[Gaunt's Ghosts 10] - The Armour of Contempt

by Dan Abnett

  “Must’ve been my imagination,” Criid said, not sounding as if she believed it. She was thinking of the hideous stalkers, the wrought ones of Ancreon Sextus, which had come and gone, thanks to the twisting influence of Chaos, in ways that a mortal man could not.

  They came in sight of their destination, a small farming hamlet called Cayfer. It was a ramshackle collection of stone buildings set on a low hill amid the pink, invader grasses, in an area studded with the dead remnants of talix and keltre trees. Several kilometres beyond the hamlet, a thicker belt of sickly woodland began.

  There was no sign of life. The hamlet seemed dead, and turned over to the elements. Through his scope, Gaunt could see that stone walls were broken down, and habs and outhouses were missing their roofs. The bones of dead livestock spotted the stony ground amongst the rusting farm machinery. The ruin of an air-mill sat in the centre of the place, its still vanes like tattered wings. Air-mills were common in the agri-provinces. They’d seen several ruined mills during their march. Gaunt remembered a row of giant air-mills marking the border of Edrian Province, a place where Brostin had once performed a particularly spectacular stunt with a tanker load of promethium. That seemed like an awfully long time ago.

  “Try the link,” he said to Beltayn.

  Beltayn knelt down and set the dials of his nonstandard voxcaster. “Daystar, Daystar, this is Skyclad. Please respond.” He sent the message as a verbal signal and a simultaneous non-verbal code pulse, tapped out by hand on the transmitter’s key bar.

  Nothing came back.

  “What the feth is wrong with them?” Gaunt muttered.

  “They weren’t exactly chatting this morning, sir,” Beltayn said. It was true. The sum total of the previous message, aside from the verification ciphers, had been “Cayfer mill, by tonight.”

  “They could be watching us,” Cirk said. “Making sure we’re who we say we are.”

  “I’d know it,” said Mkoll.

  “Or maybe you wouldn’t,” Cirk told the scout.

  “They could be lying low,” said Beltayn. “I mean, if something had spooked them. Maybe they think something’s awry and they don’t want to come out until it’s safe.”

  Gaunt was panning his scope around, taking in the hamlet and the surrounding vista of the countryside. He stopped suddenly.

  “What, sir?” Criid asked.

  “I think Bel’s right. I think something is awry.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You know you thought you saw something stalking us?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think I just saw it too.”

  III

  The building had once been a college or a hospital, and it stood in the south-west corner of Cantible. Early patrols had reported it to be empty, but now Kolea had charge of the search pattern in that part of the streets and he wanted to make sure.

  “Something that big’s going to have a basement,” he told Varl. “Storerooms, cellars, vaults. We’ll check it room by room.”

  The squads moved in.

  The sky had turned a fulminous yellow hue. Despite their care, the Ghosts’ footsteps clattered noisily through the wreck-strewn courts and cloisters of the old place.

  “Sir?”

  Kolea crossed a quadrangle to an open door where Domor and Chiria were standing.

  “What have you got, Shoggy?”

  “Just a hall,” Domor said. Kolea peered inside. It was indeed a large assembly hall or congregation room. The walls had been defaced, and the floor was covered with broken glass and shattered wooden stalls. At the far end, large, smeary lancet windows were backlit by daylight, and showed the fuzzy shapes of trees outside.

  “Any hatches here? Doors?”

  “No, sir,” Chiria told Kolea.

  “All right, then,” Kolea said, stepping back out into the quad. “Carry on.”

  His link pipped. It was Meryn.

  “Yes, captain?”

  “The habs are clear to the end of the street, sir. We found some bodies in one. Old kills. Nothing else. Shall I move on into the next row?”

  “No, stay put. We’ll be there presently. I want to keep the sweeps overlapping.”

  “Understood.”

  Varl trudged towards him across the quad followed by half a dozen other Ghosts.

  “What’s that way?” Kolea asked.

  “An undercroft,” said Varl. “It’s derelict. There’s a few storerooms, but they’ve been trashed.”

  “And what’s behind that wall?” Kolea asked him. The far side of the quad was enclosed by a tall stone wall.

