He thanks the God-Emperor with a nod. The enemy has just provided information. A minimum of two shooters, not one.
Caffran gets lower still. With his face almost pressing into the ooze, he repositions himself, and risks a look around the stone blocks.
Another shot whines past him, but it is speculative. The shooter hasn’t seen him. A filthy PDFer is hopping across the rubble towards his position, clutching an old autorifle. He looks like a hobbled beggar. The puttee around one of his calves is loose and trailing, and his breeches are torn. His face is concealed by an old gas mask. The air pipe swings like a proboscis, unattached to any air tank. One of the glass eye discs is missing.
Behind him, a distance back, a second PDFer stands on the top of a sloping section of roof that is lying across a street. He has a lascarbine raised to his shoulder and sighted. As the PDFer in the gas mask approaches, the other one clips off in Caffran’s general direction.
Caffran draws his only weapon, the long Tanith knife.
He stays low, hearing the crunch of the approaching enemy trooper. He can smell him too, a stench like putrefaction.
Another las-shot sings overhead. Caffran tries to slow his breathing. The footsteps get closer. He can hear the man’s breath rasping inside the mask.
Caffran turns the knife around in his hand until he is holding the blade, and then very gently taps the pommel against the stone block, using the knife like a drum stick.
Chink! Chink! Chink!
He hears the enemy trooper’s respiration rate change, his breath sounds alter as he turns to face a different direction. His footsteps clatter loose stone chips and crunch slime. He is right there. He is coming around the other side of the stone block.
The moment he appears, Caffran goes for him. He tries to make full body contact so he can bring the man over before he can aim his rifle. Caffran tries to force the muzzle of the rifle in under one of his arms rather than point it against his torso.
Locked together, they tumble down behind the block. The autorifle discharges.
From his vantage on the fallen roof slope, the other trooper hesitates, watching. He lowers his lasrifle, then raises it to sight again.
A shape pops back into view over the stone slab, a filthy shape, with a grimed gas-masked face. The watching trooper hesitates from firing.
The figure with the gas mask brings up an autorifle in a clean, fluid swing and fires a burst that hits the hesitating PDFer in the throat and chest, and tumbles him down the roof slope, scattering tiles.
Caffran drops the autorifle and wrenches off the gas mask as he falls to his knees. He gags and then vomits violently. The stench inside the borrowed mask, the residue, has been foul, even worse than he could have imagined. The mask’s previous owner lies on his back beside him, beads of bright red blood spattering his mud-caked chest. Caffran slides the warknife out and wipes the blade.
Then he throws up again.
He can hear activity in the ruins behind him. It’s time to move. He stares at the autorifle, and tries to weigh up the encumbrance against the usefulness of a ranged weapon. He reaches over and searches the large canvas musette pouches his would-be killer has strapped to the front of his webbing. One is full of odd junk: meaningless pieces of stone and brick, shards of pottery and glass, a pair of broken spectacles and a tin of boot polish. The other holds three spare clips for the rifle, and a battered old short-pattern autopistol, a poor quality, mass-stamped weapon with limited range.
It will have to do. He puts it into his pocket.
It’s really time to move.
It’s getting dark. Night doesn’t drop like a lid on Voltemand like it did on Tanith. It fills the sky up slowly, billowing like ink in water.
The rain’s still hammering the Imperial camp, but the dark rim of the sky makes the silent lightning more pronounced. The white spears are firing every twenty or thirty seconds, like an automatic beacon set to alarm.
The boy’s asleep, legs and arms loosely arranged like a dog flopped by a grate. Dorden hates to abuse his medicae privileges, but he believes that the God-Emperor of Mankind will forgive him for crushing up a few capsules of tranquiliser and mixing them into the boy’s broth. He’ll do penance if he has to. They had plenty of temple chapels back in the city, and a popular local saint, a woman. She looked like the forgiving sort.
The boy’s on a cot at the end of the ward. Dorden brews a leaf infusion over the small burner and turns the page of his book, open on the instrument rest. It’s a work called The Spheres of Longing. He’s yet to meet another man in the Imperial Guard who’s ever heard of it, let alone read it. He doubts he will. The Imperial Guard is not a sophisticated institution.
Nearby, Lesp is cleaning his needles in a pot of water. He’s done two or three family marks tonight at the end of his shift, a busy set. His eyes are tired, but he keeps going long enough to make sure the needles are sterile for the next job. Lesp is always eager to work. It’s as if he’s anxious to get down all the Tanith marks before he forgets them. Dorden sometimes wonders where Lesp will ink his marks when he runs out of Tanith skin to make them on.
The boy kicks as a dream trembles through him. Dorden watches him to make sure he’s all right.
The doorway flap of the tent opens and Rawne steps in out of the lengthening light and the rain. Drops of it hang in his hair and on his cloak like diamonds. Dorden gets to his feet. Lesp gathers his things and makes himself scarce.
‘Major.’
‘Doctor.’
‘Can I help you?’
‘Just doing the rounds. Is everything as it should be here?’
Dorden nods.
‘Nothing untoward.’
‘Good,’ says Rawne.
‘It’s getting dark,’ Dorden says, as Rawne moves to leave.
‘It is.’
‘Doesn’t that mean the advance unit is overdue?’
Rawne shrugs. ‘A little.’
‘Doesn’t that concern you?’ asks Dorden.
Rawne smiles.
‘No,’ he says.
‘At what point will it concern you?’ Dorden asks.
‘When it’s actually dark and they’re officially missing.’
‘That could be hours yet. And at that point it will be too late to mobilise any kind of force to go looking for them,’ says Dorden.
‘Well, we’d absolutely have to wait for morning at least,’ says Rawne.
Dorden looks at him, and rubs his hand across his face.
‘What do you think’s happened to them?’ he asks.
‘I can’t imagine,’ says Rawne.
‘What do you hope’s happened to them?’ Dorden asks.
‘You know what I hope,’ says Rawne. He’s smiling still, but it’s just teeth. There’s no warmth. It’s like lightning without thunder.
Dorden sips his drink.
‘I’d ask you to consider,’ he says, ‘the effect it would have on the Tanith Regiment if it lost both of its senior commanding officers.’
‘Please, Doctor,’ says Rawne, ‘this isn’t an emergency. It’s just a thing. They’ve probably just got held up somewhere.’
‘And if not?’
Rawne shrugged.
‘It’ll be a terrible loss, like you said. But we’d just have to get over it. We’ve had practice at that, haven’t we?’
The emaciated ghosts of Kosdorf come at them through the skeletal ruins. They have become desperate. Their need, their hunger has overwhelmed their caution. They loom through useless doors and peer through empty windows. They clamber out of sour drains and emerge from cover behind spills of rubble. They fire their weapons and call out in pleading, raw voices.
The rain has thickened the dying light. Muzzle flashes flutter dark orange, like old flame.