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nozzled gas masks sewn into the flesh of their faces. Their body armour was a dull industrial green and rubberised. They had taken the protective garb of their workspace and made it their battledress, daubing everything with eye-aching symbols.
    Slammed against the trench wall by a falling body, Milo looked down at the corpses which gathered around them. He saw for the first time, in detail, the nature of his foe… the twisted, corrupted human forms of the Chaos host, incised with twisted runes and sigils, painted on the dull green rubber of their armour or carved into their raw flesh.
    One of the Shriven ploughed in past Gaunt’s shrieking sword and dove at Milo. The boy dropped and the cultist smashed into the trench wall. Scrabbling in the muddy wetness of the trench bed, Milo retrieved one of the lasguns that had fallen from the dying grasp of one of Gaunt’s previous victims. The Shriven was on him as he hefted the weapon up and fired, point blank. The flaming round punched through his opponent’s torso and the dead cultist fell across him, forcing him down by sheer weight into the sucking ooze of the trench floor. Foul water surged into his mouth, and mud and blood. A second later he was heaved, coughing, to his feet by Trooper Bragg, the most massive of the men of Tanith, who was somehow always there to watch over him.
    ‘Get down,’ Bragg said as he hoisted a rocket launcher onto his shoulder. Milo knelt and covered his ears, tight. Hopefully muttering the Litany of True Striking to himself, Bragg fired his huge weapon off down the companionway of the trench. A fountain of mud and other unnameable things were blown into fragments. He often missed what he was aiming at, but in these conditions that wasn’t an option.
    To their right, Gaunt was scything his way into the close-packed enemy. He began to laugh, coated with the rain of blood that he was loosing with his shrieking chainsword. Every now and then he would fire his pistol and explode another of the Shriven.
    He was filled with fury. The signal from Lord General Dravere had been draconian and cruel. Gaunt would have wanted to take the enemy trenches if he could, but to be ordered to do so with no other option except death was, in his opinion, the decision of a flawed, brutal mind. He’d never liked Dravere, not at any time since their first meeting twenty years before, when Dravere had still been an ambitious armour colonel. Back on Darendara, back with Oktar and the Hyrkans…
    Gaunt had kept the nature of the orders from his men. Unlike Dravere, he understood the mechanisms of morale and inspiration. Now they were taking the damned trenches, almost in spite of Dravere’s orders rather than because of them. His laughter was the laughter of fury and resentment, and pride in his men for doing the impossible regardless.
    Nearby, Milo stumbled to his feet, holding the lasgun.
    We’re there, Gaunt thought, we’ve broken them!
    Ten metres down the line, Sergeant Blane leapt in with his platoon and sealed the event, blasting left and right with his lasgun as his men charged, bayonets first. There was a frenzy of las-fire and a flash of silver Tanith blades.
    Milo was still holding the lasgun when Gaunt snatched it from him and threw it down onto the duckboards. ‘Do you think you’re a soldier, boy?’
    ‘Yes, sir!’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘You know I am.’
    Gaunt looked down at the sixteen year-old boy and smiled sadly.
    ‘Maybe you are, but for now play up. Play a tune that will sing us to glory!’
    Milo pulled his Tanith pipes from his pack and breathed into the chanter. For a moment it screamed like a dying man. Then he began playing. It was Waltrab’s Wilde, an old tune that had always inspired the men in the taverns of Tanith, to drink and cheer and make merry.
    Sergeant Blane heard the tune and with a grimace he laid into the enemy. By his side, his adjutant, vox-officer Symber, started to sing along as he blasted with his lasgun. Trooper Bragg