him actually vibrate. The shellfire falling against its outer skin was a dull roar.
Captain Daur and three other officers of the liaison staff led the oversight party up the stair-drum of a secondary tower in the wall just west of the massive Heironymo Sondar Gate. Gaunt had brought Rawne and Mkoll, with Trooper Milo as his adjutant. General Grizmund—with three of his senior Narmenians—and General Nash—with two of his regimental aides—made up the rest of the party, along with Tarrian of the VPHC. They had a bodyguard detail of thirty Vervun Primary troopers in full battledress.
The oversight party emerged onto the tower-top, where hot breezes, stifling with fycelene fumes, billowed over them. Three missile launchers were raised and ready here, their crews standing by, but additional awnings of flak-board had been erected in preparation for the visit of the dignitaries, and the launchers, with no safe room for their exhaust wash under this extra shelter, had fallen silent. The crews saluted the visitors smartly.
“These are for our benefit?” Gaunt asked Tarrian, indicating the freshly raised awnings.
“Of course.”
“You muzzle an entire defence tower so we can get a safe peek over the Wall?”
Tarrian frowned. “General Sturm has made it a standing requirement every time he visits the Wall. I presumed you and the other eminent generals here would expect the same.”
“We’ve come to fight, not hide. Take them down and get these crews operational.”
Tarrian looked round at Nash and Grizmund. The Narmenian nodded briefly. “Gaunt speaks for us all,” said Nash dryly. “We don’t need any soft-soap.”
Tarrian turned from the group and began issuing orders to the launcher crews.
The rest of the oversight party approached the rampart and took up magnoculars or used the available viewscopes on their tripod stands. Milo handed Gaunt his own scope from its pouch and the commissar dialled the magnification as he raised it and gazed out.
Below them, the miserable wasteland of the southern outer habs lay exposed and broken. There was no discernible sign of life, but a hateful storm of enemy shelling and missiles pounded in across it at the hive. A fair amount fell short into the habs, but a good percentage struck the Curtain Wall itself. Gaunt craned over for a moment, training his scope down the gentle slope of the Wall. Its adamantine surface was peppered and scarred like the face of a moon, as far as he could see. Every few seconds, batteries to either side of them on the Wall fired out, or the great siege guns in the emplacements below in the thickness of the Wall recoiled and volleyed again.
The vibration of the Wall continued.
“No way of knowing numbers or scale—” began Nash.
Grizmund shook his head. “Not so, sir,” he replied, pointing out to the very edge of the vast, outer-hab waste. “As we have been told, this is no longer the work of their long- range artillery out in the grasslands. This is ground assault from closer range—armour moving in through the outer habitations and factories.”
“Are you certain?” asked Gaunt.
“You can see the flashes of tank cannons as they fire. Four, five kilometres out, in the very skirts of the outer habs. Their weapons are on full elevation for maximum range, so the muzzle-flashes are high and exposed. It is a simple matter of observing, counting, estimating.”
Gaunt watched for flashes through his scope. Like Nash, he was an infantry commander, and he always appreciated technical insight from experienced officers with expertise in other schools of warfare. Grizmund had a fine reputation as an armour commander. Gaunt fully trusted the Narmenian’s judgement in this. As he looked, he began to discern the flickering display of brief light points out in the hinterland.
“Your estimate?” asked Nash, also studying the scene and, like Gaunt, willing to listen to an expert opinion.
Grizmund glanced to his attending officers, who all looked up from their scopes.
“Nachin?”
The brigadier answered directly, his voice rich with the taut vowel sounds of the Narmenian accent. “At a first estimate, armour to the magnitude of twenty thousand pieces. Straight-form advance, with perhaps a forced salient to the east, near those tall cooling towers still standing. Innumerable rockets and mortars, harder to trace, but all mobile. Forty, maybe forty-five thousand.”
The other Narmenians concurred. Grizmund turned back to Gaunt and Nash as Tarrian rejoined the group. “Nachin knows his stuff as well as me. You heard his numbers. A multiple regiment-strength assault. Grand-scale armour attack. Yet—if what Commissar Kowle says is correct—not even a fraction of their numbers.”
“We can presume other army strengths are moving round through the mining district, the mud flats, perhaps the eastern outer habs and the Hass East river junction too,” said Nash dourly.
“I can make no estimates of troop strength, however,” Grizmund added.
“With permission, sir,” Rawne said, and Gaunt nodded for him to continue.
Rawne indicated the scene below with precise gestures of his nimble hands, his killer’s hands. “If you watch the armour flashes as General Grizmund has suggested, they form a rough line, like a contour. Compare that to the fall of shells. The edge of the shortest falling shells—you can see that from the explosions and from the smoke fires—approximately matches that line, with a break of perhaps a kilometre and a half between armour and line of fire. That is the space we might expect the infantry advancing before the armour, to occupy.”
Nash nodded, impressed by the junior Tanith’s insight.
“We can’t judge their tactics by our own,” Rawne went on, “Feth, I’ve seen the forces of the Chaos-scum perform many tactical aberrations on the fields of war, but assuming they are not intent on slaughtering their own troops, and assuming the widest margin of error, that shows us a clear belt of infantry advance. Even single line abreast, I’d say we were welcoming over half a million down there. Double the line, double the figure, triple it—”
“We may be senior cadre, but we follow your maths, major,” said Gaunt and the others laughed darkly. “A fine assessment. Thank you.”
“At least a million,” said Mkoll, suddenly.
They all looked round at him.
“Scout-sergeant?”
“Listen, sir,” said Mkoll and they all did, hearing nothing more than the persistent wail and wail-echoes of the shelling and the crumps of explosions.
“Behind the impacts, a higher note, like a creaking, like the wind.”
Gaunt fought hard to screen out the sounds of the assault bombing. He heard vague whispers of the sound Mkoll described.
“Lasguns, sir. So many lasguns firing over each other that their individual sounds have become one shrieking note. You’d need a… a feth of a lot of lasguns to make that sound.”
At the back of the group, Daur noticed that Gaunt’s adjutant, Milo, had crossed to the western lip of the tower and was gazing out. The adjutant was no more than a youth, his pale skin marked by a strange blue tattoo as seemed to be the custom with so many of the Ghosts.
