Only in Death, page 29
It took five careful minutes to circle the mesa to the northern side. The sun was no longer overhead and he had shadows to play with, hard shadows cast by the boulders and the crag.
He ducked down at the first sight of movement, his back to a large rock. He pulled out his stick mirror and angled it for a look, taking care that it didn’t catch the sun.
In it, he glimpsed a Blood Pact warrior clambering through the rocks, rifle in hand. The brute was panting, and sweating so profusely that his stained jacket had dark half-moons under the arms. Mkoll could smell him, he was so close. He could smell the rancid sweat and the stale blood-filth the warrior had coloured his jacket with.
How many of them were there? He kept watching.
The warrior stopped, and called out something. An answering cry came back. The warrior raised his rifle and squeezed two shots off at the overhanging crag.
Mkoll drew his warknife.
The Blood Pact warrior got up on a large boulder and looked around. Four of his comrades were toiling up the scree slope in a wide line below him. Behind them, out on the dunes, a rusty half-track sat with its engine running. A patrol, on a routine sweep.
‘Voi shett! K’heg ar rath gfo!’ the warrior on the rock shouted. Three more warriors jumped down from the half-track, one of them an officer with a gilded grotesk.
‘Borr ko’dah, voi!’ the officer yelled, waving his pistol. The trio entered the rock line and followed the other troopers up into the slopes under the crag. One trooper remained behind aboard the half-track with the driver, manning a pintle-mounted cannon.
The warrior nearby jumped down off the rock and looked around for an easy path up through the scree. A hand circled his throat from behind and a blade slid up under his shoulder blade into his heart. He died without a sound.
Mkoll lowered the body silently. He wiped the blade on the warrior’s coat and helped himself to the cell clips in his webbing. He could hear the officer shouting down below.
Mkoll darted between the rocks, head low. He heard the crunch of boots nearby and froze. Another warrior clambered past, just a few metres away, calling out.
Mkoll crept forwards and finished the warrior as quickly and clinically as before.
A lasrifle started firing and Mkoll dropped, fearing he had been spotted. But the shots were zipping up at the crag, stitching puffs of dust across the bare rock.
There was a squall of pain and the firing ceased abruptly. Mkoll peered out and tried to see what was going on. The squad of Blood Pact warriors, urged on by their officer, was scrambling up through the rocks more urgently, and all of them had started firing up at the crag.
Mkoll put his knife away. There was no more time for subtlety.
He rested his rifle across a sloping rock and took aim. A Blood Pact trooper came into view, bounding from boulder to boulder. He rose up to fire his weapon and Mkoll took him out with a single shot. The trooper dropped back off the boulder.
Confusion seized the enemy squad. They’d all heard the shot and seen their comrade fall. They started shouting at one another and firing randomly. Mkoll rotated away from his firing position, scampered down a gap between two large stone blocks, and aimed again. He got a decent line on one of the remaining enemy troopers, but the man dropped out of sight as Mkoll fired and the shot went wide. Las-fire suddenly scuffed and pinged across Mkoll’s cover. He was pinned. They had an angle on him from two sides.
He slid down into the shadows and began to crawl. Shots slammed and thukked off the rocks above him. A deflected las-bolt whined past his face. Mkoll switched on his intervox and began to wind the tuning control. It took him about thirty seconds to find the channel the Blood Pact was using.
The officer’s hoarse barks filled his ears. He translated slowly. His fluency in the Archenemy tongue had diminished somewhat since the long stay on Gereon. Something about ‘…more than one fugitive. Find them both or I’ll…’
Some visceral threat followed that Mkoll was happy not to translate, as it involved trench axes and fingers.
‘Voi shett d’kha jehlna, dooktath!’ Mkoll voxed, and stood up. The officer and the three other troopers were all looking the other way. No surprise, considering someone had just told them ‘Look and take heed, there’s one of them behind you, you ignorant rectums!’, although rather more colloquially.
Mkoll shot the officer in the back of the head, retrained his aim, and killed one of the troopers too, before the officer had even hit the ground. The other two wheeled around and opened fire. One dropped, mysteriously, of his own accord, as if he had slipped over. Mkoll flattened the last one with a spray of shots.
