sweep around to the left and follow the valley line.’ Gaunt scoped down to the left. The carved granite structure extended away beyond the curve of the vale and several of the stalking lines of towers marched up the bracken slopes to meet it, as if they were feelers spread out from the immense shrine itself. Beyond and higher, he could now see towers of blue granite in the clouds: spires, steeples and buttresses. This was just the outskirts of an ancient necropolis, a city long dead that had been raised by inhuman hands before the start of recorded time.
The honeysuckle scent in the air was becoming a stench. Vox-level chatter over the microbead in his ear told him that his men were starting to succumb to a vague, indefinable nausea.
‘You want to go left?’ Mkoll asked. ‘But that’s not in accord with the order of battle.’
‘I know.’
‘The lord general will be furious if we divert from the given advance.’
‘I have my own orders,’ Gaunt said, tapping his data-slate.
‘And the Emperor love you for your loyalty!’ Mkoll shook his head. ‘Sir, we were told to assault this… this place directly.’
‘And we will, Mkoll – just not here.’
Mkoll nodded. ‘How far down?’
‘A kilometre or two. The crystal spoke of a dome. Find it for me.’
‘Gladly,’ Mkoll said. ‘You know that if we alter our advance it will give the Jantine dogs more reason to come for us.’
‘I know,’ Gaunt said. More than ever he appreciated the way his senior officers had accommodated the truth of their endeavour. They knew what was at stake and what the real dangers were.
Mkoll and Corporal Baru led the advancing Ghosts along the top of the valley, just under the crest, and past the threatening, tower-haunted steppes of the graven hillside.
Scout Trooper Thark was the first to spot it. He voxed back to the command group: a dome, a massive, bulbous dome swelling from the living rock of the cliff face, impossibly carved from granite.
Gaunt moved up to see it for himself. It was like some vast stone onion, a thousand metres in diameter, sunk into the stepped rock wall around it, the surface inscribed with billions of obscure sigils and marks.
Thark was also the first to die. A storm of autocannon rounds whipped up the slope, exploding bracken into dust, spitting up soil and punching him into four or five bloody parts. At the cue, other weapon placements in the steppe alcoves of the facing cliff opened fire, raining las-fire, bullets and curls of plasma down at the Ghosts.
The answering fire laced a spider’s web of las-light, tracer lines and firewash between the sides of the valley.
The dying began.
Four
MARSHAL GOHL SENDAK, the so-called Ravager of Genestock Gamma, had abandoned his Command Leviathan to lead his forces from the front. He rode a Leman Russ battle-tank of the Borkellid regiments, heading a fast-moving armoured phalanx that was smashing its way across the rocky escarpments below the weathered stone structures of Shrine Target Secundus.
Laying down a ceaseless barrage, they broke through two lines of crumbling curtain walls and into the lower perimeters of the shrine structure itself. Wide, rubble-strewn slopes faced them, dotted with the lines of those infernal towers. Sendak voxed to the Oudinot infantry at his tail and urged them to follow him in. Fire as heavy as he had ever known blazed down from the archways and alcoves facing them
Sendak felt a dry stinging in his nose, and snorted it away. That damn honeysuckle odour, it was beginning to get to him like it was getting to his men.
He felt a wetness heavy his moustache and wiped it. Fresh blood smeared his grey-cloth sleeve. There was more in his mouth and he spat, his ears throbbing. Looking around in the green-lit interior of the tank, he saw all the crew were suffering spontaneous nose-bleeds, or were retching and hacking blood.
There was a vibration singing in the air: low, lazy, ugly.
Sendak swung the tank’s periscope around to scan the scene outside. Something was happening to the lines of towers which flanked them on either side. They were glowing, fulminating with rich curls of vivid damask energy. Mist was columnating around the old stones.
‘Blood of the Emperor!’ Sendak growled, his teeth and lips stained red with his own dark blood.
Outside, in the space of a human heartbeat, two things happened. The lines of towers, just ragged rows of stone spines a moment before, exploded into life and became a fence, a raging energy field forty metres