by Dan Abnett
It was Eszrah.
“Peace, soules,” he said. “Yts dunne.”
VIII
The ram struck the outer hatch with a hammer to anvil shock.
Then silence fell.
The Ghosts waiting in the gatehouse entry shifted nervously.
“Stay ready, stay ready” Kolea whispered to them.
He waited. All noise had dropped away, even the distant rattle of gunfire. The anxious breathing of the assembled men became the dominant sound, like the soft rustle of sliding material, like a lace dress brushing against the floor.
Nothing happened. Gol Kolea waited a moment longer until nothing had definitely happened again.
He glanced at Baskevyl and raised his eyebrows.
Baskevyl clicked his bead. “This is Gate. Can I get anyone on overlook, anyone?”
“This is Daur, overlook nine, copy.”
“We’re blind here, Ban. What can you see?”
There was a pause.
“Not much, Gate. Dust is suddenly coming up extra hard. But they’re falling back en masse. Repeat, the enemy has been driven off.”
“Understood, good news. Thank you.” Baskevyl looked back at Kolea. “I think we got off lightly,” he said.
Day ten, continued,
I barely care to maintain this journal any more, but I know I am bound to. I don’t know what to write.
I don’t know what I’m going to say. Z. was perfectly correct. I have to say something. I have to say the right thing.
I can’t believe I find I have some difficulty fully appreciating this circumstance. I should be coping better. I have been well trained, and pti part of that training was to prepare for this. I suppose it may be the pain I’m experiencing, but it’s weakness to blame my body for something my mind can’t do.
I simply don’t know what I’m going to say. I don’t know if there’s anyting anything I can say to make this any better.
I need to be sure. I need to see a body, I suppose.
—field journal, V.H. fifth month, 778.
THIRTEEN
Dead and Dying
I
“This area’s not secure!” Varaine called out. All around, men were coughing in the accumulated smoke, or moaning and weeping where they lay.
“Look at my face,” Dorden told Varaine as he walked past.
“Doctor!”
“You heard him, Varaine,” Rawne growled, following Dorden down the ruined upper hallway.
Night, the night of the tenth day, was closing in, and the dust was up outside. The wind swirled around the cloche domes and squealed in through the slits of hastily closed shutters.
With the shutters on the summit levels closed, they were locked in with the after-stink of battle. A trapped stench built up quickly in the armoured hallways, a smell composed of blood, smoke, fyceline haze, piss and burned meat. Rawne wrinkled his nose and wrapped his cloak up tight. Dorden, without breaking stride, popped a surgical mask over his nose and mouth.
The medicae was walking quickly, amazingly quickly for a man so old.
“You don’t have to do this,” said Rawne.
“I fancy I do. I’m senior medicae regimentum.”
“Then slow down,” said Rawne.
“I don’t think I will,” Dorden replied.
“Slow down for me, then,” complained Zweil, lagging behind them.
Dorden paused and allowed the old priest to catch up. The old man took the older man’s arm.
“He’ll laugh when he sees our faces,” Zweil said.
“Of course he will,” Dorden replied, his unsmiling mouth hidden by his mask.
II
The summit levels of the fortress had been devastated. Ignoring the mounting storm outside, men from five of the Ghost companies were attempting to clear and secure the levels. The raiders had been driven out after the most brutal of efforts, but pockets remained. Distant, sporadic gunfire echoed sharply down the hallways.
The satin brown panels on the walls were gouged and scored. Some had been blown away, revealing bare rock. Half the lights had been shot out. Bodies littered the ground, piled high in places. Corpsmen were recovering the friendly dead and the few remaining injured. Armed Ghosts with lamp-packs moved through the devastation, killing anything that moved and wasn’t one of their own with quick, sure shots from their laspistols. Smoke wove shapes in the lamp beams. Condensation, stained pink, dripped off the steaming ceiling plates. Blood coagulated in pools at the foot of steps, or dried black as it dribbled slowly down the wall panels.