  “The street,” said Varl.

  Kolea nodded and then paused. “No,” he said, “it can’t be.”

  “I’m sure it is,” said Varl.

  “Were there any trees in the street?” asked Kolea. “Do you remember any trees?”

  “No,” said Varl.

  Kolea thumbed his micro-bead. “Uh, Meryn? You still in the street?”

  “Yes, sir. Covering from the north end.”

  “You see any trees?”

  “Say again?”

  “Trees, Meryn? You see any trees?”

  A pause. “Negative on trees, major.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Varl. Kolea pointed at the end wall. “It can’t be the street behind that. The street runs further over to the left. If there was any doubt, that wall screens off whatever this hall backs onto. You can see trees through the hall windows.”

  They walked over to the high wall. The stones were dirty and black, as if soot had been baked on and then varnished. Kolea felt his way along, followed by Varl and some of the other squad members.

  “Door,” Kolea announced.

  “Feth,” said Varl. Who missed that?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kolea replied. “I don’t think this place wants us to know its secrets.”

  The door, narrow and wooden, was painted black and set flush into the stonework. Even close to, it was virtually invisible.

  “Ready weapons,” Varl started to say to the others. “We’re going to hop through and—”

  But Kolea had already opened the door.

  “Feth!” Varl said, and followed him.

  There was a yard beyond, a small, dark courtyard bordered on all sides by high, black walls except for where the hall adjoined.

  The ground was covered with human bones. Thickly covered. The bones were loose and jumbled, stacked deep in places, piled against the walls. There was a smell of old rot, and mould growth caked the inner walls. It was like an ossuary, or a foul, anatomical rubbish tip.

  “Gak,” Kolea sighed. “I think we found out where all the people went.”

  Beside him, Varl stared in bleak horror at the disarticulated relics of the dead, the staring sockets, the gaping mouths, the brown ribs. The other troopers, no strangers to death, were similarly transfixed.

  “Trees,” Kolea mused suddenly, swallowing hard and trying to get his brain moving again. “Why could I see trees?”

  He looked up and saw the three, tall, slender gibbets in front of the hall windows. The wood that they were made from was dark, as if stained with blood. Skeletal metal mannequins hung from steel strings, silent and empty and stark.

  Varl saw what Kolea was looking at. The shock lingering on his face melted into fear.

  “Gol,” he whispered, backing away very slowly and trying to make the others come with him. “Gol, for Throne’s sake… those are wirewolves.”

  IV

  They advanced up through the tousled pink grasses and tumbled stones towards the boundaries of Cayfer. Mkoll lingered at the back, watching the grasslands for signs of the thing stalking them.

  “It was low down in the grass,” Gaunt had said, “gone before I could see it.”

  “A beast?”

  “A hunting beast,” Gaunt had nodded. He refused to speak the word daemon, but what else might be haunting the moorlands of a world embraced by the Ruinous Powers?

  The slopes approaching the
hamlet were melancholy. Pink grass and violet lichens clung to the low stone walls and withered gates, and the trees were dead and desiccated like the bones of giant hands. Within the sagging walls, amongst the collapsing farm machinery and scattered animal bones were tiny shreds of human evidence: a tin bucket full of wooden clothes pegs, bleached by the sunlight; a row of odd boots and shoes, the leather cracked and worn like old flesh, mysteriously lined up along the top of a stone wall; a broken trumpet, lying in the weeds; a rag doll with one button eye; mismatched pots and drinking cups and other receptacles, laid out in a curious pattern in the grass, each one half-full of stagnant rainwater; a chopping block for splitting firewood, and a pile of cut wood beside it, but no axe.

  The sky had darkened, and a low wind had got up, brushing the grasslands like an invisible hand and making the dead trees creak. A door banged somewhere. Cloth strung to the air-mill’s ragged vanes began to flap.

  They were closing on the main hamlet now. Gaunt drew his bolt pistol and waved everyone down. The section, spread wide, got down in cover around walls and outbuildings.

  “Bel?”

  Beltayn tried the vox again. This time the answer to his send was squealing distortion.

