[Gaunt's Ghosts 02] - Ghostmaker

by Dan Abnett

  Mkoll ducked down and crept along the length of the fallen trunk as return fire cremated and split the section he had been using for cover. Digging his feet in again, he popped up once more, and shot another enemy through the side of the head.

  Two more were close on him, but a thick brake of trees baffled his aim. Shots tore at him. He blasted with his twin guns again, exploding the shoulder of an attacker flanking him to the left. A las-round exploded the trunk in front of him and he reeled back into shelter, sucking at the new splinters of wood slivered into his forearms and fingers.

  Mkoll fought away the sharp, superficial pain. He began to crawl along under the block of the tree trunk again, but back towards his original position of cover to wrong-foot them. The next time he rose to bring his weapons to bear, three of the enemy soldiers had reached his last position and were clambering over the fallen log to blast down into the gully beyond. Firing down the length of the tree, Mkoll killed them all before they realised they were shooting at nothing. One toppled back and slid under the trunk, another fell across it and dropped into thick mud that sucked his corpse half-under. The third fell draped across the log.

  The flares were dying and the strobe lighting of the storm was beginning to reassert itself.

  Mkoll saw that dozens more of the enemy were advancing down the slope from above, and there were still four or five in his immediate field of fire.

  He was running out of chances and options. He began to run, back down the length of the fallen log, then across the contour of the hill towards the ruin in the incline beyond Shots chased him. He fell once — and it saved his life, as las-rounds cut the air that had, just a second before, been occupied by his head. He rolled down the bank, only partly voluntarily, then scrambled up again and ran on. More flares lit the sky. Silver light kissed the ground, the muddy slope and the curtain of rain. The trees became black fingers with multiple shadows.

  Two enemy soldiers charged at him out of the spray, head on One fired, his shots going wild. Mkoll’s guns were still in his hands and he shot each one in the head as he ran between them. Behind the dead, three more. One managed to react fast enough to pull his trigger and Mkoll felt his neck recoil as something painfully hard and hot stung across his scalp. Blood streamed down his face. He wondered if he had been shot in the head, if his thoughts and motions were simply a nervous reaction carrying him forward past the point of death, his brain cooked backwards out of the exploded cup of his skull.

  Whatever the truth, he wasn’t going to stop. He shot the foe who had hit him with both pistols, then leapt the corpse, extending his guns out on either side to target the other pair. The leap was brave but foolish. Treacly mud took his feet away as he landed and his shots went wild. Tracking him as he leapt between them, the two soldiers of Chaos fired simultaneously and killed each other. Mkoll struggled up, laughing out loud at this little piece of Imperial justice. Then he stopped and holstered one of his guns, feeling his scalp with his freed hand. He fully expected to find a jagged edge of skull like a broken egg, but there was a just bloody gouge across the top of his head, and a section of his hair was crisped away. His cap had vanished. It had been a glancing wound. No doubt Rawne would have remarked upon the obstinate solidity of his skull.

  He stumbled on towards the rise, needles of red light sweeping his trail. Outnumbered and outgunned, he realised it was time for the most drastic action.

  Mkoll reached a tough-looking stump and lashed himself to it with his webbing. He took three tube-charges out of his thigh pouch, wound them tightly in a bunch with tape and hurled them back up the slope behind him.

  Lightning broke at the same second the charges went off, washing out the flash and the roar. Then the entire hill-face squealed and fell away, a vast mud-slide that brought thousands of tonnes of liquid mud, rock and plants down, sweeping the enemy away with it into a soft tomb at the creek bed.

  Waves of mud and liquid filth smashed into Mkoll; timbers carried down from higher up slammed into him. He choked and vomited on the fluid rush.

  Then it was over. The storm blitzed on and the air was reeking with the pungent smell of freshly exposed soil. Mkoll was hanging from the tree stump by his webbing. The slide had washed away his footing and carried off several metres of top-soil, but the stump’s deep roots had been more firmly bedded. It was one of the few things still standing proud of the smooth, sagging, crescent-shaped mud-slip.

  Mkoll pulled off his webbing and dropped free. Nearby, the clawing hand of a buried foe warrior jerked and clawed up from the thick mud. Mkoll fired into the mud until the hand stopped twitching.

