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One

A Day for Heroes

‘Betwixt the wash of the river and the waft of the wind, let my sins be transfigured to virtues.’

— Catechism of Hagia, bk I, chp 3, vrs xxxii

They’d strung the king up with razor wire in a city square north of the river.

It was called the Square of Sublime Tranquillity, an eight-hectare court of sun-baked, pink basalt surrounded by the elegant, mosaic walls of the Universitariate Doctrinus. Little in the way of sublime tranquillity had happened there in the last ten days. The Pater’s Pilgrims had seen to that.

Ibram Gaunt made a sharp, bat-like shadow on the flagstones as he ran to new cover, his storm coat flying out behind him. The sun was at its highest and a stark glare scorched the hard ground. Gaunt knew the light must be burning his skin too, but he felt nothing except the cool, blustering wind that filled the wide square.

He dropped into shelter behind an overturned, burned-out Chimera troop carrier, and dumped the empty clip from his bolt pistol with a flick-click of his gloved thumb. He could hear a popping sound from far away, and raw metal dents appeared in the blackened armour of the dead Chimera’s hull. Distant shots, their sound stolen by the wind.

Far behind, across the cooking pink stones of the open square, he could see black-uniformed Imperial Guardsmen edging out to follow him.

His men. Troopers of the Tanith First and Only. Gaunt noted their dispersal and glanced back at the king. The high king indeed, as he had been. What was his name again?

Rotten, swollen, humiliated, the noble corpse swung from a gibbet made of tie-beams and rusting truck-axles and couldn’t answer. Most of his immediate court and family were dangling next to him.

More popping. A hard, sharp dent appeared in the resilient metal next to Gaunt’s head. Crumbs of paint flecked off with the impact.

Mkoll ducked into cover beside him, lasrifle braced.

‘Took your time,’ Gaunt teased.

‘Hah! I trained you too fething well, colonel-commissar, that’s all it is.’

They grinned at each other.

More troopers joined them, running the gauntlet across the open square. One jerked and fell, halfway across. His body would remain, sprawled and unmourned in the open, for at least another hour.

Larkin, Caffran, Lillo, Vamberfeld and Derin made it across. The five scurried in beside the Ghosts’ leader and Mkoll, the regiment’s scout commander.

Gaunt assayed a look out past the Chimera cover.

He ducked back as distant pops threw rounds at him.

‘Four shooters. In the north-west corner.’

Mkoll smiled and shook his head, scolding like a parent. ‘Nine at least. Haven’t you listened to anything I’ve told you, Gaunt?’

Larkin, Derin and Caffran laughed. They were all Tanith, original Ghosts, veterans.

Lillo and Vamberfeld watched the apparently disrespectful exchange with alarm. They were Vervunhivers, newcomers to the Ghosts regiment. The Tanith called them ‘fresh blood’ if they were being charitable, ‘scratchers’ if they weren’t really thinking, or ‘cannon trash’ if they were feeling cruel.

The new Vervunhive recruits wore the same matt-black fatigues and body armour as the Tanith, but their colouring and demeanour stood them apart.

As did their newly stamped, metal-stocked lasguns and the special silver axe-rake studs they wore on their collars.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Gaunt, noting their unease and smiling. ‘Mkoll regularly gets too big for his boots. I’ll reprimand him when this is done.’

More pops, more dents.

Larkin fidgeted round to get a good look, resting his fine, nalwood-finished sniper weapon in a jag of broken armour with experienced grace. He was the regiment’s best marksman.

‘Got a target?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Oh, you bet,’ assured the grizzled Larkin, working his weapon into optimum position with a lover’s softness.

‘Blow their fething faces off then, if you please.’

‘You got it.’

‘How… How can he see?’ gasped Lillo, craning up. Caffran tugged him into cover, saving him an abrupt death as las-shots hissed around them.

‘Sharpest eyes of all the Ghosts,’ smiled Caffran.

Lillo nodded back, but resented the Tanith’s cocky attitude. He was Marco Lillo, career soldier, twenty-one years in the Vervun Primary, and here was a kid, no more than twenty years old all told, telling him what to do.

Lillo shuffled round, aiming his long lasgun.

‘I want the king, high king whatever-his-name-is,’ said Gaunt softly. Distractedly, he rubbed at a ridge of an old scar across his right palm. ‘I want him down. It’s not right for him to be rotting up there.’

‘Okay,’ said Mkoll.

Lillo thought he had a shot and fired a sustained burst at the far side of the square. Lattice windows along the side of the Universitariat exploded inwards, but the hard breeze muffled the noise of the impacts.

Gaunt grabbed Lillo’s weapon and pulled him down.

‘Don’t waste ammo, Marco,’ he said.

He knows my name! He knows my name! Lillo was almost beside himself with the fact. He stared at Gaunt, basking in every moment of the brief acknowledgement. Ibram Gaunt was like a god to him. He had led Vervunhive to victory out of the surest defeat ten months past. He carried the sword to prove it.

Lillo regarded the colonel-commissar now: the tall, powerful build, the close-cropped blond hair half hidden by the commissar’s cap, the lean cut of his intense face that so matched his name. Gaunt was dressed in the black uniform of his breed, overtopped by a long, leather storm coat and the trademark Tanith camo-cape. Maybe not a god, because he’s flesh and blood, Lillo thought… but a hero, none the less.

Larkin was firing. Hard, scratchy rasps issued from his gun.

The rate of fire spitting over their ducked heads reduced.

‘What are we waiting for?’ asked Vamberfeld.

Mkoll caught his sleeve and nodded back at the buildings behind them.

Vamberfeld saw a big man… a very big man… rise from cover and fire a missile launcher.

The snaking missile, trailing smoke, struck a coronet on the west of the square.

‘Try again, Bragg!’ Derin, Mkoll and Larkin chorused with a laugh.

Another missile soared over them, and blew the far corner of the square apart. Stone debris scattered across the open plaza.

Gaunt was up and running now, as were Mkoll, Caffran and Derin. Larkin continued to fire his expert shots from cover.

Vamberfeld and Lillo leapt up after the Tanith.

Lillo saw Derin buckle and fall as las-fire cut through him.

He paused and tried to help. The Tanith trooper’s chest was a bloody mess and he was convulsing so hard it was impossible for Lillo to get a good grip on him. Mkoll appeared beside the struggling Lillo and together they dragged Derin into cover behind the makeshift gibbet as more las-fire peppered the flagstones.

Gaunt, Caffran and Vamberfeld made it to the other side of the square.

Gaunt disappeared in through the jagged hole that Bragg’s missile had made, his power sword raised and humming. It was the ceremonial weapon of Heironymo Sondar, once-lord of Vervunhive, and Gaunt now carried it as a mark of honour for his courageous defence of that hive. The keening, electric-blue blade flashed as it struck at shapes inside the hole.

Caffran ducked in after him, blasting from the hip. Few of the Ghosts were better than him in storm clearance. He was fast and ruthless.

He blocked Gaunt’s back, gun flaring.

Niceg Vamberfeld had been a commercia cleric on Verghast before the Act of Consolation. He’d trained hard, and well, but this was all new to him. He followed the pair inside, plunging into a suddenly gloomy world of shadow-shapes and blazing energy weapons.

He shot something point-blank as he came through the crumpled stone opening. Something else reared up at him, cackling, and he lanced it with his bayonet. He couldn’t see the commissar-colonel or the young Tanith trooper any more. He couldn’t see a gakking thing, in fact. He started to panic. Something else shot at him from close range and a las-round spat past his ear.

He fired again, blinded by the close shot, and heard a dead weight fall.

Something grabbed him from behind.

There was an impact and a spray of dust and blood. Vamberfeld fell over clumsily, a corpse on top of him. Face down in the hot dirt, Vamberfeld found his vision returning. He was suffused in blue light.

Power sword smoking, Ibram Gaunt dragged him up by the hand.

‘Good work, Vamberfeld. We’ve taken the breach,’ he said.

Vamberfeld was dumbstruck. And also covered in blood.

‘Stay sane,’ Gaunt told him, ‘It gets better…’

They were in a cloister, or a circumambulatory, as far as the dazed Verghastite could tell. Bright shafts of sunlight stippled down through the complex sandstone lattices, but the main window sections were screened with ornately mosaicked wood panels. The air was dry and dead, and rich with the afterscents of las-fire, fyceline and fresh blood.

