Ghostmaker Read online

  He made it to the next rise and looked down into the deep jungle cavity where the ruin sat, solemn and mysterious on a high mound. The second volley of flares were dying away now, but he knew what he saw.

  The ruin was besieged by Chaos. I kindreds of thousands of enemy warriors, glistening and churning like beetles in the downpour, assaulted the great ruin from all sides.

  They were relentless, ignoring the storm as if all that mattered was the jagged crown of stones at the top of the mound.

  'What is that place?' Mkoll breathed aloud. 'What is it you want?'

  Still shrieking and exploding overhead, the storm didn't answer him.

  The sky spasmed above them, stricken with electrical convulsions, first platoon, with the remnants of Corbec's unit and the stragglers of Lerod's who had joined them by accident in the storm's chaos, struggled on as they beat the retreat.

  Gaunt came upon Corbec, who was clambering in the lead through the rain and the undergrowth. Trooper Melk was now on a stretcher carried in the rear of the retreat.

  'What?' Gaunt gasped to his colonel, water streaming off his lean face.

  'A river!' Corbec spat, surprised. Ahead of them, a thunderous torrent roared through the trees, foamy and deep and dangerously fast. It hadn't been there when they had come in. Gaunt stood, pummelled by the rain, and tried to make sense of the landscape in the flickering dark. He ordered Trooper Mktea forward and took one of his tube-charges. Corbec watched in disbelief as Gaunt taped it to the base of a massive ginkgo trunk and primed the fuse.

  'Back!' Gaunt shouted.

  the explosion cut the tree above the root and dropped its sixty metre mass across the boiling tide: a bridge of sorts.

  One by one, the men crawled across. Corbec led them to prove it could be done, cursing as each handhold slipped and tore away from the sodden bark. Trooper Vowl lost his grip and dropped from the horizontal log. The flash-flood carried him away like a cork. A screaming cork.

  On the far side, Corbec saw to the defence of the position, ordering each drenched man fresh from the crossing into place, lasgun aimed, creating a wide dispersal of ready soldiers in a fan to protect those still crossing the timber bridge.

  Corbec moved forward himself, into the horsetail ferns and hyacinths, their fronded leaves lashed and shaken by the drum ming rain. There was movement ahead. He reported it via his micro-bead but got nothing back. The storm was playing merry hell with the vox-links. Clammy, cold hands tightening on his lasgun, Corbec inched forward.

  A hellgun fired to his right, wide, a piercing distinctive report. He started forward and fell into the grip of three large figures which slammed into him out of the pulsing darkness. He lost his lasgun. A fist hit him in the back of the neck and he dropped, then recovered and punched out. One of his assailants went down in the mud. Another kicked at him and Corbec kicked back, breaking something crucial.

  He was wrestling with the biggest of his opponents now, blind in the rain and the mud spray. Corbec got a glimpse of gold and grey carapace armour, an Imperial Eagle stud of precious blue. Underneath his rolling foe, he punched upwards into what should have been the face twice and then rolled his stunned aggressor over so that he was straddling him.

  A flash of lightning. Corbec saw he was astride a Volpone Blueblood, a big man with a battered, bloodied face. A major. Corbec had his hands around the man's throat.

  'What the feth?' he gasped. Hellgun muzzles were suddenly pressing to his head.

  'You stinking bastard!' the major underneath him groaned venomously, trying to rise.

  Corbec raised his hands in a gesture of surrender, wary of the guns around him. The major, released, threw Corbec back off him and rose, pulling out his hellpistol and aiming at Corbec's head.

  'Don't,' said a voice, quiet yet more commanding than the thunder.

  Gaunt stepped into the clearing, his bolt pistol aimed squarely at Major Gilbear's cranium. The Blueblood guns swung around to point at him but he didn't flinch.

  'Now,' Gaunt added. His gun was unfaltering. Corbec looked up from the mud, lying on his back, conscious that the Blueblood major's gun was still pointed his way.

  'Shoot him and I can assure you, Gilbear, you will be dead before any of your men can fire.' Gaunt's voice was low and threatening. Corbec knew that tone.

  'Gaunt…' Gilbear murmured, not slackening his aim.