  He made it to the next rise and looked down into the deep jungle cavity where the ruin sat, solemn and mysterious on a high mound. The second volley of flares were dying away now, but he knew what he saw.

  The ruin was besieged by Chaos. Hundreds of thousands of enemy warriors, glistening and churning like beetles in the downpour, assaulted the great ruin from all sides.

  They were relentless, ignoring the storm as if all that mattered was the jagged crown of stones at the top of the mound.

  “What is that place?” Mkoll breathed aloud. “What is it you want?”

  Still shrieking and exploding overhead, the storm didn’t answer him.

  The sky spasmed above them, stricken with electrical convulsions, first platoon, with the remnants of Corbec’s unit and the stragglers of Lerod’s who had joined them by accident in the storm’s chaos, struggled on as they beat the retreat.

  Gaunt came upon Corbec, who was clambering in the lead through the rain and the undergrowth. Trooper Melk was now on a stretcher carried in the rear of the retreat.

  “What?” Gaunt gasped to his colonel, water streaming off his lean face.

  “A river!” Corbec spat, surprised. Ahead of them, a thunderous torrent roared through the trees, foamy and deep and dangerously fast. It hadn’t been there when they had come in. Gaunt stood, pummelled by the rain, and tried to make sense of the landscape in the flickering dark. He ordered Trooper Mktea forward and took one of his tube-charges. Corbec watched in disbelief as Gaunt taped it to the base of a massive ginkgo trunk and primed the fuse.

  “Back!” Gaunt shouted.

  The explosion cut the tree above the root and dropped its sixty metre mass across the boiling tide: a bridge of sorts.

  One by one, the men crawled across. Corbec led them to prove it could be done, cursing as each handhold slipped and tore away from the sodden bark. Trooper Vowl lost his grip and dropped from the horizontal log. The flash-flood carried him away like a cork. A screaming cork.

  On the far side, Corbec saw to the defence of the position, ordering each drenched man fresh from the crossing into place, lasgun aimed, creating a wide dispersal of ready soldiers in a fan to protect those still crossing the timber bridge.

  Corbec moved forward himself, into the horsetail ferns and hyacinths, their fronded leaves lashed and shaken by the drumming rain. There was movement ahead. He reported it via his micro-bead but got nothing back. The storm was playing merry hell with the vox-links. Clammy, cold hands tightening on his lasgun, Corbec inched forward.

  A hellgun fired to his right, wide, a piercing distinctive report. He started forward and fell into the grip of three large figures which slammed into him out of the pulsing darkness. He lost his lasgun. A fist hit him in the back of the neck and he dropped, then recovered and punched out. One of his assailants went down in the mud. Another kicked at him and Corbec kicked back, breaking something crucial.

  He was wrestling with the biggest of his opponents now, blind in the rain and the mud spray. Corbec got a glimpse of gold and grey carapace armour, an Imperial Eagle stud of precious blue. Underneath his rolling foe, he punched upwards into what should have been the face twice and then rolled his stunned aggressor over so that he was straddling him.

  A flash of lightning. Corbec saw he was astride a Volpone Blueblood, a big man with a battered, bloodied face. A major. Corbec had his hands around the
man’s throat.

  “What the feth?” he gasped. Hellgun muzzles were suddenly pressing to his head.

  “You stinking bastard!” the major underneath him groaned venomously, trying to rise.

  Corbec raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, wary of the guns around him. The major, released, threw Corbec back off him and rose, pulling out his hellpistol and aiming at Corbec’s head.

  “Don’t,” said a voice, quiet yet more commanding than the thunder.

  Gaunt stepped into the clearing, his bolt pistol aimed squarely at Major Gilbear’s cranium. The Blueblood guns swung around to point at him but he didn’t flinch.

  “Now,” Gaunt added. His gun was unfaltering. Corbec looked up from the mud, lying on his back, conscious that the Blueblood major’s gun was still pointed his way.

  “Shoot him and I can assure you, Gilbear, you will be dead before any of your men can fire.” Gaunt’s voice was low and threatening. Corbec knew that tone.

  “Gaunt…” Gilbear murmured, not slackening his aim.

  More Ghosts moved in around the commissar, guns aimed.

