Straight Silver, page 26
‘Thanks, but the jury is still out. I don’t care. Maybe I am crazy. Look out, Lijah Cuu.’
‘What’s the real reason?’ she asked.
Larkin hesitated. He wanted to tell her, but he knew how the others treated him. Mad Larkin. Untrustworthy. Crazy. His head hurt.
‘He killed Bragg,’ he said simply.
‘He what?’
‘I can’t prove it. Not even slightly. But from what he’s said to me, he killed Bragg. For ratting on him. And now he wants me too. So I thought I’d cut to the chase and get in first.’
She stared at him. ‘Really?’
‘I believe it. I don’t expect you to. In fact, I’ve probably just proved to you that I’m crazy after all.’
‘No,’ she said. She leaned forward towards him.
‘Larks… tell Gaunt about it. Gaunt or Corbec or Daur. They’ll help you. Don’t do something you’ll regret.’
‘Like killing Cuu before he kills me? Too late. And it doesn’t matter what Gaunt and Corbec and Daur believe. With what little I’ve got, their hands would be tied. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? It goes as it goes.’
He got up unsteadily and hefted his long-las. ‘Thanks for smacking Cuu off me,’ he said, ‘but do me a favour. Forget this whole conversation. It’ll be better that way.’
Stark dawn light spread across the back lawns of the manse. Mist wisped up from the wet grass.
He caught the movement out of the corner of his eye. Not much, just a flicker of something. The vaguest flicker.
Caffran left his sentry post in the greenhouse and ran up the main back lawn. Daybreak birdsong rang around him. He reached one of the most distant sheds, and yanked open the door.
‘Out! Now!’ he barked, his lasrifle aimed inside.
The Aexegarian trooper was young and matted with filth. He had a dirty twist of beard. He came out into the open, blinking, his hands over his head.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’
‘Shut up and get your hands on the wall!’ Caffran snapped.
The trooper turned and spread against the side of the shed.
Caffran reached forward to pat him down. He kept his lasrifle at the man’s back.
His vox crackled suddenly.
He backed off and adjusted his micro-bead’s setting.
‘Say again? Say again?’ he called.
The vox buzzed again, and he heard a single word.
‘Comeuppance.’
TWELVE
Anywhere but here
‘So I’m a plucky soldier boy,
My country I hold dear,
Find me somewhere to fight for, sir,
Anywhere but here.’
– refrain of popular Aexegarian song
Nine men dead. Six injured. Three more sick with gas-related injuries caused by tears in their kit. Seventeen platoon was a mess. And Raglon knew it. Gaunt could tell the novice sergeant was badly shaken and terribly ashamed of himself. His first field office, and he’d ended up with less then fifty per cent of his platoon alive or able-bodied.
Gaunt’s infiltration force moved up to occupy the ghastly ruins of the Santrebar Mill, and as the four platoons took station at windows and likely firepoints, Dorden co-opted half a dozen of them to help him deal with Raglon’s wounded.
Two were close to death. Sicre and Mkwyl; there was no hope for them. Dorden called for Zweil.
It was getting on for 19.00 hours, and the day was beginning to fade. The dull bluster of the counter-push still rolled across the wasteland towards them from the south, and the deep booming of the super-siege guns continued. Everything was still closed in and swaddled by the yellow gas vapour.
Just after the hour, it began to rain. The light changed, a soft blush across the low yellow sky. It reminded Golke of the way a brush wash could alter a watercolour. Painting had been his hobby, years before. He stood, looking out from one of the mill’s low windows, almost admiring the view. It was stark and unlovely, but there was a quality to it. The dark, rusty ground, the off-white sky slowly saturating with blue-grey.
Weighed down with his battlefield mail, heavy coat and respirator, he felt distanced. This was the land he was fighting for, the land he had spent his adult life fighting for. As far as his eyes could see, there was nothing but the scarring of warfare. This wasn’t the site of a battle, this was landscape transformed by the brute sorcery of relentless fighting. Stripped, burned, poisoned, malformed, killed.
