But by then, the fight was out of the Zoicans and had been since the thirty-seventh day. Without the hypnotic chatter to unify their cause and drive them on, they had crumbled. Imperial Fist Space Marines ceremonially destroyed the Spike and incinerated the Heritor’s corpse.
The final battle was one of humanitarian support. Intendant Banefail, along with the hive elders and noble houses, laboured to accommodate the millions of wounded and homeless. By day sixty, the true scale of the human cost was undeniable. Vervunhive was a necropolis: a city of the dead. Meeting with the surviving nobility, Macaroth signed the Dissolution Warrant that formally acknowledged Vervunhive’s extinction. The hive was dead. All population elements were to be absorbed by the Northern Collectives or shipped to Ghasthive and the Isthmus Steeples. Two new hives were to be founded, one ruled by a clique of noble houses under House Anko, the other a collective governed by Houses Chass and Rodyin. Names would come later. It would be generations until these municipal structures would begin to establish themselves, and it would be decades before the bulk of the dispossessed population could be given new, permanent homes.
Lord Anko, siting his new hive’s foundations higher up the Hass waters from dead Vervunhive, planned to exploit the prometheum reserves once controlled by Vannick. Lady Chass, the first woman to govern a collective on Vervunhive, set her foundation in the grasslands far to the south and turned to mining and servitor engineering. Their future rivalry and confrontation would be long and complex, but is not pertinent to this history.
At the time, an air of disillusion fell hard on the survivors of Vervunhive. Many felt they had given everything in defence of the city only to see the city abandoned anyway. When this mood was made known to the war-master, he spoke publicly about his decision and made law an Act of Consolation.
The warmaster’s staff faced a thousand duties as they tidied up the mess of the Vervunhive War. One of those was the prosecution of all those who had acted in a manner disloyal to the Emperor during that period of great hardship.
The reports of the Tanith Sergeant Varl, as logged by his commander, Gaunt, were sorted and processed by the Administratum during the latter stages of the purge. On day fifty-nine, prosecuting war-crime charges, Vervun Primary troops stormed the halls of Guild Worlin. Amchanduste Worlin was not to be found.
“They say he wants to see you,” Corbec said, leaning back against the sill of a vast stained-glass window in Medical Hall 67/mv.
“He can wait.”
“I’m sure he can,” Corbec grinned. “He’s only a warmaster.”
“Feth. They’re really abandoning the hive—after everything we did?”
“I think maybe because of everything we did. There’s not much left standing.”
Ibram Gaunt heaved himself upright on his cot. The pain of his shoulder and thigh wounds had long since faded, but the burning ache in his chest still plagued him. He coughed blood, for the third time since Corbec had arrived.
“You should probably lie still, sir,” Corbec ventured.
“Probably,” returned Gaunt. It was the sixty-second day. He had been unconscious for most of the previous month and had undergone repeated surgery to repair the wound Heritor Asphodel had dealt him. Gaunt still didn’t know—and never would—if it had been dumb luck or fate that had saved him. The Heritor’s bolt had hit him directly on the steel rose Lord Chass had made him wear. Though the collapsing petals had been driven into his chest, it was certain he would not have survived otherwise.
“You heard about the Act of Consolation?”
“I heard. What of it?”
“Well, sir, you wouldn’t believe the number of new Ghosts we’ve recruited.”
Under the terms of the Act of Consolation, any disillusioned Vervunhiver anxious to leave Verghast to find a new life was offered the possibility of training for a place in the Imperial Guard. Upwards of forty thousand elected to do so. Some made their choice of unit a condition of their acceptance.
Motor convoys carried them north with the regular army to board bulk carriers that had put in at Kannak Port. Sergeant Agun Soric oversaw the embarkation of his brave Irregulars. All of them were yet to be issued with their Tanith fatigues and camo-capes. Soric moved past the ship’s payload doors and greeted Sergeant Kolea, who had also joined up, along with most of his scratch company. Kolea was walking on crutches, his torso encased in mediplas bindings.
“We’ll never see it again,” said Soric.
“What?”
“Verghast. Take a last look.”
“Nothing here for me now anyway,” Kolea said. Under his breath, he uttered a last goodbye to his lost wife and beloved children.
Half a kilometre away, Bragg supervised the loading of other Ghosts. Many, like Domor and Mkoll, were walking wounded. Along with the soldiers came the inevitable wave of camp followers, lugging their possessions: clerks, cooks, armourers, mechanics, women.
Bragg caught sight of Caffran leading a girl and two children up the ramp. One was just a babe in arms. He noticed that the girl, along with her piercings and surly look, wore the temporary badge of a Guard recruit. Another female trooper. Bad enough Kolea’s fighting women had been given a place. Larkin would have a seizure.
Jumping down from his transit truck, Ban Daur took a last, wistful look at the land around him. He felt like a lost soul given one last chance to haunt the place that had raised him.
That was appropriate. He wasn’t Captain Ban Daur of Vervun Primary any more. He was a Ghost.
“I kept these for a long while,” Ana Curth said. She held out the dog tags that had been in the pocket of her apron since Veyveyr Gate. “I knew there would be no good time for you to see them, but maybe now…”
Dorden took the tags. He read them, sighing.
“Mikal Dorden. Infantryman. Yes, I… they told me…”
“I’m sorry, Dorden. Really I am.”
Dorden looked up from where he sat, his eyes wet with tears. “So am I. You know I was the only Ghost to have a relative in the Tanith regiment? My son. A fragile, last link to the world we lost. And now… that’s gone too.”
She held him to her as he shuddered and wept.
A door banged open and a guilder peered in at them. He was dressed in rich robes and had a driven intensity about his face.
“Whatever you’re looking for, it isn’t in here,” Curth told him, holding Dorden tightly.
“Surgeon Curth?”
“Yes? What?”
The guilder entered the swab-room. He smiled. “I was
