He was alone. The sound of distant gunfire echoed down the empty hallway. Merrt raised his rifle and headed down the stairs the way Ludd had gone.

  III

  The southern casemates and towers of Hinzerhaus were lit up wildly with discharge flashes. Torrents of concentrated shots streamed down from the firing slits in the cliff face fortifications and hammered into the oncoming infantry ranks.

  The Ghosts exacted their price for the surprise assault. In the first four minutes of action, the marksmen, gunners and support teams positioned inside the defence buttresses mowed down the charge. Hundreds of Archenemy troopers fell. Crew-served weapons, pumping and chattering out of casemate slots, cut down entire platoons. Bodies toppled and sprawled onto the pure white dust. Launchers spat squealing rockets down into the wave assault, and those rockets tossed burning figures into the air every time they struck. The hot shots of the expert snipers zipped into the charging host and took out warriors one at a time, blowing the running figures apart.

  For about ten minutes, the fortress of Hinzerhaus performed its role admirably. Secure inside its ancient casemates, the Ghost defenders made a killing ground outside the front door, and slaughtered each wave that came rushing in.

  ‘I’m out!’ Banda cried, dropping back from the firing slit. ‘Ammo!’

  ‘Use mine,’ Larkin spat, dropping down too. His long-las had just refused to fire. Time to change barrels.

  Banda grabbed four of Larkin’s clips and slammed the first one home. She resumed her fire position and banged it off.

  ‘Shit!’ she said.

  ‘Miss?’ Larkin asked, rummaging in his field bag for a fresh barrel section. ‘Focus, you silly bitch. And learn… don’t drink on watch.’

  ‘Shut the gak up!’ Banda replied, clacking in another hot shot load.

  She fired again. ‘Oh shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!’

  ‘You’re wasting ammo,’ Larkin snarled as he slid a fresh barrel into position. He wound it tight. ‘Don’t be so useless, or I’ll strip you of that lanyard.’

  ‘Gak you, Larks,’ she returned, reaching for another clip. ‘I can do this.’

  ‘So show me,’ Larkin replied. He checked his weapon. Ready to go. ‘Ammo here!’ he yelled, over his shoulder. ‘Barrels too! Move it!’

  He loaded from one of the handful of specialist clips remaining, and swung up to the gunslot. He took aim and dropped his breathing rate.

  The long-las bumped at his shoulder. A howling standard bearer, far below, jerked backwards and fell spread-eagled on the dust.

  ‘That shut him up.’

  ‘Bang!’ Banda announced beside him. She slid her weapon back in through the slot and beamed at Larkin. ‘See? See that? Clean kill.’

  They both reloaded.

  Trooper Ventnor, who was acting as ammunition runner on level six, burst into the overlook through the hatchway behind them. He was panting, out of breath. He dumped a heavy musette bag on the floor. ‘Clips!’ he announced.

  ‘And barrels?’ Larkin asked, taking aim and not looking around.

  ‘No,’ replied Ventnor.

  ‘I need barrels! Move!’ Larkin ordered. Bump. Another fine headshot.

  ‘Keep your fake foot on,’ Ventnor spat, exasperated, and disappeared.

  ‘Bang!’ said Banda with a great deal of satisfaction. ‘See that? See him go over?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Larkin replied, slotting in his next clip and chasing for targets through his scope. ‘Good.’

  ‘Gak. My barrel’s carked,’ Banda announced, dropping back from the slot.

  ‘Two more in the bag there. Get one,’ Larkin replied. Bump. Over went a Blood Pact officer, sword raised, mid-yell. No amount of labour would ever piece that iron mask back together.

  Banda knelt down and struggled to unwind her burned-out barrel.

  ‘Hurry up,’ Larkin called out, taking another shot. Too low. he’d misjudged. A Blood Pact warrior lost a pelvis instead of a skull. Still…

  ‘Gak!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s jammed in! It won’t pull out!’

  Larkin turned from the slot to help Banda. Her exchangeable long-las barrel was truly spent, and the carbon scoring had fused it into the body of her weapon. They fought with it until it came free.

  Banda screwed a new barrel home.

  ‘Ammo and barrels!’ Larkin yelled out. ‘Ventnor? We’re down to our last one!’