He wondered why, then, he admired its eerie beauty. Surely it wasn’t just the amateur painter in him making a trite aesthetic response. This was the Pocket, he told himself. The Seiberq Pocket. That murderous slab of country that had robbed him of his friends, his men and his health.
He’d emerged from this place a wreck, so dismayed by its horrors that he’d been receiving counselling from his physician ever since. The memories still lacerated his mind.
He tried to picture it living again. Ten, fifty years in the future, a hundred… whatever it might take. He tried to imagine the war over, and peace slowly restoring the rule of nature. Trees. Fields. Life of any kind.
Golke could imagine it, but the vision was not convincing. This, the ravaged vista before him, was the only truth.
He knew why it was important to him. The Pocket had haunted him for years, lurking in his nightmares and daydreams. And now he’d come back to face it. That’s really why he had volunteered to assist Gaunt’s mission. This was aversion therapy. He’d come back to face his daemons and deny them, exorcise them, banish them. He’d come back to recover something lost by his younger self. The Pocket was a hell-hole, an unfeasibly ugly ruin. But already he could see some beauty in it.
He’d taken the first step. He’d looked upon the landscape of his nightmares and hadn’t frozen in terror.
He could do this. He could break the Pocket just like it had once broken him.
Two months earlier, his aides had dragged him out for a night at the musical hall in Ongche. A popular touring show was in town, and they’d insisted he’d enjoy it. The gaudily-painted theatre had been packed with rowdy soldiers on furlough, but Golke had enjoyed the performance from one of the balcony-boxes. It had all been amusing enough, though the common troopers loved it as if it was the best thing ever. A conjuror, an acrobat troupe, a virtuoso viol player, a clown act with trained canines, singers, bandsmen, a rather feeble soprano. A famous comedian in a too-small hat who strutted the stage and made off-colour remarks about Shadik sexuality and hygiene to furious approval.
Then had come the girl, the little girl from Fichua, the top of the bill. This, his senior aide told him excitedly, was what the boys were all waiting for.
She didn’t seem much, just a child in a hoop skirt and bodice. But her voice…
She sang three songs. They were funny and saucy and patriotic. The last was a ditty Golke had heard the men singing from time to time. An ironic piece about doing your bit in which the soldier assured his superiors he was willing to fight, but expressed the wish to do so somewhere safe. The chorus went something like ‘I want to find a place to fight, anywhere but here.’
The crowd had gone mad. The little Fichuan girl had repeated the song as an encore. Flowers had been tossed onto the stage.
It had stayed with him. Golke had found himself humming it. ‘Anywhere but here, your lordships, anywhere but here.’ Three curtain calls and goodnight.
It was in his head now. The refrain went round and round.
Anywhere but here.
He understood why the men, sentimental fools the lot of them, like all soldiers off-duty, loved it so. It was catchy and bright and funny. It voiced their secret desires. It let them laugh away their dearest and most hidden wishes.
The tune died away in his head. Staring out at the misery of the Pocket, it simply faded away. Golke could see through its reassuring lie.
This was where he wanted to be. This was where he needed to be.
Not anywhere but here.
Right here. And right now.
The rain fell harder, sizzling on the poisoned ground, gushing through the crippled drainage of the mill. It was so intense that within fifteen minutes the air had cleared and the sky had become greyer and bigger.
Dorden used his atmosphere sniffer and declared that the gas-level had dropped under advised limits.
Gratefully, the troopers began to unbuckle their hoods.
The open air was cold and damp, and retained the metallic scent of the gas, muddled with rot and soaked earth. Some of the men were so relieved to be out of their hoods, they started laughing and chatting. Gaunt got Beltayn to circuit the mill and relay orders for them to hold it down.
Zweil, his head bared again, said a blessing to the sky, and then went back to Sicre and Mkwyl. Both were dead, and he’d said last rites over both of them already. Now he repeated the duty. ‘So they can hear me,’ he told Dorden.
