Kosdorf is a great expanse of ruins, most of it pale, like sugar icing. As they approach it, coming in from the south-east, the slumped and toppled hab blocks remind Gaunt more than anything of great, multi-tiered cakes, fancy and celebratory, that have been shoved over so that all the frosted levels have crashed down and overlapped one another, breaking and cracking, and shedding palls of dust that have become mire in the rain. A shroud of vapour hangs over the city, the foggy aftermath of destruction.
Overhead, black clouds mark the sky like ink on pale skin. Shafts of lightning, painfully bright, shoot down from the clouds into the dripping ruins, straight down, without a sound. The bars underlight the belly of the clouds, and set off brief, white flashes in amongst the ruins where they hit, like flares. Though the lightning strikes crackle with secondary sparks, like capillaries adjoining a main blood vessel, they are remarkably straight.
The regular strobing makes the daylight seem strange and impermanent. Everything is pinched and blue, caught in a twilight.
‘Why can’t we hear it?’ one of the men grumbles.
Gaunt has called a stop on a deep embankment so he can check his chart. Tilting, teetering building shells overhang them. Water gurgles out of them.
‘Because we can’t, Larks,’ Corbec says.
Gaunt looks up from his chart, and sees Larkin, the marksman assigned to the advance. The famous Mad Larkin. Gaunt is still learning names to go with faces, but Larkin has stood out from early on. The man can shoot. He’s also, it seems to Gaunt, one of the least stable individuals ever to pass recruitment screening. Gaunt presumes the former fact had a significant bearing on the latter.
Larkin is a skinny, unhappy-looking soul with a dragon-spiral inked onto his cheek. His long-las rifle is propped over his shoulder in its weather case.
‘Altitude,’ Gaunt says to him.
‘Come again, sir?’ Larkin replies.
Gaunt gestures up at the sky behind the bent, blackened girders of the corpse-buildings above them. Larkin looks where he’s pointing, up into the rain.
‘The electrical discharge is firing from cloud to cloud up there, and it can reach an intensity of four hundred thousand amps. But we can’t hear the thunder, because it’s so high up.’
‘Oh,’ says Larkin. Some of the other men murmur.
‘You think I’d march anyone into a dead zone without getting a full orbital sweep first?’ Gaunt asks.
Larkin looks like he’s going to reply. He looks like he’s about to say something he shouldn’t, something his brain won’t allow his mouth to police.
But he shakes his head instead and smiles.
‘Is that so?’ he says. ‘Too high for us to hear. Well, well.’
They move off down the embankment, and then follow the seam of an old river sluice that hugs the route of a highway into the city. There’s a fast stream running down the bed of the drain, dirty rainwater that’s washed down through the city ruin, blackened with ash, and then is running off. It splashes and froths around their toecaps. Its babbling sounds like voices, muttering.
There’s the noise of the falling rain all around, the sound of dripping. Things creak. Tiles and facings and pieces of roof and guttering hang from shredded bulks, and move as the inclination of gravity or the wind takes them. They squeak like crane hoists, like gibbets. Things fall, and flutter softly or land hard, or skitter and bounce like loose rocks in a ravine.
The scouts vanish ahead of the advance, but Mkoll reappears after half an hour, and describes the route ahead to Corbec. Gaunt stands with them, but there is subtle body language, suggesting that the report is meant for Corbec’s benefit, and Gaunt is merely being allowed to listen in. If things turn bad, Mkoll is trusting Corbec to look after the best interests of the men.
‘Firestorms have swept through this borough,’ he says. ‘There’s not much of anything left. I suggest we swing east.’
Corbec nods.
‘There’s something here,’ Mkoll adds.
‘A friendly something?’ Corbec asks.
Mkoll shrugs.
‘Hard to say. It won’t let us get a look at it. Could be civilian survivors. They would have learned to stay well out of sight.’
‘I would have expected any citizens to flee the city,’ says Gaunt.
Mkoll and Corbec look at him.
‘Flight is not always the solution,’ says Mkoll.
‘Sometimes, you know, people are traumatised,’ says Corbec. ‘They go back to a place, even when they shouldn’t. Even when it’s not safe.’
Mkoll shrugs again.
‘It’s all I’m saying,’ says Corbec.
‘I haven’t seen bodies,’ replies Gaunt. ‘When you consider the size of this place, the population it must have had. In fact, I haven’t seen any bodies.’
Corbec purses his lips thoughtfully.
‘True enough. That is curious.’ Corbec looks at Mkoll for confirmation.
‘I haven’t seen any,’ says Mkoll. ‘But hungry vermin can disintegrate remains inside a week.’
They turn to the east, as per Mkoll’s suggestion, and leave the comparative cover of the rockcrete drainage ditch. Buildings have sagged into each other, or fallen into the street in great splashes of rubble and ejecta. Some habs lean on their neighbours for support. All glass has been broken, and the joists and beams and roofs, robbed of tiles or slates, have been turned into dark, barred windows through which to watch the lightning.
The fire has been very great. It has scorched the paving stones of the streets and squares, and the rain has turned the ash into a black paste that sticks to everything, except the heat-transmuted metals and glass from windows and doors. These molten ingots, now solid again, have been washed clean by the rain and lie scattered like iridescent fish on the tarry ground.
Gaunt has seen towns and cities without survivors before. Before Khulan, before the Crusade even began, he’d been with the Hyrkans on Sorsarah. A town there, he forgets the name, an agri-berg, had been under attack, and the town elders had ordered the entire population to shelter in the precincts of the basilica. In doing so, they had become one target.
When Gaunt had come in with the Hyrkans, whole swathes of the town were untouched, intact, preserved, as though the inhabitants would be back at any moment.
The precincts of the basilica formed a crater half a kilometre across.
They stop to rest at the edge of a broad concourse where the wind of Voltemand, brisk and unfriendly, is absent. The rain is relentless still, but the vapour hangs here, a mist that pools around the dismal ruins and broken walls.
They are drawing closer to the grounding lightning. It leaves a bloody stink in their nostrils, like hot wire, and whenever it hits the streets and ruins nearby, it makes a soft but jarring click, part overpressure, part discharge.
An explosive device of considerable magnitude has struck the corner of the concourse and detonated, unseating all the heavy paving slabs with the rippling force of a major earthquake. Gravity has relaid the slabs after the shockwave, but they have come back down to earth misaligned and overlapping, like the scales of a lizard, rather than the seamless, edge-to-edge fit the city fathers had once commissioned.
Larkin sits down on a tumbled block, takes off one boot, and begins to massage his foot. He complains to the men around him in a loud voice. The core of his complaint seems to be the stiff and unyielding quality of the newly-issued Tanith kit.
‘Foot sore?’ Gaunt asks him.
‘These boots don’t give. We’ve walked too far. My toes hurt.’
‘Get the medicae to treat your foot when we get back. I don’t want any infections.’
Larkin grins up at him.
‘I wouldn’t want to make my foot worse. Maybe you should carry me.’
‘You’ll manage,’ Gaunt tells him.