to thank you again for letting me—”

  Gaunt put a finger to his lips. “You’ve come this far, it would have been rude to leave you out, Mr Landerson.”

  Gaunt looked over at Eszrah ap Niht, the other stranger in their midst. Gaunt hadn’t wanted to include the partisan in this, but it had proved impossible to dissuade the Sleepwalker from staying by Gaunt’s side. During the journey up through the heartlands, Gaunt and Mkvenner had spent a long time carefully explaining to Eszrah what was at stake and what was expected of him.

  “Opening the doors,” said Mkoll.

  “Go,” Gaunt replied.

  The truck’s big freight doors squealed open and the Ghosts dropped out into the darkness, one by one.

  Gaunt was last out. Keeping low, they joined Cirk and Varl, and hurried down the dark space between the parked transporters and the yard wall.

  It had taken the best part of a day to travel up to the environs of the bastion from Leafering. Noth’s people had arranged it. They’d used vittalers’ wagons, and crawled through the heartland bocage to a town called Gornell, in the foothills of the rampart massif. There, the local cell, commanded by a woman called Thresher, had taken them in. Going with the details Noth had forwarded to her through the underground network, Thresher had been working hard to design a way into the bastion for the team. A cell contact at one of Gereon’s butchery firms had reported that a last minute order for grox had been sent down from the bastion staff, and a truck was being prepared to deliver it.

  From there, they had been on their own.

  Hugging the wall shadows, draped in their camo-cloaks, the Ghosts edged towards the brightly lit entrances of the kitchen bay. Porters were rumbling in trolleys of food, and they could hear shouted orders and chatter. The smell of heat and cooking filled the cold mountain breeze.

  Mkoll and Mkvenner went ahead. They checked one entrance, hands raised for caution, and then snapped off quick gestures to move.

  The team raced forward into the bright light of the entrance way. A corridor, stone-built, with doorways to the right out of which steam and cooking smells billowed.

  Mkoll waved them on, and they hurried down the corridor to a junction. Left or right, or up the stairs ahead?

  Up, Gaunt signalled. Up they went, taking the stairs a turn at a time, silenced pistols in their hands.

  Five floors up, they broke left along a draughty hall lit by taper lights. They hugged the walls and moved from shadow to shadow. The diagrams of the bastion that Noth had been able to obtain had been poor and incomplete, but enough to tell Gaunt that the kitchens were in the base of the right-hand tower, and any guest as significant as Sturm would be secured in the main donjon, probably in the upper levels.

  Music rolled distantly from somewhere. Awful, jarring martial music. Bonin ushered them on across the next open junction, staying on watch, pistol raised, until the last of them was across. Was that cheering he could hear?

  There were slit windows here. Rawne crossed to one, and peered out.

  “We’re in the main tower,” he whispered.

  Now the hard part begins, Gaunt thought. As if everything they’d been through so far had been easy. The bastion was huge, with thousands of rooms. Sturm could be almost anywhere.

  They ascended another series of staircases and came out in a high gallery. The gallery had once been lined with huge oil paintings of Gereon’s nobility and army commanders. Only the gilt frames remained on the walls. The canvases had been hacked out. In the centre of each vacant frame, a sign of Chaos had been daubed on the stone wall.

  Wind moaned down the long stone hallway. They could hear snatches of the triumphal music again, far away below them.

  At the end of the gallery, an arch led through into another broad staircase landing. Gaunt was deciding which way to turn when three patrolling Occupation troopers came around the corner.

  Landerson winced. The killing was so quick. He hadn’t even registered the enemy troopers before they were dead. The three scouts wiped their silver knives and concealed the bodies in a dingy garderobe off the landing.

  The team headed on, across the landing, and down a long hallway lined with doors to private bedrooms.

  Mkoll raised his hand.

  “What is it?” Gaunt whispered as they halted.

  “I dunno, sir. Singing?”

  Gaunt signalled the main group to stay where they were and edged forward down the cold hallway with Mkoll. He could hear it now too. Singing, laughing. Voices chatting.

  One of the doors was open.

