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  Commodus grinned into her face. “Throne, you are one slow bitch.”

  She turned to glance at the ornate sword she’d cast aside before. The sword she’d believed was his.

  It was all the distraction he needed.

  His boots thudded up between her legs, striking with the strength he’d been saving for half an hour, then powered into her lower stomach, sending her sprawling backwards into the table. He rose to his feet, still tied to the wooden chair, and launched after her in the most frantic hop—surely ludicrous to see, if anyone had been looking.

  He drop-kicked her as she was picking herself up, both boots smacking into her face, breaking her cheek, her nose, and her freak-show witch-face mask. The chair crumbled beneath him as he crashed down, various jagged wooden limbs wrenching into his spine and shoulders. His wrists were still leashed behind his back, but that didn’t matter. He was free enough now.

  Commodus was on her as she moaned on the floor, his knee slamming down into her throat, crushing any hope of breath. The woman’s slitted eyes were wide in her purpling face as she clawed at his thighs and chest, raking at the exposed wounds. Commodus breathed in agonised hisses, not letting up the pressure for a moment.

  “Should’ve called for help when you had the chance,” he said.

  She kicked ineffectually at his back, and hammered increasingly weak punches at his front. Her face was blue now. Commodus grunted and pushed harder. Vertebrae in her neck gave muted, snapping clicks as the pressure increased.

  At last, she fell limp.

  The sergeant stayed where he was for another thirty heartbeats, making certain she was never getting up again.

  Several minutes later, after an ungainly performance of freeing himself from the tank cable bindings, Commodus picked up Liberatus from the floor and pulled the exquisite sabre from its plain leather sheath.

  Lightning ran the length of the curved blade as he thumbed the activation rune.

  “Pleasure talking to you,” he said to the woman’s corpse, and took one look at the chamber’s only door, before promptly leaving through the broken window.

  XVI

  As escapes went, it was hardly graceful. She’d cut him up good, and his injuries put paid to any attempt to bolt with decent speed.

  Commodus leaned into a staggering run, spit running from his clenched teeth, swallowing the pain with each painful breath. Below the chest, his uniform was dyed red in the places it wasn’t completely shredded. Dozens of cuts ran down his legs. The insides of his boots were hot and squelching, and it wasn’t with sweat.

  Blood loss would take him down soon; so the witch would kill him with her knife, after all.

  More than once, Commodus went down on all fours, scrambling over rubble in a bid to keep moving no matter how often he lost his balance. The city around him was in absolute ruin—a levelled wreckage of shattered buildings and broken roadways. The palace, ostensibly retaken by the Imperials hours before, loomed to the south. Half of it still burned behind fallen walls. The witch and her friends really hadn’t dragged him far.

  He’d made it almost five minutes away before las-rounds started dogging at his heels and slashing past his shoulders.

  The sergeant hurled himself behind the closest rise of rubble, the Warmaster’s sword gripped in the hand without half its fingers broken, and stole a look to see who his pursuers were.

  Two of them, running over the wasteland, firing from the hip. They wore the same grotesques as the witch had worn—those hook-nosed carnival facemasks leered in metallic delight—and came clad in the same scarlet uniforms.

  Blood Pact.

  He hoped there weren’t many more of these malicious bastards out there. Were they some newly founded cult? An enemy regiment they’d not crossed paths with before?

  Whatever they were, he certainly couldn’t survive another one of their knifey-knifey interrogation sessions.

  Commodus sank down into the dusty rocks and started crawling. If he couldn’t run, it was time to hide.

  XVII

  The first red-clad soldier passed through the ruins of what had been a museum only three days before. He entered with his rifle up to his cheek, aiming into corners and at chunks of rubble each time he heard a noise. Perfect movement, keen senses. Head high, ready to fire.

  And completely missing the faint trail of blood on the floor.

  When he passed another slab of fallen masonry, a sabre lashed out from beneath and cleaved through both his shins. He went down firing, hitting nothing, and died a moment later when the sword of Warmaster Slaydo chopped through his neck in one clean blow.

