[Gaunt's Ghosts 08] - Traitor General

by Dan Abnett

  A WARHAMMER 40,000 NOVEL

  TRAITOR GENERAL

  The Lost - 01

  (Gaunt’s Ghosts - 08)

  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 are

  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 are 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 forgotten, 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.

  “Towards the close of 774.M41, the nineteenth year of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, Warmaster Macaroth seemed to be consolidating the victories he had finally secured after several desperate years of tactical brinksmanship. The leading edge of the Crusade host had at last toppled the fortress world Morlond, and was now driving onwards into the Carcaradon Cluster and the Erinyes Group, to wage what Macaroth had declared, with typical arrogance, would be the final phase of the war against the archenemy overlord (‘Archon’), Urlock Gaur.

  “Crucial to the prosperity of this advance was the fact that the savage attempts by two of Gaur’s warlord lieutenants to bisect the Crusade force at the Khan Group had failed. Enok Innokenti’s assault on Herodor had been repulsed, and Innokenti himself slain. Anakwanar Sek’s counter-strikes had been denied at Lotun, Tamagua and, most particularly, Enothis.

  “But Sek and his forces remained a threat to the Crusade flank. In retreat, the magister’s host had seized a tranche of worlds in the margins of the Khan Group, and dug in. Macaroth charged the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Crusade Armies to annihilate the warlord’s disposition in that region.

  “Macaroth may have underestimated the scale of this endeavour. The war to dislodge Sek raged for several years, and saw some of the most massive and bloody battles of the entire Crusade. However, documents recently declassified by the Administratum reveal that one of the most vital actions during that period was undertaken on a far less monumental scale…”

  —from A History of the Later Imperial Crusades

  PROLOGUE

  The last of the daylight was fading, and the fields of windflowers beyond the mansion walls had turned to violet shadow. From the terrace, in the evening cool, it was possible to see the redoubts of the Guard camps on the far side of the river, the elevated barrels of the defence batteries sticking up into the pale sky like thorns.

  Barthol Van Voytz set his drink down on the terrace wall, and adjusted his fine, white gloves. They were loose. He’d lost weight since he’d last worn them for a formal occasion like this. He yearned for battlefield armour, not this ill-fitting dress uniform, starched and heavy with medals. Tomorrow, he told himself, tomorrow he could put on his wargear. Because tomorrow at oh-five thirty Imperial, the war to retake Ancreon Sextus would begin in earnest.

  “My lord? The chamberlain wonders if they might begin serving dinner.”

  Van Voytz turned. Biota, his chief tactical officer, stood behind him attentively. He too was gussied up in white, formal dress regalia.

  “You look like a game-bird’s behind in the moonlight,” said Van Voytz.

  “Thank you, lord general. You are no less splendid. What shall I tell the chamberlain?”

  “Are we all here?” asked Van Voytz.

  “Not quite.”

  “Then tell him to wait. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this right.”

  They wandered back up the stone terrace together, and went in through the glass hatches. The banquet hall appeared to have been made of gold. Hundreds of yellow glow-globes lit the long room, casting everything in a golden light. Even the white cloth on the long table and the flesh of the men present seemed to be gilded.

  There were forty places set at the table, and Van Voytz counted thirty-eight officers in the room. They clustered in groups, stiff in their formal attire, filling the room with the low murmur of their conversations. Van Voytz noted General Kelso of the Crusade Eighth Army, and Lord Militant Humel of the Ninth, mingling with the other regimental leaders and senior officers.

  Luscheim had been killed on Tarnagua, so now Van Voytz had command of the Crusade Fifth Army. He felt the honour was overdue, and hated the fact that it had taken the death of his old friend Rudi Luscheim to make his promotion possible.

  “Can we not begin, Van Voytz?” Kelso asked grumpily. He was a squat, elderly man with heavy jowls, and his brocaded dress uniform made him look even wider than he actually was.

  “We’re not all here yet,” Van Voytz replied. “If we’re going to endure the indignity of a formal staff dinner to mark the eve of war, we might as well make sure everyone suffers.”

  Kelso chuckled. “Who are we missing, then?”

  “The commissar and commanding officer of the Tanith First, sir,” Biota said.

  “Well, I suppose we could take our seats at least,” Van Voytz conceded.

  Kelso gave a signal, and the assembled officers began to move to their places at the long table. Servitors passed among the company, charging glasses.

  The outer door opened, and two men entered. One was a tall fellow, dressed in the uniform of an Imperial commissar. The other wore the black number one issue of his regiment.

  “At last,” said Kelso.

  “Gentlemen, please,” Van Voytz said, pointing the newcomers to their seats. The Tanith officers crossed to the places reserved for them.

  “A toast, I think. Van Voytz?” Kelso suggested.

