Varl pursed his lips as if stifling amusement. ‘We’re soldiers. We’re the Emperor’s Guardsmen, true and faithful. Risks are the job.’

  ‘I know. I just don’t think sometimes. I charge in. I take the plunge…’

  ‘That’s your style,’ said Varl. ‘You led from the front, which is why you’re a major and I’m not. At the moment.’

  ‘It’s going to get me killed. That’s what I’m saying. Nearly has more than once.’

  ‘Life’s going to get you killed,’ said Varl. ‘Come the feth on with you.’

  They wandered back across the dusty quad to where Domor had the search team waiting in the street archway. A dry wind chased eddies of soot and sand around the quad flagstones.

  They started to head down the street, past the derelict faces of burned-out habs and slopes of rubble dotted with nodding weeds. Meryn’s section was ahead of them, leading the way into the tattered produce barns of the old town commercia.

  ‘Know what I’ve been doing since we started on this?’ Kolea asked Varl as they walked along in the breeze-stirred quiet.

  ‘Getting on my wick?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Since we dropped, all I’ve thought about is the lad, how he is, if he’s safe, how gakking unfair it is that he isn’t with us. He must be scared, wherever the gak he is. The big zones must be bad.’

  ‘That’s natural enough.’

  ‘I’ve never once wondered… is he alive still?’

  ‘Well, you can’t think that way.’

  ‘I know.’ They had reached the gates of the produce area. Kolea fanned the section out in support of Meryn’s advancing Ghosts.

  ‘It just occurred to me, there’s something else I should think about.’

  ‘What?’ Varl asked.

  ‘When we’re all done with this place, maybe I’ll see the lad again, and that will be fine, but what if I die? What if I do something dumb and just die? How will that be for him?’

  Varl shrugged.

  ‘I left it too late before this started. My fear was, I’d left it too late full stop. Because the lad might die, I’d never get the chance to put things right. Never occurred to me it might work the other way around.’

  It was anyone’s guess how long the excubitor had been holed up in the outhouses behind the silent, boarded habs. The area was a maze of small yards and narrow alleys, dotted with store huts and privies, and it stretched all the way down to a row of market gardens inside the town wall.

  Osket, Wheln and Harjeon had just shifted left, and Kalen, Leclan and Raess to the right. Caffran moved his fingers and gestured Leyr and Neskon up behind him.

  ‘We’ll go through that way,’ he said, pointing to a dingy alley.

  Neskon shifted his flamer tanks higher onto his shoulder. ‘This is a waste of time.’

  ‘I’ll tell you when it’s a waste of time,’ Caffran advised. ‘Now stay sharp.’

  The whole place was too enclosed and too dirty to be anything but oppressive. They jumped at shadows, or shrank back from tiny pieces of horror. Bones were common, and so were the daubings and scratchings of the enemy. Glass pots of blood had been left in various locations as offerings, and their contents were starting to putrefy and separate. Not for the first time, Caffran saw evidence of vermin eating vermin. That was a testament, if one was needed, of how low Gereon had slipped. It was so spent and exhausted that the only thing left for the rats to eat was other rats.

  They’d gone about ten metres along the narrow alley when the sound of a las-lock boomed to their right and the shouting started. There were several bursts of las fire.

  ‘Report!’ Caffran yelled into the link.

  ‘Man down!’ Leclan crackled back. ‘Hostile came out of hiding. He’s coming your way!’

  Leyr and Neskon immediately raised their weapons. Caffran ran forwards a little way and looked around. He could hear footsteps echoing in all directions, but the alley walls and the sides of the outbuildings were too steep to see over.

  ‘Get me up!’ he said to Leyr.

  Leyr cupped his hands and boosted Caffran up a wall. He scrambled onto the roof of an outbuilding, ran along it and leapt onto an adjacent roof. He saw a figure darting along the crookback alleys to his left.

  Caffran turned and shouted down to Neskon, ‘Fire up the left-hand turn!’

  Neskon hurried forwards, nursed his coughing flamer for a moment, and then sent a spear of fire down the left-hand path of the alley junction. The boiling flames filled five metres of alleyway for several seconds. There was a stifled cry. Driven back by the surging flames, the excubitor reappeared, running back the way he’d come.

