[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

by Dan Abnett

  “Are we alive still?” Gaunt snarled at Hark.

  “Your scout’s down,” said Hark. Bonin lay in the footwell, concussed from the impact.

  Zweil smiled through his beard and held up his wizened hands. “Me, I’m just dandy!” he declared.

  “Could you see to Bonin?” Gaunt asked, and the ayatani jumped down, nursing Bonin into a braced, safe position.

  “Move on!” cried Gaunt.

  “S-sir?” the driver looked back out of the cave of the cockpit, terrified. Hark swept round and pointed his plasma pistol at the Pardus crewman.

  “In the name of the Emperor, drive!” he yelled.

  The Salamander roared away across the snow. Gaunt looked out and took stock of the situation.

  The Heart of Destruction and the Lion of Pardua had knocked out the last two SteGs, and Strife had blown up a Reaver. The Say Your Prayers had been hit twice by Usurper shells and had come to a standstill. It looked intact, but ominous black smoke was pouring out of its engine louvres.

  As Gaunt’s Salamander slewed around, Strife fired on the nearest Usurper and detonated its munitions. Shrapnel whickered down over several hundred metres.

  Gaunt braced himself and fired at the nearest AT70. The rocket hit its track guard. The battle tank reared up in the drifts and swung its turret around at the speeding Salamander. A heavy round blew into the snow behind them.

  “Load me!” Gaunt demanded.

  “Loaded!” Hark answered, and Gaunt felt the jolt of the rocket slamming home.

  He took aim at the Infardi battle tank and fired.

  Trailing smoke, the missile sped over the snow and hit the tank at the base of its turret. Internal explosions blew the hatches out and then burst the barrel off the tank-head.

  Zweil whooped.

  “Load me!” said Gaunt. “Loaded!” said Hark.

  But the battle was all done. The Lion of Pardua and the Heart of Destruction targetted and killed the remaining Usurper pretty much simultaneously and the Say Your Prayers, suddenly coughing back into life, crippled and then killed the last of the Reaver AT70s. Mechanical wrecks, sobbing out plumes of black smoke, marred the sugar-white perfection of the pass.

  Kleopas’ Conqueror turned hard around in a swirl of snow and bounced back alongside Gaunt’s Salamander.

  Kleopas appeared in the top hatch, holding his field cap in his hands and tugging at it. He pulled something off and tossed it to Gaunt.

  Gaunt caught it neatly. It was the cap-badge of the Pardus regiment, worked in silver.

  “Wear the mark proudly, tank killer!” Kleopas laughed as his machine sped away.

  Through his scope, Kolea saw the musters of the enemy as they came down through the fruit glade onto Bhavnager. So many machines, so many troops. Despite his defences and his careful preparation, they would be overwhelmed. There was a horde of them. A gakking horde, with armour to match.

  “Nine to all units, wait for my command. Wait.”

  The Infardi legion advanced and spread out. They were almost on top of them. Kolea held fast They would at least make a good account of themselves. “Steady, steady…”

  Without breaking stride, the enemy passed by. They bypassed Bhavnager and continued up into the rainwoods. In under a half-hour, they were gone. “Why so sad?” asked Curth.

  “They left us alone.”

  “They’re going after Gaunt,” Kolea said.

  She knew he was right.

  It was like fething Nusera Crossing all over again. The way ahead was blocked. Through his scope, Corbec could see a long line of green-painted armour and transport units crawling northwards up the wide, dry pass below him. A legion strength force.

  He shuffled back from the lip of the cliff and rose. Dizziness swirled through him for a moment. This cold, thin air was going to take quite some getting used to.

  Corbec crunched down the slope of scree and down onto the sooka where the Wounded Wagon was drawn up. His team, pinch-faced and huddled in coats and cloaks, waited expectantly.

  “We can forget it,” Corbec said. “There’s a fething great mass of enemy machines and troops heading north up the pass.”

  “So what now?” whined Greer.

