‘Shut up please, Larks!’
‘Larkin, shut your mouth!’ Gaunt barks.
Larkin makes a sound, a mewling sob. Fear’s inside him, deep as a bayonet.
The voices are out there in the dark and the rain. The words seem to move from one speaker to the next. Dead speakers. Broken throats.
‘We don’t understand why you didn’t come. We don’t understand. We don’t know who we are any more. We don’t know where we belong.’
Gaunt looks at Corbec.
‘We getting out?’ he asks.
‘Through the back way?’
‘Whatever way we can find.’
‘What happened to holding this place until reinforcements arrive?’ asks Corbec.
‘No one’s coming this way that we want to meet,’ says Gaunt.
Corbec turns to the advance force.
‘Get ready to move,’ he orders.
The voice pleads, ‘Where do we belong? We don’t know where we belong.’
‘It’s Tanith!’ Larkin cries out. ‘It’s the old place calling out to us!’
Gaunt grabs him, and pushes him against a wall.
‘Listen to me,’ he says. ‘Larkin? Larkin? Listen to me! Get yourself under control! Something worse than death happened here, something much worse!’
‘What?’ Larkin whines, wanting to know and not wanting to know.
‘Something Tanith was spared, do you understand me?’
Larkin makes the sobbing sound again. Gaunt lets him go, lets him sag against the wall. He turns, and the men are all around him. Mkoll’s right there, Mkvenner too, looking as if they’re going to step in and pull Gaunt and Larkin apart. The Tanith men are all staring at him. No one’s looking away.
‘Do you understand?’ Gaunt asks them. ‘All of you? Any of you?’
‘We understand what you did,’ one of them says.
‘Oh, this isn’t helping anything, lads!’ Corbec rumbles.
Gaunt ignores Corbec and laughs a brutal laugh. ‘I’m a destroyer of worlds, am I? You credit me with too much power. Indecent amounts of it. And anyway, I don’t much care what you think of me.’
‘Let’s go! Let’s go now,’ says Corbec.
‘There’s only one thing I want you to understand,’ Gaunt says.
‘What’s that?’ asks Larkin, his mouth trembling.
‘The worst thing you can imagine,’ says Gaunt, ‘is not the worst thing. Not by a long way.’
In the open, the rain is heavy, like a curtain. Caffran knows he’s never going to make it. The straggly figures hunting him are closing in, and they’ve been calling to him for the last ten minutes, using the voices of people he used to know, twisted by bad vox reception.
‘We don’t know why you left us,’ the voices plead. ‘Where do we belong? We don’t know where we belong.’
Caffran’s feet are sore. He’s got the pistol in his hand. Its clip is empty. He’s killed three more men on his way out of the ruins.
The voices call out, ‘We’ve forgotten what we’re supposed to be.’
He’s reached the ramparts of the hills, with the city grave at his back. He kneels down. The Imperial camp is somewhere ahead, below and far away. He can’t see it, because rain and night shadows are filling the valley, but he knows it must be there. Too far, too far.
There are signal flares in his message satchel. He’s pulling them out as the heavy raindrops bounce off his shoulders and his scalp. Does he need to find higher ground? There’ll be obs positions looking this way, won’t there? Spotters and look-outs?
The voices call to him.
He stands and fires a flare. It makes a hollow bang and soars up into the wet air, a white phosphor star with a gauzy tail, like a drawing of a comet in an old manuscript. It maxes altitude, and then starts to descend, slow, trembling, drifting.
Caffran’s watching it, the other flare in his hand ready to fire. He knows there’s no point.
The flare looks too much like the silent lightning.
There are figures on the hillside around him. They come towards him.
They call out to him.
Bonin locates the remains of a depository entrance in the south-western corner of the data library, and they exit, via the basement stacks. They make their break out from there.
The basement is flooded, up to their hips. They have to cannibalise an RPG shell to make a charge to blow the hatch open. Then they’re out into the street, into the rain, and they’re drawing heavy fire right from the start.
Gaunt orders bounding cover, and they push along a street from position to position. They stay in good formation, despite the level of fire coming at them. No one switches back to full auto, despite the temptation.
Even so, the advance is pushing the limits of the ammo supplies it’s packing.
They begin to string out into a longer and longer line. They make it to the circus where two dead boulevards cross, and pick their way through the underwalks of the crippled tramway shelters to achieve the far side. Volleys of shots rain off the crumpled metal roofs of the shelters. The objective is the arterial route that joins the eastern boulevard. Gaunt and Corbec tell Blane to push ahead and edge back to bring the rear of the line up.
The advance is halfway across the circus when it’s rushed by enemy ambushers. The ambushers come out of one of the underwalks that looked like it was choked with rubble. They’re armed like trench raiders with clubs and mauls and butcher hooks. They hit the Tanith advance in the midsection of its bounding spread. They rush Gaunt as he’s trying to direct the force forwards.
Gaunt goes down and his head strikes something. He’s too stunned to know what’s happened. A raider swings a hook to split his head and finish him.
Mkoll intercepts the raider, and guts him with his silver warknife. He meets the next one head-on, somehow evades a wide swing from a spiked mace, and rams the knife up through the throat so the point exits the apex of the skull.
Corbec’s also been caught in the initial rush. He takes his attacker over with him, and breaks his neck using body weight and a wrestling hold he’d learned watching his old dad compete at the County Pryze fair.
He looks up in time to see Mkoll pull the knife out. Blood ribbons up in a semicircle, like a red streamer in the rain, and the raider curves backwards in the opposite direction. Through the sheeting rain, Corbec can see more raiders coming out of the underwalk at Mkoll. Corbec’s lasrifle is wedged under the corpse of the man he just killed. He yells Mkoll’s name. He yells idiot and feth too, for good measure. Mkoll’s las is strapped over his shoulder. He’s facing three men with just his knife.
There’s the whine of a small but powerful fusion motor, the unmistakable whir of a chainsword firing up. Gaunt comes in beside the scout. Gaunt’s got blood down the side of his face and his cap’s gone missing. The three raiders are too close to Mkoll for Gaunt to risk a shot with his rifle or his bolter.
He takes a head clean off with his chainsword. The neck parts in a bloodmist venting from the blade’s moving edge. Corbec can see from Gaunt’s stance and the way he presents that he’s been trained in sword work to the highest degree. Covered in dust and blood, on a slope of rubble, fighting feral ghouls, he still looks like a duelling master.
Gaunt lunges and puts the chainsword through the torso of a second raider, freeing Mkoll enough to tackle the last of the group in quick order. More are running in from the underwalk. Gaunt rotates, extending, and slices the chainsword around in a wide, straight-armed arc that neatly removes the top of a skull like a lid.
Corbec’s on his feet. He pulls his lasrifle in against his gut and flips the toggle over. Then he rakes the mouth of the underwalk. Full auto flash lights up the rubble. Figures twist and jerk. He exhausts a power clip, and then lobs his last grenade down the underwalk to take care of any stragglers.