[Gaunt's Ghosts 04] - Honour Guard

by Dan Abnett

  “Come on!”

  “All right, feth it!” Varl responded, waving his men back against the street wall. The Pardus machines rumbled past.

  “I’ll try and leave some glory for you, Varl!” the armour officer called out, standing in the rear of his bucking machine and throwing a mock salute as he went by.

  “We’ll be along to rescue you in a minute, Horkan!” Varl returned, raising a single digit in response to the salute that all the Tanith in his squad immediately mimicked.

  Brin Milo smiled. The Pardus were a good lot, and such horseplay typified the good humour with which they and the Tanith co-operated in this advance.

  Behind the light armour came Trojans and other tractor units hauling heavy munitions and stowed field artillery, then Tanith pushing handcarts liberated from the weavers’ barns. The carts were laden with ammunition boxes and tanks of promethium for the flamers. Varl’s men were called over to help lift a cart out of a drain gutter and Milo moved on.

  Hurrying against the flow of men and munitions, the young trooper reached the arch of the great red-stone bridge over the river. Shell holes decorated its ancient surface, and sappers from the Pardus regiment were hanging over the sides on ropes, shoring up its structure and sweeping for explosives. In this part of the Doctrinopolis, the river surged through a deep, man-made channel, its sides formed by the basalt river walls and the sides of the buildings. The smooth water was a deep green, deeper than the shade of the Infardi robes. A sacred river, Milo had been told.

  Milo took directions from the Tanith corporal directing traffic at the junction, and left the main thoroughfare by a flight of steps that brought him down onto a riverwall path leading under the bridge itself. The water lapped at the stone three metres below and reflected ripples of white off the dark underside of the bridge.

  He made his way to an archway overlooking the water further along the wall. It was the river entrance to one of the lesser shrines and tired, hungry-looking locals loitered around the entrance.

  The shrine had been turned into a makeshift hospital early in the assault by local physicians and priests, and now, on Gaunt’s orders, Imperial medical personnel had moved in to take charge.

  Troops and civilians were being treated side by side.

  “Lesp? Where’s the doc?” Milo asked, striding into the lamp-lit gloom and finding the lean Tanith orderly at work sewing up a Pardus trooper’s scalp laceration.

  “In the back there,” Lesp replied, blotting the sutured wound with a swab of alcohol-soaked doth. Stretcher parties were arriving all the time, mostly with civilian injured, and the long, arched shrine was filling up. Lesp looked harried.

  “Doctor? Doctor?” Milo called. He saw Hagian priests and volunteers in cream robes working alongside the Imperial medics, and attending to the particular customs and rites of their own people. Army chaplains from the Ecclesiarchy were ministering to the needs of the off-world Imperials.

  “Who’s calling for a doctor?” asked a figure nearby. She rose, straightening her faded red smock.

  “Me,” said Milo. “I was looking for Dorden.”

  “He’s in the field. Old Town,” said Surgeon Ana Curth. “I’m in charge here.” Curth was a Verghastite who had joined the Tanith along with the Vervunhive soldiery at the Act of Consolation. She’d taken to combat trauma well during the hive-siege and Chief Medic Dorden had been amazed and grateful at her decision to join.

  “Will I do?” she asked.

  “The commissar sent me,” answered Milo with a nod. “They’ve found…” he dropped his voice and steered her into a private corner. “They’ve found the local lord. A king, I think. He’s dead. Gaunt wants his body dealt with according to local custom. Dutiful respect, that sort of thing.”

  “Not really my field,” Curth said.

  “No, but I figured you or the doc might have got to know some of the locals. Priests, maybe.”

  She brushed her fringe out of her eyes and led him through the infirmary crowds to where a Hagian girl in the coarse cream robes of a scholar was re-dressing a throat wound.

  “Sanian?” The girl looked up. She had the long-boned, strong-featured look of the local population, with dark eyes and well-defined eyebrows. Her head was shaved except for a bound pony-tail of glossy black hair hanging from the back of her skull.

  “Surgeon Curth?” Her voice was thin but musical.

