He sank back against the metal flank of his Basilisk. “Make the guns ready,” he told his officers. “In the name of the Emperor, make them ready.”
The guns had been silent for ten hours. Ortiz hoped he would never hear them blaze again. Dawn frosted the horizon with light. Down in the valley, and in the Blueblood emplacements, victory celebrations continued with abandon.
Dorentz ran over to Ortiz and shook him. “Look, sir!” he babbled. “Look!”
Men were coming up the Metis Road out of the valley towards them, tired men, weary men, filthy men, walking slowly, carrying their dead and wounded. They were a straggled column that disappeared back into the morning mist.
“In the name of mercy…” Ortiz stammered. All around, shocked, silent Basilisk crew were leaping down from their machines and going to meet the battered men, supporting them, helping them, or simply staring in appalled disbelief.
Ortiz walked over to meet the arrival. He saw the tall figure in the long coat, now ragged, striding wearily out of the mist. Ibram Gaunt was half-carrying a young Ghost whose head was a bloody mess of bandages.
He stopped in front of Ortiz and let medics take the wounded Ghost from him.
“I want—” Ortiz began.
Gaunt’s fist silenced him.
“He’s here,” Gilbear said with an insouciant smirk. Sturm got to his feet and straightened his jacket. “Bring him in,” he said.
Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt marched into the study. He stood, glowering at Sturm and his adjutant.
“Gaunt!” Sturm said. “You opened the way for the Royal Volpone. Good show! I hear Chanthar turned a melta on himself.” He paused and absently tapped at a data-slate on his desk. “But then this business with what’s-his-name…?”
“Ortega, sir,” Gilbear said helpfully.
“Ortiz,” Gaunt corrected.
“The Ketzok fellow. Striking a fellow officer. That’s a shooting offence, and you know it, Gaunt. Won’t have it, not in this army. No, sir.”
Gaunt breathed deeply. “Despite knowing our position, and line of retreat, the artillery unit pounded the eastern flanks of the Bokore Valley for six hours straight. They call the phenomenon ‘friendly fire’, but I can tell you when you’re in the target zone with nothing but twigs and dust for cover, it’s nothing like friendly. Host nearly three hundred men, another two hundred injured. Amongst the dead was Sergeant Cluggan, who had led the second prong of my assault and whose actions had actually won us the city.”
“Bad show indeed,” Sturm admitted, “but you must learn to expect this kind of loss, Gaunt. This is war.” He tossed the data-slate aside. “Now this hitting business. Chain of command and all that. My hands are tied. It’s to be a court martial.”
Gaunt was level and unblinking. “If you’re going to shoot me for it, get on with it. I struck Ortiz in the heat of the moment. In hindsight, I realise he was probably following orders. Some damn fool orders from HQ.”
“Now look, you jumped up—” Gilbear began, stepping forward.
“Would you like me to demonstrate what I did to Ortiz?” Gaunt asked the bigger man acidly.
“Silence, both of you!” snarled Sturm. “Commissar Gaunt… Colonel-commissar… I take my duty seriously, and that duty is to enforce the discipline and rule of Warmaster Macaroth, and through him the beloved Emperor himself, strictly and absolutely. The Imperial Guard is based upon the towering principles of respect, authority, unswerving loyalty and total obedience. Any aberration, even from a officer of your stature, is to be—What the hell is that noise?”
He crossed to the window. What he saw made him gawp speechlessly. The Basilisk tank thundering up the drive was dragging part of the main gate after it and scattering gaudcocks and drilling Bluebloods indiscriminately in its path. It slewed to a halt on the front lawn, demolishing an ornamental fountain in a spray of water and stone.
A powerful man in the uniform of a Serpent colonel leapt down and strode for the main entrance to the house. His face was set and mean, swollen with bruises down the left side. A door slammed. There was some shouting, some running footsteps. Another slamming door.
Some moments later, an aide edged into the study, holding out a data-slate for Sturm. “Colonel Ortiz has just filed an incident report. He suggested you saw it at once, sir.”
Gilbear snatched it and read it hastily. “It seems that Major Ortiz wishes to make it clear he was injured by his own weapon’s recoil during the recent bombardment.” Gilbear looked up at Sturm with a nervous laugh. “That means—”
“I know what it means!” Sturm snapped. The general glared at Gaunt, and Gaunt glared right back, unblinking.