  Blood sizzled and turned crispy black as it burned on the energised blade.

  One down. One to go.

  Commodus pulled himself clear, cursing at the cramp taking over his left leg. It made a bad limp even worse, and even availing himself of the dead Blood Pact’s lasgun didn’t bring a smile to his face.

  In a game of cat and mouse, when one side was reduced to dragging himself through the dust, the evidence started to rack up for just who would be playing the rodent. Commodus hauled himself over to a pillar, leaning his back against what was left of it. His assets were a stolen lasrifle—half-empty—that smelled a little like an open coffin, and one of the finest, most potent power weapons in the Imperium of Man.

  Working against him was the fact that the other Blood Pact soldier almost definitely knew where he was—even if his slain fellow hadn’t had the chance to scream, he’d still fired a fair few shots as he went down—and the equally troubling fact that Commodus was slowly but surely bleeding to death.

  Good odds, Yael would’ve joked. But Yael was probably dead, too.

  The sergeant blinked to clear his blurring vision. It worked on the third try.

  Stand up, he thought. Just stand up first.

  Commodus buckled the old man’s weapon belt around his waist, used the pillar for support to lift himself to his feet, and gripped his new rifle. Now get the hell out of here.

  He made it another two minutes before his pursuer tracked him down.

  By this point, Commodus could barely breathe with his mouth and throat so dry, and blinking did nothing to stop his vision from swimming.

  Something clattered to the ground. He could still feel the lasgun’s weight in his sore arms, so it must’ve been the sword. Or a piece of his armour, perhaps. It didn’t really matter.

  “Eshek gai tragir,” barked the Blood Pact, from behind him. “Eshek gai tragir kal-kasakh!”

  Commodus turned, seeing a red smear against a grey haze background.

  “I don’t speak…”

  Wait, what language is that?

  “Eshek gai tragir!” the Blood Pact yelled again.

  “I don’t speak… Evil,” Commodus said, and started laughing.

  He raised his weapon, but his hands moved like he was underwater. He heard the Blood Pact’s rifle crack once, and the red smear moved in a blur.

  He felt himself falling a moment later. There was no change in the pain, no amplifying of the agony he already felt. They’d carved him to pieces already. Shooting him wouldn’t change a damn thing.

  More gunfire rang out. More voices bleated. Commodus wiped his eyes, but couldn’t see a thing through them. Not that there was much to see, anyway. They’d levelled this beautiful city. Life at the Warmaster’s side, that was. Life in the Guard. Kill a whole world to break one viper’s back.

  By the Saint’s sacred arse, he was tired. Dimly, he wondered where he’d been shot. Everywhere hurt as much as everywhere else.

  This is what dying feels like. This is what the old man had fought through, right to the end.

  Tough old bastard.

  He was on all fours when the Blood Pact descended upon him. Their hands grabbed at his ripped clothes, taking his weight, lifting him to his feet, asking if he could hold on a little longer, and saying his name.

  “I don’t speak Evil,” he murmured again, and collapsed into Yael’s arms.
r />   XVIII

  “Senior Sergeant Commodus Ryland,” called the voice.

  “You can go in,” said the immaculately clad bodyguard. Commodus did just that, though his limp made it slow going.

  When he’d first woken up that morning, the sawbones had threatened to have away with his leg.

  “Take the leg,” Commodus had said, still flying high and grinning hard from the pain-inhibitors, “and I’ll shoot your balls off.”

  He limped through the open doorway now, hoping his leg really would start to bend again soon.

  Inside the Warmaster’s tent, twenty officers in a variety of uniforms stood around a central table that seemed to be drowning in print-papers. Commodus made no eye contact with any of the brass, and stole a glance at one of the paper scrolls that’d fallen onto the floor.

  A casualty list, from the Hyrkan 8th.

  He glanced at the table again. Throne, these were the casualties of the last two weeks. A forest must’ve been slain to make that much paper.

