He walked away from the trailer, the bolt pistol hanging in his grip. Behind him, Bacler and Criid were arguing with the handlers.
Hark’s foot disturbed something lying in the dust. He bent down.
It was a brass message shell.
Hark picked it up and unscrewed it.
There was nothing inside.
IX
Mkoll and the partisan entered the second prefab. The sour, metallic smell of blood hung in the air. A dozen prisoners were strung up on crude wooden frames along the tent space. It was obvious they had been subjected to intense interrogation under torture.
The scene was appalling, even to a hardened veteran like Mkoll. He stopped in his tracks, breathing hard. The limp, naked bodies suspended on the frames were slick with blood and covered with black, clotted wounds. The torture had been vindictive, cruel and utterly typical of Blood Pact methods. Some of the prisoners had suffered amputations or organ removal. Others had been nailed to the frames by their soft tissue. The hideous tools of the torturers’ trade, goads and nails and skewers, lay in blood-stained trays on stands around the room. Branding irons stood in fuming braziers.
Mkoll went down the line of prisoners, quickly and mercifully putting each one out of his or her misery. The deep urge he had felt to come there and enter the place had vanished as suddenly and mysteriously as it had come. He just wanted to get out and make a run for it. But he wasn’t going to leave before he’d spared these miserable beings further agonies.
It was simple to do. Just pressing the edge of his venom-smeared blade against an open wound let toxins into the blood stream. A swift, numbing death resulted, without the need for shots or further wounding.
He touched his blade against an open wound in the belly of a heavy-set man who had been partly skinned. The man opened his eyes briefly. He smiled at Mkoll as he died. Mkoll felt as if he was an ayatani priest, delivering a last comforting touch and a blessing.
He moved to the next dangling body and reached out with his ministering blade.
Eszrah caught his hand and pulled it back.
“What?” Mkoll asked.
“Not him,” Eszrah said.
Mkoll looked up at the hanging body. The man had been whipped and flayed several times. His skin was hanging off in places. His face, hanging low, was drenched in blood. The cords holding him spread-eagled to the frame were biting into his wrists and ankles.
“I need to help him,” Mkoll said. “I need to end his pain.”
Eszrah shook his head. Mkoll looked at the ruined man again. He saw the old, deep scars across his belly, the mark of a chainsword wound suffered many years before.
“Oh feth,” he murmured.
They cut him down quickly, cradling his limp body. His eyes opened. He looked at them, blood trickling out of his mouth. Mkoll realised that he had been blinded.
“Are we the last ones left alive?” he asked, turning his head towards the sound of them. “Are we? Someone, anyone, please? Are we? Is there anybody out there? Are we the last ones left alive?”
Nalwood, Nalwood, this is Elikon M.P., this is
Elikon M.P. Please respond. Please respond. Can
you hear, Nalwood? What is your status? Please
respond.
Elikon out. (transmission ends)
—Transcript of vox message, fifth month, 778.
TWENTY-THREE
The End of the World at the House
I
Late on the fourteenth day, the mechanised unit Berenson, or some warp-whisper they had known as Berenson, had promised finally fought its way up the pass to Hinzerhaus. Twenty items of armour, with troop support in the van, and air cover from a string of Vulture gunships, blasted into the rear of the Blood Pact host besieging the house and scattered it in a battle that lasted fifty-eight minutes. The last twenty minutes were little more than a massacre. The Blood Pact fled into the cracks in the mountains, leaving over four thousand dead on the dust bowl and the lower escarpments of the house.
Hinzerhaus itself was a dismaying ruin. Clotted smoke drifted up into the desert sky from a hundred separate fires. Overlooks and gunboxes had been blown out and destroyed. Several sections of the southern face had collapsed, exposing the rockcrete bunkers buried in the rock to the sky. The walls were pockmarked and chipped with hundreds of thousands of gunshots. The main gatehouse had been totally demolished. The topside ramparts along the cliff lay in ruins, each and every cloche dome ruptured and burst. Fire spewed steadily and out of control from slots of the lower casemates. The cliff walls were cratered and dimpled with the scorched impacts of heavy shelling.
Major Kallard, commanding the relief force, clambered down from his vehicle in front of the gates and gazed at the ruin. The Vultures shrieked overhead, making another pass before peeling off to hunt for fleeing enemy units in the upper gorges of the range.
“Holy Throne,” muttered Kallard, surveying the burning structure. He looked around at his adjutant, a boy-faced man named Seevan.
“Anything?” he asked.
Seevan tried his caster again and looked up at Kallard with a shake of his head.
“Nothing. Link’s dead.”
Kallard spat a curse. He waved the first detachment of his infantry forward into the place, pretty certain he knew what they would find.
“Look, sir!” one of the point men yelled.
Kallard turned and looked.
Figures were emerging from the demolished ruin of the gatehouse. Their dark uniforms were in tatters and their faces were plastered in dirt. They carried strange-looking, heavy rifles, which some had hefted up on their shoulders like yokes. They walked out across the dust towards Kallard.
He watched them approach, straightening his cap. There was something about them that demanded respect.
They came to a halt before him.
“I didn’t think there’d be anyone left alive,” Kallard spluttered.
“It comes as something of a surprise to me too,” replied the gaunt, dark-haired man in front of him.
