[Gaunt's Ghosts 11] - Only in Death

by Dan Abnett

  Just let it not be artillery, he thought.

  He made it to the far side of the courtyard and blundered in between the two Ghosts posted there.

  “Stay sharp,” he told them, and began to walk up the steps in the direction of the library and armoury, pulling off his goggles and shaking the dust out of his cape.

  III

  When Baskevyl walked into the gun room, Larkin and Maggs were busy examining some of the big antique weapons by the soft amber light.

  “If only we had ammo,” Larkin was saying.

  “We do,” said Bonin, leaning back against a rack on the far wall, his arms folded. He nodded at the armoured bunkers running down the middle space of the room.

  “If only we had useable ammo,” Larkin corrected.

  “Oh, there is that,” agreed Bonin. The back and left side of his neck were thickly dressed. The pain of his recent injury didn’t appear to bother him.

  Baskevyl knelt down and lifted the lid off one of the bunkers. He looked at the heap of brown satin pebbles inside.

  “Do you think they charged them?” he wondered. “Do you think they’re rechargeable?”

  “Coir reckoned they’d been in the coffers too long, Throne rest him,” Bonin replied. “I reckon we could kill ourselves pretty quickly fething about with old, exotic ammunition.”

  “Still,” said Larkin, picking up a brown pebble and holding it in his hand until it began to glow.

  “Larks…” Bonin warned, pushing away from the wall and standing upright.

  Baskevyl held up a hand. Larkin opened the heavy, mechanical lock of the rampart gun he was holding, dropped the glowing pebble into it, and snapped the action shut. He aimed the massive piece at the blank, end wall of the armoury, flexing his palm around the over-sized grip.

  “This is not a good idea,” said Bonin.

  “Coming to this bad rock wasn’t a good idea in the first place,” Larkin replied. He adjusted his hold, judging how to balance the considerable weight of the wall-gun.

  He pulled the trigger.

  There was a perfunctory fttppp! and a disappointing fizzle of light around the gun’s fat muzzle. Larkin clacked open the action and looked down at the dead, brown pebble inside.

  “Well, it was worth a try,” Larkin said, lowering the hefty firearm. “You’d need a slot too, to fire this beastie properly. A slot and a monopod stand.”

  “Like this?” Maggs asked. The shelving under the main gunracks was full of slender brass tubes. He pulled one free. It telescoped out neatly to form a shoulder-high pole with a forked rest at the top.

  “Exactly like that,” said Larkin.

  “We’ve got everything,” said Maggs.

  “Except ammunition, in which case we’ve got nothing,” said Bonin.

  “Are you always such a glass-half-empty bloke, Mach?” Baskevyl asked.

  “Actually, I’m a glass-half-broken-and-rammed-in-someone-else’s-face bloke,” said Bonin.

  “Good to know,” said Baskevyl. “Keep looking around and see what you can find.”

  “Hey,” said Maggs. He’d tugged at the brass gun rest again, an additional fifty centimetres had telescoped out. “Why would you want it this tall?” he asked.

  “For aiming upwards?” Baskevyl suggested with a shrug as he left the chamber. “Carry on.”

  IV

  Baskevyl crossed the corridor to the library chamber where Beltayn, Fapes and two other adjutants were at work.

  Beltayn looked up from the pile of books he was studying on the reading tables. Baskevyl didn’t like the look on Beltayn’s face.

  “We’re checking book to book, but it’s either an old or non-human script, or it’s code.”

  “Everything?”

  Beltayn patted the stack of books on the desk in front of him and then rolled his eyes meaningfully at the thousands of volumes and scrolls on the shelves around them.

  Baskevyl nodded. “All right. That was a stupid question. You’ve only just started.”

  “By all means, help,” said the adjutant.

  Baskevyl stood for a moment, listening to the slurring, scratch of the wind outside, a sound that seemed somehow to be coming from below him. Anything to take his mind off that.

