TWENTY-FOUR

Vauga, the Imperium called him.

Regara had read the man’s file, thin as it was. A damogaur, he had a reputation for sadism and ritualistic murder. Not uncommon amongst the Pacted, but Vauga also registered on the Assignment, though his actual rating on the Morianic scale had been redacted by the Ordos. According to Militarum intelligence, he had occultist ties to a minor Sanguinary faction called the Tongues of Tcharesh and was allegedly a former student of Heritor Asphodel, or a petty imitator. Claims differed on that part. Though the late magister had been slain during the Verghast conflict over twenty years ago, a war in which the Bluebloods had played a significant role, men like Vauga ensured his legacy endured.

Vauga had come to Gnostes and his army stood between the Volpone and passage through Mireland.

And the first Regara knew of it was the red swathe.

It crept under the mist, a veil beneath a veil, heavy at first then rising as a bloody fog. It unfurled across the army with eager virulence like rippling red fabric. An Ohrek died first, choking on the poison before he could lift his mask. He fell back as if shot, his death caught at the edge of Regara’s magnocular lens.

The major turned, only quick enough to see the scout’s splayed fingers swallowed by the swathe. Others followed, gurgling and rasping their last breaths, a dozen or more by Regara’s count, before the order sang out.

‘Masks! Masks!’

It resonated through the ranks, men dispersed amongst the severed trunks relaying fear down the line as sure as any contagion. A gas ­attack, that insidious horror and the promise of an ignominious death. Fingers trembled, some slipped…

Regara pulled on his rebreather and heard the quickening of his fear rebounded back at him through its plastek confines. Already stifling in the sundered forest, it only grew worse behind the partially fogged lenses he now looked through.

He raised Culcis on the internal vox.

‘Sound off, lieutenant.’

‘Vox good. Vox good, sir.’

It came back crisp, close. That was something at least. He reached the platoon, took command. Shiller had third and fourth platoon and huffed across the closed-system vox, slurring his vowels.

‘Bloody gas, the blackguards.’

Regara’s response was curt, as it needed to be. ‘Captain, signal the advance.’

A horn blast rang out, Shiller’s breath filtered through a facial vent. Then two more. Then they were moving to engage, quickly adapting from guard to assault positions. The well-drilled Volpone doing what they did best.

The Agrians fell into disarray, many fleeing the gas attack, their masks standard-issue and only partially effective. A few strays collided with the Volpone units, who barged them aside, putting their well-nourished physiques to harsh effect. Others rallied, a handful of cossacks and their golova maintaining order. In either case, the Diggers were in retreat.

Regara pushed on, unwilling to be distracted. His only instinct was to push forwards, and engage. The world had feathered around the edges, sound and light dictated by rebreather mask, perception shrunk to a pair of ocular lenses and the death rattles of men too slow or too ignorant in the face of danger.

He couldn’t find the enemy at first, the air was too thick, too red.

Las-fire whipped out, ending all that. Sporadic at first, it chimed against the armour of the Pardus tanks, leaving burn scars but little else, then intensifying like gentle rain that grew into a deluge, irresistible once it peaked.

Then Regara saw them, edging from the mist, the red swathe parting like some gossamer veil of hell admitting its daemons unto the world. Brutish, scarred, they wore iron helmets and spiked metal cuirasses over oxblood flak armour and uniforms. Grotesks glistened, the faces of old nightmares, anointed with blood. The air had become an eldritch gloaming, soft light lending the Pact’s advance an eerie, unreal quality.

Vanguard forces had engaged, some hand to hand, such was the suddenness and proximity of the attack. Mostly Ohrek and the scout cadres. A few Talpa, the vicious bastards and some plucky Agrians caught on a limb when the attack hit. Cries ululated, dulled and flattened by the crimson fog, like men dying at the bottom of a well or in some half-heard ethereal place abutting reality.

They had to push up and reach the beleaguered vanguard. Consolidate. Fight back.

A stray bead flashed Regara’s shoulder, searing his uniform. He snarled.

‘Return fire!’

