Rerval hesitated. He didn’t know what to say. It was ironic, he thought. I’m signals, a vox-officer. Communication is my speciality. But I have no idea what to say to this man.
“I wish I had pictures of them,” Gutes said. “There was no time, when I signed up. It was last minute. We agreed she’d send some on via the Munitorium. She promised me a care package. Letters.”
“They didn’t suffer, Piet,” Rerval said.
“No, I know that. Just a little flash and Tanith was dead. Bang, goodnight. Like I said, nothing matters if you’re far enough away. You know that song? ‘Far away, up in the mountains’? Brin Milo plays it sometimes.”
“I know it.”
The candle flame fluttered and almost went out. Then it flared again, as wax dribbled from the lip. Thunder slammed above the percussion of rain outside.
“I always thought,” Gutes said, “that she’d be the one getting the letter. My daughter, I mean. The one that comes in the vellum envelope. The one that says blah blah blah regret to inform you that your father, etc.”
“That letter,” Rerval nodded, taking another sip from the bottle.
“Turns out, it was the other way round. Except I didn’t get any letter. Just saw a little flash from far away.”
“You should get some sleep,” Rerval said. “I know. I know, Rerval.”
“Come on then.”
“Far away. That’s what this place is. So I thought. A chance to be far away at last, just for a few days. But it doesn’t matter where you go. It always finds you.”
He fumbled with the old papers in front of him and pushed them over towards Rerval. A letter sheet, brown with age, and its envelope. The letter was embossed with the crest of the Aexe Alliance.
Rerval read it. “Feth, where did you find this?”
“In the rack, in the hall. It was there when we came in. I didn’t pay it much heed before.”
The letterhead date told Rerval it had been sent nearly seventeen years before. It began: “Dear Madam Pridny, on behalf of the General Staff Command of the Aexe Alliance, I regret to inform you that your son, Masim Pridny, corporal, was reported missing during action at Loncort earlier this week…”
“Rain’s stopped,” Muril said. A pre-dawn glow was spreading in through the kitchen windows.
The old woman was asleep, curled up on the bench seat. Larkin was sitting hunched at the table, nursing a glass of sacra. The bruises on his face were almost black, and Muril was worried about the wound on the back of his head.
Everyone else was long since asleep, except Caffran and Rerval, who were standing guard.
Muril got up and used a cloth to open the stove plate. She tossed some more logs in, and raked them around with the poker.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah,” said Larkin. He was still studying the letter Rerval had shown them. “Poor old girl, waiting all this time… seventeen years… waiting for her son…”
“You suppose that’s why she didn’t leave this place?”
“Yeah, I suppose. Waiting at home for a son who’s never actually coming back.”
“Poor woman,” Muril said, looking over at the sleeping figure. She sat down opposite Larkin. “Tell me about Cuu.”
“Cuu?”
“Lijah gakking Cuu. He nearly killed you, Larks. That wasn’t about some old lady, was it?”
“He was drunk. He was hurting her.”
“Still… there’s more to it than that, isn’t there.”
Larkin shrugged. The gesture was painful. Muril wished they had Dorden around, or Curth, or even a corpsman, to check Larkin’s ribs and elbow.
And his head.
“Don’t know what you mean,” he said.
“What I mean,” she said, “is that you and Cuu have a thing. Everyone knows it. Don’t know when and why it started, but you have a thing.”
“A thing?”
“A feud.”
“Maybe.”
“For gak’s sake. Larks! I could help you!”
“Help me? No, Muril, you don’t want to help me. No one would want to get dragged into what I’m doing.”
“What are you doing? I mean, why the gak did you volunteer for this detail when you knew Cuu was part of it?”
Larkin smiled. He sipped his drink. Muril could see the blood blossoming in the clear liquor as he lowered the glass from his mouth.
“I mean… the two of you have a famous feud that everyone knows about. He treats you like crap. And here you are, signing up to join a squad that you know he’s in too. You usually do your best to stay away from him, but now it’s like you wanted to be close, you wanted to… oh gak!”