  Standing on the flat roof, legs braced firmly, Caffran fired from the chest. Two shots and the vile figure dropped.

  ‘Hostile is down,’ Caffran said. ‘Pull this place apart and make sure he was alone.’

  Caffran sat down on a kerbstone and pulled off his left boot. The dust and grit got into everything. He ached. His limbs were sore. The sky over the town was turning to evening and looked like marble.

  Nearby, the rest of his section was resting. Leclan was checking the dressing on the grazing wound Kalen had taken from the excubitor.

  Caffran leaned back against a wall and closed his eyes. He scooped out the silver aquila he wore on a chain around his neck and said a silent prayer. Two prayers. One for each of them, wherever they were.

  ‘Caff?’

  He opened his eyes and looked up. It was Kolea.

  ‘Major?’ he said, rising.

  ‘Bask said I’d find you here. Busy afternoon?’

  ‘Yeah. The work of the Emperor never ends.’

  ‘Praise be to that.’

  ‘Can I help you?’

  Kolea nodded. He fished something out of his pocket. It was a Tanith cap badge. ‘I’ll make this simple. I was going to give this to the lad when he finished RIP, and I never got the chance. My mistake. I’d like him to have it.’

  Caffran nodded. ‘That’d be good.’

  Kolea held it out. ‘Please, could you give it to him? When you see him?’

  ‘You can do that,’ Caffran said.

  ‘I just got this feeling, Caff. Like I’m tempting fate by hoping on this. His fate and mine. All the while I’m hoping I can give him this, I’m daring fate to stop it happening. So here’s an end to it. I don’t have to think about it any more. If you don’t mind?’

  Caffran smiled and took the cap badge. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks.’ Kolea managed a smile too. ‘Thanks. That’s a relief. Feels like it… improves our chances a bit.’

  ‘Major?’

  At Baskevyl’s call, Rawne left the map tent and hurried over to the entrenchment that the Ghosts had built across the ruins of Cantible’s main gate.

  ‘What it it?’

  Baskevyl pointed. ‘They’re here,’ he said.

  Out across the moors, three black landers were speeding in towards the town, riding low, hugging the rolling terrain in formation.

  As they came closer, Rawne could see the insignia on the hull of each one.

  The stylised ‘I’ of the Inquisition.

  VIII

  The air-mill smelled of old dust and starch. The slowly turning vanes made a low creaking that came and went with a dying fall. The shadow of the vanes passed over them at each sweep, like clouds across the sun.

  Gaunt held off for a second. Mktass and Fiko appeared from around the side of the mill and Fiko nodded. Burone and Posetine held cover from across the dry yard in front of the mill.

  Gaunt went inside. Mkoll followed, and then Derin and Nirriam. The floor was well-laid stone, but the structure was wood. The turning gears of the mill system made a painful, heavy rhythm through the floor above, like solid furniture being moved. Violet mould had infested the plasterwork and bleached some of the exposed beams. The place had been stripped, and nothing had been left except for some pieces of sacking and a litter of rope scraps. Mkoll crossed to the turning post of the mill.

  ‘Deliberate,’ he said. The mill’s vanes weren’t just rotating because the wind had picked up. Mkoll pointed to a heavy iron handle that had been thrown to release the bearings. Gaunt nodded, and walked slowly around, looking upwards. Through slots and grooves in the plank flooring, he glimpsed the cobwebbed upper spaces of the mill: shadows and shafts of thin sunlight.

  ‘Check upstairs,’ he told Mkoll and Nirriam. He turned to Derin. ‘Bring Cirk in.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Derin, and ducked out.

  ‘Nothing upstairs,’ Mkoll voxed. ‘Unless you’re interested in seeing more dust.’

  ‘Sweep the nearby buildings,’ Gaunt voxed back. ‘Whoever set this going can’t be long gone. They may be watching us.’

  ‘They’re gone,’ said Cirk, stepping in through the door. Faragut came in behind her.

  ‘They’re gone?’ Gaunt asked.

