On Dalin’s left hand in the line was Neskon, the flame-trooper. He’d heard enough of the Cullwoe/Dalin interplay over the last few weeks to find it amusing. Neskon stank of prom-juice, the smell seeping out of his rind like rank, chemical sweat.
“Ready, boy?” he asked.
Dalin nodded.
The grizzled flame-trooper, his face and neck prematurely aged by the professional heat he deployed, let his tanks gurgle up and then flicked the burner. It coughed, and took with a belch of ignition.
“Happy sounds,” Neskon muttered, adjusting the fuel feed. “You stand by me, boy. I’ll see you right.”
Dalin nodded again. He felt strangely safe and looked after: a young buddy on one side, a friendly fire-ogre on the other, both of them looking out for him, because of who he was: Caffran’s son. Criid and Caffran’s son, brought up out of the fires of Vervunhive to be a Ghost in his adoptive father’s place.
Neskon’s flamer burped fuel and stammered. The flame-trooper adjusted it expertly, and brought the burn cone back to a liquid dribble.
“E Company! Make ready to advance!”
Dalin tensed, waiting for the order, the order he felt he had been waiting for all his life.
“Straight silver!” Meryn shouted.
Do it, now. Left hand down to the webbing, slide it out, spin it around, fix it to the rifle lug, snap-snap Ten centimetres of fighting knife, locked in place. The trademark weapon of the Tanith Ghosts.
Dalin Criid felt a boiling surge of pride. His rifle was in his hands. He was a Ghost, and he had just fixed silver, straight silver, in anger for the very first time.
“Advance!” Meryn yelled.
“Come on then if you’re coming,” said Neskon.
II
Straight silver didn’t apply to everyone. Marksmen weren’t expected to fix. As the order ran down the company lines, Hlaine Larkin didn’t move. His precious long-las, miraculously recovered from the swamps of Gereon, was already up to his chin and trained.
Larkin was old. With the exception of Zweil and Dorden, he was probably the oldest man in the regiment, and the best shot. Glory fething be, was he the best shot.
Larkin was skinny and lean, his face leathery like a tanned hide. He had been through every single battle the Ghosts had fought, and he had outlived many very good friends.
Larkin waited, sniffing the air. His head was clear for once, which made a change. He was a slave to migraines. He shifted uneasily. He still wasn’t used to the foot. He’d opted for a prosthetic rather than an augmetic, but it had left him with a limp. A wooden foot brace—nalwood, thank you—Throne knew how the chief had pulled strings to make that happen. Larkin believed Gaunt felt guilty about the foot. It had been the right thing to do, of course, Larkin knew that, but he couldn’t blame the chief for feeling guilty.
He had taken Larkin’s foot off with his sword, after all.
Five seventy metres, panning, lock off. Larkin slowly travelled his scope. He ignored the foreground fuzz of advancing bodies, and played his sharp focus across the relief of the fortress walls and window slits instead. He was hunting for movement, hunting for danger with a well-practiced eye, hunting for the trouble Major Rawne had been so fething sure was waiting for them up there.
Larkin’s breathing was very slow. Kill-shot at four thousand metres. He’d managed that once or twice. It was as if he had a special, holy angel watching over him, guiding his aim. A special angel. He’d seen her once.
Once was enough.
Larkin always believed he hadn’t seen anything true until he’d seen it through his scope. As the Ghosts advanced, he watched to see what was real as much as he watched as a covering marksman.
There they went… Daur, Kolea, Kamori, driving their troops into the gate. Larkin swung his scope. There was Caober. There was Brostin and Varl. There was old father Zweil, up on a rock, using it like a pulpit to bless the advancing Guardsmen as they trudged past.
Larkin smiled. Zweil was a piece of work. Oldest man he’d ever known, and still full of it.
There was Wheln, and Melwid, there was Veddekin, Derin, Harjeon and Burone. There was Tona Criid and Nahum Ludd. There was Lubba, and Dremmond, Posetine and Nessa. There was Bragg and Noa Vadim and Bool. There was Vivvo and Lyse and sexy Jessi Banda. There was—
Wait. Pull up! Go back!
