by Dan Abnett
“You just tapped along and found it?” asked Mkoll.
Baskevyl nodded. “It was hollow. It rang hollow.”
Mkoll glanced at Gaunt. “We haven’t got a hollow response off any other wall panel in the place,” he said. “Everywhere else is just solid. Believe me, I’ve tried.”
“Has anyone been in there?” Gaunt asked Criid.
Hwlan, the lead scout in Criid’s company, nodded. “Me and Febreen, sir. Not far in, just a little way.”
“And?”
“Very rough passage, sir, quite low, running west.”
“No other routes? Divergences?”
“None we could see, but we didn’t think it smart to go too far just yet.” Hwlan paused. “Strong breeze coming through there,” he added. “I think it may go out to the surface.”
Mkoll unshouldered his rifle. “Let’s find out,” he said.
III
Gol Kolea followed Mkoll into the hole. Gaunt slithered in after them.
“Sir—” Criid began.
“I’m just taking a look,” Gaunt told her.
Baskevyl hesitated. He had absolutely no wish to climb into the dark cavity. He’d heard what was down there, the grunting, scratching thing in the dark. He wavered.
“Bask?” Gaunt called.
“Sir?”
“Stay here and stay sharp,” Gaunt said as he vanished from view. Baskevyl let out a long sigh of relief. He’d never refused an order in his career, but if Gaunt had ordered him to follow, Baskevyl wasn’t sure exactly what he would have done.
As Hwlan had described, the tunnel was low and rough. It seemed unnaturally dark. Gaunt bent low, his boots scrabbling for purchase on a dry, loose floor. His fingertips made dust and pebbles patter down out of the tunnel walls as they groped for support. A cold stream of air touched his face, gusting up from the depths before them.
Mkoll and Kolea switched on their lamp-packs. Two ribbons of yellow light picked up the swimming dust in the air ahead of Gaunt.
“Drops away here,” Mkoll hissed back. “Watch your step.” Gaunt heard flurries of scattering pebbles as Mkoll and Kolea tackled the slope.
It was indeed steep. Gaunt almost lost his footing as he gingerly followed them down. At the foot of the slope, Kolea turned and shone his lamp back for Gaunt’s benefit.
“All right, sir?”
“Fine.”
Kolea paused, and then played his lamp beam up along the slope, tracing the walls.
“What is it?” Gaunt asked.
“This has been mined out,” Kolea said.
“Mined out? You mean dug?”
“Yes,” said Kolea. He reached out and touched part of the crumbling, granular wall. “Those are pick marks.”
“And you’d know,” said Gaunt.
Kolea nodded. “I would. Look here.”
Near the base of the wall, his light picked out something metal, then another identical object further up. They were iron pins with loop heads. They ran at intervals right back up the slope.
“They set them in as they went,” said Kolea. “No doubt ran a cord or rope through the loops to help them scale the slope more easily.”
They turned and carried on after Mkoll. The tunnel levelled out a little and ran for another ten metres or so. It remained low, so they had to stoop all the way.
“Watch yourself here,” Mkoll announced as they caught up with him. Part of the tunnel floor and wall had caved in, revealing a deep, impenetrable cleft. A man would have to crawl head first to get into it.
“That’s deep,” said Kolea. “I can smell it. A natural fissure that fell in while this was being dug.”
They stepped carefully around the cleft.
“That suggests this rock isn’t especially stable,” said Mkoll.
“It absolutely isn’t,” Kolea replied. “If this was a new working, I’d order the crews out of it until it had been properly propped and braced.”
Somewhere, something rattled. Something scratched and shirred in the darkness.
“What was that?” asked Gaunt.
IV
Baskevyl had been listening at the hole. He pulled back sharply. “What’s the matter?” Criid asked him. “Nothing,” Baskevyl told her. He was lying. He’d just heard it again.
V
Hark had taken a walk to inspect the gatehouse. As he moved down the long hallway from the base chamber, he passed men toiling in the opposite direction moving sacks filled with dust. He exchanged a few encouraging words with them. Most were from Arcuda’s company, which had been detailed to dig and fill the sacks. They were powdered white from their labour outside in the wind.
