The advance came into the grave city as a unit, testing its way and proceeding with recon. Now he’s exiting alone, a solitary trooper, protected by his wits and training. There’s no doubt in his mind that the enemy will have spread strengths out through the dead boroughs surrounding the fighting zone to catch any stragglers.
Kosdorf reminds him of Tanith Magna. Architecturally, it’s nothing like it, of course. Tanith Magna was a smaller burg, high-walled, a gathering of predominantly dark stone towers and spires rising from the emerald canopy of Tanith like a monolith. It had nothing of Kosdorf’s dank, white, mausoleum quality. It’s simply the mortality of Kosdorf that has stabbed him in the heart. Caffran knows that Tanith Magna doesn’t even persist as a ruin anymore, but Voltemand’s second city, in death, inevitably makes him think of it, and the ruins become a substitute for his loss.
More than once, he feels quite sure he knows a street, or a particular corner. Memories superimpose themselves over alien habs and thoroughfares, and nostalgia, fletched with unbearable melancholy, spears him. He thinks he recognises one flattened frontage as the public house where he used to meet his friends, another shell as the mill shop where he had been apprenticed, and a broken walkway as the narrow street that had always taken him to the diocese temple. A patch of burned wasteland and twisted wire is most certainly the street market where he sometimes bought vegetables and meat for his ageing mother.
This terrace, this terrace with its cracked and broken flagstones, is definitely the square beside the Elector’s Gardens, where he used to meet Laria. He can smell nalwood… He can smell wet ash. Lightning jags silently.
He wipes a knuckle across his cheekbone, knowing that humiliating tears are mixing with the rain on his face.
He takes a deep breath. He isn’t concentrating. He isn’t paying enough attention. He stops to get his bearings, trusting the innate wiring of the Tanith mind to sense direction.
If the God-Emperor, who Caffran dutifully worshipped all his life at the little diocese temple, has seen fit to take everything away from him except this single duty, then Caffran is fething well determined to do it properly. He… He feels the hairs prick up on the back of his neck.
The las-shot misses his face by about a palm’s length. Just the slightest tremor of a trigger finger was the difference between a miss and a solid headshot. The light and noise of it rock him, the heat sears him, flash-drying the dirty tears and rain on his cheek into a crust.
Caffran throws himself down, and rolls into cover. He scrabbles in behind the foundation stones of a levelled building. Two more rounds pass over him, and then a hard round hits the block to his left. Caffran hears the distinctly different sound quality of the impact.
He thanks the God-Emperor with a nod. The enemy has just provided information. A minimum of two shooters, not one.
Caffran gets lower still. With his face almost pressing into the ooze, he repositions himself, and risks a look around the stone blocks.
Another shot whines past him, but it is speculative. The shooter hasn’t seen him. A filthy PDFer is hopping across the rubble towards his position, clutching an old autorifle. He looks like a hobbled beggar. The puttee around one of his calves is loose and trailing, and his breeches are torn. His face is concealed by an old gas mask. The air pipe swings like a proboscis, unattached to any air tank. One of the glass eye discs is missing.
Behind him, a distance back, a second PDFer stands on the top of a sloping section of roof that is lying across a street. He has a lascarbine raised to his shoulder and sighted. As the PDFer in the gas mask approaches, the other one clips off in Caffran’s general direction.
Caffran draws his only weapon, the long Tanith knife.
He stays low, hearing the crunch of the approaching enemy trooper. He can smell him too, a stench like putrefaction.
Another las-shot sings overhead. Caffran tries to slow his breathing. The footsteps get closer. He can hear the man’s breath rasping inside the mask.
Caffran turns the knife around in his hand until he is holding the blade, and then very gently taps the pommel against the stone block, using the knife like a drum stick.
Chink! Chink! Chink!
He hears the enemy trooper’s respiration rate change, his breath sounds alter as he turns to face a different direction. His footsteps clatter loose stone chips and crunch slime. He is right there. He is coming around the other side of the stone block.
The moment he appears, Caffran goes for him. He tries to make full body contact so he can bring the man over before he can aim his rifle. Caffran tries to force the muzzle of the rifle in under one of his arms rather than point it against his torso.