  Van Voytz nodded and rose to his feet, glass in hand. The distinguished company rose with him, chairs scraping back.

  Van Voytz considered his words for a moment. He looked across the table at the commanding officers of the Tanith regiment: Commissar Viktor Hark and Major Gol Kolea.

  Van Voytz raised his glass and said: “To absent friends.”

  ONE

  On the six hundred and fourth Day of Pain, the two hundred and twenty-first day of the Imperial Year 774, Gerome Landerson left his place of work at the sounding of the carnyx horn. The horn signalled the change from day-labour
to night-labour.

  He was weary, hungry and drenched with sweat. His arms and spine ached from swinging a hammer, and his hands were so numbed from the constant impacts that he could no longer feel his fingers. But he did not trudge towards the cookshops or the washhouses with the other day-labourers from the Iconoclave, nor did he begin the long walk back to the consented habitats along the river wall of Ineuron Town.

  Instead, he walked west, down through the fractured arches of the town’s old commercia. Markets had once thrived there—the daily cheaps of foodstuffs, grain, livestock, instruments—and the licensed mercantile houses had once raised their lavish silk tents and displayed the gewgaws and trinkets of their trade.

  Landerson had always loved the commercia for its flavour of the faraway. He’d once bought a small metal plaque with an engraving of an Ecclesiarchy templum on Enothis just because it had travelled so far. Now the faraway seemed even more remote and unreachable, even though it was his business tonight.

  The commercia was a ruin these days. What remained of the vast roof vault was smoke-blackened and rotten, and the rows of metal stalls where the traders had congregated for the daily cheaps were twisted and corroding. On the rubble-strewn ground, a few furtive dealers lurked by oilcan fires, bartering luxuries like marrowbones and bent cutlery for ration coins and consent wafers. Every time there was a hint of an excubitor patrol passing nearby, the scavengers melted away into the shadows.

  Landerson walked on, trying to rub some life back into his soot-caked hands. He left the commercia via the wide flight of white marble steps, steps still riddled with the black boreholes of lasfire, and began down the Avenue of Shins. That wasn’t its real name of course, but the yoke of oppression bred black humour in the conquered. This had been the Avenue of the Aquila. Long and broad, it was lined on either side by rows of ouslite plinths. The statue of an Imperial hero had once stood on each. The invaders had demolished them all. Now only splintered stone shins rose from the proud feet planted on those plinths. Hence the name.

  Talix trees, tall and slender, grew along the outsides of the avenue. At least two had been decapitated and remade into gibbets for the wirewolves. There was no point trying to avoid them. Landerson walked on, trying not to look up at the skeletal mannequins hanging limply from the axl-trees on their metal strings. They creaked, swinging slightly in the breeze.

  Daylight was fading. The sky, already hazy with the perpetual canopy of dust, had taken on a sheen as if a fog were closing in. To the west, the furnaces of the meat foundries glazed the low clouds with a glow the colour of pomegranate flesh. Landerson knew he had to hurry now. His imago consented him only for activity during daylight.

  He was crossing the square at Tallenhall when he smelled the glyf. It stank like a discharged battery pack, an ionized scent, the tang of blood and metal. He huddled down in the overgrown hedge by the tangled iron railings and watched. The glyf appeared in the northern corner of the square, drifting like a balloon eight metres up, slow and lazy. As soon as he had located it, he tried to look away, but it was impossible. The floating sigils, bright as neon, locked his attention. He felt his stomach churn at the sight of those abominable, intertwined symbols, his gorge rising. At the back of his mind, he heard a chattering, like the sound of swarming insects rubbing their wing cases. The imago in the flesh of his left arm twitched.

  The glyf wavered, then began to glide away, out of sight behind the shell of the town library. As soon as it was gone, Landerson sank onto his hands and dry-heaved violently into the burned grass. When he closed his eyes, he could see the obscene symbols shining in meaningless repeats on the back of his eyelids.

  Unsteady, he rose to his feet, succumbed to a spell of giddiness, and slumped against the bent railings for support.

  “Voi shet!” a hard voice barked.

  He shook his head, trying to straighten up. Boots crunched across the brick dust towards him.

  “Voi shet! Ecchr Anark setriketan!”

  Landerson raised his hands in supplication. “Consented! Consented, magir!”

  The three excubitors surrounded him. Each was two metres tall and clad in heavy buckled boots and long coats of grey scale armour. They aimed their ornate las-locks at him.

  “I am consented, magir!” he pleaded, trying to show them his imago.

  One of them cuffed him down onto his knees.

  “Shet atraga ydereta haspa? Voi leng haspa?”

  “I… I don’t speak your—”

  There was a click, and a crackle of vox noise. One of them spoke again, but its coarse words were obscured by a rasping mechanical echo.