  “Atmospherics,” he said. Gaunt nodded. No surprise. It felt as if there were a storm coming. The colour of the sky said as much, and the change in the light. The rising wind was cold, as if it was air displaced from some polar latitude. The warm stillness that had surrounded them since the drop was blown away.

  Gaunt was about to move forwards again when they all heard a long, purring growl. It came from a distance away, and travelled on the wind, which suggested it had been loud to begin with. Eszrah started and raised his reynbow.

  Gaunt looked back at Mkoll. The scout pointed. The sound, as far as he was concerned, had come from the swaying grassland.

  “Criid,” Gaunt said. “Hold the position here. Larks, Mktass, Garond… with me and Mkoll.”

  The designated troopers picked themselves up and scurried down the slope after Gaunt.

  “It’s moving like a felid,” Mkoll whispered as they got into cover with him. “Belly down, ears flat.”

  “It’s got ears?” Larkin asked.

  “I haven’t even seen it,” Mkoll confessed, “but I can feel it. I can feel it watching us and getting closer.”

  Another purring growl came up on them in the wind. It was almost a coughing, hacking sound.

  “And we can hear it,” Mkoll added.

  “Keep that loaded,” Gaunt told Larkin, pointing to his long-las. “If it’s big and fast, we’re going to need to be able to put it down hard.”

  “If I can see it, I’ll blow its fething head off,” Larkin assured them.

  “Right,” said Gaunt. “Garond and Mkoll, split left. Mktass with me to the right. Larks, you move forwards from here, and we’ll see if we can’t pincer it.”

  “Were there big predators on Gereon?” Garond asked.

  “No,” said Gaunt. “In the Untill, maybe, but not out in a place like this. This is trouble. This is something the enemy brought. Let’s go.”

  The two prongs hurried off, heads and backs low, through the nodding grasses. As he ran, Gaunt thought he heard the growl again, but realised it was the rumble of thunder approaching. He waved Mktass low, and they crept forwards. Gaunt felt for the grip of his sheathed power sword. It would be cumbersome to draw, in cover, but the time might come. It had a taste for warp-beasts.

  Seventy metres away across the shivering pink crop, Mkoll and Garond slithered on their bellies to the base of one of the dead trees.

  “Smell that?” Garond whispered.

  Mkoll nodded. “Blood. Dried blood.”

  “What the gak is this thing?” Garond hissed.

  “It’s dead, that’s what it is,” Mkoll whispered back. “I don’t care how big and ugly you are, you don’t ghost the Ghosts.”

  Mkoll peered out. There was still nothing visible. The coughing growl came again, a little surging purr. Then it was gone.

  “Where are you?” Mkoll murmured.

  Larkin edged forwards, nursing the long-las. He’d got a tingle, the sniper’s tingle that divined the location of a target when it still couldn’t be eyeballed. Eighty, ninety strides ahead, in the downroll of the long grass, between the two forked trees. Larkin would have put money on it if Varl had been around. It was a gut thing, and Larkin had been a hunter for a long time. He snuggled his rifle up to his cheek.

  “In that dip, between the trees,” he voxed quietly.

  “Specify” Gaunt replied.

  “Make the two trees to your left. Tall skinny one with no branches, curved like a swan-neck? And the ragged one like a woman bending in a high wind and her skirts going up?”

  “Got them.”

  “Ground dips away there, pretty deep. Down there.”

  “You certain?” Mkoll voxed in.

  “My gut is.”

  “Good enough for me,” Mkoll noted.

  Larkin settled his aim. Through his scope, he tightened in on the nodding grasses. For the first time, he thought he could see a shape, a dark shape. He was lined up.

  There was another growl, a sputter, a snorting sound, and the thing moved. It began to come up out of the grass, as if it was rising to pounce. Larkin saw its eyes, bright, yellow and glowing. His aim was set directly between them. Headshot. He took it.

  The hot-shot round sizzled across the pink grass and struck between the beast’s eyes. There was a scorching, metallic crack.

  With a further hacking, coughing roar, as if goaded by pain, the beast rose up out of the dip in a sudden, violent surge. Now they could see it.

