[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

by Dan Abnett

  “Cease fire! Cease fire!” Corbec yelled.

  The gunfire from the opposite bank had stopped.

  “Everyone okay?”

  A muted chorus of answers.

  “Back to the vehicle,” Corbec shouted. “We have to get moving.”

  They drove west out of Mukret for three kilometres and then pulled off the road, tucking the Chimera into the cover of a stand of acestus trees. Everyone was still breathing hard, faces shiny with sweat.

  “Good pick up, girl,” Corbec said to Nessa. She nodded and smiled.

  “Didn’t you see them, Bragg?”

  “I was talking to Vambs, chief. He started to go off weird on me and next thing they were shooting.”

  “Doc?”

  Dorden turned round from the supine Vamberfeld who was laid on a bed roll on the floor of the cargo bay. “He’s stopped fitting. He’ll recover soon.”

  “What was it, the trauma again?”

  “I think so. An extreme physiological reaction. This poor man is very sick, sick in a way that’s hard for us to understand.”

  “He’s a nut job,” said Greer.

  Corbec turned his considerable bulk to face Greer. “Any more talk like that and I’ll break your face. He’s one of us. He needs our help. We’re going to give it to him. And we’re not going to make him feel bad when he comes round either. Last thing he needs to feel is that we’re somehow against him.”

  “Spoken like a true medicae, Colm,” said Dorden. “Right. Support. Can we all do that? Greer? Good.”

  “What now?” asked Daur.

  “We keep on for the crossing. Problem is they likely know we’re around now. We gotta play careful.”

  It took the rest of the afternoon to reach Nusera. They moved slowly and made frequent stops. Milo kept his ear to the old vox-caster, listening for the sound of enemy transmissions. There was nothing but white noise. He dearly wished they had an auspex.

  They stopped about a kilometre short of the crossing, and Corbec, Milo and Nessa moved ahead on foot to scout. Sanian insisted on accompanying them. They crossed several irrigated fields, and a pasture gone to weed where the skeletal remains of two chelons lay, their vast shells calcifying in the sun. They passed through one wooded stretch where boxes of ornately carved wood were raised on stout decorated posts. Corbec had seen many like them along the Tembarong Road.

  “What are they?” he asked Sanian.

  “Post tombs,” she replied. “The last resting places of pilgrim-priests who die along the holy way. They are sacred things.”

  The quartet edged through the glade, skirting the shadows of the silent post tombs. Sanian made a gesture of respect to each one.

  Pilgrims who died along the way, Corbec thought. Miserably, he could identify with that all too well.

  Passing through another dense stand of woods, Corbec thought he could smell the river. But his nose had been impaired by way too many years smoking cheap cheroots. Nessa had it spot on.

  Promethium, she signed.

  She was right. It was the stink of fuel. Another few hundred metres, and they began to hear the rumble of engines.

  They crossed the mouth of an overgrown trail that joined the road from the north, and then bellied down in the final approach through the undergrowth to the crossing.

  On the far side of the river, a column of lime green painted armour and transport elements was feeding onto the Tembarong Road from the arable land to the south. Corbec counted at least fifty vehicles, and those were only the ones in view. Infardi troopers milled about the slow moving procession, and over the growl of engines he could hear the chanting and the praise-singing. A refrain kept repeating, a refrain that featured the name Pater Sin over and over.

  “Pater fething Sin,” Corbec murmured.

  Milo watched the spectacle with a chill in his blood. After the Doctrinopolis, despite the catastrophe at the Citadel, the Infardi here were supposed to be broken, just fleeing remnants in the hinterlands. Here was a damn army, moving north with a purpose. And from the signs of battle the night before, Gaunt’s force had encountered at least as many up in Bhavnager.

  It seemed to Milo that the Infardi may have actually allowed the cities of Hagia to fall so that they might regroup ready for the approaching fleet-scale reinforcements. It was a wild idea, but one that smacked of truth. No one could ever predict the illogical tactics of Chaos. Faced with an imposing Imperial liberation force, had they simply given up the cities, left foul booby-traps like the Citadel behind them, and gone to ground ready for the next phase?