The pintle-mounted cannon started to blast fire out across the rocks. The half-track’s engine was revving furiously, and black exhaust coughed out of the tail pipes, as if the driver was in a sudden hurry to leave.
Mkoll took aim. The range wasn’t good, but he was no slouch. He squeezed the trigger and held it down, pumping half a dozen shots at the half-track. The first few kissed the bodywork and bent the small shield plate fixed to a bracket around the cannon housing. The fifth or sixth bolt hit the gunner in the head and smacked him back out of the vehicle. The half-track jolted and started to move, its track sections squirming up clouds of dust as it turned. Mkoll stood up and raked the driver’s door and windshield with shots. The vehicle lurched, slewed on, and lurched again before coming to a halt. Its engine over-revved wildly as if a deadweight was pressing on the throttle. Then it stalled and the engine died away with an unhealthy clatter.
Silence. Mkoll picked his way through the rocks, checking the bodies of the dead and stealing their ammunition. He found one he hadn’t killed, though the manner of the warrior’s death was quite evident.
Mkoll stopped moving. Slowly, he raised his hands. He knew instinctively that someone was aiming a weapon at his back.
‘Eszrah?’ he whispered.
‘Hwat seyathee, sidthe?’ asked the voice behind him.
IV
Mkoll turned slowly. Eszrah ap Niht stood behind him, his reynbow aimed.
The Nihtgane was the colour of Jago. His clothing and the wode on his face had absorbed the pale grey of the bad rock somehow. Eszrah had employed some camouflage technique that Mkoll would have paid real money to learn.
‘It’s me,’ Mkoll said. ‘Histye.’
Esrah nodded. ‘Histye, sidthe,’ he acknowledged. His aim did not stir.
‘You’ve always call me that,’ Mkoll said. ‘I don’t understand your language the way Ven did. What does it mean?’
‘Ghost,’ Eszrah replied.
Mkoll smiled. ‘You don’t have to point that at me, soule,’ he said.
‘Cumenthee taek Eszrah backwey,’ Eszrah replied, maintaining his aim.
‘No,’ said Mkoll.
‘Cumenthee sidthe, cumenthee taek Eszrah bye Rawne his wyrd.’
‘For Rawne? You think he ordered me to come and get you?’ Mkoll shook his head. ‘No, soule, no, no. That’s not why I’m here.’
‘No?’ Eszrah echoed. ‘Seyathee no?’
‘I’ve come for the sword,’ Mkoll said, gently pointing to the weapon lashed to the partisan’s back. ‘It wasn’t yours to take, my friend. It belongs to the regiment.’
Eszrah slowly lowered the reynbow. ‘Eszrah’s ytis.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Eszrah’s ytis,’ the Nihtgane insisted. ‘Soule Gaunt, daeda he. So walken thys daeda waeg Y go, bludtoll to maken.’
‘Blood toll? Do you mean vengeance?’
Eszrah shrugged. ‘Not ken Y wyrd, soule.’
‘Revenge? Retribution? Payback? You’re going to take lives for Gaunt’s life?’
‘Lyfes for Gaunt his lyfen, bludtoll so,’ Eszrah nodded.
There was a long silence, broken only by the mournful song of the desert wind. Mkoll felt sudden, immeasurable sorrow: for the partisan, for Gaunt, for himself. This was how it was all going to end, and a poor, messy end it was. Loyalty and devotion, duty and love, all stretched out of shape and malformed until they were unrecognisable and tarnished.
‘You think you failed him, don’t you?’ Mkoll asked quietly.
‘Seyathee true, sidthe soule.’
Mkoll nodded. ‘I know. That’s how I feel too. I should have been there. I should have been there and…’
His voice trailed off.
‘Feth!’ he said. ‘Throne, how he’d have laughed at us!’
Eszrah frowned. ‘Gaunt laffen he?’
‘Yes, at us! Two idiots in the middle of nowhere, both of us thinking we’re doing the right thing! He doesn’t care! Not now! He’s dead, and we’ve made fools of ourselves!’
Eszrah was still frowning. ‘The daeda waeg yt is the last waeg.’
‘The what? What is the daeda waeg?’
Eszrah thought for a moment, struggling to find the words.
