[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

by Dan Abnett

  “Come on!” he rasped, waving Nessa, Lillo and Mkvan back. The four staggered through the smoke wash, coughing and spitting, half blind. Daur prayed they hadn’t lost their sense of direction.

  They were remarkably unscathed. Mkvan had a scratch across the back of his hand and Lillo was cut along the forehead, but they’d hit the Infardi hard and lived to tell of it.

  More heavy firing from the colonnade side. A couple of murderously powerful shots, glowing tracers, tore through a wall behind them and passed over their heads. The shots had passed right through the bulk of the census hall.

  “Gak!” cried Lillo. “Was that a tank?”

  Daur was about to reply when Nessa gave out a gasping cry and doubled over. He swung around, eyes stinging with the smoke and saw five Infardi rushing them from the main hall area. Two were firing lasrifles. Another’s robes had all been burnt off his seared body.

  Daur fired, and felt the kiss of a las-round past his shoulder. Daur’s gunfire blew two of the Infardi over onto their backs. Another charged Mkvan and was impaled on the Tanith’s out-thrust bayonet. Thrashing, fixed, the Infardi shot Mkvan through the face point-blank with his pistol. Both bodies toppled over in the smoke.

  Lillo was borne down by the other two who, weaponless, clawed at him and ripped into his clothes and skin with dirty, hooked fingernails. One got his hands on Lillo’s lasrifle and was trying to pull it free, though the sling was hooked. Daur threw himself at the rebel and they went over, crashing back through the doorway and into the fire-swamped main hall.

  The heat took Daur’s breath away. The Infardi was hitting and biting and clawing. They rolled through fire. The enemy had his hands around Daur’s throat now. Daur thought about his knife, but remembered it was still attached to the bayonet lug of his lasrifle, and that was lying out in the next room next to Mkvan’s corpse.

  Daur rolled, allowing the frantic Infardi to get on top of him, and then bucked and reeled, kicking up with his legs, throwing the cultist headfirst over the top of him. The cultist bounced off a burning table as he landed, throwing up a cloud of sparks. He got up, muttering some obscene oath, a smouldering chair leg in his hands, ready to wield as a club.

  The roof came in. A five tonne beam, rippling from end to end with a thick plumage of yellow and orange flame, crushed the Infardi into the ground.

  Daur scrambled up. His tunic was on fire. Little blue flames licked down the sleeve and the cuff, and around the seams of the pockets. He beat at himself, stumbling towards the door. He hadn’t taken a breath in what seemed like two or three minutes. His lungs were full of searing heat.

  In the annex at the back of the census hall, Lillo was trying to drag Nessa out through the back portico. Tarry black smoke was gusting out of the rafters and the air was almost unbearably toxic.

  Daur stumbled towards them, over the burning bodies of the Infardi. He helped Lillo manhandle Nessa’s dead weight.

  She’d been shot in the stomach. It looked bad, but Daur was no medic. He had no idea how bad.

  A dull rumble echoed through the blazing hall as another roof section collapsed, and a gust of smoke, sparks and superheated air bellowed out around them. As they staggered through the portico into the rear yard, Daur heard something fall from his tunic and clink on the ground behind him.

  The trinket. The old woman’s trinket.

  They dragged Nessa clear across the yard and Lillo collapsed by her side, coughing from the bottom of his lungs and trying to vox for a med-team.

  Daur crossed back to the flaming portico, tearing off his smouldering tunic. The heat and flames had scorched the fabric and burst the seams. One of the pockets was hanging off by singed threads and it was from there that the silver trinket had fallen.

  Daur saw it on the flagstones, lying just inside the portico. He hunkered down under the seething mass of black smoke that filled the upper half of the archway and roiled up into the windy blue sky. He reached for it and closed his fingers around the trinket. It was painfully hot from the blaze.

  Something bumped into him and knocked him to his knees. He turned to face an Infardi cultist, his flesh baked raw and bloody, who had come blindly out of the inferno.

  He reached out his blistered hands, clawing at Daur, and Daur snapped his laspistol from its holster and put two rounds through his heart.

  Then Daur fell over.