  “Something of a stand-off,” Corbec muttered from the ground. Gilbear kicked him, his aim not leaving Corbec’s head, his gaze not leaving Gaunt.

  “Lower your weapon, Major Gilbear.” Inquisitor Lilith stepped into the glade, her cowl drawn up, a staccato roll of thunder eerily punctuating her words.

  Gilbear wavered and then holstered his gun.

  “Help Colonel Corbec to his feet,” Lilith added in the perfect, effete tones of the courtly dialect.

  Gaunt’s aim had not changed.

  “And you, commissar. Put up your weapon.”

  Gaunt lowered his bolt pistol.

  “Inquisitor Lilith.”

  “We meet again,” she said, turning away, a shrouded, sinister figure in the rain.

  Gilbear held his hand down to Corbec and pulled him to his feet. Their eyes locked as Gilbear brought him up. Gilbear had the advantage of a few centimetres in height, and his broad shoulders, encased in the bulky carapace segments, eclipsed Corbec’s shambling form, but the Tanith colonel had the benefit of sheer mass.

  “No offence,” Gilbear hissed into Colm Corbec’s face.

  “None taken, Blueblood… until next time.”

  Gaunt passed Gilbear as he approached Lilith, and the commissar and the major exchanged looks. Neither had forgotten Voltemand.

  “Inquisitor Lilith,” Gaunt began, raising his voice over the cacophony of the storm, “is this a chance encounter or have you sniffed me out with your psyker ways?”

  She turned and looked at him, clear eyed. “What do you think, Ibram?”

  “What am I supposed to think, inquisitor?”

  She half-smiled, rain pattering off her white skin. “A psyker storm lights up the battle zone, aborting our assault against the foe.”

  “You’re not telling me anything I hadn’t already noticed.”

  “Where is your Third platoon?”

  Gaunt shrugged. “You tell me. Voxing has become impossible in this hell.”

  She showed him the lit dial of her data-slate.

  “They’re right in there, as last reported, fell me, don’t you think it’s significant?”

  “What?”

  “Milo… Oh, he answered my questions and wriggled out, but still, I wonder.”

  “What do you wonder, inquisitor?”

  “A boy suspected of psyker power, given rank by you, in the depth of this when it begins.”

  “This is not Brin Milo’s work.”

  “Isn’t it? How can you be sure?” Gaunt was silent.

  “What do you know of psykers, commissar? What do you know? Have you talked with them? Have you seen the way they blossom? A boy, a girl, barely in their teens, never having shown any spark of the craft, suddenly becoming all that we fear.”

  Gaunt stayed quiet. He didn’t like where this was going.

  “I’ve seen it, Ibram. The sudden development of untrained powers, the sudden eruption of activity. You can’t know for sure this isn’t Milo’s doing.”

  “It isn’t. I know it isn’t.”

  “We’ll see. After all, that’s what we are here to find out.”

  Rawne stared down from a slit window in the thick stonework, night rain and high winds lashing the outside. There were fires outside, but no longer the reassuring lines of cook fires on the founding fields. The sky had fallen. Doom had come to Tanith. If there had been any doubt, Rawne had seen warning flares rise and fall above the tree line not three minutes past.

  Rawne clutched his freshly-issued lasgun to his chest. At least he would get to use it before he died.

  “What’s happening, sir?” Trooper Caffran asked. Rawne bit back the urge to yell at him. The boy was a novice, first taste of battle. And Rawne was the only officer present.

  “Planetary assault. The enemy have fallen on us while we were still mustering.”

  Others in the squad moaned.

  “We’re finished,” Larkin howled and Feygor disciplined him with a blow to his kidneys.

  “Enough of that talk!” Rawne snapped. “They’ll not take Tanith without a fight from us! And we can’t be the only unit inside the Elector’s palace! We have a duty to protect the life of the Elector.”

  The rest murmured and nodded. It was a desperate course, but it seemed right. They all felt it.

  Feygor checked his intercom again. “Nothing. The lines are dead. Must be scrambling us.”

  “Keep trying. We have to locate the Elector and form a cohesive defence.”

  Brin Milo’s head was spinning. It all seemed so unreal, but he cautioned himself that was just shock at the speed of events. It had been stressful enough to prepare to leave Tanith for ever. All the men had been edgy these last few days. Now… this nightmare.

