Steamy smoke is rising from the cowled chimneys of the cook-tents, and he can smell the greasy blocks of processed nutrition fibre being fried. His stomach rumbles. He sets off towards the kitchens. Beyond the row of mess tents lies the canvas city of the Tanith position, and to the north-east of that, the batteries of the Ketzok.
Beyond that, the edge of the skyline flicks on and off with the unnervingly quiet lightning, far away, like a malfunctioning lamp filament that refuses to stay lit.
Slab is pretty gruesome stuff. Pressure-treated down from any and all available nutritional sources by the Munitorum, it has no discernible flavour apart from a faint, mucusy aftertaste, and it looks like grey-white putty. In fact, years before at Schola Progenium on Ignatius Cardinal, an acquaintance of Gaunt’s had once kneaded some of it into a form that authentically resembled a brick of plastic explosive, complete with fuses, and then carried out a practical joke on the Master of the Scholam Arsenal that was notable for both the magnificent extent of the disruption it caused, and the stunning severity of the subsequent punishment. Slab, as it’s known to every common Guard lasman, comes canned and it comes freeze-dried, it comes in packets and it comes in boxes, it comes in individual heated tins and it comes in catering blocks. Company cooks slice, dice and mince it, and use it as the bulk base of any meal when local provision sources are unavailable. They flavour it with whatever they have to hand, usually foil sachets of powder with names like groxtail and vegetable (root) and sausage (assorted). Ibram Gaunt has lived on it for a great deal of his adult and sub-adult life. He is so used to the stuff, he actually misses it when it isn’t around.
Men have gathered around the cook tents, huddled against the weather under their camo-cloaks. Gaunt still hasn’t got used to wearing his, even though he’d promised the Tanith colonel he would, as a show of unity. It doesn’t hang right around him, and in the Voltemand wind, it tugs and tangles like a devil.
The Tanith don’t seem to have the same trouble. They half-watch him approach, shrouded, hooded, some supping from mess cans. They watch him approach. There is a shadow in their eyes. They are a wild lot. Beads of rainwater glint in their tangled dark hair, though occasionally the glints are studs or nose rings, piercings in lips or eyebrows. They like their ink, the Tanith, and they wear the complex, traditional patterns of blue and green on their pale skins with pride. Cheeks, throats, forearms and the backs of hands display spirals and loops, leaves and branches, sigils and whorls. They also like their edges. The Tanith weapon is a long knife with a straight, silver blade that has evolved from a hunting tool. They could hunt with it well enough, silently, like phantoms.
Gaunt’s Ghosts. Someone had come up with that within a few days of their first deployment on Blackshard. It had been the sociopath with the long-las, as Gaunt recalled it, a man known to him as “Mad”. A more withering and scornful nickname, Gaunt can’t imagine.
Rawne says, “Here comes the fether now.”
He takes a sip from his water bottle, which does not contain water, and turns as if to say something to Murt Feygor.
“But I paid you that back!” Feygor exclaims, managing to make his voice sound wounded and plaintive, the wronged party.
Rawne makes a retort and steps back, in time to affect a blind collision with Gaunt as he makes his way into the cook tent. The impact is hard enough to rock Gaunt off his feet.
“Easy there, sir!” cries Varl, hooking a hand under Gaunt’s armpit to keep him off the ground. He hoists Gaunt up.
“Thank you,” Gaunt says.
“Varl, sir,” replies the trooper. He grins a big, shit-eating grin. “Infantryman first class Ceglan Varl, sir. Wouldn’t want you taking a tumble now, would I, sir? Wouldn’t want you to go falling over and getting yourself all dirty.”
“I’m sure you wouldn’t, trooper,” says Gaunt. “Carry on.”
He looks back at Rawne and Feygor.
“That was all me, sir,” says Feygor, hands up. “The major and I were having a little dispute, and I distracted him.”
It sounds convincing. Gaunt doesn’t know much about the trooper called Feygor, but he’s met his type before, a conniving son of a bitch who has been blessed with the silken vocal talent to sell any story to anyone.
Gaunt doesn’t even bother looking at him. He stares at Rawne.