The floor of the gatehouse, and the gatehouse end of the hallway, was tracked with white footsteps and dusty drag marks. Hark could hear the wind shrilling outside the open hatch.
Arcuda’s men had dug out the hatch so it would open more fully, but that had simply allowed dust to billow in more thoroughly. A curtain of camo-capes had been pegged up around the mouth of the hatch to act as a dust screen.
“Your idea?” Hark asked Maggs, who was in charge of gate security.
“It was either that or get buried in the stuff,” Maggs said. The curtain parted as several Ghosts elbowed their way in, sacks on their shoulders. Arcuda was with them.
“I don’t know how much longer we can be expected to keep this up,” Arcuda said. “Without water…”
“I know,” said Hark. He thought around for something supportive to add.
“Feth!” said Maggs suddenly Hark and Arcuda looked around. The scout had taken off towards the curtained hatchway with his weapon raised.
“Maggs?” Hark called. “What is it?”
The Belladon didn’t answer. He pulled back the undulating curtain and disappeared outside. Hark and Arcuda glanced at one another and followed him.
Outside was a hellish white-out of dust. They fumbled to get their goggles on. The gritty wind sizzled around them and, though it was luminously bright, actual visibility was down to a dozen metres. Hark could make out the shapes of the men toiling to fill sacks in the area in front of the gatehouse. If it hadn’t been for the fact there was an urgent need for sand bags, it would have been an insane activity, the whim of a sadistic commander setting some soul-destroying punishment task.
“Holy Terra,” mumbled Hark, raising a hand to stave off the gale. Maggs had gone forward, out into the open, his lasrifle up. He was hunting for something.
“Maggs? Maggs?”
Maggs dropped to his knees, inspecting the ground, as if he might determine tracks or spores.
“Maggs? What the feth are you doing?” Hark yelled as they reached him.
“I saw something,” Maggs called back. He was still looking around.
“You saw what?” Arcuda asked, raising his voice over the howling wind.
Maggs replied something that sounded like she came this way.
“She?”Hark yelled.
Maggs rose and cupped his hand around his mouth so they could hear him. “Someone I didn’t recognise,” he bellowed. “They came this way from the gatehouse.”
Hark shook his head. He hadn’t seen anybody. Why was he so sure Maggs had said she?
“Maggs?”
Wes Maggs didn’t reply. He felt excessively stupid, and embarrassed that Arcuda and the commissar had witnessed his apparently irrational behaviour.
He could hardly tell them the truth. He knew they wouldn’t believe him.
But it wasn’t the first time he’d seen the silent figure in black, and he had the ugliest feeling he’d be seeing her again before long.
VI
Eszrah ap Niht walked into the lesser hall, scanned around once with his reynbow tucked at his shoulder, and walked out again.
Nahum Ludd was huddled up in a corner of the hall, checking duty rotas off his data-slate in an effort to forget how thirsty he was.
“Eszrah?” he called. Ludd got up and hurried to the chamber door in time to see Eszrah striding away
down an east-running passageway.
“Eszrah? Wait!”
Ayatani Zweil came out of Gaunt’s room and almost collided with Ludd.
“What’s wrong with Eszrah, father?” Ludd asked.
“That’s what I want to know, young man,” Zweil replied. “We were happy as you like, reading. I was teaching him the pluperfect. Then up he jumps, snatches his uncouth bow from the table, and runs out.”
“Stay here, father,” Ludd said, and made off after the partisan.
“I’m not going to just stand here—” Zweil began.
“Then keep up!” Ludd called back over his shoulder.
Zweil sighed and came to a halt. “Ah, see? You’ve got me there too.”
“Find someone and tell them what’s going on!”
“Like who?”
“Someone useful!” Ludd shouted.
Eszrah had a good lead on the cadet, and was moving with the typical speed and stealth of a Nihtgane. Ludd realised it was no good shouting at him. Running, he managed to gain ground, mainly because Eszrah stopped to inspect a side chamber. Varl appeared out of it a moment after Eszrah had gone past.
