I scuttled up the barrier, aware of the sounds of fighting from below. I tried to calculate how far I had come. I was perhaps at the entrance to the Bazaar now, almost back where I started. I did not want to stick my head over the top and get it blown away so I inspected the cut in my leg for a moment, then glanced out into no-man’s-land. Billows of poisonous mist covered it, rolling slowly in my direction. I prayed that when it reached me I did not absorb any of its venom through my open wound.
Where the mists parted I could see piles of corpses, where the heretics had been mown down. It did not seem to have mattered to them. They had come on anyway, rolling forward in a massive wave, as if their lives meant nothing to them. They were expendable: a mere distraction while another more subtle assault had flowed over our position.
I pulled out the periscope and raised it over the parapet, from the wrong side this time. Down in the trench I caught sight of a green-uniformed Lion Guard squad locked in battle with the cultists. I could see Ivan, his mechanical arm covered in blood, brandishing the severed head of a heretic. It looked like he had pulled it clean from the neck. Anton knelt beside him and calmly snapped shots off with his sniper rifle. I could tell from his stance that he was filled with tension and excitement.
I twisted the periscope and saw a horde of heretics rushing towards them along the trench. I pulled out another grenade, lobbed it and crawled back along the brow of the parapet, tossing more grenades as I went. The enemy were so packed in that part of the trench that I could not miss. Gobbets of flesh and fountains of blood spattered me in the wake of the explosions. I kept tossing grenades. I had run out of explosives but I still had the phosphorescents so I lobbed them in as well. Even through the filters of my rebreather I thought I smelt the stench of burning, rotting flesh. I told myself it was my imagination.
A chain of explosions thundered and a line of fire filled the trench. Either I had hit a fuel dump or some of the heretics had been carrying something incendiary and I had set it off. No matter, the results were gratifying. I made my way back along the trench line for the fourth time. Black clouds emerged from it and the sound of shooting had stopped.
‘Ivan!’ I bellowed. ‘Anton! Can you hear me?’
‘Is that you, Leo?’ Anton replied.
‘No! It’s my ghost! What do you think?’
‘It has to be him,’ I heard Anton say. ‘It’s too sarky to be anybody else.’
‘I’m going to stick my head above the parapet now! Try not to blow it off!’
I extended the shotgun above my head with both hands. I figured that if someone was going to shoot me it would be better to lose a hand. I left it over the parapet for thirty seconds.
‘What are you waiting for?’ Anton asked.
‘I’m waiting to see if any one of you is trigger-happy.’
‘Well, I think you got your answer.’
I stuck my head up and saw a line of faces looking up at me. I glanced along the trench line and saw more dead heretics, slaughtered by my little ambush and fire from Ivan’s squad. Flies buzzed everywhere. Corpses lay all about. Even through the filters of my rebreather mask I caught the smell. I jumped down into the trenches and Ivan was slapping me on the back.
‘I thought we’d seen the last of you there when those heretics came charging down the trench.’
‘They got everybody else,’ I said. I glanced around at the others, expecting to see blame written on their faces. I had lost three entire squads to the ambush by being too slow on the uptake. No one except myself seemed to be accusing me of anything. I figured I could do a good enough job of that until we got back to headquarters, when doubtless I would have some explaining to do.
‘What did you find down your fork?’ I asked.
Ivan shook his head. ‘Not a thing. Whole place was abandoned. Just like it was supposed to be. What happened to you?’
I told them. Anton’s eyes grew ever narrower. ‘You mean I need to check for assassins every time I take a dump now? That will take all the fun out of it.’
‘Look on the bright side. Think about what it will be like for them,’ I said.
The words had no sooner left my mouth when air-horns sounded down the trench line. Three short blasts, then three long blasts, then three short blasts. It was not a good sign. It meant that a huge enemy attack was incoming.
‘Best be heading back,’ I said. ‘We’re going to be needed.’
Chapter Three
I could hear the drums sounding along the trenches and more of that phlegmy chanting. Much more.
I was all out of grenades and the rest of the squad had very few. There would be no repeat of my ambush, not tonight; perhaps not any night, unless we could find a better place to make a stand.
As we made our way back along the trenches, I found I was limping. I looked down at my leg, which felt stiff. When I took out a bayonet and sliced at the cloth, I spotted odd black circles around the barbed wire punctures. I swabbed at them, hoping I was not already too late. I’d seen men lose legs from lesser things on Loki.
Ivan was frowning. He knew better than most what these things could lead to. I doubted there would be any bionics available for me out here. We had left access to such things a long way behind the front lines of the crusade. Fewer and fewer supplies were getting through.
‘What you think?’ Ivan asked.
‘We fall back to Brand’s Fort,’ I said. ‘It’s got the best chance of holding out against a big assault.’
‘It’s a death-trap if we’re caught in it.’
‘This whole salient is, unless we’re reinforced soon. At least there we’ll be dug-in with food and medical supplies and as much ammunition as we’re ever likely to get.’
Brand’s Fort was a massive bunker excavated from the inside of a small hill and covered in rockcrete. Over the past couple of years it had been reinforced and reinforced again, with more weapons blisters, more rockcrete and more barbed wire. Effluent sumps poured slimy liquid down the sides. Skeletons lay within clusters of wire. Some joker had built a small wall of human skulls around the base of one of the bunkers and then spelled out the words Come and die here in bones on the slope beneath them. Where did these people find the time?
A Banshee scream filled the air and there was the sudden thunder of an explosion. I threw myself flat and all the Lion Guard around me did the same. The distant heretic batteries had opened fire once again.
Anton spidered his way up alongside me – all long legs and elbows – and out of the side of his mouth said, ‘I wonder if this is all part of Richter’s Great Plan.’
I knew what he meant but I wasn’t going to be drawn into a reply. It was possible this was an artillery barrage meant to precede the rebel attack and that there had been some mistake on the enemy side that had resulted in its delayed launch. The Emperor knows I’ve seen enough such things happen on our side of the trench system. Or maybe this was the harbinger of another assault.
We lay there for long minutes, acutely aware that it would only take one of those shells to drop on our section of trench and we would all be gone. I felt the earth shake beneath me. The pain in my leg was getting worse and I felt a little light-headed. I told myself it was because we’d been on short rations for so long, but part of me knew that it was not hunger.
I raised my head and watched a cluster of explosions stalk up the side of Brand’s Fort, carving out new indentations in the rockcrete, destroying the wall of skulls and the message written in bones.