  Lillo ran across to him, but Daur couldn’t hear what the trooper was shouting.

  He looked down. The engraved hilt of the ritual dagger was sticking out of his ribcage and blood as dark and rich as berry juice was pumping out around it. The Infardi hadn’t just bumped into him at all.

  Daur started to laugh inanely, but blood filled his throat. He stared at the Infardi weapon until his vision became like a tunnel and then faded out altogether.

  THREE

  PATER SIN

  “Fortune deliver you by the nine holy wounds!”

  —ayatani blessing

  His father turned from the workbench, put down a greasy spanner and smiled at him as he wiped his oily hands on a rag. The machine shop smelled of cog-oil, promethium and cold metal.

  He held out the piping hot cup of caffeine, a cup so big his small hands clutched it like a chalice, and his father took it gratefully. It was dawn, and the autumn sun was gliding up over the stands of massive nalwood trees beyond the lane that led down from the river road to his father’s machine shop.

  The men had arrived at dusk the previous night, eight raw-palmed men from the timber reserve fifteen leagues down river. They had a big order to meet for a cabinet maker in Tanith Magna and their main woodsaw had thrown its bearings. A real emergency… could the best mechanic in Pryze County help them out?

  The men from the reserve had brought the saw up on a flatbed wagon, and they helped his father roll it back into the workshop. His father had sent him to light all the lamps. It was going to be a late hour before work would be finished.

  He waited in the doorway of the shop as his father made a last few adjustments to the woodsaw’s big motor and then screwed the grille cover back in place. Collected sawdust had spilled out of the recesses of the cover and the room was suddenly perfumed with the pungent fragrance of nalwood.

  As he waited for his father to test the saw, he felt his heart beating fast. It had been the same as long as he could remember, the excitement of watching his father perform magic, of watching his father take dead lumps of metal and put them together and make them live. It was a magic he hoped he’d inherit one day, so that he could take over when his father had done with working. So that he’d be the machinesmith.

  His heart was beating so fast now, it hurt. His chest hurt. He clutched the doorframe to steady himself.

  His father threw the switch on the sawblock and the machine shrilled into life. Its rasping shriek rattled around the shop.

  The pain in his chest was quite real now. He gasped. It was all down one side, down the left, across his ribs. He tried to call out to his father, but his voice was too weak and the noise of the running saw too loud.

  He was going to die, he realised. He was going to die there in the doorway of his father’s machine shop in Pryze County with the smell of nalwood in his nose and the sound of a woodsaw in his ears and a great big spike of impossible pain driving into his heart—

  Colm Corbec opened his eyes and added a good thirty-five years to his life. He wasn’t a boy anymore. He was an old soldier with a bad wound in a grim, grim situation.

  He’d been stripped to the waist, with the filthy remnants of his undershirt still looped about his shoulders. He’d lost a boot. Where the feth his equipment and vox-link had gone was anybody’s guess.

  Blood, scratches and bruises covered his flesh. He tried to move and pain felled him back. The left side of his ribcage was a mass of purple tissue swelling around a long laser burn.

  “D-don’t move, chief,” a voice said.

  Corbec looked around and saw Yael beside him. The young Tanith trooper w
as ash-white and sat with his back against a crumbling brick wall. He too had been stripped down to his breeches and dried blood caked his shoulders.

  Corbec looked around. They were sprawled together in the old, dead fireplace of a grand room that the war had brutally visited. The walls were shattered skins of plaster that showed traces of old decorations and painting, and the once-elegant windows were boarded. Light stabbed in through slits between the planks. The last thing Corbec remembered was storming into the guild hall. This, as far as he could tell, wasn’t the guild hall at all.

  “Where are we? What h—”

  Yael shook his head gently and gripped Corbec’s arm tightly.

  Corbec shut up fast as he followed Yael’s look and saw the Infardi. There were dozens of them, scurrying into the room through a doorway out of sight to his left. Some took up positions at the windows, weapons ready. Others moved in, carrying ammo crates and bundles of equipment. Four were manhandling a long and obviously heavy bench into the room. The feet of the bench scraped on the stone floor. The Infardi spoke to each other in dull, low voices.