“How many, do you think?” Zweil asked.
Rawne shrugged. “If we’ve lost four hundred, we should count ourselves lucky.”
“We’re going to lose half that without water and better medical supplies,” Dorden said, still walking. “The wounded are going to die quickly. Add that to your tally.”
“It’s not a tally I started, Dorden,” Rawne replied.
Dorden didn’t reply. He kept walking.
III
Maggs heard slow, shuffling steps approaching along the hallway. His eyes were sore with the smoke. His heart ached.
Come on, then, if you’re coming.
“Put that away, Maggs,” said Rawne.
“Sorry, sir. Can’t be too careful. We think we’ve driven them all out, but there may be some survivors.”
“Understood. This is upper west sixteen?”
“Sir, yes sir. It’s… it’s a mess.”
“We’ll see for ourselves, lad,” Dorden told Maggs, patting him on the arm as he pushed on.
* * * * *
IV
Famous battles did not leave dignified remains. That had always been Tolin Dorden’s experience. Battle, under any circumstance, was a savage, thrashing mechanism that ripped bodies asunder indiscriminately and left an unholy mess for men like him to clear up.
The sort of battles that might win a place in the records—famous battles—well, they were the worst. Dorden had found, to his distress, that any combat that was destined to be remembered and celebrated left in its immediate wake the most atrocious debris of all.
The rumours had already begun to spread: upper west sixteen, a place of heroes, toughest fight there ever was, locked in the tunnels, man to man, blade to blade. Dorden knew there would be more stories later on, and maybe decorations to cement their authenticity. Upper west sixteen had been a finest hour for the Ghosts, a make or break that would be honoured for as long as the regiment existed.
There was nothing heroic about the scene that greeted him.
The stretch of hallway was a charnel house. It looked as if a mad vivisectionist had gone to work and then burned all of his findings. The air was filled with steam and smoke. The smoke issued from the burning corpses and the steam from the wet. The floor was coated several centimetres deep with blood and mushed tissue.
Dorden took the lamp-pack from Rawne. Zweil moaned and covered his nose with a handkerchief. The lamp beam moved. There was not a single intact body. Bodies lay burned to a crisp, grinning out of blackened, heat-stiffened faces. Bodies lay burst like meat sacks, trailing loops of pungent yellow intestine across the soaked floor. Parts of bodies littered the floor space: a hand, a chopped off foot in a boot, a chunk of flesh, the side of a face, half a grotesk.
“Feth take you and your war,” Dorden whispered.
“It’s not my war,” Rawne began.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
There had been flamers, at the end. Parts of the hallway were burned back down to the rock, and blood had cooked to sticky treacle in places. The soles of their boots adhered unpleasantly as they advanced.
Ghosts were picking through the dead, searching with lamp-packs and—once in a while—firing rounds. Dorden was fairly sure it wasn’t just the Blood Pact they were finishing cleanly.
Mercy is mercy, he told himself.
“Can you help me?” asked a voice. It was Major Berenson. He had been shot through the right shoulder and his arm wa
s hanging limply.
Dorden moved towards him. “Let me see—”
“Not me, medicae. Him.”
Berenson nodded down at the man slumped beside him on a pile of corpses. The man had lost both legs to a chainsword or the like. The exploded remains of a voxcaster set was still attached to his back.
Dorden bent down. “Kit!” he yelled. “Tourniquets! Don’t waste your time, medicae,” whispered Karples, blood leaking out of his mouth. “I know I’m done.”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Dorden replied, reaching out for the medical pack Rawne handed to him.
“I am not a stupid man,” Karples gasped. “I know I can’t be saved. Is there an officer here? A Tanith officer?”
Rawne knelt down and bent in close. “I’m Tanith.”
“He deserves a medal.”
“Who?”
“Your—guh! Your colonel-commissar,” Karples gurgled. “He led the way, all the way. I have never seen so much—”
“So much what?”
