[Gaunt's Ghosts 02] - Ghostmaker

by Dan Abnett

  Caffran wasn’t sure what sickened him most: the scale of the mass firing squads or the willing, uncomplaining way each rank slew the last and then stepped forward and waited to be cut down.

  “What the Feth are they doing?” Adare gasped.

  Caffran thought for a moment, reaching into his memory to recover the parts of the briefing he had blanked. The parts where Gaunt had spoken about Sholen Skara.

  It came back to him, out of the darker reaches of his mind, recollections rising like marsh-gas bubbles out of the mire of forgetfulness. Suddenly, Gaunt’s voice was in his ear, Gaunt’s image before him. The briefing auditorium of the mighty troop-ship Persistence, Gaunt, in his long storm coat and cap, striding onto the dais under the stone lintel of the staging, glancing up at the gilt spread-eagle with its double heads on the velvet drop behind him. Gaunt, removing his coat and dropping it on the black leather chair, standing there in his dress jacket, taking off his cap once to smooth his cropped hair as the men came to order.

  Gaunt, speaking of the abominations and filthy concepts Caffran had blanked from his mind.

  “Sholen Skara is a monster. He worships death. He believes it to be the ultimate expression of the Chaotic will. On Balhaut, before we came in, he ran murder-camps. There, he ritually slaughtered nearly a billion Balhauteans. His methods were inventive and—”

  Even now, Caffran could not bring himself to think of Gaunt’s descriptions. The names of the foul species of Chaos that Sholen Skara had commanded, the symbolic meaning of their crimes. Now though, he understood why Ibram Gaunt, champion of human life and soldier of the divine Emperor, would so personally loathe the likes of the monster called Skara.

  “He kills to serve Chaos. Any death serves him. Here, we can be sure, he will have butchered any Imperially-loyal hive workers en masse. We can also be sure that if he believes defeat is close, he will begin a systematic purge of any living things, including his own troops. Mass suicide, to honour Chaos. To honour the blasphemy they call Khorne.”

  Gaunt coughed at the word as if his gorge was rising, and a murmur of revulsion passed through the assembled Ghosts.

  “That is a way we have of winning. We can defeat him — and we can convince him he will be defeated and thus save us the bother of killing them all. If he thinks he is losing, he will begin to slaughter his own as a final hymn of defiance and worship.”

  Caffran’s mind swam round to the present. Adare was speaking, “—fething more of them, Caff! Look!”

  Kith soldiers, in their hundreds, were marching out onto the concourse to fall in behind the rows already slaughtered.

  Not slaughtered, thought Caffran: harvested. It reminded him of the rows of corn stooks back on the meadows of Tanith, as the mechanical threshers came in reaping row after row.

  Despite the sickness in his stomach, a sickness that pinched and viced with each echo of gunfire, Caffran smiled.

  “What?” Adare asked.

  “Nothing…”

  “So what do we do now? What’s the plan?”

  Caffran grinned again. He realised he did have a plan, after all. And he’d already executed it. When he’d brought that tower crashing down, he’d made Sholen Skara believe a significant enemy force was inside Oskray Hive. Made him believe that defeat loomed.

  As a result, Skara was ordering the Kith to kill themselves, one hundred at a time. One hundred every thirty seconds.

  Caffran sat back. His aching body throbbed. There was a las-burn across his thigh he hadn’t even noticed before.

  “You’re laughing!” said Adare, perplexed.

  Caffran realised he was.

  “Here’s the plan,” he said at last. “We wait.”

  Afternoon squalls from the ocean were clearing the smoke from Oskray Hive, but even the wind and rain couldn’t pry the stink of death from the great refinery. Formations of Imperial gunships shrieked overhead, pummelling the rain clouds with their fire-wash.

  Gaunt found Caffran asleep amongst several hundred other Ghosts under a tower piling. The young trooper snapped to attention as soon as he realised who had woken him.

  “I want you with me,” Gaunt said.

  They crossed the great concourse of the refinery city, passing squads of Ghosts, Volpone and Abberloy Guardsmen detailed at building-to-building clearance. Shouts and whistles rang commands through the air as the Imperial forces took charge of the island hive and marshalled ranks of dead-eyed prisoners away.