Savage light erupted from the Volpone ranks, and the air succumbed to heat and fury. Regara sweltered, the mask sticking to his skin, adhering so tightly he thought it had melted, become part of him. He saw a private wrench off his rebreather, suffocating in his own terror. And then suffocating for real, spewing blood and matter as his organs liquified and his flesh ran like wax. Others wizened, their emaciation evident in the concavity of their cheeks. Reduced to husks before they fell. Every death held a different grim story.

The red swathe funnelled on, crashing like a dread wave against the Militarum forces. A primal hunger drove it, a terrible animus that wanted only suffering and pain. It drank of it, expanding, reaching…

‘Throne, it’s coming for us.’

Regara heard Shiller over the vox, willed him to gather his bloody wits.

‘Fight them!’ he roared, urging on the Bluebloods. ‘Get to the vanguard, form up and make ranks. Fight!’

He didn’t know how many the Pact had but he doubted it was equal to the Volpone and their auxiliaries. The ambush levelled things, but only for a time. Restore order, retaliate with strength and the battle was theirs. Gazing through steamed-up plastek, he saw his rallying point.

The tanks.

The Pardus had closed all hatches, hermetically sealing themselves up in their war machines, but they were strung out, too far ahead of the main forces and vulnerable. A few fired off sponson guns, but the swathe was fouling auto-targeters and most of their shots skewed astray. Turrets boomed, as Ganza fought to make their artillery superiority count, sending spouts of dirt and water pluming. Bodies too.

Out of the fog, another threat. They ran low and fast, like rats. Lighter armoured than the other Pacters. Regara shot at one but it jinked away, as if presciently warned. Metal flashed, serrated and sharp. Scarred hands gripped a grenade. An explosion bloomed, the side of a battle tank blown out in a cascade of smoke and shrapnel. No one staggered out. The crew died in their seats, drowned by the swathe.

Ganza pressed on, his Conqueror trying to forge a firing line, but the road the Agrians had raised was narrow. Tank tracks fouled on mud or ran up against hefty stumps and stalled. It was a mess. A second tank blew. Fuel reserves cooked off. Regara threw a hand up to ward off the sudden flare of light, a powerful blast knocking him onto his back.

He felt a hand grab his forearm and lift. Culcis looked back at him, eyes firm through the dirt-flecked lenses of his mask.

‘To the Pavis,’ grated Regara, still catching his breath. The tanks were being torn apart.

Another explosion lit up the twilight, casting dead faces in monochrome. Long shadows stretched like rubber, only to recoil a few moments later.

Aramis ran through the dark and light, her troops at her heels. She felt every ache anew, every blow she had taken in the ring. Throne, it hurt like the hells to push herself, but if she didn’t then brave men would die. Her platoons ranged across the far left flank, the captain’s hurried route an intercept with the Volpone core. But they were too far out and needed to close.

A few skirmishers roamed this far but they were outriders and soon fell back before determined Imperial opposition. Aramis cut one down that had dared to loiter in her path, slitting them from crotch to crown. Burnt meat tanged the air, muddied through her breather.

A squadron of Sentinels advanced with them, the long-limbed engines better suited to the terrain than the bulkier Pardus engines but not as hardy. A missile struck the chassis of the forward-most walker, turning it to scrap and leaving the dismembered legs standing ponderously bereft of their body. Underslung multi-lasers from the surviving machines stuttered in reply, raking the Pacters and pushing them back. She heard a regimental priest shout a blessing to the Emperor.

Aramis kept pace with the walkers, her breath huffing inside her mask. It was hard going, slogging through the mire, boots splashing, slipping on mud. One man fell, impaled himself on a fallen branch. She didn’t go back or even slow. They had to drive on, consolidate with the core. The ambush had come at the worst moment, as all ambuscades invariably do. The Volpone were strung out, disorientated. Coalesce and they could mount a viable counter-attack. Remain broken up as they were and the enemy would take them piecemeal.

‘Not on my damn watch,’ she growled, huffing through her mask, then louder to her men, ‘Move, move!’

She had eighth and ninth platoon of the 86th, Henessey at her side. Her men shot on the hip, lasguns held low with one hand bracing the stock, chattering on rapid fire. Then she saw the flank of the enemy army revealed before her and the robed magister at its heart, and her objective changed.

