“You make it sound like a game of regicide!” the pheguth laughed.
Mabbon looked at him. “A bigger board, a billion more pieces, and those pieces alive, but…” The etogaur smiled.
They were approaching the brake of sickly trees that screened the end of the field from the valley beyond. The pheguth glimpsed the hedgerow outlines of the field system covering the heartland bocage all around them.
“So,” the pheguth wondered, “you felt you might be backing the wrong horse?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My idiom, I’m sorry. I meant… you made your choice because you felt the Archon might not be the best Archon for the job?”
“Wait here,” Mabbon told the troop detail and they came to a halt. “You may wait too, life-ward,” Mabbon added.
Desolane glared at the etogaur.
“I will guard him, Desolane. You have my word.”
Reluctantly, Desolane halted too. Mabbon led the pheguth down into the trees. Some form of lice or blight had afflicted them. Their leaves were withered and sere, and their trunks wet with black decay. There was a powerful stench of decomposition.
“We must watch our words,” Mabbon said to the pheguth as they wandered in through the dead stand.
“Desolane vets your guards carefully, but as you have already found, there are some amongst the host who might consider our opinions heresy. The Archon is still the Archon. He is master of us all, even Anarch Sek.”
“But you seek to change that balance of power?”
Mabbon Etogaur paused. He raised his hand and idly touched the deep, old scars that decorated his face and bald head. It was as if he was considering the best way of replying. That, or remembering some past pain and the promise it had contained. “Many believe that if Gaur remains in command of our forces, he will squander our strengths with his fury, wear our host down with relentless assaults against Macaroth, and ultimately lead us to nothing but defeat and annihilation. Many believe that Sek should have been Nadaybar’s successor after Balhaut. Many believe that particular mistake must be corrected, and soon, before we lose the Sabbat Worlds forever.”
“And the first step?” asked the pheguth. To give Sek a martial order to rival the Blood Pact?”
Mabbon nodded. “You know that much already, sir.”
“Yes, I know. But I think it’s just really sinking in now. The… the scale of this. The audacity.”
Mabbon chuckled. “That concept again. I told you, Sek admires the quality.”
“But the Archon could have us all killed. This is tantamount to insurrection. Gaur was my enemy for a long time, and now I’ve come over, I don’t relish the irony of it happening again.”
“As far as the Archon is concerned,” said Mabbon, “we are helping Magister Sek to improve his forces, and thus the quality of his service to the Gaur. We are not the simple brutes you Imperials seem to think, sir. We are not beyond politicking and intrigue We will disguise and misdirect, and behind those lies, build our forces. The rest the dangerous part, can wait. It may be years until Sek is ready to make his move. We have years. This war is old, and it isn’t going anywhere.”
“So that’s why you turned pheguth too?”
The etogaur laughed out loud. “Traitor, eh? Traitor to the Archon. Yes, that’s why. I believe in the future. And the future is not Urlock Gaur.”
“You renounced the Pact?”
“I did,” said Mabbon. “My heart and mind were easy to change. My ritual scars were not.” He held up those pale, soft, unblemished hands of his. The meat foundries gave me new hands to erase the marks of my pledge.”
The pheguth found himself looking down at his own, augmetic hand. “It’s strange, don’t you think, Mabbon? That we both celebrate our treasons, the break of long-held loyalties, in our hands?”
“You must tell me your story sometime, sir,” Mabbon said.
“My dear Mabbon, I will. As soon as I remember it.”
They came out through the trees into the lower field and the pheguth saw what he had been brought there to witness. It was an impressive sight.
Some three hundred men, stripped down to ochre combat trousers and brown boots, were training in paired teams down the length of the field. They were sparring with dummy rifles, roughly-shaped wooden blanks, refining bayonet work. The air was filled with grunts and gasps and the crack of wood on wood. Every man wore a distinctive amulet on a chain around his neck. The badge of the Anarch.
These were the Sons of Sek.