Major Rawne stares right back. His handsome face betrays no emotion whatsoever. Gaunt is a tall man, but Rawne is one of the Tanith he doesn’t tower over, and he only has a few pounds on the major.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rawne says.
“Do you, Rawne? Is that an admission of unholy gifts? Should I call for emissaries of the Ordos to examine you?”
“Ha ha,” says Rawne in a laugh-less voice. He just says the sounds. “Look, that there was a genuine slip, sir. A genuine bump. But we have a little history, sir, you and I, so you’re bound to ascribe more motive to it than that.”
A little history. In the Blackshard deadzones, Rawne had used the opportunity of a quiet moment alone with Gaunt to express his dissatisfaction with Gaunt’s leadership in the strongest possible terms. Gaunt had disarmed him and carried Rawne’s unconscious body clear of the fighting area. It’s hard to say what part of that history yanks Rawne most: the fact that he had failed to murder Gaunt, or the fact that Gaunt had saved him.
“Wow,” says Gaunt.
“What?”
“You used the word ascribe,” says Gaunt, and turns to go into the cook tent. Over his shoulder, he calls out, “If you say it was a bump, then it was a bump, major. We need to trust each other.”
Gaunt turns and looks back.
“Starting in about twenty minutes. After breakfast, I’m going to take an advance out to get a look at Kosdorf. You’ll be in charge.”
They watch him pick up a mess tin from the pile and head towards the slab vat where the cook is waiting with a ladle and an apologetic expression.
He sits down with his tin at one of the mess benches. The slab seems to have been refried and then stewed along with something that was either string or mechanically recovered gristle. “I don’t know how you can eat that.”
Gaunt looks up. It’s the boy, the civilian boy. The boy sits down facing him.
“Sit down, if you like,” Gaunt says.
Milo looks pinched with cold, and he has his arms wrapped around his body.
“That stuff,” he says, jutting his chin suspiciously in the direction of Gaunt’s tin. “It’s not proper food. I thought Imperial Guardsmen were supposed to get proper food. I thought that was the Compact of Service between the Munitorum and the Guardsman: three square meals a day.”
“This is proper food.”
The boy shakes his head. He is only about seventeen, but he’s going to be big when he fills out. There’s a blue fish inked over his right eye.
“It’s not proper food,” he insists.
“Well, you’re not a proper Guardsman, so you’re not entitled to a proper opinion.”
The boy looks hurt. Gaunt doesn’t want to be mean. He owes Brin Milo a great deal. Two people had gone beyond the call to help Ibram Gaunt get off Tanith alive. Sym had been one, and the man had died making the effort. Milo had been the other. The boy was just a servant, a piper appointed by the Elector of Tanith Magna to wait on Gaunt during his stay. Gaunt understands why the boy has stuck with the regiment since the Tanith disaster. The regiment is all Milo has left, all he has left of his people, and he feels he has nowhere else to go, but Gaunt wishes Milo would disappear. There are camps and shelters, there are Munitorum refugee programmes. Civilians didn’t belong at the frontline. They remind troopers of what they’ve left behind or, in the Tanith case, lost forever. They erode morale. Gaunt has suggested several times that Milo might be better off at a camp at Voltis City. He even has enough pull left to get Milo sent to a Schola Progenium or an orphanage for the officer class.
Milo refuses to leave. It’s as if he’s waiting for something to happen, for someone to arr
ive or something to be revealed. It’s as if he’s waiting for Gaunt to make good on a promise.
“Did you want something?” Gaunt asks.
“I want to come.”
“Come where?”
“You’re going to scout the approach to Kosdorf this morning. I want to come.”
Gaunt feels a little flush of anger. “Rawne tell you that?”
“No one told me.”
“Caffran, then. Damn, I thought Caffran might be trustworthy.”
“No one told me,” says Milo. “I mean it. I just had a feeling, a feeling you’d go out this morning. This whole taskforce was sent to clear Kosdorf, wasn’t it?”
“This whole taskforce was intended to be an instrument of petty and spiteful vengeance,” Gaunt replies.
“By whom?” asks Milo.
Gaunt finishes the last of his slab. He drops the fork into the empty tin. Not the best he’d ever had. Throne knows, not the worst, either. “That general,” Gaunt says. “General Sturm?”