  Banda and Larkin chocked clips in simultaneously, and went back to the slot. Hunting, hunting…

  ‘Bang!’ Banda rejoiced.

  Bump went Larkin’s long-las.

  The runner burst into the gunbox behind them again. ‘Barrels!’ he yelled.

  ‘At last,’ Larkin said.

  ‘Get down,’ the runner added.

  Larkin turned. ‘What?’ he began. His voice drained away.

  Colm Corbec grinned at him. ‘Get down, Larks. Get the lovely lass down too, all right?’

  ‘Oh feth,’ Larkin groaned. He threw himself at Banda and smashed her away from the slot in a clumsy body tackle.

  ‘Hey! Ow!’ Banda complained as she landed.

  A second later, the top of the casemate, right above the gunslot, took the full force of the first artillery shell.

  IV

  At the summit of the fortress, along the cloche and casemate domes of the ridge line, the fight was a much closer affair.

  The Blood Pact raiders had tried at first to enter the shutters quietly, the way they had done many times in the previous days. They found the cloches manned, armed and ready. The waiting Guardsmen did not hesitate. As shutters flew open, small-arms fire blazed out, cutting down the nearest raiders at point-blank range. With nowhere to run to, and just a sheer drop at their backs, the enemy tried to rush the domes and overcome them with weight of numbers.

  Inside each strong point, the noise and smoke was hellish. The Ghosts had hastily constructed stages and firesteps during the night, most often out of flak board laid across sand bags, so that they could present at the shutters at head height. Unit officers had little visibility, and were forced to rely on voxed commentaries from the men firing frantically through the wedged-open shutters. The officers attempted to create zones of fire between adjacent cloches and casemates to deny the assault, but most of the strong points, especially those on the upper west levels, were quickly choked with mobs of Blood Pact warriors and mounds of corpses.

  Where the ridge defences were stepped, with three banks of cloches overlooking the cliff drop in some places, the men posted in the higher levels attempted to range their fire down onto the raiders attacking the lower positions. There was, however, little opportunity for proper, directed fire. The summit fight was frenzied: a frantic whirl of desperate shooting and hasty reloading.

  About seven minutes into the brutal confrontation, the enemy achieved penetration. A Blood Pact warrior, already wounded, leapt from behind the piled dead outside a cloche on upper west sixteen and managed to launch himself onto the dome. Rolling forwards on his blood-soaked belly, he lobbed a bundle of stick grenades in under the flap of the nearest shutter.

  The blast killed all eight Ghosts manning the dome. Before the thick, sweet fyceline smoke had even begun to clear, Archenemy raiders were pouring in through the blackened shutter slots and spreading out along the interior hallway. In the confusion, they took out the Guards manning the next cloche along, cutting them down off their makeshift firestep from behind. A second entry point was created as a result.

  Two minutes later, a lucky grenade deflected in through a shutter on upper west fourteen and blew the defenders off their platform. Once again, the enemy came scrambling inside, slaughtering the Ghosts maimed and dazed by the explosion. Fierce fighting, some of it bloody hand-to-hand business, was now boiling along two separate spurs of the summit galleries.

  By the time Gaunt reached the upper levels of the house, the Blood Pact had sunk its teeth in and was biting down hard. Gaunt moved down upper west sixteen with Criid’s company, bolstering each cloche he came to with sections of Criid’s force. He had to shout to be understood. The rain of shots pummelling the lid of each dome sounded like hail striking sheet tin. A backwash of discharge smoke had built up like smog in the ancient hallways. Every few seconds there was the dry, gritty crump of a grenade detonation, and hot air billowed down the confined spaces, driven by over-pressure. The voices of men, shouting in dismay, or confusion, or pain, were as loud as the gunfire.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Berenson yelled.

  Gaunt glanced at him, scowling at the notion there was anything except total noise around them.

  Berenson’s face was wide eyed. ‘Listen!’ he shouted.

  Gaunt heard them. Distant sounds, contrapuntal to the incessant din of war nearby: whistle-krump, whistle-krump, the unmistakable signature of shelling, coming from the southern face of the house.

  Instantly, the vox-link was alive with shouts and reports.

