He limped towards the door. ‘Stay out of my way, Cuu,’ he growled at the empty air. ‘I’ve got to go away and die with the real Ghosts now.’

  VII

  The Blood Pact warriors were milling around the burning Valkyrie. Some of them were beginning to spread out, searching the immediate area. An officer got up from the turret of one of the captured tanks and shouted some orders.

  ‘Stay down,’ Hark whispered to the others. They were flat on their faces on the rock. Hark slowly reached for his bolt pistol.

  A whisker of lightning laced the purple sky above the pass. Slow thunder rolled, like mountains grating together. Down below, the enemy soldiers were suddenly agitated. They shouted to one another.

  The air temperature had dropped by several degrees.

  Twenzet whimpered. ‘W-what is that?’ he whispered.

  Hark didn’t answer. He could feel it too, a creeping dread, unfathomable and unnameable, that made his flesh crawl and his ravaged back bleed.

  Something terrible, some unutterable horror, was approaching.

  Help me

  TWENTY-TWO

  Only in Death

  I

  The vox-mast, poking up into the enormous night sky, was emitting a string of clicks and beeps into the darkness, like some fidgeting nocturnal insect. The dust-proof tents, pitched in a wide ring, were internally lit by oil lamps and small, portable lights, so they glowed golden like paper lanterns. Braziers had been lit on the outer rim of the camp and brass storm cressets hung from poles. Figures moved about in the fire-lit spaces of the inner encampment. Voices came out of the night, along with the smell of cooking.

  Two perimeter sentries, their patrol circuits crossing, paused to exchange a few words, then carried on along their routes, moving away from one another.

  One paused and looked around. There was no sign of his comrade. The grey desert flat stretched away, empty, into the night.

  He began to retrace his path, about to call out, and that became the final action of his life: a foot raised to take a step, his mouth open to call a name.

  Mkoll lowered the body into the dust and wiped his knife. He nodded once, though his fellow infiltrator was invisible to him.

  Low to the ground, Mkoll scurried forwards, dropping onto his belly for the last stretch where the lamp light extended.

  Veiled by the dust-shroud of a tent, Mkoll rose, and stepped carefully over the guy wires. He waited as two thuggish men with scarred faces passed by. They were talking casually. One had a long-necked bottle.

  When they’d gone, he slipped between two more of the tents and entered a darker area where the vehicles were parked. Half-tracks and cargo-8 transports made angular blue shadows against the sky. Mkoll dropped down, slid under the first vehicle, and went to work. Feeling, blind, he found the fuel line and cut a slit in it with his warknife. In under three minutes, two other vehicles had been bled in the same way, their fuel loads slowly, quietly pattering away onto the dust beneath them.

  Mkoll prised the fuel cap off one of the crippled trucks and packed the pipe with strips of material sliced off the hem of his camo-cloak. Then he poked a strip of det-tape into the wadding with his finger.

  He wondered how far Eszrah had got.

  Mkoll fixed his warknife to the lug of his rifle and tore the ignition patch off the det-tape.

  II

  A clammy sensation of evil engulfed them. The night air seemed to bristle with it, like a static charge. Twenzet started to moan, but Criid clamped his mouth shut with her good hand. She looked at Hark. His eyes were wide. A pulse was pounding in his temple.

  Below them, the commotion amongst the Blood Pact warriors had died away. They were standing stock still, gazing into the distance with their rifles in their hands. They could feel it too. There was no sound except the idling murmur of the tank engines and the dying crackle of flames as the Valkyrie burned out.

  The night wind stirred. The ground, the air, reality itself, seemed to tremble for a second.

  They heard howling. It was a pitiful, yowling noise, like an animal in pain, and it appeared to come from all around them. The Blood Pact warriors started, turning, hunting for the source.

  They began shouting again as they realised the howling was coming from one of their own. The stricken warrior tore off his helmet and his grotesk. He was shaking, as if experiencing the initial spasms of a seizure. Two of his comrades moved to help him.

  He killed them.

  His autorifle made a hard, cracking sound in the night air. He kept firing, cutting down two more men who were backing away, waving their arms in protest. Stray shots pinged off the sponson armour of the nearest tank. The tank commander, yelling in rage, stood up in his turret hatch and shot the howling maniac with his pistol. The man flopped over, arched his back, and died.

