‘How by Throne have these scum given Arbettan so much trouble?’ he muttered. ‘What say you, Sergeant Vengo?’
Vengo replied with a muted shake of the head. His eyes were distant and glassy.
Regara didn’t get a chance to question him about it.
‘Sir...’ It was Speers. He had his hellgun trained on one of the fallen cultists and was waving the major over.
One of the enemy lived. He was half-buried under a chunk of hauler-truck. The broken engine block had crushed his feeble body but he was breathing. He was also talking.
‘What’s he saying?’ Regara fought the urge to shoot the creature through the skull. Some enemy intelligence might prove useful and unlock some of the mystery around Sagorrah.
Leaning down to listen, Speers frowned and then looked up. ‘Tongues of Tcharesh, he just keeps repeating it over and over.’
‘What’s that in his eye?’
Speers took a closer look. ‘Some kind of cataract, maybe?’
The cultist’s right eye was shot through with purple veins. There was also a dark crust on his lips.
‘Does that look like blood to you, sir?’ Speers continued.
Regara noticed Sergeant Vengo was drawn to a marking on the wall, daubed in the same matter coating the dying cultist’s lips. He was staring at it. The major found he couldn’t focus on the precise image. It kept changing.
‘Destroy it,’ he said.
A moment’s indecision by his men increased Regara’s urgency. ‘Do it now.’
Trooper Basker came forwards with his flamer and doused the patch of wall until the image was scoured away. All the while, Vengo didn’t retreat. He only backed off once it was gone.
The stricken cultist’s mantra grew louder, rising to an agitated shriek. Speers killed him with a shot between the eyes.
‘Making my head hurt, sir.’
Regara looked back to the scorched section of wall where the strange icon had been. ‘Yes, it was,’ he said, noting that Vengo had returned to squad position and was organising the men.
‘Corporal, situation report,’ the major added to his aide. He had no desire to linger any longer than was necessary but felt it pertinent to check on their progress.
Speers pulled a data-slate from his pack and put it in front of the major. It showed a litho-pict mapping out a section of the slums. Regara’s five fire teams, supported by elements of the Castellian Rangers and Harpine Fusiliers, had penetrated and cleared the outer markers of the eastern approach into the sector.
It was a moderate offensive, more of a fact-finding mission in truth. Regara wanted to gauge the level of insurgent presence in the slums, fathom its strength and likely dispositions. Once he had those details in hand, he could organise a widespread purging operation that would wipe out the traitors utterly. As it stood, he had operational command and just shy of two hundred men at his disposal, spread over an area of several square kilometres. This was just the first approach. There’d be more, and judging by the feeble resistance they’d met so far, such forays wouldn’t be long in coming either. The glyphs were... bothersome, however.
‘How are we faring, corporal?’
Speers regarded the data-slate, navigated through a few screens to get a wider geographical view of the area. ‘So far we’ve mapped thirty-two per cent of this quadrant, sir.’
‘And Captains Siegfrien and Trador?’
‘Reporting steady progress. Resistance minimal.’
‘I expected more,’ he admitted to Speers.
‘Sir?’
‘The insurgents are dogs, by all that the Emperor is holy, but I thought they’d at least be organised.’
‘You think Commissar Arbettan isn’t taking his job seriously?’
‘I’m not sure what I think at this juncture.’
The vox crackling to life interrupted Regara’s train of thought.
Trooper Crimmens handed him the receiver cup without needing to be asked.
‘This is Major Regara.’
Captain Trador of the Harpine responded. ‘We encountered some glyphs, major, daubed on the brickwork. One of my scouts, Jedion, has just voxed it in. Please advise.’
Regara went back to the scorched wall for a third time. His voice was full of conviction. ‘Destroy it, captain. Destroy any and all glyphs you come across.’ He cut the vox link, handing the cup back to Crimmens.
Regara’s face was grim. ‘Pack it away, Speers, and have Sergeant Vengo move the men out. We’ve lingered here long enough.’
Less than a half-hour later the major’s squad was moving low through the north-east quadrant of the slums. They passed an open alleyway. It was long, and at the other end, Regara saw some of the Harpine tracking past in their green armour-mesh, stubby lascarbines held low in a grip suited to a crouched-running advance. Since they’d entered the slums, the major hadn’t seen any of Siegfrien’s men. Most of the Castellians formed the rearguard, anyway, their mortars and autocannons providing vital long-range support to take out particularly entrenched insurgents.
Regara battle-signed for his squad to continue forwards at pace.
The narrow streets that fed like corrupted arteries through the slums gave way to an open plaza. It was huge, some kind of provincial square, and bore recent signs of battle. Several dusty craters gouged clay flagstones and exposed the sandy earth beneath. Toppled columns created barricades of debris that broke the expanse into several discrete sections.
Across the carnage, Regara spotted Lieutenant Culcis and his squad moving into position. At the far end of the plaza, some three hundred metres or so distant, were a pair of tall towers. They looked empty, but then nothing was ever as it appeared to be in an urban engagement. Just arriving were a second squad of Volpone, led by Sergeant Pillier, and two squads of Harpine Fusiliers. A third entered through a side street just ahead of Regara. It was the group he’d seen down the alleyway a few minutes earlier. They took up an advanced position, dropping a tube-launcher into a particularly deep crater and aiming it at one of the towers.
Silence rolled across the shattered esplanade. A hot breeze kicked up grit and created coiling dust eddies. The creak of hinges, the shriek of bending wood and the hollow echo of the low wind passing through the carcass of the city provided a haunting chorus.
For the first time since they’d entered the slum zone, Culcis felt unease. He’d already noticed the major and Sergeant Pillier. All told, there were sixty men occupying the massive plaza, almost half the strength of the Imperial insertion force.
Culcis brought up the map of the eastern approach to the slums to his mind. All of its streets and conduits led to this point like tributaries to a river. All other ways had been blocked by toppled buildings or stacked trucks and the wreckage of other vehicles. That alone should have tipped the lieutenant off.
He surveyed their surroundings through the magnoculars, waiting for the order to advance. Regara had brought them to a halt. Wisely, given the environs. Culcis noticed an altercation brewing between one of the Harpine and his sergeant. The lieutenant couldn’t tell what they were arguing over, only that it was getting heated. Such insubordination was to be expected of lesser regiments.
Lower breeding, he told himself but was then put in mind of the appalling discipline at Sagorrah in general. Something niggled at Culcis at the back of his mind and he called for the vox. When he managed to raise the Harpine, all he got was a fairly breathless and crazed reply from their comms-officer.