[Gaunt's Ghosts 11] - Only in Death

by Dan Abnett - (ebook by Undead)

  “Back hatch, sir,” Merrt replied, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

  Hark walked around behind the massive staircase. There was a hole on the floor there, a brass hatch that had been levered open. Hark stood at the lip and peered down.

  Darkness.

  Packs of Guard equipment had been dumped on the deck beside the hatch. Hark went over and helped himself to a lamp-pack. He switched it on. The beam was hot and yellow, in strong contrast to the milky radiance of the house lights.

  He went back to the hatch and played the light down. There was the rickety iron staircase. Hark lowered himself gently onto it.

  VIII

  “If you flick ’em, they get brighter,” Trooper Twenzet remarked, flicking one of the wall-hung lights.

  “Don’t do that,” said Varl.

  “Why not?”

  “Because… I’ll shoot you,” said Varl.

  “Fair enough,” replied Twenzet.

  The chamber was clammy and cold. It was the lowest part of the house, deep under the crust, or so the plans said. Varl had very little faith in the plans.

  He was leading a fire-team of six men from B Company, Rawne’s own boys: Brostin, Laydly, Twenzet (he of the lamp flicking), Gonlevy, LaHurf and Cant. Orders, straight from Gaunt in person, had been to find and secure the objective’s water supply.

  Ceglan Varl was old-school Tanith, one of the first of the few. He was popular, because he was a joker and a trickster, and unpopular, funnily enough, for precisely the same reasons. Varl was lean and taut, like a pulled rope. The men with him were mostly Belladon newcomers, except Brostin, the flame-trooper, who was old-school Tanith too, very old-school.

  Brostin and Varl had done Gereon together, the first time round. They’d known tough, and had spat right back in its eye.

  The orders had come with plans, flimsy things on see-through paper, which had led them down to what Brostin had delighted in describing as the “butt-hole end” of the house.

  Deep down, rock-cut, clammy-deep. Dew perspired off the rough, lime-washed walls. A shaky iron staircase had led them down into this pit.

  They moved around, swinging their lamp-packs back and forth like swords of light in the gloom. The house lamps down in the well room were very feeble.

  The chamber was roughly oval, and cut out of the deep rock. The floor was boarded with thick, varnished planks. A big cast iron tub with a brass lid stood in the centre of the chamber. A complex system of chains ran from the lid mechanism up to pulleys and gears in the roof space.

  “So that’s the well,” said Varl, aiming his lamp at it.

  “Well, well, well,” said Twenzet.

  “I do the jokes,” snapped Varl.

  “Yeah, why is that?” asked Laydly.

  “Because… I’ll shoot you,” said Varl.

  “Once again, fair enough,” replied Twenzet.

  “Get it open,” Varl ordered.

  Gonlevy and Cant began to wind on the levers on top of the lid.

  “It won’t budge, sarge,” said Cant.

  “Why not?”

  Cant paused. He knew full well what was coming.

  “I… don’t seem to be able to move the levers, sarge.”

  “Because?” Varl asked.

  Cant mumbled something.

  “We can’t hear you,” said Varl.

  “Because I can’t, sarge,” Cant said.

  “Oh, you can’t can you, Cant?” Varl said. All of them broke up in fits of laughter, again.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Cant, who’d long ago lost sight of the funny side of the joke. “Just bloody help us with—”

  “Tweenzy’s right,” said Brostin, from across the dank chamber.

  “Please don’t call me that,” said Twenzet. “I did ask you.”

  “Tweenzy’s on the money, Varl,” Brostin insisted.

  Varl switched his beam over to pick out Brostin. Brostin was hunched down, flicking one of the wall lights with a sturdy index finger.

  “They do get brighter when you flick ’em,” Brostin smiled.

  “Stop it!” Varl snarled. “All of you! We’re meant to be—”

  “Vaguely capable?”

  They all froze. Commissar Hark clumped down the staircase into the chamber.

  “Sir,” said Varl.

  “This the well, Varl?”

  “It is, sir.”

  “Got it open? Secure?”

  “Not yet, sir, sorry.”

  “Open it up.”