“Major Kallard, Cadogus Fifty-Second Mechanised,” Kallard said, making the sign of the aquila. The bad rock wind moaned.
“Major Rawne, commander, First-and-Only” the man replied, throwing a half-hearted salute. “These are my men… Kolea, Larkin, Daur, Commissar Ludd, Baskevyl, Bonin.”
The men behind him nodded in turn, and showed no sign of lowering the hefty antique weapons they carried.
“How… how did you manage to hold out for so long?” Kallard asked.
Rawne shrugged. “We just decided we wouldn’t die,” he replied.
Kallard gathered his wits. “What are your losses, sir?”
“Forty-seven per cent dead. Eighteen per cent wounded,” Rawne said. “I have two medicaes in there fighting to cope with the casualties.”
“Medics forwards and in!” Kallard yelled, waving his hand. Corpsmen and surgeons from the column hurried past him into the house.
“Might I ask, sir, what are those weapons?” Kallard asked.
Rawne took the wall gun off his shoulder and held it out for Kallard’s inspection. “They’re what kept us alive. I have a feeling the Ordo Xenos will want to look at them.”
“I think they might,” said Kallard. He crunched around on the dust and gestured. “I have transports waiting to ferry you out,” he said. “Will you follow me?”
Rawne looked around at Kolea and Daur. “Lead the way. Get moving. I’m not leaving until the last man is clear.”
Behind Rawne, a chunk of the southern cliff collapsed with a crunch and a gust of powder.
“Go.”
Rawne turned and walked back towards the house. Ludd followed him.
“You can leave now, Ludd,” Rawne said.
“I’ll leave when my duty’s done, sir,” Ludd replied. “Let’s get the men out.”
II
They filed out along the burned out corridor that joined the base chamber to the gatehouse. Man after man, carrying their wounded
with them. Curth and Dorden escorted the procession, tending to the most severely injured.
In the base chamber, Zweil cast a final blessing to the walls, and turned to hobble out of the place.
Merrt was one of the last troopers to leave. He left 034TH leaning against a wall in the base chamber.
“Don’t you want that?” Dalin asked.
“It doesn’t belong to me,” Merrt replied.
III
“Maior! Major Rawne!” Kallard yelled, running up the pass towards the line of Chimeras.
Rawne turned.
“I’m sorry, major, I quite forgot. There was a signal for you, from Van Votyz at Elikon.”
Kallard handed the slip of paper to Rawne.
Rawne read it. He turned to look at the Ghosts mounting the transports along the pass.
“Gaunt’s alive!” Rawne yelled to them. “He’s fething well alive!”
One by one, they began to shout.
EPILOGUE
Elikon
I
Several sets of boots came marching down the stone hallway. Sentries presented arms as the figures marched by.
The boots crunched to a halt outside a ward room. The medicae on duty saluted and opened the door.
“Is that you, Barthol?” the man on the bed asked, turning his head from one side to the other. His eyes were bandaged.
“How did you know, Ibram?” General Barthol Van Voytz asked, sitting down beside the bed.
“I could smell acceptable losses.”
“Uhm,” Van Voytz replied. He looked over his shoulder at Biota and the escort guards. “Out,” he said.
They made themselves scarce. The door closed behind them.
“I’m glad you’re alive, Ibram,” Van Voytz said.
“As I understand it, that’s thanks to Mkoll and Eszrah and a five-hour desert drive in a captured enemy half-track.”
“You surround yourself with good people, good things happen,” the general said.
Gaunt sat back. It was going to take many months of skin grafts to repair his body.
“I have always surrounded myself with good people, Barthol. Why do think I’ve lived this long?”
Van Voytz chuckled.
“You sent me to the end of the world, Barthol. You sent me to a death trap,” Gaunt said. “Me and all my men. Barely half of them came out alive.”
“I’m sorry, Ibram,” Van Voytz said. “Listen, we’ve spared no expense. Your new eyes will be the best aug—”
“My Ghosts, Barthol. My Ghosts, and you saw fit to let half of them die.”
“It wasn’t like that, Ibram. It was vital to hold the enemy back for as long as possible. A delay was ess—”
“Here’s what I want you to do, Barthol. Never ask that of me and my men again.”
II
Faraway, the house at the end of the world expires. The worm ceases its subterranean scratching. The old dam stops walking fretfully along the empty halls, hiding her time and waiting, her black lace dress brushing the satin brown floors.
A standard-pattern infantry rifle, serial 034TH, standing in the corner of a smoke-blackened room, begins to rust.
Hinzerhaus falls silent. The wall lights flare and then dim away to nothing. In death, the house sleeps, waiting for the next soldiers to arrive out of the wind and dust, and the next battle to begin, one day, in ages to come.
Day eighteen.
Sunrise at something dawn. No dust.
According to sources at the Tacticae, the documents retrieved from the library archive have proven remarkably helpful to the Jago campaign. I am told the war to reconquer Jago might be shortened by two or three years.
I am tired of this bad rock. It has cost us too much. My arm hurts. My mouth is constantly dry. I miss the music in
When I told Rawne that Gaunt was alive, he looked as if he was going to cry. Just the dust, I suspect. The dust got into everything on Jago.
—Field journal, V.H. fifth month, 778.
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