She vox-cast orders to all her platoon leaders and sergeants.

‘Priority target in the field, on my marker. Volpone glory!’

Culcis knew these warriors. Bastards, every one. He’d fought them on Titus, and old memories of that war stirred in his gut like rotten oysters.

Blood Pact grenadiers. Jaegans. Each one had a dead man’s trigger, designed for shock and awe. Different by degrees to the more formal military stylings of the Death Brigades, the Jaegans roved in loosely dispersed packs and had more in kind with their ancestral hunter-barbarian forebears than most of the common Pacted. Long-blades for close work, akin to a dirk or trench knife, and a bandolier of grenades. Disorientate, terrify, fall back. Repeat.

Against the Pardus tanks, they would wreak utter havoc.

A Jaegan slipped out of the fog and he nearly missed it. An instinctive shot took the warrior in the throat. He went up like a tripped landmine, broken apart like kindling.

Ten more feet of hoofing through the mud and first and second platoon reached the Pardus. Six more tanks had been destroyed, their hulls agape, the crew within shot or gassed to death. Twenty or more remained in the vanguard, left in train to defend themselves or in the throes of trying to escape. Culcis followed Regara through a graveyard of vehicles, their inner parts spilled from their mortal wounds like organs. Fires lit a false night, redolent with burnt flesh and hair. Risking a glance over his shoulder, he saw Hanmar and the others coming up behind. Even Darian, the lad pale behind murky eye-lenses but his eyes fierce.

‘Protect the tanks,’ bellowed Culcis, his voice muffled even across the vox, ‘then consolidate this position.’

A pack of Jaegans sprang into a side alley made by the flanks of two sundered vehicles, knives out and bloody. Culcis fired off four quick shots, all mortal wounds. Another six made it through and Darian got one, spearing it through the chest with his las-beam. Regara took another, a bolt-shell turning the grenadier’s upper torso to blasted meat. The rest went for the major, having spent their payloads and trying to take out an enemy officer.

They hadn’t reckoned on Hanmar. His antique blade danced like silver light and it was over in a rapid flurry of deft sword strokes. Four dead Jaegans lay piled up around him. Seconds had lapsed, the merest distraction dealt with.

They moved on, sixty men or more weaving between the scorched-black carriages, a hull-down labyrinth of narrow avenues and dead ends of torn metal. Other Jaegans roamed the cluster of tanks too, darting away after delivering their devastating payloads. The Volpone rooted them out, firing snapshots down the false thoroughfares of adjacent vehicle walls.

It took almost fifteen minutes before they cleared out the rest of the enemy grenadiers. A few scattered back to the lines, using the red swathe to their advantage, but the fog was thinning, its integrity decaying. Rake and Dresk chased after them with rounds from the heavy stubber but caught only a handful of stragglers.

‘Really crawling out of the woodwork, major,’ commented Rake, as he slammed another box mag into the heavy stubber’s breech.

‘Like roaches, only uglier,’ added Dresk, his eye pressed along his iron sights.

‘As ugly as Greiss, anyway,’ said Hanmar, and most of the men laughed.

Regara didn’t. Culcis saw his face as severe at hot iron, his gaze searing.

‘A sortie, nothing more,’ he said, though the las-storm had ebbed in recent minutes. ‘The bulk of the enemy are up ahead. We have to push up behind the Pavis.’

A hatch was thrown open, arresting further orders. Ganza leaned out of his Conqueror, face flushed and angry. He spared a glance for the Volpone but the colonel’s blood was up and he bellowed an order to advance on the main army emerging from the fog.

‘Armour forward!’ Chest puffed, chin up, he had an aristocratic sneer to put any Blueblood to shame.

Enough makeshift road had been laid for three tanks abreast and Ganza led the Pavis like he was the point of their armoured spear. He drew and levelled his sword, a fine silver-bladed spatha with a chased gold hilt, evoking the spirit of a cavalry charge of old. Engines roaring, increasing pace, the Conqueror rode hard, its battle cannon thundering in rapid succession. Hefty divots chewed through the Blood Pact ranks, scattering bodies and turning men to mist. Amongst the infantry platoons, stalk tanks roamed, and their pulse lasers lashed at the Pavis armour but found it hardy and near-inviolable.

