Ghostmaker (39 page)

Blasting with his bolt pistol, Gaunt saw a tiny opportunity: break and fall back now, or become locked irrevocably into the fighting.

He saw Gilbear’s unit spill down the rise and fall upon the enemy weapon stations with a ferocious and admirable grace, overwhelming and slaughtering them in a matter of a minute or two. The powerful hellguns, supported by two grenade launchers and a plasma rifleman, ripped into the hindquarters of the guncrews’ position and cut them down.

Gilbear haughtily voxed his success as his men took over control of the enemy weapons, turning missile launchers and field artillery on the ranks of the chaos army beyond. The Volpone Tenth Elite were damn good, Gaunt had to admit. Rotation training on all combat disciplines meant that they could take a gun post and then man that gun as surely and deftly as if they were dedicated artillery troops.

Gaunt knew the moment had gone. To break now would have left the Volpone alone. His choice was made for him. Battle was truly joined and there would be no respite.

The twin prongs of the Ghosts punched into the rear of the besiegers. Gilbear, tactically astute, turned the aim of captured guns down the turn of the valley and covered the Ghost push, creating huge breaks in the enemy’s makeshift flanking manoeuvre. Shells whistled down under Gilbear’s direction, pin-point accurate, throwing ribbons of mud, strands of foliage and pieces of Chaos troopers into the air not twenty metres in front of the advancing Ghosts.

The fighting was close range and white hot. Incredibly, but for a few grazes and glancing burns, Gaunt found his men suffered no casualties.

Within five minutes of first contact, the Imperials had cut a wedge into the enemy rearguard, made up half a kilometre of ground and slaughtered upwards of two hundred enemy troops, at no mortal cost.

Gilbear held the line as long as he could, but there came a point, mutually agreed between him and Gaunt over the vox-link, when the separation of the two small Imperial advances would become too great.

When the signal was given, the Bluebloods mined the gun emplacements and pushed on, scything a double-time advance to swing themselves in behind the Ghosts. Limed explosions, staggered and staggering, set off the emplacement munitions and excavated a new valley where a small plateau had been.

Into the heat now, on the lower slopes of the mound, the Imperial expedition force slicing a break in the foe as a spearhead formation, Ghosts to the right, Volpone to the left, with Gaunt and Corbec at the tip.

Gaunt knew the Tanith fought well, but he had never seen them discharge themselves so determinedly, so brilliantly. In his heart, he couldn’t believe that this was a simple response to his motivational speech. They were fighting for something, something deep in theirs hearts, something that would not be denied.

“For Tanith! For Tanith, bless her memory!” he heard Corbec yelling as he advanced.

The cry, as it was taken up by Ghosts all around him, prompted a deep, emotional response in Gaunt. It shocked him. They were indeed fighting for Tanith… not for some memory or for a sense of vengeance. They were fighting for the love of their homeworld, of the misty cities, the darkling woodlands, the majestic seas.

He knew this because he felt it too. He had spent all of a day on Tanith before the fall, and most of that inside the dim anterooms of the Elector’s palace at Tanith Magna. But it felt as if it had been his home, something he had grown to love through years of upbringing, something that was still attainable…

With Corbec and two other Ghosts, he was the first to reach a defence ditch on the lower slopes of the mound where superior numbers of Chaos filth were turning from their assault of the ruin to repel the hind attack. Gaunt led with his chainsword, slicing the enemy apart. It seemed like he was las-proof. All opposing shots went wild. The joy of Tanith sang in his heart.

He dropped into the ditch, cutting the first aggressor before him open down the middle, then swung the whining blade left to decapitate another. In his other hand, his bolt pistol blasted down the ditch, blowing the legs off two charging ghouls with fixed bayonets. His bolter clacked empty. Corbec was beside him, bellowing, blasting with his lasgun at figures who fell and squirmed and fled down the narrow defile. To the other side, Troopers Yael and Mktea fought hand to hand with silver daggers, passionate, furious. Beyond them, Bragg, blasting with his autocannon over the ditch top.

Gaunt threw his bolter and his sword aside and grabbed the firing handles of an enemy storm-bolter with a belt feed set into the lip of the ditch. The massive gun was set on flak-board, with wire tie-downs to prevent the tripod from skating. Gaunt thumbed the trigger and swept the shuddering gun left and right, decimating the ranks of enemy advancing up the hill above him.