Feth, feth, feth, no—
In the midst of it all, all those moving figures… Bragg?
No, just a trick of the eye. A lie of the scope. A blip of the mind. Not Bragg. Some other fether. Not Bragg at all.
Come on, how stupid was that?
Larkin adjusted his sweep, his scope clicking.
III
Commissar Viktor Hark heaved his not inconsiderable bulk through the wedged hatch and entered the old gatehouse. Men were gathering inside, waiting, looking around, chattering quietly. Captain Daur stood by the inner hatch, despatching men from the waiting mass a few at a time into the main house.
“Quiet!” Hark said. The chatter slid away like a sheathed blade.
“Next fire-team!” Daur called out, consulting a packet of papers he’d been carrying in his musette bag.
Five Ghosts moved forward from the gathered group, C Company men led by Derin.
“Up, forty metres, take the turn to your left. Reinforce the teams in the gallery and push forward.” Daur gestured up through the inner hatch as he gave out the instructions.
“Got it,” said Derin.
“Vox anything,” said Daur.
Derin nodded. He said “Yes, sir,” but the look on his face was all about being indoors out of the dusty wind.
“Vox anything, Derin,” said Hark, coming up behind them. “This is not a safe place until the chief tells us it is.”
Derin and his men suddenly had their game faces on.
“Absolutely, commissar, sir.”
“You so much as hear a mouse fart, you sing it in, Derin,” said Hark. “Watch your backs and read the signs and don’t tell me anything’s clear unless you can personally guarantee it on your baby sister’s unblemished honour.”
There were times when Derin would have felt bold enough to remind the commissar that any baby sister he might ever have had was long dead in the ashes of Tanith. This was not one of those times.
“Got it, commissar.”
“Off you go.”
Derin’s team took off through the inner hatch. Hark could hear their footsteps thudding off the stone floor.
“Next fire-team!” Daur called. More men separated from the main body and moved forward.
“How accurate’s the map, d’you suppose?” Hark asked Daur.
Ban Daur wrinkled his nose and looked down at the packet of papers he was holding. Several senior officers, Hark included, had been issued with copies of the objective layouts at Elikon Muster Point.
“Well, they’re old and they look like they were done from memory,” said Daur dubiously. “Or by someone guessing. So…”
Hark nodded. “My thoughts exactly. We’re going to be running into surprises in this place.” He took off his cap and removed his brass goggles. His eyes were sore.
“You all right, commissar?” Daur asked.
“Huh?”
“You look tired, if I may say.”
“I haven’t been sleeping well. Get the next team moving. We’re backing up.”
Ever more troops were coming in through the outer hatch, and assembling in the gatehouse space. Hark watched and waited as Daur brought up, instructed, and sent on three more teams into the house proper. While he waited, Hark pulled out his own packet of papers, and found the central floor plan. Ban Daur’s description of the cartography had been kind.
“I’m keen to locate this place’s water supply,” he told Daur.
“The well?”
“Yeah.”
“Bottom of the central level, I think. Supposed to be. I sent Varl’s team in to section it.”
Hark nodded. “I’ll go find them. If anyone
comes looking for me, that’s where I’ve gone.”
“Yes, commissar.” Daur glanced at the big man. “Do you want an escort, sir?”
“Do I look like I need an escort, captain?” Hark asked.
“You haven’t looked like you needed an escort since the day I met you, sir,” said Daur.
“Good answer, captain. I’ll see you later.”
Hark stepped through the inner hatch.
IV
A broad hallway led back from the gatehouse’s inner hatch into the heart of the house. It had an octagonal shape in cross-section, and the floor was paved. The walls and ceiling were panelled with a dark, glossy material which Hark imagined was either a weathered alloy or some time-discoloured, lacquered hardwood. A sheeny dark brown, at any rate, like polished tortoiseshell or tobacco spit. There was the faintest suggestion of etchings or engravings on the shoulder-level sections of the walls, but nothing that eye or touch could read.
