by Dan Abnett
“I suppose it is.”
“But now, here… I’m sorry. You were right.”
Dorden looked away, awkwardly. “Okay, then. Haven’t you got a war to win or something?”
Gaunt pushed his way back out through the screen and found himself facing Soric in the hallway.
“Chief? What are you doing here?”
Soric’s face was set firmly. “I’m sorry, sir. I hope you will believe me when I say I meant no harm. I was always loyal, despite what he might tell you.”
“Who? What is this?”
“Just do me one thing, sir. Hear me out and then make it quick.”
“Make what quick, Agun?”
“My execution, sir.”
“Soric? What the feth are you talking about?”
“I know Hark’s told you everything, sir. I blame myself for not coming forward earlier.”
The plastic screen behind Gaunt wrenched back, and three orderlies emerged, wheeling Hark’s gurney to the boarding ramp.
Soric’s eyes widened as he saw the body roll past.
“I’m here because Hark’s been hit bad, Soric. He’s not been in a position to say anything to me. So… why don’t you?”
Soric straightened up, pulling his ramshackle bulk to attention. “Colonel-Commissar, sir. It is my duty and my shame to admit to you here that I… I have the touch of the warp in me. It’s been in me since Phantine, and I have pretended for too long. The curse of the psyker corrupts my mind. I have been receiving messages, sir. Guidance, advice, warnings. All of them have been true. I am so sorry, sir.”
“Is this a joke, Soric?”
“No, sir. I wish it was.”
Gaunt was stunned. “You realise I can take no chances, Sergeant? I have no choice. If there is any truth in this… if you are warp-touched, I must—”
“I know it, sir.”
“What are you going to do. Gaunt? Shoot him?” Dorden stood behind Gaunt. He’d overheard the whole exchange.
“I don’t believe even selfless medics take chances with the warp, doctor.”
“This isn’t some enemy warp-scum, Ibram,” Dorden said. “It’s fething Agun Soric!”
“Don’t fight my corner, doc,” Soric said. “Please, it’s not right. You know yourself what’s in me. Back on Phantine, with Corbec. I know it spooked you.”
Both Gaunt and Dorden remembered the incident well. It had indeed rattled them.
“It’s been getting worse since then. A lot worse.” Soric seemed to be getting agitated, as if there was something alive in his pocket that was nagging at him.
“Standard practice says I should shoot you right here,” said Gaunt. “But it’s you, Agun, and I’ve never heard of a warp-freak turning himself in. Duty troopers?”
Three sentries from the Herodian PDF hurried over. “Take this man’s weapons, and his rank pins, and bind his limbs. Escort him to the hives and lock him down in the securest cell they have. If he tries anything, shoot him. And when you get to the hive, summon the local Guild Astropathicae to examine him.”
“Yes sir.”
“Sir, please. Before they take me. I have to warn you.”
“Agun, go. Before I change my mind.”
“Sir, please!” The troopers grabbed Soric, and pinned him hard. “Please! For the good of us all! It told me nine are coming! Nine are coming! They will kill her and the blood will be on my hands! Please, sir! In the name of all that’s holy! Please listen to me!”
Dragged by the troopers, shouting, Soric disappeared down the busy triage station hallway.
“Should you have listened?” Dorden asked.
Gaunt shook his head. “Either he’s snapped under pressure, in which case, I lament his passing, because he was a damn good soldier. Or… he’s warp-touched like he says he is. I favour the former explanation. Whichever, he has nothing to say that I should trust. The rantings of a lunatic, or the perverse lies of the warp.”
“Because the warp never reveals truth to mankind?”
“Not to the untrained and the unsanctioned, doctor. No, it doesn’t.”
“Psyker tricks,” said Corbec. “Sounds like it to me.”
“Fething psykers,” Feygor agreed.
“Felt like it had hold of my mind. I wasn’t me anymore. I…” Rawne’s voice trailed off:
“What?” asked Corbec.
“If I hadn’t shaken it off, Colm. Feth. I was going to kill her.”
“Who, Banda?”
“Feth, no! Her. The Beati.”
