[Gaunt's Ghosts 08] - Traitor General

  Beltayn and Varl were half-carrying Feygor, who seemed to be lolling in and out of consciousness feverishly. Cirk was limping badly, and kept shooting Gaunt evil looks as if the particular situation was somehow all his fault.

  Gaunt ignored her. The “sunburn” on his face was becoming raw and painful, and seemed to attract the local bugs. He was sure it was the same for Rawne and Mkvenner.

  He wondered what lay in store for them now. The mission to Gereon had seemed an overwhelming challenge right from the outset, but for a while there, they had seemed to be getting somewhere. Now he seemed to have lost sight of the mission entirely. Bad luck had driven them further and further away from their goals, and now they had fallen into this surreal world. It was like a dream. En route to Gereon, he’d imagined many fates that might befall them there. This was so unlike any of them it almost made him laugh.

  The partisans brought them through the pools to the encampment. Many more Sleepwalkers, silent and pale, watched them approach from the platforms. The watchers were mostly male, but Gaunt saw womenfolk and children too. All of them were tall, slender and grey-skinned.

  Cynulff ap Niht, or whatever his name was, led them up the walkboards onto the lower stages, and they trudged up into the camp, the silent figures gazing at them. He took them to where a heavy wooden chest sat bolted to the platform and lifted the lid.

  “Setye brandes herein,” he ordered in his strange, thick voice.

  “Weapons,” Mkvenner said. “He wants us to put them here in the coffer.”

  “Is that an order?” Gaunt asked. Mkvenner asked Cynulff and listened to the reply.

  “It’s their law,” he told Gaunt. “Guests are not permitted to carry firearms in the camp. We must leave them here, where they will be safe. We can keep our blades, apparently, and he doesn’t seem bothered by your sword.”

  “Do it,” Gaunt told the team. Lasrifles and pistols went into the chest, along with Brostin’s cannon and the autorifles Cirk and Landerson carried. Larkin sighed and kissed his long-las before he put it in.

  Cynulff closed the lid and then beckoned them again. They followed him up onto a larger platform, and he pointed up a woven ladder that dangled from a much smaller hanging stage suspended from the canopy.

  “He wants us to wait up there while he consults his leader,” Mkvenner said.

  One by one, they climbed the ladder. It took a few minutes to get Feygor up onto the platform. Once he was there, he laid down and fell asleep on the mossy boards almost at once. The others sat down and rested wherever there was space. The platform swayed slightly under their moving weight.

  Gaunt stayed by the top of the ladder and looked down into the camp. Cynulff and the other partisans who had brought them in were moving away towards the dome-tents on the main platform. No guard had been set on the Ghosts, but Gaunt knew they were absolutely expected to stay on the small stage until Cynulff returned.

  Mkoll crouched down beside Gaunt. “Well, this is all pretty odd,” he said.

  “It could be worse,” Gaunt began.

  “We could be dead,” Mkoll finished. They both smiled.

  “If you like, I can slip away. Up that tree there, maybe. Take a look around. Get some weapons back.”

  Gaunt shook his head. “We’re up here in trust, I think. Throne knows, Mkoll, we could turn this to our advantage. If we could get them to help us…”

  “They don’t look to me much like the helping kind, sir,” Mkoll replied.

  “What do they look like?”

  “The freaky dangerous kind who just happen not to have killed us yet.”

  “Uh huh. That’s my reading too. But let’s give them the benefit. It’s clear to me that if they wanted us dead, we wouldn’t even have known about it until it happened. I think we intrigue them. They’re curious. Speaking of curious, get Ven over here.”

  Mkvenner came across to them at Mkoll’s signal.

  “Sir?”

  “Ven, I believe we’re only alive now because you possess a previously undisclosed facility with proto-Gothic.”

  Mkvenner shrugged.

  “A shrug isn’t going to cut it, Ven. I need to know.”

  “It’s a personal matter, sir. Private. I’d prefer not to speak of it.”

  “I’d prefer not to have to ask you, but I’m asking. The needs of this mission supercede any private issues any of us might have. That’s the way it is.”