  More Ghosts moved in around the commissar, guns aimed.

  'Something of a stand-off,' Corbec muttered from the ground. Gilbear kicked him, his aim not leaving Corbec's head, his gaze not leaving Gaunt.

  'Lower your weapon, Major Gilbear.' Inquisitor Lilith stepped into the glade, her cowl drawn up, a staccato roll of thunder eerily punctuating her words.

  Gilbear wavered and then holstered his gun.

  'Help Colonel Corbec to his feet,' Lilith added in the perfect, effete tones of the courtly dialect.

  Gaunt's aim had not changed.

  'And you, commissar. Put up your weapon.'

  Gaunt lowered his bolt pistol.

  'Inquisitor Lilith.'

  'We meet again,' she said, turning away, a shrouded, sinister figure in the rain.

  Gilbear held his hand down to Corbec and pulled him to his feet. Their eyes locked as Gilbear brought him up. Gilbear had the advantage of a few centimetres in height, and his broad shoulders, encased in the bulky carapace segments, eclipsed Corbec's shambling form, but the Tanith colonel had the benefit of sheer mass.

  'No offence,' Gilbear hissed into Colm Corbec's face.

  'None taken, Blueblood… until next time.'

  Gaunt passed Gilbear as he approached Lilith, and the commissar and the major exchanged looks. Neither had forgotten Voltemand.

  'Inquisitor Lilith,' Gaunt began, raising his voice over the cacophony of the storm, 'is this a chance encounter or have you sniffed me out with your psyker ways?'

  She turned and looked at him, clear eyed. 'What do you think, Ibram?'

  'What am I supposed to think, inquisitor?'

  She half-smiled, rain pattering off her white skin. 'A psyker storm lights up the battle zone, aborting our assault against the foe.'

  'You're not telling me anything I hadn't already noticed.'

  'Where is your Third platoon?'

  Gaunt shrugged. 'You tell me. Voxing has become impossible in this hell.'

  She showed him the lit dial of her data-slate.

  'They're right in there, as last reported, fell me, don't you think it's significant?'

  'What?'

  'Milo… Oh, he answered my questions and wriggled out, but still, I wonder.'

  'What do you wonder, inquisitor?'

  'A boy suspected of psyker power, given rank by you, in the depth of this when it begins.'

  'This is not Brin Milo's work.'

  'Isn't it? How can you be sure?' Gaunt was silent.

  'What do you know of psykers, commissar? What do you know? Have you talked with them? Have you seen the way they blossom? A boy, a girl, barely in their teens, never having shown any spark of the craft, suddenly becoming all that we fear.'

  Gaunt stayed quiet. He didn't like where this was going.

  'I've seen it, Ibram. The sudden development of untrained powers, the sudden eruption of activity. You can't know for sure this isn't Milo's doing.'

  'It isn't. I know it isn't.'

  'We'll see. After all, that's what we are here to find out.'

  Rawne stared down from a slit window in the thick stonework, night rain and high winds lashing the outside. There were fires outside, but no longer the reassuring lines of cook fires on the founding fields. The sky had fallen. Doom had come to Tanith. If there had been any doubt, Rawne had seen warning flares rise and fall above the tree line not three minutes past.

  Rawne clutched his freshly-issued lasgun to his chest. At least he would get to use it before he died.

  'What's happening, sir?' Trooper Caffran asked. Rawne bit back the urge to yell at him. The
boy was a novice, first taste of battle. And Rawne was the only officer present.

  'Planetary assault. The enemy have fallen on us while we were still mustering.'

  Others in the squad moaned.

  'We're finished,' Larkin howled and Feygor disciplined him with a blow to his kidneys.

  'Enough of that talk!' Rawne snapped. 'They'll not take Tanith without a fight from us! And we can't be the only unit inside the Elector's palace! We have a duty to protect the life of the Elector.'

  The rest murmured and nodded. It was a desperate course, but it seemed right. They all felt it.

  Feygor checked his intercom again. 'Nothing. The lines are dead. Must be scrambling us.'

  'Keep trying. We have to locate the Elector and form a cohesive defence.'

  Brin Milo's head was spinning. It all seemed so unreal, but he cautioned himself that was just shock at the speed of events. It had been stressful enough to prepare to leave Tanith for ever. All the men had been edgy these last few days. Now… this nightmare.