  He walked the length of one of the walls, running a fingertip along the lip of the elbow-high shelf. A fine billow of dust rippled out in a drowsy wake behind his moving finger. The books were a jumbled assortment, the spines frayed, worn and old. In some cases, it was clear from a collapsed knot of papers wedged between volumes that whole bindings had disintegrated. A few of the volumes bore embossed titles on their spines, but Baskevyl couldn’t read any of them. Others seemed to be adorned with emblems or decorative motifs. He looked around at random for a book to start with.

  “Is everything all right, sir?” Fapes asked him.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Nothing, sir. You just made a sound like you were surprised at something.”

  “Just clearing my throat, Fapes. This dust.”

  Screw the dust, dust had nothing to do it. Nothing to do with the mumble of shock he’d been unable to stifle. Baskevyl swallowed and looked back at the shelf. It wasn’t just the emblem his eyes had alighted on, it was also the fact that he’d been picking at random—at random!—and it had been right there waiting for him.

  He stared at the spine of the book. It was bound in what looked like black leather, sheened and smooth, like-Stop it.

  Too late to stop it. Too late to stop his mind racing. The emblem, embossed in silver on the spine, glared at him. A snake, a serpent, a worm, its long, segmented body curled around in a circle, so that its jaws clenched its tail-tip to form a hoop.

  He swallowed again, and reached out to take down the book. Deep in the recesses of his mind, he heard the scratching grow louder: the grunting, sloughing, scraping beneath his feet, beneath the floor, beneath the mountain itself, increasing as the daemon-worm writhed in pleasure and anticipation.

  Baskevyl’s hand wavered a few centimetres from the spine of the book.

  Take it. Take it. Take it down. Look at it.

  His fingers touched the black snakeskin binding just above the silver motif.

  “Major?”

  Baskevyl snatched his fingers away. “Beltayn? What did you want?”

  Beltayn had a large, leather bound folio open on the reading desk.

  “You might want to see this, sir,” Beltayn said, leafing through the pages.

  Glad of any excuse to leave the snakeskin book where it was, Beltayn moved around the desk behind Beltayn.

  The folio Beltayn had found was big and loose-leaf, containing fragile pages almost half a metre square. Some were blocks of annotated text: copy-black blocks of script in an arcane tongue, decorated with faded penmanship that was even less intelligible.

  The rest were illustrated plates. They were finely done, but the colours that had been used to hand tint them were just ghosts of their former strengths.

  The plates were diagrams of fortress walls, bastions, emplacements, outworks for debauchment, casemate lines, trench systems, cloche groupings.

  “Feth,” said Baskevyl. “Is this… here?”

  Beltayn nodded. “I think it might be. Actually, I think this might be a record of Jago. That… that looks like Elikon, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes it does.”

  “And that… that’s way too big to be here. That’s… well, it looks like a hundred kilometres long at least.”

  “At least.” Baskevyl breathed deeply. “Records of the fortress world, old records. I wonder how accurate they are?”

  “Better than ours, I’ll bet,” said Fapes, peering in over their shoulders.

  “Throne bless you, Bel,” said Baskevyl, slapping Beltayn on the shoulder. “You may have just found something truly important to the war. How many more volumes are there like this?”

  “Er… four, six, eight…” Fapes said as he began to count. “Twenty-three on this stack. There may be others.”
<
br />   “Shit,” said Baskevyl.

  “You’re not wrong there,” said Beltayn. “Look.”

  He’d turned over another plate. This one wasn’t a diagram, it was a picture, an illustration. It was a cut-away view, done in an antique style, of armoured men defending a casemate during action. Starry missiles, like ancient depictions of comets, arced down at them. Some lay dead, side on, at the foot of the page, their scale and attitudes disagreeing with the perspective of the picture. The men at the casemate were quite clearly armed with wall guns identical to the weapons stored not twenty metres away from where they stood.

  “Fighting men,” said Baskevyl, “at a gun slit.”

  Beltayn turned another plate over and revealed another, similar image, a third. Then a fourth, which showed the warriors winding the shutters open for firing. The intricate shutter mechanisms were clearly shown.

