Perhaps.”
Gaunt nodded and turned away. The Imperial eagle in the fractal topiary was now complete.
“Gaunt?”
He turned back. Lord Chass reached into his waist-sack and pulled out a rose. It was perfect, made of steel, just budding and faintly edged with rust. The silver stem was stiff and aluminium thorns split out of it.
Chass held it out.
“Wear this for honour.”
Gaunt took the metal rose and hooked it into the lapel of his jacket, over his heart.
He nodded. “For honour, I’ll wear anything.”
Chass stood alone as Gaunt threaded his way out of the metal garden and departed. Chass remained stationary in thought for a long time.
“Father?” Merity appeared out of the brass-orange grove.
“What did you make of him?”
“An honourable man. Slightly stiff, but not shy. He has spirit and courage.”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Can we trust him?”
“What do you think?”
Merity paused, stroking the fractal blooms absently.
“It’s your choice, master of our house.”
Heymlick Chass laughed. “It is. But you like him? That’s important. You asked me to keep you informed.”
“I like him. Yes.”
Chass nodded. He took the amulet from the waist sack where it had been all the time, buried in the garden scraps.
He turned it over in his hands. It writhed and clicked.
“We’ll know soon enough,” he told his daughter.
Day thirty-one passed without major incident. Shelling whined back and forth between the wall defenders and the waiting Zoican army. At dawn on the thirty-second day, the second Zoican assault began.
VEYVEYR GATE
—Warmaster Slaydo, on his deathbed
It was a dismal, hollow dawn. The early daylight was diffused by cliffs of grey cloud that prolonged the night. Rain began to fall: spots at first for a half hour, then heavier, sheeting across the vastness of the hive and the wastelands beyond. Visibility dropped to a few hundred metres. The torrential downpour made the Shield crackle and short in edgy, disturbing patterns.
At the Veyveyr position, in the first hour of light, Colm Corbec walked the Tanith line, the eastern positions of the ruined railhead. His piebald camo-cloak, the distinctive garb of the Tanith, was pulled around him like a shroud, and he had acquired a wide-brimmed bowl helmet from somewhere—the NorthCol troops most likely—which made more than a few of his Ghosts chuckle at the sight of it. It was cold, but at least the Shield high above was keeping the rain off.
Corbec had surveyed the Ghost positions a dozen times and liked them less each time he did. There was a group of engine sheds and cargo halls through which sidings ran, all of them bombed-out, and then a forest of rubble and exploded fuel tanks leading down to the vast main gate, the white stone of its great mouth scorched black. Beyond the rear extremity of the railyard’s eastern border rose the burned-out smelteries. A regiment of Vervun Primary troops—called the Spoilers, Corbec had been told—held that position and watched the approach up the treacherous slag-mountain. Corbec had around two hundred Ghosts dug in through the engine sheds and the rubble beyond, with forward scout teams at the leading edge towards the gate.
Colonel Modile’s Vervun Primary units, almost five thousand strong, manned the main trenches and rubble glacis in the central sector of the wide railyard. Bulwar’s NorthCol troops, two thousand or more, were positioned along the west, towards proud and grimy rows of as yet undamaged manufactories. Fifty units of NorthCol armour waited at the north end of the railhead in access roads and marshalling yards, ready to drive forward in the event of a breakthrough.
Corbec crossed between fire-blackened, roofless engine sheds, his hefty boots crunching into the thick crust of ash and rubble that littered the place despite the pioneer teams’ clearance work.
In the shed, twenty Ghosts were standing easy, all except their spotters at blast-holes and windows, looking south. The roof was bare ribs and tangles of reinforcing metal strands poked from broken rockcrete.
Corbec crossed to where Scout MkVenner and Trooper Mochran squatted on a makeshift firestep of oil drums, gazing out through holes in the brickwork.
“You’ve a good angle here, boys,” Corbec said, pulling himself up onto the rusty drums and taking a look.
“Good for dying, sir,” MkVenner muttered dryly. He was a scout in the true mould of Scout Sergeant Mkoll, dour and terse. Mkoll had trained most of them personally. MkVenner was a tall man in his thirties with a blue, half-moon tattoo under his right eye.
“How’s that, MkVenner?”
MkVenner pointed out at the gates. “We’re square on if they make a frontal, us and the locals in the main yard.”
“And our angles have been cut and blinded since that thing fell in,” Mochran added in a tired voice.
The “thing” he referred to was the gigantic wreck of the spider siege engine which the NorthCol batteries had brought down during the First Storm three days before. Its massive bulk, slumped across the gatemouth barricades, half blocked the entrance and had proved impossible to shift, despite the efforts of pioneer teams and sappers with dozers and heavy lifters.
Corbec saw the trooper was right. Enemy infantry could come worming in around the bulk and be inside before they were visible. The war machine gave the enemy a bridge right in through the tangled, rusting hulks of the gate barricade.
Corbec told them something reassuring and light that made them both laugh.
Afterwards, though he tried, he could not recall what it was.
He sauntered southwards, skirting through a trenchline and entered the rubble scarps closer to the gate. He had eleven heavy weapon teams tied in here at intervals behind flakboards and bagging. Six heavy stubbers on tripod mounts, two autoguns on bipods with ammo feeders sprawled on their bellies next to the gunners, and three missile launchers. Between the weapon positions, Tanith troopers were spread in lines along the embrasures. Walking amongst them, Corbec sensed their vulnerability.