Vamberfeld could see Gaunt and Caffran moving ahead, Caffran hugging the cloister walls and searching for targets as Gaunt perused the enemy dead.

The dead. The dreaded Infardi.

When they had seized Hagia, the Chaos forces had taken the name Infardi, which meant ‘pilgrims’ in the local language, and adopted a green silk uniform that mocked the shrine world’s religion. The name was meant to mock it too; by choosing a name in the local tongue, the enemy were defiling the very sanctity of the place. For six thousand years, this had been the shrine world of Saint Sabbat, one of the most beloved of Imperial saints, after whom this entire star cluster – and this Imperial crusade – were named. By taking Hagia and proclaiming themselves pilgrims, the foe were committing the ultimate desecration. What unholy rites they had conducted here in Hagia’s holy places did not bear thinking about.

Vamberfeld had learned all about Pater Sin and his Chaos filth from the regimental briefings on the troop ship. Seeing it was something else. He glanced at the corpse nearest him: a large, gnarled man swathed in green silk wraps. Where the wraps parted or were torn away, Vamberfeld could see a wealth of tattoos: images of Saint Sabbat in grotesque congress with lascivious daemons, images of hell, runes of Chaos overstamping and polluting blessed symbols.

He felt light-headed. Despite the months of training he had endured after joining the Ghosts, he was still out of shape: a desk-bound cleric playing at being soldier.

His panic deepened.

Caffran was suddenly firing again, splintering the dark with his muzzle-flashes. Vamberfeld couldn’t see Gaunt any more. He threw himself flat on his belly and propped his gun as Colonel Corbec had taught him during Fundamental and Preparatory. His shots rattled up the colonnade past Caffran, supporting the young Tanith’s salvoes.

Ahead, a flock of figures in shimmering green flickered down the cloister, firing lasguns and automatic hard-slug weapons at them. Vamberfeld could hear chanting too.

Chanting wasn’t the right word, he realised. As they approached, the figures were murmuring, muttering long and complex phrases that overlapped and intertwined. He felt the sweat on his back go cold. He fired again. These troops were Infardi, the elite of Pater Sin. Emperor save him, he was in it up to his neck!

Gaunt dropped to his knee next to him, aiming and firing his bolt pistol in a two-handed brace. The trio of Imperial guns pummelled the Infardi advance in the narrow space.

There was a flash and a dull roar, and then light streamed in ahead of them, cutting into the side of the Infardi charge. Blowing another breach in the cloister, more Ghosts poured in, slaughtering the advancing foe.

Gaunt rose. The half-seen fighting ahead was sporadic now. He keyed his micro-bead intercom.

There was a click of static that Vamberfeld felt in his own earpiece, then: ‘One, this is three. Clearing the space.’ A pause, gunfire. ‘Clearance confirmed.’

‘One, three. Good work, Rawne. Fan inward and secure the precinct of the Universitariat.’

‘Three, acknowledged.’

Gaunt looked down at Vamberfeld. ‘You can get up now,’ he said.

Dizzy, his heart pounding, Vamberfeld almost fell back out into the sunlight and wind of the square. He thought he might pass out, or worse, vomit. He stood with his back to the hot cloister stonework and breathed deeply, aware of how cold his skin was.

He tried to find something to focus his attention on. Above the stupa and gilt domes of the Universitariat thousands of flags, pennants and banners fluttered in the eternal wind of Hagia. He had been told the faithful raised them in the belief that by inscribing their sins onto the banners they would have them blown away and absolved. There were so many… so many colours, shapes, designs…

Vamberfeld looked away.

The Square of Sublime Tranquillity was now full of advancing Ghosts, a hundred or more, spilling out across the pink flagstones, checking doors and cloister entranceways. A large group had formed around the gibbet where Mkoll was cutting the corpses down.

Vamberfeld slid down the wall until he was sitting on the stone flags of the square. He began to shake.

He was still shaking when the medics found him.

Mkoll, Lillo and Larkin were lowering the king’s pitiful corpse when Gaunt approached. The colonel-commissar looked dourly at the tortured remains. Kings were two a penny on Hagia: a feudal world, controlled by city-states in the name of the hallowed God-Emperor, and every town had a king. But the king of Doctrinopolis, Hagia’s first city, was the most exalted, the closest Hagia had to a planetary lord, and to see the highest officer of the Imperium disfigured so gravely offended Gaunt’s heart.

‘Infareem Infardus,’ Gaunt muttered, remembering at last the high king’s name from his briefing slates. He took off his cap and bowed his head. ‘May the beloved Emperor rest on you.’

‘What do we do with them, sir?’ Mkoll asked, gesturing to the miserable bodies.

‘Whatever local custom decrees,’ Gaunt answered. He looked about. ‘Trooper! Over here!’

Trooper Brin Milo, the youngest Ghost, came running over at his commander’s cry. The only civilian saved from Tanith, saved by Gaunt personally, Milo had served as Gaunt’s adjutant until he had been old enough to join the ranks. All the Ghosts respected his close association with the colonel-commissar. Though an ordinary trooper, Milo was held in special regard.

Personally, Milo hated the fact that he was seen as a lucky charm.

‘Sir?’

‘I want you to find some of the locals, priests especially, and learn from them how they wish these bodies to be treated. I want it done according to their custom, Brin.’

Milo nodded and saluted. ‘I’ll see to it, sir.’

Gaunt turned away. Beyond the majestic Universitariat and the clustering roofs of the Doctrinopolis rose the Citadel, a vast white marble palace capping a high rock plateau. Pater Sin, the unholy intelligence behind the heretic army that had taken the Doctrinopolis, the commanding presence behind the entire enemy forces on this world, was up there somewhere. The Citadel was the primary objective, but getting to it was proving to be a slow, bloody effort for the Imperial forces as they claimed their way through the Doctrinopolis street by street.

Gaunt called up his vox-officer, Raglon, and ordered him to patch links with the second and third fronts. Raglon had just reached Colonel Farris, commander of the Brevian Centennials at the sharp end of the third front pushing in through the north of the city, when they heard fresh firing from the Universitariat. Rawne’s unit had engaged the enemy again.

Four kilometres east, in the narrow streets of the quarter known as Old Town, the Tanith second front was locked in hard. Old Town was a warren of maze-like streets that wound between high, teetering dwellings linking small commercial yards and larger market places. A large number of Infardi, driven out of the defences on the holy river by the initial push of the Imperial armour, had gone to ground here.

It was bitter stuff, house to house, dwelling to dwelling, street to street. But the Tanith Ghosts, masters of stealth, excelled at street fighting.

Colonel Colm Corbec, the Ghost’s second-in-command, was a massive, genial, shaggy brute beloved of his men. His good humour and rousing passion drove them forward; his fortitude and power inspired them. He held command by dint of sheer charisma, perhaps even more than Gaunt did, certainly more than Major Rawne, the regiment’s cynical, ruthlessly efficient third officer.

Right now, Corbec couldn’t use any of that charismatic leadership. Pinned by sustained las-fire behind a street corner drinking trough, he was cursing freely. The micro-bead intercom system worn by all Guardsmen was being blocked and distorted by the high buildings all around.

‘Two! This is two! Respond, any troop units!’ Corbec barked, fumbling with his rubber-sheathed earpiece. ‘Come on! Come on!’

A drizzle of las-blasts rocked the old sandstone water-tub, scattering chips of stone. Corbec ducked again.

‘Two! This is two! Come on!’

Corbec had his head buried against the base of the water-tub. He could smell damp stone. He saw, in sharp focus, tiny spiders clinging to filmy cones of web in the tub’s bas-relief carvings, inches from his eyes.

He felt the warm stone shudder against his cheek as las-rounds hit the other side.

His micro-bead gurgled something, but the broken transmission was drowned by the noise of a tin ladle and two earthenware jugs falling off the edge of the trough.

‘Say again! Say again!’

‘–chief, we–’

‘Again! This is two! Say again!’

‘–to the west, we–’

Corbec growled a colourful oath and tore out his earpiece. He sneaked a look around the edge of the tub and threw himself back.

A single las-round whipped past, exploding against the wall behind him. It would have taken his head off if he hadn’t moved.