  “Are they?” Beltayn asked.

  “Are they what?”

  “Are they men?” Beltayn asked. “Look closely.”

  Baskevyl peered down. Beltayn was right. The warriors in the pictures were humanoid, but they were encased in intricate armour from head to foot. Their faces were covered with complex visors.

  “They might not be men at all,” said Beltayn. “Look how big they are in comparison to the casemate slots.”

  “You can’t say that. There’s no perspective, no scale,” Baskevyl said.

  “Then look how big they are compared to the guns,” said Fapes.

  In the illustrations, the warriors at the casemate slots were holding the rampart weapons as if they were lasrifles. Some of them were shown using gun rests, but even so…

  Baskevyl remembered Maggs slotting out that last fifty centimetres of telescoping brass pole.

  “Oh holy Throne,” he murmured.

  “What’s the matter, major?” asked Fapes. “You seem awfully jumpy today.”

  Baskevyl touched his microbead. “Sir, this is Baskevyl.”

  “Go,” replied Rawne’s voice.

  “Can you get yourself down to that library we found? There’s something I’d like to show you.”

  “Ten minutes, Baskevyl. Can it wait that long?”

  “It’s waited I don’t know how many centuries so far. I’m sure another ten minutes won’t make any difference.”

  V

  Hundreds of footsteps echoed around the house. The watch shift was changing.

  The wailing storm outside had outlasted the night and the first watch of the day. Mkoll strode down a corridor spur off the base chamber to check on the scout rotations. He passed the door to Gaunt’s chamber. It was ajar.

  Not Gaunt’s, he told himself, not any more. Rawne’s.

  He stopped walking, and stepped back a pace or three until he could look in through the open door.

  Oan Mkoll was a hard man, a man not given to displays of emotion. He would never have admitted to anyone how lost he felt without Gaunt. They were all feeling it, he knew that. Every last one of them was feeling the loss, and there was no point amplifying that misery. He certainly didn’t want anybody commiserating with him.

  But the centre of his universe had gone, just like that, even though he had always known it probably would one day. He’d give his life to the service of the Tanith First and, more importantly, to Ibram Gaunt. Mkoll knew war as more than a passing acquaintance. Given his particular role, Mkoll had always assumed he’d die long before Gaunt. Now that Gaunt had beaten him to the happy place, nothing seemed to matter any more.

  He hated himself for feeling this way. He resented Gaunt for his passing. It wasn’t right. All the while Gaunt had been alive, there’d been some purpose to living, some point to the endless catalogue of war zones and battles, some hope, some… destination.

  Mkoll pushed the door open and walked into the room. He breathed in. He could smell Gaunt, the ghost of him. He could smell Gaunt’s cologne, the starch of his uniform, his lingering body odour.

  Rawne’s belongings were strewn untidily around the room. Mkoll walked over to the desk. Rawne’s announcement that morning that Gaunt’s sword had been purloined had filled Mkoll with the deepest fury.

  What a bastard, dishonourable thing to do. Steal a dead man’s sword? That was low.

  Mkoll stared down at the desk top. A few personal items lay on it: a data-slate, a button-brush, a tin of metal polish, a tin mug.

  From the moment Mkoll had entered the gatehouse of Hinzerhaus, he hadn’t been himself. He’d been jumpy, tense and terrified that he was off his game. He’d told Gaunt as much, that evening out on the crag top. Gaunt had tried to buck him up, but Mkoll had continued to feel it: the sloppiness, the doubt.

  I can’t trust myself. This place is making a fool out of me. And fools die faster than others.

  That’s what he’d said.

  Mkoll was painfully sure that Gaunt would still be alive if Mkoll had been on form. Mkoll would have been up in upper west sixteen, leading the way, making sure Gaunt didn’t have to lead the way.

  I should have been there. I should have known where the real danger was. I should have been there and I should have saved Ibram, even if that meant I took a kill shot myself.

  Mkoll sighed. I failed you. I’m so sorry.