It was getting darker. Apart from drifting streams of artillery smoke, they could see for several kilometres. The sky was turning black, and the lights of the lines, both friend and foe, were visible. Over in the east, the false dawn of a flare barrage lit the landscape white. From the south came the flashes and glows of the counter-push. Beyond the eastern horizon, the great blinks of light from the super-siege guns backlit the land.
Overhead, in the dark, muddy blue, Gaunt could see stars, for the first time since he’d set foot on Aexe Cardinal. They were twinkling and blurred by the thinning smoke in the upper atmosphere, but he could make them out. Every now and then, a red or orange line scored the sky as rockets flew over. Part of the Peinforq Line – Sector 56, Gaunt guessed – began to strobe as it started off the night’s barrage. They could hear the whine and squeal of shells in flight. Fires began to burn along the reciprocal edge of the Shadik lines.
Mortars pounded from somewhere. Feldkannone crumped.
Another night on the Front began.
‘What happened?’ Gaunt asked. He led Raglon to a quieter corner of the mill ruin and sat him down. Raglon was strung out and shaking.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘For fething up so badly.’
‘Skip it, sergeant. What happened last night?’
‘We got pounced on. We were following a dead trench and we ran smack into enemy raiders. The fight didn’t last long. But it was furious. Back and forth, almost single file. We gave a decent account, I think. They fell back and we moved north, dragging the wounded with us, hoping to join up with ten. We’d heard Criid had taken the mill.’
‘And?’
Raglon sighed. ‘I don’t know how much we missed them by, but they’d already fallen back. The enemy had begun to shell. So we stayed put. It seemed like the right choice. I thought I could feasibly hold the mill, even cut to half strength.’
‘Any contact in the night?’
‘None, sir.’
Gaunt nodded. ‘Did you leave any men behind, Raglon?’
‘No, sir!’
‘Then I think you did all right. You should stop beating yourself up.’
Raglon looked at Gaunt. ‘I thought you’d take my pins right away, sir.’
‘For what, Rags?’
‘For fething up. For losing so many men.’
‘One of my earliest actions, Rags. One of my first real command actions, you understand, I led a ten-man unit of Hyrkans into a forest ward on Folion. We had been told it had been cleared. It had not. I lost seven men. Seventy per cent losses. I hated myself for it, but I retained my rank. Oktar knew I’d just got myself into a bad place. It happens. It happens to all Guards, sooner or later. When you’re in a position of authority, it seems to matter all the more. You did all right. You were just unlucky.’
Raglon nodded, but he still seemed unsettled. ‘I just hate the responsibility–’
‘Of the deaths?’
‘And the mistake…’
Gaunt paused. ‘Raglon, this is your first real test of command. Not the fight, not the actions afterwards. Truth is the test. If it all went off the way you say it did, fine. If you’re covering for someone, then it’s not. If you want to be an officer in my regiment, then you have to deal in the truth, right from the start. So… is there anything else you want to tell me?’
‘I was in command, sir.’
‘Yes, you were. So who fethed up?’
‘I did. I was in command.’
‘Sergeant, the mark of a good squad leader is that he or she recognises weaknesses and brings them to the attention of his commanding officer. Take it on the chin by all means. Feth knows, you’ll have to live with the pain. But if there’s a loose link, tell me now.’
Raglon sighed. ‘I think we’d have run into the raiders anyway, although I’m told Scout Suth had advance warning. I had allowed myself to be spaced too far back in the file. As I understand it, Trooper Costin blew our cover.’
‘How?’
‘He was drinking on duty, sir. He gave away our position by failing to observe proper stealth discipline.’
Gaunt nodded and got to his feet.
‘For the God-Emperor’s sake, sir!’ Raglon moaned. ‘Don’t!’
‘Sergeant Adare, may the Emperor rest him, advised me of Costin’s unguarded drinking last year. Adare should have come down on it. I should have come down on it. At the very least, I should have warned you about it when you took over seventeen. This is my fault, primarily, and then Adare’s, long before it’s yours. First and foremost, it’s Costin’s.’