He felt a hand on his arm. Lilith was beside him, her face pale, her eyes full of tears.

“What?” he barked, continuing to fire.

“Can’t you feel it? You’re swept up in the storm-magic too!”

He released his hands and the drum belt rattled round on auto-feed. “Magic?”

“The web of deceit I spoke of… it’s enflamed all your men, the Bluebloods too. It’s tearing at my mind! Gaunt…!”

Involuntarily, he held her. She pushed him off after a second. “I’m all right! All right!”

“Lilith!”

“Whatever… whoever… it is up there in the ruin, they’re preying on our emotions.”

“What do you mean?”

“I… I think they want all the help they can get, Gaunt! They’ve woven a psychic spell through the storm that makes us… makes us respond by touching our deepest desires! For your Ghosts, this is Tanith… a Tanith where it’s still possible to win and save the world! For the Bluebloods, it’s Ignix Majeure, where they lost after a desperate fight! But Ibram… it’s
killing me!
So strong, so powerful!”

Gaunt fought to catch his breath. “W-why me? Why Tanith?”

“What?” she asked, wiping her puffy eyes.

“I’m not Tanith, but the will inside me responded that way. Why aren’t I fighting for some great cause in my own life? Why have I been living and breathing Tanith in my waking dreams all this while?”

She smiled, simply and painfully, her perfect face lit by the fire-flashes around them. “Don’t you know it, Ibram? Tanith is your cause, no matter if you were born there or not. You’ve devoted your service and life to these men, to the memory of their world.

“The fate of Tanith consumes you, as it does them, and though you’re not a true son of the forests, this magic plays on your deepest urges! You’re a Ghost, Ibram Gaunt, whether you know it or not! You’re not just their master, you’re one of them!”

Gaunt pulled off his cap and wiped brow-sweat back into his cropped hair. He was panting, painfully high on adrenaline. “This is all false?” he began.

“We’re being used. Manipulated. Driven to fight by something that touches our deepest causes.”

“Then… in the Emperor’s name, if it helps us kill the Chaos scum, let’s not deny it! Let’s use it!” Gaunt cued his micro-bead and opened a channel to his force. “Sixty men against ten thousand! The stuff of legends! Push on! Push on, for Tanith and for Ignix Majeure! Take the slope and make for the ruin!”

At the head of his wave of Bluebloods, Gilbear heard the call and screamed into the night as he emptied yet another power-pack out through the glowing muzzle of his hellgun. The Volpone took the rise, scattering enemy before them.

Lerod, who now thought himself truly immortal, led his detachment up the mound, stampeding over the panicking, splintering waves of Chaos filth.

Corbec, with Bragg firing solid lines of destruction from his heavy weapon at his side, pushed the other Ghost band up between the prongs. To either side of the Imperial advance, a hundred thousand soldiers of the foe swarmed and regrouped. But the sixty or so Imperials cut a line up through them that wouldn’t be denied.

Years later, painstakingly reconstructing the details of this assault from patchy data collected at the time, Imperial tacticians on London would be utterly unable to account for the success of the action. Even given the surprise nature of the assault, from the rear, there was no sense to the data. Simple statistics should have had Gaunt’s expeditionary force cut down to the last man, at most a half kilometre from the ruin. The tacticians would factor in charismatic leadership, tactical insight, luck… and still there was no mistake. Gaunt’s men should have been entirely slaughtered long before they reached the ruin.

But that was not the case. Gaunt drew his forces, without the loss of a single man, up to the walls of the ruin perhaps thirty minutes after they had first engaged the back of the enemy positions. They had cut through a legion of the foe who outnumbered them ten thousand to one, and attained a target area the enemy had been trying to force its way into for hours. They slew, approximately, two-point-four thousand soldiers of the enemy.

Eventually, after a prolonged analytical study, the tacticians would decide that the only explanation could be that there were no enemy units on the field that day. It was all an illusion. Gaunt had mounted an assault through open, undefended ground. Only then did the computations and the statistics and the possibilities match up.

None of them could admit that this wasn’t the case. And so, perhaps the greatest and most spectacular success of Macaroth’s great Crusade, out-classed and out-numbered but still successful, was deleted from the Imperial Annals as a phantom engagement. Such is the fate of true heroism.

