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  Dravere turned away. The inquisitor was still useful to him, but as soon as that usefulness ended he would not hesitate to remove him.

  Gazing into the mirror, Heldane absently recognised the malicious thought in Dravere's blunt intellect. Dravere utterly misunderstood his place in the drama. He thought himself a leader, a manipulator, a commander. But in truth, he was nothing more than another pawn – and just as expendable.

  NINETEEN

  Colonel Flense led the Jantine Patricians down the great outer ditch and into the outskirts of the necropolis ruins, passing through the exploded steatite fragments and blackened corpses left by Corbec's assault. Distantly, through the archways and stone channels they could hear gunfire. The Ghosts had plainly met more opposition inside.

  The afternoon was lengthening, the paling sky striated with lingering bands of smoke from the fighting. Flense had six hundred and twelve men left, forty of that number so seriously injured they had been retreated to the field hospitals far back at the deployment fields. Fifty Tanith, fighting to the last, had taken over a third of his regiment. He felt bitterness so great that it all but consumed him. His hatred of Ibram Gaunt, and the rivalry with the Tanith First that it had bred, had been a burning frustration. Now when they actually had the chance to face them on the field, the Tanith skirmishers had fought above their weight and scored a huge victory, even in defeat.

  He cared little now what happened. The other Ghosts could live or die. All he wanted was one thing: Gaunt. He sent a Magenta level communique to Dravere, expressing his simple wish.

  The reply surprised and delighted him. Dravere instructed Flense to place his main force under Brochuss's direct command to continue the advance into the Target Primaris. The battle orders were to neutralise the Ghosts and then prosecute a direct assault on the enemy itself. With luck, the Tanith would be crushed between the Jantine and the forces of Chaos.

  But for Flense there was a separate order. Dravere had learned from the Inquisitor Heldane that Gaunt was personally leading an insertion team into the city from below. The entry point, a shaft beneath an outcrop of stones on the hillside, was identified and a route outlined. On Dravere's personal orders, Flense was to lead a fire-team in after the commissar and destroy him.

  Flense quietly conveyed the directive to Brochuss as they stood watching the men advance in three file lines up into the vast ancient necropolis. Brochuss was swollen with pride at this command opportunity. The big man turned to face his colonel with a battle-light firing his eyes. He drew off his glove and held out his hand to Flense. The colonel removed his own gauntlet and they shook, the thumb-clasping grip of brotherhood learned in the honour schools of Jant Normanidus.

  'Advance with hope, fight with luck, win with honour, Brochuss,' Flense said.

  'Sheath your blade well, colonel,' his second replied.

  Flense turned, pulling his glove back on and tapping his microbead. Troopers Herek, Stigand, Unjou, Avranche, Ebzan report to the colonel. Bring climbing rope.'

  Flense took a lasrifle from one of the dead, blessed it silently to assuage the soul of its previous owner, and checked the ammo dips. Brochuss had two of his platoon gather spare lamp packs from the passing men. The rearguard platoon watched over Flense and his team as they made ready and descended into the shaft under the stones.

  In the isolation sphere of the command globe, Heldane sensed this manoeuvre. He hadn't been inside the fool Flense's mind for long enough to turn him, but he had left his mark there, and through that psychic window he could sense and feel so much already. Above all, he could feel Flense's bitter hatred.

  So, Dravere was trying a ploy of his own, playing his own man Flense into the intrigue, anxious to secure his own leverage. Aching with dull pain, Heldane knew he should be angry with the lord general. But there was no time, and he hadn't the will power to spare for such luxuries. He would accommodate Dravere's counter-ploy, and appropriate what elements of it he could use for his own devices. For mankind, for the grand scheme at hand, he would serve and manipulate and win the Vermilion treasure hidden beneath Target Primaris. Then, and only then, he would allow himself to die.

  He swallowed his pain, blanked out the soft embrace of death. The pain was useful in one sense; just as it allowed him to co-opt the minds of blunt tools, so it gave his own mind focus. He could dwell upon his own deep agony and drive it on like a psychic scalpel to slit open the reserve of his pawn and make him function more ably.

  He looked at the mirror again, the life-support machines around him thumping and wheezing. He saw how his hand trembled, and killed the shake with a stab of concentration.