  The officer continued shouting as he climbed down from his machine. Warriors who had ducked for cover when the shooting started slowly began to rise to their feet. The officer strode over to the lunatic’s corpse, fiercely rebuking each cowering soldier as he went by. He stood over the body and put four more rounds into it.

  A blinding fork of electrical discharge leapt out of the corpse and struck the officer’s pistol with a shower of sparks. The officer was hurled backwards through the air by the massive shock. He hit the track guards of his tank with such force, his back snapped. The electrical discharge, blue-white like ice and as bright as a las-bolt, lit up the tank’s hull in a crackling, sizzling display of raw voltage. Then it leapt again, striking the nearest warrior in the face.

  The warrior bucked and twitched as the power overloaded his central nervous system. The energy let him go and, before his limp body had time to topple over, the forking blue charge had jumped to another victim, then another, then another. Each one died, his last seconds spent as a spastic, dancing puppet.

  The commander of the second tank emerged from his hatch and started yelling at the rest of the foot troops to fall back. In the general panic, no one noticed the four, long barrels of the flak tank’s cannon array slowly lowering to the horizontal plane.

  The flak tank opened fire with a deafening, prolonged blurt of noise. Its quad autocannons were built for anti-aircraft operations, and delivered streams of explosive shells at an extremely high rate of fire. All four guns unloaded into the rear of the nearest tank from a range of about ten metres.

  Despite its heavy plating and monumental chassis strength, the larger tank shredded. Its hull ripped like wet paper, and a billion slivers of torn metal flew out in a lethal blizzard. Less than a second after the tank began to disintegrate, auguring flak shells found its magazine.

  The sun came out, and everything died.

  The overpressure of the gigantic blast knocked Hark and Twenzet off the top of the rock. Criid managed to hold on. An expanding fireball raced out and scorched the air above her, and dust slammed out in a shockwave wall. Small pieces of debris and rock rained down out of the night sky.

  Criid got up. The area below was a litter of fire. All three armoured fighting machines had been obliterated.

  ‘Hark?’ she yelled. ‘Hark?’

  He was below her in the shadow of the rock. Twenzet was sprawled beside him. Hark clambered to his feet.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he shouted up.

  ‘I can see lights!’ she yelled back, pointing to the south. ‘I can see lights coming this way!’

  Hark got up onto a boulder and stared. Vehicles were approaching fast, their lights bobbing as they rode over the dunes and scree on their tracks.

  ‘Throne help us,’ Hark murmured, and wondered if his micro-bead still worked.

  III

  Rawne could hear the squealing rasp of flamers echoing down the tunnel from the main gate. Ghosts, many of them wounded, were pouring back out of the tunnel into the base chamber all around him.

  ‘Obel!’

  Obel limped up the steps to the first landing where Rawne stood. ‘Main gate’s done for. It was all well and good while we had ammo left, but…’ he shrugged and looked at Rawne. ‘They’re leading in with flamers, sir. We had no choice but to pull back.’

  Rawne nodded. He had one clip left for his pistol. He was already holding his warknife.

  ‘Anyone with ammo left, send them back to defend the field station for as long as possible. There are men there we can’t move. Everyone else digs in. Tell them to spread out and go deep into the place. Find a corner, a nook, a hiding place, and stay there until something comes their way that they can kill.’

  Obel saluted and turned to spread the instructions to his men.

  ‘Beltayn!’ Rawne roared. Below him, the vox-officers were packing up the last of the casters. ‘Get them all clear, now!’ Rawne yelled.

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘Kolea?’

  ‘Rawne?’ Kolea replied over the link. His signal was patchy, and washed out by lots of background noise.

  ‘How does it stand?’

  ‘Lost east four, five and seven. It’s hand to hand in the tunnels and getting worse. They’re pouring in. Any word from topside?’

  ‘Negative,’ said Rawne. The signals from Kamori and the other officers running the cliff repulse had gone ominously quiet about six minutes earlier.