There was a door: a tall, pointed arch of stone faced with stone, in the side of the smooth flank of the ruin. Gaunt grouped his force around it as relentless firepower strafed up at them from the muddled but regrouping legions of the enemy.

Gilbear intended to mine the door in the hope of blowing it open, though, as Corbec pointed out, the scorch marks on the stone facing seemed to indicate that the enemy had tried that more than once and failed.

They were about to argue the point some more when the door opened. Brin Milo stood there, looking out at them, flanked by Caffran and a spectacularly grim eldar warrior with a red plume set behind his white helmet.

The storm flashed above, still furious and wild.

“You’ve come this far,” Milo said. “Now let’s finish this.”

Sealed inside the onyx walls of the Way-Place, Gaunt and his force heard the low wailing of eldar mourners, remorsefully singing the last songs of closure.

Muon Nol faced Gaunt for a long while, until Gaunt saluted and held out his hand.

“Ibram Gaunt.”

Nothing more need be said, Gaunt thought.

Muon Nol looked at the proffered hand, then slung Uliowye over his shoulder and clasped it.

He spoke, a bewildering slither of otherworldly language.

“You’ve just been formally worshipped as a fellow warrior,” Lilith said, stepping up. Muon Nol turned his huge gaze to look at her.

“I am Lilith, of the Imperial Inquisition,” she stated. Muon Nol, a head taller than even Gilbear, paused and nodded slowly.

Gaunt looked round sharply at the inquisitor. “We’re not getting anywhere fast,” he hissed. “Does anyone here speak eldar?”

“I do,” Lilith said, but Muon Nol spoke simultaneously.

“There is no need,” he said in melodiously accented Low Gothic. “I understand. You must follow me now. The farseer-lord awaits.”

“Fine…” Gaunt began.

Muon Nol stepped back. “No. Not you. The female.”

Lord Eon Kull felt the wash and burn of the Chaos hosts as they assaulted the ruin around him. Fuehain Falchior had begun to rattle in her rack again.

The door of the Inner Place slid open and Muon Nol entered, escorting a cowled human female, a hulking stormtrooper in grey and gold, and a human male in a long coat and cap.

Muon Nol bowed. Lilith did likewise. Gilbear and Gaunt remained upright.

Eon Kull spoke, perfectly using the clumsy low Gothic he had once wasted a brief year mastering.

“I am Eon Kull Farseer. My enchantments have brought you into this. I make no apologies. The Way must be closed to the Dark and I will use all my powers to accomplish that.”

Muon Nol took a step forward, gesturing to indicate Lilith. “My lord… this female is called Lilith, in the human tongue. Is that not a sign?”

“Of what?”

“Of purpose… lord?”

Eon Kull seemed about to answer, as if he too recognised the symbolic coincidence. But then he slumped against the side of his throne, blood leaking from under the seal of his helmet.

“My lord!”

Gaunt reached him first, pulling off the tall helm and cradling the pale skull of the worn-out, dying Eldar farseer in his gloved hands.

“I can send for medics… healers,” he began.

“No… n-no… no time. No purpose to it. I want to die, Gaunt human. The Way must be closed before Chaos can corrupt it.”

Holding Eon Kull, Gaunt looked up hopelessly at Lilith. She came and took his place, embracing the frail eldar’s head and body.

“That’s what the Chaos forces are here on Monthax for, isn’t it, farseer lord?”

“You speak truth. This Way has stood open for twenty-seven centuries. Now the enemy have found it and through it they will invade Dolthe craftworld. For the sake of Dolthe, for the living souls of the eldar, this Way must be closed. For this great purpose I have conjured you. For this great purpose, my aspect warriors have given their all and their last.”

“All of this… some trick of a stinking alien scumbag…” Gilbear growled.

Gaunt launched himself forward, bringing down Muon Nol before the enraged eldar could splinter Gilbear to pieces with his shrieker cannon.

Gaunt got up off the aspect warrior and strode across the onyx room to face Gilbear.

“What? What did I say that was so bad?” Gilbear asked, a second before Gaunt’s fist laid him out unconscious on the flag stones.

“Ibram!” Gaunt turned as Lilith cried out. She was cradling Eon Kull in her arms. Gaunt rushed to her, with Muon Nol at his elbow, but there was no mistaking the signs.

Farseer Eon Kull, the Old One, was dead.

They placed his frail remains on the floor.