  Now he began to remember. He remembered the four of them taking the main chamber of the guild hall. God Emperor, but they’d punished those cultist scum! Kolea had fought like a daemon, Leyr and Yael at his side. Corbec remembered pressing ahead with Yael, calling to Kolea to cover them. And then—

  And then pain. A las-shot from almost point-blank range from an Infardi playing dead in the rubble.

  Corbec pulled himself up beside Yael, wincing at the pain.

  “Let me look,” he whispered, and tried to see to the young man’s injury. Yael was shaking slightly, and Corbec noticed that one of the boy’s pupils was more dilated than the other.

  He saw the back of Yael’s head and froze. How was the boy still alive?

  “Kolea? Leyr?”

  “I think they got out. I didn’t see…” Yael whispered back. He was about to say something else, but he fell suddenly dumb as a sigh wafted through the room.

  Corbec felt it rather than heard it. The Infardi gunmen had gone quiet and were backing to the edges of the chamber beyond the fireplace, heads bowed.

  Something came into the room, something the shape, perhaps, of a large man, if a man can be clothed in a whisper. It was something like a large, upright patch of heat haze, fogging and distorting the air, humming like the low throb of a drowsy hornet’s nest.

  Corbec stared at the shape. He could smell the way it blistered reality around itself, smell that cold hard scent of the warp. The shape was simultaneously translucent and solid: vapour-frail but as hard as Imperator armour. The more Corbec looked, the more he saw in the haze. Tiny shapes, twinkling, seething, moving and humming like a billion insects.

  With another sigh, the refractor shield disengaged and dissolved, revealing a large figure wrapped in green silk robes. The compact generator pack for the body-shield swung from a belt harness.

  It turned to face the two guard prisoners in the empty fireplace.

  Well over two metres, built of corded muscle, with skin, where it showed past the rich emerald silk, decorated with the filthy tattoos of the Infardi cult.

  Pater Sin smiled down at Colm Corbec.

  “You know who I am?”

  “I can guess.”

  Sin nodded and his grin broadened. An image of the Emperor tortured and agonised was tattooed across his left cheek and forehead, with Sin’s bloodshot left eye forming the screaming mouth. Sin’s teeth were sharpened steel implants. He smelled of sweat and cinnamon and decay. He hunched down in front of Corbec. Corbec could feel Yael quaking with fear beside him.

  “We are alike, you and I.”

  “I don’t think so…” said Corbec.

  “Oh yes. You are a son of the Emperor, sworn to his service. I am Infardi… a pilgrim devoted to the cults of his saints. Saint Sabbat, bless her bones. I come here to do homage to her.”

  “You come here to desecrate, you vile bastard.”

  The steel grin remained even as Sin lashed out and kicked Corbec in the ribs.

  He blacked out. When his mind swam back, he was crumpled in the centre of the room with Infardi all around him. They were chanting and beating time on their legs or the stocks of their rifles. He couldn’t see Yael. The pain in his ribs was overwhelming.

  Pater Sin reappeared. Behind him was the bench his minions had dragged in. It was a workbench, Corbec now saw. A stonecutter’s bench with a big rock drill damped to it. The drill whined. The noise had been in Corbec’s dream.

  He had thought it was a woodsaw.

  “Nine holy wounds the saint suffered,” Sin was saying. “Let us celebrate them again, one by one.”

  His men threw Yael on the bench. The drill sang.

  There was nothing Corbec could do.

  To the north of its area, the Old Town rose steeply, dinging to the lower scarps of the Citadel plateau. A main thoroughfare called, confusingly enough, Infardi Mile, curved up from the Place of Wells and the livestock markets and climbed through a more salubrious commercial neighbourhood, the Stonecutters Quarter.

  One glimpse of the temples, the stelae, the colonnades — any of the Doctrinopolis’ triumphant architecture — told a visitor how exalted the work of the stonecutters and the masonic guilds was. The most massive work, the great sarsens and grandiorite blocks, were brought in by river or canal from the vast upland quarries, but in their workshop houses on the skirts of the Citadel mount, the stonecutters carved their intricate statuary, gargoyles, ceiling bosses, cross-facings and lintels.