“That’s the one,” Gaunt nods. “General Noches Sturm of the 50th Volpone. He was trying to use the Tanith First, and we made him look like a prize scrotum by taking Voltis when his oh-so-mighty Bluebloods couldn’t manage the trick. Throne, he even let us ship back to the transport fleet before deciding we should stay another month or so to help clean up. He’s done it all to inconvenience us. Pack, unpack. Ship to orbit, return to surface. March out into the backwaters of a defeated world to check the ruins of a dead city.”
“Make you eat crap instead of fresh rations?” asks Milo, looking at the mess tin.
“That too, probably,” says Gaunt.
“Probably shouldn’t have pissed him off, then,” says Milo.
“I really probably shouldn’t,” Gaunt agrees. “Never mind, I heard he’s getting retasked. If the Emperor shows me any providence, I’ll never have to see Sturm again.”
“He’ll get his just desserts,” says Milo.
“What does that mean?” asks Gaunt.
Milo shrugs. “I dunno. It just feels that way to me. People get what they deserve, sooner or later. The universe always gets payback. One day, somebody will stick it to Sturm just like he’s sticking it to you.”
“Well, that thought’s cheered me up,” says Gaunt, “except the part about getting what you deserve. What does the universe have in store for me, do you suppose, after what happened to Tanith?”
“You only need to worry about that if you think you did anything wrong,” says Milo. “If your conscience is clear, the universe will know.”
“You talk to it much?”
“What?”
“The universe? You’re on first name terms?” Milo pulls a face.
“Things could be worse, anyway,” Milo says.
“How?”
“Well, you’re in charge. You’re in charge of this whole task force.”
“For my sins.”
Gaunt gets to his feet. A Munitorum skivvy comes by and collects his tin.
“So?” asks Milo. “Can I come?”
“No,” says Gaunt.
He’s walked a few yards from the mess tents when Milo calls out after him. With a resigned weariness, Gaunt turns back to look at the boy.
“What?” he asks. “I said no.”
“Take your cape,” says Milo.
“What?”
“Take your cape with you.”
“Why?”
Milo looks startled for a moment, as if he doesn’t want to give the answer, or it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would need one. He dithers for a second, and seems to be making something up.
“Because Colonel Corbec likes it when you wear it,” he says. “He thinks it shows respect.”
Gaunt nods. Good enough.
The advance is waiting for him at the north post, the end marker of the camp area. There are two batteries of Ketzok Hydras there, barrels elevated at a murky sky that occasionally blinks with silent light. Gunners sit dripping under oilskin coats on the lee side of their gun-carriages. Tracks are sunk deep in oozing grey clay. Rain hisses. “Nice day for it,” says Colm Corbec.
“I arranged the weather especially, colonel,” replies Gaunt as he walks up. The clay is wretchedly sticky underfoot. It sucks at their boots. The men in the three squads look entirely underwhelmed at the prospect of the morning’s mission. The only ones amongst them who aren’t standing slope-shouldered and dejected are the three scout specialists that Corbec has chosen to round out the advance. One is the leader of the scout unit, Mkoll. Gaunt has already begun to admire Mkoll’s abilities, but he has no read on the man himself. Mkoll is sort of nondescript, of medium build and modest appearance, and seems a little weatherbeaten and older than the rank and file. He chooses to say very little.
Gaunt hasn’t yet learned the names of the two scouts with Mkoll. One, he believes, he has overheard someone refer to as “lucky”. The other one, the taller, thinner one, has a silent, faraway look about him that’s oddly menacing.
“It may just have been me,” says Corbec, “but didn’t we spend an hour or so in the tent this morning agreeing not to do this?” Gaunt nods.
“I thought,” says Corbec, “we were to stay put until the Ketzok had been resupplied?”
They were. The purpose of the expedition is to evaluate and secure Kosdorf, Voltemand’s second city, which had been effectively taken out in the early stages of the liberation. Orbit watch reports it as ruined, a city grave, but the emergency government and the Administratum want it locked down. The whole thing is a colossal waste of time. Voltis City, which had been the stronghold for the charismatic but now dead Archenemy demagogue Chanthar, was the key to Voltemand. The Kosdorf securement is the sort of mission that could have been handled by PDF or a third-tier Guard strength.