  He looked down at the desk again. Feth take Hark and his due process. I’ll find the bastard who lifted Gaunt’s sword and I’ll—

  Mkoll saw the sunshades. He picked them up and turned them over in his hands. They were cheap things, machine stamped out of some plastek mill on Urdesh or Rydol. He remembered Varl posing with them for a laugh on Herodor.

  What he most clearly remembered was the fact that the sunshades had never once left the Nihtgane’s face from the moment Varl had given them to Eszrah on Gereon.

  “Oh, you stupid feth,” Mkoll murmured to himself. “What have you gone and done?”

  VI

  Rawne entered the library. “This had better be worth my time,” he said. “Oh, it is,” Baskevyl replied. “Look at this.”

  “Look at what?” Hark asked, limping in behind Rawne.

  “I—” Baskevyl began. He paused, and looked at Hark. “Commissar? What’s the matter?”

  Hark had frowned suddenly, as if hearing something. When he spoke, his words came out in a short bark.

  “Brace yourselves!”

  They felt the shudder of the first shells falling on the house. One salvo, another. Some burst nearby, causing the floor to vibrate and dust to spill down from the ceiling.

  “The storm is still blowing!” Beltayn complained. “How can they range us?”

  “They had us yesterday. That range still applies,” Rawne shouted back. “Even firing blind!”

  “But—” Beltayn began.

  The next salvo felt as if it struck the bulk of the house directly overhead. Chunks of plasterwork and sections of brown satin panels spilled down out of the roof space. The lights flickered.

  Rawne’s eyes narrowed. How do we fight an enemy we can’t see and we can’t reach? How do we fight an enemy that can pick us apart one piece at a time?

  VII

  The shelling continued for ten more minutes and then eased off. In another ten, it began again, like a summer rainstorm that comes and goes with the chasing clouds.

  The house jarred in its rocky bedding. Several overlook casemates took square hits and were demolished, but there were few casualties as the Ghosts had withdrawn into the fortified heart of the house. The shell impacts sounded through the wailing drone of the wind, shrill and raucous, like the bleats of livestock going to slaughter.

  Zweil had been conducting a service in the base chamber when the first shells started to land. As the men around him looked up in consternation, he hushed them down and carried on with his reading as if nothing was happening.

  Nearby, on a lower landing of the same chamber, Rerval, Rafflan and other vox-officers had continued to apply themselves to their caster-sets, their constant, murmuring voices becoming a liturgical chorus to Zweil’s confid
ent voice.

  Daur was in command of the watch on the main gatehouse. He knew that what they were hearing—and feeling—was harassing fire at best, a constant plugging away to weaken their resolve. No one, not even the Chaotic enemy, used artillery during a full-scale typhoon with any expectation of accurate, productive results. It was a wonder anything was hitting the house at all.

  But even the whine of shells passing overhead, or the sound of a barrage landing within earshot, was enough to unsettle dug-in troops. It made them feel helpless and even more vulnerable than usual. It whittled away their hope and eroded their confidence.

  Daur walked down through the huddles of muttering, wary men in the gatehouse and stood in front of the main hatch. His fingers traced the slight crease in the seam where the ram had done its work the day before. It wouldn’t take much more to break the seal.

  He placed the palm of his hand flat against the metal of the hatch and felt a slight, continuous vibration beneath his touch. Was that the pressure of the storm driving against the other side?

  The shelling persisted for another half an hour and then died away again. There was no respite from the storm. High in the house, along those ill-fated uppermost halls and galleries, the fiercely moving air and dust outside made sounds against the metal domes of the cloches like claws on glass. Hastily tied or wired-down shutters juddered in their sockets. Sentry fire-teams waited in uneasy groups, listening, talking softly, playing at cards or dice, or gnawing on dried rations.

  Mkoll toured the upper galleries, checking on the sentry teams. The men were glad to see him. Mkoll was a reassuring figure. As the shelling came and went, he told them not to worry, and to keep a close watch on the shutters and the trip-wires.

  More than once, as if in passing, he casually asked, “Do you happen to have seen the Nihtgane today?”