trees. They tumbled together down a short incline into a creek bed swollen with storm water. The Ghost and Volpone audience hovered at the rim of the creek, looking down and chanting.
Gilbear rose first, black with the muddy water, and swung a punch. It kissed air. Corbec exploded up out of the flood, greased jet-black with liquid mud, and doubled Gilbear with a low punch to the gut, then sent him over in a spray of silver droplets with an upper cut to the chin.
Gilbear wasn't done. He came back out of the water like a surfacing whale, as loud and vicious as the storm which quaked the sky above, and knocked Corbec back two, three steps with blow after blow. Corbec's mouth was split open and his nose broken, flooding his beard with blood.
Corbec ducked in low, throwing punches before he shoulder-charged Gilbear off his feet. Corbec lurched the massive Blueblood backwards on his shoulder, legs dangling, then twisted and threw him over himself in a perfect wrestling move, slamming Gilbear down into the creek on his back. Corbec kicked him for good measure.
Trooper Alhac, a Blueblood, was pounding his hands together wildly until he realised his side had lost. He was about to turn his venom on the cheering Tanith beside him when the undergrowth to his left flickered.
Alhac froze. So did the Ghost he was about to strike.
Something black and abominable grew out of the jumping lights in the thicket.
Alhac died, cut into streaks of evaporating flesh. The Ghost beside him perished the same way a second later. Then another Blueblood, skinned in an instant. The other Ghosts and Bluebloods who had been cheering the fight from the creek edge fled in panic.
'Oh feth!' Corbec said, dripping with ooze, looking up.
'What?' asked Gilbear, rising beside him.
'That!'
The creature was like a dog, if a dog could be the size of a horse, if a horse could move as fast as a humming bird. A red, arched-backed quadruped with long, triple jointed limbs and a skin-less, blistered pelt. Its skull was huge and short, blunt, with the lower jaw extending beyond the upper, and multiple rows of triangular saw-teeth in each. It had no eyes. A warp creature, loosed from the storm and hunting for Chaos.
'Oh feth!' Corbec spat.
'Great Vulpo!' barked Gilbear.
The dog-thing leapt down into the creek and began to pound towards them. Corbec and Gilbear turned and ran as fast as they could through the root-twisted waterway. It was right behind them, baying.
The thing leapt on Gilbear and dragged him down, ripping at his carapace armour with its tusks. Strips of armaplas shredded off his shoulder panels. Gilbear cried out, helpless.
Corbec leapt astride the warp-beast, pulling its head back by the mane and plunging his Tanith dagger into its throat, foetid purple blood squirted from the wound and the thing opened its mouth to howl and squeal.
'Now, Blueblood! Now!' Corbec shouted, riding the beast, pulling its skull back.
Gilbear pulled a frag grenade from his belt and threw it straight into the beast's mouth, right down its gullet past the wincing pink larynx.
Gilbear threw himself down and Corbec propelled himself clear.
The dog-thing exploded from within, showering both them and the creek bed with stinking meat.
Corbec pulled himself up out of the fluid muck at the bottom of the watercourse. He looked across at Gilbear, sat with his back against the creek wall, eyes straining.
'You all right?' Corbec gurgled.
Gilbear nodded.
'About time we called a truce, eh?'
Gilbear nodded again. They both got up, unsteady and filmed with mud and flecks of putrid meat. 'A truce. Yes. A truce…' Gilbear was still stunned. 'For now.'
'The ruin, sir, the one I glimpsed before. I found it again.'Mkoll's voice was soft and brittle, his breath laboured. He sat on a fallen log, sipping alternately from a water canteen and a sacra flask that Bragg had manifested. He was bandaged and caked in mud. Gaunt crouched by him, listening carefully. Mkoll seemed a little spooked by Lilith, but she read this response quickly and held back so Gaunt could talk to his valued scout.
'What is it?' asked Gaunt.
Mkoll shrugged. 'No idea. Big, old, fortified. It's on top of a mound that I don't think is natural. Too regular. All I know is, the enemy are surrounding it thicker than sap-flies round a glucose trap.'
Gaunt felt a tingle of alarm. Not only did he know precisely what Mkoll meant, he had a brief, vivid mental flash of the long-bodied insects themselves, swarming around a beaker of glistening fluid on a woodsman's hut- stoop. Insects native to Tanith. Insects he had never seen.
'Numbers?' he pressed on.
'I didn't take a headcount,' Mkoll muttered dryly. 'I was a little busy, fens of thousands is my guess. Maybe more, beyond my line of sight. The terrain was hilly, thick cover. There could have been hundreds of thousands up there.'
'What are they after?' Gaunt wondered out loud.
'I think we have to find out,' Lilith said quietly.
Gaunt rose and looked round at the inquisitor, her face in shadow from her cowl. 'Before we explore the insanity of sending sixty men up against a possible force of hundreds of thousands, may I remind you that we can't even find this place? Our locators and auspex are screwed, my scouts can't tell one direction from another, feth, Mkoll's my best, and he admits he only found it again by accident.'