“Now you’re getting it,” Larkin smiled.
Muril blanched. “What the gak are you planning?”
“Nothing you need to know about. Forget it.”
“I will not, Hlaine! What is this about?”
“Payback,” he said.
“Payback? For what?”
“Doesn’t matter. I should go relieve Caff.” He knocked back the drink and stood up. “With your head? Are you sure?”
He sat back down, blinking, and felt the back of his skull with cautious fingers. “Maybe not.”
“So tell me about payback.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
Larkin smiled. “You’re a good girl, Muril.”
“So they say. Don’t change the subject. Payback.”
“What can I tell you? What if I said I want to get even for the way Cuu has persecuted me since the day we first met? Would that be okay? He’s made my life a misery, leant on me, beaten me down. Would that be enough?”
She shrugged. “Probably. Cuu’s a bastard. A predator. He bullies anyone he can. Caff hates him, you know? After that thing on Phantine. I know Gaunt got Cuu off, but Caff believes Cuu killed that woman. And Caff nearly went to the wall for it.”
“I got Caff off,” Larkin said. “Me and Try. We got Caff’s case dismissed and got Cuu sent up in his place. Bragg ratted on him. Then Gaunt got Cuu off on a technicality. Got him the lash rather than a firing squad. That’s why he hates me. He blames me for the lashes. Me and Try.”
“So his hate is focused on you now Bragg is gone?”
“Kind of,” Larkin said, with a smile Muril didn’t like the look of.
“So that’s why you want—”
Larkin raised a finger. “I never said that. What if I want payback on Cuu because I’m crazy? Everyone knows I’m crazy. Mad Larkin, you know the form.”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’m not right in the head. Everyone knows that. Maybe I want Cuu because I’m insane.”
“You’re not insane.”
“Thanks, but the jury is still out. I don’t care. Maybe I am crazy. Look out, Lijah Cuu.”
“What’s the real reason?” she asked.
Larkin hesitated. He wanted to tell her, but he knew how the others treated him. Mad Larkin. Untrustworthy. Crazy. His head hurt.
“He killed Bragg,” he said simply.
“He what?”
“I can’t prove it. Not even slightly. But from what he’s said to me, he killed Bragg. For ratting on him. And now he wants me too. So I thought I’d cut to the chase and get in first.”
She stared at him. “Really?”
“I believe it. I don’t expect you to. In fact, I’ve probably just proved to you that I’m crazy after all.”
“No,” she said. She leaned forward towards him.
“Larks… tell Gaunt about it. Gaunt or Corbec or Daur. They’ll help you. Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
“Like killing Cuu before he kills me? Too late. And it doesn’t matter what Gaunt and Corbec and Daur believe. With what little I’ve got, their hands would be tied. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? It goes as it goes.”
He got up unsteadily and hefted his long-las. “Thanks for smacking Cuu off me,” he said, “but do me a favour. Forget this wh
ole conversation. It’ll be better that way.”
Stark dawn light spread across the back lawns of the manse. Mist wisped up from the wet grass.
He caught the movement out of the corner of his eye. Not much, just a flicker of something. The vaguest flicker.
Caffran left his sentry post in the greenhouse and ran up the main back lawn. Daybreak birdsong rang around him. He reached one of the most distant sheds, and yanked open the door.
“Out! Now!” he barked, his lasrifle aimed inside.
The Aexegarian trooper was young and matted with filth. He had a dirty twist of beard. He came out into the open, blinking, his hands over his head.
“Don’t hurt her,” he said. “It wasn’t her fault.”
“Shut up and get your hands on the wall!” Caffran snapped.
The trooper turned and spread against the side of the shed.
Caffran reached forward to pat him down. He kept his las-rifle at the man’s back.
His vox crackled suddenly.
He backed off and adjusted his micro-bead’s setting.
“Say again? Say again?” he called.
The vox buzzed again, and he heard a single word.
“Comeuppance.”
TWELVE
ANYWHERE BUT HERE
“So I’m a plucky soldier boy, My country I hold dear, Find me somewhere to fight for, sir, Anywhere but here.”