  ‘They wouldn’t stay around to be followed or discovered. Far too cautious for that.’

  ‘But this is a sign? A… signal?’

  Cirk started looking around. What clues or evidence she was searching for was beyond Gaunt. She had far more experience than he did of the esoteric practices of the Gereon resistance.

  ‘It’s got to look accidental so the enemy won’t notice it, but it will also be very precise. There–’

  She pointed to a part of the floor where several handfuls of rope off-cuts lay in the dust.

  ‘I don’t see,’ said Gaunt.

  ‘Compare,’ she said, raising her pointing finger and aiming it at a part of the mould-covered wall. Random marks had been scratched in the mould. Gaunt would never have noticed it, but now she showed him, he saw that the pattern of scratches matched exactly the pattern of the scattered rope strands.

  ‘They repeat the pattern so we know it’s not random,’ she said. She crouched down beside the rope strands and began to examine them, turning her head to one side, and then the other. Mkoll and Nirriam returned from the floor above.

  ‘It’s a map,’ she said at last.

  ‘Of what?’ Faragut asked.

  ‘This area, I would imagine, but it’s encrypted.’

  ‘Encrypted?’ laughed Faragut. ‘It’s just bits of string…’

  ‘It’s encrypted. We’re not meant to use all of it. Some of the rope used has a blueish fleck in the weave. The rest has red. Please look around. Can you find more examples of either?’

  ‘Here,’ said Mkoll immediately. He indicated the heavy iron handle. There was a short tuft of rope tied around the metal spoke. It had a red fleck to it.

  Cirk smiled. She reached down and quickly picked up all the blue-flecked strands and threw them to one side.

  ‘There. The red is all that matters. There’s our map.’

  ‘I still don’t see…’ Faragut began. Gaunt shushed him and took out his pocket book. He quickly copied the lines and shapes down.

  ‘The aspect will be accurate, won’t it?’ he asked Cirk as he drew.

  ‘I would think so. This is aligned the way it is in the real world.’

  Gaunt finished drawing and put his stylus away. He hurried up the creaking wooden steps onto the boarded first floor, and then up a quivering ladder into the second, a dusty loft in the narrower upper part of the structure. Ducking under part of the noisy, rotating vane assembly, he found another ladder and clambered up. Cirk, Mkoll and Faragut were following him.

  The third storey was a very cramped space, and there was a real danger of being snagged by the turning wheels, and dragged into the crushing embrace of the mill’s machinery. Gaunt poked around cautiously until he located some metal rungs bolted to the wall. The rungs led up to a small trapdoor in the roof.

  He climbed out onto the roof. It was a precarious, small space, a rough platform of pitch-treated wood with no guard rail. The air-mill seemed very much taller outside than in. Gaunt had a good head for heights, but he steadied himself. The sloping sides of the mill dropped away, and below them, the roofs of the hamlet, the sides of the hill and the spread of the countryside beyond. He had a commanding view of the area, and that was deliberate. This vantage point was why the resistance had led him to the mill and left the map there.

  Cirk and Mkoll clambered out beside him. Both showed no alarm at the height, and moved about casually. The wind was quite considerable now, and buffeted at all three of them. Every few seconds, another of the mill’s vanes would swish past like a scything blade, which Gaunt found disconcerting. He took his hurried sketch out of his pocket and tried to align himself.

  ‘About… so?’ he asked, holding the map out and orienting his body. Mkoll nodded, and took out his scope. He began to play it over the distances.

  The sky was blotchy and very threatening. The thunder that had been grumbling ever closer was now a regular rumble, and the clouds along the western skyline had an underbelly full of hazy, ugly light.

  Cirk stood by Gaunt’s shoulder, comparing the map lines with the landscape. ‘That’s the line of the hill, and that’s the large escarpment,’ she said, her pointing finger moving between map and distance. ‘That’s the stand of trees to the right, and that’s got to be the line of the watercourse.’

  Mkoll agreed. He didn’t seem to need to look at Gaunt’s sketch. The lines of the map were already imprinted on his mind. ‘I think the intention is to get us to head north-east. About three kilometres takes us to the edge of that woodland. Whatever is marked by that cross would seem to be about another kilometre further on.’