  “Commodus Ryland?” asked the same nasal voice that had called him in. “I believe you have something to present to me.”

  “Yes, my Warmaster.”

  In a smooth motion, he offered the beautiful, fresh-cleaned sword out, hilt-first. Even leaning forwards like this made the healing muscles in his back catch fire. He trembled as he offered the blade, feeling his leg begin to go.

  A hand gloved in white lifted Slaydo’s sword from his grip. It was all he could do not to reach for it and steal it back.

  “Yes, yes,” the sword’s new owner trilled. “Lovely weapon. Served the old man well. My thanks, sergeant. You did gloriously.”

  Commodus stood straight and saluted. He still avoided the Warmaster’s eyes, instead fixing his gaze on the man’s silver-white breastplate that encased a physique edging into portly.

  “Thank you, my Warmaster.”

  “I may have something for you in the future, to recognise your valour in the field. You’re dismissed for now, sergeant.” He saluted again, and turned to limp out.

  “Ryland?” The Warmaster seemed to voice his name through a nasal sneer. “I’ve not seen your report yet. Those traitors in the ruins, sergeant—what did they call themselves?”

  “Blood Pact, my Warmaster.”

  “Ah, yes, that’s it. Thank you.” Macaroth, heir to Slaydo, Warmaster of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, turned back to his command staff. “Blood Pact,” he said to them. “I do not like the sound of that at all.”

  This one’s by me, and it’s the only story in the book that’s appeared somewhere before.

  It’s a Gaunt’s Ghosts story that was commissioned as the convention-only exclusive for the 2008 UK Games Day. As with all such chapbooks, it was always intended that the story would be anthologised eventually to make it available to a wider audience, and this seemed like the right place.

  The Iron Star fits directly into Gaunt’s Ghosts continuity, falling precisely between Only In Death and Blood Pact (ie; between arc three, The Lost, and arc four, The Victory). It’s the story of the aftermath of the battle of Ilinzerhaus, during which Gaunt was severely wounded…

  Dan Abnett

  THE IRON STAR

  Dan Abnett

  I

  Under an iron star set in a sky the colour of raw meat, the Ghosts of Tanith made their loyal but weary advance towards…

  Dammit. What was the place called? He thought about it for a moment. The somewhere-or-other bridge. He was sure the name would come back to him. He looked around for his map, but his eyes were hurting again, and he couldn’t find it.

  It was a bridge, anyway. Another bridge. Another fething objective. This particular bridge lay at the western tip of… of… the some such plateau, on a world called… called who the feth cares anymore.

  Truth be told, he certainly didn’t. It was just another world and another battle.

  The Ghosts didn’t care either. They simply advanced, loyal but weary, weary but loyal; neither quality first, neither quality last.

  They were tired, there was no mistaking that. They toiled along through the mud, under the raw-meat sky, heads low, hearts lower, their banners as limp as their spirits; lonely in life, and lonely in death.

  In the distance, across the mire, the black figures gathered to watch them.

  During long crusades, Guard regiments could stay on the front line without rotation for years at a time. Such was the size of the Imperium, whole seasons could be lost simply making shift aboard carrier transports from one zone world to the next.

  The Ghosts of Tanith had been on front-line deployment for decades, without rotation, since the day their homeworld had blinked out in a hot puff of scatter-light.

  He had been petitioning of late for his regiment to be rotated out of the line. He had become increasingly insistent on the subject. The phrase “loyal but weary” appeared in almost every one of his dispatches to High Command. Late at night, under canvas or in the mud-stink of a dugout, or in the noon heat at a roadside during a rest stop, he worked hard to get the tone of his petitions right. If it please you, sirs… begging your accommodation on this small matter, my masters… The Ghosts were not cowards, but they had been pushed hard for too long. They yearned for respite and rotation. They were tired.

  He knew he was.

