First and Only

  Corbec handed his laspistol to the trooper who rose smartly to take it from him.

  ‘This is stupid,’ Gaunt said abruptly. The guns turned their attention to him. ‘Do you know who I am, Lekulanzi?’

  The warrant officer tensed as his name was used without formal title. He narrowed his flesh-hooded eyes.

  Gaunt hauled himself forward and stood free of Corbec’s support. ‘I am Commissar-Colonel Ibram Gaunt.’

  Warrant Officer Lekulanzi froze. Without the coat, the cap, the badges of authority, Gaunt looked like any lowborn Guard officer.

  ‘Come here,’ Gaunt told him. The man hesitated, then crossed to Gaunt, whispering a low order into his vox-link. The guard detail immediately rose from their knees, snapped to attention and slung their weapons.

  ‘That’s better…’ Corbec smiled.

  Gaunt placed a hand on Lekulanzi’s shoulder, and the officer stiffened with outrage. Gaunt was pointing to something on the deck, a charred, greenish slick or stain, oily and lumpy. ‘Do you know what that is?’

  Lekulanzi shook his head.

  ‘It’s the remains of an assassin who set upon me here. The weapon’s discharge was my First Officer saving my life. I will formally caution him for concealing a firearm aboard, strictly against standing orders.’

  Gaunt smiled to see a tiny bead of nervous perspiration begin to streak Lekulanzi’s pallid brow.

  ‘He was one of yours, Lekulanzi. A rating. But he was in the sway of others, dark forces that beguiled and drove him like a toy. You don’t like illicit weapons on your ship, eh? How about illicit psykers?’

  Some of the security troopers muttered and made warding gestures. Lekulanzi stammered. ‘But who… who would want to kill you, sir?’

  ‘I am a soldier. A successful soldier,’ Gaunt smiled coldly. ‘I make enemies all the time.’

  He gestured down at the remains. ‘Have this analysed. Then have it purged. Make sure no foul, unholy taint has touched this precious ship. Report any findings directly to me, no matter how insignificant. Once my wounds have been treated, I will report to Lord Captain Grasticus personally and submit a full account.’

  Lekulanzi was lost for words.

  With Corbec supporting him, Gaunt left the Glass Bay. At the elevator doors, Lekulanzi caught the hard look in the boy’s eyes. He shuddered.

  In the elevator, Milo turned to Gaunt. ‘His eyes were like a snake’s. He is not trustworthy.’

  Gaunt nodded. He had changed his mind. Just minutes before, he had reconciled himself to acting as Fereyd’s courier, guardian to the crystal. But now things had changed. He wouldn’t sit by idly waiting. He would act with purpose. He would enter the game, and find out the rules and learn how to win.

  And that would mean learning the contents of the crystal.

  * * *

  Four

  ‘BEST I CAN DO,’ murmured Dorden, the Ghosts’ chief medic, making a half-hearted gesture around him that implicated the whole of the regimental infirmary. The Ghosts’ infirmary was a suite of three low, corbel-vaulted rooms set as an annex to the barrack deck where the Tanith First were berthed. Its walls and roof were washed with a greenish off-white paint and the hard floors had been lined with scrubbed red stone tiles. On dull steel shelves in bays around the rooms were ranked fat, glass-stoppered bottles with yellowing paper labels, mostly full of treacly fluids, surgical pastes, dried powders and preparations, or organic field-swabs in clear, gluey suspensions. Racks of polished instruments sat in pull-out drawers and plastic waste bags, stale bedding and bandage rolls were packed into low, lidded boxes around the walls that doubled as seats. There was a murky autoclave on a brass trolley, two resuscitrex units with shiny iron paddles, and a side table with an apothecary’s scales, a diagnostic probe and a blood cleanser set on it. The air was musty and rank, and there were dark stains on the flooring.

  ‘We’re not over-equipped, as you can see,’ Dorden added breezily. He’d patched the commissar’s wounds with supplies from his own field kit, which sat open on one of the bench lockers. He hadn’t trusted the freshness or sterility of any of the materials provided by the infirmary.

  Gaunt sat, stripped to the waist, on one of the low brass gurneys which lined the centre of the main chamber, its wheels locked into restraining lugs in the tiled floor. The gurney’s springs squeaked and moaned as Gaunt shifted his weight on the stained, stinking mattress.

