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Headquarters.
    Outside, on the lawn, a squad of Blueblood elite in full battle dress were executing a precision synchronised drill with chainswords. Metal flashed and whirled, perfect and poised. Beyond them, a garden of trellises and arbours led down to a boating lake, calm and smoky in the afternoon light. Navigation lights flashed slowly on the barbed masts of the communications array in the herbarium. Somewhere in the stable block, strutting gaudcocks whooped and called.
    You wouldn’t think there was a war on, mused Sturm. He wondered where the previous owners of the manse were now. Did they make it off world before the first assault? Are they huddled and starving in the belly hold of a refugee ship, reduced overnight to a level with their former vassals? Or are they bone-ash in the ruins of Kosdorf, or on the burning Metis Road? Or did they die screaming and melting at the orbital port when the legions of Chaos first fell on their world, vaporised with the very ships they struggled to escape in?
    Who cares? thought Sturm. The war is all that matters. The glory, the crusade, the Emperor. He would only care for the fallen when the bloody head of Chanthar, demagogue of the Chaos army that held Voltis Citadel, was served up to him on a carving dish. And even then, he wouldn’t care much.
    Gilbear was on his feet, refilling his glass. “This Gaunt, he’s quite a fellow, isn’t he? Wasn’t he with the Hyrkan 8th?”
    Sturm cleared his throat, “Led them to victory at Balhaut. One of old Slaydo’s chosen favourites. Made him a colonel — commissar, no less. It was decided he had the prestige to hammer a new regiment or two into shape, so they sent him to the planet Tanith to supervise the rounding there. A Chaos space fleet hit the world that very night, and he got out with just a few thousand men.”
    Gilbear nodded. “That’s what I heard. Skin of his teeth. But that’s his career in tatters, stuck with an under-strength rabbit-like that. Macaroth won’t transfer him, will he?”
    Sturm managed a small smile. “Our beloved overlord does not look kindly on the favourites of his predecessor. Especially as Slaydo granted Gaunt and a handful of others the settlement rights of the first world they conquered. He and his Tanith rabble are an embarrassment to the new regime. But that serves us well. They will fight hard because they have everything to prove, and everything to win.”
    “I say,” said Gilbear suddenly, lowering his glass. “What if they do win? I mean, if they’re as useful as you say?”
    “They will facilitate our victory,” Sturm said, pouring himself a drink. “They will not achieve anything else. We will serve Lord Macaroth twofold, by taking this world for him, and ridding him of Gaunt and his damn Ghosts.”
     
    “You were expecting us?” Gaunt asked, riding on the top of Ortiz’s Basilisk as the convoy moved on.
    Colonel Ortiz nodded, leaning back against the raised top-hatch cover. “We were ordered up the line last night to dig in at the north end of the Bokore Valley and pound the enemy fortifications on the western side. Soften them up, I suppose. En route, I got coded orders sent, telling us to meet your regiment at Pavis Crossroads and transport you as we advanced.”
    Gaunt removed his cap and ran a hand through his short fair hair. “We were ordered across country to the crossroads, all right,” he responded. “Told to meet transport there for the next leg. But my scouts picked up the World Eaters’ stench, so we doubled back and met you early.”
    Ortiz shuddered. “Good thing for us.”
    Gaunt gazed along the line of the convoy as they moved on, taking in the massive bulk of the Basilisks as they ground up the snaking mud-track through the sickly, dim forest. His men were riding on the flanks of the great war machines, a dozen or more per vehicle, joking with the Serpent crews, exchanging drinks and smokes, some cleaning weapons or even snoozing as the lurch of the metal beasts allowed.
    “So Sturm’s