Feygor swore colourfully. It sounded, as always, curiously funny coming out of his flat-pitched augmetic voice box.
“Something got in your head and made you decide to kill the Saint?” Caffran asked.
Rawne shrugged. He couldn’t tell them the truth. How would they ever trust him again?
Something had got into his head, all right. Something so soft and strong and seductive, he’d forgotten everything. Every loyalty, every friendship, every oath he’d ever sworn, even his startling intense affection for Jessi Banda.
All of it, forgotten. The only thing that had remained had been his ruthless streak of hate. His killer instinct. The part of his character that made others eternally wary of him, the part of his character that made sure Ibram Gaunt never quite turned his back.
The very, very worst part of him. It had swelled and grown and taken over his mind, body and soul completely. For that brief moment, he would have happily killed anything and anyone.
Then it had gone again, rushing out like a fast ebbing tide.
One terrible thought remained. If it had done that to him, what might it do to others? If it had cast him aside, where had it gone now?
Milo blinked again, his mind unsteady. He was so damn tired. The effects of the Beati’s touch were fading, and the headache was returning. Voices seemed to be calling, as from a dream, as from the edge of sleep.
“You okay there, Brin?” Dremmond asked.
“Yeah, sure,” Milo said.
Twelve platoon was retreating carefully down a low alley in the Guild Slope, falling back towards the hives. The second line hadn’t broken so much as compressed. Shells sang overhead from the massed enemy batteries down in the suburbs.
The sun was setting. Already, it was out of sight behind the rooftops. By nightfall, they would be into the hives, sealing the hatches, making those massive towers the site of their last stand.
Domor suddenly held up a hand, and the troopers in his company dropped into cover positions.
All, except the Beati. Gleaming bright she walked down the alley to the head of the position, in open view.
“Get down!” Milo hissed.
“Get down, ma’am!” Domor added, urgently.
A death-brigade stormed the street. They came running, howling, charging, weapons blasting. Stone flecks exploded off the alley’s side walls as they advanced.
Milo sighted up and fired. His shot brought down the closest of the iron-masked Blood Pact. The men around him began to fire too.
Sabbat stood her ground, her power sword whirling, ricocheting las-rounds off in all directions. She gutted the first two Blood Pacters who reached her, and decapitated the next one.
“Into them! Into them! Straight silver!” Domor yelled, and the platoon rose and charged, surging up around the defiant Beati, meeting the enemy head on.
Milo ran forward, his head pounding. He lanced his rifle-mounted warknife into the face of the nearest Blood Pact trooper, twisting it to pull it free.
He saw her. She looked so vulnerable. Just one shot One last shot and she’d be finished.
He threw himself against the enemy tide.
The last dregs of fading daylight filtered slantwise through the partially shuttered glass hoarding of the covered market and gleamed off Pater Sin’s steel teeth as he mouthed soothing words to his twins. They had done their work. They were linked to the instrument and with each passing moment they were imprinting the task deeper and deeper into its mind.
The twins were the most potent psykers in the sector. They were alpha level. Between them, their combined minds packed more power than all the astropaths and psykers on Herodor, Imperial and foe alike. His children. The children of Sin.
Karess was submerged now, ten metres deep in chalybeate spring water that pushed at him, heavy with current. Beads of escaped gas twinkled along the seams of his adamite casing and around the perforated cowls of his heavy weapons. His auditory tracts rippled with the swoosh of aquatic pressure.
The rock base of the aquifer was soft, and Karess’ massive hooves churned up silt and eyeless mote-creatures, bacterium and thermal scum.
Machine-pain thrummed through his superstructure. He checked his positioning systems.
True south, true south. There, he would rise and kill.
Tifeh was dead. The human’s bullet had lodged deep inside it and killed it. Chto, who had brood command, ordered Reghh to let Tifeh drop. The cold, rank body slipped to the ground. Chto and Reghh stood up on their heels and howled at the sky in mourning. There was no sound audible to human ears, just a deep, sickening throb that shook the air.
Wet and gleaming, the two remaining loxatl wound round each other and slithered away down the next street.
