[Gaunt's Ghosts 11] - Only in Death

by Dan Abnett

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  ONLY IN DEATH

  The Lost - 04

  (Gaunt’s Ghosts - 11)

  Dan Abnett

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred

  centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden

  Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will

  of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of

  his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing

  invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He

  is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand

  souls arc sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his

  eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested

  miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars,

  their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic

  manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in

  his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst his

  soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines,

  bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms arc

  legion: the Imperial Guard and countless planetary defence

  forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the

  Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few.

  But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold

  off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics,

  mutants—and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold

  billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime

  imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the

  power of technology and science, for so much has been for-

  gotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress

  and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only

  war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of

  carnage and slaughter, and the laughter

  of thirsting gods.

  Only in death does duty end.

  —old Imperial proverb

  “In 778.M41, the twenty-third year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, Warmaster Macaroth’s main battle groups advanced swiftly and thoroughly into the frontiers of the Carcaradon Cluster, driving the hosts of the Archenemy overlord (‘Archon’) Urlock Gaur, before them. Archon Gaur’s forces seemed to fracture under the successive Imperial assaults, though it now seems likely they were in fact withdrawing to establish a defensive cordon in the Erinyes Group.

  “To coreward, the Crusade’s secondary battle-groups—the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Armies—continued to combat the legions of Magister Anakwanar Sek, Gaur’s most capable lieutenant. The Second Front’s avowed intent was to hound Sek’s rabble from the fringes of the Khan Group, and oust them from the many fortress worlds of the Cabal System.

  “During this murderous phase of the Crusade, an especially bloody banishment campaign took place on the ruinous fortress world of Jago…”

  —from A History of the Later Imperial Crusades

  Day two (out of Elikon M.P.). Sunrise at four, but dust-out til later. Progress fair (23km). Am concerned about water rations, have mentioned matter to G. and R. Dust a factor. R. repeated his “no spit” order, useles frankly unworkable in my opinion. G. assures objective has its own well/water supply. We’ll see.

  K. has once again ras raised questions re: dust jamming weapons. Inspect ordered for noon halt. To follow up. Good evidence for casing all weapons during march, though R. reluctant. Casing would slow unit response in event of ambush scenario.

  Dreams getting worse, more troubl

  Rumour persists. Have failed to winkle out origin. Suddenly everyone’s a superstitious fething idiot. Bad form. Intend to get on top of it once we’re installed at objective.

  Don’t like this place at all. Doing best to maintain morale. Dust and rumours not helping.

  Sunset seven plus twenty-one. Light winds. Saw stars for first time. They looked a long aw way away.

  —Field journal V.H. fifth month, 778.

  ONE

  The House at the End of the World

  I

  During the six-day trudge up-country, some bright spark (and no one ever found out who) started a gossipy piece of rumour that swept through the regiment like a dose of belly-flu. The rumour ran that a bunch of Guardsmen, maybe a pioneer unit or a scout reconnaissance, had come across a ravine up in the hills full of skulls with all the tops sawn off.

  The Ghosts, both old and new, were tough fethers who had seen far, far worse than a few bleached bones in their days, but there was something about the rumour, that damned gossipy piece of rumour, that stuck like a splinter under the skin, and dug until it nagged.

  Like all rumours, the art was in the detail. The skulls, so it went, were human, and they were old, really old. They weren’t some relic of the present war, not even an atrocity perpetrated by the Archenemy who had, until the previous spring, been the undisputed master of Jago. Old, old, old and dusty; fossil-old, tomb-old; weathered and worn and yellow, evidence of some godless crime enacted in those wild, lonely hills in ages past. It smacked of ritual, of trophy taking, of predation. The meaning was long lost, erased by time and weather and the debrading dust, so that no clear detail could be discerned anymore, and all the awful possibilities imaginable came bubbling up in the minds of the marching troops.

  More than anything else, the rumour seemed to cement the dim view every last one of them had formed about the place. Jago was a bad rock, and these lonely hills were the baddest, bleakest stretch of that bad rock.

  Gaunt was having none of it. When the gossip reached him, he tried to have it stamped out, quick and neat, like a bug under a boot-heel. He told Hark and Ludd to “have issue” with anyone caught using the words “cursed” or “haunted”. He told them that he wanted it made known that there would be punishment duties available to any trooper found spreading the rumour.

  Hark and Ludd did as they were told, and the gossip died back to a mumble, but it refused to go away.

  “The men are spooked,” said Viktor Hark.

  II

  It didn’t help that Jago was such a Throne-forsaken arse-cleft.

  The northern mountains, an eight thousand kilometre-long range of buck and broken teeth, were possessed of three prevailing characteristics: wind, dust and craggy altitude. Those ingredients worked in concert to produce an environment that every single one of the Ghosts would have gladly said goodbye to at short notice, without regret.