  She’s no older than me, Milo thought, but with the severe shaved head it was difficult to guess an age.

  “Trooper Milo here has been sent by our commanding officer to find someone with a good knowledge of Hagian lore.”

  “I’ll help if I can.”

  “Tell her what you need, Milo,” said Curth.

  Milo and the Hagian girl went out of the hospital into the hard sunlight of the river wall. She put her hands together and made brief nods of respect to the river and the sky before turning to him.

  “You’re a doctor?” Milo asked.

  “No.”

  “Part of the priesthood, then?”

  “No. I am a student, from the Universitariat.” She gestured to her pony-tail. “The braids mark our station in life. We are called esholi.”

  “What subject do you study?”

  “All subjects, of course. Medicine, music, astrography, the sacred texts… is that not the way on your world?”

  Milo shook his head. “I have no world now. But when I did, students at advanced levels specialised in their study.”

  “How… strange.”

  “And when you’ve finished your study, what will you become?”

  She looked at him quizzically.

  “Become? I have become what I will become. Esholi. Study lasts a lifetime.”

  “Oh.” He paused. A line of Trojans rattled by over the bridge above them. “Look, I have some bad news. Your king is dead.”

  The Hagian put her hands to her mouth and bowed her head.

  “I’m sorry,” Milo said, feeling awkward. “My commander wants to know what should be properly done to… to care for his remains.”

  “We must find the ayatani.”

  “The who?”

  “The priests.”

  A wailing noise made Rawne swing round, but it was only the wind.

  He felt the movement of air against his face, gusting down the stone hallways and vaults of the Universitariat. Many windows had been blown out and shell holes put through the walls, and now the windy air of Hagia was getting in.

  He stood for a thoughtful moment stealth cape swept back over one shoulder, lasgun slouched barrel-down across his belly staring into…

  Well, he didn’t rightly know what. A large room, scorched and burned out, the twisted, blackened limbs of fused sconces adhering to the sooty walls like stomped spiders. Millions of glass fragments littered the burnt floor. There were seared tufts of carpeting around the room edges.

  What great purpose this room had once had was no longer important. It was empty. It was clear. That was all that mattered.

  Rawne turned and went back out into the hallway. The wind, leaking through shell holes and exposed rafters, whined after him.

  His clearance squad moved up. Feygor, Bragg, Mkillian, Waed, Caffran.. and the women.

  Major Rawne still hadn’t sorted his head out about the women. There were a fair number of them, Verghastites who had elected to join the Ghosts during the Act of Consolation.

  They could fight — feth!—he knew that much. They’d all been baptised in combat during the war for Vervunhive, common workers and habbers forced into fighting roles.

  But still they were women. Rawne had tried to speak to Gaunt about it, but the colonel-commissar had droned on about various illustrious mixed or all female units in Guard history blah blah blah and Rawne had pretty much blanked him out.

  He wasn’t interested in history. He was interested in the future. And in being there to enjoy it.

  Women in the regiment put a strain on them all. Cracks were already showing. There had
been a few minor brawls on the troop ships: Verghastite men protecting the “honour” of their women; men falling out over women; women fighting off men…

  It was a powder keg and soon there’d be more than a few split lips and broken teeth to show for it.

  Bottom line was, Rawne had never really trusted women much. And he’d certainly never trusted men who put too much trust in women.

  Caffran, for example. One of the youngest Ghosts: compact, strong, a fine soldier. On Verghast, he’d gotten involved with a local girl and they’d been inseparable ever since. A couple, would you believe? And Rawne knew for a fact the girl had a pair of young children who were cared for amongst the other non-combatants and camp-followers in the regimental escort ships.

  Her name was Tona Criid. She was eighteen, lean and hard, with spiky bleached hair and gang tattoos that spoke of a rough life even before the Vervunhive war. Rawne watched her as she walked with Caffran down the shattered Universitariat hallway, covering each other, checking doors and alcoves. She moved with easy grace. She knew what she was doing. The black Ghost uniform fitted her well. She was… good-looking.