‘Sir…’
‘Speak?’
‘I only got half my platoon out of that trench. Please don’t reduce the number of survivors.’
Gaunt put a hand on Raglon’s shoulder. ‘See to your duty and regret nothing. I’ll see to mine. You’ll make a first class platoon leader, Raglon.’
Gaunt walked through the mill. Mkoll hurried up to him.
‘Sir?’
‘In a moment, Mkoll.’
Gaunt reached the dingy alcove of rockcrete where Costin was lying. Dorden was changing the dressings of the trooper’s shattered hand.
The doctor looked up, and recognised the grim set of Gaunt’s face.
‘No,’ he said, rising. ‘No. No way, Gaunt. Not now. He’s half bled to death and I’ve spent the last twenty minutes saving his hand.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gaunt.
‘Fething no! No, I said! I will not stand by and let you do this! Where the feth is your humanity? I respected you, Gaunt! I’d have followed you to the ends of the worlds, because you weren’t like the others! That shit at the triage station… that I understood! I hated you for it, but I forgave you! But not this.’
‘He confessed to you, then?’
‘It all came out,’ Dorden looked down at Costin. ‘He told me about it. He’s traumatised. Remorseful. Suicidal, probably.’
‘Suicide is no option. His laxity caused the death of several Ghosts.’
‘So what? You’ll shoot him for it?’
‘Yes,’ said Ibram Gaunt.
Dorden stood in front of Costin. ‘Through me, then. Go on, you bastard. Do it.’
Gaunt slid his bolt pistol from its holster. ‘Stand aside, Doctor.’
‘I will not. I fething well will not.’
‘Stand aside, doctor, or I will have you stood aside.’
Dorden leaned in, standing on tip-toe so his eyes were level with Gaunt’s. ‘Shoot me,’ he snarled. ‘Go on. I’m defying your orders. If Costin deserves the bullet for breaking your orders, so do I. So, shoot me. Or have everyone know you as an inconstent leader… one rule for one, another for another.’
Gaunt didn’t blink. He slowly raised the bolt pistol until the muzzle was pressing at Dorden’s adam’s apple.
‘You’re forcing an issue that shouldn’t be forced, doctor. You are the backbone of the First, depended on by everyone. You are loved by the men. I consider myself lucky to count you as a friend. But if you choose to take a stand on this, I will shoot you. It is my duty. My duty to the Guard, to the Warmaster and to the God-Emperor of Mankind. I cannot make exceptions. Not Costin. Not you. Please, doctor… stand aside.’
‘I will not.’
Gaunt raised the bolter a little so that Dorden was forced to tilt his head back.
‘Please, doctor. Stand aside.’
‘I will not.’
‘We are mirrors, Tolin, you and me. Mirrors of war. I break them. You put them back together. For every gramme of your soul that wishes war would end, mine matches it tenfold. But until the killing ends, I won’t back down from my duty. Don’t make the next round I fire be the one that kills Tolin Dorden.’
‘You really would shoot me,’ Dorden marvelled softly, ‘wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Holy feth… then that just makes me want to stand here all the more.’
Gaunt’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Tighter.
Tighter.
He turned away and lowered the weapon, clicking on the safety.
‘Tolin,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve just undermined me in front of my men. You’ve just weakened my authority. I’m glad to the bottom of my heart that I couldn’t shoot you, because of our friendship. But I hope you’re ready to cope with the consequences.’
‘There won’t be any consequences, Ibram,’ Dorden said.
‘Oh yes, there will,’ said Gaunt. ‘Oh, most certainly there will.’
Mkoll stood nearby, alarmed by the confrontation. For a minute, he’d thought Gaunt was going to ask him to step in and bundle Dorden away.
He should have known better. Gaunt would never involve another man in a personal fight.
But it was bad. There wasn’t a trooper in the First who’d take a gun to Doc Dorden. The idea was criminal. Time would tell what Gaunt’s loss of face would lead to.