  “I never thought you to be a tactical man, Caffran,” Gaunt began as they walked together.

  Caffran shrugged. “I have to say I made it up as I went along, sir.”

  Gaunt stopped and turned to smile at the young Ghost. “Don’t tell Corbec that, for Feth’s sake, he’ll get ideas.”

  Caffran laughed. He followed Gaunt into a blockhouse of thick stone where oil-drum stacks had been packed aside to open a wide space. Sodium lamps burned from the roof.

  A ring of Imperial Guardsmen edged the open area; Volpone mostly, but there were some Ghosts, including Rawne and other officers.

  In the centre of the open area, a figure kneeled, shackled. He was a tall, shaven-headed man in black, tight-fitting robes. Powerful, Caffran presumed, had he been allowed to stand. His eyes were sunken and dark, and glittered out at Gaunt and Caffran as they approached from the edge of the guarding circle.

  “The little juicy maggot of the Imperial—” the figure began, in a soft, sugar-sweet tone. Gaunt smacked him to the ground with the back of his fist to silence him.

  “Sholen Skara,” Gaunt said to Caffran, pointing down at the sprawled figure who was trying to rise, despite his fetters, blood spurting from his smashed mouth.

  Caffran’s eyes opened wide. He gazed down.

  Gaunt pulled out his bolt pistol, checked it, cocked it and offered it to Caffran. “I thought you might like the honour. There’s no court here. None’s needed. I think you deserve the duty.”

  Caffran took the proffered gun and looked down at Skara. The monster had pulled himself up onto his knees and grinned up at Caffran, his teeth pink with blood.

  “Sir—” Caffran began.

  “He dies here, today. Now. By the Emperor’s will,” Gaunt said curtly. “A duty I would dearly liked to have saved for myself. But this is your glory, Caffran. You wrought this.”

  “It’s… an honour, commissar.”

  “Do it… Do it, little Ghost-boy… What are you waiting for?” Skara’s sick-sweet tones were clammy and insistent. Caffran tried not to look down into the sunken, glittering eyes.

  He raised the gun.

  “He wants death, sir.”

  “Indeed he does! It is the least we can do!” Gaunt snapped.

  Caffran lowered the gun and looked at Gaunt, aware that every eye in the chamber was on him.

  “No, sir, he wants death. Like you told us. Death is the ultimate victory for him. He craves it. We’ve won here on Sapiencia. I won’t soil that victory by handing the enemy what he wants.” Caffran passed the gun back to Gaunt, grip first.

  “Caffran?”

  “You really want to punish him, commissar? Let him live.”

  Gaunt thought for a moment. He smiled.

  “Take him away,” he said to the honour guard as it closed ranks around Skara.

  “I may have to promote you someday,” Gaunt told Caffran as he led him away.

  Behind them, Skara screamed and begged and pleaded and shrieked. And lived to do so, again and again.

  Brin Milo, Gaunt’s young adjutant, brought the commissar a tin cup of caffeine brew and the data-slates he hadn’t requested — though he had been about to. Gaunt was sat on a camp chair on the deck outside his command shelter, gazing out at the Tanith lines and the emerald glades of Monthax beyond them. Milo gave the data-slates to the commissar and then paused as he turned away, guilty as he realised what he had done.

  Gaunt eyed the slates, scrolling the charts on the lit fascia of the top one. “Mkoll’s surveys of the western swamps… a
nd the orbital scans of Monthax. Thank you.”

  The boy tried to cover his mistake. “I thought you’d want to look them over,” he began. “When you attack today, you’ll—”

  “Who said I’d attack today?”

  Milo was silent. He shrugged. “A guess. After last night’s action, so close, I thought…”

  Gaunt got up and looked the boy squarely in the eyes. “Enough of your guesses. You know the trouble they might cause. For me. For you. For all the Ghosts.”

  Milo sighed and leaned against the rail of the command shed’s stoop where he attended the commissar. Mid-morning light lit the marshy groves beyond, lighting the tops of the tree cover an impossibly vivid green. Armoured vehicles ambled through the mire somewhere, kilometres away. There was the distant thump of guns.