  That was what it was like. A nightmare. A twisting of reality where some things seemed blurred and others bright and over-sharp.

  There was no time to settle his nerves or soothe it away Gunfire and a gout of flame rushed down the stone hallway from behind them. The enemy had gained access to the palace Rawne's squad took cover-places along the wall and returned fire.

  'For Tanith!' Rawne yelled. 'While it yet lives!'

  Eon Kull, the Old One, awoke with a start. He cried out, an animal bark of pain. He found himself lying on the polished stone floor of the Inner Place. For a moment, he did not remember who or what he was.

  Then it trickled back, like sand through the waist of an hourpiece, a grain at a time. He had lost consciousness and lain here, undiscovered, in his delirium.

  He could barely rise. His hands trembled; his limbs were as weak as a fildassai. Blood was clotting in his mouth and nose. He felt his beating organs and pumping lungs rustle and wheeze inside his ribs like dying birds in a cage.

  He had to take stock. Had he been successful?

  The spirit stones had all gone dark. Fuehain Talchior sat silent and still in her rack. The rune slivers were scattered across the floor as if someone had kicked over the arrangement. Some glowed red hot and smouldered like iron in a smelter. Others were wisps of curled ash.

  Eon Kull Warlock gasped at the sight. He clawed at the runes, gathering up the fragments and the ash, burning his fingers. In the name of Vaul the Smithy-God, what had he wrought this day? What had he done? Attempted too much, that was certain His age and his frailty had failed him, made him pass out and lose control, but surely for only a second or two. What had he unleashed? Sacred Asuryan, what had he done?

  His exhausted mind sensed Muon Nol returning to the Inner Place. The warrior should not, would not see him like this, Eon Kull found strength from somewhere and hauled himself back into his throne, clasping the purse of ash and bone-cinders to his belt. Joints cracked like bolter shots and he felt blood rise in his gorge as his head span.

  'Lord Eon Kull? Are you… well?'

  'Fatigued, no more. How goes it?'

  'Your… storm… it is a work of greatness. More fierce than I had imagined.'

  Eon Kull frowned. What did Muon Nol mean? He couldn't show his ignorance to the warrior. He would have to reach out and see for himself. But his mind was so weak and spent.

  'The Way must be closed now. The storm won't last forever.'

  Muon Nol knelt on both knees and made the formal gesture of petition. 'Lord, I beseech you once more, for the last time, let us not abandon the Way here. Let me send to Dolthe for reinforcements. With exarchs, with the great Avatar itself, we can hold out and—'

  Eon Kull bade him rise, shaking his helmeted head slowly. He was glad Muon Nol couldn't see the blood that tracked down his septum and over his dry lips. 'And I tell you, for the last time, it cannot be. Dolthe can spare no more for us. They are beset. Have you any idea of the scale of the foe here on Monthax?' Eon Kull leaned forward and touched Muon Nol's brow with his bared hand, sending a hesitant mental pulse that conveyed the unnumbered measure of the foe-host as he had sensed it. Muon Nol stiffened and shuddered. He looked away.

  'Chaos must not take us. They must be denied access to the Webway. Our Way here must be closed now, as I have wished it.'

  'I understand,' the warrior nodded.

  'Go see to the final provisions. When all is ready, come and escort me to the High Place. That is where I will meet my end.'

  Alone again, Eon Kull the Old One flexed his mind, trying to peer out beyond the Inner Place and sense the outside world. But he had no strength. Had he expended so much? What had Muon Nol meant when he remarked upon his storm?

  Shuffling, unsteady, Eon Kull crossed the Inner Place and opened the lid of a quartz box set against the wall. It was full of charred dust and some empty silk bags. A rare few still held objects and he took one out now. The wraithbone wand slipped out of its protective bag into his hand. It was warm, pulsing; one of the last he had left. He shuffled back to the throne, sank onto the seat with a sigh and clutched the wand to his chest. He prayed that there was strength enough in it to channel and focus his dissipated powers. The embers of his power lit through the wand, and the spirit stones around him and set into his armour blinked back into a semblance of life. Most of them, at least. Some remained dull and dead. Many merely flickered with a dull luminosity.

