by Dan Abnett
“Let me check, chief,” he said, and went outside.
Mkoll waited. He heard marching footsteps on the road and ducked down behind the butcher’s table. The shadow of a squad of excubitors travelled over the dirt-clouded windows.
The hand cart was useless. It was missing its back wheels. Hefting his lasrifle up under the crook of his right arm like a gamekeeper, Hwlan walked down the sheds and discovered that they backed onto the annexe of a neighbouring property. He crossed the narrow, shadowed yard and stood on tip-toe to look in through the window lights.
Hwlan sighed.
It was a nursery. The place had been ransacked some time before and left to rot in disarray, but he could see small wooden blocks, painted bright colours, scattered over the floor, the tattered remains of dolls, and some rather less identifiable piles of rubbish.
And, on its side, a baby carriage.
He tried the door. The lock had been kicked off a long time before. Inside, there was a terrible, musty smell of enclosed air, of dry rot, of decay.
For the first time he realised, with a strange start, that there were no cobwebs at all. Arachnids, like rats and lice, had accompanied mankind out into the stars and had permeated all his living spaces. What had happened to all the spiders here? Was there something about Chaos that drove them out or—and Hwlan had always had a thing about spiders—was the absence of webs a sign that spiders enjoyed some sort of collusion with the Ruinous Powers? He wouldn’t put that past them, filthy little wrigglers.
Contemplating the essential evil of all eight-legged things, Hwlan crossed the room to the overturned carriage. Effortlessly and skilfully, his feet avoided every loose object in his path. He stooped to move aside a pile of rags to get to the baby carriage.
The pile of rags was alive.
In the butcher’s, Mkoll froze when he heard the shrill wail echo from the neighbouring building. With smooth, expert calmness, he picked up his satchel and the tied package of tube-charges, and slid them out of sight under the counter. Then he ducked down behind a large galvanised vat.
The back door opened. Two excubitors, alerted by the cry, stepped inside from the roadway and peered around. Down in cover, Mkoll could smell the sweet perfume of the oils and unguents they used to dress their flesh. It was a smell he hadn’t known in a while, but he hadn’t forgotten it. He closed his grip around his lasrifle.
“Eshet tyed g’har veth?” one of the excubitors said to the other. What was that sound/noise in here/in this place? The sounds crackled from the speaker boxes in their brass collars.
“Voi ydereta haspa cloi c’shull myok,” the other replied. You go join the others/attend to duties while I look/check/search.
Like Gaunt, and the rest of the Sturm mission team, Mkoll had learned the basic elements of the enemy language as a survival skill.
“Desyek? Seyn voi shet?” Are you certain/sure/confident?
“Syekde. Jj’jan fer gath tretek irigaa.” Go/I’m sure. This is nothing, but I should check nevertheless.
One of the excubitors turned and went. The other moved into the room, his las-lock aimed from his chest.
Mkoll stood up, leaving his lasrifle out of sight. The excubitor started, turning to aim at him.
“Eletreeta j’den kyh tarejaa fa!” Mkoll said. Thank goodness you’re here! Look here/look at this thing I have!
“Jabash je kyh tarej?” said the excubitor, taking a step closer. What thing must I look at/must I inspect for you?
“Straight silver,” Mkoll said, and plunged his Tanith warknife into the excubitor’s forehead. The excubitor dropped his las-lock and reached both hands up to his impaled skull. Mkoll hugged the excubitor down onto a chopping block table top, his left hand cupped behind the thing’s scalp, pulling the head deeper onto the knife. Foul, septic blood poured out around the wound over Mkoll’s knife hand. The excubitor spasmed and went limp.
Gently, Mkoll lowered the body to the floor rather than let it fall. He jerked the knife out. The other excubitor reappeared in the doorway.
VI
The excubitor froze. It saw the fresh blood spilt across the worktop, and the body of its comrade curled on the floor. It began to speak and, at the same time, began to lift its primed las-lock.
Mkoll flicked his wrist and threw the blood-wet dagger. It planted itself, blade-first, in the excubitor’s left eye, so deep that the hilt bars were stopped by the rim of the socket. The excubitor swayed for a moment, its head rocked back by the impact. Then it fell on its face.