The stand-off had shown Gaunt was human. Ironically, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Even more ironically, most of the First probably knew it already.
‘What’s the real reason?’ she asked.
Larkin hesitated. He wanted to tell her, but he knew how the others treated him. Mad Larkin. Untrustworthy. Crazy. His head hurt.
‘He killed Bragg,’ he said simply.
‘He what?’
‘I can’t prove it. Not even slightly. But from what he’s said to me, he killed Bragg. For ratting on him. And now he wants me too. So I thought I’d cut to the chase and get in first.’
She stared at him. ‘Really?’
‘I believe it. I don’t expect you to. In fact, I’ve probably just proved to you that I’m crazy after all.’
‘No,’ she said. She leaned forward towards him.
‘Larks… tell Gaunt about it. Gaunt or Corbec or Daur. They’ll help you. Don’t do something you’ll regret.’
‘Like killing Cuu before he kills me? Too late. And it doesn’t matter what Gaunt and Corbec and Daur believe. With what little I’ve got, their hands would be tied. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that? It goes as it goes.’
He got up unsteadily and hefted his long-las. ‘Thanks for smacking Cuu off me,’ he said, ‘but do me a favour. Forget this whole conversation. It’ll be better that way.’
Stark dawn light spread across the back lawns of the manse. Mist wisped up from the wet grass.
He caught the movement out of the corner of his eye. Not much, just a flicker of something. The vaguest flicker.
Caffran left his sentry post in the greenhouse and ran up the main back lawn. Daybreak birdsong rang around him. He reached one of the most distant sheds, and yanked open the door.
‘Out! Now!’ he barked, his lasrifle aimed inside.
The Aexegarian trooper was young and matted with filth. He had a dirty twist of beard. He came out into the open, blinking, his hands over his head.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’
‘Shut up and get your hands on the wall!’ Caffran snapped.
The trooper turned and spread against the side of the shed.
Caffran reached forward to pat him down. He kept his lasrifle at the man’s back.
His vox crackled suddenly.
He backed off and adjusted his micro-bead’s setting.
‘Say again? Say again?’ he called.
The vox buzzed again, and he heard a single word.
‘Comeuppance.’
TWELVE
Anywhere but here
‘So I’m a plucky soldier boy,
My country I hold dear,
Find me somewhere to fight for, sir,
Anywhere but here.’
– refrain of popular Aexegarian song
Nine men dead. Six injured. Three more sick with gas-related injuries caused by tears in their kit. Seventeen platoon was a mess. And Raglon knew it. Gaunt could tell the novice sergeant was badly shaken and terribly ashamed of himself. His first field office, and he’d ended up with less then fifty per cent of his platoon alive or able-bodied.
Gaunt’s infiltration force moved up to occupy the ghastly ruins of the Santrebar Mill, and as the four platoons took station at windows and likely firepoints, Dorden co-opted half a dozen of them to help him deal with Raglon’s wounded.
Two were close to death. Sicre and Mkwyl; there was no hope for them. Dorden called for Zweil.
It was getting on for 19.00 hours, and the day was beginning to fade. The dull bluster of the counter-push still rolled across the wasteland towards them from the south, and the deep booming of the super-siege guns continued. Everything was still closed in and swaddled by the yellow gas vapour.
Just after the hour, it began to rain. The light changed, a soft blush across the low yellow sky. It reminded Golke of the way a brush wash could alter a watercolour. Painting had been his hobby, years before. He stood, looking out from one of the mill’s low windows, almost admiring the view. It was stark and unlovely, but there was a quality to it. The dark, rusty ground, the off-white sky slowly saturating with blue-grey.
Weighed down with his battlefield mail, heavy coat and respirator, he felt distanced. This was the land he was fighting for, the land he had spent his adult life fighting for. As far as his eyes could see, there was nothing but the scarring of warfare. This wasn’t the site of a battle, this was landscape transformed by the brute sorcery of relentless fighting. Stripped, burned, poisoned, malformed, killed.