  ‘Would they expect us to make that by nightfall?’ Gaunt asked.

  Cirk shook her head. ‘I doubt it. The original message told us to be here by tonight.’

  ‘But this fits with our expectations,’ Gaunt mused. Mkoll knelt down and slid his copy of the mission chart from his thigh pocket. He unfolded it enough to study the section covering their location. The Departmento Tacticae had produced their charts using orbital scans, supplemented by detailed governance surveys of Gereon held on file by the Administratum.

  ‘Yeah, it does. Untill,’ he said, looking up at Gaunt. ‘Eszrah will be pleased.’

  ‘I’m sure he will,’ Gaunt replied. During his time on Gereon, and thanks to his efforts, the partisans of the Untill had linked with the struggling underground resistance, and the fathomless wastes of the Untill itself had been a vital hiding place. Even the Archenemy found it difficult to penetrate those untillable swamps and marshes. ‘So we’re really that close?’ he asked Mkoll.

  ‘Well, the main tracts of the Untill are two, three hundred kilometres further east, but the limits of it extend out this far. That woodland we can see is the borderland. A day’s march beyond it, you get into Sleepwalker territory.’

  Mkoll got up and put the chart away. ‘What do you think? Stay here overnight, or move–’

  He cut off. Gaunt had raised his hand for quiet, and Mkoll knew that sign. Gaunt was staring west, down across the hamlet of Cayfer, down the hillside, onto the rippling pink moorland.

  ‘We’re about to have a problem,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Cirk asked.

  Down below, half a kilometre from the hamlet at the base of the hill, the beast was back.

  IX

  Gaunt was about to trigger his link when the vox-net came alive. Three of the troopers left on look out – Larkin, Brostin and Spakus – had spotted the tank and called it in.

  ‘Hold your positions,’ Gaunt sent back. ‘Keep your eyes on it. Criid, get Gonry front and centre, and for feth’s sake, keep him covered and safe.’

  ‘Understood.’

  Gaunt, Mkoll and Cirk scurried back down the ladders into the mill.

  With Gonry running, head down, behind her, Criid crossed the inner yards of the hamlet and moved down through the derelict outbuildings. A sagging length of old wall fenced the sloping backfield from the rest of the hillside. Larkin was snuggled up there, long las resting on the lip of the wall. He was calmly watching the tank through his scope. Brostin was nearby, smoking a lho-stick as if he was waiting for his discharge papers. His flamer and its tanks lay on the grass next to him.

  Brostin was a phlegmatic type. He knew when his area of expertise wasn’t going to be called on. A flamer was no weapon to use against armour. Even the ‘airburst special’, a little party trick he and Larkin had improvised during their previous stay on Gereon, had no application here.

  Criid dropped in beside Larkin. Gonry, a scrawny little Belladon, fell over beside her. ‘Load that tube,’ Criid told him. ‘I’ll stand by with the spares for cut and come again.’ The satchel Gonry was carrying contained five rockets. That was their lot. He nodded to Criid and set to work setting the launcher and slipping the first rocket into place. Gonry was a sweet sort, and she knew he had a little bit of a crush on her. That helped. He did everything she told him as quickly as he could.

  ‘Larks?’

  ‘Just taking the evening air,’ he replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not me, lady. The tank,’ Larkin snorted. He passed her the scope. ‘Take a look.’

  She swung up and panned the scope, being careful not to knock it against the wall top. This was Larkin’s scope, after all. The master sniper had trusted her with a lend of his precious instrument.

  She looked down the hill slope, past two runs of wall and several dead trees, skeletal-white in the changing light. The tank was down in the vale bottom, close to the place where it had played cat and mouse with Gaunt and the others earlier in the day. It was entirely visible to them, but it had decided to go hull-down in the grass, gun lowered, headlamps off. This attitude seemed insouciant to her. Something that big couldn’t hide in open landscape, but it seemed to be pretending to do just that, as if all that really mattered was if the wind changed and its prey caught its scent and scattered.