‘Corpse. Road,’ he said.
‘And where does that lead?’ Mkoll asked.
Eszrah gestured out towards the dune sea beyond them.
‘Out there?’ Mkoll asked, looking around. ‘Forever?’
The partisan shook his head. ‘Closen bye, sidthe soule. Bloodtoll wayten.’
Mkoll looked at Eszrah. ‘Will you let me take the sword? Will you let me take Gaunt’s sword back to the house?’
The Nihtgane shook his head. ‘Yt must…’ he began, wrestling with his words again, ‘…yt must be his sword. His weapon. For the bludtoll.’
Mkoll sighed. He had no wish to fight Eszrah ap Niht. He wasn’t entirely sure he would win.
‘All right. Then will you let me walk the daeda waeg with you? Will you let me help you make the blood toll?’
Eszrah nodded.
‘Good, then.’
Side by side, they clambered down through the rocks onto the desert floor.
‘How many of them do we have to kill?’ Mkoll asked. ‘To make the blood toll, I mean?’
Eszrah grinned. ‘All of them, soule,’ he said.
Day thirteen cont.
Under attack from two sides. Munition carrier lost, and our hopes with it. Heavy casualties at second gate. Basic estimates put the enemy numbers ten to one in their favour.
Ammunition virtually exhausted. Even R. acknowledges this is the endgame. I had always imagined a last stand to be a heroic thing, but this is just brutal, senseless. I suppose heroism and glory are things perceived later by those who did not have to endure the circumstances. We are going to die in the next few hours, one by one, in the most violent manner. They will not show us – nor do we expect – any mercy. Once they get in–
I am wasting time with such self-serving remarks. I may not get the chance to record this later, so let me commit this to the record now. It has been my honour to servethe serve the Tanith First-and-Only. Every man and woman has my respect, Tanith, Verghastite, Belladon. I hope this record survives us. I want the masters of this crusade to know how dearly the Tanith cost the Archenemy, when the time came. They are the best and the most devoted soldiers I have ever seen. I stand beside them with pride.
I pray my master, Viktor Hark, has made it clear of the house with the material from the library. It has been reported to me that several men saw a Valkyrie taken out by a surface to air rocket over the Banzie Pass earlier. If that is true, then our deaths here will ultimately mean nothing.
– Field journal, N.L. for V.H. fifth month, 778.
TWENTY
The Lost
I
As the thirteenth day began to end, they went into the fire with no hope or expectation of seeing another sunrise.
The sky had gone dark with smoke. Even in the depths of the house, there was no escape from the constant thunder of weapons and the howl of voices.
The Archenemy had descended upon Hinzerhaus in a force over ten thousand strong. In a drab, red mass like an old blood stain, they spread down out of the cliffs and the pass and filled the dust bowl, pressing in at the main gate and southern fortifications. They brought hundreds of light field guns and auto-mortars with them, and bombarded the fracturing rockcrete bulwarks with shells and rocket-propelled munitions. A large assault force, spearheaded by warriors carrying long, stave-flamers, drove in against the main gate. Spiked ladders and extending climbing poles clattered up against the lower earthworks, and raiders began to scale the walls. Some of the raiders, equipped with a spiked mace in each hand and toe-hooks on their boots, came up the walls without the need for ladders, hacking and gouging their own foot– and hand-holds like human spiders. The drums and horns in the host made a din that echoed down the pass.
There was no shortage of targets for the Ghosts. Firing from the casemates, overlooks and gunboxes, the Tanith First made hundreds of kills, but the Blood Pact was not going to be deterred. Oath-sworn warriors of Archon Gaur, the elite storm troops of the Great Adversary, they were too far gone with bloodlust to care about individual lives. They had been goaded and roused to berserker pitch by their sirdar commanders, until they had achieved a feverish state of zealous devotion and feral glee. Gol Kolea had been quite right – the Blood Pact intended to make the Imperial forces pay for their defiance. Some of the raiders had cast off their helmets and grotesk masks to reveal the ritual scars cut into their faces and scalps. They wanted the marks of their dedication to the Archon to be plainly visible to their victims.
‘That’s right, you mad fether,’ murmured Larkin, ‘take your shiny hat off. That’ll make my job easier.’