  Rawne looked up at the deep stone vault of the base chamber, the vast wooden staircase rising like a mature nalwood in its centre, its landings extending into the adjacent hallways on each level like branches. Ghosts were running in all directions, fleeing into the house, carrying packs of supplies, caster-sets and wounded comrades. They were heading for bolt holes, for sub cellars and attics, for corridors and stairwells where they could make their final stands, alone or in small groups, stabbing their straight silvers in defiance at death as it overran the house at the end of the world. Whatever corner of Hinzerhaus they went to, Rawne hoped they would find endings to their lives that were as quick as they were brave. One thing was certain: none of them would find a way out.

  There was no more time for reflection. The vocal roar of the enemy outside threatened to tear down the house all on its own.

  Flames scoured into the base chamber from the tunnel. On the lower steps, Mkfeyd, Mosark and Vril were caught and engulfed. Their thrashing forms crashed backwards down the stairs. Flames caught at the wooden staircase and scorched the stained brown floor panels. An abandoned vox-caster caught light and blew up.

  ‘Move!’ Rawne yelled. ‘Move!’

  Another belch of flame came rushing into the base chamber. Then the first of the Blood Pact flame-troopers appeared, sooty devils in heavy smocks wielding long firelances. Storm troops followed them, cracking shots up into the landings. Wooden steps splintered. Railings exploded like matchwood. Struck by las-fire, a Ghost plunged from an upper landing.

  Rawne turned and fired his pistol at the invading figures. The last remaining troopers around him, Beltayn included, opened fire with their handguns as they retreated up the staircase. Rawne’s first shots clipped a flame-trooper, and he went over, his lance thrashing out of control like a fire-drake, scorching several warriors and forcing them back.

  Blood Pact gunfire filled the air with ribbons and darts of light. Tokar, standing right beside Rawne, fell backwards, the top of his skull blown off. Folore collapsed on the first landing, almost cut in two by autofire. Pabst was hit so hard he smashed backwards through the landing rail and dropped out of sight.

  ‘Get back! Back!’ Rawne shouted. He scrambled back up the staircase towards the second landing, pushing men ahead of him. ‘Out of the chamber! Out of the chamber!’

  Creach fell on his hands and knees, blood gushing from his mouth. Beltayn tried to pick him up and carry him on. A hail of shots cut them both down.

  ‘Bastards!’ Rawne bawled, and fired down into the advancing raiders. He reached Beltayn and Creach. The latter was dead. Beltayn had been hit in the side and thigh, and his uniform was soaked with blood. He blinked up at Rawne, his face peppered with blood spots.

  ‘Something’s awry,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been shot you silly bastard,’ Rawne told him. He started to hoist Beltayn up.

  ‘Major!’ Rattundo yelled from a few steps higher. The Belladon was firing down over Rawne’s head.

  Rawne swung round, Beltayn over his shoulder, and saw the Blood Pact storm troops thundering up the flight behind him. He shot the first one in the belly, and the second one in the hand and the forehead. The third fired his carbine from the hip. A round creased Rawne’s cheek with stunning force. Behind him, Rattundo took the full force of the burst and fell against the stair rail.

  Rawne fired again, but his pistol was finally dead. With a bellow of fury, he hurled it at the storm-trooper and bounced the heavy sidearm off the man’s face with enough force to knock him over.

  Hands grabbed at Rawne and Beltayn from behind. Rerval, Nehn and Garond dragged them back up the staircase to the third landing. Bonin and Leyr, both of them firing a laspistol in each hand, hammered shots down the steps to cover them.

  They made it into a side hallway and began to head in the direction of the field station. Nehn and Rerval took Beltayn from Rawne and carried him between them. The rattle of gunfire rolled after them, interspersed with the crump of grenades and the rasp of flamers. The air filled with the stench of burning.

  They’re going to burn the place down around us, Rawne thought, burn us like rats. And all that’ll be left of us will be dry skulls in a dusty valley.

  ‘Keep going,’ Corbec said.

  Rawne stopped and turned.

  ‘Come the feth on, major!’ Bonin yelled. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Rawne stared into Corbec’s twinkling eyes.

  ‘You’re just a ghost,’ he said.

  ‘No such thing as just a Ghost,’ Corbec replied.

  Then Corbec wasn’t there. Las-bolts whipped along the hallway past Rawne. He started to run after the others. Blood Pact storm-troopers thundered down the hallway behind him, yelling and firing.