“What’s up with Ez?” Varl asked as Ludd ran up. “He came in, aimed his bow at us, bold as brass, and then left again.” Varl’s company was billeted in the side room. Several of the men were getting up off their bedrolls, bemused.
“He’s seen something,” said Ludd. “Or heard something. I don’t know.” Varl grabbed his weapon and gave chase with Ludd. He called out for a fire-team to follow on the double. Ludd heard the clatter of boots coming after them.
They reached a junction. The main spur ran east, and a side hallway forked to the south. A stairwell climbed into the upper galleries.
Varl and Ludd came to a halt. “Where did he go?” Ludd asked.
Varl shook his head. The fire-team—Twenzet, Kabry, Cant, Cordrun and Lukos—came running up the hallway behind them. Varl clicked his microbead. “Listen up, sentries on the upper east galleries and east main. Anybody got anything? Anybody got sight of the Sleepwalker?”
There was a crackle of negative responses.
“Maybe he just had a funny turn,” suggested Twenzet.
“No,” replied Varl firmly.
“Why not?”
“Because… I’ll shoot you,” said Varl.
“Oh sacred feth!” Lukos suddenly exclaimed.
Eszrah had silently reappeared out of the south-east spur without warning. He regarded them for a moment from behind his sunshades, his reynbow against his chest.
“Eszrah?” Ludd asked.
Without replying, the Nihtgane turned and started up the stairs towards the upper galleries.
“Follow him!” Varl ordered.
They ran up four flights in the weird, white gloom. The partisan left the stairs at the top, and turned east along upper east twelve, one of the highest fortified spurs on that side of the house. The spur was punctuated at regular points by casemate blockhouses and the roof domes of armoured cloches. They could feel a breeze from somewhere.
In a thunder of boots, a second fire-team joined them from the west. Six men, led by Rawne.
“Old man Zweil said Eszrah was acting up,” Rawne said bluntly.
Ludd nodded. “He’s gone this way.”
The Sleepwalker was almost out of sight. The two fire-teams started to move, jogging down the hallway. Rawne got on his link and ordered other teams to move up from the galleries below and cut off the spur ahead at the next staircase junctions.
“Where’s he gone?” Varl asked. “I can’t see him anymore.” They slowed to a walk.
“He can’t have got past us,” said Ludd. “Or them.”
He pointed. Thirty metres away, a group of figures was moving towards them, evidently another fire-team, coming up and west from one of the other stairlinks.
“Then where the feth is he?” Varl asked.
“Forget the fething Nihtgane,” Rawne growled. “Those aren’t ours.”
VII
The darkness melted. Rough light seeped into the gloom. Gaunt could smell raw, cold air, and feel the airborne particulates pin-pricking off his face.
The tunnel grew wider as it bottomed out. There was a jagged, vertical scar of white in the blackness ahead.
“Leads right out into the open,” said Mkoll.
They scrambled up towards the jagged opening, negotiating a slope of tumbled boulders and dry, flaking earth. The wind made a low, eerie sigh as it blew into the cavity.
Mkoll reached the lip of the cave mouth, and leaned back to help Kolea and Gaunt up. They were in daylight now. A narrow shelf had choked with drifting dust in the entrance, and sprays of grit were winnowing in around the edges and chinks of the rock.
They clambered out into the open. It took them a moment to adjust their goggles and look around. They had emerged through the steep cliff wall on the far side of the crag that contained Hinzerhaus. The ground dropped away below them into a wide ravine, jumbled with boulders and scree. Beyond that, through the dust haze, they could see a broader plain of rough ground.
Gaunt turned and looked up, appreciating the northern face of the fortress rock. The cliff ran east and west, as indomitable as a city’s curtain wall. He could just make out cloche towers and casemates on the cliff tops a hundred metres above. The scale was vast, far grander and more overpowering than it had been on the southern side when they’d approached the main gatehouse. The great rock ridge of the Banzie Altids dropped away like a gigantic step into the hostile flatlands behind. Flatlands—badlands, more like, badlands on a bad rock. Gaunt felt small, diminished. The three of them were just tiny specks at the foot of the soaring, dusty buttress.