  His face was more drawn and lean than ever. These days, he walked with a bone-sore limp. When he washed, on those few, precious occasions when water actually pumped through a trench camp’s shower block, he stood under the pitiful rusty trickle, scrubbing lice and dirt from his limbs, and found himself looking down at a body scored and welted by the traces of so many old wounds that he had lost track of their origins. This? Where had he got this? Fortis Binary? And this, this old puckered gouge? Where had he come by that? Monthax? Aexe Cardinal? Vervunhive?

  It no longer seemed to matter. These days, it was often a struggle just to remember where he was.

  “Are we still on… on thingumajig?” he had asked his adjutant that morning while shaving.

  His adjutant, whose name he was sure he knew well, had frowned, thinking the question over.

  “Thingumajig? Uh… yes. I believe so, sir,” the adjutant had replied.

  The names really weren’t of any consequence anymore, the names of cities or continents or worlds. Each one was just a new place to get into, and then get out of again, once the job was done. He’d stopped worrying about the names. He just concentrated on the jobs; loyal but weary, weary but loyal.

  Sometimes, he was so tired he even forgot his own name.

  He dipped his old cutthroat razor into the chipped bowl, washing off the foam and the residue of shorn bristles. He looked at his reflection in the cracked shaving mirror. Though the reflection didn’t seem to have a face at all, he recognised it anyway.

  Ibram Gaunt. That was it. Ibram Gaunt.

  Of course it was.

  II

  His eyes hurt. They hurt at night, when he was working at his latest pleading dispatch by the glow of a lamp, and they hurt by day, under the radioactive glimmer of the iron star. They hurt when he stared out across the mire to look at the black figures gathering to watch them.

  The iron star was an ugly thing. It throbbed in the sky like an ingot cooling from the furnace. The sky was marbled black and red, like hung meat. The throb of the star made his head ache and his eyes run. Sometimes, when he dabbed the tears off his face, his fingertips came away red.

  III

  A scout came running back along the muddy track. The track was so muddy that it was impassable to wheeled vehicles. The Tanith were up to their shins in the slime. The strange part was that there had been no rain, not a drop of rain since they had made planetfall on who the feth cares anymore. Well, none he could remember, anyway.

  Things lurked in the mud. If you scraped it back, or dug it away to commence trench work, you risked striking the turret tops of tanks that had been sucked down under the ooze, or exposing the bodies of dead men, pale and sig
htless.

  “There’s so much mud,” he said, watching the scout as he approached. “So much mud, but no rain. Why is that?”

  “Don’t you know where you are, Ibram?” asked Medic Curth.

  “I don’t,” he smiled. “That’s a terrible confession for a commanding officer to make, isn’t it?”

  She grinned back. Curth was thin, but very pretty. “Under the circumstances, I’ll forgive the lapse, Ibram.”

  “Good,” he said, nodding.

  “So, where are we?” he added. “Remind me?”

  She leaned down and whispered into his ear.

  IV

  A scout came running back along the muddy track. It was Leyr. No, Bonin. No, it was Leyr. “Ten units,” Leyr reported. “They’re dug down behind that stand of trees to the left of the bridge.”

  “Well, we’ve got to get across the bridge,” Gaunt said.

  “Of course we have,” said Medic Curth.

  “This really isn’t the time for a medical opinion,” Gaunt told her.

  “Sorry,” she said, with a deferential nod of her head. She stood back to let some of the senior officers close in around Gaunt.

  “The bridge is vital,” Major Baskevyl said.

  “Agreed,” said Captain Daur.

  “No question about it,” nodded Captains Arcuda and Obel.

  “Absolutely vital,” Commissar Hark concurred. “We have to get across it, or—”

  “Or what?” asked Cadet-Commissar Nahum Ludd. The young man looked nervous. He glanced sidelong at Hark. Commissar Viktor Hark looked daggers at the youngster. “Try to keep up, Ludd,” he hissed. “We have to get across the bridge before someone dies.”

  “Oh,” said Ludd. “Oh, right.”

  “Another ten units,” said Curth.

  “Another ten?” Gaunt asked. “I thought there were just ten. Just ten, wasn’t it, Leyr?”