  Rawne saw Daur, Haller and Caober ahead of him. They were facing him, blocking the hallway.

  ‘Back!’ Rawne yelled as he closed on them. ‘Get back!’

  ‘Get down,’ Daur replied.

  IV

  The parked vehicles at the edge of the encampment went up in a satisfyingly dramatic whoosh of flame. In the seconds that followed, the site went into a frenzy. Enemy troopers and support crews ran in all directions, shouting and assembling extinguisher gear. The glare from the blazing vehicles lit the whole camp and threw long, leaping shadows. A fourth vehicle caught fire as flames raced along the fuel-soaked dust.

  In all the commotion, few of the rushing enemy personnel noticed that some of them were falling down. Iron darts shot silently from the shadows. A trooper fell on his face. A mechanic with a hose tumbled onto his side. A junior officer flopped back into the side-screen of a tent.

  Eszrah kept moving. Weaving from point of cover to point of cover, he fired his quarrels one at a time and made every one count. Where possible, he reclaimed his darts, wrenching them out of dead flesh, and slotted them back into his reynbow’s barrel. He ran past a large tent, pausing briefly to fire two bolts through the backlit canvas. The silhouetted men inside convulsed and went sprawling.

  Eszrah kicked over braziers as he went, rolling the sparking, sputtering cans onto ground sheets and into the hems of tents where the spilled coals ignited the canvas. A warrior with a trench axe came barrelling out of one tent, and took a wild swing at the Nihtgane. Eszrah thumped a quarrel into his sternum at point-blank range.

  Eszrah ran on. Behind him, another large blast split the night.

  Mkoll was employing the first of his tube charges. He took out a storage tent with it and then ran on in the direction of the vox-mast. Every time an enemy figure appeared in his path, he fired snapshots from the hip, knocking them down. A few rounds of fire came his way as the enemy began to gather their wits.

  Mkoll ducked behind a row of tents. At each one, he slit the back sheet open with his bayonet and shot at anyone inside. Halfway through this surgical, methodical exercise, Blood Pact troopers appeared at the end of the tent row and opened fire on him.

  Las-rounds zipped past him. Mkoll leapt into a tent through the slit he had just ripped. Inside, an officer with a gruesome mass of scar-tissue for a face was reaching for his bolt pistol. Mkoll broke his head with the butt of his rifle and kept running. More las-rounds scorched indiscriminately through the flapping canvas wall behind him.

  He came out through the front of the tent. A hard round hit him in the left shoulder and knocked him over. Mkoll rolled and raked off a quick burst of fire on auto that did for the pair of enemy troopers rushing at him.

  He got up again. Several tents were alight. Random shouting and blurts of gunfire echoed around the camp. He heard pursuers crashing in through the tent behind him, and tossed his grenade in through the flaps. There was a flash and the sides of the tent bulged and tore. Smoke gusted out through the rips.

  He had three tube-charges left. Enough for the vox-mast, he thought.

  The encampment’s main shelters, a pair of large prefabs, lay close to the mast, which was mounted on a lashed-down field carriage platform. Mkoll reasoned that while he was still alive, he could silence both the mast and the bastard issuing orders through it.

  He ran towards the prefabs. As he ran, he realised, without a shred of doubt, that something was still urging him forwards. Something was telling him the prefabs were more important than anything else.

  Eszrah was out of bolts. His last shot had slain a large mechanic who had tried to attack him with a sledgehammer. Eszrah dropped the reynbow and drew Gaunt’s sword. It felt clumsy and unfamiliar. Swords had never been part of his arsenal. Still running, he lit the blade and felt it throb with power. An enemy trooper emerged from behind a burning tent, and Eszrah cut him down without breaking stride. The blade went clean through the man’s torso. Two more troopers appeared, and one saw the partisan in time to squeeze off a shot with his rifle. The round ripped through Eszrah’s left side just above the waist. Before either of them could take another shot, he was into them, swinging the bright blade. The first slice cut a rifle in half and the second decapitated its owner. Eszrah shoulder barged the other man onto the ground and ran him through. As a swordsman, he made up in efficiency what he lacked in finesse.