  Dorden had patched the wound in the commissar’s shoulder with sterile dressings, washed the whole limb in pungent blue sterilising gel and then pinched the mouth of the wound shut with bakelite suture clamps that looked like the heads of biting insects. Gaunt tried to flex his arm.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Dorden said quickly. ‘I’d wrap it in false-flesh if I could find any, but besides, the wound should breathe. Honestly, you’d be better off in the main hospital ward.’

  Gaunt shook his head. ‘You’ve done a fine job,’ he said. Dorden smiled. He didn’t want to press the commissar on the issue. Corbec had muttered something about keeping this private.

  Dorden was a small man, older than most of the Ghosts, with a grey beard and warm eyes. He’d been a doctor on Tanith, running an extended practice through the farms and settlements of Beldane and the forest wilds of County Pryze.

  He’d been drafted at the Founding to fulfil the Administratum’s requirements for regimental medical personnel. His wife had died a year before the Founding, his only son a trooper in the ninth platoon. His one daughter, her husband and their first born had perished in the flames of Tanith. He had left nothing behind in the embers of his homeworld except the memory of years of community service, a duty he now carried on for the good of the last men of Tanith.

  He refused to carry a weapon, and thus was the only Ghost that Gaunt couldn’t rely on to fight… but Gaunt hardly cared. He had sixty or seventy men in his command who wouldn’t still be there but for Dorden.

  ‘I’ve checked for venom taint or fibre toxin. You’re lucky. The blade was clean. Cleaner than mine!’ Dorden chuckled and it made Gaunt smile. ‘Unusual…’ Dorden added and fell silent.

  Gaunt raised an eyebrow. ‘How so?’

  ‘I understood assassins liked to toxify their blades as insurance.’ Dorden said simply.

  ‘I never said it was an assassin.’

  ‘You didn’t have to. I may be a non-combatant. Feth, I may be an old fool, but I didn’t come down in the last barrage.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself with it, Dorden,’ Gaunt said, flexing his arm again against the medic’s advice. It stung, ached, throbbed. ‘You’ve worked your usual magic. Stay impartial. Don’t get drawn in.’

  Dorden was scrubbing his suture clamp and wound probes in a bowl of filmy antiseptic oil. ‘Impartial? Do you know something, Ibram Gaunt?’

  Gaunt blinked as if slapped. No one had spoken to him with such paternal authority since the last time he had been in the company of his Uncle Dercius. No… not the last time…

  Dorden turned back, wiping the tools on sheets of white lint. ‘Forgive me, commissar. I– I’m speaking out of turn.’

  ‘Speak anyway, friend.’

  Dorden jerked a lean thumb to indicate out beyond the archway into the barrack deck. ‘These are all I’ve got. The last pitiful scraps of Tanith genestock, my only link to the past and to the green, green world I loved. I’ll keep patching and mending and binding and sewing them back together until they’re all gone, or I’m gone, or the horizons of all known space have withered and died. And while you may not be Tanith, I know many of the men now treat you as such. Me, I’m not sure. Too much of the chulan about you, I’d say.’

  ‘Koolun?’

  ‘Chulan. Forgive me, slipping in to the old tongue. Outsider. Unknown. It doesn’t translate directly.’

  ‘I’m sure it doesn’t.’

  ‘It wasn’t an insult. You may not be Tanith-breed, but you’re for us every way. I think you care, Gaunt. Care about your Ghosts. I think you’ll do all in your power to
see us right, to take us to glory, to take us to peace. That’s what I believe, every night when I lay down to rest, and every time a bombardment starts, or the drop-ships fall, or the boys go over the wire. That matters.’

  Gaunt shrugged – and wished he hadn’t. ‘Does it?’

  ‘I’ve spoken to medics with other regiments. At the field hospital on Fortis, for instance. So many of them say their commissars don’t care a jot about their men. They see them as fodder for the guns. Is that how you see us?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No, I thought not. So, that makes you rare indeed. Something worth hanging on to, for the good of these poor Ghosts. Feth, you may not be Tanith, but if assassins are starting to hunger for your blood, I start to care. For the Ghosts, I care.’

  He fell silent.

  ‘Then I’ll remember not to leave you uninformed,’ Gaunt said, reaching for his undershirt.

  ‘I thank you for that. For a chulan, you’re a good man, Ibram Gaunt. Like the anroth back home.’