Either side of him in the overlook, Banda and Nessa matched his rate of fire. Banda had already been forced to switch to a standard pattern las. There were no fresh barrels for the long-form variants left. Their ammo bag was alarmingly empty too. Out in the hallway behind the gunboxes, Ventnor and the other ammo runners had set up braziers to cook some life back into spent cells. It was risky work, and they could never hope to juice enough back into operation in time.
Kolea had placed the bulk of his flamers in the lowest level of embrasures, so that their weapons, short-range at best, could roast the scaling parties off the walls. In one gunbox, where the air was eye-stingingly acrid with promethium fumes, Brostin speared squealing gouts of flame down out of the slot while Lyse coupled a fresh tank to her set.
Brostin ducked back inside as las-bolts chipped off the lip of the gunslot.
‘They seem awfully eager to say hello to Mister Yellow,’ he said.
Lyse answered his grin with a thin smile.
‘What’s the matter?’ Brostin asked.
‘That was the last tank,’ she replied.
Four floors above, Kolea rushed along a busy, smoke-swamped communication hallway, coordinating the repulse. A mortar shell had just penetrated one of the casemates on seven, slaughtering the five Ghosts inside. Another gunbox had been blown out by grenade work, though thankfully without fatalities. Its defenders were now firing from the cover of the ruptured rockcrete socket.
The volume of fire striking against the outer walls sounded like a rotary saw eating through lumber. Corpsmen hurried by, carrying the wounded. Kolea saw Ludd.
‘Is the gate holding?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Ludd replied numbly. Kolea saw the dazed look in Ludd’s eyes. Everyone around him was beginning to look that way. It was the seeping shock of the noise trauma, the inexorable destruction of nerves and focus wrought by the constant aural assault.
‘Get with it,’ Kolea hissed to Ludd. ‘You’re no use to the men unless you’re sharp.’
Ludd blinked. ‘Yes, yes of course.’
‘You know how you feel?’ Kolea asked. ‘Every last one of the Ghosts feels like that. You need to help them forget it, ignore it, shut it out, or this fiasco is going to end a lot sooner than it has to.’
Ludd summoned some reserve of willpower. He hadn’t realised how far he’d flagged.
‘I’m sorry, major,’ he said.
‘Don’t apologise,’ Kolea replied. ‘Didn’t Hark teach you anything? Commissars never apologise. That’s why we hate them so much.’
Ludd laughed. It was the last laughter Kolea would hear that day.
Part of Chiria’s company surged down the hallway, sent to reinforce the gunboxes. Ludd moved away smartly to oversee and direct their deployment.
The intervox suddenly clicked. ‘Contact! Contact! Upper galleries!’
So they’re coming in from the north side too, Kolea thought. Fething fantastic.
II
‘Pick your targets!’ Varl shouted, firing from one of the cloche slots. ‘Conserve your fething ammunition or we might as well hold the shutters open and invite them in!’
The first Blood Pact grotesks had appeared over the cliff lip about two minutes earlier. Now all the cloches and casemates along upper east sixteen, east fifteen and west sixteen were busy firing on the raiders swarming up over the edge of the precipice.
‘Seems a shame,’ remarked Maggs, snapping off a shot that knocked a Blood Pact warrior twenty metres away back off the drop. ‘Poor bastards have climbed such a long way.’
‘My heart bleeds,’ replied Varl.
He jumped down off the fire step and yelled down the hallway. ‘Stay sharp! Don’t give them a chance to establish a foothold!’
Kamori appeared, running down the hallway at the head of twenty men.
‘Varl! Where’s Baskevyl?’
Varl shrugged. ‘I ain’t seen him, sir.’
‘But he’s got command of this level!’ Kamori exclaimed.
‘Maybe he got a better offer,’ Varl suggested. Kamori was not well known for his humour. Varl turned away quickly. ‘Cant! Go and find Major Baskevyl!’
‘Where will he be?’ Cant asked, jumping down from the step.
‘If I knew that, he wouldn’t need finding, would he?’ Varl replied. Cant hurried away down the hall. ‘And don’t come back if you’re still an idiot!’ Varl called after him.