He wondered why, then, he admired its eerie beauty. Surely it wasn’t just the amateur painter in him making a trite aesthetic response. This was the Pocket, he told himself. The Seiberq Pocket. That murderous slab of country that had robbed him of his friends, his men and his health.
He’d emerged from this place a wreck, so dismayed by its horrors that he’d been receiving counselling from his physician ever since. The memories still lacerated his mind.
He tried to picture it living again. Ten, fifty years in the future, a hundred… whatever it might take. He tried to imagine the war over, and peace slowly restoring the rule of nature. Trees. Fields. Life of any kind.
Golke could imagine it, but the vision was not convincing. This, the ravaged vista before him, was the only truth.
He knew why it was important to him. The Pocket had haunted him for years, lurking in his nightmares and daydreams. And now he’d come back to face it. That’s really why he had volunteered to assist Gaunt’s mission. This was aversion therapy. He’d come back to face his daemons and deny them, exorcise them, banish them. He’d come back to recover something lost by his younger self. The Pocket was a hell-hole, an unfeasibly ugly ruin. But already he could see some beauty in it.
He’d taken the first step. He’d looked upon the landscape of his nightmares and hadn’t frozen in terror.
He could do this. He could break the Pocket just like it had once broken him.
Two months earlier, his aides had dragged him out for a night at the musical hall in Ongche. A popular touring show was in town, and they’d insisted he’d enjoy it. The gaudily-painted theatre had been packed with rowdy soldiers on furlough, but Golke had enjoyed the performance from one of the balcony-boxes. It had all been amusing enough, though the common troopers loved it as if it was the best thing ever. A conjuror, an acrobat troupe, a virtuoso viol player, a clown act with trained canines, singers, bandsmen, a rather feeble soprano. A famous comedian in a too-small hat who strutted the stage and made off-colour remarks about Shadik sexuality and hygiene to furious approval.
Then had come the girl, the little girl from Fichua, the top of the bill. This, his senior aide told him excitedly, was what the boys were all waiting for.
She didn’t seem much, just a child in a hoop skirt and bodice. But her voice…
She sang three songs. They were funny and saucy and patriotic. The last was a ditty Golke had heard the men singing from time to time. An ironic piece about doing your bit in which the soldier assured his superiors he was willing to fight, but expressed the wish to do so somewhere safe. The chorus went something like ‘I want to find a place to fight, anywhere but here.’
The crowd had gone mad. The little Fichuan girl had repeated the song as an encore. Flowers had been tossed onto the stage.
It had stayed with him. Golke had found himself humming it. ‘Anywhere but here, your lordships, anywhere but here.’ Three curtain calls and goodnight.
It was in his head now. The refrain went round and round.
Anywhere but here.
He understood why the men, sentimental fools the lot of them, like all soldiers off-duty, loved it so. It was catchy and bright and funny. It voiced their secret desires. It let them laugh away their dearest and most hidden wishes.
The tune died away in his head. Staring out at the misery of the Pocket, it simply faded away. Golke could see through its reassuring lie.
This was where he wanted to be. This was where he needed to be.
Not anywhere but here.
Right here. And right now.
The rain fell harder, sizzling on the poisoned ground, gushing through the crippled drainage of the mill. It was so intense that within fifteen minutes the air had cleared and the sky had become greyer and bigger.
Dorden used his atmosphere sniffer and declared that the gas-level had dropped under advised limits.
Gratefully, the troopers began to unbuckle their hoods.
The open air was cold and damp, and retained the metallic scent of the gas, muddled with rot and soaked earth. Some of the men were so relieved to be out of their hoods, they started laughing and chatting. Gaunt got Beltayn to circuit the mill and relay orders for them to hold it down.
Zweil, his head bared again, said a blessing to the sky, and then went back to Sicre and Mkwyl. Both were dead, and he’d said last rites over both of them already. Now he repeated the duty. ‘So they can hear me,’ he told Dorden.
