Nonetheless my boot slid into the barbed wire and the metal thorns pierced the fabric of my uniform. As I pulled my leg free, the cloth tore along with the flesh beneath it. I was aware of the pain and knew I was badly scratched but in the heat of the action my body was able to ignore it, the way a fighting man can ignore the loss of a limb until he collapses dead at the end of a battle.

I scuttled up the barrier, aware of the sounds of fighting from below. I tried to calculate how far I had come. I was perhaps at the entrance to the Bazaar now, almost back where I started. I did not want to stick my head over the top and get it blown away so I inspected the cut in my leg for a moment, then glanced out into no-man’s-land. Billows of poisonous mist covered it, rolling slowly in my direction. I prayed that when it reached me I did not absorb any of its venom through my open wound.

Where the mists parted I could see piles of corpses, where the heretics had been mown down. It did not seem to have mattered to them. They had come on anyway, rolling forward in a massive wave, as if their lives meant nothing to them. They were expendable: a mere distraction while another more subtle assault had flowed over our position.

I pulled out the periscope and raised it over the parapet, from the wrong side this time. Down in the trench I caught sight of a green-uniformed Lion Guard squad locked in battle with the cultists. I could see Ivan, his mechanical arm covered in blood, brandishing the severed head of a heretic. It looked like he had pulled it clean from the neck. Anton knelt beside him and calmly snapped shots off with his sniper rifle. I could tell from his stance that he was filled with tension and excitement.

I twisted the periscope and saw a horde of heretics rushing towards them along the trench. I pulled out another grenade, lobbed it and crawled back along the brow of the parapet, tossing more grenades as I went. The enemy were so packed in that part of the trench that I could not miss. Gobbets of flesh and fountains of blood spattered me in the wake of the explosions. I kept tossing grenades. I had run out of explosives but I still had the phosphorescents so I lobbed them in as well. Even through the filters of my rebreather I thought I smelt the stench of burning, rotting flesh. I told myself it was my imagination.

A chain of explosions thundered and a line of fire filled the trench. Either I had hit a fuel dump or some of the heretics had been carrying something incendiary and I had set it off. No matter, the results were gratifying. I made my way back along the trench line for the fourth time. Black clouds emerged from it and the sound of shooting had stopped.

‘Ivan!’ I bellowed. ‘Anton! Can you hear me?’

‘Is that you, Leo?’ Anton replied.

‘No! It’s my ghost! What do you think?’

‘It has to be him,’ I heard Anton say. ‘It’s too sarky to be anybody else.’

‘I’m going to stick my head above the parapet now! Try not to blow it off!’

I extended the shotgun above my head with both hands. I figured that if someone was going to shoot me it would be better to lose a hand.