  Rawne turned away and scratched behind his ear. These women were going to be the death of someone.

  The clearance squad prowled forward, picking their way down empty halls over the glass of broken windows and the kindling of shattered furniture. Rawne found himself moving level with the other female in his squad. Her name was Banda, an ex-loom worker from Vervunhive who’d fought in the famous guerilla company run by Gol Kolea. She was lively, playful, impetuous with close-cut curly brown hair and a figure that was a tad more rounded and feminine than that of the lithe ganger Criid.

  Rawne signalled her on with a silent gesture and she did so, with a nod and a wink.

  A wink!

  You didn’t wink at your commanding officer!

  Rawne was about to call a halt and shout into her face when Waed signalled.

  Everyone fell into shadows and cover, pressing against the hallway walls. They were reaching a turn. A wooden, red-painted door lay ahead, closed, and then further down the corridor, around the turn, there was an archway. The carpet in the halls had been racked up and was stained and stiff with dried blood.

  “Waed?”

  “Movement. In the archway,” Waed whispered back. “Feygor?”

  Rawne’s adjutant, the ruthless Feygor, nodded to confirm. Rawne gestured some orders in quick succession. Feygor and Waed moved up, hunched low, hugging the right-hand wall. Bragg took the corner as cover and got his big autocannon braced. Banda and Mkillian went up the left side of the corridor until they reached the cover of a hardwood ottoman pushed against the wall.

  Caffran and Criid slung their lasrifles over their shoulders, drew their blunt-nosed laspistols and went to the red door. If, as seemed likely, it opened into the same room as the archway, this could open their field of fire. And double checking it covered their arses.

  Total silence. They were all Ghosts, moving with a Ghost’s practiced stealth.

  Caffran grasped the door handle, turned it, but didn’t open it. He held it fast as Criid leaned down and put her ear to the red-painted wood. Rawne saw how she brushed her bleached hair out of the way to do it. He-He was going to have to fething concentrate, he realised.

  Criid looked round and made the open-handed sign for “no sound”.

  Rawne nodded, made sure all the squad could see him, raised three fingers and then dropped them one by one.

  As the third finger dropped, Criid and Caffran went through the door low and fast. They found themselves in a large stone chamber that had once been a scriptorium before rockets had blown out the vast lancet windows opposite the door and shattered the wooden desks and writing tables. Caffran and Criid dropped for cover amid the twisted wooden wreckage. Las-shots spat their way from an archway at the far end of the room.

  At the sound of gunfire from the room, Rawne’s team opened up at the corridor arch. Fire was hastily returned.

  “Caffran! What have you got?” Rawne snarled into his vox-link.

  “The room doesn’t go right along to your archway, but there’s access through.”

  Caffran and Criid crawled forward, popping the occasional shot off at the doorway over the broken lecterns and cracked stools. The floor was soaked with spilled ink and their palms were quickly stained black. Criid saw how the explosions had blown sprays of ink up the walls of the scriptorium: spattered patterns like reversed-out starmaps.

  Caffran pulled open his hip-case and yanked out a tube-charge.

  “Brace for det!” he yelled, ripping the foil strip off the chemical igniter and tossing the metal tube away through the doorway.

  There was a bang that shook the floor and clouds of vapour and debris burst out of the hallway arch. Feygor tried to move forward to get a look in.

  Criid and Caffran had risen and approached the inner doorway. Smoke wreathed the air and there was a pungent smell of fyceline. Just short of the doorway, Criid unslung her lasrifle and took something out of her pocket. It was the pin-mount of a brooch or a medal, the surface polished into a mirror. She hooked it over the muzzle of her weapon and pushed it into the room ahead of her. A turn of the wrist and the mirror slowly revealed the other side of the doorway.

  “Clear,” she said.

  They moved in. It was an annex to the scriptorium. Metal presses lined one wall. Three Infardi, killed by Caffran’s charge, lay near the doorway. They were spattered and drenched by multi-coloured inks and tinctures from bottles exploded by the blast.

