done, they were on the same side. Word had come that the fighting had opened at the other two target sites, heavy and bloody.
There was no telling what they would encounter up ahead in the thin altitude. He dared not drive back the units which might be the only forces to support the Tanith in a direct action.
Gaunt pulled a note-pad from the pocket of his storm-coat and consulted several pages that Colonel Zoren had written. Carefully, with uncertainty, he composed a message in the Vitrian battlefield language, using the code-words Zoren had told him. Then he had Rafflan send it.
‘Speaking in tongues, sir?’ the vox-officer laughed, ironically using the Tanith’s own war-dialect that Gaunt had made sure he had learned early on. Many of the regiments used their own languages or codes for internal messages. On the battlefield, secrecy was imperative in vox-commands. And Dravere couldn’t know Gaunt had a working knowledge of Jantine combat-cant.
Gaunt called up Sergeant Blane. ‘Take the seventh platoon and function as a rearguard,’ he told Blane directly.
‘You’re expecting a hindquarters strike, then?’ asked Blane, puzzled. ‘Mkoll’s scouts have covered the hill line. The enemy won’t be sneaking round on us.’
‘Not the given enemy,’ Gaunt said. ‘I want you watching for the Jantine who are following us up. Our code word will be “Ghostmaker”. Given from me to you, or you back to me, it will indicate the Jantine have made a move. I don’t want to be fighting our own… but it may come to that. When you hear the word, do not shrink from the deed. If you signal me, I will send everything back to support you. As far as I am concerned, the Jantine are as much our foe as the things that dwell up here.’
‘Understood,’ Blane said, looking darkly at his commander. Corbec had briefed the senior men well after Gaunt’s unlocking of the crystal. They knew what was at stake, and were keeping the thought both paramount and away from their men, who had enough to concern them. Gaunt had a particular respect for the gruff, workmanlike Blane. He was as gifted and loyal an officer as Corbec, Mkoll or Lerod, but he was also dependable and solid. Almost despite himself, Gaunt found himself offering Blane his hand.
They shook. Blane realised the weight of the duty, the potentially terrible demands.
‘Emperor go with you, sir,’ he said, as he broke the grip and turned to retreat down the bracken slope.
‘And may He watch over you,’ Gaunt returned.
Nearby, Milo saw the quiet exchange. He shook spit from the chanters of his Tanith pipes and prepared to play again. This is it, he thought. The commissar expects the worst.
Sergeant Mkoll’s scouts were returning from the higher ground. Gaunt joined them to hear their report.
‘I think it’s best if you see it yourself,’ Mkoll said simply and gestured back at the heights.
Gaunt spread the fire-teams of three platoons along the width of the valley slope and then moved forward with Mkoll’s scout unit. By now, all of the Ghosts had rubbed the absorbent fabric of their stealth cloaks with handfuls of ochre bracken and dusted them so that they blended into the ground cover. Gaunt smiled as Mkoll scolded the commissar’s less than Tanith-like abilities, and scrupulously damped down the colour of Gaunt’s cloak with a scrub of ashy bracken. Gaunt removed his cap and edged forward, trying to hang the cloak around him as deftly as the Tanith scout. Behind them, there were two thousand Ghosts on the bracken-thick mountainside, but their commanding officer could see none of them.
He reached the rise, and borrowed Mkoll’s scope as they bellied down in the fern and the dust.
He hardly needed the scope. The rise they were ascending dropped away and a cliff face rose vertical ahead of them, looking like it was ten thousand metres tall. The milky-blue granite face was carved into steps like a ziggurat, a vast steepled formation of weather-worn storeys, rows of archways and slumped blocks. Gaunt knew that this was his first look at Shrine Target Primaris. Other than that, he had no idea what it was. A burial place, a temple, a dead hive? It simply smacked of evil, of the darkness. A vile corruption seeped up from every pore of the rockface, every dark alcove and pillared recess.
‘I don’t like the look of it,’ Mkoll said flatly.
Gaunt smiled grimly and consulted his own data-slate. ‘Neither do I. We don’t want to approach it directly. We need to