Ghostmaker (27 page)

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… and 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.

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 Bluebloods, 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.

“Now then, lad,” Varl said, turning to him and putting a heavy bionic arm around his shoulders paternally. “Be good now and play along so that the nice gentlemen here can enjoy a simple game.” Unseen to all others present, he winked at Milo. Milo fought the fiercest battle of his life not to laugh.

“O-okay,” he said.

“The boy will play in my place!” Varl said, turning back to the crowd and raising his arms. There was cheers and applause in reply.

They set to it. A larger crowd gathered. Paper markers were handed out and coin produced. Gilbear decided to play, as did two Roane Deepers and three of the Slammabadden. In the crowd, secondary bets were laid on winners and losers. Varl opened the censer and took up his jar.

Gilbear plucked it from his hand, opened it and dropped the lice out onto the deck, crunching them all underfoot. He held it out to one of his men. “Raballe! Go fetch fresh lice from the silos!”

“Sir!”

“What is this?” Varl gasped, dropping to his knees and wiping away what seemed to Milo a real tear as he surveyed his crushed insects. “Do you not even trust my lice, Major Gilbear, Blueblood, sir?”

“I don’t trust anything I can crush with my boot,” Gilbear replied, looking down and apparently dangerously close to stamping on Varl too. A tidal change swept through the secondary betting, some of it in sympathy with the damaged Ghost and his crushed pets, some sensing trickery was routed and heaping money on the Blueblood major.

“You could have drugged them, overfed them — they seemed docile. You could place your money on the lower holes so that the sluggish things simply fell from the bottom as gravity pulled.” Gilbear smiled at his deduction and his men growled approval. So did several of the wily Slammabadden, and Milo was afraid the mood might turn ugly.

“I’ll tell you what,” Varl said to the major as he got up. The Blueblood’s second was returning with a jar packed full of agitated lice and semi-digested meal where he had scooped it from the dank silos. “We’ll use your pick of the bugs…and you can set the censer whichever way up you like.” Varl pulled a cargo hook from the crates behind him to use as a makeshift base. “Happy?”

Gilbear nodded.

They made ready. The gamblers, Milo included, prepared to make their guess on the paper slips provided. Varl flexed his good shoulder, as if easing out an old hurt. A signal, the next guile.

“I’ll play this too,” Caffran said, pushing forward through the huddle. He seemed to sway and he stank of sacra. Many gave him a wide berth.

“Cafy, no… you’re not up to it…” Varl murmured.

Caffran was pulling out a weight of coins, rolls of thick, high-issue disks.

“Give me the paper… Hike a bet,” Caffran mumbled, slurring.

“Let your Ghost play,” Gilbear growled with a smirk as Varl began to protest.

It looked to all present like the Tanith showman had lost control of his simple game, and if there had been any trickery in it, any guile, then all of it was ruined now.

The first lice went in. Gilbear spun the censer and set it down. Markers were overturned. A Slammabadden came closest, closest to guessing the exit by three holes. Milo was nowhere near and seemed to whimper. Caffran raged as his money was scooped away. He produced more.