[Gaunt's Ghosts 08] - Traitor General

  “This way.”

  Desolane walked him down to the waiting group. There was some back-and-forth formal ceremony involving Desolane and the other life-wards. Challenges were shouted, antique oaths and ritual insults, a drawing and brandishing of weapons.

  Isidor waited until the performance was done, and then beckoned to the pheguth.

  He’d met Isidor twice before, once on arrival on Gereon, then again the night before the transcoding sessions had begun. Isidor Sek Incarnate was a short, plump human male wearing long black robes and a grey cowl. His pale, hairless face presented a permanent expression of disdain. He was the Anarch’s instrument of government on Gereon.

  There was nothing about him that was at all intimidating or frightening, and that’s why he terrified the pheguth. This little man was surrounded by monsters—

  a veritable minotaur held a black parasol over his head deferentially—and massive Chaos Marines paid him fealty, yet there was no visible clue to his source of power. He was just a little man under a parasol.

  “Welcome, pheguth,” the Plenipotentiary said. His voice was like a sharp knife slicing satin.

  “Magir magus,” the pheguth responded as he had been rehearsed, bowing.

  “There are two persons I would like you to meet,” said the Plenipotentiary. “You will be spending a lot of time with them in the next few months.”

  “What, may I ask, about the transcoding, magir magus?” he asked.

  “That will continue. Transcoding you is our foremost agenda. But other issues will grow in importance. Otherwise, there is no point keeping you alive. Meet these persons.”

  “Of course, magir magus.”

  Isidor made a signal. Something vast and vaguely female crawled forward. She was immense and swollen, like the effigies of the Earth Mother early humans had fashioned, so morbidly obese that all the features of her face had vanished into folds of skin except her loose mouth. A wide-brimmed Phrygian hat perched on her scalp and swathes of green and silver fabric enveloped her bulk and flapped loose in the wind. Four midget servitors, squat and thick, clung around her lower body in the folds of her gown, to support her weight. Two hooded life-wards, both women, both skeletally thin, walked beside her, their long fingers implanted with bright scalpels.

  “This is Idresha Cluwge, Chief Ethnologue of the Anarch,” said the Plenipotentiary. “She will be interviewing you over the coming weeks.”

  “I…” he began.

  The female slug spoke. A barbaric clutch of consonants burst from her fat mouth like a burp. Immediately, her two female life-wards translated, in chorus.

  “This is the pheguth, Isidor? How intriguing. He is a little man. He looks not at all like a commander of soldiers.”

  “I’d like to say you don’t look like an ethnologue,” said the pheguth. “Except that I have no idea what one of those is.”

  The female life-wards hissed and raised their blade-fingers towards him.

  “Oh, have I erred on the protocol front?” the pheguth asked dryly.

  “Show respect, or I will slay you,” Desolane warned him.

  “He’ll eat your liver…”

  “I’ll take that chance. The chief ethnologue is a person of consequence. You will evidence respect for her at all times.”

  “Just playing with you, Desolane. Can she at least tell me what an ethnologue is?”

  “It is my duty to learn in all detail about the life and culture of the enemy,” the life-wards said in unison the moment the female thing had stopped burping out more noises.

  “I’m sure it is,” said the pheguth.

  “All will become evident,” said the Plenipotentiary. He nodded, and a second figure stepped forward. This is the other person I wish you to greet.”

  The man was a warrior. The pheguth recognised that at once. Straight-backed, broad, powerful. He wore a simple coat of brown leather, insignia-less army fatigues and steel-shod boots. His head was bald and deeply, anciently scarred. Ritually scarred. The warrior took off one glove and held out an oddly soft and pink hand to the pheguth.

  “I believe this is how one warrior greets another in your part of the galaxy,” he said in clipped, learned Low Gothic.

  “We also salute,” said the pheguth, shaking the man’s hand.

  “Forgive me. I can clasp your hand, sir, but I cannot salute you. That would result in unnecessary liver-eating.”

  The pheguth smiled. “I didn’t catch your name, sir,” he said.

  “I am Mabbon Etogaur. The etogaur is an honorific.”