Corbec rolled back onto his arse, his back against the tub, and checked his lasrifle. The curved magazine of the wooden-stocked weapon was two-thirds dry, so he pulled it out and snapped in a fresh one. The right-hand thigh pocket of his body armour was heavy with half-used clips. He always changed up to full-load when there was a chance. The half-spent were there at hand for dug-in resistance. He’d known more than one trooper who’d died when his cell had drained out in the middle of a firefight, when there was no time to reload.

There was a burst of firing ahead of him. Corbec spun, and noted the change in tone. The dull snap of the Infardi weapons was intermingled with the higher, piercing reports of Imperial guns.

He lifted his head above the edge of the tub. When he didn’t get it shot off, he rolled up onto his feet and ran down the narrow alleyway.

There was fighting ahead. He leapt over the body of an Infardi sprawled in a doorway. The curving street was narrow and the dwellings on either side were tall. He hurried between hard shadow and patches of sunlight.

He came up behind three Ghosts, firing from cover across a market yard. One was a big man he recognised at once, even from the back.

‘Kolea!’

Sergeant Gol Kolea was an ex-miner who’d fought through the Vervunhive war as a part of the ‘scratch company’ resistance. No one, not even the most war-weary and cynical Tanith, had anything but respect for the man and his selfless determination. The Verghastites practically worshipped him. He was a driven, quiet giant, almost the size of Corbec himself.

The colonel slid into cover beside him. ‘What’s new, sarge?’ Corbec grinned over the roar of weaponsfire.

‘Nothing,’ replied Kolea. Corbec liked the man immensely, but he had to admit the ex-miner had no sense of humour. In the months since the new recruits had joined the Ghosts, Corbec hadn’t managed to engage Kolea at all in small talk or personal chat, and he was pretty sure none of the others had managed it either. But then the battle for Vervunhive had taken his wife and children, so Corbec imagined Kolea didn’t have much to laugh or chat about any more.

Kolea pointed out over the crates of rotting produce they were using as cover.

‘We’re tight in here. They hold the buildings over the market and west down that street.’

As if to prove this, a flurry of hard-round and laser fire spattered down across their position.

‘Feth,’ sighed Corbec. ‘That place over there is crawling with them.’

‘I think it’s the merchant guild hall. They’re up on the fourth floor in serious numbers.’

Corbec rubbed his whiskers. ‘So we can’t go over. What’s to the sides?’

‘I tried that, sir.’ It was Corporal Meryn, one of the other Ghosts crouched in the cover. ‘Sneaked off left to find a side alley.’

‘Result?’

‘Almost got my arse shot off.’

‘Thanks for trying,’ Corbec nodded.

Chuckling, Meryn turned back to his spot-shooting.

Corbec crawled along the cover, passing the third Ghost, Wheln, and ducked under a metal handcart used by the market’s produce workers. He looked the market yard up and down. On his side of it, Kolea, Meryn and Wheln had the alley end covered, and three further squads of Ghosts had taken firing positions in the lower storeys of the commercial premises to either side. Through a blown-out window, he could see Sergeant Bray and several others.

Opposing them, a salient of Infardi troops was dug into the whole streetblock. Corbec studied the area well, and took in other details besides. He had always held that brains won wars faster than bombs. Then again, he also believed that when it really came down to it, fighting your balls off never hurt.

You’re a complex man, Sergeant Varl had once told him. He’d been taking the piss of course, and they’d both been off their heads on sacra. The memory made Colm Corbec smile.

Head down, Corbec sprinted to the neighbouring building, a potter’s shop. Shattered porcelain and china fragments littered the ground inside and out. He paused near a shell hole in the side wall and called.

‘Hey, inside! It’s Corbec! I’m coming in so don’t hose me with las!’

He swung inside.

In the old shop, troopers Rilke, Yael and Leyr were dug in, firing through the lowered window shutters. The shutters were holed in what seemed to Corbec to be a million places and just as many individual beams of light shafted in through them, catching the haze of smoke that lifted through the dark shop’s air.

‘Having fun, boys?’ Corbec asked. They muttered various comments about the wanton proclivities of his mother and several other of his female relatives.

‘Good to hear you’re keeping your spirits up,’ he replied. He began stamping on the pottery-covered floor.

‘What the sacred feth are you doing, chief?’ asked Yael. He was a youngster, no more than twenty-two, with a youngster’s insubordinate cheek. Corbec liked that spirit a lot.

‘Using my head, sonny,’ smiled Corbec, pointing to his size eighteen field boot as he stomped it again.

Corbec raked away some china spoil and dragged up a floor-hatch by the metal yoke.

‘Cellar,’ he announced. The trio groaned.

He let the hatch slam down and crawled up to the window with them.

‘Think about it, my brave Tanith studs. Take a look out there.’

They did, peering though the shredded shutter-slats.

‘The market’s raised… a raised podium. See there by that pile of drums? Gotta be a hatch. My money’s on a warren of produce cellars under this whole market… and probably under that guild hall too.’

‘My money’s on you getting us all dead by lunchtime,’ growled Leyr, a hard-edged, thirty-five year old veteran of the Tanith Magna militia.

‘Have I got you dead yet?’ asked Corbec.

‘That’s not the point–’

‘Then shut up and listen. We’ll be here til doomsday unless we break this deadlock. So let’s fight smart. Use the fact this cess-pit of a city is a trazillion years old and full of basements, crypts and catacombs.’

He keyed his micro-bead intercom, adjusting the thin wire arm of the mike so it was close to his lips.

‘This is two. You hearing me, six?’

‘Six, two. Yes I am.’

‘Bray, keep your men where they are and give the front of that hall a good seeing to in about… oh, ten minutes. Can you do that?’

‘Six, got it. Firestorm in ten.’

‘Good on you. Two, nine?’

‘Nine, two.’ Corbec heard Kolea’s tight voice over the channel.

‘Sarge, I’m in the pottery vendor’s down from you. Leave Meryn and Wheln put and get over here.’

‘Got you.’

Kolea scrambled in through the shell hole a few seconds later. He found Corbec shining his lamp pack into the open cellar hatch.

‘You know about tunnels, right?’

‘Mines. I was a miner.’

‘Same difference, it’s all underground. Prep, we’re going down.’ He turned to Leyr, Rilke and Yael. ‘Who’s got a yen for adventure and a satchel full of tube-charges?’

Again, they groaned.

‘You’re safe, Rilke. I want you popping at those windows.’ Rilke was a superb sniper, second only to the regimental marksmanship champion Larkin. He had a long-pattern needle-las. ‘Give up any tubes you got to these plucky volunteers.’

Leyr and Yael moved back to the hatch. Each of them, like Corbec and Kolea, wore twenty kilos of matt-black composite body armour over their fatigues and under their camo-cloaks. Most of that weight came from the modular webbing pouches filled with ammo, lamp packs, sheathed blades, waterproof micro-bead sets, coiled climbing rope, rolls of surgical tape, ferro-plastic binders, Founding-issue Imperial texts, door-spikes, flashbombs, and all the rest of the standard issue Imperial Guard kit.

‘Gonna be tight,’ mused Leyr sourly, looking down into the hole where Kolea’s flashlight played.

Kolea nodded and pulled off his camo-cloak. ‘Ditch anything that will get hung up.’ Leyr and Yael did so, as did Corbec himself. The cloaks went onto the floor, as did other loose items. All four copies of the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer hit the cloaks at the same time.

The men looked at Corbec, almost ashamed.

‘Ahh, it’s all up here,’ Corbec said, tapping his temple.

Sergeant Kolea tamped a spike into the tiled floor and ran the end of his climbing rope through the eye. He dropped the snake of cable down into the hole.

‘Who’s first?’ he asked.

Corbec would have preferred to let Kolea lead, but this was his call and he wanted them to know he trusted it.

He grabbed the rope, slung his lasrifle over his shoulder, and clambered down into the hole.

Kolea followed, then Leyr. Yael brought up the rear.

The cellar shaft was eight metres deep. Almost immediately, Corbec was struggling and sweating. Even though he had ditched a lot of kit, the sheer bulk of his webbing and body armour was confining him and screwing with his centre of balance.

He landed on a floor in the darkness and switched on his lamp pack. The air was thick and foetid. He was in a cellar space four metres wide, dripping with ancient fluid and rot. His boots sloshed through semi-solid waste and murk.