  It was a regal bedchamber, lit by glow-globes. Two antlered mutants, household servants, were making the bed. One was singing a tuneless refrain, the other gibbering about something as it smoothed the coverlet of the four-poster. There was a wooden cart near the doorway, stacked with brooms and dustpans, flasks of bleach, nosegays of scented herbs, and piles of laundered sheets.

  Gaunt nodded to Mkoll and stepped into view. His silenced autopistol was raised.

  “Sturm,” he said carefully. “Where is he?”

  The mutant by the bed defecated in fear and threw its lamp-trimmer at Gaunt. Gaunt ducked, and shot it dead. The other scampered for the door, mewling. Mkoll tackled it, but the beast was surprisingly strong and threw him off. Gaunt turned quickly and his silencer coughed twice. The fleeing servant crashed into the wooden cart and brought it over as it fell.

  “Sorry, sir,” Mkoll said, rising to his feet. “Must be getting slow in my old age.”

  Gaunt knew it wasn’t that. He didn’t want to think about the real reason that Mkoll’s reactions were down.

  Criid and Mkvenner moved up and helped them to drag the mutants’ corpses into hiding behind the bed. Criid also collected up the spilled trolley.

  “Sir?” she called. She’d found a roll of parchment that had fallen out of the cart. She passed it to him.

  It was a long list of names or titles, and numbers were attached to them. Other than that, it made no sense.

  “Cirk?” Gaunt called softly. She came forward.

  “Can you read it?”

  Cirk studied the parchment. “It’s a room registry,” she said. “This here is a list of ordinals, dignitaries and senior officers, and this is a chart of the rooms they’ve been assigned for accommodation. Whoever wrote this wanted there to be no slip-ups. Everything’s detailed. Every particular need accounted for. See, here, it says, ‘Ordinal Cluwge requires a south-facing room’. And here, ‘The high sirdar’s bed must be made up with hemp sheets, and a single lamp placed on his night table’.”

  “Yes, but—” Gaunt began.

  “Way ahead of you,” she replied. “Here. It says that the grand apartment on the si
xteenth floor is to be prepared for the pheguth. A bath must be drawn. There are some details about a uniform. Blah blah. Seems he wants cotton sheets.”

  Cirk looked at him.

  “And the sixteenth floor?” he asked.

  “According to this, we’re on the ninth,” Cirk said.

  Gaunt nodded. “Close up!” he called out. The team gathered round. This is where we split up,” Gaunt told them.

  Laced with stablights, the Plenipotentiary’s shuttle settled in to land in the upper courtyard. The band began to play, horns droning loud above the thundering kettledrums. An honour guard formed to greet him. Behind them, the long avenues of the Occupation troopers stood to attention, and the phalanxes of the ordinals, heads bowed.

  Plenipotentiary Isidor Sek Incarnate stepped down out of his hovering flyer. Two massive Chaos Marines flanked him, snarling, their weapons brandished high, and behind them came four minotaurs, snorting in the cold air, their thick arms supporting the posts of the umbrella shield above the Plenipotentiary’s disdainful head.

  He waved indifferently at the hallowing crowd, the troopers rattling their weapons. The high sirdar came forward and bowed. Beside him, Desolane made reverence.

  Isidor nodded, and allowed them to kiss his hands as another fanfare broke out.

  “Does General Sturm await my pleasure?” Isidor asked above the thrashing music.

  “He does, magir,” Desolane said.

  It took twenty-seven minutes for the Plenipotentiary to walk the length of the long carpet. He stopped frequently to acknowledge the sirdars in the ranks, and then began to greet the ordinals, allowing them to kneel and kiss his fingers.

  By then, Desolane had sent a runner to bring the pheguth.

  Sturm stood and admired himself in the long looking-glass. He shook out his cuffs.

  “Not bad. The coat is a little tight, but the sash is glorious.”

  The lexigrapher hammered on the keys.

  “Don’t write that, you maggot!” Sturm snarled.

  Humiliti cowered and, taking out his eraser, started to scrub out the lines he had just scrolled back.