“I think you should know,” Gaunt said, low and deadly, “it seems that callous murder can be committed out here in the lawless warzones, and the fact of it can be hidden by the confusion of war. You should bear that in mind, general, sir.”
Sturm was lost for words for a moment. By the time he had remembered to dismiss Gaunt, the commissar had already gone.
“Oh, for Feth’s sake, play something more cheerful,” Corbec said from his troop-ship bunk, flexing his bandaged hand. He was haunted by the ghost of his missing finger. Appropriate, he thought.
In the bunk below him, Milo squeezed the bladder of his pipes and made them let out a moan, a shrill, sad sigh. It echoed around the vast troop bay of the huge, ancient starship, where a thousand Tanith Ghosts were billeted in bunks. The dull rhythm of the warp engines seemed to beat in time to the wailing pipes.
“How about… ‘Euan Fairlow’s March’?” Milo asked.
Above him, Corbec smiled, remembering the old jig, and the nights he heard it played in the taverns of Tanith Magna.
“That would be very fine,” he said.
The energetic skip of the jig began and quickly snaked out across the iron mesh of the deck, between the aisles of bunks, around stacks of kits and camo-cloaks, through the smoky groups where men played cards or drank, over bunks where others slept or secretly gazed at portraits of women and children who were forever lost, and tried to hide their tears.
Enjoying the tune, Corbec looked up from his bunk when he heard footsteps approach down the deck-plates. He jumped up when he saw it was Gaunt. The commissar was dressed as he had first met him, fifty days before, in high-waisted dress breeches with leather braces, a sleeveless undershirt and jack boots.
“Sir!” Corbec said, surprised. The tune faltered, but Gaunt smiled and waved Milo on. “Keep playing, lad. It does us good to hear your merrier tunes.”
Gaunt sat on the edge of Milo’s bunk and looked up at Corbec.
“Voltemand is credited as a victory for the Volpone Bluebloods,” he told his number two frankly. “Because they seized the city. Sturm mentions our participation with commendations in his report. But this one won’t win us our world.”
“Feth take ’em!” spat Corbec.
“There will be other battles. Count on it.”
“I’m afraid I do, sir,” Corbec smiled.
Gaunt bent down and opened the kit-bag he was carrying. He produced a half dozen bottles of sacra.
“In the name of all that’s good and holy!” Corbec said, jumping down from his bunk. “Where—”
“I’m an Imperial commissar,” Gaunt said. “I have pull. Do you have glasses?”
Chuckling, Corbec pulled a stack of old shot glasses from his kit.
“Call Bragg over, I know he likes this stuff,” Gaunt said. “And Varl and Meryn. Mad Larkin. Suth. Young Caffran… hell’s teeth, why not Major Rawne too? And one for the boy. There’s enough to share. Enough for everyone.” He nodded down the companion way to the three bewildered naval officers who were approaching with a trolley laden with wooden crates.
“What do we drink to?” Corbec asked.
“To Sergeant Cluggan and his boys. To victory. And to the victories we are yet to have.”
“Drink to revenge, too,” Milo said quietly from his bunk, setting down his pipes. Gaunt grinned.
“Yes, that too.”
“You know, I’ve got just the treat to go with this fine brew,” Corbec announced, searching his pockets. “Cigars, liquorice flavour…”
He broke off. What he had pulled from his coat pocket had ceased to be cigars a good while before. There were a matted, frayed, waterlogged mess.
Corbec shrugged and grinned, his eyes twinkling as Gaunt and the others laughed.
“Ah, well,” he sighed philosophically, “Some you win…”
Heavy, spoon-billed wading birds flew west across the lines, white against the encroaching dark. In the thickets, the daytime chirruping insects gave up their pitches to the night beetles, the nocturnal crickets, the tick-flies, creatures that spiralled and swam in the light of the stove fires and filled the long hot darkness with their percussion. Other cries rolled in the sweaty air: the whoops and gurgles of unseen climbers and grazers in the swamp. The distant artillery had fallen silent.
