chunk of wall, and brought down a small avalanche of basalt chunks. For a moment the heat was so intense that Gaunt's nightscope read nothing but emerald glare. Then it showed him the chiselled mouth of the watergate had become a bubbling, blazing wound in the huge wall, a ragged, slumping incision in the sheer basalt. He could hear agonised screaming from within the chute. Beyond the city wall, alarm bells and sirens rose in pandemonium.
The Ghosts charged the watergate. Orcha led the first squad up the sloping drain-away under the molten arch of ruptured stone. He and three of his men swung flamers in wide arcs, scorching and scouring up unto the darkness of the echoing chute. Behind them, Corbec brought in fire teams with lasguns who darted down into the side passages and cisterns of the watergate, butchering the cultists who had limped or crawled into cover after the first attack.
The third wave went in, under Major Rawne. In the front rank was Bragg, his empty launcher discarded in favour of the heavy bolter that he had liberated from its mounting back on Blackshard and now lugged around like a smaller man might heft a heavy rifle.
Gaunt leapt forward too, bolt pistol in one hand, chain sword in the other. He bellowed after his attacking men, all of them racing silhouettes backlit against the glittering water by fire. Milo sprang up, fumbling with the Tanith pipes under his arm.
'Now would be a good time, Brin,' Gaunt said. Milo found the mouthpiece, inflated the bag and began to keen an old battle lament of Tanith, ''The Dark Path of the Forest''.
Up in the chute, Orcha and his squad heard the shrill wail of the pipes outside. Damp darkness was before them.
'Close up,' Orcha snapped into his micro-bead.
'Aye.'
'To your left,' Brith yelled suddenly.
An assault cannon raged out of the darkness of a side chute. Brith, Orcha and two others disintegrated instantly into red mist and flesh pulp.
Troopers Gades and Caffran ducked back behind the buttress work of the huge vault.
'Enemy fire!' Caffran yelled into his bead. 'They have the chute covered in a killing sweep.'
Corbec cursed. He might have expected this.
'Stay down!' he ordered the young Ghost over the mike as he beckoned his first two squads up the lower chute, black water swilling around their knees.
'Hell of a foul place for a firefight,' mourned Mad Larkin, scoping with his lasgun.
'Stow it, Larks,' Corbec growled. Ahead they heard the nightmare chatter of the cannon, and the added rhythm of drums and guttural chants. Corbec knew Larkin was right. A tight, confined, unyielding stone tunnel was no place for a serious fight. This was a two-way massacre in the making.
'They're just trying to psyche us out,' he told his Ghosts smoothly as they edged forward.
'What d'you know? It's working!' Varl said.
The drums and chanting got louder, but suddenly the cannon shut off.
'It's stopped,' Caffran reported over the link.
Corbec looked round into Larkin's crazed eyes. 'What do you think? A trick to lure us out?'
Larkin sniffed the thick air. 'Smell that? Burning ceramite. I'd wager they've got an overheat jam.'
Corbec didn't answer. He cinched his bayonet onto his lasgun and charged up the slope of the chute, screaming louder and shriller than Milo's pipes. In uproar, the Ghost squads followed him.
Caffran and Gades joined the charge, bellowing, weapons held low as they splashed out from behind the buttress into the main vault.
Corbec leapt clear a sandbag line damming one gully and disembowelled the two cultists who were struggling to unjam the assault cannon.
Larkin dropped down on one knee in the brackish soup and popped the cover on his lasgun's darkscope. Carefully selecting his expert long shots, he blasted four cultists further down the chute.
Las and bolt fire slammed back at the Ghosts, dropping several of them. The charging Guardsmen met the cultist force head on in a tight, tall sub-chute, no wider than two men abreast. Bodies exploded, blasted at close range. Bayonets and blades sliced and jabbed. Corbec was in the thick of it. Already a chain sword had gashed his left hand and cost him a finger, and blood blurted from a slash to his shoulder. He speared a man, but lost his gun when the corpse's weight on the bayonet tore it out of his hands. He ripped out his fallback weapons, a laspistol and his Tanith knife of sheer silver. Around him in the frenzy, men killed or died in a confined press that was packed in close like a busy work transit, crowded at rush hour. Already the water level was rising because of the depth of bodies and body parts in the gully.
Corbec shot a cultist through the head as he was charged, and then lashed sideways with the silver blade, opening a throat.
'For Tanith! First and Last and Only!' he screamed.
Advancing up the tunnel fifty paces back, Gaunt could hear the sheer tumult of the nightmarish close-quarters fight in the chute. He looked down and saw that the trickle of Bokore River water that ran down over his boots was thick and red.
Ten yards further, he found Trooper Gades, part of Orcha's original squad. The boy had lost his legs to a chainsword and the water had carried his twitching form back down the smooth slope of the channel.
'Medic! Dorden! To me!' Gaunt bellow, cradling the coughing, gagging Gades in his arms.
Gades looked up at his commissar. 'A real close fight, so it is,' he said with remarkable clarity, 'packed in like fish in a can. The Ghosts will make ghosts tonight.'
Then he coughed again. Bloody matter vomited from his mouth and he was gone.
Gaunt stood.
