Dan Abnett - Ghostmaker

With Foskin's help, he treated Tremard's wound and got him stable. Then he ordered all the Ghosts back out to the defence, all except Tesp, whom he needed. Another comatose Volpone had woken during the rough relocation and was convulsing.

Caffran, Toskin, Gutes and Claig made their way up the cellar steps, taking their pick of the broken Volpone weapons stacked in the stable-block on their way to rejoin the defence.

The convulsing Volpone died. Though he showed no outward signs of injuring except severe bruising, Dorden knew his innards had been turned to jelly by artillery concussion. Lesp helped him haul the corpse back up the undercroft stairs and dump it in the hall.

They went back down. The undercroft was damp and pun gent, lit by hissing chemical lamps the Ghosts had set up hurriedly. The injured moaned and sighed. Some slept like they were dead. The earth around them all shook and trickles of liquid mud spurted down from the roof every now and then as the onslaught rattled the foundations of the house.

'We're all going to die here, aren't we, sir?' Lesp asked, his voice clear and certain.

Dorden stammered for a moment, lost for words. He thought, desperately, what Gaunt might say in such circumstances. What would a trained political officer do here, trying to raise the spirits of men looking death in he face? He couldn't do it. It wasn't in him. He couldn't compose any deft line about 'the greater good of the Imperial Guard' or the ''lifeblood of the Emperor''. Instead, all he could manage was something entirely personal.

'I'm not,' he told Lesp. 'When I die, my wife and daughter and granddaughter die too, their memories lost with me. Tor them, I'll not die here, Tesp.'

Tesp nodded, his big Adam's apple gulping in his narrow throat, He thought of the memories he carried: mother, father, brothers, crew mates on the archipelago trawler.

'Neither will I, then,' he managed.

Dorden turned towards the stairs.

'Where are you going?' Lesp asked.

'You manage things here. I'm going to take a look up top. From the sound of things, they may need a medic.'

Tesp pulled out his laspistol and offered it, butt-first, to the chief medic.

Dorden shook his head. 'I can't start that now,' he said.

Upstairs, the old ruin was quiet. It seemed as if the storm and the assault had abated together for the moment. Dorden edged into the vacated long hall and tried his micro-bead but it was dead. The ceiling lamps swung and loose debris fluttered down. Tree of bodies, the stinking cots looked pitiful and sadly spoiled. Dorden stepped over pools of blood and shreds of discarded clothing.

He strode into the outer kitchen, looking once at the stained table where he had excised a part of Regara's leg. He saw the old fireplace for the first time. Black iron, just like the one he had sat before at home on Tanith. He and his wife, at the end of a long night, with a book and a glass of something warming, before the grate-light.

Along the mantle, small blocks of what looked like chalk sat in a row. He moved over and took one in his hand. A tusk. The small, shed tusk of a pig. The inhabitants of this manor, whoever they were, had raised swine, cared for them enough to treasure the trophies of their growth and development. Pig teeth, each marked in a delicate hand with a name… Emperor, Sire, His lordship… and dates.

This touch of frugal humanity, the day-to-day chronicle of a farmstead, affected him deeply. It wasn't mawkish, it mattered somehow. Why pigs? Who had lived here, raised the swine, toiled in the fens, brought up a family?

A sound from the long hall brought him up to the surface of his thoughts. He moved back to meet a gaggle of men as they limped and blundered in through the hall doors from the outside. The Volpone substitutes and the Ghosts, all except Corbec. They were shell-shocked and dazed, weary on their feet.

Dorden found Mkoll at the rear of the group.

'They've fallen back,' Mkoll said. 'It's dead quiet out there. That can mean only one thing…'

'I'm a medic, not a soldier, Mkoll! What does it mean?'

Mkoll sighed as Dorden attended to the splinter wounds in his face. They've failed with a physical assault. 'They're drawing back so they can bring up artillery.'

Dorden nodded. 'Get below, into the undercroft, all of you. Foskin – Lesp will help you cook up some food for all. Do it! Artillery or not, I want everyone sustained.'

The men filed away towards the steps into the cellar. Dorden was alone again in the hall.

Corbec entered, covered in blood and fire-soot. He dropped Brostin's empty flamer onto one cot and threw Tamard's spent lasgun the other way.

'Time's trickling away, Doc,' he said. 'We held them – feth but we held them! – but they're gonna hammer us now. I scoped movement over the fens, big guns being wheeled into place. An hour, if we're lucky, and then they'll level us from a distance.'

'Colm… I thank you for all you and the men have done tonight. I hope it was worth it.'

'It's always worth it, Doc.'

'So what do we do now? Bury ourselves in the cellar?'

Corbec shrugged. That won't save us from their shells. Don't know about you, but I'm going to do the only thing I can think of at a time like this?'

'Which is?'

'Pray to the Emperor. Mkoll said there was an old shrine out back of this place. Prayers are all we have left.'

Together, Corbec and Dorden pulled their way through a litter of rubble and debris and broken furniture into the little room at the back of the farmhouse. It had lost its roof and the stars twinkled above them.

Corbec had brought a lamp. He played its light over the rear walls, picking up the flaking painted image on the ornamental screen Mkoll had mentioned. It showed the Divine Emperor subduing the Heretics, and smaller figures of a man, a woman, and three small children, shown in obeisance to the central figure of the God-emperor of Man.

'There's an inscription here,' Dorden said, scraping the dirt away from the wall with his cuff pulled up over the ball of his hand.

'A pig! What is this?'

Corbec raised the lamp and read off the inscription. 'Here's irony for you, Doc: this was a trophy world. A New Tanith. The master of this hall was a Parens Cloker, of the Imperial Guard, Hogskull Regiment. The Hogskulls won this world during the first advance into the Sabbat one hundred and ninety years ago Winning it, they were awarded settlement rights. Cloker was a corporal in the Guard, and he took his rights gladly. Settled here, made a family, raised swine in honour of the mascot beast of his old regiment. His kin have honoured that ever since.'

Corbec faltered, something like sadness in his eyes. 'Feth! To get there, to win it, to take the trophy world… and still it comes down to this?'

'Not for all. How many trophy worlds are there out there where the soldiers of the Guard have retired and lived out their days?'

'I don't know. This is all too real. To fight for your lifetime, get the prize you wanted, and then this?'

Corbec and Dorden sank down together in the debris-strewn chapel.

'You asked me why I stayed with you, Doc. I'll tell you now as we're dead and we have nothing to live for.' With that last remark, Corbec flung his hand towards the reredos' inscription.

'Well?'

'You were the doctor for Pryze County for twenty years.'

'Twenty-seven. And Beldane.'

Corbec nodded. 'I was raised in Pryze. My family were wood workers there. I was born out of wedlock and so I took my father's name, when I knew him. My mother now… I was a difficult birth.'

Dorden stiffened, knowing somehow what must come next.

'She'd have died in labour, had it not been for the young medic who charged out in the night and saw to her. Landa Meroc. Remember her?'