  They’d been making good time up the sooka trails through the high pastures of the foot hills. The old Chimera seemed to respond better in the cooler climate. About an hour earlier they’d passed the edge of the tree-line, and now vegetation of any land was getting thin and rare. The landscape had become a chilly, rock-strewn desert of pink basalt and pale orange halite, rising in great jagged verticals and sheer gorges that forced the ancient herding path to loop back and forth upon itself. The wind groaned and buffeted. Beyond, the awesome peaks of the Sacred Hills were dark and smudged with what Sanian said were snowstorms at the higher altitude levels.

  They huddled around the chart-slates, discussing options. Corbec could feel the welling frustration in his team, especially in Daur and Dorden who, it seemed to him, were the only ones who felt the true urgency of the mission in their hearts.

  “These here,” said Daur, pointing to the glowing screen of the chart with numb fingers. “What about these? They turn east about six kilometres above us.”

  They studied the radiating pattern of sooka branches that stretched out like thread veins.

  “Maybe,” said Milo.

  Sanian shook her head. “This chart is not current. Those sooka are old and have been blocked for years. The herdsmen favour the western pastures.”

  “Could we clear a way through?”

  “I don’t think so. This section here is entirely fallen away into the gorge.”

  “Feth it all!” Daur murmured.

  “There is perhaps a way, but it is not for our machine.”

  “You said that about the sookas.”

  “I mean it this time. Here. The Ladder of Heaven.”

  Five thousand metres higher up and sixty kilometres to the north-west, the honour guard column climbed the ragged high passes in the driving snow. It was past dark on the night of the seventh day, but still they pressed on at a desperate crawl, headlamps blazing into the dark. Blizzarding snow swirled through the beams of their lights.

  According to the last reliable auspex reading, an enormous enemy force was half a day behind them.

  The route they were following, known as Pilgrim’s Pass, was becoming treacherous in the extreme. The track itself, climbing at an incline of one in six, was no more than twenty metres broad. To their left rose the sheer cliffs of the mountainside. To their right, invisible in the dark and the snow, it fell away in a scree-slope that tumbled almost vertically down to the floor of the gorge six hundred metres below.

  It was hard enough to read the road in the day. Everyone was tense, expecting a wrong turn to send a vehicle tumbling off into the chasm. And there was also the chance of a rock-slide, or a simple loss of grip in the snow. Every time the troop truck wheels slid, the Ghosts went rigid, expecting the worst… a long, inexorable slide to oblivion.

  “We have to stop, colonel-commissar!” Kleopas urged over the link.

  “Noted, but what happens if it continues like this all night? Come the dawn, we might be so buried in snow we can’t move again.”

  Another hour, perhaps two, Gaunt thought. They could risk that much. In terms of distance, the Shrinehold was close now. The duration of the journey was more determined by the conditions.

  “Sabbat does love to test her pilgrims on the path,” chuckled Zweil, huddled up in a bed roll in the back of the Salamander’s compartment.

  “I’m sure,” said Gaunt. “Feth take her Holy Depths.”

  That made the old priest laugh so heartily he started coughing.

  If anything, the snow seemed to be getting heavier.

  Suddenly, there came a series of unintelligible bursts on the vox. Rearlamps ahead of them in the pelting flakes flashed and swung.

  “Full stop!” Gaunt ordered and clambered out. He trudged forward into the wind and the driving sno
w, his boots sinking thirty or forty centimetres into the drifts.

  Revealed only at the last minute by the groping auspex and by the driver’s struggling eyesight, the track swung hard around a spur, almost at forty-five degrees. Even this close, Gaunt could barely see it himself. One of the pair of scout Salamanders fronting the column was dangling over the edge of the chasm, most of one entire track section hanging in space. Gaunt hurried up through the headlamp beams of the machines behind, joined by other Ghosts and vehicle crews. The four occupants of the stricken light tank: the Pardus driver, Vox-officer Raglon and Scout Troopers Mklane and Baen, were standing in the crewbay of the teetering machine, frozen in place, not daring to move.

  “Steady! Steady, sir!” Raglon hissed as Gaunt approached. They could all hear rock and ice crumbling under the body of the scout machine.

  “Get a line attached! Come on!” Gaunt yelled. A Pardus driver hurried forward with a tow-hook, playing out the plasteel-mesh cable. Gaunt took the hook and gently reached out, sliding it in place over one of the Salamander’s hardpoint lugs.