‘Oh feth!’ spat Leyr as he made the ground.

There was an arched conduit snaking off towards the underyard. It was less than a metre high and only half a metre wide. With kit and weapons, even stripped down, they had to hunch and edge in sideways, single file. The liquid ooze on the floor sucked up around their boot-tops.

Corbec attached his lamp pack to the bayonet fitting under his lasgun’s muzzle. He swung the weapon back and forth as best he could side on, bent over, and led them on into the soupy darkness.

‘Probably wasn’t the best idea in the galaxy to send either of us on this,’ said Kolea behind him.

It was the closest Corbec had ever heard to a joke from the scratch sergeant. Apart from ‘Try Again’ Bragg, he and Kolea were the biggest men in the Tanith First. Neither Leyr and Yael topped out over two metres.

Corbec smiled. ‘How did you manage? In the mines?’

Kolea slid round, passing Corbec in an awkward hunch. ‘We crawled when the seams dipped. But there are other ways. Watch me.’

Corbec shone his light onto Kolea so that he and the two Tanith behind him could see. Kolea leaned back against the conduit wall until he was almost in a sitting position. Then he skirted along through the muck, bracing his back against the wall so that the top half of his body could remain upright. His feet ran against the foot of the far wall to prevent him slipping out.

‘Very saucy,’ said Corbec in admiration.

He followed suit, and so did Leyr and Yael. The quartet slid their way down the conduit. Overhead, through the thick stone, they heard heavy fire. The ten minutes were up. Bray had begun his promised firestorm.

They were behind, too slow.

The conduit fanned and then opened out into a wide box. The stinking ooze was knee deep. Their flashlights found bas-relief markers of old saints on the walls.

At least the roof was higher here.

Straightening up, they headed forward through the tarry fluid. They were directly under the centre of the market yard now, by Corbec’s estimation.

Another conduit led away towards what he presumed was the guild hall. Now Corbec led the way, double-time, back-crawling down the low conduit as Kolea had taught them.

They came on a shaft leading up.

By flashlight, they could see the sides were smooth brick, but the shaft was narrow, no more than a metre square.

By force of thighs alone, it was possible to edge up the shaft with back braced against one wall and feet against the other. Corbec led again.

Grunting and sweating, he climbed the shaft until his face was a few centimetres from a wooden hatch.

He looked down at Kolea, Yael and Leyr spidered into the flue below him.

‘Here goes,’ he said.

He pushed the hatch up. It didn’t budge initially, then it slumped open. Light shone down. Corbec waited for gunfire but none came. He shuffled up the last of the shaft, shoulderblade by shoulderblade, and pushed out into the open.

He was in the guild hall basement. It was boarded up and empty, and there were several corpses on the floor, drizzled with flies.

Corbec pulled himself out of the shaft into the room. The others followed.

Rising, their legs wet and stinking from the passage, they moved out, lasguns ready, lamp packs extinguished.

The percussive throb of las-fire rolled from the floor above.

Yael checked the corpses. ‘Infardi scum,’ he told the colonel. ‘Left to die.’

‘Let’s help their pals join them,’ Corbec smiled.

The four took the brick stairs in the basement corner as a pack, guns ready. A battered wooden door stood between them and the first floor.

His foot braced against the door, Corbec looked back at the three Ghosts clustered behind him.

‘What do you say? A day for heroes?’

All three nodded. He kicked in the door.

Two

Servants of the Slain

‘Let the sky welcome you, for therein dwells
the Emperor and his saints.’

— Saint Sabbat, proverbs

Brin Milo, his lasgun slung muzzle-down over his shoulder, made his way against the press of traffic approaching the square from the south. Detachments of Tanith and light mechanised support from the Eighth Pardus Armoured were pouring into the Universitariat district from the fighting zones to the south-west, moving in to support the commissar’s push. Milo ducked into doorways as troop carriers and Hydra batteries grumbled past, and slid sideways to pass platoons marching four abreast.

Friends and comrades called greetings to him as they moved by, a few breaking step to quiz him on the front ahead. Most of them were caked in pink dust and sweating, but morale was generally high. Fighting had been intense during the last fortnight, but the Imperial forces had made great gains.

‘Hey, Brinny-boy! What lies in store?’ Sergeant Varl called, the squad of men with him slowing into a huddle that blocked the street.

‘Light stuff, the commissar’s opened it up. The Universitariat is thick with them though, I think. Rawne’s gone in.’

Varl nodded, but questions from some of his men were drowned by an air horn.

‘Come on, move aside!’ yelled a Pardus officer, rising up in the open cab of his Salamander command vehicle. A line of flamer tanks and tubby siege gun platforms was bottling up behind him. More horns sounded and the coughing motors raised pink dust in the air of the narrow street.

‘Come on!’

‘All right, feth it!’ Varl responded, waving his men back against the street wall. The Pardus machines rumbled past.

‘I’ll try and leave some glory for you, Varl!’ the armour officer called out, standing in the rear of his bucking machine and throwing a mock salute as he went by.

‘We’ll be along to rescue you in a minute, Horkan!’ Varl returned, raising a single digit in response to the salute that all the Tanith in his squad immediately mimicked.

Brin Milo smiled. The Pardus were a good lot, and such horseplay typified the good humour with which they and the Tanith cooperated in this advance.

Behind the light armour came Trojans and other tractor units hauling heavy munitions and stowed field artillery, then Tanith pushing handcarts liberated from the weavers’ barns. The carts were laden with ammunition boxes and tanks of promethium for the flamers. Varl’s men were called over to help lift a cart out of a drain gutter and Milo moved on.

Hurrying against the flow of men and munitions, the young trooper reached the arch of the great red-stone bridge over the river. Shell holes decorated its ancient surface, and sappers from the Pardus regiment were hanging over the sides on ropes, shoring up its structure and sweeping for explosives. In this part of the Doctrinopolis, the river surged through a deep, man-made channel, its sides formed by the basalt river walls and the sides of the buildings. The smooth water was a deep green, deeper than the shade of the Infardi robes. A sacred river, Milo had been told.

Milo took directions from the Tanith corporal directing traffic at the junction, and left the main thoroughfare by a flight of steps that brought him down onto a riverwall path leading under the bridge itself. The water lapped at the stone three metres below and reflected ripples of white off the dark underside of the bridge.

He made his way to an archway overlooking the water further along the wall. It was the river entrance to one of the lesser shrines and tired, hungry-looking locals loitered around the entrance.

The shrine had been turned into a makeshift hospital early in the assault by local physicians and priests, and now, on Gaunt’s orders, Imperial medical personnel had moved in to take charge.

Troops and civilians were being treated side by side.

‘Lesp? Where’s the doc?’ Milo asked, striding into the lamp-lit gloom and finding the lean Tanith orderly at work sewing up a Pardus trooper’s scalp laceration.

‘In the back there,’ Lesp replied, blotting the sutured wound with a swab of alcohol-soaked cloth. Stretcher parties were arriving all the time, mostly with civilian injured, and the long, arched shrine was filling up. Lesp looked harried.

‘Doctor? Doctor?’ Milo called. He saw Hagian priests and volunteers in cream robes working alongside the Imperial medics, and attending to the particular customs and rites of their own people. Army chaplains from the Ecclesiarchy were ministering to the needs of the off-world Imperials.

‘Who’s calling for a doctor?’ asked a figure nearby. She rose, straightening her faded red smock.

‘Me,’ said Milo. ‘I was looking for Dorden.’

‘He’s in the field. Old Town,’ said Surgeon Ana Curth. ‘I’m in charge here.’ Curth was a Verghastite who had joined the Tanith along with the Vervunhive soldiery at the Act of Consolation. She’d taken to combat trauma well during the hive-siege and Chief Medic Dorden had been amazed and grateful at her decision to join.

‘Will I do?’ she asked.

‘The commissar sent me,’ answered Milo with a nod. ‘They’ve found…’ he dropped his voice and steered her into a private corner. ‘They’ve found the local lord. A king, I think. He’s dead. Gaunt wants his body dealt with according to local custom. Dutiful respect, that sort of thing.’

‘Not really my field,’ Curth said.

‘No, but I figured you or the doc might have got to know some of the locals. Priests, maybe.’