  “Is there some crime…” he ventured at last, “in anticipation? Sir. Isn’t that what a good adjutant is supposed to do? Anticipate his officer’s needs and requirements ahead of time? Have the right thing to hand?”

  “No crime in that, Brin,” Gaunt replied, sitting back down. “That’s what makes a good adjutant, and you’re making a fine job of being one. But… you anticipate too well sometimes. Some times it spooks me, and I know you. Others might view it another way. I don’t need to tell you that.”

  “No…”

  “You know what happened in orbit last week. That was too close.”

  “It was a conspiracy. I was set up.”

  Gaunt wiped the sweat from his temple. “You were. But it was easy to do. You’d be an easy victim for a determined manipulator. And if it came to that again, I’m not sure I could protect you.”

  “About that… I have a request, sir. You do protect me… you have since Tanith.”

  “I owe you. But for your intervention, I would have died with your world.”

  “And from that you know I can handle myself in a combat situation. I want to be issued with a gun. I want to fight with the Tanith in the next push. I don’t care what squad you put me in.”

  “You’ve seen your share of fighting, Brin,” Gaunt said, shaking his head. “But I won’t make a soldier out of you. You’re too young.”

  “I was eighteen three days ago,” the boy said flatly.

  Gaunt frowned. He hadn’t realised. He flapped away a persistent fly and sipped his cup. “Not a lot I can say to counter that,” he admitted.

  He sat back down. “What if we make a deal?”

  Milo looked back at him with bright eyes and a cautious smile. “Like what?”

  “I give you a brevet field rank, a gun, and stick you next to Corbec. In return, you stop anticipating — completely.”

  “Completely?”

  “That’s right. Well, I don’t mean stop doing your job. Just stop doing things that people could take the wrong way. What do you say?”

  “I’d like that. Thank you. A deal.”

  Gaunt flashed him a rare smile. “Now go and find me Corbec and Mkoll. I need to run through some details with them.”

  Milo paused and Gaunt turned, looking down off the stoop to see the colonel and the scout sergeant standing side by side, looking up at him expectantly.

  “Milo suggested that we should stop by. When we had a chance,” Corbec said. “Is now a good time?”

  Gaunt turned back to find Milo but the boy, probably on tin-basis of another wise anticipation, had made himself scarce.

  TEN

  WITCH HUNT

  Varl lifted the Tanith camo-cloak off the censer on the floor like a magician about to perform a conjuring trick. There was a hushed silence around the ship’s hold as the veil came away.

  The game was simple and enticing and completely fixed, and Sergeant Varl and the boy mascot made a good team. They had a jar of fat, jumping lice scooped from the troop-ship’s grain silos and that beaten old censer borrowed from the Ecclesiarch chapel. The censer was a hollow ball of rusty metal whose hemispheres hinged open so that incense could be crumbled into the holder inside and lit. The ball’s surface was dotted with star-shaped holes.

  “The game is simple,” Varl began, holding up the jar and jiggling it so all could see the half dozen, thumb-sized bugs inside. He held it in his mechanical hand, and the servos hummed and whirred as he agitated the glass.

  “It’s a guessing game. A game of chance. No trickery, no guile.”

  Varl was something of a showman, and Milo liked him very much. He was one of what Milo regarded as the inner circle of Ghosts, a close friend of Corbec and Larkin, one of a gaggle of tight-knit friends and comrades mustered together from the militia of Tanith Magna at the founding. Varl’s sharp tongue and speak-your-mind attitude had retarded his promotion chances early on, but then he had lost his arm on Fortis Binary during the heroic reconquest of the forge world and by the time of the now-legendary actions of Menazoid Epsilon he had been made a squad sergeant. Many thought it was well past time. Next to the ruthless command styles of Rawne and Feygor, and the intense military mindset of the likes of Mkoll and the commissar himself, Varl, like the beloved Colonel Corbec, injected a note of humanity and genial compassion into the Ghosts’ command structure. The men liked him: he told jokes as often as Corbec, and they were for the most part funnier and cruder; his prosthetic arm proved he was not shy of close fighting; and he could, in his own, informal, garrulous way, spin a fine, inspiring speech to rouse his squad if the need called for it.