  “Tension! Tension!” he cried, and the electric drum of the vehicle behind them started to rotate taking up the slack on the cable until the line was taut. The Salamander tilted back a little onto the track.

  “Out! Now!” Gaunt ordered, and Raglon’s crew scrambled out onto the snowy trail, dropping to their knees and gasping with relief.

  The crews around them now began the job of hauling the empty machine back onto the path. Gaunt helped Mklane up.

  “I thought we were dead, sir. The road just wasn’t there anymore.”

  “Where’s scout one?” asked Gaunt.

  They all stopped dead and turned to look out into the darkness. They’d been so busy saving one machine, no one had realised the other had vanished entirely.

  He’d forced the pace, Gaunt reflected, and the scout crew had paid the price.

  “Gaunt to convoy. Full stop now. We go no further tonight.”

  “Maybe we do,” said ayatani Zweil, suddenly appearing at Gaunt’s side. He pointed up into the darkness and the blizzarding snow. There was a light. Strong, yellow, bright, shining in the night above them.

  “The Shrinehold,” said Zweil.

  FOURTEEN

  SHRINEHOLD

  “In war, one must prepare for defeat. Defeat is the most insidious of our foes. It never comes the way we expect.”

  —Warmaster Slaydo,

  from A Treatise on the

  Nature of Warfare

  The honour guard approached the Temple of the Shrinehold of Saint Sabbat Hagio at first light. The snows had stopped, and the mountain scenery was perfect, sculptural white under a golden sky.

  The Shrinehold was a towering structure rising out of the basalt of a promontory spur that ran down from the ice-capped peak above. The road ran along the crest to a hefty gatehouse in the lower of two concentric walls. Within those walls stood the close-packed buildings of the Shrinus Basilica, the monastery of the tempelum ayatani shrinus, and a great square-sided tower topped by a golden gambrel roof with up-swept eaves. Prayer flags and votive kites fluttered from the tower. The buildings and walls of the Shrinehold were pink basalt. Shutters and doors were painted a bright gloss red and their frames edged in white. Beyond the walls and the tower, at the very edge of the promontory, stood a massive stone pillar of black corundum on top of which the eternal light of the signal fire burned.

  Gaunt halted the column on the causeway before the gate and approached on foot with Kleopas, Hark, Zweil, Rawne and an escort of six Ghosts. True to Sergeant Mkoll’s estimate, it had taken eight days to make the journey. They needed to expedite the business here if they were going to make it back to the Doctrinopolis in the ten days remaining before complete evacuation. Gaunt didn’t even want to start thinking about how hard that journey was going to be The Infardi were closing on their heels in huge numbers and as far as he knew there was no other way down from the Sacred Hills.

  The gigantic red doors under the grim carved aquila on the gatehouse swung open silently as they approached, and they strode in up the steps. Six blue robed ayatani brothers bowed to them but said nothing. They were taken up a wide flight of stone steps, which had been brushed clear of snow, to the gate in the inner wall, and then through into a lofty entrance hall.

  The place was smoky brown and gloomy, with light entering through high windows, cold and pure. Gaunt could hear chanting, and the sporadic chiming of bells or gongs. The air was full of incense smoke.

  He removed his cap and looked around. Colourful gleaming mosaics decorated the walls, showing the saint at various points in her hallowed life. Small holographic portraits set into lit alcoves along one wall depicted the great generals, commanders and Astartes who had served during her crusade The great banner standard of Sabbat, an ancient and worn swathe of material, was suspended from the arched roof.

  Ayatani of the tempelum ayatani shrinus entered the hall through the far doors, approached the Imperial retinue and bowed. There were twenty of them, all old, calm-faced men with tight, wrinkled skin worn by wind and cold and altitude.

  Gaunt saluted. “Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt, commander of the Tanith First, Imperial Crusade Liberation Army. These are my chief officers, Major Rawne, Major Kleopas and Commissar Hark. I am here under orders from Lord Militant General Lugo.”