She brushed her fringe out of her eyes and led him through the infirmary crowds to where a Hagian girl in the coarse cream robes of a scholar was re-dressing a throat wound.

‘Sanian?’ The girl looked up. She had the long-boned, strong-featured look of the local population, with dark eyes and well-defined eyebrows. Her head was shaved except for a bound pony-tail of glossy black hair hanging from the back of her skull.

‘Surgeon Curth?’ Her voice was thin but musical.

She’s no older than me, Milo thought, but with the severe shaved head it was difficult to guess an age.

‘Trooper Milo here has been sent by our commanding officer to find someone with a good knowledge of Hagian lore.’

‘I’ll help if I can.’

‘Tell her what you need, Milo,’ said Curth.

Milo and the Hagian girl went out of the hospital into the hard sunlight of the river wall. She put her hands together and made brief nods of respect to the river and the sky before turning to him.

‘You’re a doctor?’ Milo asked.

‘No.’

‘Part of the priesthood, then?’

‘No. I am a student, from the Universitariat.’ She gestured to her pony-tail. ‘The braids mark our station in life. We are called esholi.’

‘What subject do you study?’

‘All subjects, of course. Medicine, music, astrography, the sacred texts… is that not the way on your world?’

Milo shook his head. ‘I have no world now. But when I did, students at advanced levels specialised in their study.’

‘How… strange.’

‘And when you’ve finished your study, what will you become?’

She looked at him quizzically.

‘Become? I have become what I will become. Esholi. Study lasts a lifetime.’

‘Oh.’ He paused. A line of Trojans rattled by over the bridge above them. ‘Look, I have some bad news. Your king is dead.’

The Hagian put her hands to her mouth and bowed her head.

‘I’m sorry,’ Milo said, feeling awkward. ‘My commander wants to know what should be properly done to… to care for his remains.’

‘We must find the ayatani.’

‘The who?’

‘The priests.’

A wailing noise made Rawne swing round, but it was only the wind.

He felt the movement of air against his face, gusting down the stone hallways and vaults of the Universitariat. Many windows had been blown out, and shell holes put through the walls, and now the windy air of Hagia was getting in.

He stood for a thoughtful moment, stealth cape swept back over one shoulder, lasgun slouched barrel-down across his belly staring into…

Well, he didn’t rightly know what. A large room, scorched and burned out, the twisted, blackened limbs of fused sconces adhering to the sooty walls like stomped spiders. Millions of glass fragments littered the burned floor. There were seared tufts of carpeting around the room edges.

What great purpose this room had once had was no longer important. It was empty. It was clear. That was all that mattered.

Rawne turned and went back out into the hallway. The wind, leaking through shell holes and exposed rafters, whined after him.

His clearance squad moved up. Feygor, Bragg, Mkillian, Waed, Caffran… and the women.

Major Rawne still hadn’t sorted his head out about the women. There were a fair number of them, Verghastites who had elected to join the Ghosts during the Act of Consolation. They could fight – feth! – he knew that much. They’d all been baptised in combat during the war for Vervunhive, common workers and habbers forced into fighting roles.

But still they were women. Rawne had tried to speak to Gaunt about it, but the colonel-commissar had droned on about various illustrious mixed or all female units in Guard history blah blah blah and Rawne had pretty much blanked him out.

He wasn’t interested in history. He was interested in the future. And in being there to enjoy it.

Women in the regiment put a strain on them all. Cracks were already showing. There had been a few minor brawls on the troop ships: Verghastite men protecting the ‘honour’ of their women, men falling out over women, women fighting off men…

It was a powder keg and soon there’d be more than a few split lips and broken teeth to show for it.

Bottom line was, Rawne had never really trusted women much. And he’d certainly never trusted men who put too much trust in women.

Caffran, for example. One of the youngest Ghosts: compact, strong, a fine soldier. On Verghast, he’d gotten involved with a local girl and they’d been inseparable ever since. A couple, would you believe? And Rawne knew for a fact the girl had a pair of young children who were cared for amongst the other non-combatants and camp-followers in the regimental escort ships.

Her name was Tona Criid. She was eighteen, lean and hard, with spiky bleached hair and gang tattoos that spoke of a rough life even before the Vervunhive war. Rawne watched her as she walked with Caffran down the shattered Universitariat hallway, covering each other, checking doors and alcoves. She moved with easy grace. She knew what she was doing. The black Ghost uniform fitted her well. She was… good-looking.

Rawne turned away and scratched behind his ear. These women were going to be the death of someone.

The clearance squad prowled forward, picking their way down empty halls over the glass of broken windows and the kindling of shattered furniture. Rawne found himself moving level with the other female in his squad. Her name was Banda, an ex-loom worker from Vervunhive who’d fought in the famous guerilla company run by Gol Kolea. She was lively, playful, impetuous with close-cut curly brown hair and a figure that was a tad more rounded and feminine than that of the lithe ganger Criid.

Rawne signalled her on with a silent gesture and she did so, with a nod and a wink.

A wink!

You didn’t wink at your commanding officer!

Rawne was about to call a halt and shout into her face when Waed signalled.

Everyone fell into shadows and cover, pressing against the hallway walls. They were reaching a turn. A wooden, red-painted door lay ahead, closed, and then further down the corridor, around the turn, there was an archway. The carpet in the halls had been rucked up and was stained and stiff with dried blood.

‘Waed?’

‘Movement. In the archway,’ Waed whispered back.

‘Feygor?’

Rawne’s adjutant, the ruthless Feygor, nodded to confirm.

Rawne gestured some orders in quick succession. Feygor and Waed moved up, hunched low, hugging the right-hand wall. Bragg took the corner as cover and got his big autocannon braced. Banda and Mkillian went up the left side of the corridor until they reached the cover of a hardwood ottoman pushed against the wall.

Caffran and Criid slung their lasrifles over their shoulders, drew their blunt-nosed laspistols and went to the red door. If, as seemed likely, it opened into the same room as the archway, this could open their field of fire. And double checking it covered their arses.

Total silence. They were all Ghosts, moving with a Ghost’s practiced stealth.

Caffran grasped the door handle, turned it, but didn’t open it. He held it fast as Criid leaned down and put her ear to the red-painted wood. Rawne saw how she brushed her bleached hair out of the way to do it. He–

He was going to have to fething concentrate, he realised.

Criid looked round and made the open-handed sign for ‘no sound’.

Rawne nodded, made sure all the squad could see him, raised three fingers and then dropped them one by one.

As the third finger dropped, Criid and Caffran went through the door low and fast. They found themselves in a large stone chamber that had once been a scriptorium before rockets had blown out the vast lancet windows opposite the door and shattered the wooden desks and writing tables. Caffran and Criid dropped for cover amid the twisted wooden wreckage. Las-shots spat their way from an archway at the far end of the room.

At the sound of gunfire from the room, Rawne’s team opened up at the corridor arch. Fire was hastily returned.

‘Caffran! What have you got?’ Rawne snarled into his vox-link.

‘The room doesn’t go right along to your archway, but there’s access through.’

Caffran and Criid crawled forward, popping the occasional shot off at the doorway over the broken lecterns and cracked stools. The floor was soaked with spilled ink and their palms were quickly stained black. Criid saw how the explosions had blown sprays of ink up the walls of the scriptorium: spattered patterns like reversed-out starmaps.

Caffran pulled open his hip-case and yanked out a tube-charge.

‘Brace for detonation!’ he yelled, ripping the foil strip off the chemical igniter and tossing the metal tube away through the doorway.

There was a bang that shook the floor and clouds of vapour and debris burst out of the hallway arch. Feygor tried to move forward to get a look in.

Criid and Caffran had risen and approached the inner doorway. Smoke wreathed the air and there was a pungent smell of fyceline. Just short of the doorway, Criid unslung her lasrifle and took something out of her pocket. It was the pin-mount of a brooch or a medal, the surface polished into a mirror. She hooked it over the muzzle of her weapon and pushed it into the room ahead of her. A turn of the wrist and the mirror slowly revealed the other side of the doorway.

‘Clear,’ she said.

They moved in. It was an annex to the scriptorium. Metal presses lined one wall. Three Infardi, killed by Caffran’s charge, lay near the doorway. They were spattered and drenched by multi-coloured inks and tinctures from bottles exploded by the blast.