  The wind was cold and saw-edged, and banged around the tight valleys and deep ravines like a ricocheting las-round. It rubbed exposed flesh red-raw, and made knuckles as numb as ice. It tugged at capes, and whipped off hats without invitation. It slung itself about, and gnawed and bit and, all the while, sang like a siren; like a fething siren. It had had eons to practise its music, and it sang for the Ghosts of Tanith more keenly than any pipe or marching flute. It found crevices, split rocks, clefts, fissures and chasms, and wailed through them. It played the lonely hills like a templum organ, exploiting every last acoustic possibility of the mountainous terrain.

  Then there was the dust. The dust got into everything, not least the singing wind. It sifted into collars and ears and cuffs; it invaded puttees and gloves; it clogged noses until they were thick with grey tar. It found its way into kitbags, into weapons, into ration packs, into underwear even, where it chafed like scrubbing powder. Trekking up the narrow passes, the Ghosts spat lumpy grey phlegm, r
insing their mouths from their water bottles. Rifles fatigued and ailed, polished steel scoured matt, and mechanisms jammed, until Gaunt ordered weapons to be carried cased in weather-proofs. “Up ahead” became an opaque mist, “behind” a trail of boot prints that was erased in seconds. “Above” was a vague suggestion of jagged cliffs. All around them washed the haunting song of the grit-laden wind.

  Quickly, they all became very grateful indeed for the brass-framed goggles they’d been issued with by the Munitorum aides at Elikon Muster Point.

  Dry skulls in a dusty valley, with all the tops sawn off.

  “This is going to be trouble,” said Elim Rawne.

  “Trouble’s what we do,” said Ibram Gaunt.

  III

  Part of the trouble was that the war was taking place elsewhere. It might as well have been taking place in another century. At night, during the intervals when the wind died back and the dust clouds dropped away, they could hear the sky-punch of the artillery and the armour divisions south of Elikon. Sometimes they saw the flashes, like lightning on a different planet, pulsing like a watchtower beacon, far away. Once in a while, drop-ships droned overhead—Valkyries and heavy Destriers—zoning in towards the active killing grounds. The dropships courteously waggled their wings at the thread of troopers winding along the valley floors.

  Jago was a fortress world, one of the infamous fortress worlds built along the trailwards salient of the Cabal System. Nahum Ludd hadn’t known quite what to expect, so his imagination had run fast and loose with the words “fortress” and “world”. He had conceived of a planet built like a castle, all gun-slits and machicolations; a planet with bastion towers and square corners; an improbable, impregnable thing. The truth was rather different. Jago had been fortified long before the reach of mankind’s memory. Its rocky, howling, fuming crust had been mined out and laced with thousands of kilometres of casemates, bunkers and structural emplacements. Ludd wondered what manner of long-forgotten war had engulfed the place so thoroughly that such formidable earthworks had been necessary. Who had the defenders been? Who had they been fighting? How could anyone tell where one fortress line ended and the next began? Elikon had been a bewildering matrix of sub-crust forts, a labyrinth of tunnels and hard points, a maze of armoured tunnels and cloche turrets, sprouting from the landscape like mushrooms.

  “So, who fought here? Originally, I mean?” Ludd asked. “Why was all this stuff built?”

  “Does it matter?” replied Viktor Hark.

  “Ask the skulls with all the tops sawn off,” mumbled Hlaine Larkin, limping up the gully behind them.

  IV

  They marched for six days, following the rough country up into the waistline of the mountains. The dust billowed around them. General Van Voytz had been quite specific in his instructions. At Elikon, his gold braid fingered by the hillside wind, he’d climbed up onto the broad back of a scabby Chimera to address them all, like a serious but well-meaning friend. He’d been forced to raise his voice above the trundle of a passing convoy: heavy armour, troop transports, vox trailers, and the guarded cage-trucks of battlefield psykers, all rolling out towards the front.

  “The Archenemy may attempt to side-swipe us here,” Van Voytz had said, his voice planed smooth by the gritty breeze. “I’m asking the Ghosts to watch our eastern flank.”

  Asking. Gaunt had smiled at that: a dry smile, for no other kind was possible on Jago. His old friend and sometime mentor Barthol Van Voytz was an expert at making the average fighting soldier feel as if any given commission was either his own idea, or a favour for the boss. Asking. Show some spine, Barthol. What you’re doing is called ordering.

  “There is an end-of-line stronghold called Hinzerhaus at the far east reach of the fortress wall,” Van Voytz continued. “It’s up in the Banzie Altids, a spur of the main mountain range, eight days from here.”

  More like six, the way my Ghosts march, thought Gaunt.

  “Hinzerhaus is your objective. Find it,” said Van Voytz. “Find it, secure it, hold it, and deny any attempt by the enemy to cross the line at that place. The Emperor is counting on you.”

  They had all made the sign of the aquila. They had all thought the fething Emperor doesn’t even know my name.

  “Do we like this job?” asked Braden Baskevyl. “Show of hands?”

  “Does it matter?” replied Gol Kolea, as the regiment struck camp.

