The Tanith knot tight, and fend them off with precision. They fall back through the manufactory into the data library.
It’s there they lose their first life. A Tanith infantryman is caught by autogun fire. He staggers suddenly, as if winded. Then he simply goes limp and falls. His hands don’t even come up to break his impact against the tiled floor. Men rush to him, and drag him into cover, but Gaunt knows he’s gone by the way his heels are kicking out. Blood soaks the man’s tunic, and smears the floor in a great curl like black glass when they drag him. First blood.
Gaunt doesn’t know the dead man’s name. It’s one of the names he hasn’t learned yet. He hates himself for realising, just for a second, that it’s one less he’ll have to bother with.
Gaunt keeps the nalwood stock of Caffran’s lasrifle tight against his shoulder and looses single shots. The temptation to switch to auto is almost unbearable.
The lobby of the data library is a big space, which once had a glass roof, now fallen in. Rain pours in, every single moving drop of it catching the light. Kosdorfer ghosts get up on the lobby’s gallery, and angle fire down at the Tanith below. The top of the desk once used by the venerable clerk of records stipples and splinters, and the row of ornate brass kiosks where scholars and gnostics once filled out their data requests dent and quiver. Floor tiles crack. The delicate etched metal facings of the wall pit and dimple.
Corbec looks out at Gaunt from behind a chipped marble column.
‘This won’t do,’ he shouts.
Gaunt nods back.
‘Support!’ Corbec yells.
They’ve been sparing with their heavy weapon all day. They’re only a light advance team, and they weren’t packing much to begin with.
The big man comes up level with Corbec, head down. He’s carrying the lascarbine he’s been fighting with, but he’s got a long canvas sleeve across his back. He unclasps it to slide out the rocket tube.
The big man’s name is Bragg. He really is big. He’s not much taller than Corbec, but he’s got breadth across the shoulders. There’s a younger Tanith with him, one of the kids, a boy called Beltayn. He’s carrying the leather box with the eight anti-tank rockets in it, and he gets one out while Bragg snaps up the tube’s mechanical range-finder.
‘Any time you like, Try!’ Larkin yells out from behind an archway that is becoming riddled with shots.
‘Shut your noise,’ Bragg replies genially. He glances at Gaunt abruptly.
‘Sorry, colonel-commissar, sir!’ he says.
‘Get on with it, please!’ Gaunt shouts. It’s not so much the heavy fire they’re taking, it’s the voices. It’s probably his imagination, but the pleading, moaning voices of the Kosdorfers calling out to them are starting to make sense to him.
Beltayn goes to offer up the rocket to Bragg’s launcher, and a las-bolt fells him. Gaunt’s eyes widen as the rocket tumbles out of the hands of the falling boy and drops towards the tiled floor.
It hits, bounces, a tail-fin dents slightly.
It doesn’t detonate.
Gaunt dashes forward. Corbec has reached Bragg too. Bragg has picked up the rocket. He taps it cheerfully against his head.
‘No fear,’ he says. ‘Arming pin’s still in.’
Gaunt snatches the rocket, and stoops to the box to swap it for an undamaged one.
‘See to the boy!’ he says to Corbec.
‘Just a flesh wound!’ Corbec replies, hunched over Beltayn. ‘Just his arm.’
‘Get him back to the archway!’
‘I can’t leave–’
‘Get his arse back to the archway, colonel! I’ll do this!’
‘Yes sir!’
Corbec starts dragging the boy back towards the main archway. Men come out of cover to help him. Gaunt gets a clean rocket out of the box. He rolls it in his hands to check it by eye. It’s been a long time since he loaded, a long time since he learned basic skills. A long time since he was the boy, the Hyrkan boy, apprenticed to war, born into it as if it was a family business.
‘Set?’ he asks the big man.
‘Yes, sir!’ says Bragg.
Gaunt fits the rocket and removes the arming pin. Bragg hoists the top-heavy tube onto the shelf of his shoulder and takes aim at the lobby gallery. Gaunt slaps him twice on the shoulder.
‘Ease!’ he yells.
‘Ease!’ Bragg yells back. The word opens the mouth and stops the eardrums bursting.
Bragg pulls the bare metal trigger. The ignition thumps the air, and blow-back spits from the back of the tube and throws up dust. The rocket howls off in the other direction, on a trail of flame. It hits the gallery just under the rail, and detonates volcanically. The entire gallery lifts for a second, and then comes down like an avalanche, spilling rubble, stonework, grit, glass and men. It collapses with a drawn-out roar, a death rattle of noise and disintegration.
Gaunt looks at Bragg. Bragg grins. Their ears are ringing.
Gaunt signals back to the archway.
They run in through the archway, through the smoke blowing from the lobby. They get down. Corbec has signalled a pause while they wait to hear how the enemy redeploys.
It gets quieter. The building settles. Rubble clatters as it falls now and then. Glass tinkles.
Gaunt sinks down next to Bragg, his back to a wall.
‘First time that time,’ says Larkin from a corner nearby.
‘I know,’ says Bragg. He looks at Gaunt. He’s proud of himself.
‘Sometimes I miss,’ he explains.
‘I know,’ says Gaunt. The big man’s nickname is Try Again because he’s always messing up the first shot.
Gaunt sits quiet for a minute or two. He wipes the sweat off his face. He thinks about trying again, and second chances. Sometimes there just isn’t the opportunity or the willingness to make things better. Sometimes you can’t simply have another go. You make a choice, and it’s a bad one, and you’re left with it. No amount of trying again will fix it. Don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for you, to cut you slack; you made a mistake you’ll have to live with.
It was like failing to play the glittering game when he had the chance as one of Slaydo’s brightest; like leaving the Hyrkans; like trying to salvage anything from the Tanith disaster; like thinking he could win broken, grieving men over; like coming out with a small advance force into a city grave, just because he was bored of sitting in his tent.
He takes his cap off, leans the crown of his head back against the damp wall and closes his eyes. He opens them again. It’s dark above him, the roofspace of the library. Beads of rainwater and flakes of plaster are dripping and spattering down towards him, catching the intermittent lightning, like snow, like the slow traffic of stars through the aching loneliness of space.
He remembers something, one little thing. He puts his hand in his pocket, just to touch the letter, just to put his fingers on the letter his old friend Blenner sent him: Blenner, his friend from Schola Progenium, manufacturer of fake plastic explosives and practical jokes.
Blenner, manufacturer of empty promises, too, no doubt. The letter’s old. The offer may not still stand, if it ever did. Vaynom Blenner was not the most reliable man, and his mouth had a habit of making offers the rest of him couldn’t keep.
But it’s a small hope, a sustaining thing, the possibility of trying again.
The letter is gone.
Suddenly alert, torn from his reverie, Gaunt begins to search his pockets. It’s really gone. The pocket he thought he’d put it in is hanging off, thanks to the thrust of a rusty sword bayonet. All the pockets of his field jacket and storm coat are empty.
The letter’s lost. It’s outside somewhere in this grave of a city, disintegrating in the rain.
‘What’s the matter?’ asks Bragg, noticing Gaunt’s activity.