General Sturm is playing games, of course, getting his own back, and doing it in such a way as to make it look like he is being magnanimous. As his last act before passing control of the Voltemand theatre to a successor, Sturm appointed Gaunt to lead the expedition to Kosdorf, a command of twenty thousand men including his own Tanith, a regiment of Litus Battlefield Regimental Units, and a decent support spread of Ketzok armour.
Everyone, including the Litus and the Ketzok, have seen it for what it is, so they’ve started making heavy going of it, dragging their heels. At this last encampment, supposedly the final staging point before a proper run into Kosdorf, the Ketzok have complained that their ammo trains have fallen behind, and demanded a delay of thirty-six hours until they can be sure of their supplies.
The Ketzok are a decent lot. Despite a bad incident during the Voltis attack, Gaunt has developed a good working relationship with the armoured brigade, but Sturm’s edict has taken the warmth out of it. The Ketzok aren’t being difficult with him, they’re being difficult with the situation.
“The Ketzok can stay put,” says Gaunt. “There’s no harm getting some exercise though, is there?”
“I suppose not,” Corbec agrees.
“In this muck?” someone in the ranks calls out from behind him.
“That’s enough, Larks,” Corbec says without turning. Corbec is a big fellow, tall and broad, and heavy. He raises a large hand, scoops the heavy crop of slightly greying hair out of his face, and flops it over his scalp before tying it back. Raindrops twinkle like diamonds in his beard. Despite the bullying wind, Gaunt can smell a faint odour of cigars on him.
Gaunt wonders how he’s going to begin to enforce uniform code when the company colonel looks like a matted and tangled old man of the woods.
“This is just going to be a visit to size the place up,” says Gaunt, looking at Mkoll. “I intend for us to be back before nightfall.” Mkoll just nods.
“So what you’re saying is you were getting a little bored sitting in your tent,” says Corbec. Gaunt looks at him.
“That’s all right,” Corbec smiles. “I was getting pretty bored sitting in mine. A walk is nice, isn’t it, lads?”
No one actually a
nswers.
Gaunt walks the line with Corbec at his side, inspecting munition supplies. They’re going to be moving light, but every other man’s got an extra musette bag of clips, and two troopers are carrying boxes of RPGs for the launcher. Nobody makes eye contact with Gaunt as he passes.
Gaunt comes to Caffran in the line.
“What are you doing here?” Gaunt asks.
“Step forward, trooper,” says Corbec.
“I thought I was supposed to stay with you all day,” Caffran replies, stepping forward. “I thought those were my orders.”
“Sir,” says Corbec. “Sir,” says Caffran.
“I suppose they are,” says Gaunt and nods Caffran back into the file. A march in the mud and rain is the least you deserve for talking out of turn, Gaunt thinks, especially to a civilian.
There’s a muttering somewhere. They’re amused by Caffran’s insolence. Gaunt gets the feeling that Corbec doesn’t like it, though Corbec does little to show it. The colonel’s position is difficult. If he reinforces Gaunt’s authority, he risks losing all the respect the men have for him. He risks being despised and resented too.
“Let’s get moving,” says Gaunt.
“Advance company!” Corbec shouts, holding one hand above his head and rotating it with the index finger upright. “Sergeant Blane, if you please!”
“Yes, sir!” Blane calls out from the front of the formation. He leads off.
The force begins to move down the track into the rain behind the sergeant. Mkoll and his scouts, moving at a more energetic pace, take point and begin to pull away.
Gaunt waits as the infantrymen file past, their boots glopping in the mire. Not one of them so much as glances at him. They have their heads down.
He jogs to catch up with Corbec. He had hoped that getting out and doing something active might chase away his unhappiness. It isn’t working so far.
He still has that letter in his pocket.
“Back again?” asks Dorden, the medicae.
The boy hovers in the doorway of the medical tent like a spectre that needs to be invited in out of the dark. The rain has picked up, and it’s pattering a loud tattoo off the overhead sheets.