  He saw into the small mind of his pawn again, sensed the close, cold, airless space of the tunnels he moved through, far beneath the tumbling steatite of the necropolis. He branched out with his thoughts, seeing and feeling his way into the spaces ahead of his pawn. There was warmth there, intellect, pulsing blood.

  Heldane tensed, and sent a jolt of warning to his pawn: ambush ahead!

  TWENTY

  They had reached a long, low cistern of rock, pale-blue and glassy, which branched off ahead in four directions! Oily black water trickled and pooled down the centre of the sloping floor-space.

  Rawne felt himself tense and falter. He reached out a hand to support himself against the gritty wall as a stabbing pain entered his head and clung like a great arachnid, biting into the bones of his face. His vision doubled, then swirled.

  It was like a warning… warning him that something ahead was…

  The major screeched an inarticulate sound that made the others turn or drop in surprise. The noise had barely begun to echo back down the cistern when Wheyland was firing, raking the darkness ahead with his lasgun, bellowing deployment orders.

  A volley of barbs and las-blasts spat back at them.

  Gaunt dropped against a slumped rock as gunfire cracked and fizzed against the glassy walls over him. They almost walked into that! If it hadn't been for Rawne's warning and Fereyd's rapid reaction… But how had Rawne known? He was well back in the file. How could he have seen anything that Mkoll's sharp eyes, right at the front, had missed?

  Fereyd was calling the shots at the moment but Gaunt didn't resent the abuse of command. He trusted his friend's tactical instinct and Fereyd was in a better position and line of sight to direct the tunnel fight. Gaunt clicked off his lamp pack to stop himself becoming a target and then swung his las-rifle up to sight and fire. Mkoll, Caffran, Baru and the tactician's troopers were sustaining fire from their own weapons, and Larkin was using his exotic rifle to cover Bragg while he moved the hefty autocannon up into a position to fire. Dorden cowered with Domor.

  Rawne bellied forward and fitted a barbed round to his stolen weapon. He rose, fingers feeling their way around the unfamiliar trigger grip, and blasted a buzzing barb up the throat of the passage. There was a crump and a scream. Rawne quickly reloaded and fired again, his shot snaking like a slow, heavy bee between the darting light-jags of the other men's las-guns. Larkin's rifle fired repeatedly with its curious dap-blast double sound. Then Bragg opened up, shuddering the entire chamber with his heavy, rapid blasts. The close air was suddenly thick with cordite smoke and spent fycelene.

  'Cease fire! Cease!' Gaunt yelled with a downward snap of his hand. Silence fell.

  Heartbeats pounded for ten seconds, twenty, almost a minute, and then the charge came. The enemy swarmed down into the chamber, flooding out of two of the tunnel forks ahead.

  Gaunt's men waited, disciplined to know without order how long to pause. Then they opened up again: Rawne's barb-gun, Bragg's autocannon, Larkin's carbine, the lasguns of Gaunt,

  Fereyd, Mkoll, Baru, Caffran, the three Crusade bodyguards. The cistern boxed the target for them. In ten seconds there were almost thirty dead foe bunched and crumpled in the narrow chamber, their bodies impeding the advance of those behind, making them easier targets.

  Gaunt knelt in concealment, firing his lasgun over a steatite block
with the drilled track-sight-fire-readdress pattern which he had trained into his men. He expected it of them and knew they expected no less in return. They were slaughtering the enemy, every carefully placed shot exploding through plastic body suits and masked visors. But there was no slowing of the tide. Gaunt began to wonder what would run out first: the flow of enemy, his team's ammo or airspace in the cistern not filled with dead flesh.

  TWENTY-ONE

  They emerged from the stifling shadows of the necropolis arches and into a vast interior valley of baking heat and warmth-radiating rock. Brochuss and his men blinked in the light, eyes tearing at the intense heat. The major snapped orders left and right, bringing his men up and thinning the file, extending in a wide front between the jumbled monoliths and splintered boulders. He kept as many of his soldiers in the sweeping overhanging shadows of the valley sides as he could.

