‘Of course I was coming back to her–’
‘You sign up, you leave. Warp transfers, long rotations, tours along the rim. You never go back. You never go home, not once the Guard has you. Years go by, decades. You forget where you came from in the end.’
‘But the recruiting officer said–’
‘He lied to you, trooper. Do you think any bastard would sign up if the recruiters told the truth?’
Caffran sags. ‘He lied?’
‘Yes. But I won’t. That’s the one thing you can count on with me. Now go and get Corbec.’
Caffran snaps off a poor salute, turns and heads out of the tent.
Gaunt sits down again. He begins to collect up the flimsies, and packs away the bolter shell cartons holding them down. He thinks about the letter in his pocket again.
On his list, he writes:
Appoint a new adjutant.
Under that, he writes:
Find a new adjutant.
Finally, under that, he writes:
Start telling a few lies?
He pulls his storm coat on as he leaves the tent, partly to fend off the rain, and partly to cover his jacket. It’s his number one staff-issue field jacket, but it’s become too soiled with clay from the trek out of Voltis City to wear with any dignity. He has a grubby, old number two issue that he keeps in his kit as a spare, but it still has Hyrkan patches on the collar, the shoulders and the cuffs, and that’s embarrassing. Sym would have patched the skull-and-crossed-knives of the Tanith onto it by now. He’d have got out his sewing kit and made sure both of Gaunt’s field uniforms were code perfect, the way he kept the rest of Gaunt’s day-to-day life neat and sewn up tight.
Steamy smoke is rising from the cowled chimneys of the cook-tents, and he can smell the greasy blocks of processed nutrition fibre being fried. His stomach rumbles. He sets off towards the kitchens. Beyond the row of mess tents lies the canvas city of the Tanith position, and to the north-east of that, the batteries of the Ketzok.
Beyond that, the edge of the skyline flicks on and off with the unnervingly quiet lightning, far away, like a malfunctioning lamp filament that refuses to stay lit.
Slab is pretty gruesome stuff. Pressure-treated down from any and all available nutritional sources by the Munitorum, it has no discernible flavour apart from a faint, mucusy aftertaste, and it looks like grey-white putty. In fact, years before at Schola Progenium on Ignatius Cardinal, an acquaintance of Gaunt’s had once kneaded some of it into a form that authentically resembled a brick of plastic explosive, complete with fuses, and then carried out a practical joke on the Master of the Scholam Arsenal that was notable for both the magnificent extent of the disruption it caused, and the stunning severity of the subsequent punishment. Slab, as it’s known to every common Guard lasman, comes canned and it comes freeze-dried, it comes in packets and it comes in boxes, it comes in individual heated tins and it comes in catering blocks. Company cooks slice, dice and mince it, and use it as the bulk base of any meal when local provision sources are unavailable. They flavour it with whatever they have to hand, usually foil sachets of powder with names like groxtail and vegetable (root) and sausage (assorted). Ibram Gaunt has lived on it for a great deal of his adult and sub-adult life. He is so used to the stuff, he actually misses it when it isn’t around.
Men have gathered around the cook tents, huddled against the weather under their camo-cloaks. Gaunt still hasn’t got used to wearing his, even though he’d promised the Tanith colonel he would, as a show of unity. It doesn’t hang right around him, and in the Voltemand wind, it tugs and tangles like a devil.
The Tanith don’t seem to have the same trouble. They half-watch him approach, shrouded, hooded, some supping from mess cans. They watch him approach. There is a shadow in their eyes. They are a wild lot. Beads of rainwater glint in their tangled dark hair, though occasionally the glints are studs or nose rings, piercings in lips or eyebrows. They like their ink, the Tanith, and they wear the complex, traditional patterns of blue and green on their pale skins with pride. Cheeks, throats, forearms and the backs of hands display spirals and loops, leaves and branches, sigils and whorls. They also like their edges. The Tanith weapon is a long knife with a straight, silver blade that has evolved from a hunting tool. They could hunt with it well enough, silently, like phantoms.
Gaunt’s Ghosts. Someone had come up with that within a few days of their first deployment on Blackshard. It had been the sociopath with the long-las, as Gaunt recalled it, a man known to him as ‘Mad’. A more withering and scornful nickname, Gaunt can’t imagine.
Rawne says, ‘Here comes the fether now.’
He takes a sip from his water bottle, which does not contain water, and turns as if to say something to Murt Feygor.
‘But I paid you that back!’ Feygor exclaims, managing to make his voice sound wounded and plaintive, the wronged party.
Rawne makes a retort and steps back, in time to affect a blind collision with Gaunt as he makes his way into the cook tent. The impact is hard enough to rock Gaunt off his feet.
‘Easy there, sir!’ cries Varl, hooking a hand under Gaunt’s armpit to keep him off the ground. He hoists Gaunt up.
‘Thank you,’ Gaunt says.
‘Varl, sir,’ replies the trooper. He grins a big, shit-eating grin. ‘Infantryman first class Ceglan Varl, sir. Wouldn’t want you taking a tumble now, would I, sir? Wouldn’t want you to go falling over and getting yourself all dirty.’
‘I’m sure you wouldn’t, trooper,’ says Gaunt. ‘Carry on.’
He looks back at Rawne and Feygor.
‘That was all me, sir,’ says Feygor, hands up. ‘The major and I were having a little dispute, and I distracted him.’
It sounds convincing. Gaunt doesn’t know much about the trooper called Feygor, but he’s met his type before, a conniving son of a bitch who has been blessed with the silken vocal talent to sell any story to anyone.
Gaunt doesn’t even bother looking at him. He stares at Rawne.
Major Rawne stares right back. His handsome face betrays no emotion whatsoever. Gaunt is a tall man, but Rawne is one of the Tanith he doesn’t tower over, and he only has a few pounds on the major.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Rawne says.
‘Do you, Rawne? Is that an admission of unholy gifts? Should I call for emissaries of the Ordos to examine you?’
‘Ha ha,’ says Rawne in a laugh-less voice. He just says the sounds. ‘Look, that there was a genuine slip, sir. A genuine bump. But we have a little history, sir, you and I, so you’re bound to ascribe more motive to it than that.’
A little history. In the Blackshard deadzones, Rawne had used the opportunity of a quiet moment alone with Gaunt to express his dissatisfaction with Gaunt’s leadership in the strongest possible terms. Gaunt had disarmed him and carried Rawne’s unconscious body clear of the fighting area. It’s hard to say what part of that history yanks Rawne most: the fact that he had failed to murder Gaunt, or the fact that Gaunt had saved him.
‘Wow,’ says Gaunt.
‘What?’
‘You used the word ascribe,’ says Gaunt, and turns to go into the cook tent. Over his shoulder, he calls out, ‘If you say it was a bump, then it was a bump, major. We need to trust each other.’
Gaunt turns and looks back.
‘Starting in about twenty minutes. After breakfast, I’m going to take an advance out to get a look at Kosdorf. You’ll be in charge.’