  “I know,” said the pheguth. “It’s a rank name. The Guard had pretty damn good intelligence. It’s indicative of a colonel rank or its equivalent.”

  “Yes, sir, it is. General, actually.”

  “It’s a Blood Pact rank.”

  Mabbon nodded. “Indeed.”

  “But you present to me unmasked and your hands are clean of rite scars.”

  Mabbon pulled his glove back on. “You appreciate a great deal.”

  “I was a general too, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “And you’re going to be talking to me?”

  Mabbon nodded.

  “I look forward to it, sir. I wonder if at some point we might explore the meaning of the word ‘pheguth’.”

  Mabbon looked away. “If needs be, that might happen,”

  The pheguth looked back at the Plenipotentiary.

  “Are we done?” he asked.

  “Not even slightly, pheguth,” the magir magus replied. “Nine worlds in the Anarch’s domain lack water sources. They are parched, thirsty. Today, here, we conduct a ceremony that will access Gereon’s resources to aid them. The process has already been done at four sites on the planet already. I wanted you to oversee this one.”

  “Another test of my resolve?”

  “Of course another test. Wards, bring the cylinder.”

  With Desolane and the minotaur at their heels, the Plenipotentiary led him to the wall of the dam overlooking the vast reservoir beyond.

  “Eight billion cubic metres of fresh water, replenished on a three-day cycle. Do you know what a jehgenesh is?”

  “No, magir magus, I don’t.”

  Isidor smiled. “Literally, a ‘drinker of seas’. That’s quite accurate. It leaves out the warp-fold part, but other than that…”

  Two goat-headed servants clopped up to the wall, and held out a glass canister in which about three litres of green fluid sloshed. Deep in the fluid suspension, the pheguth could see something writhing.

  Isidor Sek Incarnate took the cylinder and handed it to the pheguth. “Don’t be misled by its current size. It’s dormant and infolded. Released into the water, it will grow. Essentially, it’s a huge maw. On one end, flooding in, this water source. The jehgenesh is a warp beast. The water that pours into its mouth will be ejected through the holy warp onto another world. The arid basins of Anchisus Bone, for example.”

  The pheguth gazed at the cylinder in his hands. “This is how you plunder?”

  “It is one way amongst many.”

  “But this is why so many worlds we find have been drained?”

  The Plenipotentiary nodded. “The drinkers swallow water, also fuel oil, promethium, certain gas reserves. Why would we conquer worlds if we didn’t actually use them? I mean, literally, use them?”

  The pheguth shrugged. “It makes perfect sense. What do I have to do?”

  “Unscrew the lid. Release it.”

  “And prove I am loyal?”

  “It’s another step on the way.”

  The pheguth turned the steel cap of the canister slowly. He felt the warp-thing inside writhing, agitated. The lid came off. There was a smell… like dry bones. Like desert air.

  “Quickly,” said the Plenipotentiary. “Or it will drink you.”

  The pheguth up-ended the canister, and the green water poured out into the reservoir, along with something slithering and coiled.

  “Two days,” said Desolane. Then
it will grow.”

  “I’d like to go back to the bastion now,” the pheguth said, turning away from the lake.

  FOUR

  Gaunt opened his eyes. It was early still, and only a thin suggestion of light bled through the woodland canopy. In the violet twilight of the forest, it was cold and damp, and dawn mists fumed like artillery smoke.

  They’d found the glade late the previous night and had bedded down to steal a few hours’ rest. Gaunt had settled into a half-waking doze, more meditation than actual slumber, ready to snap alert at the slightest cue. He got like that during intense combat rotations. Sometimes true sleep would elude him for days or weeks at a time, and he survived on these snatches of subsistence rest. “Sleeping with one eye open,” that’s what Colm Corbec had liked to call it.

  It was at times like this—the quiet, tense interludes—

  that Gaunt missed Corbec the most.

  He realised his awakening had been triggered by a shadow next to him. Gaunt looked up. It was Mkvenner. The tall scout was standing so still he seemed to be part of the tree behind him.

  “Ven?” Gaunt whispered.