  Ahead, no more than two kilometres away, a great combat was taking place. Brochuss could see the las-fire flashing over and between the rocky outcrops of the valley basin, and the boiling smoke plumes of a pitched infantry battle were rising up into the pale light above the valley. He could hear laser blasts, the rasp of meltas, the occasional fizz of rockets, and knew that Colonel Corbec's despicable Ghosts had engaged ahead. There were other sounds too: the whirr of motors, the buzz of barbs, the chatter of exotic repeater cannons. And the bellows and screams of men, a long, backwash of noise that ululated up and down the sound-box of the valley.

  Brochuss tapped his microbead link. 'A tricky play, my brave boys. We come upon the Tanith from the rear to crush them. But defend against the vermin they are engaging. Kill the Ghosts so we get to face the enemy ourselves. Face them and carry back the glory of victory to the ancestral towers of Jant Prime! Normanidus excelsius!'

  Six hundred voices answered in a ripple of approval, uttering the syllables of the devotional creed, and the war hymn began spontaneously, echoing like the sonorous swell of an Ecclesiarchy litany from the rock faces around and above them, as if from the polished basalt of a great cathedral.

  Most of the Patricians had raised their blast-cowls because of the heat, but now they snapped the visors back down in place, covering their faces with the diamond eye-slit visages of war. Their battle hymn moved to the channels of their microbeads, resounding in the ears of every man present.

  Brochuss slid down his own blast-cowl so that the hymn swam in his earpiece and around the close, hot-metal confines of his battledress helmet. He turned to Trooper Pharant at his side and unslung his lasgun. Wordlessly, Pharant exchanged his heavy stubber and ammunition webbing for his commander's rifle. He nodded solemnly at the honour; the commander would carry his heavy weapon into combat at the head of the Patricians, the Emperor's Chosen.

  Brochuss arranged the heavy webbing around his waist and shoulders with deft assistance from Pharant, settling the weighty pouches with their drum-ammo feeders against his back and thighs. Then he braced the huge stubber in his gloved fists, right hand around the trigger grip, the skeleton stock under his right armpit, his left hand holding the lateral brace so that he could sweep the barrel freely. His right thumb hit the switch that cycled the ammo-advance. The belt feed chattered fat, ugly cartridges into place and the water-cooled barrel began to steam and hiss gently.

  Brochuss had advanced to the head of his phalanx when one of his rearguard voxed directly to him. Troop units! Inbound to our rear!'

  Brochuss turned. At first he saw nothing, then he detected feint movement against the milky-blue and charred blocks of the archway curtain behind them. Soldiers were coming through in their wake. Hundreds of them, almost invisible in the treacherous side-light of the valley. The body-armour they wore was reflective and shimmering. The Vitrians.

  Brochuss smiled under his blast-cowl and prepared to signal the Vitrian commander. With the support of the Vitrian Dragoons, they could—

  Las-fire erupted along the rear line of his regiment.

  Colonel Zoren led his men directly down onto the exposed and straggling line of the Jantine Patricians. They were upwards of six hundred in number and the Vitrians only four hundred, but he had them on the turn.

  Gaunt's message had been as per their agreement, though it was still the worst, most devastating message he had received in sixteen years as a fighting man. Their mutual enemies had shown their hands and now the success of the venture depended upon his loyalty. To Colonel-Commissar Gaunt. To the man called Fereyd, among other things. To the Emperor.

  It went against all his schooling as an Imperial Guardsman, all his nature. It went against the intricate teachings of the Byhata. But still, the Byhata said there was honour in friendship, and friendship in valour. Loyalty and honour, the twinned fundamental aspects of the Vitrian Art of War.

  Let Dravere have him shot, him and all four hundred of his men. This was not insubordination, nor was it insurrection. Gaunt had showed the colonel what was at stake. He had showed him the greater levels of loyalty and honour at stake on Menazoid Epsilon. He had been truer to the Emperor and truer to the teachings of the Byhata than Dravere could ever have been.

  In a triple arrowhead formation, almost invisible in their glass armour, the Vitrian Dragoons punched into the hindquarters of Brochuss's extended advance line; a tight, dense triple wedge where the Patricians were loose and extended. The Jantine had formed a lateral file to embrace the enemy, utterly useless for countering a rearguard sweep. So it said in the Byhata: book six, segment thirty one, page four hundred and six.