Locked together, they tumble down behind the block. The autorifle discharges.
From his vantage on the fallen roof slope, the other trooper hesitates, watching. He lowers his lasrifle, then raises it to sight again.
A shape pops back into view over the stone slab, a filthy shape, with a grimed gas-masked face. The watching trooper hesitates from firing.
The figure with the gas mask brings up an autorifle in a clean, fluid swing and fires a burst that hits the hesitating PDFer in the throat and chest, and tumbles him down the roof slope, scattering tiles.
Caffran drops the autorifle and wrenches off the gas mask as he falls to his knees. He gags and then vomits violently. The stench inside the borrowed mask, the residue, has been foul, even worse than he could have imagined. The mask’s previous owner lies on his back beside him, beads of bright red blood spattering his mud-caked chest. Caffran slides the warknife out and wipes the blade.
Then he throws up again.
He can hear activity in the ruins behind him. It’s time to move. He stares at the autorifle, and tries to weigh up the encumbrance against the usefulness of a ranged weapon. He reaches over and searches the large canvas musette pouches his would-be killer has strapped to the front of his webbing. One is full of odd junk: meaningless pieces of stone and brick, shards of pottery and glass, a pair of broken spectacles and a tin of boot polish. The other holds three spare clips for the rifle, and a battered old short-pattern autopistol, a poor quality, mass-stamped weapon with limited range.
It will have to do. He puts it into his pocket.
It’s really time to move.
It’s getting dark. Night doesn’t drop like a lid on Voltemand like it did on Tanith. It fills the sky up slowly, billowing like ink in water.
The rain’s still hammering the Imperial camp, but the dark rim of the sky makes the silent lightning more pronounced. The white spears are firing every twenty or thirty seconds, like an automatic beacon set to alarm.
The boy’s asleep, legs and arms loosely arranged like a dog flopped by a grate. Dorden hates to abuse his medicae privileges, but he believes that the God-Emperor of Mankind will forgive him for crushing up a few capsules of tranquiliser and mixing them into the boy’s broth. He’ll do penance if he has to. They had plenty of temple chapels back in the city, and a popular local saint, a woman. She looked like the forgiving sort.
The boy’s on a cot at the end of the ward. Dorden brews a leaf infusion over the small burner and turns the page of his book, open on the instrument rest. It’s a work called The Spheres of Longing. He’s yet to meet another man in the Imperial Guard who’s ever heard of it, let alone read it. He doubts he will. The Imperial Guard is not a sophisticated institution.
Nearby, Lesp is cleaning his needles in a pot of water. He’s done two or three family marks tonight at the end of his shift, a busy set. His eyes are tired, but he keeps going long enough to make sure the needles are sterile for the next job. Lesp is always eager to work. It’s as if he’s anxious to get down all the Tanith marks before he forgets them. Dorden sometimes wonders where Lesp will ink his marks when he runs out of Tanith skin to make them on.
The boy kicks as a dream trembles through him. Dorden watches him to make sure he’s all right.
The doorway flap of the tent opens and Rawne steps in ou
t of the lengthening light and the rain. Drops of it hang in his hair and on his cloak like diamonds. Dorden gets to his feet. Lesp gathers his things and makes himself scarce.
“Major.”
“Doctor.”
“Can I help you?”
“Just doing the rounds. Is everything as it should be here?” Dorden nods. “Nothing untoward.”
“Good,” says Rawne.
“It’s getting dark,” Dorden says, as Rawne moves to leave.
“It is.”
“Doesn’t that mean the advance unit is overdue?”
Rawne shrugs. “A little.”
“Doesn’t that concern you?” asks Dorden.
Rawne smiles.
“No,” he says.
“At what point will it concern you?” Dorden asks.
“When it’s actually dark and they’re officially missing.”
“That could be hours yet. And at that point it will be too late to mobilise any kind of force to go looking for them,” says Dorden.
“Well, we’d absolutely have to wait for morning at least,” says Rawne. Dorden looks at him, and rubs his hand across his face.
“What do you think’s happened to them?” he asks.