  Gaunt froze. ‘What did you say?’

  Dorden looked round at him sharply. ‘Anroth. I said anroth. It wasn’t an insult either.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  Dorden hesitated uneasily, unsettled by Gaunt’s hard gaze. ‘The anroth… well, household spirits. It’s a cradle-tale from Tanith. They used to say that the anroth were spirits from other worlds, beautiful worlds of order, who came to Tanith to watch over our families. It’s nothing. Just an old memory. A forest saying.’

  ‘Why does it matter, commissar?’ said a new voice.

  Gaunt and Dorden looked around to see Milo sat on a bench seat near the door, watching them intently.

  ‘How long have you been there?’ Gaunt asked sharply, surprising himself with his anger.

  ‘A few minutes only. The anroth are part of Tanith lore. Like the drudfellad who ward the trees, and the nyrsis who watch over the streams and waters. Why would it alarm you so?’

  ‘I’ve heard the word before. Somewhere,’ Gaunt said, getting to his feet. ‘Who knows, a word like it? It doesn’t matter.’

  He went to pull on his undershirt but realised it was ripped and bloody, and cast it aside. ‘Milo. Get me another from my quarters,’ he snapped.

  Milo rose and handed Gaunt a fresh undershirt from his canvas pack. Dorden covered a grin. Gaunt faltered, nodded his thanks, and took the shirt.

  Both Milo and the medical officer had noticed the multitude of scars which laced Gaunt’s broad, muscled torso, and had made no comment. How many theatres, how many fronts, how many life-or-death combats had it taken to accumulate so many marks of pain?

  But as Gaunt stood, Dorden noticed the scar across Gaunt’s belly for the first time and gasped. The wound line was long and ancient, a grotesque braid of buckled scar-tissue.

  ‘Sacred Feth!’ Dorden said too loudly. ‘Where–’

  Gaunt shook him off. ‘It’s old. Very old.’

  Gaunt slipped on his undershirt and the wound was hidden. He pulled up his braces and reached for his tunic.

  ‘But how did you get such a–’

  Gaunt looked at him sharply. ‘Enough.’

  Gaunt buttoned his tunic and then put on the long leather coat which Milo was already holding for him. He set his cap on his head.

  ‘Are the officers ready?’ he asked.

  Milo nodded. ‘As you ordered.’

  With a nod to Dorden, Gaunt marched out of the infirmary.

  Five

  IT HAD CROSSED his mind to wonder who to trust. A few minutes’ thought had brought him to the realisation that he could trust them all, every one of the Ghosts from Colonel Corbec down to the lowliest of the troopers. His only qualm lay with the malcontent Rawne and his immediate group of cronies in the third platoon, men like Feygor.

  Gaunt left the infirmary and walked down the short companionway into the barrack deck proper. Corbec was waiting.

  Colm Corbec had been waiting for almost an hour. Alone in the antechamber of the infirmary, he had enjoyed plenty of time to fret about the things he hated most in the universe. First and last of them was space travel.

  Corbec was the son of a machinesmith who had worked his living at a forge beneath a gable-barn on the first wide bend of the River Pryze. Most of his father’s work had come from log-handling machines: rasp-saws, timber-derricks, trak-sleds. Many times, as a boy, he’d shimmied down into the oily service trenches to hold the inspection lamp so his father could examine the knotted, dripping axles and stricken synchromesh of a twenty-wheeled flatbed, ailing under its cargo of young, wet wood from the mills up at Beldane or Sottress.

  Growing up, he’d worked the reaper mills in Sottress and seen men lose fingers, hands and knees to the screaming band saws and circular razors. His lungs had clogged with saw mist and he had developed a hacking cough that lingered even now. Then he’d joined the militia of Tanith Magna on a dare and on top of a broken heart, and patrolled the sacred stretches of the Pryze County nalwood groves for poachers and smugglers.

  It had been a right enough life. The loamy earth below, the trees above and the far starlight beyond the leaves. He’d come to understand the ways of the twisting forests, and the shifting nal-groves and clearings. He’d learned the knife, the stealth patterns and the joy of the hunt. He’d been happy. So long as the stars had been up there and the ground underfoot.

  Now the ground was gone. Gone forever. The damp, piney scents of the forest soil, the rich sweetness of the leaf-mould, the soft depth of the nalspores as they drifted and accumulated. He’d sung songs up to the stars, taken their silent blessing, even cursed them. All so long as they were far away. He never thought he would travel in their midst.