It was getting darker. Apart from drifting streams of artillery smoke, they could see for several kilometres. The sky was turning black, and the lights of the lines, both friend and foe, were visible. Over in the east, the false dawn of a flare barrage lit the landscape white. From the south came the flashes and glows of the counter-push. Beyond the eastern horizon, the great blinks of light from the super-siege guns backlit the land.
Overhead, in the dark, muddy blue, Gaunt could see stars, for the first time since he’d set foot on Aexe Cardinal. They were twinkling and blurred by the thinning smoke in the upper atmosphere, but he could make them out. Every now and then, a red or orange line scored the sky as rockets flew over. Part of the Peinforq Line – Sector 56, Gaunt guessed – began to strobe as it started off the night’s barrage. They could hear the whine and squeal of shells in flight. Fires began to burn along the reciprocal edge of the Shadik lines.
Mortars pounded from somewhere. Feldkannone crumped.
Another night on the Front began.
‘What happened?’ Gaunt asked. He led Raglon to a quieter corner of the mill ruin and sat him down. Raglon was strung out and shaking.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘For fething up so badly.’
‘Skip it, sergeant. What happened last night?’
‘We got pounced on. We were following a dead trench and we ran smack into enemy raiders. The fight didn’t last long. But it was furious. Back and forth, almost single file. We gave a decent account, I think. They fell back and we moved north, dragging the wounded with us, hoping to join up with ten. We’d heard Criid had taken the mill.’
‘And?’
Raglon sighed. ‘I don’t know how much we missed them by, but they’d already fallen back. The enemy had begun to shell. So we stayed put. It seemed like the right choice. I thought I could feasibly hold the mill, even cut to half strength.’
‘Any contact in the night?’
‘None, sir.’
Gaunt nodded. ‘Did you leave any men behind, Raglon?’
‘No, sir!’
‘Then I think you did all right. You should stop beating yourself up.’
Raglon looked at Gaunt. ‘I thought you’d take my pins right away, sir.’
‘For what, Rags?’
‘For fething up. For losing so many men.’
‘One of my earliest actions, Rags. One of my first real command actions, you understand, I led a ten-man unit of Hyrkans into a forest ward on Folion. We had been told it had been cleared. It had not. I lost seven men. Seventy per cent losses. I hated myself for it, but I retained my rank. Oktar knew I’d just got myself into a bad place. It happens. It happens to all Guards, sooner or later. When you’re in a position of authority, it seems to matter all the more. You did all right. You were just unlucky.’
Raglon nodded, but he still seemed unsettled. ‘I just hate the responsibility–’
‘Of the deaths?’
‘And the mistake…’
Gaunt paused. ‘Raglon, this is your first real test of command. Not the fight, not the actions afterwards. Truth is the test. If it all went off the way you say it did, fine. If you’re covering for someone, then it’s not. If you want to be an officer in my regiment, then you have to deal in the truth, right from the start. So… is there anything else you want to tell me?’
‘I was in command, sir.’
‘Yes, you were. So who fethed up?’
‘I did. I was in command.’
‘Sergeant, the mark of a good squad leader is that he or she recognises weaknesses and brings them to the attention of his commanding officer. Take it on the chin by all means. Feth knows, you’ll have to live with the pain. But if there’s a loose link, tell me now.’
Raglon sighed. ‘I think we’d have run into the raiders anyway, although I’m told Scout Suth had advance warning. I had allowed myself to be spaced too far back in the file. As I understand it, Trooper Costin blew our cover.’
‘How?’
‘He was drinking on duty, sir. He gave away our position by failing to observe proper stealth discipline.’
Gaunt nodded and got to his feet.
‘For the God-Emperor’s sake, sir!’ Raglon moaned. ‘Don’t!’
‘Sergeant Adare, may the Emperor rest him, advised me of Costin’s unguarded drinking last year. Adare should have come down on it. I should have come down on it. At the very least, I should have warned you about it when you took over seventeen. This is my fault, primarily, and then Adare’s, long before it’s yours. First and foremost, it’s Costin’s.’
‘Sir…’
‘Speak?’