Rawne came in through the hallway arch.

‘What’s through there?’ he asked, pointing to a small curtained door at the back of the annex.

‘Haven’t checked,’ Caffran replied.

Rawne went to the door and pushed the curtain aside. A burst of las-fire pelted at him, punching through the cloth.

‘Feth!’ he cried, taking cover behind a mixing table. He fired through the doorway with his lasrifle and saw an Infardi crash sideways into a rack of vellum, spilling the whole lot over.

Rawne and Caffran went through the door. It was a parchment store, with no other exits. The Infardi, his green robes yanked up over his face, was dead.

But there was still shooting.

Rawne turned. It was outside in the corridor.

‘We’ve picked up some–’ MKillian’s voice spat over the link.

‘Feth!’ That was Feygor.

Rawne, Criid and Caffran hurried to the corridor archway, but the force of crossfire outside prevented them from sticking their heads out. Las-shots smacked into the archway’s jamb and ricocheted back into the annex room. One put a burn across Rawne’s chin.

‘Feth!’ He snapped back in, smarting, and keyed his micro-bead. ‘Feygor! How many!’

‘Twenty, maybe twenty-five! Dug in down the hall. Gods, but they’re putting up a wall of fire!’

‘Get the cannon onto it!’

‘Bragg’s trying! The belt-feed’s jammed! Oh crap–!’

‘What? What? Say again?’

Nothing but ferocious las-fire for a second, then Feygor’s voice crackled over the link again.

‘Bragg’s down. Took a hit. Feth, we’re pinned!’

Rawne looked around, exasperated. Criid and Caffran were over by the blasted window arches in the main scriptorium. Criid was peering out.

‘What about this?’ Caffran called to the major.

Rawne hurried over. Criid was already up and out on the ledge, shuffling along the stone sill.

‘You’ve got to be kidding…’ Rawne began.

Caffran wasn’t. He was up on the sill too, following Criid. He reached a hand down for Rawne.

The major put his rifle strap over his shoulder and took the hand. Caffran pulled him up onto the stone ledge.

Rawne swore silently. The air was cold. They were high up. The stone flanks of the Universitariat dropped away ninety metres below the scriptorium window, straight down into the green, opaque channel of the river. Above the scriptorium’s sloping, tiled roof, domes and spires rose. Rawne swayed for a second.

Criid and Caffran were edging down the ledge, stepping gingerly over leaded rainwater spouts and gutter trays. Rawne followed them. Bas-relief wall carvings, some in the form of saints or gargoyles, all weathered by age, stuck out, in some places wider than the ledge. Rawne found they had to go sidelong with their backs to the drop so they could hunch and belly around such obstructions.

He felt his foot go into nothingness and put his arms round a saint’s stone neck, his heart thundering, his eyes closed.

When he looked again, he could see Caffran about ten metres away, but there was no sign of Criid. Feth! Had she fallen off? No. Her bleached-blonde head appeared out of a window further down, urging them on. She was back inside.

Caffran pulled Rawne in through the broken window. He ripped his kneecaps on the twisted leading and toothy stubs of glass in the frame and it took him a minute to get his breathing rate down again. He looked around.

A seriously big artillery shell had taken this chamber out. It had come through the windows, blown out the floor and the floor beneath. The room had a ring of broken floorboards jutting out around the walls and a void in the centre. They worked their way round on the remains of the floor to the hallway door. The firing was now a way behind them.

Caffran led the way out into the corridor. The shell blast had blown the room’s wooden door, complete with frame, out across the hall and left it propped upright against the far wall. The three Ghosts scattered back down the hall at a run, coming in behind the enemy position that was keeping the rest of their team pinned.

The Infardi, twenty-two of them, were dug in behind a series of barricades made from broken furniture. They were blazing away, oblivious to anything behind them.

Rawne and Caffran drew their silver Tanith knives. Criid pulled out her chain-dagger, a gang-marked legacy of her low-life Vervunhive days. They went into the cultists from behind and eight were finished before the rest became aware of the counter-attack.

Then it came to hand to hand, a frantic defence. But Rawne and Criid had begun to open fire with their lasguns and Caffran had pulled out his pistol.

An Infardi with a bayonet charged Rawne, screaming, and Rawne blew his legs and belly out, but the momentum of the charge threw the body into the major and knocked him down.

He tried to scramble out from under the slippery, twitching body. Another Infardi appeared above him, swinging down with one of those wicked, twist-bladed local axes.

A headshot toppled him.

Rawne got up. The Infardi were dead and his squad was moving up.

‘Feygor?’

‘Nice move, boss,’ Feygor replied.

Rawne said nothing. He could see no point in mentioning that the sneak attack had been Caffran’s and Criid’s idea.

‘What’s the story?’ he asked.

‘Waed’s taken a scratch. He’s okay. But Bragg’s got a shoulder wound. We’ll need to vox up a team to stretcher him out.’

Rawne nodded. ‘Good headshot,’ he added. ‘That bastard had the drop on me there.’

‘Wasn’t me,’ said Feygor, jerking a dirty thumb at Banda. The ex-loom girl grinned, patted her lasgun.

And winked.

‘Well… Good shooting,’ Rawne mumbled.

In a prayer yard east of the Universitariat precinct, Captain Ban Daur was controlling traffic when he heard the colonel-commissar calling his name.

Colonel Corbec’s second front push had woken up the Old Town, and civilians who had been hiding there in cellars and basements for the best part of three weeks were now fleeing the quarter en masse.

In the long narrow prayer yard, the tide of filthy, frightened bodies moved west in slow, choked patterns.

‘Daur?’

Ban Daur turned and saluted Gaunt.

‘There are thousands of them. It’s jamming up the east-west routes. I’ve been trying to redirect them into the basilica at the end of that street. We’ve got medical teams and aid workers from the city authorities and the Administratum down there.’

‘Good.’

‘There’s the problem.’ Daur pointed to a row of stationary Hydra battery tractors from the Pardus unit drawn up against the far side of the yard. ‘With all these people, they can’t get through.’

Gaunt nodded. He sent Mkoll and a group of Tanith away into a nearby chapel and they returned with pews which they set up as saw-horses to channel the refugees away.

‘Daur?’

‘Sir!’

‘Get down to this basilica. See if you can’t open up some of the buildings around it.’

‘I was taking a squad into the Old Town, sir. Colonel Corbec has asked for more infantry team support in the commercia.’

Gaunt smiled. Daur meant market district, but he used a term from Vervunhive. ‘I’m sure he has, but the war will keep. You’re good with people, Ban. Get this working for me and then you can go get shot at.’

Daur nodded. He respected Gaunt beyond measure, but he wasn’t happy about this order. It seemed all too characteristic of the jobs he’d found himself doing since joining the Ghosts.

In truth, Daur felt empty and unfulfilled. The fight for Vervunhive had left him hollow and grim, and he’d joined the Tanith mainly because he couldn’t bear to stay in the shell of the hive he had called home. As a captain, he was the senior ranking Vervun Primary officer to join the Tanith, and as a result he’d been given a place in the regimental chain of command on a par with Major Rawne, as officer in charge of the Verghast contingent, answering only to Corbec and Gaunt.

He didn’t like it. Such a role should have gone to a war hero like Kolea or Agun Soric, to one of the men who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps to earn the respect of the men in the scratch companies. The majority of the Verghastite men and women who had joined the Ghosts were workers turned warriors, not ex-military. They just didn’t have the sort of respect for a Vervun Primary captain they had for a hero like Gol Kolea.

But that wasn’t the way it was done in the guard, apparently. So Daur was caught in the middle, with a command role he didn’t like, giving orders to men who he knew should be his commanders, trying to keep the rivalry between Tanith and Verghastite under control, trying to win respect.

He wanted to fight. He wanted to badge himself with the sort of glory that would make the troops look up to him.

Instead, he found most of his days spent on squad details, deployment orders, refugee supervision. He could do that kind of thing well, and Gaunt knew it. So he was always the one Gaunt asked for when such tasks came up. It was as if Gaunt didn’t think about Ban Daur as a soldier. Just as a facilitator. An administrator. A people person.