Mkoll started forwards, dragged the corpse fully indoors, and quietly closed the back door.
The pile of rags was something vaguely human. An old man, an old woman, Hwlan wasn’t sure. Something half dead and bone-thin. As he moved it, and it came to life and wailed, he struck out involuntarily, and knocked it aside. It fell, turned and ran away back into the house.
Hwlan followed it knowing, if nothing else, that he had to silence it, but it had vanished, and it wasn’t making any more noise. He picked his way back through the shuttered, abandoned rooms to the nursery and the baby carriage.
He was just righting it and checking it over when Mkoll appeared behind him. The master scout’s right sleeve was soaked with blood.
“What the feth are you playing at?” Mkoll whispered. Vehicle,” Hwlan replied.
Half a town away, Bonin and Maggs were heading deeper into Cantible, hugging the shadows and not staying anywhere for long. They both turned as they heard the rolling boom of Caober’s tube-charges.
“Temple?” Maggs whispered, pointing.
Bonin shook his head. Iconoclave, he signed carefully.
“What’s that then?” Maggs whispered with a smile.
Do you not know how to sign? Bonin signed angrily.
Yes, Maggs signed back, and to prove it elaborately signed, You are a total feth-wit.
Bonin tried not to smile. Maggs was all right, for a non-Tanith. Feth, he was all right for a non-Verghastite.
They ducked into cover as a troop of soldiers rushed past, followed by a long, gawky procession of excubitors, heading towards the gate.
The building Maggs had mistaken for the temple was a long, new structure raised of heavy dressed stone. An iconoclave was where the forces of the enemy pressed citizens into the wholesale destruction of any icon, statue or motif that honoured the Imperium. The town temple was two streets away, a grand but wrecked edifice.
They hurried to it. There was meant to be a sign here, a contact. Navy Intel had said there would be. Maggs and Bonin could find nothing except miserably defaced temple dressings and the sacrilegious handiwork of the enemy. The great mosaic of an aquila in the temple floor tiles had been damaged with hammers.
Maybe there’s another temple, Maggs signed. Before Bonin could reply, a las-shot passed between them, narrowly missing both of them. Several more followed, but Maggs and Bonin were already rolling for cover.
Occupation troops in green armour were surging in through the main doors of the derelict temple, firing their weapons. Bonin wondered if this was just an unlucky mischance, or if the enemy had kept the temple under surveillance.
Laser bolts splintered into the old wooden seating and high-backed chairs. Maggs and Bonin, both on the cold floor, raised their rifles and began to fire back. Bonin’s first burst dropped the leading trooper, and his second burst killed the two men behind him. The enemy was fanning out around the sides of the fane, taking cover behind pillars and the stone tombs of ancient grandees. Though temporarily protected by the fragile shield of the congregation seating, Maggs and Bonin would shortly find themselves outflanked on both sides. There was no cover for them to drop back to.
“Not good!” Maggs yelled.
“You can say that again,” Bonin replied. He fired another burst that caught an occupation trooper in the neck and the side of the head. The man’s frame twisted around violently. A spigot of blood emptied out of his throat as he crashed over into a bench.
Maggs tried to move, but gunfire from the
side of the fane chewed at the tiled floor and drove him back. Thick smoke from the weaponsfire began to clog the air and catch the bars of weak sunlight stabbing in from the clerestory windows.
Bonin fired selectively, but there were too many targets to hit, too many targets to drive back.
The situation had just become very lousy indeed.
A full-scale battle raged beyond the town walls and the main gatehouse. In answer to the Imperial onslaught, the forces occupying Cantible had filled the wall tops with troops and opened up with the heavy weapon nests built into the high towers and gatehouse. Though it had taken the Archenemy a while to properly rouse itself, as if from a coldblooded torpor, the resistance was now considerable.
Inside the main gate, reinforcement squads of occupation troops clambered out of trucks and hurried up the gatehouse stairs to take position. More troops from the town’s garrison were arriving in vehicles that came speeding down the hill from the town hall.