Their harness cannons were armed. Woe betide anything that met them now.
“Orders, sir!” the signals officer yelled. Major Landfreed ran over to him, ducking down below the parapet. Shrapnel fluttered through the air from the nearby bombardment.
Orders were for the life company elements under Land-freed to fall back to Old Hive.
Landfreed relayed the orders to his men. Since noon, he had lost sixty troopers to the Blood Pact death-brigades. He was determined that those who remained would stay alive. His men started to move out: two squads, tight order.
A hi-ex shell landed just the other side of the ruined wall and the blast shook the ground. Tiles rattled down from the remains of the rafters. Landfreed threw himself down hard.
When he got up again, he was surrounded by smoke. He couldn’t see any of his men.
Blinking, his eyes watering, he peered around, and found himself face to face with a black-robed figure that appeared out of nowhere.
Landfreed froze. Terror locked up his limbs and his reflexes. He gazed up into a face materialising just twenty centimetres from his.
It was bald and white, and utterly hairless. Deep folds crisscrossed the skin, and made furrows around the smiling mouth and the dark eyes. A dried, brown residue soiled the eye-sockets. It was the face of death, the bogey man that Landfreed had been taught to fear.
The haunter of the dark.
Skarwael slowly slid the tip of his boline up Landfreed’s tunic front, effortlessly slicing off every button in turn. The silver fastenings cascaded to the floor, bouncing and clattering.
Skarwael’s boline stopped when it reached Landfreed’s bare throat.
Skarwael smiled. The smile made furrows deepen. Predatory teeth, whiter than the pallid flesh that cased them, were distressingly revealed.
Landfreed tried to find a scream.
“Sir? Sir? Major Landfreed?” Some of his men — Sanchez, Grohowski, Landis, Boles — came blundering forward through the acrid shell-smoke looking for him, and drew to a halt, astonished by what they saw.
Landis yelled out, bringing his lasrifle up. He didn’t know precisely what the cadaverous thing in black was, but his gut told him enough.
Skarwael wheeled, his leathery black robes swishing out and twisting vortices in the dust-thick air. Landis’ shots rippled the dust patterns but struck nothing solid.
Like a shadow, thrown suddenly elsewhere by a switching light-source, Skarwael reappeared on the other side of them. A glinting splinter pistol came up from under his cloak of raw human hides, gripped by long, pale fingers. Energy-charged filaments of toxic crystal spat from the barrel, and Grohowski doubled over, explosively gutted. Landis fired again, and missed again.
“Move! Move!” Landfreed yelled, finding his voice at last. And his laspistol.
He opened fire on the monstrous shadow, but it had vanished. With a baffled gurgle, Landis fell on his back, shot apart by his commander’s blasts.
Boles and Sanchez fired together, hosing the ruined brick wall in front of them with auto-fire. They had the shadow in their sights, but it moved like a black flicker up the wall, around their raking shots, and into the air. It turned for a moment in mid-flight, the ghastly black cape flowing out behind it like wings, then fell on Sanchez. The life company trooper struggled and yelled and came apart as the near invisible shadow mauled him and then threw him aside.
Backing away, Boles looked at Landfreed.
“Run,” Landfreed said simply.
Boles ran. Behind him, Landfreed turned to face the monster, raising his arm to shoot.
But there was no pistol. No hand. Just a cleanly severed wrist-stump.
Skarwael materialised in front of Landfreed and impaled him on his boline.
Boles threw himself forward through the smoke and rubble. He could hear his commander dying back there. In the back of his terrified mind, he wondered one thing. What could make a death scream last so long?
“What’s awry?” Gaunt asked Beltayn, pre-empting his signals officer’s usual remark.
“How about… everything?” Beltayn replied.