Daur snapped out of his reverie as shots rang out and the refugees around him scattered and screamed. Some of Mkoll’s makeshift saw-horses pitched over in the press. Daur looked around for a sniper, a gunman in the crowd…

One of the gun crew officers on the stationary Pardus vehicles was taking pot-shots with his pistol at the clusters of votive kites and flags that fluttered over the prayer yard. The flags and banners were secured on long tether-lines to brass rings along the temple wall. The officer was pinking at them for the entertainment of his crew.

‘What the gak are you doing?’ Daur shouted as he approached the Hydra mount. The men in their baggy tan fatigues and slouch caps looked down at him in puzzlement.

‘You!’ Daur yelled at the officer with the pistol in his hand. ‘You trying to cause a panic?’

The man shrugged. ‘Just passing the time. Colonel Farris ordered us up to help assault the Citadel Hill, but we’re not getting anywhere, are we?’

‘Get down here,’ Daur ordered.

With a glance to his men, the officer holstered his service pistol and climbed down from the tractor. He was taller than Daur, with pale, freckled skin and blond hair. Even his eyelashes were blond.

‘Name?’

‘Sergeant Denil Greer, Pardus Eighth Mobile Flak Company.’

‘You got a brain, Greer, or do you get through life with only that sneer?’

‘Sir.’

Gaunt approached and Greer lost some of his bluster. His sneer subsided.

‘Everything in order, Captain Daur?’

‘High spirits, commissar. Everything’s fine.’

Gaunt looked at Greer. ‘Listen to the captain and be respectful. Better he reprimands you than I do.’

‘Sir.’

Gaunt moved away. Daur looked back at Greer. ‘Get your crews down and help us get these people off the road in an orderly fashion. You’ll move all the quicker that way.’

Greer saluted halfheartedly and called his men down off the parked vehicles. Mkoll and Daur quickly got them to work moving civilians off the thoroughfare.

Daur moved through the filthy crowd. No one made eye contact. He’d seen that shocked, war-wrecked, fatigued look before. He’d worn it himself at Vervunhive.

An old woman, stick-thin and frail, stumbled in the crowd and went over, spilling open a shawl full of possessions. No one stopped to help. The refugees plodded on around her, stepping over her reaching hands as she tried to recover her possessions.

Daur helped her up. She was as light as a bag of twigs. Her hair was shockingly white and pinned back against her skull.

‘There,’ he said. He stooped and picked up her few belongings: prayer candles, a small icon, some beads and an old picture of a young man.

He found she was looking at him with eyes filmed by age. None of them had found his eyes out like that.

‘Thank you,’ she said, her voice richly flavoured with antique Low Gothic. ‘But I don’t matter. We don’t matter. Only the saint.’

‘What?’

‘You’ll protect her, won’t you? I think you will.’

‘Come on now, mother, let’s move you along.’

She pressed something into his hand. Daur looked down. It was a small figurine, made of silver, worn almost featureless.

‘I can’t take this, it’s–’

‘Protect her. The Emperor would will it of you.’

She wouldn’t take the trinket back, damn her! He almost dropped it. When he looked round again, she had disappeared into the river of moving bodies.

Daur looked about, confused, searching the moving crowd. He thrust the trinket in his pocket. Nearby, waving refugees past him, Daur saw Mkoll. He started to ask the scout leader if he’d seen the old woman.

A woman fell against him. A man just ahead dropped to his knees suddenly. Nearby in the crowd, someone burst in a puff of cooked blood.

Daur heard the shooting.

Not even twenty metres away, through the panicking crowd, he saw an Infardi gunman, shooting indiscriminately with a lasrifle. The killer had dragged back the dirty rags that had been concealing his green silk robes. He’d snuck in amid the refugee streams like a wolf coming through in the thick of a herd.

Daur drew his laspistol, but he was surrounded by jostling, screaming people. He heard the rifle firing again.

Daur fell over a body on the flagstones. He stumbled, looking through the running legs around him, catching sight of green silk.

The cultist’s gunfire brought down more of the shrieking people. It made a gap.

Clutching his laspistol two-handed, Daur fired and put three shots through the gunman’s torso; at almost exactly the same moment, Mkoll put a las-round through his skull from another angle.

The killer twisted and fell down onto the pink stones. Gleaming blood leaked out of him and threaded between the edges of the flags. There were bodies all around him.

‘Sacred soul!’ said Mkoll, moving through. Other Tanith troopers ran past, pushing through the crowd and heading for the north-east end of the yard. The vox-link buzzed and crackled.

More shooting, fierce exchanges, from the direction of the Old Town Road.

Daur and Mkoll pushed against the almost stampeding flow of refugees. At the north-east end of the prayer yard, a large sandstone pylon led through onto a long colonnade walk between temple rows. Ghosts were grouped in cover around the pylon, or were daring short runs down into the colonnade to shelter around the bases of black quartzite stelae spaced at regular intervals.

Gunfire, like a blizzard of tiny comets, churned up and down the colonnade. The long sacred walkway was littered with the bodies of native Hagians, sprawled out in twisted, undignified heaps.

More Ghosts ran up behind them, and some of the Pardus artillery men too, pistols drawn. Daur glimpsed Sergeant Greer.

‘Go! Go left!’ Mkoll yelled across at Daur, and immediately darted along from the arch towards the plinth of the nearest right-hand stelae. Four of his men gave him covering fire and a couple ran after him. Las-shots stitched across the walkway’s flags and smacked chippings off the ancient obelisk.

Daur moved left, feeling the heat of a close round across his neck. He almost fell into the shadows of the nearest obelisk plinth. Other Ghosts tumbled in with him: Lillo, Mkvan and another Tanith whose name he didn’t know. A Pardus crewman attempted to follow, but he was clipped in the knee and collapsed back into cover yelping.

Daur dared a look out, and glimpsed green movement further down the colonnade. The heaviest fire seemed to be coming from a large building on the left side of the colonnade which Daur believed was a municipal census hall.

‘Left, two hundred metres,’ Daur barked into his link.

‘I see it!’ Mkoll replied from the other side of the colonnade. Daur watched as the scout leader and his fireteam tried to advance. Withering fire drove them back into cover.

Daur ran again, reaching the next obelisk plinth on the left side. Shots were suddenly coming across him from the right and he turned to see two Infardi straddling the sloping tiles of a building, raking shots down into the shadows of the street.

Daur fired back, hastily, dragging his lasrifle off his shoulder. Lillo and Nessa reached his position around the same time and joined his fire. They didn’t hit either of the Infardi but they drove them back off the roof out of sight. Broken tiles from the section of roof they had bombarded slithered off and crashed down onto the flagstones.

Mkvan reached their position too. The crossfire was intense, but they were a good twenty metres closer to the census hall than Mkoll’s fireteam.

‘This way,’ Daur said, making sure he signed the words as he did so. Nessa was an ex-hab worker turned guerilla and like a fair number of the Verghastite volunteers, she was profoundly deaf from enemy shelling at Vervunhive. Signed orders were a scratch company basic. She nodded she understood, her fine, elfin features set in a determined frown as she slid a fresh ammunition cell into the port of her sniper-pattern lasgun.

Running stooped and low, the quartet left the main colonnade and ventured through the airy cool and shadows of a hypostyle hall. This temple, and the next which they crossed into via a small columned passage, was empty: what decoration and ornament the faithful hadn’t taken and hidden prior to the invasion had been plundered by the Infardi during their occupation. Lamp braziers were overturned, and puddles of loose ash dotted the ceramic tiles of the floor. Splintered wood from broken furniture and prayer mats was scattered around. Along one east-facing wall, in a pool of sunlight cast by the hypostyle’s high windows, a row of buckets and piles of rags showed where local people had attempted to scrub the Infardi’s heathen blasphemies off the temple walls.

The four of them moved in pairs, providing bounding cover, two stationary and aiming while the other two swept forward to the next contact point.

The back of the second temple led into a subsidiary precinct that connected to the census hall. Here, the walls were faced in black grandiorite, but some Infardi hand had taken a sledgehammer to the ancient wall-carvings.

The Infardi had posted lookouts at the back of the census hall. Mkvan spotted them, and brought the Ghosts into cover as laser and solid shots cut into the arched doorway of the precinct and blew dusty holes in the ashlar.

Nessa settled and aimed. She had a good angle and two single shots brought down a couple of the enemy gunmen. Daur smiled. The vaunted Tanith snipers like ‘Mad’ Larkin and Rilke would have to guard their reputations against some of the Verghastite girls.