  A phase they knew they would certainly win.

  “No going through that way,” Corbec whispered, turning back to look at his companions. He sighed and looked down, apparently defeated.

  “Feth… We might as well give up.”

  “What if we follow the river north instead of the road?” Milo asked. “There’s no track, boy.”

  “Yes, yes there is, chief. The… the whatcha call ’em. The sooka. Sanian, what are they?”

  “We passed one just a while back. They are the herdsman trails, older even than the road of pilgrimage. The routes used by the drovers to take the chelon herds up into the high pastures, and bring them down again for market each year.”

  “So they run up into the Sacred Hills?”

  “Yes, but they are very old. Not made for machines.”

  “We’ll see,” said Corbec, his eyes bright again. He punched Milo on the arm playfully. “Good head you got there, Brin. Smart thinking. We’ll see.”

  So it was that the Wounded Wagon began to thread its way up north along the sooka after dark that night, running east of the holy river. The track was very narrow for the most part, and its course worn into a deep trough by millennia of plodding feet. The Chimera slithered and bounced, jarring violently. Once in a while, members of the team had to dismount and clear overgrowth by the light of the hull searchlight.

  They were now over a hundred and fifty kilometres behind the honour guard advance, travelling slower, and diverging steadily away to the north.

  Vamberfeld slept. He dreamed of the herd-girl, her calf chelons and her piercing eyes.

  TWELVE

  THE HOLY DEPTHS

  “One aching vista, everlasting.”

  —Saint Sabbat,

  Biographica Hagia

  Ghosts. Ice-clad ghosts. Giants looming, impossibly tall, out of the dry, distant haze.

  It had taken two full days for the honour guard column to crawl and squirm its way up through the dense, dark, smelly rainwoods. There had been sixteen random, inconsequential ambushes along the way. Gaunt’s forces had skirmished with unseen harriers who left only a few dead behind. The progress lost Gaunt eighteen more men, one scout Salamander and a Chimera. But now, at dawn on the sixth day out from the Doctrinopolis, the honour guard began the laborious climb out of the rainwoods’ humid mist and into the feet of the Sacred Hills. Above and around them, the mountain range rose up like silent monsters. They were already passing three thousand metres above sea-level. Some of the surrounding mountains topped out at over ten thousand metres.

  The air was cool and dry, and the highland path ran through flat raised valleys where the soil was desiccated and golden. Few plants grew, except a wind-twitching gorse, rock-crusting lichens and a ribbony kelp-like weed.

  It was temperate, cool and clear. Visibility was up to fifty kilometres. The sky was blue, and the ridges of mountains stood clear of the lower rainwood fogs like jagged white teeth.

  Six thousand years before, a child called Sabbat, daughter of a high pasture herdsman, had lived up in these inhospitable and awesomely beautiful highlands. The spirit of the Emperor had filled her, and caused her to abandon her herds and track her way down through the filthy swamps of the rainwoods on the start of a course that would lead her, in fire and steel and ceramite, to distant stars and fabulous victories.

  One hundred and five years later, she had made the return journey, borne on a palanquin by eight Spa
ce Marines of the Adeptus Astartes White Scars chapter.

  A saint, even from the moment of her martyrdom. An Imperial saint carried in full honour to her birthplace by the Emperor’s finest warriors.

  The local star group that now twinkled above her mountains in early evening was named after her. The planet was made sacred in her memory.

  Saint Sabbat. The shepherd girl who came down from the mountains of Hagia to shepherd the Imperium into one of its most punishing and fast-moving crusades. One hundred inhabited systems along the edge of the Segmentum Pacificus. The Sabbat Worlds. A pan-planet civilisation.

  Gaunt stood up in the crewbay of his lurching Salamander, gazing at the wide, high, clear scenery, the refreshing wind in his face. The sweat of two days in the rainwoods needed blowing away.