  “Everything’s fine, sir,” Mkvenner replied. “But it’s time we were waking. Time we were moving.”

  Gaunt got to his feet, his joints stiff and aching. A campfire was a luxury they couldn’t afford. Nearby, Beltayn, Varl and Larkin were huddled up, drinking soup through the straws of self-heating ration packs. Brostin was still asleep close to them, bundled up under his camo-cloak with his arms around his autocannon.

  “Wake him up,” Gaunt told Beltayn, and his young adjutant nodded.

  Tona Criid sat against a large, sprawling tree root further up the slope. She was cleaning her lasrifle and keeping watch over the three locals. They were curled like children in the underbrush, slumbering deeply. Gaunt took three ration packs from his own kit and handed them to Criid.

  “Wake them in a few minutes,” he told her, “and give them these. Make sure they eat properly.”

  “All right,” she said simply, not commenting on the fact that Gaunt was giving away some of his own precious supplies.

  “Did you get any sleep?” he asked.

  Her hands fitted the lasrifle sections together, wiping each one with a vizzy cloth. She didn’t even have to look at what she was doing.

  “Not much,” she admitted.

  “In the night. Anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “That’s good.” He paused. “He’ll be all right. All of them will. You know that, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Because you trust my word on that?”

  “Because I trust your word, sir,” she said.

  Tona Criid’s lover was a Tanith trooper called Caffran. Both of them were excellent soldiers, amongst the very best in Gaunt’s regiment. Competition for a place on this mission had been gratifyingly fierce. Gaunt had been forced to turn down many fine Ghosts he would have loved to bring along. Both Criid and Caffran had qualified easily for the final cut. It had been a hard choice, but Gaunt had accepted he could take one or the other, so he’d switched Caffran out in favour of Feygor, Rawne’s adjutant.

  Criid and Caffran had two kids in the regimental entourage, waifs they’d rescued from the urban wastes of Vervunhive. He couldn’t and wouldn’t risk both parental proxies on a mission that the Departmento Tacticae officially rated “EZ”—extremely hazardous/suicidal.

  Gaunt made his way on up the slope. He couldn’t see Mkoll or Bonin, but he knew they were out there, invisible, covering the perimeter.

  Rawne and Feygor sat with Ana Curth, the team’s medicae, in the shadow of a moss-skinned boulder. She was giving them both shots using a dermo-needle from her field kit. Curth was technically a non-combatant, but she had guts and she was fit and it was essential they had a medicae with them. Gaunt knew he’d have to look after her, and he’d asked Mkoll to keep a special eye out for her safety.

  Curth had voluntarily undergone intensive field training for the mission, and Gaunt was already impressed with the discipline she displayed. She’d been the only viable choice for the medicae place anyway: Dorden, the regiment’s chief medic, surpassed her in ability, but he was too old and—after the grievous injuries he’d taken on Herodor almost a year before—too frail for this kind of operation.

  “Everything all right here?” Gaunt asked, joining them.

  “Dandy,” said Murtan Feygor. Rawne’s adjutant was a rawboned rogue whose voice came flat and sarcastic from an augmetic voice box thanks to a miserable throat wound he’d taken on Verghast. He was a mean piece of work, vicious and disingenuous, but he was a devil in combat. He’d made Gaunt’s cut because Gaunt figured his relationship with Rawne would work better if Rawne felt he had a crony to complain to.

  Major Elim Rawne had become Gaunt’s number two following the death of Colm Corbec. Rawne was darkly handsome and murderous. There had been times, especially in the early days, when Rawne might have sheathed his silver Tanith warknife in Gaunt’s back the first chance he got. Some among the Tanith—a precious few, these days, and getting fewer all the time—still blamed Gaunt for abandoning their homeworld to its fate. Rawne was their ringleader. Hate had fuelled him, driven him on.

  But they had served together now for the best part of nine years. A kind of mutual respect had grown between the major and the colonel-commissar. Gaunt no longer expected a knife in the back. But he still didn’t turn his back on Rawne, nevertheless.

  “Feygor’s showing signs of the ague,” Curth said, cleaning and reloading her dermo-needle. “I want to give everyone a shot.”