‘He’ll ride right through them, major.’ Culcis had seen the fury in Ganza’s eyes. The indignation. He was a proud man, and he had been battered for much of this war. Now he yearned to hit back, to clench his mailed fist and smash aside whatever was in his way.

‘Get on his heels, then. We’ll ride the cover the tanks provide, use them to reach the Pact. On them, on them!’

The order rang down the line and companies came together, pushing hard. Slowly, slowly, the Volpone and their allies started to consolidate. Shiller’s horn clarioned, the infantry flooding after the tanks to exploit the imminent break through the Archenemy lines and a moving shield wall.

Culcis ran on, caught in the surging madness.

The Pact held, that was the thing that struck Aramis as she came in on their flank. They occupied a defensive position, a partially raised embankment with a low revetment ringed around it. Heavy shelling had ripped out sections, the craters swiftly filled, the dead either trampled or heaped up like makeshift sandbags. Razor wire glistened, knife-sharp and bitter. Aramis reckoned on at least five hundred men, barring any losses from the Pardus barrage.

Hit the flank at the same time as the core of the army, everyone coming together as one. Overwhelm in one swift assault, that was the plan. She had made good ground, her and her troops. She felt it in the burn of her muscles, the sweat down her back. And there was still that magister to consider.

For now though, her eye was drawn elsewhere as the Pavis came on with ironclad fury. Throne, but Ganza rained down on them like the Nine Devils of Horus, his armoured stallions given their head, voices crying thunder and death.

Yet the Pact still held, dug in but bleeding, weathering the storm. They replied in kind, heavy weapons chugging out rounds. One of the tanks suffered an unlucky hit, a blow to its tracks that turned it sharply and exposed its lighter flank. A collimated beam from a battery of lascannons skewered it and sent fire spitting into the sky from the resulting explosion.

The rest drove on, glory in their hearts. A few stray volleys came her way, and Aramis gave the order to take cover and advance, before her platoons took too much fire.

She was not alone. A lieutenant, Fenk she thought was his name, had two platoons in his charge. Nearly a hundred, and the priests in addition to that. The main thrust moving up behind the armour had five times that. Another hundred or more on the other flank, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Barbastian. God-Emperor, it had looked simpler on a map. Three forces, two ranging wide. Run the flanks, meet in the centre. Textbook. Here, in the mud and the terror, it was anything but.

Fenk sent a look her way, and she gave the signal to move up.

‘We take their flank,’ she told Henessey, needing to voice her thoughts, to hear something other than her rasping breath from the pain in her ribs, ‘and keep on going, roll right across them until we hit Regara’s contingent. If Barbastian does the same on his side, we’ll crush these bastards in an Imperial vice.’

‘Volpone glory, captain,’ replied Henessey, his face almost as pale as alabaster.

‘Volpone glory,’ said Aramis, slashing down with her sword and ordering the charge.

His legs felt leaden, his overtaxed muscles burning from the effort of hefting the four pounds of mud clinging to each of his boots.

They never told you that, thought Darian, as the las-beams zipped overhead like lethal fireflies and he tried to keep the tanks between him and an early demise. The drudgery of war, the sheer mindless slogging before you even get to fight. Throne, he’d seen soldiers die trying to cleave the mud off their boots, before even raising a lasgun. Ignominy the reward for succumbing to the drudge.

He had lost count of how many of the enemy he had killed. He remembered the first one in this fight, her grotesk smiling in parody of her savagery. She had Guard fatigues, stolen from some corpse or else she was a traitor, though he didn’t recognise the uniform. Daubed in blood and unnameable filth, he doubted it resembled what it had once represented. He had shot her in the face, the split mask revealing she was female. Such hellish fury in her bloody eyes and mouth. It had made a mess of her, that first las-beam, cauterising skin and burning flesh. Parts of her lips had fused but still she raged. A shot spat from her weapon, a bullet that whipped by Darian’s ear, a high-pitched insect buzz that seared the lobe. His second shot killed her, the las-bolt finding her eye and bursting it in a welter of vitreous matter. It cored out her skull, flash-frying the brain inside.