  Gaunt remembered Slaydo reciting her history to him, back in the early days, as their crusade was being formed. It was shortly after Khulen. Everyone was talking excitedly about the new crusade. The High Lords of Terra were going to select Slaydo as Warmaster because of Khulen. The great honour would fall to him.

  Gaunt remembered being called to the study office of the great lord militant commander. He had been just a commissar back then.

  The study office, aboard the Citadel ship Borealis, was a circular wooden library of nine levels, lined with fifty-two million catalogued works. Gaunt was one of two thousand and forty officers attending the initial meeting.

  Slaydo, a hunched but powerful man in his late one-forties, limped up to the lectern at the heart of the study office in his flame yellow plate armour.

  “My sons,” he began, not needing a vox-boost in the perfect acoustics of the study office. “It seems the High Lords of Terra approve of the work we’ve done together.”

  A monumental cheer exploded out across the chamber.

  Slaydo waited for it to die down.

  “We have been given our crusade, my sons… the Sabbat Worlds!”

  The answering shout deafened Gaunt He remembered yelling until he was hoarse. No sound he’d ever experienced since, not the massed forces of Chaos, not the thunder of titans, matched the power of that cheer.

  “My sons, my sons.” Slaydo held his augmetic hand up for peace. “Let me tell you about the Sabbat Worlds. And first, let me tell you about the saint herself…”

  Slaydo had spoken with passionate conviction about Saint Sabbat the beati as he called her. It had seemed to Gaunt even then that Slaydo held her in a special regard. He was a dutiful man, who honoured all the Imperial worthies, but Sabbat was somehow dearest to him.

  “The beati was a warrior,” Slaydo had explained to Gaunt months later, on the eve of the liberation of Formal Prime. “She exemplifies the Imperial creed and the human spirit better than any figure in the annals. As a boy, she inspired me. I take this crusade as a personal matter, a duty greater than any I have yet undertaken for the Golden Throne. To repay her inspiration, to walk in her path and make free again the worlds she brought from darkness. I fed as if I am… a pilgrim, Ibram.”

  The words had never left him.

  The wide, bare plateau allowed them to make back time, but it lent them a sense of vulnerability too. In the lowlands, on the roads and tracks, the heavy column of armoured machines and carriers had seemed imposing and huge, dominating the environment. But out here, in the majestic uplands, they seemed lonely and small, exposed in the tree-less plains, dwarfed by the location.

  Already, Lesp had reported the first few cases of altitude sickness. There was no question of stopping or slowing to assist acclimatisation. Surgeon Curth, ever the pragmatic thinker, had included decent quantities of acetazolamide in the drags carried on the medical supply track. This mild diuretic stimulated oxygen intake, and Lesp began prescribing it for the men worst affected by the thinner air.

  Landmarks on the plateau itself were few, and their appearance became almost hypnotically fascinating to the troops. They stared as shapes spied distantly slowly resolved as they came closer. Usually they were nothing more than large boulders, erratics left by long departed glaciers. Sometimes they were single post tombs. Many of the Ghosts watched for hours as these lonely objects slowly receded from view in the distance behind them.

  By mid-afternoon on the fifth day of travel, the temperature again dropped sharply The air was still clear blue and the sun was bright, so bright in fact that several Ghosts had burned without realising it. But there was a biting wind now, moaning over the flatness, and the great shapes of the mountains no longer glowed translucent white in the brilliance They had become a shade or two darker and duller, greying and misting.

  “Snow,” announced ayatani Zweil, travelling with Gaunt. He stood up in the back of the Salamander, swaying at the motion, and sniffed the air. “Snow definitely.”

  “The air looks clear,” said Gaunt.

  “But the mountains don’t. Their faces are dark. Snow will be with us before the day’s done.”

  It was certainly colder. Gaunt had put on his storm coat and his gloves.

  “How bad? Can you tell?”

  “It may flurry for a few hours. It may white out and murder us all. The mountains are capricious, colonel-commissar.”

  “She calls them the Holy Depths,” Gaunt said idly, meaning the saint.

  “She certainly does. Several times in her gospel, in fact. She came from up here and went down into the world. It’s typical of her to think about them from the point of looking down. In her mind, the Sacred Hills rise up over everything. Even space and other planets.”

