‘For a start, I’m still not sure who we’re fighting.’
‘It’s tribal Archenemy,’ says Corbec, ‘like Mkoll says. They’ve just ransacked the city arsenal.’
Gaunt touches his arm and draws him out of earshot.
‘You never left Tanith before, did you, Corbec?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Never fought on a foreign front?’
‘I’ve been taught about the barbaric nature of the Archenemy, if that’s what you’re worried about. All their cults and their ritual ways–’
‘Corbec, you don’t know the half of it.’
Corbec looks at him.
‘I think they are Kosdorfers,’ Gaunt says. ‘I think they were, anyway. I think the Ruinous Powers, may they stand accursed, have salvaged more than kit and equipment. I think they’ve salvaged men too.’
‘Feth,’ Corbec breathes. Rain drips off his beard.
‘I know,’ says Gaunt.
‘The very thought of it.’
‘I need you to keep that to yourself. Don’t say anything to the men.’
‘Of course.’
‘None of them, colonel.’
‘Yes. Yes, all right.’
Corbec’s taken one of his cigars out again and stuck it in his mouth, unlit.
‘Just light the damn thing,’ says Gaunt.
Corbec obeys. His hands shake as he strikes the lucifer.
‘You want one?’
‘No,’ says Gaunt.
Corbec puffs.
‘All right,’ he says. He looks at Gaunt.
‘All right,’ says Gaunt, ‘if we give ground here and try to fall back, we leave ourselves open. If they take us out on the way home, they’ll be all over our main force without warning. But if we can manage to keep their attention here while we relay a message back...’
Corbec frowns. ‘That’s a feth of a lot to ask, by any standards.’
‘What, the message run or the action?’ asks Gaunt.
‘Both,’ says Corbec.
‘You entirely comfortable with the alternative, Corbec?’
Corbec shrugs. ‘You know I’m not.’
‘Then strengthen our position here, colonel,’ Gaunt says. ‘We can afford to drop back a little if necessary. Given the visibility issues, the concourse isn’t helping us much.’
‘What do you suggest?’ asks Corbec.
‘I suggest you ask Mkoll and his scouts. I suggest we make the best of that resource.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Corbec turns to go.
‘Corbec – another thing. Tell the men to select single shot. Mandatory, please. Full auto is wasting munitions.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Corbec stubs out his cigar and moves away. Keeping his head down, Gaunt moves along the shooting line of jumbled pavers and column bases in the opposite direction.
‘Trooper!’
Caffran looks up from his firing position.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘It’s your lucky day,’ says Gaunt.
He gets down beside Caffran and reaches into his jacket pockets for his stylus and a clean message wafer.
His hip pocket is torn open and flapping. It’s empty. He checks all the pockets of his jacket and the pockets of his storm coat, but his stylus and the wafer pad have gone.
‘Do you have the despatch bag, Caffran?’
Caffran nods, and pulls the loop of the small message satchel off over his head. Gaunt opens it, and sees it is in order: fresh message wafers, a stylus, and a couple of signal flares. Caffran has taken his duty seriously.
Gaunt begins writing on one of the wafers rapidly. He uses a gridded sheet to draw up a simple expression of their route and the layout of the city’s south-eastern zone, copying from his waterproof chart. Rain taps on the sheet.
‘I need you to take this back to Major Rawne,’ he says as he writes. ‘Understand that we need to warn him of the enemy presence here and summon his support.’
Gaunt finishes writing and presses the setting of his signet ring against the code seal of the wafer, authorising it.
‘Caffran, do you understand?’
Caffran nods. Gaunt puts the wafer back into the message satchel.
‘Am I to go on my own?’ Caffran asks.
‘I can’t spare more than one man for this, Caffran,’ says Gaunt.
The young man looks at him, considers it. Gaunt is a man who quite bloodlessly orders the death of people to achieve his goals. This is what’s happening now. Caffran understands that. Caffran understands he is being used as an instrument, and that if he fails and dies, it’ll be no more to Gaunt than a shovel breaking in a ditch or a button coming off a shirt. Gaunt has no actual interest in Caffran’s life or the manner of its ending.
Caffran purses his lips and then nods again. He hands his lasrifle and the munition spares he was carrying to Gaunt.
‘That’ll just weigh me down. Somebody else better have them.’
The young trooper gets up, takes a last look at Gaunt, and then begins to pick his way down through the ruined street behind the advance position, keeping his head down.
Gaunt watches him until he’s out of sight.
Under Mkoll’s instruction, the advance gives ground.
Working as spotters out on the flanks, Mkoll’s scouts, Bonin and Mkvenner, have pushed the estimate of enemy numbers beyond eight hundred. Gaunt doesn’t want to show that he is already regretting his decision not to pull out while the going was good.
Against lengthening, lousy odds, he’s committed his small force to the worst kind of combat, the grinding city fight, where mid-range weapons and tactics become compressed into viciously barbaric struggles that depend on reaction time, perception and, worst of all, luck.
The Tanith disengage from the edge of the concourse, which has become entirely clouded in a rising white fog of vapour lifted by the sustained firefight, and drop back into the city block at the south-west corner. Here there are two particularly large habitat structures, which have slumped upon themselves like settling pastry, a long manufactory whose chimneys have toppled like felled trees, and a data library.
The scouts lead them into the warren of ruined halls and broken floors. It is raining inside many of the chambers. Roofs are missing, or water is simply descending through ruptured layers of building fabric. The Tanith melt from view into the shadows. They cover their cloaks with the black dirt from the concourse, and it helps them to merge with the dripping shadows. Gaunt does as they do. He smears the dirt onto his coat and pulls the cloak on over the top, aware that he is looking less and less like a respectable Imperial officer. Damn it, his storm coat is torn and his jacket is ruined anyway.
They work into the habs. Gunfire cracks and echoes along the forlorn walkways and corridors. Broken water pipes, weeping and foul, protrude from walls and floors like tree stumps. The tiled floor, what little of it survives, is covered with broken glass and pot shards from crockery that has been fragmented by the concussion of war.
Gaunt has kept hold of Caffran’s rifle. He’s holstered his pistol and got the infantry weapon cinched across his torso, ready to fire. It’s a long time since he’s seen combat with a rifle in his hands.
Mkoll looms out of the filmy mist that fills the air. He is directing the Tanith forward. He looks at Gaunt and then takes Gaunt’s cap off his head.
‘Excuse me?’ says Gaunt.
Mkoll wipes his index finger along a wall, begrimes it, and then rubs the tip over the silver aquila badge on Gaunt’s cap.
He hands it back.
‘It’s catching the light,’ says Mkoll.
‘I see. And it’s not advisable to wear a target on my head.’
‘I just don’t want you drawing fire down on our unit.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ says Gaunt.
Every few minutes the gunfire dies away. A period of silence follows as the enemy closes in tighter, listening for movement. The only sound is the downpour. The entire environment is a source of noise: debris and rubble can be dislodged, kicked, disturbed, larger items of wreckage can be knocked over or banged into. Damaged floors groan and creak. Windows and doors protest any attempt to move them. When a weapon is discharged, the echoes set up inside the ruined buildings are a great way of locating the point of origin.