Gaunt returned to the command shed just as the grille-shaded watch lights came on, casting their greenish glow downwards into the slush, bull’s-eye covers damping their out-flung light in any direction other than down. No sense in making a long range target of the base. Furry, winged insects the size of chubby hands flew in at once to bounce persistently off the lit grilles with a dull, intermittent thok thok thok.
Gaunt took one last look around the base site, now distinguished only by the points of light: the cook-fires, stoves, watch lights and moving torches. He sighed and went inside.
The command centre was long and low, with a roof of galvanised corrugate and walls of double-ply flak-board. The floor was fresh-cut local wood sawn into planks and treated with vile-smelling lacquer. Blast shutters on the windows stood half-open and the wire screens inside them were already thick with a fuzzy, quivering residue — the mangled bodies of moths and night-bugs which had thrown themselves at the mesh.
Gaunt’s command equipment and his duffel bags of personal effects were set off the floor on blocks of wood. They’d been sat directly on the floor for the first two days until it was discovered that where damp didn’t seep up, burrowing worms did.
He draped his coat on a wire hanger and hung it from a nail on the overhead rafter, then pulled up a camp chair and sat down heavily. Before him, block-mounted, sat a cogitator, a vox-uplink and a flat-screen mimeograph. A tech-priest had spent over an hour diligently intoning prayers of function as he made the sacred machines ready. They were still propped in their half-open wrought-iron casings to protect against the damp, and thick power feeds snaked off from them and ran from clip supports on the rafters, out of a socket-shutter and off to the distant generator. Lights and light images shimmered and flickered on glass plates glossed by condensation. Setting dials throbbed a dull orange. The vox-link made a low-level serpent hiss as it rose and fell through frequencies.
Gaunt leaned forward and idly surveyed the latest information and tactical data coming through from the orbital fleet and other units. A skein of coded runes crossed and blinked on the dark glass.
Quiet as nightfall, Milo entered from the ante-room. He offered a pewter beaker to his commissar. Gaunt took it with a nod, delighting at the beaded coolness of the metal.
“The tech-priests got the cooling units working again just now,” Milo muttered by way of explanation. “For a few minutes. It’s only water, but it’s cold.”
Gaunt nodded his appreciation and sipped. The water was metallic and sharp, but it was deliciously cool.
There was a thump on the outside step, then a quiet knock at the door. Gaunt smiled. The thump had been deliberate, a reassuring advance warning from a man who made no sound if he did not wish to.
“Come in, Mkoll,” Gaunt said.
Mkoll entered, his lined face a little quizzical as if surprised at being recognised in advance. “Patrol report, sir,” he said, standing stiffly in the doorway.
Gaunt gestured him to a seat. Mkoll’s battledress and cloak were drenched in wet mud. Everything including his face was splattered — everything except his lasgun, miraculously clean.
“Let’s have it.”
“Their positions are still far back,” Mkoll began, “beyond the offensive line coded alpha pink. A few forward patrols.”
“Trouble?”
The powerful, wiry man grimaced noncommittally. “Nothing we couldn’t handle.”
“I’ve always admired your modesty,” Gaunt said, “but I need to know.”
Mkoll screwed up his mouth and nose. “We took six of them in the western swamps. No losses on our side.”
Gaunt nodded approval. He liked Mkoll, the Tanith’s finest scout. Even in a regiment of stealthers and covert warriors, Mkoll was exceptional. A woodsman back home on lost Tanith, he had reconnaissance skills that had proved themselves time and again to the Ghosts. A ghost amongst ghosts, and modest with it. He never bragged, and it was certain he had more to brag about than most.
Gaunt offered his beaker to the man.
“Thank you, sir, no.” Mkoll looked down at his hands.
“It’s cold,” Gaunt assured him.
“I can tell. But no. I’d rather go without something I could get used to.”
Gaunt shrugged and sipped again. “So they’re not moving?”
“Not yet. We sighted a… I’m not sure what it was, an old ruin of some kind.” Mkoll rose and pointed to a position on the wall chart. “Around here, far as I can tell. Could be nothing, but I’d like to follow it through with a survey in the morning.”
“An enemy position?”
“No, sir. Something… that was already here.”