  “I always thought it was a metaphor too. The great elevation from which the Emperor looks down on us all, his lowly servants toiling in the depths.”

  Zweil grinned and toyed with his beard. “What a profoundly bleak and inhospitable cosmos you inhabit, colonel-commissar. No wonder you fight so much.”

  “So — it’s not a metaphor.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is! I’m sure that stark image is precisely its meaning. Remember, Saint Sabbat was an awful lot more like you than like me.”

  “I take that as a compliment.”

  Zweil gestured at the ring of peaks. “Actually, being at the top of a great mountain means only one thing.”

  “Which is?”

  “It means there’s a long way to fall.”

  As the light began to fail, they made camp at the mouth of the next ascending pass. Mkoll estimated that the Shrinehold was still two days away. They raised tents and a strong perimeter. Heater units were put to work and chemical fires lit. No one had thought to bring kindling from the foothills and there was no wood to gather up here.

  The snow began just before dark, billowing silently from the north. A few minutes before it began, a trooper on watch saw what he thought were contacts on the wide-band auspex. By the time he’d called up Gaunt and Kleopas, the snow had closed in and the sensor was blind.

  But for the short time it lasted, it had looked like contacts. A mass of vehicles, moving north across the plateau behind them, twenty kilometres away.

  “Back! Back now!” cried Milo, trying his best not to get caught in the sheets of liquid mud the Chimera’s tracks were kicking up. Wheezing and puffing, the transport’s turbines gunned again, and it slithered from side to side in the steep rut.

  “Shut it down! Shut it down before it overheats!” shouted Dorden, exasperated. The engine whined and cut out. Quiet returned to the sooka trackway. Birds warbled in the gorse thickets and the gnarled vipiriums.

  Greer jumped down from the back hatch and came around the side of the Wounded Wagon to survey the problem. A fast-moving stream, running directly alongside this stretch of sooka, had undercut the trail and the weight of the Chimera had collapsed it leaving the machine raked over at a drunken angle.

  They’d been on the sooka for over two days now, since Corbec’s decision to avoid the Infardi at Nusera, and this was by no means the first time the transport had fallen foul of the track. But it was the first time they hadn’t been able to right it again fi
rst rime.

  The chelon trails led up into the holy river headwaters and were for the most part steep. The narrow and sometimes winding trail had taken them up into wooded country where there was no other sign of human life. Using Sanian’s knowledge, they had taken a route that avoided the worst of the lower spurs and gorges where the thick and unwholesome rainwoods flourished. Instead, they kept to more open ground where the shelving land was clad in breaks of trees, or small deciduous woods through which the trails rambled. The water was never far away: hectic rills and streams that sometimes shot out over lips in the crags and poured in little silver falls; or the mass of the main water itself, crashing down the sloping land and turning sudden drops into seething cataracts.

  Each time they moved clear of tree cover, it was possible to look back and see the vast green and yellow plain of the river basin below them.

  “Maybe we could find a tree trunk and lever it,” suggested Bragg.

  Greer looked at the big Tanith, then at the Chimera, and then back at the Tanith. “Not even you,” he said.

  “Does that work?” Corbec asked, pointing to the power-assisted cable drum mounted under the Chimera’s nose. “Of course not,” said Greer.

  “Let’s try and pack stuff under the tread there,” Corbec said, “then Greer can try it again.”

  They gathered rocks and logs from the trail and pieces of slate from the stream bed and Derin and Daur wedged them in under the track assembly.

  The team stood clear and Greer revved the engines again. The tracks bit. There was a loud crack as a log fractured, and then the machine lurched forward and onto the trail. There was a half-hearted cheer.

  “Mount up!” Corbec called.

  “Where’s Vamberfeld?” Dorden asked. The Verghastite had said little since the episode at Mukret and had kept to himself.

  “He was here a second ago,” said Daur.

  “I’ll go look for him,” Milo volunteered.

  “No, Brinny,” said Bragg. “Let me.”