First platoon was dug down in Digre Street, a commercial block off Principal I in the Guild Slope, when Gaunt rejoined them from the triage station. The pull back from the second line was a mess compared with the one the Imperials had staged from the northern suburbs at first light. They hadn’t held the second line for anything like as long as Gaunt had hoped. The archenemy was ploughing deep furrows up through the dense Guild Slope and was already threatening the agridomes to the west. The defenders were meant to be withdrawing to the hive towers for the last stand, a tactical move overseen by Biagi and Lugo. Landfreed had gone off line and his forces were in rout. Kaldenbach’s retreat was fundamentally impaired too — it seemed from the vox-log that he’d somehow lost several of his key subordinates, including Lamm from the Regiment Civitas. Even the Ghosts were in disarray. Gaunt tried and failed to coordinate with Corbec and Rawne Their actions had been delayed by incidents that the vox-log gave no details of.
The last contact from the Beati had been a report of a hellish firefight in the low Slope region.
On Digre Street, it was getting bloody. First, fourth and twentieth platoons were heads down under heavy bombardment. The archenemy had drawn up a serious wedge of self-propelled guns into the skirts of the Guild Slope below their position, and now they were pasting the area.
Bright green-yellow geysers of fire erupted from the buildings around them, showering roof tiles and slabs into the air, and cascading rivulets of fire down off the intact rooftops. The air smelled of burned brick dust, so earthy and intense, it made the nostrils close.
Gaunt knew they were right on the edge now. They had a very narrow hope of getting the withdrawal to work. If they fumbled it — and fate wasn’t with them — they wouldn’t even live long enough to stage a last stand at the hives. If the enemy kept this pressure up, the Imperial defence on Herodor would be annihilated before it even reached the hives.
Gaunt ran across a burning street with Beltayn, and joined with Mkoll and Ewler in the shelter of a half-tumbled wall.
“We need to get out now. Back to the hives.”
Mkoll nodded. “It’ll be tight.”
“Wish I could get Corbec or Rawne on the vox.”
“Too much interference,” said Mkoll. “The shelling alone is scrambling basic signals.”
“If I put up a line here, can you start leading the men out south?” Gaunt asked.
Ewler nodded. Mkoll shrugged. “We have to look for snipers.”
“This deep in?”
Mkoll looked at his commander darkly. “I got a report earlier. Larks and Nessa aced a sniper right up in the Guild Slopes. He’d almost drawn the Beati. They
got him before he could take the shot.”
Mkoll showed Gaunt the location on the chart.
“Feth,” murmured Gaunt. “Really, that far in?”
“Yes,” said Mkoll. “I think they’ve got specialists deep into us now. Far, far deeper than their main front. And they’re gunning for one thing.”
“Her,” said Gaunt.
Mkoll nodded.
Gaunt looked over at Beltayn. “Bel… raise the Beati. Raise her or anyone with her. Tell her to fall back to the hives. My orders. She’s what they’re after.”
Beltayn flipped the dust-cover up off his caster-set. “Do my best, sir,” he said.
“I just got Domor,” he said, a moment later. “He says the Bead’s with him. He’ll urge her to withdraw.”
“Tell him to do more than urge, Bel. If she dies, it’s all over.”
Beltayn nodded and turned back to his work.
Shells hammered down around them again. They all ducked.
“Right,” said Gaunt. “Let’s try and find a way out of this rat-trap. Ewler? Take the south side there. Mkoll, with me. You too, Bel.”
They ran from cover, dodging the sprays of debris and flame. Unsteady with his heavy vox-pack, Beltayn stumbled. Mkoll dragged him to his feet and pushed him into cover in a hab doorway beside Gaunt.
Gaunt’s power sword took the lock off and they went inside, into a dark, drafty hallway where the air-rush of the shells outside ebbed and sucked like a giant respirator, fluttering paper scraps and dust back and forth.
It was pitch black. Mkoll kicked open a door and revealed an untidy hab module. Beltayn opened another, a blank room. Mkoll hurried on, and revealed another cluttered apartment with his boot.
“Mkoll!”
Mkoll backtracked and rejoined Gaunt and Beltayn at the door of the empty room Beltayn had opened.
There was nothing to see, an entirely bare hab module. No carpet or rugs, no shade on the overhead lamp, walls stripped. A door to one side, closed. A console table drawn up in the centre of the floor, with a book on it.