  “You boys hear that thing about the skulls, then? The sawn-off skulls?” asked Ceglan Varl, as he wandered by.

  V

  So they had trekked out into the back end of nowhere, into the most forgotten parts of the bad rock called Jago, into the Banzie Altids. The ravines grew deeper, the cliffs grew steeper, and the dusty wind sang for them at the top of its dry lungs.

  “This is going to be trouble,” said Elim Rawne, spitting out a wad of thick grey phlegm.

  “Oh, rot! You always say that, young man,” said Zweil, the old chaplain, plodding along beside him.

  VI

  Dust hung, like a gauze veil, along the body of the deep valley. The wind had dropped for a moment, and ceased its singing, an eerie hiatus. Gaunt held up his hand. The fingers of his glove were white with dust.

  “It’s taking too fething long,” said Tona Criid.

  “Give them a minute,” whispered Gaunt.

  Ghosts materialised, ghostly figures, tracking back to them out of the veil of dust: Mkoll, Bonin, Hwlan. The regiment’s best.

  “Well?” asked Gaunt.

  “Oh, it’s up there all right,” said Mkoll, spitting to clear his mouth. His brass-framed goggles were covered in a residue of fine powder, and he wiped them with his fingers.

  “We saw it,” said Bonin.

  “And what does it look like?” asked Gaunt.

  “Like the last house before the end of the fething world,” said Mkoll.

  VII

  They got up and moved on; two and a half thousand troopers in a long, straggly file. The wind found its energy again, and restarted its song.

  Thus it was the Tanith First-and-Only came to Hinzerhaus, the house at the end of the world.

  “This is going to be trouble,” said Elim Rawne as they plodded up towards the main gate in the stinging haze.

  “Any chance,” wondered Hlaine Larkin, “any chance at all you could stop saying that?”

  The wind shrieked around them. It sounded like the scream skulls would make if their tops had all been sawn off.

  Day six (out of Elikon M.P.). Sunrise at four plus ten, considerable dust-out, increasing at eight (or thereabouts). Progress good (18 km). Objective achieved at noon minus twenty. Can’t get a good look at the place, due to dust storms. Advance moving up to secure as I write. Troop in holding pattern. G. has ordered cases off, to some general cmplaint complaint from the r & f.

  I have dreamed again, this last night, of voices noises someone who won’t

  I wonder if I should speak to Doc D. about my dreams. Would he understand? Maybe A. C.? She might be more receptive. It troubles me to reflect that, since Gereon, I have a difficulty knowing what to say to A.C. She has changed so. No surprise, I suppose. I am given to wonder where the Ana I knew went to.

  It’s hard to know what to do for the best. They’re only dreams, after all. I’ll wager if I could look into the dreams these Ghosts endure, night after night, I’d see a lot worse. I’ve walked the camp after nightfall. I’ve seen them twitch and fidget in their bedrolls, trapped in their own nightmares. Still though I

  Signals from the front. Scouts are returning. Will record more later.

  —Field journal, V.H. fifth month, 778.

  TWO

  Enter Here

  I

  The gatehouse has been empty for nine hundred years. It is made of stone, close-dressed stone: floor, walls and roof alike. It is big. It has an echo that has not been tested in a while.

  The lights are still on. Glow-orb fitments sag from ancient piping, dull and white like a reptile’s lidded eyes. The lig
ht issuing from them throbs, harsh then soft, harsh then soft, in tune with some slow, respiratory rhythm. The pulse of Hinzerhaus.

  There is a rug on the floor. Its edges are curled up like the dry wings of a dead moth. There is a picture on the wall, beside the inner hatch. It has an ornate gilt frame. The canvas within is dirt-black. What is it a picture of? Is that a face, a hand?

  Outside, through the thick bastion walls, the wind sings its siren melody.

  Scraping, now. Shuffling. Voices. Scratching. Old, unoiled bolts protesting as they are wrenched back.

  The outer hatch slides—

  II

  —open.

  The thick metal door swung open about half a metre and then stopped. No amount of shoving could persuade it to open any wider. Its hinges were choked with dust and grit.

  Mkoll slithered inside, through the narrow entry. The wind came indoors with him, its song diminished, its dust inhaled by the gatehouse. Fine powder hung in the stilled air for a moment, as if surprised, before settling.

  The rug fidgeted, tugged by the draught.

  Mkoll looked around, sliding his lamp beam about him gently.

  “Well? Anything? Have you been killed at all?” called Maggs, hidden behind the hatch.

  Mkoll didn’t dignify the question with a reply. He pushed ahead, crouching low, weapon braced, his lamp-pack chasing out all the corners and the shadows.

  The shadows moved as his lamp turned. They dribbled and fell away, they altered and bent. The air was smoke-dry, not a hint of moisture in it. A pulse began to beat in Mkoll’s temple.

  “Chief? Is it clear?” the vox crackled. Bonin, this time, poised outside with Maggs.