Karples opened his mouth. Blood rolled out of it like lava from a volcano.
“Karples!” Berenson cried out.
“Shame,” sputtered Karples. “Shame to give a medal posthumously.”
“What are you saying?” Rawne exclaimed.
Karples didn’t answer. He was dead.
V
Maggs led them on by the light of the lamp-pack fixed under his rifle muzzle. They wandered past Ghosts despairing and weeping as they searched for evidence of the living.
A figure moved in the dark under a cloche dome ahead of them. Maggs started, raising his weapon. He saw a meat-wound face and a black lace dress.
He was about to fire when Zweil rammed his rifle aside.
“You idiot!” Zweil yelled. “That’s Varl!”
VI
“It was something,” Varl said. He was so completely covered in blood, it looked as if he had been deliberately painted. The whites of his eyes seemed very white against the red, the pupils very black. He was shaking. Dorden helped him to sit down.
“Where are you hit?” Dorden asked.
“I don’t think I am,” Varl said. His voice was oddly quiet. He looked up at Rawne.
“It was going to happen one day, wasn’t it?” he asked.
Rawne made no reply.
“What happened?” Zweil asked. “Son?”
Varl shrugged. “I can’t really tell it as a story. It was all so mad, everything happening at once. I know he was hit. He was beside me and he was hit. I heard him cry out. He told me to keep going. Next thing… next thing I know, he’s gone down. I tried to protect him, but I got pushed back down the hall by the bodies shoving forwards.”
Varl wiped his mouth. “When we regained ground, he wasn’t there any more. It was all a bit confused, but then I saw him. I saw him. The enemy had him. Six of them were just carrying his body away. I suppose they recognised his rank pins and decided to take a trophy. That’s what I thought at the time.”
He shook his head sadly. “I wasn’t having that. I fething well wasn’t having that. I went at them, me and a couple of the lads. We really got into it. It was just a blur for a bit. Then I saw him again. They were lifting him out through one of the shutters.”
Varl stopped talking.
“Finish the story,” said Rawne in a voice that seemed as old and tired as the house around them.
“I followed them,” Varl said bitterly. “I fought my way in and followed them out of the shutter onto the peak top. The dust was up. I could barely see at first. There was fighting still going on in and out of the cloches. They were lugging him over onto their climbing ropes to carry him down the cliff. That was when I saw why. He was alive. He was still alive. He saw me. I tried to get to him, but there were too many of them. They were dragging him down, they had a rope on him. I think he knew what was going on. I think he knew what kind of fate awaited him if they took him away.”
Varl looked up at the men listening to him. “He shouted to me. I don’t know what he said. He still had his sword. Somehow he still had it. He killed one of them with it, but they were all over him. So he… he took his sword and cut the ropes.”
No one spoke.
“That was it,” said Varl. “The whole lot of them just went. He took them all with him. They just went back over the edge and that was it.”
“Are you sure?” Rawne asked. “Are you sure it was him?”
Varl lifted something up. They’d all assumed it was his lasrifle he’d been carrying, but it wasn’t. It was the power sword of Heironymo Sondar.
“This was left on the ledge, right on the edge of the cliff,” Varl said. Tears were running down his face, making tracks of white skin in the plastering blood. “Gaunt’s dead.”
Elikon M.P., Elikon M.P., this is Nalwood,
this is Nalwood. Reporting loss in action of
commanding officer. Repeat, commanding
officer regimental has perished. Objective
remains secure at this time.
Nalwood out. (transmission ends)
—Transcript of vox message, fifth month, 778.
FOURTEEN
Death Songs
I
It took another four hours to make Hinzerhaus secure. A scattered handful of the Blood Pact, unable to retreat with their main forces, laid low in sub-chambers and the dark ends of lonely galleries, and dished out hell to any search teams that discovered them. None died without a bloody scrap. Those were the cruellest Ghost fatalities, Rawne thought. The battle was done and still his men were dying.