—refrain of popular Aexegarian song
Nine men dead. Six injured. Three more sick with gas-related injuries caused by tears in their kit. Seventeen platoon was a mess. And Raglon knew it. Gaunt could tell the novice sergeant was badly shaken and terribly ashamed of himself. His first field office, and he’d ended up with less then fifty per cent of his platoon alive or able-bodied.
Gaunt’s infiltration force moved up to occupy the ghastly ruins of the Santrebar Mill, and as the four platoons took station at windows and likely firepoints, Dorden co-opted half a dozen of them to help him deal with Raglon’s wounded.
Two were close to death. Sicre and Mkwyl; there was no hope for them. Dorden called for Zweil.
It was getting on for 19.00 hours, and the day was beginning to fade. The dull bluster of the counter-push still rolled across the wasteland towards them from the south, and the deep booming of the super-siege guns continued. Everything was still closed in and swaddled by the yellow gas vapour.
Just after the hour, it began to rain. The light changed, a soft blush across the low yellow sky. It reminded Golke of the way a brush wash could alter a watercolour. Painting had been his hobby, years before. He stood, looking out from one of the mill’s low windows, almost admiring the view. It was stark and unlovely, but there was a quality to it. The dark, rusty ground, the off-white sky slowly saturating with blue-grey.
Weighed down with his battlefield mail, heavy coat and respirator, he felt distanced. This was the land he was fighting for, the land he had spent his adult life fighting for. As far as his eyes could see, there was nothing but the scarring of warfare. This wasn’t the site of a battle, this was landscape transformed by the brute sorcery of relentless fighting. Stripped, burned, poisoned, malformed, killed.
He wondered why, then, he admired its eerie beauty. Surely it wasn’t just the amateur painter in him making a trite aesthetic response. This was the Pocket, he told himself. The Seiberq Pocket. That murderous slab of country that had robbed him of his friends, his men and his health.
He’d emerged from this place a wreck, so dismayed by its horrors that he’d been receiving counselling from his physician ever since. The memories still lacerated his mind.
He tried to picture it living again. Ten, fifty years in the future, a hundred… whatever it might take. He tried to imagine the war over, and peace slowly restoring the rule of nature. Trees. Fields. Life of any kind.
Golke could imagine it, but the vision was not convincing. This, the ravaged vista before him, was the only truth.
He knew why it was important to him. The Pocket had haunted him for years, lurking in his nightmares and daydreams. And now he’d come back to face it. That’s really why he had volunteered to assist Gaunt’s mission. This was aversion therapy. He’d come back to face his daemons and deny them, exorcise them, banish them. He’d come back to recover something lost by his younger self. The Pocket was a hellhole, an unfeasibly ugly ruin. But already he could see some beauty in it.
He’d taken the first step. He’d looked upon the landscape of his nightmares and hadn’t frozen in terror.
He could do this. He could break the Pocket just like it had once broken him.
Two months earlier, his aides had dragged him out for a night at the musical hall in Ongche. A popular touring show was in town, and they’d insisted he’d enjoy it. The gaudily-painted theatre had been packed with rowdy soldiers on furlough, but Golke had enjoyed the performance from one of the balcony-boxes. It had all been amusing enough, though the common troopers loved it as if it was the best thing ever. A conjuror, an acrobat troupe, a virtuoso viol player, a clown act with trained canines, singers, bandsmen, a rather feeble soprano. A famous comedian in a too-small hat who strutted the stage and made off-colour remarks about Shadik sexuality and hygiene to furious approval.
Then had come the girl, the little girl from Fichua, the top of the bill. This, his senior aide told him excitedly, was what the boys were all waiting for.
She didn’t seem much, just a child in a hoop skirt and bodice. But her voice…
She sang three songs. They were funny and saucy and patriotic. The last was a ditty Golke had heard the men singing from time to time. An ironic piece about doing your bit in which the soldier assured his superiors he was willing to fight, but expressed the wish to do so somewhere safe. The chorus went something like “I want to find a place to fight, anywhere but here.”