  ‘Rawne?’ Gaunt called urgently into his micro-bead. ‘Rawne! Two, Two, this is One, this is One.’

  ‘–barrage coming in!’ Rawne came back, his signal crumpled by distortion. ‘Artillery ranging us from the pass. Repeat, artillery re–’

  ‘Two? Two? Say again!’

  ‘–in hard. Really hard! Feth, we–’

  The link went dead, flat dead, no signal at all. Gaunt heard more shells striking the other side of the fortress. This time, he felt the floor shake slightly.

  ‘Dear Throne,’ said Karples. ‘This is madness–’

  He began to add something else, but Gaunt could no longer hear him because Criid, Berenson and some of the other troopers alongside had started firing. Screaming out their uncouth warcries, warriors of the Blood Pact were rushing towards them along the smoke-filled hall.

  Gaunt drew his sword, the sword of Heironymo Sondar. It had been gifted to him after his successful defence of another bloody siege: the hive clash at Vervunhive.

  ‘Men of Tanith!’ he bellowed.

  There was no time to say anything else. With trench axe, billhook, bayonet and pistol, the enemy was upon them.

  V

  Dalin could smell fresh air. He could also hear the wail and blast of artillery shells a lot more clearly than Gaunt could.

  ‘They’re giving us all kinds of feth,’ he said.

  ‘Sounds like it,’ replied Beltayn. ‘Keep moving.’

  Dalin glanced at Bonin, Coir and Hwlan. The three scouts Mkoll had sent back with them were exchanging uneasy looks. Dalin knew they were dearly wishing they were somewhere else, somewhere they could be useful. They were three of the regiment’s finest, and they were missing a full-on battle in order to run what was, essentially, a supply mission.

  ‘Why don’t you go?’ Dalin suggested.

  ‘What?’ Bonin asked.

  ‘Beltayn and me, we can find the water drop. Why don’t you get going?’

  ‘Mkoll gave us an order,’ said Coir.

  ‘But–’

  ‘Mkoll gave us an order,’ said Bonin. ‘That’s the start and the finish of it.’

  They had passed through the hole where the wall panels had been pried away earlier, and had entered a corridor that had not seen life in a very long time. It was dry, and the polished floor was covered in a thick layer of undisturbed dust. There was something odd about the wall lights in this section. They were of the same style and arrangement as the wall lights in other parts of the house, strung along the wall panels almost organically on their heavy trunking, but these lights shone with an unremitting amber glow, not fading and returning. They burned like old lamps reaching the clamped-end of their wicks.

  ‘Guess how much I don’t like this?’ Beltayn murmured.

  ‘Guess how much I don’t care?’ Bonin replied.

  They walked forward slowly, leaving five sets of footprints in the dust behind them. The air stirred like a cold breath. From somewhere ahead of them, they heard the rich, reverberative blasts of falling shells. The sound was not in any way baffled or dampened by intervening walls or doors.

  ‘This match anything on the charts?’ Hwlan asked.

  Dalin studied the collection of maps he was carrying. ‘It’s hard to say…’ he began.

  Hwlan glared at him.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Dalin said.

  ‘Sorry’s not good enough,’ said Hwlan.

  The hallway ahead bent to the left and widened slightly. They went down a short flight of steps. The walls were clad with the same satin brown panels that lined all of the house’s walls, but there were more engravings and markings along the shoulder-height strips.

  Beltayn ran the beam of his light along them. None of the decorations made any sense.

  ‘I wish I knew what those meant,’ he said.

  ‘I wish you knew what those meant too,’ said Bonin.

  ‘Doors,’ Hwlan said.

  Up ahead, at the very limit of their lamp beams’ reach, there were two doors, one on either side of the hall.

  ‘Let’s look,’ said Bonin, his voice down to a whisper.

  They approached the door on the left. It was solid and wooden. Bonin went first, his lasrifle cradled in a one-handed grip as he reached for the door’s brass handle. Coir moved to his right, his own weapon up and aimed. Hwlan stayed behind Bonin, a grenade ready in his hand.

  Bonin threw open the door and rolled inside, coming up onto his knees in a firing crouch. Coir swept in behind him, aiming up. Hwlan had their backs.