  “I was just saying how the levers was stiff, commissar,” Cant began. “We can’t—”

  Viktor Hark put out his left hand. His augmetic fingers closed like a vice around the winding handle.

  “Can’t Cant, or won’t?” Hark snorted.

  “Oh, not you too,” moaned Cant.

  Hark’s arm turned. With a creaking, shrieking complaint, the gears turned and the lid began to open. Chains clattered in the darkness above them. A foul, dry stench oozed out of the well-head.

  “Was that you, Brostin?” Varl asked.

  “Not this time,” Brostin groaned, fingers pinching his nose shut.

  Varl, Hark and Brostin went to the side of the well and looked down. Varl shone his lamp. The beam picked up moss and treacly black lichen. The drain-stench was unbearable.

  Brostin took out a spare seal ring, a small knurled brass object, and tossed it down the well.

  “One, Throne of Terra… Two, Throne of Terra… Three, Throne of Terra…” Hark began.

  He got to sixteen, Throne of Terra. There was no plunk, no splash, just a dry, jingling series of impacts as the ring skittered away.

  Hark looked at Varl. “You see, this,” he said, “this is what I was afraid of.”

  Day seven (out of Elikon M.P.). Sunrise at four plus nineteen, wind storm all night. Got last of regiment in just before midnight local. No sleep. Squads working to secure objective. Place is a maze. Bears litl little or no resemblance to schematics. Keep finding new chambers, new halls. K. found whole new wing running east that wasn’t on any version of charts.

  Objective feels curiously dead and alive, both at the same time. Dry, empty, but power still on, and some signs of habitation. Major problem—no water supply despite promise. Well dry. Trying to contact Elikon for assist. G. annoyed. Local water supply essential if we are to stay on station here. Rumour of secondary well, which can’t be found. Not only do our schematics not agree with actal actual layout of place, have discovered our charts don’t even agree with each other. Will send official rebuke to office of tactics for this error.

  I cannot shake the feeling that there’s a dream trying to wanting to something in my head that

  Medics report high incidence of eye infection amongst troops, due to dust.

  —Field journal, V.H. fifth month, 778.

  FOUR

  Written in Dust

  I

  There were strange echoes in Hinzerhaus, echoes that took a while to get used to. Alone in one chamber, a man might hear the footsteps of a comrade two floors up and a hundred metres distant. Sound carried.

  If the wind ever gets in here, Baskevyl thought, what a song it will sing.

  He was moving down through the house in search of the power room. At every turn or junction, he consulted a scrap of paper. Mkoll had written out directions to the power room for him. The charts couldn’t be trusted. Daur and Rawne had gone nose to nose the night before over the location of a room marked as the “lesser hall”. It had nearly got ugly—Baskevyl was sure Daur had been on the verge of throwing a punch—until Gaunt pointed out that, for one thing, Daur’s chart and Rawne’s chart were appreciably different and, for another, they were having their argument in the lesser hall.

  Looking back on it, Baskevyl reflected that perhaps the gravest cause for concern during the argument had been Daur’s behaviour. Ban Daur, clean-cut and Throne-fearing, was a model officer, the last person you’d ever expect to see swinging for a senior man.

  It’s because we�
�re spooked, every man jack. Some admit it, some don’t, but we’re all spooked by this bad rock and this labyrinth house. There’s something in the air here, some—

  dry skulls in a dusty valley

  —thing palpable, an oozing tension.

  Whatever it was, it wasn’t in the water because there wasn’t any. The well was dead. They were living off their own bottles, on quarter rations. Ludd had been detailed to mark all water bottles with a piece of chalk, and write up any man drinking too much. As a result, everybody loved Nahum Ludd.

  Baskevyl’s mouth tasted as dry as a storm coat’s pocket lining, and his tongue felt like a scrap of webbing. He’d snatched two hours’ sleep since they’d entered the house, and all one hundred and twenty minutes of it had been a dream about a fountain, gushing pure, bright liquid.

  Baskevyl checked his crumpled paper. It told him to follow the next staircase down, and he obeyed. The walls were panelled in a dark, glossy material that had been overlaid in turn by a light coating of pale dust. The white wall lights pulsed slowly.