“You’re right: deserves a look. In the morning then,” Gaunt agreed. “If that’ll be all, sir?”
“Dismissed, Mkoll.”
“I’ll never get the measure of him,” Gaunt said to Milo after Mkoll had left. “Quietest man I’ve ever known.”
“That’s what he does, isn’t it, sir?” Milo said. “What?”
“Quiet.”
THREE
SOUND AND FURY
All around there was a hushing sound, as if the whole world wanted to silence him.
Mkoll bellied in low amid the forest of ferns, trying to pick through the oceanic rushing sound they made as the wind stirred them. The fern growth in that part of Ramillies 268-43, flourishing on the thin, ashy soils of the long-cold volcanic slopes, was feathery and fibrous, mottled stalks rough as cane rising three man-heights into swaying multi-part fronds as white as water-ice.
They reminded him of the nal-wood forests back home, when there was still a back home, the nal-woods in winter, when he’d gone out logging and hunting. Frost had crusted the evergreen needles on the sighing trees then until they had tinkled like wind chimes.
Here, now, there was only the sigh, the motion of the dry ferns and the clogging dust that got into every pore and rasped the soft tissue at the back of the throat. The sunlight was bright and harsh, stabbing down through the pale, spare air out of a sky translucent blue. It made a striated web out of the ground cover under the ferns — stark sun-splashes and jagged shadows of blackness.
He crept forward twenty metres into a break of skeleton brush. His lower legs were already double-wrapped with chain-cloth to protect against the shredding thorns. He had his lasgun held to his chest on a tightly cinched strap to keep it clear of the dust but, every ten minutes or so, he checked its moving parts and cleared the dust, fern-fibres, twig-shreds and burrs that accumulated constantly.
Several cracks made him turn and freeze, sliding his gun into a firing grip between smooth, dry palms. Something was moving through the thicket to his left, cracking the occasional spent thorn underfoot.
To be fair, they were moving with extreme and trained stealth, but still their progress sounded like a careless march to Mkoll’s acute hearing.
Mkoll drew his knife, its long silver blade deliberately dulled with ash. He backed into a thorn stalk and moulded his body to the kinking plant. Two steps, one.
He
swung out, only pulling back his blade at the last moment.
Trooper Dewr cried out and fell backwards, splintering dry stalks as he dropped. Mkoll was on top of him in a second, pinning his arms and pushing the blade against his neck.
“Sacred Feth! You could’ve killed me!” Dewr barked agitatedly.
“Yes, I could,” said Mkoll, a whisper.
He relaxed his grip, rolled off and let the man rise.
“So could anything else out here, noise you were making.”
“I…” Dewr dropped his voice suddenly. “Are we alone?”
Mkoll didn’t answer. Chances were, if anything else was out here, it would have heard Dewr’s fall too.
“I didn’t mean anything,” Dewr began hoarsely, wincing as he plucked out the thorns he had fallen on.
Mkoll was scanning around, his gun ready. “What the feth did they teach you during basic?” he whispered. “You’re meant to be a scout!”
Dewr didn’t reply. All the scouts knew Mkoll’s exacting standards, and knew just as well how they all failed to meet them. Dewr felt angry, in fact. During basic training, before that as a hunter in the southern gameland of Tanith Attica, he’d been reckoned as a good tracker. That was why they had selected him for the scout unit when the regiment mustered, for feth’s sake! And this old bastard made him feel like a fool, a clumsy fool!
Wordlessly, ignoring the stare he knew Dewr was boring into the back of his head, Mkoll signalled an advance, heading down the slope into the fern-choked vale.
The Tanith had arrived on Ramillies two weeks before, just in time to miss the main action. The Adeptus Astartes had cleaned out and secured the four enemy strongholds, banishing Chaos from the world. The Ghosts had assembled on the low plains near one burning fortress, seeing Space Marines, threatening bulks in the smoky distance like the giants of myth, piling the ragged corpses of slain cultists onto pyres. The air had been thick with filthy char.
It seemed some small components of the enemy had fled the defeat, making into the fern forests in the north, too small and insignificant for the glorious Space Marines to waste time upon. The commissar was charged with a search and destroy detail. The Ghosts had advanced into the low hills and the dense forestation, to smoke out the last of the foe.