They watch him pick up a mess tin from the pile and head towards the slab vat where the cook is waiting with a ladle and an apologetic expression.
He sits down with his tin at one of the mess benches. The slab seems to have been refried and then stewed along with something that was either string or mechanically recovered gristle.
‘I don’t know how you can eat that.’
Gaunt looks up. It’s the boy, the civilian boy. The boy sits down facing him.
‘Sit down, if you like,’ Gaunt says.
Milo looks pinched with cold, and he has his arms wrapped around his body.
‘That stuff,’ he says, jutting his chin suspiciously in the direction of Gaunt’s tin. ‘It’s not proper food. I thought Imperial Guardsmen were supposed to get proper food. I thought that was the Compact of Service between the Munitorum and the Guardsmen: three square meals a day.’
‘This is proper food.’
The boy shakes his head. He is only about seventeen, but he’s going to be big when he fills out. There’s a blue fish inked over his right eye.
‘It’s not proper food,’ he insists.
‘Well, you’re not a proper Guardsman, so you’re not entitled to a proper opinion.’
The boy looks hurt. Gaunt doesn’t want to be mean. He owes Brin Milo a great deal. Two people had gone beyond the call to help Ibram Gaunt get off Tanith alive. Sym had been one, and the man had died making the effort. Milo had been the other. The boy was just a servant, a piper appointed by the Elector of Tanith Magna to wait on Gaunt during his stay. Gaunt understands why the boy has stuck with the regiment since the Tanith disaster. The regiment is all Milo has left, all he has left of his people, and he feels he has nowhere else to go, but Gaunt wishes Milo would disappear. There are camps and shelters, there are Munitorum refugee programmes. Civilians didn’t belong at the frontline. They remind troopers of what they’ve left behind or, in the Tanith case, lost forever. They erode morale. Gaunt has suggested several times that Milo might be better off at a camp at Voltis City. He even has enough pull left to get Milo sent to a Schola Progenium or an orphanage for the officer class.
Milo refuses to leave. It’s as if he’s waiting for something to happen, for someone to arrive or something to be revealed. It’s as if he’s waiting for Gaunt to make good on a promise.
‘Did you want something?’ Gaunt asks.
‘I want to come.’
‘Come where?’
‘You’re going to scout the approach to Kosdorf this morning. I want to come.’
Gaunt feels a little flush of anger. ‘Rawne tell you that?’
‘No one told me.’
‘Caffran, then. Damn, I thought Caffran might be trustworthy.’
‘No one told me,’ says Milo. ‘I mean it. I just had a feeling, a feeling you’d go out this morning. This whole taskforce was sent to clear Kosdorf, wasn’t it?’
‘This whole taskforce was intended to be an instrument of petty and spiteful vengeance,’ Gaunt replies.
‘By whom?’ asks Milo.
Gaunt finishes the last of his slab. He drops the fork into the empty tin. Not the best he’d ever had. Throne knows, not the worst, either.
‘That general,’ Gaunt says.
‘General Sturm?’
‘That’s the one,’ Gaunt nods. ‘General Noches Sturm of the 50th Volpone. He was trying to use the Tanith First, and we made him look like a prize scrotum by taking Voltis when his oh-so-mighty Bluebloods couldn’t manage the trick. Throne, he even let us ship back to the transport fleet before deciding we should stay another month or so to help clean up. He’s done it all to inconvenience us. Pack, unpack. Ship to orbit, return to surface. March out into the backwaters of a defeated world to check the ruins of a dead city.’
‘Make you eat crap instead of fresh rations?’ asks Milo, looking at the mess tin.
‘That too, probably,’ says Gaunt.
‘Probably shouldn’t have pissed him off, then,’ says Milo.
‘I really probably shouldn’t,’ Gaunt agrees. ‘Never mind, I heard he’s getting retasked. If the Emperor shows me any providence, I’ll never have to see Sturm again.’
‘He’ll get his just desserts,’ says Milo.
‘What does that mean?’ asks Gaunt.
Milo shrugs. ‘I dunno. It just feels that way to me. People get what they deserve, sooner or later. The universe always gets payback. One day, somebody will stick it to Sturm just like he’s sticking it to you.’
‘Well, that thought’s cheered me up,’ says Gaunt, ‘except the part about getting what you deserve. What does the universe have in store for me, do you suppose, after what happened to Tanith?’
‘You only need to worry about that if you think you did anything wrong,’ says Milo. ‘If your conscience is clear, the universe will know.’
‘You talk to it much?’
‘What?’
‘The universe? You’re on first name terms?’
Milo pulls a face.
‘Things could be worse, anyway,’ Milo says.
‘How?’
‘Well, you’re in charge. You’re in charge of this whole task force.’
‘For my sins.’
Gaunt gets to his feet. A Munitorum skivvy comes by and collects his tin.
‘So?’ asks Milo. ‘Can I come?’
‘No,’ says Gaunt.
He’s walked a few yards from the mess tents when Milo calls out after him. With a resigned weariness, Gaunt turns back to look at the boy.
‘What?’ he asks. ‘I said no.’
‘Take your cape,’ says Milo.
‘What?’
‘Take your cape with you.’
‘Why?’
Milo looks startled for a moment, as if he doesn’t want to give the answer, or it hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would need one. He dithers for a second, and seems to be making something up.
‘Because Colonel Corbec likes it when you wear it,’ he says. ‘He thinks it shows respect.’
Gaunt nods. Good enough.
The advance is waiting for him at the north post, the end marker of the camp area. There are two batteries of Ketzok Hydras there, barrels elevated at a murky sky that occasionally blinks with silent light. Gunners sit dripping under oilskin coats on the lee side of their gun-carriages. Tracks are sunk deep in oozing grey clay. Rain hisses.
‘Nice day for it,’ says Colm Corbec.
‘I arranged the weather especially, colonel,’ replies Gaunt as he walks up. The clay is wretchedly sticky underfoot. It sucks at their boots. The men in the three squads look entirely underwhelmed at the prospect of the morning’s mission. The only ones amongst them who aren’t standing slope-shouldered and dejected are the three scout specialists that Corbec has chosen to round out the advance. One is the leader of the scout unit, Mkoll. Gaunt has already begun to admire Mkoll’s abilities, but he has no read on the man himself. Mkoll is sort of nondescript, of medium build and modest appearance, and seems a little weatherbeaten and older than the rank and file. He chooses to say very little.
Gaunt hasn’t yet learned the names of the two scouts with Mkoll. One, he believes, he has overheard someone refer to as ‘lucky’. The other one, the taller, thinner one, has a silent, faraway look about him that’s oddly menacing.
‘It may just have been me,’ says Corbec, ‘but didn’t we spend an hour or so in the tent this morning agreeing not to do this?’
Gaunt nods.
‘I thought,’ says Corbec, ‘we were to stay put until the Ketzok had been resupplied?’
They were. The purpose of the expedition is to evaluate and secure Kosdorf, Voltemand’s second city, which had been effectively taken out in the early stages of the liberation. Orbit watch reports it as ruined, a city grave, but the emergency government and the Administratum want it locked down. The whole thing is a colossal waste of time. Voltis City, which had been the stronghold for the charismatic but now dead Archenemy demagogue Chanthar, was the key to Voltemand. The Kosdorf securement is the sort of mission that could have been handled by PDF or a third-tier Guard strength.