  Rawne came in through the hallway arch.

  “What’s through there?” he asked, pointing to a small curtained door at the back of the annex.

  “Haven’t checked,” Caffran replied.

  Rawne went to the door and pushed the curtain aside. A burst of las-fire pelted at him, punching through the cloth.

  “Feth!” he cried, taking cover behind a mixing table. He fired through the doorway with his lasrifle and saw an Infardi crash sideways into a rack of vellum, spilling the whole lot over.

  Rawne and Caffran went through the door. It was a parchment store, with no other exits. The Infardi, his green robes yanked up over his face, was dead.

  But there was still shooting.

  Rawne turned. It was outside in the corridor.

  “We’ve picked up some—” MKillian’s voice spat over the link.

  “Feth!” That was Feygor.

  Rawne, Criid and Caffran hurried to the corridor archway, but the force of crossfire outside prevented them from sticking their heads out. Las-shots smacked into the archway’s jamb and ricocheted back into the annex room. One put a burn across Rawne’s chin.

  “Feth!” He snapped back in, smarting, and keyed his microbead. “Feygor! How many!”

  “Twenty, maybe twenty-five! Dug in down the hall. Gods, but they’re putting up a wall of fire!”

  “Get the cannon onto it!”

  “Bragg’s trying! The belt-feed’s jammed! Oh crap—!”

  “What? What? Say again?”

  Nothing but ferocious las-fire for a second, then Feygor’s voice crackled over the link again. “Bragg’s down. Took a hit. Feth, we’re pinned!”

  Rawne looked around, exasperated. Criid and Caffran were over by the blasted window arches in the main scriptorium. Criid was peering out.

  “What about this?” Caffran called to the major.

  Rawne hurried over. Criid was already up and out on the ledge, shuffling along the stone sill.

  “You’ve got to be kidding…” Rawne began.

  Caffran wasn’t. He was up on the sill too, following Criid. He reached a hand down for Rawne.

  The major put his rifle strap over his shoulder and took the hand. Caffran pulled him up onto the stone ledge.

  Rawne swore silently. The air was cold. They were high up. The stone flanks of the Universitariat dropped away ninety metres below the scriptorium window, straight down into the green, opaque channel of the r
iver. Above the scriptorium’s sloping, tiled roof, domes and spires rose. Rawne swayed for a second.

  Criid and Caffran were edging down the ledge, stepping gingerly over leaded rainwater spouts and gutter trays. Rawne followed them. Bas-relief wall carvings, some in the form of saints or gargoyles, all weathered by age, stuck out, in some places wider than the ledge. Rawne found they had to go sidelong with their backs to the drop so they could hunch and belly around such obstructions.

  He felt his foot go into nothingness and put his arms round a saint’s stone neck, his heart thundering, his eyes closed.

  When he looked again, he could see Caffran about ten metres away, but there was no sign of the girl Criid. Feth! Had she fallen off? No. Her bleached-blonde head appeared out of a window further down, urging them on. She was back inside.

  Caffran pulled Rawne in through the broken window. He ripped his kneecaps on the twisted leading and toothy stubs of glass in the frame and it took him a minute to get his breathing rate down again. He looked around.

  A seriously big artillery shell had taken this chamber out. It had come through the windows, blown out the floor and the floor beneath. The room had a ring of broken floorboards jutting out around the walls and a void in the centre. They worked their way round on the remains of the floor to the hallway door. The firing was now a way behind them.

  Caffran led the way out into the corridor. The shell blast had blown the room’s wooden door, complete with frame out across the hall and left it propped upright against the far wall. The three Ghosts scattered back down the hall at a run, coming in behind the enemy position that was keeping the rest of their team pinned.

  The Infardi, twenty-two of them, were dug in behind a series of barricades made from broken furniture They were blazing away, oblivious to anything behind them.

  Rawne and Caffran drew their silver Tanith knives. Criid pulled out her chain-dagger, a gang-marked legacy of her low-life Vervunhive days. They went into the cultists from behind and eight were finished before the rest became aware of the counter-attack.