Truth be told, he certainly didn’t. It was just another world and another battle.
The Ghosts didn’t care either. They simply advanced, loyal but weary, weary but loyal, neither quality first, neither quality last.
They were tired, there was no mistaking that. They toiled through the mud, under the raw-meat sky, heads low, hearts lower, their banners as limp as their spirits, lonely in life, and lonely in death.
In the distance, across the mire, the black figures gathered to watch them.
During long crusades, Guard regiments could stay on the frontline without rotation for years at a time. Such was the size of the Imperium, whole seasons could be lost simply making shift aboard carrier transports from one zone world to the next.
The Ghosts of Tanith had been on frontline deployment for decades, without rotation, since the day their home world had blinked out in a hot puff of scatter-light.
He had been petitioning of late for his regiment to be rotated out of the line. He had become increasingly insistent on the subject. The phrase ‘loyal but weary’ appeared in almost every one of his dispatches to High Command. Late at night, under canvas or in the mud-stink of a dugout, or in the noon heat at a roadside during a rest stop, he worked hard to get the tone of his petitions right. If it pleases you, sirs... begging your accommodation on this small matter, my masters... The Ghosts were not cowards, but they had been pushed hard for too long. They yearned for respite and rotation. They were tired.
He knew he was.
His face was more drawn and lean than ever. These days, he walked with a bone-sore limp. When he washed, on those few, precious occasions when water actually pumped through a trench camp’s shower block, he stood under the pitiful rusty trickle, scrubbing lice and dirt from his limbs, and found himself looking down at a body scored and welted by the traces of so many old wounds that he had lost track of their origins. This? Where had he got this? Fortis Binary? And this, this old puckered gouge? Where had he come by that? Monthax? Aexe Cardinal? Vervunhive?
It no longer seemed to matter. These days, it was often a struggle just to remember where he was.
‘Are we still on... on thingumajig?’ he had asked his adjutant that morning while shaving.
His adjutant, whose name he was sure he knew well, had frowned, thinking the question over.
‘Thingumajig? Uh... yes. I believe so, sir,’ the adjutant had replied.
The names really weren’t of any consequence any more, the names of cities or continents or worlds. Each one was just a new place to get into, and then get out of again, once the job was done. He’d stopped worrying about the names. He just concentrated on the jobs, loyal but weary, weary but loyal.
Sometimes, he was so tired he even forgot his own name.
He dipped his old cut-throat razor into the chipped bowl, washing off the foam and the residue of shorn bristles. He looked at his reflection in the cracked shaving mirror. Though the reflection didn’t seem to have a face at all, he recognised it anyway.
Ibram Gaunt. That was it. Ibram Gaunt.
Of course it was.
His eyes hurt. They hurt at night, when he was working at his latest pleading dispatch by the glow of a lamp, and they hurt by day, under the radioactive glimmer of the iron star. They hurt when he stared out across the mire to look at the black figures gathering to watch them.
The iron star was an ugly thing. It throbbed in the sky like an ingot cooling from the furnace. The sky was marbled black and red, like hung meat. The throb of the star made his head ache and his eyes run. Sometimes, when he dabbed the tears off his face, his fingertips came away red.
A scout came running back along the muddy track. The track was so muddy that it was impassable to wheeled vehicles. The Tanith were up to their shins in the slime. The strange part was, there had been no rain, not a drop of rain since they had made planetfall on who the feth cares anymore. Well, none he could remember, anyway.
Things lurked in the mud. If you scraped it back, or dug it away to commence trench work, you risked striking the turret tops of tank regiments that had been sucked down under the ooze, or exposing the bodies of dead men, pale and sightless.
‘There’s so much mud,’ he said, watching the scout as he approached. ‘So much mud, but no rain. Why is that?’
‘Don’t you know where you are, Ibram?’ asked Medic Curth.
‘I don’t,’ he smiled. ‘That’s a terrible confession for a commanding officer to make, isn’t it?’
She grinned back. Curth was thin, but very pretty. ‘Under the circumstances, I’ll forgive the lapse, Ibram.’
‘Good,’ he said, nodding.
‘So, where are we?’ he added. ‘Remind me?’
She leaned down and whispered into his ear.
A scout came running back along the muddy track. It was Leyr. No, Bonin. No, it was Leyr. ‘Ten units,’ Leyr reported. ‘They’re dug down behind that stand of trees to the left of the bridge.’
‘Well, we’ve got to get across the bridge,’ Gaunt said.
‘Of course we have,’ said Medic Curth.
‘This really isn’t the time for a medical opinion,’ Gaunt told her.
‘Sorry,’ she said, with a deferential nod of her head. She stood back to let some of the senior officers close in around Gaunt.
‘The bridge is vital,’ Major Baskevyl said.
‘Agreed,’ said Captain Daur.
‘No question about it,’ nodded Captains Arcuda and Obel.
‘Absolutely vital,’ Commissar Hark concurred. ‘We have to get across it, or–’
‘Or what?’ asked Cadet-Commissar Nahum Ludd. The young man looked nervous. He glanced sidelong at Hark. Commissar Viktor Hark looked daggers at the youngster. ‘Try to keep up, Ludd,’ he hissed. ‘We have to get across the bridge before someone dies.’
‘Oh,’ said Ludd. ‘Oh, right.’
‘Another ten units,’ said Curth.
‘Another ten?’ Gaunt asked. ‘I thought there were just ten. Just ten, wasn’t it, Leyr?’
‘Uhm, yes, sir. Ten units,’ said Leyr.
‘Just enough to hold us here,’ said Curth.
‘We really have to bring this operation to a successful close,’ said the old doctor, Dorden.
Gaunt nodded.
‘Of course we do,’ he said. ‘I want this operation finished by nightfall. Ten, then. Ten. What are we looking at? Regular Gaurist forces or what? Ten units of what?’
‘Blood, sir,’ replied Leyr.
‘Blood Pact?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Well, that’s a tough dance on anybody’s card,’ Gaunt said. ‘May I take a look?’
He hurried up through the mud behind Leyr. The mud was deep, and it kept slowing him down, sucking at his boots, so that he advanced like a man wading through a dream. His heels, deep in the mire, kept knocking against skulls and helmets and the turrets of long-lost armour pieces.
Bonin, Mkoll and Maggs were waiting for them at the turn of the track. They hunkered down together behind a swirl of razor wire.
‘How are you holding up, sir?’ Maggs asked him.
‘Don’t ask him questions, Maggs,’ Mkoll hissed. ‘We’re not here to ask him questions.’
‘Sorry,’ said Maggs.
‘I’m fine, since you asked, Maggs,’ said Gaunt. ‘Why did you ask?’
Maggs looked awkward.
‘It’s been a long tour,’ Bonin said. ‘You look tired, sir.’
‘Do I?’ Gaunt responded.