  ‘Feth!’ Bonin muttered, rising to his feet and lowering his aim. ‘Look at this! Bel?’

  Beltayn and Dalin scurried in past the scouts.

  ‘Oh my word,’ Beltayn gasped.

  The chamber was long and high, and slanted slightly to the south halfway along its length. It was lit by the steady amber glow of the wall lights. From floor to roof, the room was lined with shelves, shelves laden with dusty books, manuscripts and matching volumes. Reading tables ran down the middle of the chamber.

  ‘It’s… it’s a library,’ Beltayn said.

  They entered, looking around, playing their lamps up into the corner shadows of the roof, where the amber light did not reach. Slow dust billowed and twinkled in the beams of the lamps.

  Thousands of books, slates and curling scrolls were stuffed onto the slumping shelves.

  ‘So, not a courtyard then?’ asked Bonin.

  ‘No, but quite a discovery,’ Beltayn said, peering at the spines of the books on the nearest shelf. ‘We have to–’

  ‘We have to find the water,’ said Bonin.

  ‘Now wait,’ Beltayn said. ‘This is–’

  ‘We have to find the water, adj,’ Bonin told him. ‘Books are books are books. They’ll still be here when we’re done fighting.’

  Beltayn scowled at Dalin. ‘Check down there,’ Bonin instructed, and Coir and Hwlan went down the room on either side of the reading tables, searching for doors.

  ‘Dead end,’ Hwlan called back.

  ‘No other way out,’ Coir agreed.

  ‘All right then, the other door,’ Bonin ordered, and Coir and Hwlan headed back to the exit.

  ‘We really should check these books,’ Dalin began.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We might learn something about this place,’ Dalin said.

  Bonin smiled at Dalin. It wasn’t a very friendly smile. ‘We’ve learned all we have to. This fething place is a death trap, and we’re all going to die here unless we secure some basics like water and a decent perimeter defence. Let’s learn about the history of this place later, Trooper Criid, when we’re not getting our arses shot off.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘Oh, don’t “but” me again, or I’ll smack you.’

  Dalin shut up quickly.

  ‘The lad’s right,’ said Beltayn.

  ‘Same thing applies to you, adj,’ Bonin told him. ‘Hwlan?’

  ‘Ready, Mach.’

  Hwlan and Coir had taken up positions either side of the door across the hall.

  ‘Take it,’ said Bonin, with a nod.

  Hwlan burst through the second door, Coir behind him.

  ‘Feth me! It’s an armoury, Mach.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An armoury. Come and see.’

  Bonin crossed the hallway with Dalin and Beltayn in tow, and entered the second room behind Coir and Hwlan.

  Lit by the same amber glow, the long gun room was high-ceilinged and lined with racks. Rows of ancient guns, most of them huge, the size of .50s, waited upright in the wooden racks for long-dead warriors who would never return to use them. The middle space of the room was taken up with armoured bunkers.

  Hwlan took one of the old weapons down, grunting with the weight of it. ‘What the feth is this?’ he asked.

  ‘Las?’ Bonin asked.

  ‘Yeah. I think so,’ Hwlan replied, opening the action of the gun he was holding. ‘Single shot charge, old style, like a las-lock. Feth, this thing is heavy.’

  ‘Wall guns,’ said Coir.

  ‘What?’ Bonin asked.

  ‘Wall guns,’ Coir repeated, taking one down from the racks for himself. Dec Coir was well known in the regiment for his knowledge of antique firearms. He carried a single shot las-lock pistol as a back-up piece.

  ‘Hmm. Big and clumsy. Definitely wall guns,’ he said, examining the weapon. ‘Rampart guns is another name for them. Big, heavy, long range bastards used for battlement defence.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ said Dalin. ‘I mean, given the nature of this place.’

  Coir nodded. ‘The casemates were built for firing these bastards. They were built with an army armed with these in mind. I mean, that’s what this place was constructed for.’

  ‘To defend against what?’ Bonin asked.

  ‘I can’t begin to imagine,’ said Coir. He was studying the hefty weapon in his hands, intrigued. ‘Throne, these would have kicked. And killed. Slow rate of fire, mind you, but the sheer kill power…’