Daur and Mkvan ran forward through the archway, back into the bright sunlight, and tossed tube-charges in through the rear doors of the census hall. A row of small glass windows overlooking the alley blew out simultaneously and smoke and dust rolled back out of the doors.

The four Ghosts went in, knives fixed as bayonets, firing short bursts into the smoke. They came into the Infardi position from behind. The intense firefight began to split the airy interior of the census hall.

Daur’s strike immediately diluted the Infardi barrage from the front of the building, allowing the pinned forces in the colonnade ample chance to push in. Three fireteams of Ghosts, including Mkoll’s, circled in down the colonnade.

By then, Gaunt had moved up to the front line amongst the stelae. ‘Mkoll?’

‘The front’s barricaded firmly, sir,’ the scout leader reported over the link. ‘We’ve got their attention turned away from us… I think that’s Daur’s doing.’

Gaunt crouched behind a stelae and waved a signal down the line of crouching Ghosts ranged along the side of the colonnade. Trooper Brostin ran forward, the tanks of his flamer unit clanking.

‘What kept you?’ Gaunt asked.

‘Probably all the shooting,’ Brostin replied flippantly. The colonel-commissar indicated the census hall facade.

‘Wash it out, please.’

Brostin, a big man with ursine shoulders and a ragged, bushy moustache, who always reeked of promethium, hefted the flamer around and thumbed the firing toggle. The tanks made a coughing gurgle and then retched a spear of liquid fire out at the census hall. The jet of flame arced downwards with yellow tongues and noxious black smoke curling off it like a mane.

Fire drizzled and trickled across the boarded front of the hall. Painted panels suddenly scorched black and caught fire. Paint peeled and beaded in the heat. The tie-beams over the door burst into flames.

Brostin took a few steps forward and squirted flame directly in through some of the tight firing slits in the hall’s defences. Gaunt liked watching Brostin work. The burly trooper had an affinity with fire, an understanding of the way it ran and danced and leapt. He could make it work for him; he knew what would combust quickly and what slowly, what would burst in fierce incandescent flames and what would smoulder; he knew how to use wind and breeze to fan flames up into target dugouts. Brostin wasn’t just hosing an enemy emplacement with flames here, he was artfully building an inferno.

According to Sergeant Varl, Brostin’s skill with fire came from his background as a firewatcher in Tanith Magna. Gaunt could believe this. It wasn’t what Trooper Larkin said, though. Larkin said Brostin was an ex-convict with a ten-year sentence for arson.

The fire, almost white, coiled up the hall front and caught the roof. A significant section of the front wall blew out into the street as fire touched off something volatile, perhaps an Infardi’s satchel of grenades. Another section guttered and fell in. Three green-clad men came out of the hall door mouth, firing las-weapons down the colonnade. The robes of one of the trio were burning. Ghost weapons opened up all around and the three toppled.

A couple of grenades flew from the burning hall and exploded in the middle of the street. Then two more Infardi tried to break out. Mkoll killed both within seconds of them appearing at the doorway.

Now, under Gaunt’s orders, the Ghosts were firing into the burning facade. A Pardus Hydra platform clanked down the centre of the colonnade, trailing a bunch of prayer-kite tails that had snagged on its barrels and aerial mount, and rolled in beside Gaunt’s position.

Gaunt climbed up onto the plate behind the gunner and supervised as the NCO swung the four long snouts of the anti-aircraft autocannons down to horizontal.

‘Target practice,’ Gaunt told him.

The gunner tipped a salute and then tore the front of the census hall into burning scraps with his unforgiving firepower.

Inside, at the rear of the hall, Daur and his comrades were moving back the way they had come in. Thick black smoke boiled out from the main body of the hall. Daur, choking, could smell promethium and knew a flamer had been put to good work. Now there was a hell of a noise out front. Heavy fire, and not something man-portable.

‘Come on!’ he rasped, waving Nessa, Lillo and Mkvan back. The four staggered through the smoke wash, coughing and spitting, half blind. Daur prayed they hadn’t lost their sense of direction.

They were remarkably unscathed. Mkvan had a scratch across the back of his hand and Lillo was cut along the forehead, but they’d hit the Infardi hard and lived to tell of it.

More heavy firing from the colonnade side. A couple of murderously powerful shots, glowing tracers, tore through a wall behind them and passed over their heads. The shots had passed right through the bulk of the census hall.

‘Gak!’ cried Lillo. ‘Was that a tank?’

Daur was about to reply when Nessa gave out a gasping cry and doubled over. He swung around, eyes stinging with the smoke and saw five Infardi rushing them from the main hall area. Two were firing lasrifles. Another’s robes had all been burned off his seared body.

Daur fired, and felt the kiss of a las-round past his shoulder. Daur’s gunfire blew two of the Infardi over onto their backs. Another charged Mkvan and was impaled on the Tanith’s out-thrust bayonet. Thrashing, fixed, the Infardi shot Mkvan through the face point-blank with his pistol. Both bodies toppled over in the smoke.

Lillo was borne down by the other two who, weaponless, clawed at him and ripped into his clothes and skin with dirty, hooked fingernails. One got his hands on Lillo’s lasrifle and was trying to pull it free, though the sling was hooked. Daur threw himself at the rebel and they went over, crashing back through the doorway and into the fire-swamped main hall.

The heat took Daur’s breath away. The Infardi was hitting and biting and clawing. They rolled through fire. The enemy had his hands around Daur’s throat now. Daur thought about his knife, but remembered it was still attached to the bayonet lug of his lasrifle, and that was lying out in the next room next to Mkvan’s corpse.

Daur rolled, allowing the frantic Infardi to get on top of him, and then bucked and reeled, kicking up with his legs, throwing the cultist headfirst over the top of him. The cultist bounced off a burning table as he landed, throwing up a cloud of sparks. He got up, muttering some obscene oath, a smouldering chair leg in his hands, ready to wield as a club.

The roof came in. A five tonne beam, rippling from end to end with a thick plumage of yellow and orange flame, crushed the Infardi into the ground.

Daur scrambled up. His tunic was on fire. Little blue flames licked down the sleeve and the cuff, and around the seams of the pockets. He beat at himself, stumbling towards the door. He hadn’t taken a breath in what seemed like two or three minutes. His lungs were full of searing heat.

In the annex at the back of the census hall, Lillo was trying to drag Nessa out through the back portico. Tarry black smoke was gusting out of the rafters and the air was almost unbearably toxic.

Daur stumbled towards them, over the burning bodies of the Infardi. He helped Lillo manhandle Nessa’s dead weight. She’d been shot in the stomach. It looked bad, but Daur was no medic. He had no idea how bad.

A dull rumble echoed through the blazing hall as another roof section collapsed, and a gust of smoke, sparks and superheated air bellowed out around them. As they staggered through the portico into the rear yard, Daur heard something fall from his tunic and clink on the ground behind him.

The trinket. The old woman’s trinket.

They dragged Nessa clear across the yard and Lillo collapsed by her side, coughing from the bottom of his lungs and trying to vox for a med-team.

Daur crossed back to the flaming portico, tearing off his smouldering tunic. The heat and flames had scorched the fabric and burst the seams. One of the pockets was hanging off by singed threads and it was from there that the silver trinket had fallen.

Daur saw it on the flagstones, lying just inside the portico. He hunkered down under the seething mass of black smoke that filled the upper half of the archway and roiled up into the windy blue sky. He reached for it and closed his fingers around the trinket. It was painfully hot from the blaze.

Something bumped into him and knocked him to his knees. He turned to face an Infardi cultist, his flesh baked raw and bloody, who had come blindly out of the inferno.

He reached out his blistered hands, clawing at Daur, and Daur snapped his laspistol from its holster and put two rounds through his heart.

Then Daur fell over.

Lillo ran across to him, but Daur couldn’t hear what the trooper was shouting.

He looked down. The engraved hilt of the ritual dagger was sticking out of his ribcage and blood as dark and rich as berry juice was pumping out around it. The Infardi hadn’t just bumped into him at all.

Daur started to laugh inanely, but blood filled his throat. He stared at the Infardi weapon until his vision became like a tunnel and then faded out altogether.

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Honour Guard first published in 2003 by Games Workshop Ltd.
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