  The Patricians had greater strength, but their line was convex where it should have been concave. Zoren's men tore them apart. Zoren had ordered his men to set las-weapons for maximum discharge. He hoped Colonel-Commissar Gaunt would forgive the extravagance, but the Jantine heavy troops wore notoriously thick armour.

  The First Regiment of the Jantine Patricians, the so called Emperor's Chosen, the Imperial Guard elite, were destroyed that late afternoon in the valley inside the necropolis of the Target Primaris. The noble forces of the Vitrian Dragoon's Third, years later to be decorated and celebrated as one of the foremost Guard armies, took on their superior numbers and vanquished them in a pitched battle that lasted twenty-eight minutes and relied for the most part on tactical discretion.

  Major Brochuss denied the Vitrians for as long as he was able. Screaming in outrage and despair, he smashed back through his own ranks to confront the Vitrians with Pharant's massive autocannon. It was in no way the death he had foreseen for himself, nor the death of his celebrated company.

  He bellowed at his men, admonishing them for dying, kicking at corpses as they fell around him in a raging despair to get them to stand up again. In the end, Brochuss was overwhelmed by a stinging wash of anger that having come so far, fought so hard, he and his Patricians would be cheated.

  Cheated of everything they deserved. Cheated of glory by this inglorious end. Cheated of life by lesser, weaker men who nevertheless had the resolve to fight courageously for what they believed in.

  He was amongst the last to die, as the last few shells clattered out of his ammo drums, raining into the Vitrian advance as he squeezed the trigger of the smoking, hissing stubber on full rapid. Brochuss personally killed forty-four Vitrian Dragoons in the course of the Jantine First's last stand. His autocannon was close to overheating when he was killed by a Vitrian sergeant called Zogat.

  His armoured torso pulverised by Zogat's marksmanship, Brochuss toppled into the flecked mica sand of the valley floor and his name, and bearing and manner and being, was utterly extinguished from the Imperial Record.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Then Baru died. The filthy barbed round smelted into the rock-face behind him and ribboned him with its lethal backwash of shrapnel. He didn't even have time to scream.

  From his cover, seeing the death and regretting it desperately, Gaunt slid around and set his lasgun to full auto, bombarding the torrent of foe with a vivid cascade of phosphorescent bolts. He heard Rawne scream something unintelligibl
e.

  Baru, one of his finest, as good a scout and stealther as Mkoll, pride of the Tanith. Pulling back into cover to exchange ammo clips, Gaunt glanced back at the wet ruin that had been his favoured scout. Claws of misery dug into him. For the first time since Khedd, the commissar tasted the acrid futility of war. A soldier dies, and it is the responsibility of his commander to rise above the loss and focus. But Baru: sharp, witty Baru, a favourite of the men, the clown and joker, the invisible stealther, the truest of true. Gaunt found he could not look at the corpse, at the torn mess that had once been a man he called friend and whom he trusted beyond simple trust.

  Around him, and he was oblivious to it, the other Guard soldiers blasted into the ranks of the enemy. Abruptly, as if turned off like a tap, the flow of charging cultists faltered and stopped. Larkin continued to pop away with his long-snouted carbine, and Rawne sent round after round of barb-heads into the dark. Then silence, darkness, except for the fizzle of ignited clothing and the seep of blood.

  'Fereyd's voice lifted over them, urgent and strong They're done! Advance!'

  He's too eager, thought Gaunt, too eager… and I'm the commander here. He rose from cover, seeing the other troopers scrambling up to follow Fereyd. 'Hold!' he barked.

  They all turned to face him, Fereyd blinking in confusion.

  'We do this my way or not at all,' Gaunt said sternly, crossing to Baru's remains. He knelt over them, plucking the Tanith silver icon up and over his shirt collar, dangling it on the neck chain. In low words, echoed by Dorden, Larkin and Mkoll, he pronounced the funeral rites of the Tanith, one of the first things Milo had taught him. Rawne, Bragg and Caffran lowered their heads. Domor slumped in uneasy silence.

  Gaunt stood from the corpse and tucked the chain-hooked charm away. He looked at Fereyd. The Imperial Tactician had marshalled his men in a solemn honour guard, heads steepled low, behind the Tanith.