Mabbon led the pheguth down towards the clattering rows. The practice weapons were toys, but there was nothing playful about the practice itself. Dummy rifles splintered under the repeated blows, sweat glistened on the huge backs and thick arms of the trainees. Broken wood drew blood. Scratches bled freely down chests and bellies. Some men were down, fysik attendants treating deep gashes and gouges. Two men were actually unconscious.
Discipline masters—Mabbon called them scourgers—
walked the lines with whips and whistles, punishing any half-hearted efforts. The scourgers were brutish men dressed in blue chainmail and iron sallet helms.
“The Gaur based the Blood Pact formation on the structure principles of the Imperial Guard,” Mabbon explained. “But he did not duplicate all aspects. The Blood Pact has no equivalent of the… what is the word?”
“Commissars?”
“Exactly. This is something my magister seeks to correct in the Sons. The scourgers have been selected from veteran units, and are trained separately from the Sons, along with my officer cadre. The scourgers’ duties are discipline, education and morale.”
“The Magister is perspicacious,” said the pheguth. “Without the Commissariate, the Guard is nothing.” The pheguth watched as one burly scourger lashed a man’s back with his whip for slacking, and then turned and gently advised another on technique. Just like the bloody commissars, he thought, one hand teaching, one hand striking.
“You approve, sir?” Mabbon asked.
The pheguth nodded. The martial excellence on display was undeniable. The sheer savagery. But his headache was growing worse. Pain flared and ebbed behind his eyes. Perhaps it was the sunlight. He’d been out of it so much recently. He wondered if he should have asked Desolane for a hat.
They strolled down the lines, admiring the display. The noise all around was hard and brutal: clacking weapon-dummies, snorts of breath, whip cracks.
“How many?” the pheguth asked, rubbing his aching brow.
“Sir?”
“In the first year, how many men do you think you’ll raise?”
“This is the trial unit, pheguth. My officers intend to establish two more camps of similar size here in the heartland in the next few weeks. But I plan to have a force of at least six thousand come winter, here, and in camps on two nearby worlds. Subject to your advice and assistance, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
The pheguth winced as the fighting pair next to them ended their latest bout with one man on his back, his nose mashed by a well-placed stock.
“Fysik here!” a scourger called, blowing his whistle for emphasis.
“We’ll begin the exhibition this afternoon, sir,” Mabbon said. “Furgesh Town is just over the hill. Before then, I was hoping you’d address the men. Say a few words.”
“I’d be happy to.” The pheguth massaged his pulsing head again. Colours seemed very bright suddenly, sounds far too stark.
“I’d also appreciate it if you’d talk with the senior scourgers. Maybe a little insight into the workings of the Commissariate?”
“No problem,” the pheguth replied. Damn the pain. Right behind his eyes. Like hot needles. Nearby, one of the sparring Sons lost a chunk of meat from his shoulder as his partner sliced in with a dummy bayonet. The man cried out as his wound squirted into the warm air.
The pheguth shivered. The cry felt so loud, like a physical slap, and it seemed to echo in his head, over and around.
“Are you all right, sir?” Mabb
on asked.
“Fine. I’m fine,” the pheguth said, realising he was sweating profusely. “Fine. Just the effects of transcoding. All this talk of commissars, I think. Touched a nerve, Mabbon. I have a thing about…”
…about
about
about
a thing about
about…
A rushing sound, like water down a drain. A humming. No light. Darkness. No light. A taste of blood.
And then Gaunt. Ibram Gaunt, in the full, brocaded uniform of a commissar, his eyes like slits, that damned superior expression he so loved to inflict on others. Gaunt was holding something. A bolt pistol. Holding it out butt-first.
“Final request granted,” Gaunt said. Damn him, damn him, who did he think he was? Who did he think he was…
…he was
was
was
he was…
He wasn’t.
It wasn’t Gaunt at all. It was Desolane. The pistol was a flask of water. The light came up, as if lamps had been lit. Sound returned. So did the dry smell of the bocage field. Distantly, the pheguth could hear Mabbon ordering the men back.
“Into groups! Groups, now! Scourgers, get them back in line!”
“Pheguth?” Desolane said.
“Nhhn.”