  “What is your purpose here?”

  “I am consented to pass in daylight, magir,” he answered.

  “Look at me!” Again, the barbarous tongue was overlaid with augmetically-generated speech.

  Landerson looked up. The excubitor leaning over him was as hellish as any of its kind. Only the upper half of its head was visible—pale, shrivelled and hairless. A dripping cluster of metal tubes and pipes sprouted from the back of its wrinkled skull and connected to the steaming, panting support box strapped across its back. Three huge, sutured scars split its face, one down through each eye socket—in which augmetic ocular mounts were now sewn—and the third straight down over the bridge of a nose from which all flesh had been debrided. A large brass collar rose in front of the face, mercifully obscuring the excubitor’s mouth and most of the nasal area. The front of this collar mounted a wire-grilled speaking box, which the excubitor had switched to “translate”.

  “I… I look upon you, and I am graced by your beauty,” Landerson gasped as clearly as he could.

  “Name?” the thing snapped.

  “Landerson, Gerome, consented of day, b-by the will of the Anarch.”

  “Place of industry?”

  “The Iconoclave, magir.”

  “You work in the Breaking House?”

  “Yes, magir.”

  “Display to me your consent!”

  Landerson lifted his left arm and drew back the sleeve of his torn workcoat to reveal the imago in its blister of clear pus.

  “Eletraa kyh drowk!” the excubitor said to one of its companions.

  “Chee ataah drowk,” came the reply. The sentinel drew a long metal tool from its belt, the size and shape of a candle-snuffer, and placed the cup over Landerson’s imago. Landerson gasped as he felt the thing in his flesh writhe. Small runes lit up on the shank of the tool. The cup withdrew.

  The third excubitor grabbed Landerson by the head and turned it roughly so as to better examine the stigma on his left cheek.

  “Fehet gahesh,” it said, letting him go.

  “Go home, interceded one,” the first excubitor told Landerson, the machine words back-echoed by the alien speech. “Go home and do not let us catch you out here again.”

  “Y-yes, magir. At once.”

  “Or we will have sport with you. Us, or the wirewolves.”

  “I understand, magir. Thank you.”

  The excubitor stepped back. It covered the grille of its speaking box with one hand. Its brethren did the same.

  “We serve the word of the Anarch, whose word drowns out all others.”

  Landerson covered his own mouth quickly. “Whose word drowns out all others,” he repeated quickly.

  The excubitors looked at him for a moment longer, then shouldered their massive las-locks and walked away across the overgrown square.

  It was a long while before Landerson had recovered enough to get back on his feet.

  * * * * *

  It was almost dark when he reached the abandoned mill at the edge of the town. The dimming sky was lit by fires: the burning masses of the distant hives and the closer glows of the ahenum furnaces that powered the town’s new industries. On the wide roadway below the mill, torches were bobbing and drums were beating. Another procession of proselytes was being led to the shrines by the ordinals.

  Landerson tapped on the wooden door.

&n
bsp; “How is Gereon?” asked a voice from within.

  “Gereon lives,” Landerson replied.

  “Despite their efforts,” the voice responded. The door swung open, revealing only darkness. Landerson peered in.

  Then he felt the nudge of an autopistol muzzle against the back of his head.

  “You’re late.”

  “I ran into trouble.”

  “It had better not have followed you.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Step in, nice and easy.”

  Landerson edged into the darkness. A light came on, in his face.

  “Check him!” a voice said, as the door swung closed behind him.

  Hands grabbed him and hustled him forward. The paddle of an auspex buzzed as it was passed up and down his body.

  “Clean!” someone said.

  The hands withdrew. Landerson squinted into the light, resolving his surroundings. A dank cellar of the old mill, figures all around, flashlights aimed his way.

  Colonel Ballerat stepped into the light, holstering his pistol.

  “Landerson,” he said.

  “Good to see you, sir,” Landerson, replied.

  Ballerat moved forward and embraced Landerson. He did so with only one hand. Ballerat’s left arm and left leg had been ripped away in the foundries. He had a crude prosthetic that allowed him to walk, but his left arm was just a nub.

  “I’m relieved you got the message.” Ballerat smiled. “I was beginning to worry you hadn’t.”

  “I got it all right,” Landerson said. “Dropped into my food pail. It was difficult getting away. Is it tonight, sir?”

  Ballerat nodded. “Yes, it is. They’re definitely down. We need to make contact so we can move to the next stage.”

  Landerson nodded. “How many, sir?”

  “How many what?” Ballerat asked.

  “I mean… what sort of numbers, sir? Disposition? What sort of size is the liberation force?”

  Ballerat paused. “We… we don’t know yet, major. Working on that. The key thing right now is to make contact with their recon advance so we can lead them in.”