  That was what it was like. A nightmare. A twisting of reality where some things seemed blurred and others bright and over-sharp.

  There was no time to settle his nerves or soothe it away Gunfire and a gout of flame rushed down the stone hallway from behind them. The enemy had gained access to the palace Rawne’s squad took cover-places along the wall and returned fire.

  “For Tanith!” Rawne yelled. “While it yet lives!”

  Eon Kull, the Old One, awoke with a start. He cried out, an animal bark of pain. He found himself lying on the polished stone floor of the Inner Place. For a moment, he did not remember who or what he was.

  Then it trickled back, like sand through the waist of an hourpiece, a grain at a time. He had lost consciousness and lain here, undiscovered, in his delirium.

  He could barely rise. His hands trembled; his limbs were as weak as a fildassai. Blood was clotting in his mouth and nose. He felt his beating organs and pumping lungs rustle and wheeze inside his ribs like dying birds in a cage.

  He had to take stock. Had he been successful?

  The spirit stones had all gone dark. Fuehain Talchior sat silent and still in her rack. The rune slivers were scattered across the floor as if someone had kicked over the arrangement. Some glowed red hot and smouldered like iron in a smelter. Others were wisps of curled ash.

  Eon Kull Warlock gasped at the sight. He clawed at the runes, gathering up the fragments and the ash, burning his fingers. In the name of Vaul the Smithy-God, what had he wrought this day? What had he done? Attempted too much, that was certain His age and his frailty had failed him, made him pass out and lose control, but surely for only a second or two. What had he unleashed? Sacred Asuryan, what had he done?

  His exhausted mind sensed Muon Nol returning to the Inner Place. The warrior should not, would not see him like this, Eon Kull found strength from somewhere and hauled himself back into his throne, clasping the purse of ash and bone-cinders to his belt. Joints cracked like bolter shots and he felt blood rise in his gorge as his head span.

  “Lord Eon Kull? Are you… well?”

  “Fatigued, no more. How goes it?”

  “Your… storm… it
is a work of greatness. More fierce than I had imagined.”

  Eon Kull frowned. What did Muon Nol mean? He couldn’t show his ignorance to the warrior. He would have to reach out and see for himself. But his mind was so weak and spent.

  “The Way must be closed now. The storm won’t last forever.”

  Muon Nol knelt on both knees and made the formal gesture of petition. “Lord, I beseech you once more, for the last time, let us not abandon the Way here. Let me send to Dolthe for reinforcements. With exarchs, with the great Avatar itself, we can hold out and—”

  Eon Kull bade him rise, shaking his helmeted head slowly. He was glad Muon Nol couldn’t see the blood that tracked down his septum and over his dry lips. “And I tell you, for the last time, it cannot be. Dolthe can spare no more for us. They are beset. Have you any idea of the scale of the foe here on Monthax?” Eon Kull leaned forward and touched Muon Nol’s brow with his bared hand, sending a hesitant mental pulse that conveyed the unnumbered measure of the foe-host as he had sensed it. Muon Nol stiffened and shuddered. He looked away.

  “Chaos must not take us. They must be denied access to the Webway. Our Way here must be closed now, as I have wished it.”

  “I understand,” the warrior nodded.

  “Go see to the final provisions. When all is ready, come and escort me to the High Place. That is where I will meet my end.”

  Alone again, Eon Kull the Old One flexed his mind, trying to peer out beyond the Inner Place and sense the outside world. But he had no strength. Had he expended so much? What had Muon Nol meant when he remarked upon his storm?

  Shuffling, unsteady, Eon Kull crossed the Inner Place and opened the lid of a quartz box set against the wall. It was full of charred dust and some empty silk bags. A rare few still held objects and he took one out now. The wraithbone wand slipped out of its protective bag into his hand. It was warm, pulsing; one of the last he had left. He shuffled back to the throne, sank onto the seat with a sigh and clutched the wand to his chest. He prayed that there was strength enough in it to channel and focus his dissipated powers. The embers of his power lit through the wand, and the spirit stones around him and set into his armour blinked back into a semblance of life. Most of them, at least. Some remained dull and dead. Many merely flickered with a dull luminosity.