Thirty metres from the gate, Mkoll peered out from an alleyway and looked down the cobbled slope to the gatehouse. He waited while two decrepit army trucks went by, let go of the wooden handle and stepped back into cover beside Hwlan. There was a little scrap of parchment in his hand.
Occupation troops were scrambling down from revving trucks by the gates when the baby carriage appeared. It was rolling free, jiggling over the cobbles, picking up speed as it came down the long slope of the road. A couple of troopers looked at it in frank puzzlement, others called to friends and comrades. The baby carriage rolled right past a few mystified troopers, past a truck, heading for the gates themselves.
One officer, a sirdar, cried out, recognising the sinister subtext to the curious apparition that his men had missed. He shouted for someone to stop the carriage, to grab it, to prevent it from reaching or hitting the gates.
No one moved to obey. Puzzlement was slowing them. So the sirdar leapt from the flatbed of the truck where he was standing and lunged at the carriage as it rolled by.
He stopped it three metres from the gates. He stopped it with a violent jerk. The jerk snapped quicksilver along a glass phial.
There was a click.
VII
The blast hurt, even from a distance. The tarnished moorland air outside the town seemed to snap, as if the day had fractured suddenly. All of the advancing Ghosts felt it deep in the warm cavities of their bodies and the tight knots of their joints.
The main gates of Cantible rose up off their giant iron hinges on a luminous cloud of fire, and spread like great wings as they disintegrated. Only small burning slivers were left to flutter back to the ground. The gate blockhouse vanished in a swift, roiling, rising mass of fire-threaded smoke, and collapsed, spilling outwards in a noisy torrent of loose stone and tiles.
As a downpour of ash, cinders and burning flecks rained across the hill slopes and approaches, a considerable cheer issued from the Imperial forces. The charge began at once.
Heads down, Ghosts began to flock up the main trackway to the burning ruin of the gate, heading in under the billowing swathe of black smoke that climbed above the town and made a broad stain across the pale sky.
They met no resistance at first. All the enemy personnel in the vicinity of the gate had perished in the blast, or had been injured so fearfully that they died in minutes. Others, especially wall defenders further down the curtain from the gate, were knocked down by the Shockwave, or hit by debris, or simply stunned into temporary immobility by their sudden misfortune. The Ghosts poured in through the ragged breach unopposed.
Captain Ban Daur’s G Company was the first inside, closely followed by Ferdy Kolosim’s F Company. Daur’s approach was methodical and efficient. He brooked no dallying in the initial advance, but urgently pushed his platoons into the main street network to secure strongpoints before the reeling enemy could recover. Ban Daur was a tall, clean-cut and youthful man of good breeding and polite manners. Meeting him, it was easy to forget he was a veteran of the Vervunhive War and had firsthand expertise in siege warfare and city fighting. Gaunt often thought Daur was the most underestimated of his unit commanders. Daur didn’t trail a robust air of soldiering about him like Kolea, Obel or Varaine, nor did he have the air of a killer like Rawne or Mkoll. It was too easy to mistake him for an affable, well-mannered chap who could run a neat camp but who left war to the grown-ups.
G Company invaded Cantible with well-drilled grace. Daur’s principal squad leaders—Mohr, Vivvo, Haller, Vadim, Mkeller and Venar—pushed their troops forwards in overlapping fan formations, securing street corners and likely buildings. Sporadic fighting broke out as the advancing Tanith met pockets of bewildered excubitors.
Within five minutes, Daur’s beachhead had opened the way for Kolosim’s company to push forwards, followed by Rawne’s and Kolea’s. The last two were the heavyweight, thoroughbred companies of this new model First, rivalled as warriors only by Mkoll’s scout pack and the fighting companies of Obel and Domor. They began to claw into the town where Daur had stabbed.
In their cover position thirty metres from the gate, Mkoll and Hwlan slowly picked themselves up. The shockwave had smashed across the entire area and blown out every window and door. His ears ringing, Mkoll quietly cursed Rawne’s “one for luck”. The two scouts started to move in time to link up with Daur’s advance.
“Nice work,” Daur commented as he met Mkoll.
“Let’s make the most of it,” Mkoll replied.