“You fell, pheguth. You passed out.”
“time a lord—”
“What? Pheguth, what did you say?”
“I said… the only time a Lord General passes out is on his graduation review.”
“Are you all right?”
The pheguth sat up. His head swam. But the ache had gone. He breathed deeply and looked around. Silent, staring, the Sons of Sek stood all about him, their dummy weapons lowered. Desolane knelt down and offered up the flask to the pheguth’s lips.
The water was deliriously cold.
“You fell—” Desolane began again.
“So help me up,” the pheguth said. His head was amazingly clear suddenly. Clearer than it had been in a long, long time.
Desolane lifted him to his feet. “Your nose is bleeding,” the life-ward whispered.
The pheguth wiped his nose and smeared blood across his cheek. He looked at the rows of warriors. There was suspicion and disgust in their perspiring faces. Now that just wouldn’t do.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, his voice suddenly strong, and carrying the way it had once done over the Phantine parade grounds. “Weakness in an officer is not a thing for soldiers to see. And you are most certainly soldiers of the highest quality. You are the Sons of Sek.”
A murmur ran through the assembly.
“That was not weakness,” he cried. It was all returning now, the manner, the effortless rhetoric, the art of voice-pitch, the confidence of command. He’d forgotten how wonderful it felt. He’d forgotten how good he was at it. “Not weakness, no. That was an ugly aftershock of a process known as mindlock. Can I trust you, soldiers? Can I trust you, friends, with the truth?”
The Sons hesitated, then they began to snarl out a wild assent.
He smiled, acknowledging them, playing them. He raised a hand, his real hand, for quiet. A hush immediately fell. “You see,” he said, “your enemy decided my brain was too valuable, my secrets so awesome, that you should never know them. Psykers placed a cage around my mind, a cage that months of careful work is now, finally, undoing. My mind is almost free again. My secrets are almost yours. Yours, and our beloved Anarch’s!”
The men roared their approval. Wooden rifle blanks clattered together furiously.
“Pheguth?” Desolane whispered above the rapturous tumult.
Dabbing at his bloody nose, the traitor general turned towards the life-ward. “Don’t call me that. Not ever again. My memory is returning fast now. Like a rock-slide. I have remembered things, Desolane. Even my own name. And that’s how you’ll address me in future.”
“H-how…?” Desolane asked.
Lord Militant General Noches Sturm didn’t bother to reply He turned to face the uproar coming from the ranks of the Sons of Sek. This time, he raised his augmetic hand, clenched in a fist. “For the future!” he bellowed.
They began to cheer. Like animals. Like daemons.
Like conquerors.
TWENTY-TWO
Night and day had no particular delineation beneath the dank canopy of the Untill.
They walked, waded, and clambered, moving on through a permanent gloom fraught by warm fogs and miasmas of marsh gas. The sluggish green pools pulsed and bubbled, and unimaginable things snaked through the slick water, betrayed only by their rippling wakes. Other life clicked and fretted in the lowering black canopy above. What little light there was seemed as hard and unyielding as green marble.
This was not a place for men, for men had no mastery of it They hadn’t had it when they first arrived on the planet and named it Gereon, and they didn’t have it now. Not even the Sleepwalkers, seasoned to the Untill’s murky dangers. Though they had dwelt here for generations, they were only tenants, tolerated by the true rulers of the marshland.
For this was the domain of the inserts. They were everywhere. They were lice in the hair, parasites on the skin, formations of tiny waders, a billion strong, hurrying upon the surface tension of the water. They were crawlers on tree bark, marching in formation, burrowers in mud, gnawers into wood. They criss-crossed the humid air on dank, trembling wings.
And in the swelter of the Untill, they had not been told when to stop growing. Moths swooped amidst the upper canopy like hawks, taking flying beetles as air-prey. Dragonflies thrummed across the glades, primordial gliders the size of vultures. Stalking grazers, bloated like balloons, stilted their way through the waterbeds, gorging on silt-dwelling creatures that they raked up with their mouthparts and then sucked dry.