He’d barely had the time to register her death before he had killed his second, and his third. And on they went.

It felt different to Lodden. That had been frantic, terrifying, but it had had a shape to it, a scheme he could understand. God-Emperor, he would never forget the Traitor Astartes, the smell and heat and presence of it, but this was another thing entirely. He had heard the term ‘meat grinder’ many times in his tenure as a mil-serve around the camps. Only now in the sucking morass of Mireland did he fully understand what that meant.

The tanks were advancing at pace, Colonel Ganza exhorting his machines to charge. Everyone was charging, all running towards the Pact army, towards death, hearts afire with glory and adrenaline. Darian felt it spike in his chest, that urgent thunder of it running through his veins. It overcame the drudge, kept his legs moving, gave him strength he didn’t know he possessed.

Through gaps in the armoured shield wall, he caught glimpses of the horde beyond. They occupied a raised, defensive position, ranked up in firing lines and giving the Pardus hell. At the centre, surrounded by the stoutest defences and a cadre of heavy-armoured Death Brigade, stood a robed figured. He had a mix of flak armour and mesh chainveil beneath, his grotesk a much more ornate version of the ones worn by his cohorts. Every scrap of bare, muscular skin bore the evidence of scarification. This man was a damogaur, an officer of the Pact, and in this fight, their leader.

He climbed the reinforced revetments as the tanks began to close, seemingly unperturbed by the massive ordnance, which unerringly bent around him or simply dissipated into iridescent powder. Darian squinted, sweat in his eyes, his vision retarded by the smearing on his goggles. It must have been the smear that tricked him into seeing that impossible shimmer distorting the air, that unearthly radiance that negated every shell, withered every blast. Not a field of any kind – Darian knew what those looked like and remembered the ozone reek after every ­activation. It wasn’t that. A force field left a mark, a sort of temporary imprint on the air, something that could be gauged and understood. Physics. This put him in mind of an opening, a doorway into another place, an unplace, like a reflection against glass. It remade the shells and energy blasts, or unmade them, as if they didn’t exist or had never been deadly munitions at all.

It only seemed to enrage Ganza, who drove ever harder as the gap between the Volpone infantry and the Pardus armour widened. He wanted to crush them, grind the enemy’s bodies under his tracks. Tank shock had broken heavy formations, Darian had read about it, but those were men or craven xenos – the damogaur had something unfathomable at his disposal. He inhabited both the real and the unreal.

And he wasn’t alone. A coven of hunched, robed women clambered up after him. They were tall despite their obvious disfigurement, their thin frames mummified in form-fitting leather. Each wore a grotesk like the rest of the Pacted, but theirs were narrower to match the angle of their faces. A sickle-shaped opening just below the nose revealed a slash of a mouth the colour of intestines.

His acolytes.

The damogaur raised his arms, hands reaching as if clutched around some imagery globe. The witches emulated him.

Lieutenant Culcis cried out just as the damogaur brought his hands together.

‘Bludvayne!’

Darian didn’t know what it meant but he figured it must be bad.

Red lightning sparked across the damogaur’s muscled body and the witches died as one, collapsing like empty cloaks that had slipped their coat hooks. The air resonated like a pane of glass about to shatter.

The tanks disintegrated, pushed together like a concertina. Metal folded like paper, turrets collapsed, tracks crumpled. Crewmen were reduced to mulch and ground bone.

It took a few seconds for the explosion to hit, a long drawn-out moment that lingered like an opera singer’s top note, dramatic and terrible all at once. Everything slowed in that sliver of a moment… Culcis springing off his heels to try to shield the major from the blast, Drake and Resk throwing their bodies to the ground, Hanmar falling to his knees as he began to pray…

Darian moved too, shrinking down instinctively, making himself small, turning his face from the firestorm.

The infantry charge collapsed, the tanks were all but gone. A split second of silence followed, then a roar, so loud it deafened meaning.

Then the earth fell away, plunging and shaking as a wave buffeted his body and cast him like a kite untethered into mist and shadows.