‘I only got half my platoon out of that trench. Please don’t reduce the number of survivors.’
Gaunt put a hand on Raglon’s shoulder. ‘See to your duty and regret nothing. I’ll see to mine. You’ll make a first class platoon leader, Raglon.’
Gaunt walked through the mill. Mkoll hurried up to him.
‘Sir?’
‘In a moment, Mkoll.’
Gaunt reached the dingy alcove of rockcrete where Costin was lying. Dorden was changing the dressings of the trooper’s shattered hand.
The doctor looked up, and recognised the grim set of Gaunt’s face.
‘No,’ he said, rising. ‘No. No way, Gaunt. Not now. He’s half bled to death and I’ve spent the last twenty minutes saving his hand.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gaunt.
‘Fething no! No, I said! I will not stand by and let you do this! Where the feth is your humanity? I respected you, Gaunt! I’d have followed you to the ends of the worlds, because you weren’t like the others! That shit at the triage station… that I understood! I hated you for it, but I forgave you! But not this.’
‘He confessed to you, then?’
‘It all came out,’ Dorden looked down at Costin. ‘He told me about it. He’s traumatised. Remorseful. Suicidal, probably.’
‘Suicide is no option. His laxity caused the death of several Ghosts.’
‘So what? You’ll shoot him for it?’
‘Yes,’ said Ibram Gaunt.
Dorden stood in front of Costin. ‘Through me, then. Go on, you bastard. Do it.’
Gaunt slid his bolt pistol from its holster. ‘Stand aside, Doctor.’
‘I will not. I fething well will not.’
‘Stand aside, doctor, or I will have you stood aside.’
Dorden leaned in, standing on tip-toe so his eyes were level with Gaunt’s. ‘Shoot me,’ he snarled. ‘Go on. I’m defying your orders. If Costin deserves the bullet for breaking your orders, so do I. So, shoot me. Or have everyone know you as an inconstent leader… one rule for one, another for another.’
Gaunt didn’t blink. He slowly raised the bolt pistol until the muzzle was pressing at Dorden’s adam’s apple.
‘You’re forcing an issue that shouldn’t be forced, doctor. You are the backbone of the First, depended on by everyone. You are loved by the men. I consider myself lucky to count you as a friend. But if you choose to take a stand on this, I will shoot you. It is my duty. My duty to the Guard, to the Warmaster and to the God-Emperor of Mankind. I cannot make exceptions. Not Costin. Not you. Please, doctor… stand aside.’
‘I will not.’
Gaunt raised the bolter a little so that Dorden was forced to tilt his head back.
‘Please, doctor. Stand aside.’
‘I will not.’
‘We are mirrors, Tolin, you and me. Mirrors of war. I break them. You put them back together. For every gramme of your soul that wishes war would end, mine matches it tenfold. But until the killing ends, I won’t back down from my duty. Don’t make the next round I fire be the one that kills Tolin Dorden.’
‘You really would shoot me,’ Dorden marvelled softly, ‘wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Holy feth… then that just makes me want to stand here all the more.’
Gaunt’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Tighter.
Tighter.
He turned away and lowered the weapon, clicking on the safety.
‘Tolin,’ he said quietly. ‘You’ve just undermined me in front of my men. You’ve just weakened my authority. I’m glad to the bottom of my heart that I couldn’t shoot you, because of our friendship. But I hope you’re ready to cope with the consequences.’
‘There won’t be any consequences, Ibram,’ Dorden said.
‘Oh yes, there will,’ said Gaunt. ‘Oh, most certainly there will.’
Mkoll stood nearby, alarmed by the confrontation. For a minute, he’d thought Gaunt was going to ask him to step in and bundle Dorden away.
He should have known better. Gaunt would never involve another man in a personal fight.
But it was bad. There wasn’t a trooper in the First who’d take a gun to Doc Dorden. The idea was criminal. Time would tell what Gaunt’s loss of face would lead to.
The stand-off had shown Gaunt was human. Ironically, that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Even more ironically, most of the First probably knew it already.