Gaunt heard a dog barking in the wind, somewhere far away. He was about to remark on it when he realised it couldn’t be a dog, and wasn’t a dog.
It was the whining bark of a heavy support weapon.
Shots pummelled against the cliff face above them, making the brittle sound of a rock drill.
“Get down!” Mkoll yelled, but Gaunt didn’t need to be told.
Elikon M.P., Elikon M.P., this is Nalwood,
this is Nalwood, Requesting immediate
assistance. Multi-point attack, unknown
strength. This objective cannot be consid-
ered secure. Repeat, requesting immediate
support at this time.
Nalwood out. (transmission ends)
—Transcript of vox message, fifth month, 778.
SEVEN
The First Assault
I
The volleys of shots striking the cliff face behind them were heavy and sustained. The scabby stone surface became riddled with black dents that vanished as fast as they appeared as the swirling dust retouched them. Gaunt, Mkoll and Kolea were pressed down behind a pile of loose rocks and scree. Occasionally the enemy’s aim dropped lower, and explosive impacts rattled along the top of the pile, blowing stones into fragments.
“Well, we’re pinned,” groaned Kolea.
Mkoll scurried forwards on his hands and knees, searching for a way to move clear.
“No good,” he reported.
Gaunt had drawn his bolt pistol. He reached up over his head and fired off a couple of blind shots.
The enemy fire stopped. Gaunt looked at Kolea. Kolea shrugged. A second later, they both winced as the enemy fire resumed, more urgently.
“Great,” muttered Gaunt. “Made them angry.” He clicked his microbead. “Baskevyl? We’ve got hot contact. Support, if you please!”
II
Baskevyl glanced at Criid. She was staring at him. “Read you, sir. Where are you?” Baskevyl said into his bead.
“The tunnel runs all the way to the outside,” his link hissed in his ear. “We got caught in the open. We need cover fire from the cave mouth if we’re going to get back in.”
“Understood.”
“Come carefully,” Gaunt’s voice warned.
“Understood.”
Criid was still staring at Baskevyl. “Well,” she asked, “what are you waiting for?”
What am I waiting for, Baskevyl asked himself? What am I waiting for? Any possible excuse not to have to crawl into that bloody hole, that’s what.
Criid shook her head in bafflement and headed for the hole herself, cinching her lasrifle tight around her body. “You six, with me!” she ordered.
“Hold on, hold on!” Baskevyl called out. He drew his pistol and pushed his way to the front of the assembling team. “Follow me,” he said.
He paused for a moment, one hand clutching the ragged edge of the hole. Darkness yawned in front of him.
He took a deep, steadying breath. “Come on,” he said, and swung down into the blackness.
III
Rawne was right.
Thirty metres away down the gloomy hall, the figures advancing towards them came to a halt. They were just shadows, half a dozen silhouettes, almost insubstantial. But they weren’t Ghosts. Ludd felt that in his gut as a certainty. They absolutely weren’t another fire-team responding to Rawne’s order.
Rawne and Varl opened up without hesitation. Their las-rounds cracked away down the hallway. The Ghosts on either side of them began firing too. The fusillade was deafening and made Ludd’s vision flash and blink. He pulled himself in against a wall and fumbled with his holster, trying to get his sidearm out. He couldn’t really see the figures any more. It was as if they had gone, dissipated like smoke.
They hadn’t.
Answering fire ripped towards the Ghosts. Somebody cried out as he was hit. Hard rounds and las-bolts dug into the ceiling and walls, some of them ricocheted off wildly, pinging almost comically around the tight box of the hallway like angry insects trying to escape. A wall light burst in a shower of white sparks.
“Hostile contact!” Rawne yelled. “Hostile contact upper east twelve!”
* * * * *
IV
Outside the gate, in the gruelling wind, Hark turned his head sharply.