Hark walked up the hallway. Every twenty or so metres, a short flight of stone steps raised the entire tunnel a metre or so, so it was impossible to see clearly the entire length of the passage.
For the first time in weeks, Hark felt genuinely alone. For the first time in years, perhaps. There was no sound except for his own footsteps and breathing, and the tiny crackle of his leather coat as he moved. There was no sound of movement or voices, and he was so deep in the rock, the song of the wind outside was gone.
The lights were strange: dull white chemical glow-orbs strung from fat, withered piping that looked like diseased arteries. The light came and went in slow pulse, brighter then softer. Unnerving. The satin-brown walls seemed to soak the light up too, so that the hallway was filled with a warm, white gloom, fuzzy and softly dense, like starlight on a summer’s evening.
Hark stopped and watched the slow throb of the lights for a moment. It reminded him of something else. It reminded him of the bone-deep, heavy throb of pain, which was something he’d learned all about during the battle for Herodor five years earlier. Five years. Had it really been that long?
Hark realised he was sweating. Some other memory, unbidden, had just rekindled itself, and not for the first time. It wasn’t the memory of the extreme pain he’d suffered at Herodor, nor was it the nagging phantom ache of the arm he had lost there. Yet it was both of those things, too. It was linked to them, sparked off by them. It was like a dream, forgotten on waking, that flashed back later, uninvited and formless. A sense of sadness, of regret and lingering pain. Oh yes, that too.
V
Hark swallowed. He dearly wished he could pin the sensation down, identify it, perceive it clearly for once. It had been coming to him repeatedly for months, perhaps years, more and more frequently. In his dreams mostly, waking him with a start and a sense of bafflement. Sometimes, it came when he was awake, an itch he couldn’t scratch, a taste in the mouth, a taste in the mind. Dorden, the old medicae, had advised Hark that serious physical trauma of the type Hark had suffered often left an indelible residue on the victim. He hadn’t just been talking about phantom limb syndrome. He had meant a mental scar, the burned pathway of synapses flared and fused by the moment of agony.
“Some patients report a metallic taste, Viktor,” Dorden had said.
“You’ve been to the mess hall, then?”
Dorden had smiled. “A metallic taste. Sometimes a smell, a memory of a smell, from childhood perhaps. Soap. Your mother’s preferred fragrance.”
“My mother was an all-comers wrestling champion in the PDF,” Hark had replied. “She didn’t go in for perfume much.”
“You’re joking,” Dorden had said.
“Yes.”
“Joke all you like, if that’s how you wish to cope. Everyone develops their own strategies, Viktor. You asked me for help.”
“I asked you for your medical opinion, doctor,” Hark had said. Then he had paused. “Sorry. Sorry, doctor. You were saying?”
“Is it a taste? A smell? A memory?”
“It’s… it’s a dream, doctor. Just the faded echo of a dream that I cannot actually remember. It’s just out of reach. Always just beyond my ability to recall it.”
“Do you dream it? Is it an actual dream, or just the sensation of a dream recalled?”
Hark had paused before replying. “I dream quite a lot these days, doctor. My sleep is bothered and disturbed, but I cannot say what by.”
“It may pass in time,” Dorden had assured him.
It hadn’t. Hark knew it wasn’t going to. Sometimes he woke up biting his lip so as not to scream aloud. Sometimes, when he was wide awake, the feeling came to him: an amorphous, incomprehensible wash of softness, like smoke, like soft-filled pillows pressing in against him. But there was always something with a hard edge hidden inside the softness, pushing at him from behind the pillows.
The lights pulsed slowly, as if the house was breathing the slow breath of a sleeper. Exactly like that, precisely like that. What was it? What in Throne’s name was-
VI
“Hark?”
Hark snapped around, his good hand on the grip of his holstered plasma pistol.
A fire-team led by Ferdy Kolosim had come up behind him. The men hung back as the Belladon officer came forward, his brow furrowed. Hairline sweat had made tracks down through the dust caked to Kolosim’s forehead.