  “Do it,” said Gaunt.

  “Arm please,” she said.

  Gaunt rolled up his sleeve. This was to be expected. The ague was a broad and non-specific term for all kinds of infections and maladies suffered by personnel transferred from one world to another. A body might acclimatise to one planet’s germ-pool, its pollens, its bacteria, and then ship out on a troop transport and plunge into quite another bio-culture. These changes required adjustment, and often triggered colds, fevers, allergies, or simply the lags and fatigues brought on by warp-space transfer. Gereon was going to make them all sick. That was a given. Potentially, they might all get very ill indeed, given the noxious touch of Chaos that had stained this world. It was Curth’s primary job to monitor their health, treat any maladies, keep them fit enough to see out the mission. Treating wounds and injuries they might sustain was entirely secondary to this vital work.

  She gave him the shot.

  “Now you,” Gaunt said.

  “What?”

  “You’re looking out for us, Ana. I’ll look out for you. Let me see you self-administer before you go to the others.”

  Ana Curth glared at him for a moment. Even annoyed, even smeared with dirt, her heart-shaped face was strikingly attractive. “As if I would jeopardise this operation by failing to maintain my own health,” she hissed.

  “As if you would withhold preventative drugs because you decided others needed them more, doctor.”

  “As if,” she said, and gave herself the shot.

  Gaunt rose, and drew Rawne to one side.

  “What’s the play?” Rawne asked quietly.

  “Unless I hear a good reason, the same as before. We use our contacts to penetrate Ineuron Town and contact the resistance cell. We’ve got to hope they can give us what we need.”

  “Right,” said Rawne.

  “You have concerns?”

  “I don’t trust them,” said the Tanith.

  “Neither do I. That’s why I’ve disclosed as little as possible.”

  “But you’ve told Lanson—”

  “Landerson.”

  “Whatever. You’ve told him there’s no liberation coming.”

  “I have.”

  Rawne took off his cap and smoothed his hair back with one gloved palm. “They’re jumpy. All three of them. Fething dangerous-jumpy, you ask me.”

  “Yes, strung out.
I noticed,” said Gaunt.

  “They’ve had things in them too.”

  “The implants, you mean? Yes, they have. They call them imagos. It’s the archenemy’s way of tagging the populace.”

  “And the marks on their faces.”

  Gaunt sighed. “Rawne, I won’t lie. I don’t like that either. The stigmas. The brands of the Ruinous Powers. Makes me very uneasy. But you have to understand, these people are Imperial citizens. They had no choice. To remain active, to keep the resistance running, they had to blend in. They had to submit to the authorities. Take the brand, play along.”

  Rawne nodded. “Troubles me, is all I’m saying. Never met anyone or anything with a mark of Chaos cut into its flesh that wasn’t trying to kill me.”

  Gaunt was silent for a moment. “Major, I doubt we’d find a man, woman or child on this world that hasn’t been scarred by the archenemy. This is intruder ops, nothing like anything we’ve ever faced. The point is, sooner or later we’re going to have to trust some of them. If not trust them, then work with them at least. But your point is well made. Consider operational code Safeguard active from this time. Command is ‘vouchsafe’. Tell Feygor, Criid and the scouts.”

  “All right then,” said Rawne.

  “But only on the word, and it had better be mine, you understand me? These people, and any others we meet, are to stay alive unless there’s a fething good reason.”

  “I hear you.”

  “Look at me when you say that.”

  Rawne fixed Gaunt’s eyes with his own. “I hear you, sir.”

  “Let’s round up and move out. Ten minutes. Make a personal check that Curth’s given everyone a shot of the inhibitors.”

  Rawne saluted lazily and turned away.

  “I’ve been discussing things with my men,” Landerson said. His eyes were still puffy from sleep. “We’re uneasy.”

  “We’re all uneasy,” Gaunt said.

  “You’re telling me you want us to get you into Ineuron Town?”

  “Yes.”

  “And broker contact with the cell there?”

  “Yes.”

  Landerson paused for a moment. “I’d like you to reconsider this, sir. I’d like you to think again.”