The crowd had gone mad. The little Fichuan girl had repeated the song as an encore. Flowers had been tossed onto the stage.
It had stayed with him. Golke had found himself humming it. “Anywhere but here, your lordships, anywhere but here.” Three curtain calls and goodnight.
It was in his head now. The refrain went round and round.
Anywhere but here.
He understood why the men, sentimental fools the lot of them, like all soldiers off-duty, loved it so. It was catchy and bright and funny. It voiced their secret desires. It let them laugh away their dearest and most hidden wishes.
The tune died away in his head. Staring out at the misery of the Pocket, it simply faded away. Golke could see through its reassuring lie.
This was where he wanted to be. This was where he needed to be.
Not anywhere but here. Right here. And right now.
The rain fell harder, sizzling on the poisoned ground, gushing through the crippled drainage of the mill. It was so intense that within fifteen minutes the air had cleared and the sky had become greyer and bigger.
Dorden used his atmosphere sniffer and declared that the gas-level had dropped under advised limits.
Gratefully, the troopers began to unbuckle their hoods.
The open air was cold and damp, and retained the metallic scent of the gas, muddled with rot and soaked earth. Some of the men were so relieved to be out of their hoods, they started laughing and chatting. Gaunt got Beltayn to circuit the mill and relay orders for them to hold it down.
Zweil, his head bared again, said a blessing to the sky, and then went back to Sicre and Mkwyl. Both were dead, and he’d said last rites over both of them already. Now he repeated the duty. “So they can hear me,” he told Dorden.
It was getting darker. Apart from drifting streams of artillery smoke, they could see for several kilometres. The sky was turning black, and the lights of the lines, both friend and foe, were visible. Over in the east, the false dawn of a flare barrage lit the landscape white. From the south came the flashes and glows of the counter-push. Beyond the eastern horizon, the great blinks of light from the super-siege guns backlit the land.
Overhead, in the dark, muddy blue, Gaunt could see stars, for the first time since he’d set foot on Aexe Cardinal. They were twinkling and blurred by the thinning smoke in the upper atmosphere, but he could make them out. Every now and then, a red or orange line scored the sky as rockets flew over. Part of the Peinforq Line — Sector 56, Gaunt guessed — began to strobe as it started off the night’s barrage. They could hear the whine and squeal of shells in flight. Fires began to burn along the reciprocal edge of the Shadik lines.
Mortars pounded from somewhere. Feldkannone crumped. Another night on the Front began.
“What happened?” Gaunt asked. He led Raglon to a quieter corner of the mill ruin and sat him down. Raglon was strung out and shaking.
“I’m sorry, sir,” he said.
“What for?”
“For fething up so badly.”
“Skip it, sergeant. What happened last night?”
“We got pounced on. We were following a dead trench and we ran smack into enemy raiders. The fight didn’t last long. But it was furious. Back and forth, almost single file. We gave a decent account, I think. They fell back and we moved north, dragging the wounded with us, hoping to join up with ten. We’d heard Criid had taken the mill.”
“And?”
Raglon sighed. “I don’t know how much we missed them by, but they’d already fallen back. The enemy had begun to shell. So we stayed put. It seemed like the right choice. I thought I could feasibly hold the mill, even cut to half strength.”
“Any contact in the night?”
“None, sir.”
Gaunt nodded. “Did you leave any men behind, Raglon?”
“No, sir!”
“Then I think you did all right. You should stop bearing yourself up.”
Raglon looked at Gaunt. “I thought you’d take my pins right away, sir.”
“For what, Rags?”
“For fething up. For losing so many men.”
“One of my earliest actions, Rags. One of my first real command actions, you understand, I led a ten-man unit of Hyrkans into a forest ward on Folion. We had been told it had been cleared. It had not. I lost seven men. Seventy per cent losses. I hated myself for it, but I retained my rank. Oktar knew I’d just got myself into a bad place. It happens. It happens to all Guards, sooner or later. When you’re in a position of authority, it seems to matter all the more. You did all right. You were just unlucky.”