“I can’t imagine,” says Rawne.
“What do you hope’s happened to them?” Dorden asks.
“You know what I hope,” says Rawne. He’s smiling still, but it’s just teeth. There’s no warmth. It’s like lightning without thunder. Dorden sips his drink.
“I’d ask you to consider,” he says, “the effect it would have on the Tanith Regiment if it lost both of its senior commanding officers.”
“Please, Doctor,” says Rawne, “this isn’t an emergency. It’s just a thing. They’ve probably just got held up somewhere.”
“And if not?”
Rawne shrugged.
“It’ll be a terrible loss, like you said. But we’d just have to get over it. We’ve had practice at that, haven’t we?”
The emaciated ghosts of Kosdorf come at them through the skeletal ruins. They have become desperate. Their need, their hunger has overwhelmed their caution. They loom through useless doors and peer through empty windows. They clamber out of sour drains and emerge from cover behind spills of rubble. They fire their weapons and call out in pleading, raw voices.
The rain has thickened the dying light. Muzzle flashes flutter dark orange, like old flame.
The Tanith knot tight, and fend them off with precision. They fall back through the manufactory into the data library.
It’s there they lose their first life. A Tanith infantryman is caught by autogun fire. He staggers suddenly, as if winded. Then he simply goes limp and falls. His hands don’t even come up to break his impact against the tiled floor. Men rush to him, and drag him into cover, but Gaunt knows he’s gone by the way his heels are kicking out. Blood soaks the man’s tunic, and smears the floor in a great curl like black glass when they drag him. First blood.
Gaunt doesn’t know the dead man’s name. It’s one of the names he hasn’t learned yet. He hates himself for realising, just for a second, that it’s one less he’ll have to bother with.
Gaunt keeps the nalwood stock of Caffran’s lasrifle tight against his shoulder and looses single shots. The temptation to switch to auto is almost unbearable.
The lobby of the data library is a big space, which once had a glass roof, now fallen in. Rain pours in, every single moving drop of it catching the light. Kosdorfer ghosts get up on the lobby’s gallery, and angle fire down at the Tanith below. The top of the desk once used by the venerable clerk of records stipples and splinters, and the row of ornate brass kiosks where scholars and gnostics once filled out their data requests dent and quiver. Floor tiles crack. The delicate etched metal facings of the wall pit and dimple.
Corbec looks out at Gaunt from behind a chipped marble column.
“This won’t do,” he shouts.
Gaunt nods back.
“Support!” Corbec yells.
They’ve been sparing with their heavy weapon all day. They’re only a light advance team, and they weren’t packing much to begin with.
The big man comes up level with Corbec, head down. He’s carrying the lascarbine he’s been fighting with, but he’s got a long canvas sleeve across his back. He unclasps it to slide out the rocket tube.
The big man’s name is Bragg. He really is big. He’s not much taller than Corbec, but he’s got breadth across the shoulders. There’s a younger Tanith with him, one of the kids, a boy called Beltayn. He’s carrying the leather box with the eight anti-tank rockets in it, and he gets one out while Bragg snaps up the tube’s mechanical range-finder.
“Any time you like, Try!” Larkin yells out from behind an archway that is becoming riddled with shots.
“Shut your noise,” Bragg replies genially. He glances at Gaunt abruptly.
“Sorry, colonel-commissar, sir!” he says.
“Get on with it, please!” Gaunt shouts. It’s not so much the heavy fire they’re taking, it’s the voices. It’s probably his imagination, but the pleading, moaning voices of the Kosdorfers calling out to them are starting to make sense to him.
Beltayn goes to offer up the rocket to Bragg’s launcher, and a las-bolt fells him. Gaunt’s eyes widen as the rocket tumbles out of the hands of the falling boy and drops towards the tiled floor.
It hits, bounces, a tail-fin dents slightly. It doesn’t detonate.
Gaunt dashes forward. Corbec has reached Bragg too. Bragg has picked up the rocket. He taps it cheerfully against his head. “No fear,” he says. “Arming pin’s still in.”