  He heard footsteps approaching, and paused to see who was coming down the stairs behind him. No one appeared. It was just another echo, relayed through the warren of halls. During his ten-minute walk from the main staircase, he’d heard all manner of things: footsteps, voices, the bump and rattle of crates being stowed. Once, he’d heard a snatch of distinct conversation, three men complaining about the water rationing. The voices had come and gone, as if the men had been walking right past him.

  When he arrived at the next landing, he found two troopers standing watch, Tokar and Garond from J Company. They both visibly jumped when he walked into view, then saluted with nervous laughs.

  “On edge?” he asked.

  “We thought you were another echo,” said Garond.

  “We keep hearing noises, then there’s no one there,” said Tokar. “Feth, you gave us a scare.”

  “My apologies,” said Baskevyl. “The power room?”

  “Down there, sir,” Garond said, indicating the narrow staircase behind him.

  Baskevyl nodded. “Anything to report? Apart from noises?”

  Tokar and Garond shook their heads. Baskevyl nodded again, and took a quick look around the landing space. “What about that?” he asked.

  “What, sir?” asked Tokar.

  Baskevyl pointed at the wall opposite. “That.”

  “I don’t see anything,” Tokar began.

  “In the dust,” Baskevyl insisted.

  The troopers squinted.

  “Oh!” said Garond suddenly. “It’s been drawn there! Gak, I didn’t see that. Did you see that, Tokar?”

  “First time I’ve noticed it.”

  “Did either of you draw it?” asked Baskevyl.

  “No,” they both answered together.

  He could see they hadn’t. It had been drawn in the dust on the satin-brown wall panel, but so long ago the lines themselves had been covered in dust. It was just a ghost image, a human face, neither specifically male nor female, open-mouthed. There were no eyes. It had been drawn in the dust with slow, lazy finger strokes. Somehow, Baskevyl felt certain they had been slow and lazy.

  “What the gak is it?” Garond asked.

  Baskevyl stared at the face. It was unsettling. “I don’t know.”

  “Why” Tokar began, “why didn’t we notice it before? We’ve been standing here two hours.”

  “I don’t know,” Baskevyl repeated. He took a deep breath. “Wash it off.”

  “With what, sir?” asked Garond.

  “Spit?” Tokar suggested.

  “Wipe it off, then. Use your capes.”

  The troopers moved forward to oblige, scooping up handfuls of their camo-capes.

  Baskevyl noticed how they hesitated. Neither one wanted to be the first to touch it.

  II

  “Not in here, please,” said Dorden as he entered the high-ceilinged room.

  Gaunt paused in the act of emptying an appreciable quantity of dust out of his boot onto the floor.

  “Why not? Is there a medical reason?”

  “If this is going to be the field station, then I have to keep it swept of dust,” Dorden tutted, putting down an armful of medical cartons.

  “The field station?” Gaunt asked.

  “Yes,” said Dorden.

  When Gaunt didn’t reply, Dorden looked at him. He saw Gaunt’s sarcastically arched eyebrows. He saw the old stuffed leather chair Gaunt was sitting in, the ancient desk behind him, the stacks of kit bags and munition boxes.

  “Not the field station, then?” he asked.

  “My office, I think you’ll find.”

  “Ah.”

  “The field station is three chambers along, on the right.”

  Dorden shook his head. “These fething maps. Are they of use to any man?”

  Gaunt shook his head. “Not any I’ve met.” With some satisfaction, he poured the dust out of his boot. It drizzled out in a long, smoking shower.

  Dorden looked around. The room was dark and tall, fast in the heart of the house. Dirty outlines on the sheened brown walls showed where paintings had once hung. It had been impressive once, a fine stateroom. Now it seemed like a cave, lit by the dim glow of the lamps.

  With a slight start, Dorden realised they weren’t alone. There was a third person in the room. Eszrah ap Niht was sitting in one corner, patiently reading an old book by the light of the wall lamp he had huddled up to. His fingertip was moving under the text, sticking at difficult words.

  The Nihtgane had developed quite a thirst for knowledge and Gaunt had taught him his letters well. However, no one had yet convinced Eszrah that wearing sunshades indoors wasn’t a good idea.