  Now they could see what kind of beast it was.

  “Oh feth,” said Mkoll.

  V

  “Move!” Gaunt bellowed. “Stay low!”

  They scattered. Roaring and snorting, the beast reared out of the dip, flattening the long grass in its path. Chugging geysers of black smoke streamed from its hindquarters straight up into the air as it exerted itself to move forwards. Its enormous engine revved. It was a machine, but it was a beast and a daemon too. It was an enemy tank.

  The battered, wounded armour was crimson, the paint flaking off to bare grey metal in places. Twisted sheet plating and skeins of rusted barbed wire reinforced its skirts. Rivets covered it like barnacles. Strung trophies knocked and clattered against its flanks. On its turret side was a single painted mark, a runic symbol of cosmic malevolence. Yellow headlamp eyes glowed from the front of the hull.

  The beast came up out of the dip with alarming speed, and set off across the flat ground with a steady clatter of tracks. It was heading directly for Larkin’s position.

  Gaunt was still moving. He looked back.

  “Larkin?”

  The autocannon hard point built into the left-hand side of the beast’s forward hull began firing. Large calibre rounds wasped across the swishing grass. Clumps of earth sprayed up into the air. A small, dead tree splintered into dry kindling.

  “Larkin!”

  There was no sign of the master sniper.

  The beast abruptly slewed around to its left, one set of tracks braking as the other raced on. Dirt and soil sprayed out behind it as it dug in. Bouncing, it rolled around in the direction of Gaunt and Mktass.

  As if it had heard his voice.

  The beast’s main gun, lolling with its motion like a slack limb, was angled down steeply, slightly below the horizontal. The turret clamp squealed out above the brute thunder of the engine as the turret began to traverse.

  Gaunt and Mktass were already down in the grass. Gaunt turned his head to the side and glimpsed Mktass a few metres away through the grass stalks, scurrying forwards on his hands and knees.

  “Stay still—” he was about to say.

  The beast spoke.

  The sound of its main gun firing was painfully loud, like a sledgehammer striking an anvil. The range was so short that there was no space to hear the whistle of
the shell. Twenty metres ahead of Gaunt, a large lump of moorland disintegrated in a cone of smoke and flame. The blast shook the ground.

  The beast lurched to a halt, and another metal-on-metal squeal sounded as the turret traversed back in the other direction. It stopped.

  Gaunt wrapped his arms over his head and clenched his teeth, waiting for the—

  Again, the beast spoke. Another volcano of dirt and fire erupted out of the moorland.

  Gaunt had heard tankfire hundreds of times before, both close to and from far away, and it wasn’t just the proximity of the threat that made the beast’s voice particularly monstrous.

  It was the fact that it was a voice. It was the boom of a heavy gun, but in that boom, in that sledgehammer on anvil clash of main gun mechanism and shellfire, there was an organic note. A howl. A roar of lust and rage and glee. A rumble of hunger.

  The engine revved again, and the beast swung about, track links rattling. It began to rock and bounce in the direction of Mkoll’s position.

  Its behaviour was extraordinary. Gaunt knew the use and value of armoured weapons, for power and strength, for psychological force. Tanks were a vital tool of warfare as unsubtle monsters that could roll in and deliver stupendous firepower.

  This beast wasn’t behaving like a tank. It wasn’t just advancing inexorably towards them, firing its weapons. It was hunting them, and it had been hunting them since they’d first become aware of it earlier in the day. Since before that, most probably. They’d become convinced there was a big predatory animal shadowing them on the moors, and there had been. When the beast first emerged, it was all Gaunt could do to remember that it had been hull down in the dip and the long grasses, and not belly down.

  Since when did tanks act like wolves or felids?

  The beast trundled towards the area where Gaunt had last seen Mkoll. Its hard point spat out a few lazy shots, and then it lurched to a sudden halt. Braking hard, its hull rocked nose to tail on its suspension. The trophies decorating its flanks—mostly human skulls and Guard helmets strung on wire like beads -swung and clattered for a moment. The big turbine throbbed, idling. Little gusts of black smoke dribbled up out of the exhaust pipes.