Gaunt snatches the rocket, and stoops to the box to swap it for an undamaged one. “See to the boy!” he says to Corbec.
“Just a flesh wound!” Corbec replies, hunched over Beltayn. “Just his arm.”
“Get him back to the archway!”
“I can’t leave—”
“Get his arse back to the archway, colonel! I’ll do this!”
“Yes sir!”
Corbec starts dragging the boy back towards the main archway. Men come out of cover to help him. Gaunt gets a clean rocket out of the box. He rolls it in his hands to check it by eye. It’s been a long time since he loaded, a long time since he learned basic skills. A long time since he was the boy, the Hyrkan boy, apprenticed to war, born into it as if it was a family business.
“Set?” he asks the big man.
“Yes, sir!” says Bragg.
Gaunt fits the rocket and removes the arming pin. Bragg hoists the top-heavy tube onto the shelf of his shoulder and takes aim at the lobby gallery. Gaunt slaps him twice on the shoulder.
“Ease!” he yells.
“Ease!” Bragg yells back. The word opens the mouth and stops the eardrums bursting.
Bragg pulls the bare metal trigger. The ignition thumps the air, and blow-back spits from the back of the tube and throws up dust. The rocket howls off in the other direction, on a trail of flame. It hits the gallery just under the rail, and detonates volcanically. The entire gallery lifts for a second, and then comes down like an avalanche, spilling rubble, stonework, grit, glass and men. It collapses with a drawn-out roar, a death rattle of noise and disintegration.
Gaunt looks at Bragg. Bragg grins. Their ears are ringing.
Gaunt signals back to the archway.
They run in through the archway, through the smoke blowing from the lobby. They get down. Corbec has signalled a pause while they wait to hear how the enemy redeploys.
It gets quieter. The building settles. Rubble clatters as it falls now and then. Glass tinkles. Gaunt sinks down next to Bragg, his back to a wall. “First time that time,” says Larkin from a corner nearby. “I know,” says Bragg. He looks at Gaunt. He’s proud of himself. “Sometimes I miss,” he explains.
“I know,” says Gaunt. The big man’s nickname is Try Again because he’s always messing up the first shot.
Gaunt sits quiet for a minute or two. He wipes the sweat off his
face. I le thinks about trying again, and second chances. Sometimes there just isn’t the opportunity or the willingness to make things better. Sometimes you can’t simply have another go. You make a choice, and it’s a bad one, and you’re left with it. No amount of trying again will fix it. Don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you, to cut you slack; you made a mistake you’ll have to live with.
It was like failing to play the glittering game when he had the chance as one of Slaydo’s brightest; like leaving the Hyrkans; like trying to salvage anything from the Tanith disaster; like thinking he could win broken, grieving men over; like coming out with a small advance force into a city grave, just because he was bored of sitting in his tent.
He takes his cap off, leans the crown of his head back against the damp wall and closes his eyes. He opens them again. It’s dark above him, the roofspace of the library. Beads of rainwater and flakes of plaster are dripping and spattering down towards him, catching the intermittent lightning, like snow, like the slow traffic of stars through the aching loneliness of space.
He remembers something, one little thing. He puts his hand in his pocket, just to touch the letter, just to put his fingers on the letter his old friend Blenner sent him: Blenner, his friend from Schola Progenium, manufacturer of fake plastic explosives and practical jokes.
Blenner, manufacturer of empty promises, too, no doubt. The letter’s old. The offer may not still stand, if it ever did. Vaynom Blenner was not the most reliable man, and his mouth had a habit of making offers the rest of him couldn’t keep.
But it’s a small hope, a sustaining thing, the possibility of trying again.
The letter is gone.
Suddenly alert, torn from his reverie, Gaunt begins to search his pockets. It’s really gone. The pocket he thought he’d put it in is hanging off, thanks to the thrust of a rusty sword bayonet. All the pockets of his field jacket and storm coat are empty.
The letter’s lost. It’s outside somewhere in this grave of a city, disintegrating in the rain.
“What’s the matter?” asks Bragg, noticing Gaunt’s activity. “Nothing,” says Gaunt. “You sure?” Gaunt nods.