  “What are you reading there, Eszrah?” Dorden called out. The old doctor still hadn’t quite got the trick of pronouncing Eszrah’s name.

  Eszrah looked up from his book. “Yt is ancallyd The Mirror of Smoke,” he replied.

  “Ah,” said Dorden. He glanced at Gaunt, who was busy evacuating grit from his other boot. “One of your favourites.”

  Gaunt nodded. “Yes, it is.”

  “What’s that phrase, that famous phrase? ‘By dying, we finish our service to the Emperor?’ Or something?”

  “I think you mean ‘Only in death, does duty end’,” said Gaunt. The colonel-commissar was staring down at his bootless feet. His filthy toes poked out of the holes in his socks. He wiggled them.

  “That’s it,” said Dorden.

  “Not original to the author, of course,” said Gaunt, preoccupied with his own feet. “An old proverb.”

  Dorden nodded. “And rather disheartening.”

  Gaunt looked up at him. “Disheartening? Don’t you intend to die in the service of the God-Emperor? Is there something you’d like to tell your commissar, Tolin?”

  Dorden chuckled. “Do you know how old I am, Ibram?”

  Gaunt shrugged.

  “Well,” said Dorden, “let’s just say if I’d chosen to muster out at Guard retirement age, as per the edicts, I’d have been a man of leisure for thirteen years now.”

  “Feth? Really?”

  Tolin Dorden smiled. “Age-muster is, of course, voluntary. Besides, where would I go?”

  Gaunt didn’t answer.

  “You know how I see myself ending my days?” asked Dorden. “As a local doctor. A local doctor, serving some backwater community on a colony world. That’d be all right with me. The day comes I get too old, too slow to keep up with the pace of the Tanith First, that’s where I want to end up. Leave me somewhere, would you? Somewhere I can treat sprains and flu and ague, and the odd broken bone or colicky newborn. Somewhere quiet. Will you do that for me, when the day comes?”

  “You’ll be with us forever,” retorted Gaunt.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  Gaunt stared at him. “Afraid?”

  Dorden sighed. “How much longer, Ibram? How many more years, how many more battles? We all die sometime. I saw my world di
e, and now I go from war to war, seeing out the last of my people, one by one. I don’t want to be the last man of Tanith, Ibram, scrubbing blood off the surgery table as they wheel out the second to last man of Tanith in a body bag.”

  “It wouldn’t go like that—” Gaunt began.

  “No, it wouldn’t,” Dorden agreed. “One day, I’ll just get too old and doddery and you’ll have to remove me from service.”

  “Hardly. Look at Zweil.”

  Dorden grinned. “If that old fool makes a mistake, people don’t die.”

  Gaunt got to his feet. “I’ll find you that colony world, time comes,” he said. “That’s a promise. Maybe it’ll even be the world the Tanith get to settle. Our reward for service.”

  “Ibram, do you honestly believe that’s ever going to happen?”

  Gaunt was silent for a long time. “No,” he said finally.

  Warmaster Slaydo had promised Gaunt the settlement rights of the first world he won, as a reward after Balhaut. Gaunt had always intended to share that reward with the homeless Tanith. “Somehow, I doubt Macaroth will honour a rash promise his predecessor made,” Gaunt said quietly.

  “If he does intend to,” said Dorden, “then just make sure we don’t win here. The Tanith would lynch you if you won them this bad rock.”

  Dorden looked up at the vacant places on the walls.

  “I wonder what hung here,” he said.

  “Do you?” Gaunt replied. “All I seem to wonder is… who took them down?”

  “What about you?” Dorden asked.

  “Me? What about me?”

  “How do you see your service ending?”

  Gaunt sighed and sat down again. “Tolin, we both know how my service is going to end, sooner or later.”

  He gazed down at his socks. “Do you have a needle and thread I could borrow? Of course you do.”

  “You can darn, can you?” asked Dorden with a slight smile.

  “I can learn to darn. This is unseemly for a man of my rank.”

  “Don’t you have spare socks?”

  “These are my spare socks.”

  “Dickerson.”

  “What?”

  “Dickerson, tall Belladon in Arcuda’s mob. I hear he darns socks for a few coins. He’s good. Used to be a seamster before the Guard. He’ll probably do yours for free.”