“What are you doing, standing there?” Kolosim asked.
“Just, erm, just getting my bearings, Ferdy,” Hark replied. He took out his floor plans and shook them out.
“You sure?” Kolosim was a good man, a worthy addition to the ranks of the First-and-Only.
“Oh yes,” said Hark, forcing a smile onto his lips. “This place… quite a place.”
“Good to be out of that bloody wind, though, right?”
“I think that’s just it, Ferdy,” Hark replied. “It’s suddenly so quiet, I quite lost myself.”
“I know what you mean,” said Kolosim, lowering his rifle and looking up at the tunnel roof. “This place feels—”
“Don’t say it,” Hark advised with a grin.
“I won’t. I know what Gaunt ordered. But it does, doesn’t it?”
Hark nodded. “A little bit, yes. You carry on.”
“Sure?”
“Carry on, boys.”
The fire-team moved past him and rattled away up the hall. Hark looked down at his left hand. The skin of his wrist, under the heavy black glove, itched like a bastard. He wanted to tug the glove off and scratch. Except, as he knew very well, there was no skin under that glove, just augmetic bones and sinews, just wires and plasteks and solenoids.
Hark turned, trying to ignore it, and walked on.
VII
The long hallway led up into the base chamber of the house. Side galleries had opened to left and right as he walked the length of the hallway;
long, drafty tunnels leading out into the base-level casemates and fortifications. The wind blew down them, thready and weak, forced in through distant apertures and slits. He could smell dust.
Hark reached a wide flight of steps. The hallway broadened out into a vestibule. The floor was no longer paved; it was tiled in the same sheened brown substance that clad the walls. It clacked under his boots, soft and gleaming, like polished leather. The steps went up under a huge wooden arch riddled with worm holes. The arch had been ornately carved, like the screen of a templum. Interlocking figures twisted into scrolling patterns, all sanded down by time until they had been rendered meaningless.
The base chamber was a circular stone vault fifty metres wide and four floors deep. A vast wooden screw-stair ran up from its centre into the upper levels of the house. At the ground floor level, and at each landing turn, hallways let out into the side sections of the house. Sentries had been placed on all the landings. The lights in the base chamber were hung from ceiling pipes, slack and heavy like eyeballs strung from optic nerves. They pulsed too: slowly, oh so slowly.
The wind was in the base chamber, gusting around from t
he doorways standing open on each level. It gave the air a dry, powdery smell.
“Where’s that coming from?” Hark asked.
“There’s a… gn… gn… shutter open somewhere, sir,” the trooper guarding the bottom of the staircase replied. Hark knew the voice and the messed-up face.
“A shutter, Trooper Merrt?”
Merit nodded. He was cautious of the commissar. Hark had slammed Merrt down to RIP duties en route from Ancreon Sextus, though Merrt didn’t hold it against him. Merrt knew he’d deserved it. As a result, Merrt had seen the Gereon liberation offensive from the sharpest end.
Rhen Merrt had once been a marksman, second only to Mad Larkin in skill. A headshot on Monthax, years before, had ended that speciality. Merrt was now the proud owner of an ugly augmetic jaw that made him look like a gruesome collision between a servitor and a human skull. The damage had ruined his aim, and he’d suffered for it. He was back at the bottom of the heap, his speciality a distant regret.
“A gn… gn… shutter, yes, sir,” Merrt said. He had trouble articulating his clumsy artificial jaw most of the time. His speech was slow and mannered.
Hark nodded. “Well, we’ll have to see to that. If any part of this fortress is open enough to let the wind blow through, Throne only knows what else it might let in.”
Merit nodded. A couple more fire-teams clattered into the base chamber and headed off up the staircase.
“By the way, it’s good to see you back, Merit,” Hark said quietly.
“Sir?”
“This is where you belong. In the First. Try not to feth it up for yourself again.”
“I’m a gn… gn… changed man, commissar.”
“Glad to hear it. I’m heading for the well.”