  Corbec was afraid of the crossings, as he knew many of his company were afraid, even now after so many of them. To leave soil, to leave land and sea and sky behind, to part the stars and crusade through the Immaterium. That was truly terrifying.

  He knew the Absalom was a sturdy ship. He’d seen its vast bulk from the viewspaces of the dock-ship that had brought him aboard. But he had also seen the great timber barges of the mills founder, shudder and splinter in the hard water courses of the Beldane rapids. Ships sailed their ways, he knew, until the ways got too strong for them and gave them up.

  He hated it all. The smell of the air, the coldness of the walls, the inconstancy of the artificial gravity, the perpetual constancy of the vibrating Empyrean drives. All of it. Only his concern for the commissar’s welfare had got him past his phobias onto the nightmare of the Glass Bay Observatory. Even then, he’d focussed his attention on Gaunt, the troopers, that idiot warrant officer – anything at all but the cavorting insanity beyond the glass.

  He longed for soil underfoot. For real air. For breeze and rain and the hush of nodding branches.

  ‘Corbec?’

  He snapped to attention as Gaunt approached. Milo was a little way behind the commissar.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Remember what I was telling you in the bar on Pyrites?’

  ‘Not precisely, sir… I… I was pretty far gone.’

  Gaunt grinned. ‘Good. Then it will all come as a surprise to you too. Are the officers ready?’

  Corbec nodded perfunctorily. ‘Except Major Rawne, as you ordered.’

  Gaunt lifted his cap, smoothed his cropped hair back with his hands and replaced it squarely again.

  ‘A moment, and I’ll join you in the staff room.’

  Gaunt marched away down the deck and entered the main billet of the barracks.

  The Ghosts had been given barrack deck three, a vast honeycomb of long, dark vaults in which bunks were strung from chains in a herringbone pattern. Adjoining these sleeping vaults was a desolate recreation hall and a trio of padded exercise chambers. All forty surviving platoons, a little over two thousand Ghosts, were billeted here.

  The smell of sweat, smoke and body heat rose from the bunk vaults. Rawne, Feygor and the rest of the third platoon were waiting for him on the slip-ramp. The
y had been training in the exercise chambers, and each one carried one of the shock-poles provided for combat practice. These neural stunners were the only weapons allowed to them during a crossing. They could fence with them, spar with them and even set them to long range discharge and target-shoot against the squeaking moving metal decoys in the badly-oiled automatic range.

  Gaunt saluted Rawne. The men snapped to attention.

  ‘How do you read the barrack deck, major?’

  Rawne faltered. ‘Commissar?’

  ‘Is it secure?’

  ‘There are eight deployment shafts and two to the dropship hangar, plus a number of serviceways.’

  ‘Take your men, spread out and guard them all. No one must get in or out of this barrack deck without my knowledge.’

  Rawne looked faintly perplexed. ‘How do we hold any intruders off, commissar, given our lack of weapons?’

  Gaunt took a shock-pole from Trooper Neff and then laid him out on the deck with a jolt to the belly.

  ‘Use these,’ Gaunt suggested. ‘Report to me every half hour. Report to me directly with the names of anyone who attempts access.’ Pausing for a moment to study Rawne’s face and make sure his instructions were clearly understood, Gaunt turned and walked back up the ramp.

  ‘What’s he up to?’ Feygor asked the major when Gaunt was out of earshot. Rawne shook his head. He would find out. Until he did, he had a sentry duty to organise.

  Six

  THE STAFF ROOM was an old briefing theatre next to the infir mary annex. Steps led down into a circular room, with three tiers of varnished wooden seats around the circumference and a lacquered black console in the centre on a dais. The console, squat and rounded like a polished mushroom, was an old tactical display unit, with a mirrored screen in its top which had once broadcast luminous three-dimensional hololithic forms into the air above it during strategy counsels. But it was old and broken; Gaunt used it as a seat.

  The officers filed in: Corbec, Dorden, and then the platoon leaders, Meryn, Mkoll, Curral, Lerod, Hasker, Blane, Folore… thirty-nine men, all told. Last in was Varl, recently promoted. Milo closed the shutter hatch and perched at the back. The men sat in a semi-circle, facing their commander.