‘I don’t think they’re going to give us a choice!’ Corbec yells back.
The Tanith are returning fire, snapping shots from their corner of the open space. The air fills with a laced crossfire of energy bolts. The mist seems to thicken as the crossfire stirs the air. Gaunt sees a couple of the men in Kosdorfer uniforms crumple and fall.
‘In the name of the Emperor, cease your firing,’ he hollers out across the square. ‘For Throne’s sake, we serve the same master!’
The Kosdorf PDFers shout back. The words are unintelligible, hard to make out over their sustained gunfire.
‘I said in the name of the Emperor, hold your fire,’ Gaunt bellows. ‘Hold your fire. I command you! We’re here to help you!’
A PDFer comes at him from the left, running out of the shadows of the hospital ruins. The man has a hard-round rifle equipped with a sword bayonet. His eyes are swollen in their sockets, and one pupil has blown.
He tries to ram the bayonet into Gaunt’s gut. The blade is rusty, but the thrust is strong and practiced. Gaunt leaps backwards.
‘For the Emperor!’ Gaunt yells.
The man replies with a jabbering stream of obscenity. The words are broken, and have been purloined from an alien language, and he is only able to pronounce the parts of them that fit a human mouth and voicebox. Blood leaks out of his gums and dribbles over his cracked lips.
He lunges again. The tip of the sword bayonet goes through Gaunt’s storm coat and snags the hip pocket of his field jacket underneath.
Gaunt shoots the man in the face with his bolt pistol.
The corpse goes over backwards, hard. Bloody back-spatter over-paints the dirt filming Gaunt’s face and clothes.
‘Fire, fire! Fire at will!’ Gaunt yells. He’s seen enough. ‘Men of Tanith, pick your targets and fire at will!’
Another PDFer charges in at him through an archway, backlit for a second by a pulse of lightning. He fires a shot from his rifle that hits the wall behind Gaunt and adds to the wet haze fuming the air. Gaunt fires back and knocks the man out of the archway, tumbling into two of his brethren.
The Tanith advance has been rotated out of line by the sudden attack, and Gaunt has been pushed to the eastern end of the formation. He has lost sight of Corbec. It is hard to issue any useful commands, because he has little proper overview on which to base command choices.
Gaunt tries to reposition himself. He hugs the shadows, keeping the crumbling pillars to his back. The firefight has lit up the entire concourse. He listens to the echoes, to the significant sound values coming off the Tanith positions. Gaunt can hear the hard clatter of full auto and, in places along the rubble line, see the jumping petals of muzzle flashes. The Tanith are eager, but inexperienced. The lasrifles they have been issued with at the Founding are good, new weapons, fresh-stamped and shipped in from forge worlds. Many of the Tanith recruits will never have had an automatic setting on a weapon before; most will have been used to single shot or even hard-round weapons. Finding themselves in a troop-fight ambush, they are unleashing maximum firepower, which is great for shock and noise but not necessarily the most effective tactic, under any circumstances.
‘Corbec!’ Gaunt yells. ‘Colonel Corbec! Tell the men to select single f–’
He ducks back as his voice draws enemy fire. Plumes of mire and slime spurt up from the slabs he is using as cover. Impacts spit out stinging particles of stone. He tries shouting again, but the concentration of fire gets worse. The vapour billowing off the shot marks gets in his mouth and makes him retch and spit. Two or three of the PDFers have advanced on his position, and are keeping a heavy fire rate sustained. He can half see them through the veiling mist, calmly standing and taking shots at him. He can’t see them well enough to get a decent shot back.
Gaunt scrambles backwards, dropping down about a metre between one rucked level of paving slabs and another, an ugly seismic fracture in the street. Loose shots are whining over his head, smacking into the plaster facade of a reclining guild house and covering it with black pockmarks. He clambers in through a staring window.
A Tanith trooper inside switches aim at him and nearly shoots him.
‘Sacred Feth. Sorry, sir!’ the trooper exclaims.
Gaunt shakes his head.
‘I snuck up on you,’ he replies.
There are four Tanith men in the ground floor of the guild house. They are using the buckled window apertures to lay fire across the concourse from the east. They’d been on the eastern end of the advance force when it turned unexpectedly, and thus have been effectively cut off. Gaunt can’t chastise them. Oddities of terrain and the dynamic flow of a combat situation do that sometimes. Sometimes you just get stuck in a tight corner.
For similar reasons, he’s got stuck there with them.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks the man who’d almost shot him, even though he knows it perfectly well.
‘Domor,’ the man replies.
‘I don’t think we want to spend too much more time in here, do we, Domor?’ Gaunt says. Enemy fire is pattering off the outside walls with increasing fury. It is causing the building to vibrate, and spills of earth, like sand in a time-glass, are sifting down from the bulging roof. There’s a stink of sewage, of broken drains. If enemy fire doesn’t finish them, it will finish the building, which will die on their heads.
‘I’d certainly like to get out of here if I can, sir,’ Domor replies. He has a sharp, intelligent face, with quick eyes that suggest wit and honesty.
‘Well, we’ll see what we can do,’ Gaunt says.
One of the other men groans suddenly.
‘What’s up, Piet?’ Domor calls. ‘You hit?’
The trooper is down at one of the windows, pinking rounds off into the concourse outside.
‘I’m fine,’ he answers, ‘but do you hear that?’
Gaunt and Domor clamber up to the sill alongside him. For a moment, Gaunt can’t hear anything except the snap and whine of las-fire, and the brittle rattle of masonry debris falling from the roof above.
Then he hears it, a deeper noise, a throaty rasp.
‘Someone’s got a burner,’ says the trooper in a depressed tone. ‘Someone out there’s got a burner.’
Domor looks at Gaunt.
‘Gutes is right, isn’t he?’ he asks. ‘That’s a flamer, isn’t it? That’s the noise a flamer makes?’
Gaunt nods.
‘Yes,’ he says.
None of the Munitorum skivvies has the nerve to argue when Feygor helps himself to one of the full pots of caffeine on the mess tent stove.
Feygor carries the pot over to where Rawne is sitting at a mess table with the usual repeat offenders. Meryn, young and eager to impress, has brought a tray of tin cups. Brostin is smoking a lho-stick and flicking his brass igniter open and shut. Raess is cleaning his scope. Caober is putting an edge on his blade. Costin has produced his flask, and is pouring a jigger of sacra into each mug ‘to keep the rain out’.
Feygor dishes out the brew from the pot.
‘Come on, then,’ says Rawne.
Varl grins, and slides the letter out of his inside pocket. He holds it gently by the bottom corners and sniffs it, as though it is a perfumed billet-doux. Then he licks the tip of his right index finger to lift the envelope’s flap.
He starts to read to himself.
‘Oh my!’ he says.
‘What?’ asks Meryn.
‘Listen to this... My darling Ibram, how I long for your strong, manly touch...’ Varl begins, as if reading aloud.
‘Don’t be a feth-head, Varl,’ warns Rawne. ‘What does it actually say?’
‘It’s from somebody called Blenner,’ says Varl, scanning the sheet. ‘It goes on a bit. Umm, I think they knew each other years back. And from the date on this, he’s been carrying it around for a while. This Blenner says he’s writing because he can’t believe that Gaunt got passed over after “all he did at Balhaut”. He’s asking Gaunt if he chose to go with “that bunch of no-hope backwoodsmen”, which I think would be us.’