  At the bottom end of Infardi Mile, the Tanith chief medic Tolin Dorden had set up a field aid-post in a ceramic-tiled public washhouse. Some of the men had carried in buckets or helmets full of water from the fountain pools in the square to sluice the washrooms out. Dorden had personally taken a disinfectant rub to the worktops where the clothes had been scrubbed. There was a damp, stale scent to the place, undercut by the warm, linty aroma that drifted from the drying cupboards over the heating vents.

  He was just finishing sewing up a gash on Trooper Gutes’ thumb when a Verghastite Ghost wandered in from the harsh sunlight in the square. The raiding thump of Pardus mortars shelling the Citadel rolled in the distance. Out in the square, Dorden could see huddles of Tanith resting by the fountains.

  He sent Gutes on his way.

  “What’s the trouble?” he asked the newcomer, a broad-faced, heavy jawed man in his thirties.

  “It’s me arm, doc,” he replied, his voice full of the Verghastite vowel-sounds.

  “Let me take a look. What’s your name?”

  “Trooper Tyne,” the man replied, dragging up his sleeve. The upper part of his left arm was a bloody, weeping mess, with infection setting in.

  Dorden reached for a swab to start cleaning.

  “This is infected. You should have brought it to me before now. What is it, a shrapnel wound?”

  Tyne shook his head, wincing at the touches of the alcohol-soaked swab. “Not really.”

  Dorden cleaned a little more blood away and saw the dark green lines and the knife marks. Realising what it was, he cleaned a little more.

  “Didn’t the commissar issue a standing order about tattoos?”

  “He said we could mark ’em if we knew how to do it.”

  “Which you clearly don’t. There’s a man in eleven platoon, one of yours, what’s his name… Trooper Cuu? They say he does a good job.”

  “Cuu’s a gak-head. I couldn’t afford him.”

  “So you did it yourself?”

  “Mm.”

  Dorden washed the wound as best he could and gave the trooper a shot. The Tanith were, to a man, tattooed. Mostly these were ritual or family marks. It was part of the culture. Dorden had one himself. But the only Verghastite volunteers with tattoos were gangers and slum-habbers wearing their allegiances and clan-marks. Now almost all of them wanted a mark — an axe-rake, a Tanith symbol, an Imperial aquila.

  If you didn’t have a mark,
the sentiment went you weren’t no Ghost.

  This was the seventeenth infected home-made mark Dorden had treated. He’d have to speak to Gaunt.

  Someone was shouting out in the square. Trooper Gutes ran back in. “Doc! Doc!”

  Outside, everyone was on their feet. A group of Tanith Ghosts had appeared from the direction of the fighting down in the merchant market, carrying Trooper Leyr on a makeshift stretcher. Gol Kolea was running beside the prostrate man.

  There was shouting and confusion. Calmly, Dorden pushed his way through the mob and got the stretcher down on the ground so he could look.

  “What happened?” he asked Kolea, as he started to dress the las-wound in Leyr’s thigh. The man was hurt, battered, covered in minor wounds and semi-conscious, but he wouldn’t die.

  “We lost the colonel,” Kolea said simply.

  Dorden stopped his work abruptly and looked up at the big Verghastite. The men all around went quiet.

  “You what?”

  “Corbec took me and Yael and Leyr in under the guild hall. We were doing pretty well but there were too many. I got out with Leyr here, but Colonel Corbec and the lad… They got them. Alive. As we shot our way out of the hall, Leyr saw the bastards dragging both of them away.”

  There was murmuring all around.

  “I had to get Leyr to an aid-station. That’s done. I’m going back for Corbec now. Corbec and Yael. I want volunteers.”

  “You’ll never find them!” said Trooper Domor, stunned and miserable.

  “The bastards were taking them north. Into the high part of the Old Town, towards the Capital. They’re holding positions up there. My guess is they’re going to interrogate them. Means they’ll be alive for a while yet.”

  Dorden shook his head. He didn’t agree with the brave Verghastite’s assessment. But then he’d seen a great deal more of the way Chaos worked.