  Mkvenner took a deep breath.

  “I’ll be over there, checking on Feygor,” Mkoll said, and got up quickly to leave them alone.

  “So,” said Gaunt. “Even the sarge doesn’t know the secrets of his best scout?”

  “He knows some. More than anybody else. But not everything.”

  “You can speak the old tongue.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because…?”

  “I learned it as a child on Tanith, sir.”

  “I learned it as a child too, in a classroom on Ignatius Cardinal. But you speak it like a native, Ven.”

  “Maybe.”

  Gaunt took off his cap and ran his fingers though his lank hair. “I’m not a dentist, you know, Mkvenner.”

  “A… what, sir?”

  “This is like pulling teeth. We haven’t got much time. Talk to me, for feth’s sake. Is this to do with the Nalsheen?”

  Mkvenner seemed wary suddenly. “It is, sir. Who’s been talking?”

  “Ven, there have been rumours about you since the day of the First Founding. There’s not a man in the regiment who hasn’t heard them. And not a single man who’s seen you fight hand to hand that doubts them. Your skills are like no one else’s.”

  “Sir.”

  “The Nalsheen are supposed to be extinct, Ven. A memory from the feudal days of Tanith. As I heard it, the Nalsheen were wood-warriors, a fighting brotherhood who dwelt in the nalwoods and who overthrew the old tyrants. Some think them a myth. Some think they never existed at all. But they did, didn’t they, Ven?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come on, man. I’d like to think that you can trust me.”

  Mkvenner sat down next to Gaunt. Their feet hung over the edge of the platform. The Nalsheen existed, sir. Right up until the day Tanith died. They continued their traditions in the remote woods, passing on the lore of cwlwhl from father to son. There were very few of them, but they had sworn to keep the brotherhood alive in case tyranny ever rose again on Tanith. My family line has been Nalsheen as far back as records go.”

  Gaunt nodded, and waited for Mkvenner to continue.

  “I was trained from an early age, three or four, I think. I was taken to the old master in the nalwoods by my father, and the lore was passed to me. The fighting skills, the woodcraft, the faith itself. And the language. The Nalsheen had always used the old form of Gothic as their private tongue. The same language the first woodsmen spoke when they settled Tanith in the Early Times.”

  “Just the same as here,” Gaunt said.

  “Yes, sir. When I heard the partisan speak, it chilled my blood. It was like hearing the voice of my father again.”

  Mkvenner stared silently out across the marshland trees for a long moment, lost in his own memories.

  “That’ll do, Ven. You’ve answered my questions. Not all that I’d like to ask, but enough.”

  “Thank you, sir. But you should ask the rest of them, I think. You deserve to know. I don’t believe I should have secrets from my commander.”

  “Right. Are you Nalsheen, Mkvenner?”

  “No, sir. I have many of their skills and craft, but I never finished my training. My father wanted me to, and so did the old master. But I was a headstrong youth. I… thought I knew better. I wanted to serve the Emperor, you see. I joined the militia of the nearest city and, when the Founding was called, signed up to the Guard. The last of the Nalsheen… men like my father and the other wood masters in the remote places… died when Chaos burned our world.”

  Gaunt nodded. “Ven,” he said, “if you hadn?
??t been that headstrong youth, if you hadn’t quit the woods and joined the Guard, you’d also have died with Tanith. And if that had been the case, two men would have been very sorry.”

  “Sir? Who?”

  “Me, for one, because without you so many of the Ghosts’ battles would have been lost. How many times have you saved me? Just yesterday, on that field, against the wirewolves. I owe you. The Ghosts owe you. I know Corbec owed you to his dying day.”

  “Is Colm the other man, then, sir?” Mkvenner asked.

  “No, Ven. The other man is your father. If you had stayed in the nalwoods, and died with him as Tanith died, there wouldn’t have been a Nalsheen to guide the last men of Tanith today.”

  Brostin sat on the far side of the hanging stage, looking out over the swamp and mock-smoking one of his precious lho-sticks. He didn’t care who saw him.

