The Tanith are supremely good at this. Gaunt witnesses several occasions when a trooper makes a rattle out of a stone in an old tin cup or pot and sets up a noise to tempt a shot from the demented Kosdorfers. As soon as the shot comes, another Tanith trooper gauges the source of the bouncing echo and returns fire with a lethal volley.
The enemy becomes wise to the tricks, and starts acting more circumspectly. Unable to out-stalk the Tanith, the Kosdorfers begin to call out to them from the darkness.
It is unnerving. The voices are distant and pleading. Little sense can be made of them in terms of meaning, but the tone is clear. It is misery. They are the voices of the damned.
‘Ignore them,’ Gaunt orders.
They have to stick tight. The enemy has a numerical advantage. By getting out of the open, the Tanith has forced its own spatial advantage.
Gaunt wonders if it will be enough.
The ruins still feel like a grave site, a waste of mouldering funereal rot. He wonders if this place will mark the end of his life and soldiering career; a well-thought-of officer who wound up dying in some strategically worthless location because he didn’t make the right choices, or shake the right hand, or whisper in the right ear, or dine with the right cliques. He’s seen men make high rank that way, through the persuasive power of the officers’ club and the staff coterie. They were politicians, politicians who got to execute their decisions in the most literal way. Some were very capable, most were not. Gaunt believes that there is no substitute at all for practical apprenticeship, for field learning to properly supplement the study of military texts and the codices of combat. Slaydo had believed that too, as had Oktar, Gaunt’s first mentor.
The vast mechanism of the Imperial Guard, as a rule, did not. Slaydo had once said that he believed he could, through proper reform of the Guard, improve its efficiency by fifty or sixty per cent. Soberly, he had added that mankind was probably too busy fighting wars to ever initiate such reforms.
There is truth in that. Gaunt knows for a fact that Slaydo had a reform bill in mind to take to the Munitorum after the Gorikan Suppression, and again after Khulan. Every time, a new campaign beckoned, a new theatre loomed to occupy the attentions of military planners and commanders. The Sabbat Worlds, now it was the Sabbat Worlds. Slaydo had committed to it mainly, Gaunt knew, for personal reasons. After Khulan, the High Lords had tempted Slaydo with many offers: he’d had the pick of campaigns. He had turned them down, hoping to pursue a more executive office in the latter part of his life and work to the fundamental improvement of the Imperial Guard, which he believed had the capacity to be the finest fighting force in known space.
However, the High Lords had outplayed him. They had discovered his old and passionate fondness for the piety of Saint Sabbat Beati and the territories she had touched, and they had exploited it. The Sabbat Worlds had long since been thought of as unrecoverable, lost to the predations of the Ruinous Powers spreading from the so-called Sanguinary Worlds. No commander wanted to embrace such a career-destroying challenge. The High Lords wanted a leader who would stage the offensive with conviction. They sweetened the offer with the rank of Warmaster, sensing that Slaydo would be unable to resist the opportunity to liberate a significant territory of the Imperium that he felt had been woefully neglected and left to over-run, and at the same to acquire a status that allowed him much greater political firepower to achieve his reforms.
Instead, Balhaut had killed him. All he accomplished was the commencement of a military campaign that was likely to last generations and cost trillions of lives.
Thus are dreams dashed and good intentions lost. Everything returns to the dust, and everything is reduced to blind fighting in the shadowed ruins of cities against men who were brothers until madness claimed their minds.
Everything returns to the dirt, and the dirt becomes your camouflage, and hides your face and your cap badge in the dark, when death comes, growling, to find you out.
Faced alone, out of sight of the other men, the ruination of Kosdorf brings tears into his eyes.
Caffran understands the urgency of his mission, but he’s also smart enough not to run. Headlong running, as the chief scout has pointed out so often, just propels a man into the open, into open spaces he hasn’t checked first, across hidden objects that might be pressure-sensitive, through invisible wires, into the line of predatory gunsights.
Caffran is fit, as physically fit as any of the younger men who’ve been salvaged from Tanith. That’s one of the reasons he’s been selected as a courier.
The advance came into the grave city as a unit, testing its way and proceeding with recon. Now he’s exiting alone, a solitary trooper, protected by his wits and training. There’s no doubt in his mind that the enemy will have spread strengths out through the dead boroughs surrounding the fighting zone to catch any stragglers.
Kosdorf reminds him of Tanith Magna. Architecturally, it’s nothing like it, of course. Tanith Magna was a smaller burg, high-walled, a gathering of predominantly dark stone towers and spires rising from the emerald canopy of Tanith like a monolith. It had nothing of Kosdorf’s dank, white, mausoleum quality. It’s simply the mortality of Kosdorf that has stabbed him in the heart. Caffran knows that Tanith Magna doesn’t even persist as a ruin any more, but Voltemand’s second city, in death, inevitably makes him think of it, and the ruins become a substitute for his loss.
More than once, he feels quite sure he knows a street, or a particular corner. Memories superimpose themselves over alien habs and thoroughfares, and nostalgia, fletched with unbearable melancholy, spears him. He thinks he recognises one flattened frontage as the public house where he used to meet his friends, another shell as the mill shop where he had been apprenticed, and a broken walkway as the narrow street that had always taken him to the diocese temple. A patch of burned wasteland and twisted wire is most certainly the street market where he sometimes bought vegetables and meat for his ageing mother.
This terrace, this terrace with its cracked and broken flagstones, is definitely the square beside the Elector’s Gardens, where he used to meet Laria. He can smell nalwood–
He can smell wet ash. Lightning jags silently.
He wipes a knuckle across his cheekbone, knowing that humiliating tears are mixing with the rain on his face.
He takes a deep breath. He isn’t concentrating. He isn’t paying enough attention. He stops to get his bearings, trusting the innate wiring of the Tanith mind to sense direction.
If the God-Emperor, who Caffran dutifully worshipped all his life at the little diocese temple, has seen fit to take everything away from him except this single duty, then Caffran is fething well determined to do it properly. He–
He feels the hairs prick up on the back of his neck.
The las-shot misses his face by about a palm’s length. Just the slightest tremor of a trigger finger was the difference between a miss and a solid headshot. The light and noise of it rock him, the heat sears him, flash-drying the dirty tears and rain on his cheek into a crust.
Caffran throws himself down, and rolls into cover. He scrabbles in behind the foundation stones of a levelled building. Two more rounds pass over him, and then a hard round hits the block to his left. Caffran hears the distinctly different sound quality of the impact.