Free Ghostmaker by Dan Abnett Page A

nal-wood forests back home, when there was still a back home, the nal-woods in winter, when he’d gone out logging and hunting. Frost had crusted the evergreen needles on the sighing trees then until they had tinkled like wind chimes.
    Here, now, there was only the sigh, the motion of the dry ferns and the clogging dust that got into every pore and rasped the soft tissue at the back of the throat. The sunlight was bright and harsh, stabbing down through the pale, spare air out of a sky translucent blue. It made a striated web out of the ground cover under the ferns — stark sun-splashes and jagged shadows of blackness.
    He crept forward twenty metres into a break of skeleton brush. His lower legs were already double-wrapped with chain-cloth to protect against the shredding thorns. He had his lasgun held to his chest on a tightly cinched strap to keep it clear of the dust but, every ten minutes or so, he checked its moving parts and cleared the dust, fern-fibres, twig-shreds and burrs that accumulated constantly.
    Several cracks made him turn and freeze, sliding his gun into a firing grip between smooth, dry palms. Something was moving through the thicket to his left, cracking the occasional spent thorn underfoot.
    To be fair, they were moving with extreme and trained stealth, but still their progress sounded like a careless march to Mkoll’s acute hearing.
    Mkoll drew his knife, its long silver blade deliberately dulled with ash. He backed into a thorn stalk and moulded his body to the kinking plant. Two steps, one.
    He swung out, only pulling back his blade at the last moment.
    Trooper Dewr cried out and fell backwards, splintering dry stalks as he dropped. Mkoll was on top of him in a second, pinning his arms and pushing the blade against his neck.
    “Sacred Feth! You could’ve killed me!” Dewr barked agitatedly.
    “Yes, I could,” said Mkoll, a whisper.
    He relaxed his grip, rolled off and let the man rise.
    “So could anything else out here, noise you were making.”
    “I…” Dewr dropped his voice suddenly. “Are we alone?”
    Mkoll didn’t answer. Chances were, if anything else was out here, it would have heard Dewr’s fall too.
    “I didn’t mean anything,” Dewr began hoarsely, wincing as he plucked out the thorns he had fallen on.
    Mkoll was scanning around, his gun ready. “What the feth did they teach you during basic?” he whispered. “You’re meant to be a scout!”
    Dewr didn’t reply. All the scouts knew Mkoll’s exacting standards, and knew just as well how they all failed to meet them. Dewr felt angry, in fact. During basic training, before that as a hunter in the southern gameland of Tanith Attica, he’d been reckoned as a good tracker. That was why they had selected him for the scout unit when the regiment mustered, for feth’s sake! And this old bastard made him feel like a fool, a clumsy fool!
    Wordlessly, ignoring the stare he knew Dewr was boring into the back of his head, Mkoll signalled an advance, heading down the slope into the fern-choked vale.
    The Tanith had arrived on Ramillies two weeks before, just in time to miss the main action. The Adeptus Astartes had cleaned out and secured the four enemy strongholds, banishing Chaos from the world. The Ghosts had assembled on the low plains near one burning fortress, seeing Space Marines, threatening bulks in the smoky distance like the giants of myth, piling the ragged corpses of slain cultists onto pyres. The air had been thick with filthy char.
    It seemed some small components of the enemy had fled the defeat, making into the fern forests in the north, too small and insignificant for the glorious Space Marines to waste time upon. The commissar was charged with a search and destroy detail. The Ghosts had advanced into the low hills and the dense forestation, to smoke out the last of the foe.
    There were a few early successes: enclaves of cultists, some well-armed, dug into bolt-holes and lodges, making a last stand. Then, after a week, as they reached the