  “Can I bum one of those?” Curth asked, sitting down beside him.

  Brostin grinned. He was a massive brute, but his smile was infectious. He hooked the pack out of his tunic pocket and let Curth take one.

  They sat for a while, pretending to smoke.

  “Mmmm… tastes good,” she murmured.

  “Finest rolled Imperial grade,” he agreed, playing along with the charade.

  “Of course,” she said, “as a Guard medicae, I ought to warn you of the health risks. Smoking lho-sticks is very, very bad.”

  “Oh, I know, doc. Really, I do. Filthy things.”

  “Exactly. Smoking lho is, frankly, stupid. Only stupid people do it. Really, really stupid people.”

  “You know,” Brostin said, hooking the heel of his right boot up on the edge of the stage and making another, laborious fake draw on the smoke. “You know what’s really stupid though?”

  “Tell me, trooper.”

  “It’s people pretending to smoke.”

  She laughed. “I hear that, Bros. What I wouldn’t do for a light.”

  He glanced at her and raised his thick eyebrows suggestively. She laughed again.

  He chuckled too, then pointed out across the camp. “There’s a light,” he said.

  He was pointing to one of the camp braziers, throbbing with flame.

  “Too far away,” she said.

  “Its burning promethium,” he said. “Crude prom, not refined stuff. They use it here for fuel. In fact, that’s why their camp is here.”

  “What do you mean?” Curth asked, momentarily forgetting to keep up her pantomime of smoking.

  “Over yonder,” Brostin replied, nodding towards the swamp pools west of the stage-camp. The water there was murky and brown, and bubbled lazily. The Sleepwalkers had planted several marker poles in the centre of the pools.

  “A natural well,” Brostin said. “Gushing up from the silt. Raw, mind you, not synthesised. My guess is the moth-freaks built this camp at a place where they could dredge up fuel for burning.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “I can smell it, doc,” he said, tapping the side of his fleshy nose with a dirty finger. “Besides, just look at the oil patterns on the water there. Like a rainbow, they are. That’s crude prom, coming up from the deposits. Sure as I’m not a petite blonde lass called Ana.”

  She looked at him. “I’m guessing, but you have an overwhelming desire to set fire to it right now, don’t you?”

  “Doc,” he replied, “many call it arson. Many call me a pyromaniac. I just think of it as fun with matches. But I tell you this: I’d toss my whole pack of lhos into the marsh for a chance to light that baby up. Fire, y’see. It’s what I do.”

  Curth pretended to flick ash from her lho-stick. “Let’s just keep pretending, shall we?” she said.

  There was activity down on the lower platforms suddenly. Cynulff ap Niht reappeared with a gang of armed Sleepwalkers, and gestured for Gaunt to descend.

  “Ven, with me,” he said, getting up. “Rawne, you’re in charge.”

  For the life of him, Gaunt had wanted to give Mkoll command of the group he was leaving, but Rawne had rank.

  “Just don’t do anything stupid,” Gaunt told Rawne.

  “As if.”

  “You, or anyone else.”

  Gaunt climbed down the rope ladder onto the lower stage, Mkvenner behind him. They followed Cynulff s men towards the main platform.

  “So, they call themselves sleepwalkers?” Gaunt whispered to Mkvenner.

  “No, sir. They call themselves nihtgane, which means ‘those who go about in the night’. Simply put, they are nightwalkers.”

  Gaunt nodded. How easily the locals had translated that word into noctambulists and therefore sleepwalkers. They’d missed the point entirely.

  “The niht is the darkness of these marshes,” Mkvenner said. “That’s all they know.”

  The main tent, articulated like a giant umbrella, was lit from within by a single large promethium burner, hanging from a chain. The partisans had packed in, surrounding the chieftain, who looked more like a gigantic moth than any of them. His cloak was long and thick, and trailed out across the platform around him.

  His eyes glinted from within the mosaic ovals. His woaded moustache was so long it was plaited.