  “You are welcome to the Shrinehold, sir,” said the leader of the brothers, his blue robes a deeper shade of violet. His face was as weatherbeaten as his colleagues’, and his eyes had been replaced by an augmetic visor that made his stare milky and blank, like chronic cataracts. “My name is Cortona. I am ayatani-ayt of this temple and monastery. We welcome you all to the shrine, and praise your diligence in making the arduous trek here at this time of year. Perhaps you will take refreshment with us? You are also free to make devotion at the shrine of course.”

  “Thank you, ayatani-ayt. Refreshment would be welcome, but I should make clear that the urgency of my mission means I have little time to spare, even for pious observances.”

  The Imperials were taken through into an anteroom where soda farls, dried fruit and pots of a warm, sweet infusion were laid out on low, painted tables. They sat: Gaunt and his men on squat stools; the ayatani, including Zweil, on floor mats. Refreshment was passed round by junior esholi in white robes.

  “I am touched that your lord general has seen fit to be concerned for our welfare,” Cortona continued, “but I fear your mission here has been a waste of effort. We are fully aware of the enemy forces that seek to overran this world, but we have no need of defence. If the enemy comes, the enemy comes and that will be the way of things. Our holy saint believed very much in natural fate. If it is decreed by destiny that this Shrinehold should fall to the enemy, and that our lives are to be forfeit, then it is decreed. No amount of tanks and soldiers can change that.”

  “You’d let the Chaos breed just walk in?” Rawne asked, incredulously.

  “Watch your mouth, major!” Hark hissed.

  “It is an understandable question,” said Cortona. “Our belief system may be hard to comprehend for minds versed and schooled in war.”

  “Saint Sabbat was a warrior, ayatani-ayt,” Gaunt pointed out smoothly.

  “She was. Perhaps the finest in the galaxy. But she is at rest now.”

  “Your concerns are moot anyway, with respect, father,” Gaunt went on. “You have misjudged our purpose here. We have not been sent to defend you. Lord General Lugo has ordered me to recover the relics of the saint and escort them with full honour to the Doctrinopolis, prior to the evacuation of Hagia.”

  The calm smile never left Cortona’s face. “I fear, colonel-commissar, that I can never allow that to happen.”

  “You quite took my breath away,” murmured Zweil. “I never imagined that was why you were coming to the Shrinehold! Bead’s blood, colonel-commissar! What were you thinking?”

  “I was obeying orders,” said Gaunt. They stood together on the
terrace of the Shrinehold’s inner wall, looking out across the bright snows towards the gorge.

  “I thought you’d been sent to protect this place! I knew the tempelum ayatani would be none too pleased with a military intervention, but I left that to you.”

  “And if I’d told you my full purpose, would you have advised me to turn back?”

  “I would have told you what ayatani-ayt just told you. The saint’s relics can never be taken from Hagia. It’s one of the oldest doctrines, her deathbed prophecy. Even the likes of this General Lugo, or your esteemed Warmaster Macaroth, would be fools to break it!”

  “I’ve read it. You know I’ve read the gospels closely. I just assumed it was… a whim. A minor detail.”

  Zweil shook his head. “I think that’s where you keep going wrong, my boy. Half the time you read the scriptures hunting for absolute literal sense, the other half you try too hard to decipher hidden meanings! Textual interpretation indeed! You need balance You need to understand the fundamental equilibrium of faith as it matters to us. If you expect the ayatani to devoutly and strictly keep the customs and relics and traditions of the beati alive then you must equally expect us to treat the instruction of her scriptures with absolute conviction.”

  “It is written,” Gaunt began thoughtfully, “that if the remains of Saint Sabbat are ever taken from Hagia, if they are ever removed by accident or design, the entire Sabbat Worlds will fall to Chaos forever.”

  “What’s not clear about that?”

  “It’s an open prophecy! A colourful myth designed to intensify devotion and worship! It couldn’t actually happen!”

  “No?” Zweil gazed out across the Sacred Hills. “Why not? You believe in the saint, in her works, in her incorruptible sanctity. Your belief in her and all she represents shines from you. It brought you here. So why wouldn’t you believe in her deathbed prophecy?”

  Gaunt shrugged. “Because it’s too… insane! Too big, too far-fetched! Too unlikely…”