  Just now though, in one of the troop-ship’s echoing holds with an audience of off-duty guardsmen roused from their cots and stoves all around, he was turning his charismatic tongue to something far more important. The pitch.

  “Here’s the deal, my friends, my brave fellow guardsmen, praise be the Golden Throne, here’s the deal.”

  He spoke clearly, slowly, so that his sing-song Tanith accent wouldn’t confuse the other guard soldiers here. Three other regiments were sharing this transport with the Ghosts: big, blond, square-jawed brutes from the Royal Volpone 50th, the so-called Bluebloods; sallow-skinned, idle-looking compact men from the 5th Slamabadden; and tall, tanned, long-haired types from the 2nd Roane Deepers. Worlds and accents, separated by a common tongue. Varl worked his crowd with care and precision, making sure nothing he said was lost or misunderstood.

  He handed the censer to Milo, who opened it. “See now, a metal ball, with surface holes. The grain-lice go in the ball…” He tipped a couple from his jar out into the censer as Milo held it ready. “And my young friend here closes it up. Notice how I’ve scratched a number next to all the holes. Thirty-three holes, a number next to each. No tricks, no guile… you can examine the ball if you like.”

  Varl took the rusty ball from Milo and set it on the floor where all could see. A large washer welded to the censer’s base stopped it from rolling. “Now, see, I sets it down. The lice want the light, right? So sooner or later, they’ll hop out… through one of the holes. There’s the game. We wager on the number.”

  “And we lose our money,” said a Deeper near the front, his voice twanged with that odd, rounded Roane accent.

  “We’ll all make a bet, friend,” Varl said. “I will, you will, anyone else. If you guess the right number or get closest, you win the pot. No tricks, no guile.”

  As if on cue, a bug emerged from one of the star-shaped holes and lit off onto the deck, where a Blueblood crunched it sourly underfoot.

  “No matter!” Varl cried. “Plenty more where he came from… and if you’ve seen the grain silos, you’ll know what I mean!”

  That brought general laughter and keen sense of suffering comradeship. Milo smiled. He loved the way Varl could play a crowd.

  “What if we don’t trust you, Ghost?” asked a Blueblood, the big ox who had mashed the bug. He wore his grey and gold twill breeches and black boots, but was stripped down to his undershirt. His body was a mass of well-nourished muscles and he stood two heads taller than Varl. Arrogance oozed from him.

  Milo tensed. He knew that some rivalry existed between the Ghosts and the Blueblo
ods, ever since Voltemand. No one had ever said, but the rumour was that the Blueblood’s own commanders, steering the invasion force, had ordered the barrage on the Voltis riverbed where so many Ghosts had died. The Bluebloods, so high and Emperor-damned mighty, seemed to despise the “common born” Ghosts, but then they despised everyone. This aristocratic giant, with his hooded eyes and bullying manner, had at least six friends in the crowd, and all were as big as him. What the feth do they feed them on back home to raise such giants? Milo wondered.

  Varl, unconcerned, got down off the crates he had been using as a stage and approached the giant. He held out his hand. It whirred. “Ceglan Varl, Sergeant, Tanith First-and-Only. I admire a man who can express his doubts… sergeant?”

  “Major Gizhaum Danver De Banzi Haight Gilbear, Royal Volpone 50th.” The giant didn’t offer to take the outstretched hand.

  “Well, major, seems you’ve no reason to trust a low-life like me, but it’s all a game, see? No tricks, no guile. We all make a bet, we all have a laugh, we all pass the voyage a little quicker.”

  Major Gilbear did not seem convinced.

  “You’ve rigged it. I’m not interested if you place a bet.” He swung his look past Varl and took in Milo. “Let your boy do it.”

  “Oh. Now, that’s just silly!” Varl cried. “He’s just a kid… he knows nothing about the fine and graceful art of gamesmanship. You want to play this with gamblers!”

  “No,” Gilbear said simply. Others in the crowd agreed, and not just Bluebloods. Some seemed in danger of walking away, disinterested.

  “Very well, very well!” Varl said, as if it was breaking his heart. “The boy can play in my stead.”

  “I don’t want to, sir!” Milo squeaked. He prayed his outburst had the right mix of reluctance and concern, and that it didn’t sound too much on cue.