  His name was Cynhed ap Niht. He was “of the night”, that was a thing he insisted on making clear through Mkvenner’s translation. He introduced his sons: Eszekel, Eszebe, Eszrah and almost a dozen others. Gaunt lost track. In their grey skin paint and capes, they all looked alike.

  When his turn came, Gaunt tried to explain his identity and his purpose. It was slow work. Mkvenner did his best to translate, but the chieftain kept asking questions and interrupting.

  “Gereon has changed,” Gaunt found himself repeating. The world outside the niht has changed. The Imperium is no longer your enemy. Chaos has come.”

  “Khh-aous?” the chieftain repeated. “Hwat yitt meanye thissen werde?”

  “The archenemy of us all,” Gaunt tried to explain. “My team, my men, we are here on an important mission. It is vital to the Imperium. Many will die if we don’t—” he looked at Mkvenner, who was still translating.

  “This is getting us nowhere, isn’t it?”

  “Keep going, sir,” Mkvenner said.

  “Tell him… tell him I want the help of the partisans. The nihtgane. I want guides to lead us through the Untill so we can reach Lectica and the heartlands. Tell him many lives—”

  “Many lives will be saved, Yes sir. I’ve told him that. Twice. He seems fixated on the notion of another enemy.”

  “Another enemy?”

  “Chaos, sir.”

  “Preyathee,” the chieftain said, leaning forward. “Hwat beyit thissen khh-aous, soule?”

  “Ven, tell him that the archenemy is a murderous beast, one that seeks to murder him and his kind as much as it wants to kill us. We are here to fight it. In the name of the God-Emperor.”

  Mkvenner translated again. The chieftain listened with interest.

  “Tell him—”

  Cynhed ap Niht interrupted, holding up a grey hand. “Histye, lissenye we haf. Council beyit takken, preyathee. Goye from heer, withe rest alse, as yitt meanye goode mett wherall. On yitt we shalle maken minde.”

  The Sleepwalkers led them out of the tent.

  “Well?” Gaunt said.

  “Now, we wait,” said Mkvenner. They’re going to consider what we’ve said and decide what to do about it.”

  One of the ordinal’s excubitors had accidentally inhaled a moth. It writhed in the thick water, splashing and vomiting itself to death.

  Uexkull looked down at it. It wasn’t worth a bolt round to put it out of its misery. The ordinal had five more. Hell knew why he’d brought them in the first place. Sthenelus had an escort of five warrior Marines. What did he need with excubitors?

  The ordinal stalked his way over to the dying excubitor. The choking wretch clawed at Sthenelus’ slim metal limbs with slippery hands, hoping for benediction and relief. The ordinal simply extended a thin sampling hook and took a swab of the exc
ubitor’s bloody froth.

  “Toxin levels at eight point one on the Fabius scale. Air humidity now nine parts to level. Land is pooled to a half metre, and shelves away at two degrees. Flora sampling now follows.”

  The ordinal’s pict-coders began to click as they recorded the surrounding tree mass. The excubitor convulsed one final time and expired.

  Around them, in the gloom, Sthenelus’ remote mapping psyber skulls hovered and recorded.

  The ordinal continued his non-stop vocal cataloguing, engaging the flimsy brass sensors of his walker frame to chart. The articulated rods reached out in all directions.

  “Thick-husked berry fruit with red exocarp, toxic, but with potential commercial value for seed oils. Small pendule fruit with brownish pith, approximately—”

  “My ordinal,” Uexkull said. “Please concentrate. The enemy. Where is the enemy?”

  One of Sthenelus’ long brass samplers lifted from the ooze, sucking.

  “One moment, lord Uexkull. Hmmm… one part in ten million, but human blood nevertheless. Someone was bitten here. I detect an odd concentration of moth venom too. Curious. An artificial compound.”

  “Which way?” Uexkull demanded.

  Sthenelus pointed.

  On the high, suspended platform, the members of the mission team waited. Minutes swelled into hours. Time seemed to pass at the most laborious rate. Around them, the quiet camp and the slow, swirling fogs of the vaguely illuminated marsh seemed to match the crawl of time.