them.
Gaunt shook his head. 'Nothing,' he pulled his data-slate from the pocket of his leather coat and plugged the short lead into the socket at the base of the vox-link on Raglon's back. Then he tapped his clearance into the small board of rune-marked keys, and main battle-data began to display on his slate, direct from General Thoth's Leviathan command base.
Gaunt selected an overall tactical view so he and Corbec could take in the state of the battle.
The Tanith were shown as a thin, vulnerable line, static and held along the main watercourse. To either side of them, heavier regiments and armoured units were making greater headway, but these too were slow and foundering. The Volpone were pushing from the east, with massive artillery support, but the Trynai Sixth and Sixteenth were pinned down and slowly being slaughtered.
'Teth, but it's bad…' Corbec muttered. 'This whole push is grinding to a halt.'
'We'll have to see if we can improve matters,' Gaunt returned, solemn and occupied. He wound the dial to bring up a specific display of the Ghosts' struggling advance. All of the platoons were essentially halted and most engaged in heavy fire. I^rod's unit was taking the brunt of it. Rawne's, Gaunt noticed, had so far failed to engage.
'Have they got the luck?' Corbec asked.
'Or are they not trying?' Gaunt said aloud.
The Third edged on, passing a deep hidden pool with a glittering waterfall that fell from a crop of mossy rock. Rawne split his platoon and moved them up either side of the water.
Feygor stooped to pick up something and showed it to the major. It was a cell from a lasgun, but not Imperial issue.
'They've been through here.'
'And we've missed them!' Rawne cursed. 'Teth take this bastard jungle! We're in amongst them and we can't see them!'
On the far side of the pool, Milo paused and turned to Caffran. 'Smell that?' he whispered.
Caffran frowned. 'Mud? Filthy water? Pollen?'
'This jungle doesn't smell like it did before. I can almost smell… nal-wood.' Milo rubbed his own nose, as if he distrusted it.
Caffran was about to laugh, but then realised that he smelled it too. It was astonishing, almost overwhelming in its nostalgia. The air indeed smelt of the rich conifers of Tanith. Now he thought about it, the trees and foliage around them seemed darker, much more like the wet-land forests of his lost home-world. Nothing like the stinking, seething jungle they had known since arriving on Monthax.
'This is crazy,' he said, reaching out and touching one of the familiar trees. Milo nodded. It was crazy – and scary too.
From the cover of some low, flowering bushes, busy with insects, Mkoll could see a clearing ahead. There had been brief, heavy fighting there not more than two hours before. The earth was churned up, trees burned back and splintered. Bodies smouldered on the ground.
He crept forward to look. The dead were Chaos soldiery heavily armed and armoured in quilted red fatigues and bare steel armoured sections. Their helmets were inscribed with such horrific symbols and figures he began to dry-heave until he looked away.
Others had fallen here too, but their bodies had been removed. No Imperial unit had got this far in. There was another force at play on Monthax. Mkoll looked at the wounds on the fallen. Here and there, a helmet or metal breast-plate had been punctured, not by an energy round or explosive shell, but by something sharp and clean which had punched right through composite metal. In a tree stump behind one corpse, Mkoll found a missile embedded, a wickedly sharp metal star with razor-edged points.
With a long, slow sigh that wheezed out of his helmet's mouthpiece, the Old One sat back on the stone seat at the centre of the Inner Place.
Like a spider at the heart of a complex web, he reached out mentally and tested the strands of his net of deceit, the cloak of confusion he had spread out around him, leagues in every direction. It was serving its purpose for now. He studied the minds caught in his net: so very many of them cruel and brutish and overflowing with the poison of Chaos. And the others, the brief human sparks. The Imperials had engaged too, he realised, coming in to try their strength against the forces of Chaos as they moved. He saw bloody fighting. He saw primitive courage. Humans always surprised him that way. Such little life-spans, so furiously exhausted. Their valour would be almost admirable if it wasn't so futile.
Yet perhaps he could use that. To make allies was out of the question, but he could use all the time he could buy, and these determined Imperial humans, with their relentless urge to fight and win, could help him in that.
It was past time for him to play his last hand. He would work the humans, for what little good they could do, into that gambit. A final check now.
Muon Nol, Dire Avenger, master of the bodyguard, entered the Inner Place at the Old One's mental summons. He held his great white-crested helm under one arm, the red plume crest perfect and trim, and his opalescent blue armour glittered with flecks of gold, like the heart of a cooling star. The braided tassels of his cape hung down to his waist, shrouding the weapons cinched tight to his back. His noble, ancient eyes studied the Old One. There was fatigue in his long, solemn face.
'Muon Nol: how goes the work?'
The Way is open, lord.'
'And it must be closed. How much longer?'
Muon Nol looked down at the smooth stone floor where the shimmer of his blue armoured form was reflected. 'All but the bodyguard have departed, lord. The Closing of the Way has now begun. It will be a little time yet before we are finished.'
'A little time for us, perhaps, Muon Nol. Not for the enemy. More than long enough for them, I fear. There is no time for proper closure now. We must sever.'
'Lord!'