Treading onwards, the Ghosts saw skaters the size of small deer, travelling over the water surface on hundreds of long, paired legs. They saw grubs like fat, pallid, glistening fingers, waving as they extruded from rotten trees. They saw mantis-spiders as big as hunting dogs dancing slow, jerky tangos with wasp-worms.
The wet air stank of gossamer. Gossamer, wood-rot, steam and stagnation.
The three scouts moved on ahead, trailing Eszrah ap Niht, who seemed to know where he was going. To Mkvenner’s quiet disgust, Larkin had decided that the partisan’s name was “Ezra Night”. The nomenclature would undoubtedly stick. Larkin had a knack for coining simple names. They had become “Gaunt’s Ghosts’ because of him, after all.
The tail end of the party was lagging. Feygor had not recovered consciousness, and Beltayn, Curth, Landerson, and sometimes Gaunt himself, took turns carrying him.
Rawne was tense. Gaunt had ordered him to keep the group together, but the slower the back-end got, the further the scouts led away.
He slopped to a halt in a glade where engorged, fist-sized aphids suckled in their hundreds around the albino taproots of a fallen mangrove. The forward party was now out of sight, and the only sign of the rest of them was some distant splashing behind him.
“Feth this,” he said.
“Agreed.” Cirk appeared, her weapon over her shoulder. Her skin was glowing with sweat, and dark half-circles stained the armpits of her jacket. Rawne didn’t like her at all, but he found himself admiring her. And not for the first time. She was a damned attractive woman. Fully loaded, that would have been Murt Feygor’s description. Her jacket was unbuttoned and loose, and her damp, clinging undervest accentuated her bosom as she strode towards him.
Cirk came right up to him, face to face. He swallowed hard. He could smell her musky perspiration. Her generous mouth curled in a slight smile. She tilted her chin down slightly and coyly widened her eyes.
“Uh, seen something?” she inquired.
Rawne realised he was staring at her. This was wrong. He knew it. She couldn’t be trusted. That mark on her cheek. That… brand of Chaos. He forced himself to look at it. He tried to curb his libido by thinking about that sickening thin
g inside Cirk’s arm. That did the trick. The fething imago. Rawne was at a loss to know why Gaunt hadn’t just executed her. She was dangerous. For a while now, Rawne knew Cirk had been playing him off against Gaunt. She’d picked up on their old enmities, and since then she’d been siding with Rawne on every call, every argument. The woman was trying to build an alliance that Rawne wanted no part of. Ibram Gaunt would never, ever be Elim Rawne’s friend, but for the good of the mission, there was no way he’d let this—
“Rawne? What’s the matter?”
He glanced up and their eyes locked. Her gaze was full of simmering heat, hotter than the damn marsh itself. A promise of something illicit and taboo. Rawne tried to tear his eyes away to the cheek-brand. But now even that wretched mark on her cheek seemed to be just part of her allure. He wondered what it would feel like to touch the scars of the stigma. He-Shocked by his own desires, he looked away. He was a soldier of the God-Emperor, feth it! Not the purest, he’d be the first to admit that. But he was an officer of the Guard. And he had a woman of his own. Since Aexe Cardinal, he’d enjoyed a liaison with Jessi Banda, the Verghast girl serving as a sniper in three platoon. Their affair was secret, but it meant something to him. For Throne’s sake, Rawne had a lock of Banda’s hair in a spent cartridge case around his neck!
“They’re falling behind, major,” Cirk said.
“I know, major,” he replied.
What was wrong with him? According to Curth, the taint of this world was now so deep inside them, it was affecting their hormonal balance, their emotions, their self-control. Was that it? Were they all beginning to lose it, him included?
“Time to cut the poor man loose,” she said, wiping the sweat from her forehead on her jacket cuff. Her raised arm accented her full breasts.
“What?” he said.
“I said time to cut the poor man loose. What’s the matter with you?”
Rawne hesitated. “Nothing. Nothing. Not a thing. I just thought I saw a bug. There. On your… throat.”
“Is it gone?”
“Your throat?”
“No, idiot!”
“Yeah, it’s gone.”