  His mind blinked, two or three times, flashing images of the outside which roared and wailed. Then it coalesced and he saw.

  He saw the storm, the magnitude of the storm. He cursed himself. He should have realised that he had been too weak to control such a conjuration. He had intended a storm, of course, as a diversion to cover his more subtle, complex illusions. But the stress had robbed him of consciousness, and he had lost control.

  He had unleashed a warp-storm, a catastrophic force that now raged entirely beyond his ability to command, far from covering the humans and allow them in close enough for the illusions to work them to his cause, he had all but blasted them away.

  His head lolled back. His final deed had been a failure. He had exhausted his entire power, burned his runes, extinguished some of his guide spirits, and all for this. Kaela Mensha Khaine! An elemental force of destruction that fell, unselective, upon all. It roared about him, like a war-hound he had spent months training, only to see it go feral.

  There were a few faint spats of light, the traces of a handful of humans who had been close enough to become wrapped in his illusions. But far from enough.

  Lord Eon Kull, Old One, warlock, wept. He had tried. And he had failed.

  Mkoll had been stumbling through the torrential rain for fifteen or more minutes before he stopped dead in his tracks, shook himself in amazement, and then hurled himself into the cover of a dripping, exposed tree-root.

  It was not possible. It was… some kind of madness.

  He look up at the stormy sky, shuddered and hugged himself. All along, he had suspected the storm was not natural in origin. Now he knew it was playing with his mind.

  This was Monthax, Monthax, he told himself, over and over. Not Tanith.

  Then why had he spent the last twenty minutes making his way home to the farmstead he shared with his wife and sons in the nal-groves above Heban?

  Shock pounded in his veins. It was like losing Eiloni all over again, though he knew she was dead of canth-fever these last ten, fifteen years. It was like losing Tanith again, losing his sons.

  He had been so convinced he was hurrying back through a summer storm from the high-pasturing cuchlain herds, so convinced he had a wife and a farm and a family and a livelihood to return to. But in fact he had been scrambling his way back towards the ruin and the massed forces of the enemy.

  How had his mind been so robbed of truth? What witchcraft was at work?

  He pulled himself to his feet and made off again,
now in the opposite direction, towards what he prayed were friendly lines.

  On Lilith's orders, a sizable force of men began pushing back into the storm-choked jungles. Her bodyguard formed around her, following a roughly equal number of Tanith Ghosts under Gaunt, the regrouped remnants of the first, Second and Seventh platoons. The wounded had been sent on to the lines.

  Gilbear had protested, both at the advance and the co-operation of the Tanith, but Lilith had made no great efforts to disguise her contempt for him when she denied his objections. If her fears were realised, this was Gaunt's business as much as hers. Besides, the Ghosts had already been in there, and had a taste of what to expect, for all the vaunted veteran skills of the Volpone's elite Tenth Brigade, she wanted a serious fighting force, with enough numbers that losses wouldn't dent. Sixty men, or thereabouts, half dedicated heavy infantry, ordered to guard her by the general, half the best stealth fighters in the Guard, led by their own charismatic commissar.

  A reasonable insurgency force, she reckoned. Still, she had had her astropath signal back for reinforcements. Thoth had been reluctant until she had pulled rank and suggested the magnitude of the threat. Now five hundred Bluebloods under Marshal Ruas and three hundred Roane Deepers under Major Alef and Commissar Jaharn were moving up in their wake, an hour or so behind them. The astropath was now dead from the effort of sending and receiving through the storm. They left his body where it lay.

  It seemed bloody-minded to push a unit back into the storm zone when all other Imperials had retreated out of it, and it seemed to compound that error by sending in fresh numbers after them. But Lilith knew that, storm or no storm, Chaos host or no Chaos host, the key to victory on Monthax lay in the heart of that zone. And the focus of her own, personal inquisition too, perhaps.

  Lerod led the spearhead, lie had volunteered, brimming with an enthusiasm that Gaunt found faintly alarming. Yael, one of Lerod's men from the Seventh, had told of I^rod's miraculous escape from the enemy gunners on the creek bank, and explained that Lerod now thought his life charmed.