His men. The thought made him light-headed. After all this time, they were his men now.
II
As the night drew out, Jago’s furious wind screamed around the house, unleashing the worst dust storm the bad rock had yet inflicted on them. Dust invaded through the many broken and damaged shutters, despite efforts to seal them. The wind moaned along the hallways and galleries, clearing out the smoke, making men shiver. It sounded like grief, like the moaning despair of a widow or an orphan.
Somewhere in the noise, late in the night, Tanith pipes began to play. Hark heard them calling, plaintive and clear. His bed had been shifted to a side chamber when the field station had become full. Pain had overcome him, he’d stood for too long. The flesh of his back throbbed.
When he heard the pipes, he tried to rise. A hand touched his shoulder gently and a voice urged him to lay still.
“I can hear the music,” he said.
“It’s Caober,” said Ana Curth.
“Caober doesn’t play,” Hark said. “No one in the Tanith plays the pipes any more.”
“Caober had an old set,” she said, “and he’s playing them now.”
Hark listened again. He realised it wasn’t the same music that had been haunting him. It wasn’t very good. There were bum notes and poor shifts of key. It was the work of someone who hadn’t played the pipes in a long time.
He was playing the old tune, the old Tanith marching song, but he was playing it so slowly, it was a dirge, a lament.
“They all know,” Hark said.
“Everyone knows,” said Curth.
III
Rawne walked into the room that had been Gaunt’s office. Charts lay on the desk, and Gaunt’s pack was leaning against the wall. A few personal items lay around: a data-slate, a button-brush, a tin of metal polish, a tin mug. A bedroll was laid out neatly on the small cot. Under the cot, by one of the legs, lay a pair of socks in desperate need of darning.
Rawne put the power sword down on the desk. Then he sat down heavily. He picked up the tin mug and set it on the desk in front of him. He took out his water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and half-filled the cup with water.
They had water now, a tiny little success almost lost in the day’s bad business. Ludd and Beltayn had been so proud of their achievement. Rawne had taken no pleasure in wiping the smiles off their faces and the triumph out of their hearts.
Gangs of Ghosts had spent
three hours lugging the water drums into the house from the courtyard. A great deal had been lost, but there was enough for full rations, enough for washing wounds and cleaning bodies, enough to make up eyewash to treat the sore and dust-blind.
Rawne took a sip. The water tasted of disinfectant, of Munitorum drums, of nothing at all.
There was a knock at the door.
“Come.”
Baskevyl looked in. “Company reports are coming through, sir,” he said. “Casualty lists and defence reports.”
“Field them for me, please,” said Rawne. “Gather them all in and then report to me.”
Baskevyl nodded. He hadn’t said a thing about Gaunt all night, nor commented on Rawne’s elevation to command. Under other circumstances, Baskevyl might have had every right to be considered. But Rawne knew that Baskevyl understood that it had to be him. It had to be Tanith.
“Berenson would like a moment,” Baskevyl said.
“Ask him to wait, please.”
“Sir.” Baskevyl closed the door behind him.
Rawne took another sip of water. He was numb, and painfully aware that he had no idea what he was supposed to do now. It was hard to think.
“Thanks a lot,” he said to the power sword on the desk, speaking to it as if it was Gaunt. “Thanks so very much for leaving me to deal with this shit.”
Rawne had no expectations of a happy ending anymore. Another assault like the one they had just been through would probably finish them. Gaunt had informed Rawne of Van Voytz’s instructions. Keep them busy. That amounted to stay there and die.
There was another knock.
“Go away!” Rawne yelled.
Hlaine Larkin limped into the chamber and closed the door behind him.
“Are you deaf?” Rawne growled.
Larkin shook his head. “Just disobedient,” he replied. He came over to the desk and sat down facing Rawne. His prosthetic was clearly rubbing sore, because he winced with every step and sighed as he sat.