Within ten minutes of the blast, the picture had changed a little. Waking up from the explosion that had slapped it into a daze, Cantible began to fight back. The unseen commander of its garrison realised little mattered except that the enemy was now inside the walls, and had directed all of his forces through the town streets to engage and repel. Squads of green-armoured troops appeared, along with armoured carrier vehicles and a few light tanks. The narrow streets of the lower town began to ring and shake with gunfire and cannon shot. Gaunt, entering the town himself for the first time, ordered up the armour support, and the first of the Dev Hetra units began to roll in across the smashed gateway and clatter up into the town.
The blast temporarily saved Bonin’s life, and Maggs’ too. The enemy troops had been pouring into the temple, surging inside to overwhelm them. Maggs had taken two las-burns across the left arm, and Bonin had suffered a hit to the back that had burned a deep gash in his flesh but which had glanced off the surgical plate of his old spinal wound.
Both of them knew, without saying it, without conferring—and there was no opportunity to confer in that hell-fight—that they had two or three minutes left to live at the most optimistic guess.
Then Rawne’s present went off across town. The ground shook and all the south facing windows of the temple blew inwards in a cascade of glass. Caught by the flying shards, several enemy troopers screamed and fell, lacerated and shredded.
Low, in cover in the heart of the place, Bonin and Maggs were the best protected. Seeing the momentary confusion, the fleeting advantage, both seized the initiative.
Maggs rolled to his feet and began a headlong dash towards the heavy wood and stone of the altarpiece at the back of the temple.
Bonin began to sprint towards the base of the nearest screw stair, a stone-cut arch on the far side of the congregation space that led to a narrow twist of steps to the temple gallery.
Collecting their wits and realising their quarry was in flight, the enemy troopers resumed shooting. Las bolts and hard rounds chased Maggs across the floor of the temple, scratching tiles and chipping stones. He threw himself bodily forward into cover, but a shot struck him in the left heel and slammed him against the altarpiece rather than behind it. The heavy frame of inlaid wood and its ouslite base went over with him. He fell, dazed for a second, under the lancet windows of the nave. Three enemy troops rushed forward across the open heart of the temple, their boots scuffing over the desecrated mosaic of the aquila on the floor. They had, for a second, clean kill-shots on the fallen Maggs.
/> However Mach Bonin had reached the carved stone cover of the stairway. Turning, face set like an angel bringing solemn notice of death, he emptied half of his last power clip in a flurry of shots that blazed across the echoing chamber.
The shots struck—and chopped into—the three troopers like hacking axe blows. One of the enemy troopers was hit in the knee by a shot that severed his leg. Before his toppling body could fall, he had been sliced through the torso twice, and the shoulder, and the neck. The second pitched over as two shots entered his back above the waistline and incinerated his gut and lungs. He fell, foul steam exhaling from his screaming mouth. The third was hit in the ankle and calf of his left leg the hip and the side of the head, and went over as if run into from the side by a truck.
The rest of the considerable enemy force turned their guns on Bonin, but immediately had to duck and find cover as Maggs rose behind the felled altar-piece and opened fire.
Briefly guarded by Maggs’ frantic support, Bonin turned and ran up the narrow stairs onto the gallery. This balcony of stone ran around the upper level of the temple dome, supported by the ring of pillars. As he came up onto the gallery deck, Bonin could feel the heavy pulse of the gunfire below as the enemy turned its attention back to Maggs.
Bonin ran to the edge of the gallery and unloaded the last of his clip down at the gathering enemy. They scattered backwards through the smashed and overturned seating, leaving several dead, twisted and still, behind them.
Bonin ducked down and ejected his dead clip. There was abrupt silence in the fane as the enemy regrouped. Clattering footsteps and boots crunching over glass and wooden splinters replaced the whine of gunfire.
“Wes!” Bonin voxed from his vantage point. “I’m out. Chuck me something.”
“Where the hell are you?” Maggs replied.
“Upstairs. Gallery, to your left.”
Down in cover, Maggs took out one of his last clips, weighed it up and hurled it towards the gallery. It struck the rim and fell back into the main space of the fane. Several enemy troopers fired at the movement.