Ghostmaker (30 page)

“You’re… what?”

They’re all soldiers. “That’s why they’re here, that’s why they survived the fall of Tanith. They were all new-founded Guards, mustered to leave Tanith anyway, and the commissar only evacuated them because of their worth to the Emperor. But I’m not. I’m a civilian. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t have survived. The Tanith see me and they think ‘Why did that boy survive? Why is he here? If he’s here, why not my brother, my daughter, my father, my wife?’

“I represent a possibility of survival denied to them all.”

She was silent for a moment.

It was all Gaunt could do to stop himself smiling. Milo’s answer had been perfect, as had the way he had allowed it to seem she was leading him into a trap. It made his response seem all the more honest.

Lilith got to her feet and crossed to Gaunt’s side. He could see the fierce annoyance in her face. She whispered, “Have you briefed the boy? Coached him in good answers for just such an event?”

Gaunt shook his head. “No, and if I had, don’t you suppose such an admission might make it look as if I knew Milo had something to hide?”

She hissed a curse and thought for a moment.

“Why this charade of questions?” Gaunt asked. “Why not just probe his mind? You have the gift, don’t you?”

She looked and him and nodded. “You know I do. But a good psyker, a dangerous psyker, can hide his power. The questions are an effective method of opening up his guard and winkling out the truth. And if his mind is the seething furnace we fear, I have no wish to touch it directly.”

She turned back, pacing around Milo’s throne, from behind him, she said. “Tell me about the game.”

“Game?”

“The game you and your Tanith friends play in the troop decks.”

She paced round in front of him and held out her right hand, palm down, balled in a fist. She turned it over and opened it. A grain-louse sat in the palm, twitching and alive.

“This game.”

“Oh,” Milo said. “It’s a betting game. You bet on which hole the bug will come out.”

She put the bug on his knee and it made no effort to jump away. Milo looked down at it with fascination. Lilith crossed to the side of the room and took something from a wall cupboard. The object was covered in a velvet cloth. When she unveiled it, it was like a magician about to perform a conjuring trick. But not half as much as when Varl did it.

She gave the rusty censer ball to Milo. “Open it. Put the bug inside.”

He obeyed.

“Now, Milo. This isn’t a game, is it? It’s a scam. It’s a trick the Tanith use to win cash from the other Guards. And if it’s a scam, it needs a sting. It needs a foolproof method to make it a sure thing the Tanith will win. You’re the sting, aren’t you? On demand, you can guess right… because that’s what you do, isn’t it? Your mind does the trick and makes it a certainty.”

Milo shook his head. “It’s just a game…”

“I have it on good authority that it is not. If it’s a game, why do you play it with unsuspecting troops from other regiments? By my own investigation, you and your friends have earned a small fortune from other men in these last few days. More than you would expect to win if it was just chance.”

“Lucky, I gu — I suppose.”

“You cannot run a scam on such wide odds. How do you really ensure the bug emerges from the right hole?”

Brin lifted the censer. The bug ticked inside. “Okay… if it matters so much, I’ll show you. Pick a hole.”

“Sixteen,” she said, sitting down on the stool facing him, apparently eager.

“I say nine.” He set it down. The bug emerged from hole twenty.

“You win. You were closer.”

She shrugged.

He opened the censer and put the bug back inside. “That was round one. You’re more confident now. You’ll play again. Pick.”

“Seven.”

“Twenty-five,” said Milo. They waited, and then the bug wriggled out of hole six and hopped across the carpet.

“Again you win. You’re feeling good now, aren’t you? Two wins. On the troop deck, you might have a pile of coins now, and you might wager the lot. You put the bug in.”

She did so and handed the censer back to Milo.

“Pick?” he said.

“Nineteen. All my money and all the cash my comrades-in arms have on nineteen.” He smiled. “One,” he said. The bug squirmed out of hole one.

“And so I take my huge winnings, look you in your open-mouthed face and say good night.” Milo sat back.

“A beautiful demonstration… and one that may have just incriminated you. How could you do that, to order, at just the right moment, unless your mind knew in advance which way the bug was going?”

Milo tapped his head. “You’re so sure it’s my mind, aren’t you, ma’am? So sure it’s the twisted workings I’ve got up here… You think I’m
psyker,
don’t you?”

Her expression was icy. “Show me an alternative.”

He tapped his jacket pocket. “It’s not up there, it’s down here.”

“Explain.”

“At the start of each game, we reach into our pockets for the next wager. Let you place the bug and so on, but I’m the last to handle the censer. The bugs love sugar dust. There’s some in the seam of my pocket. I wipe my finger in it as I take out my money and then wipe that finger around the hole I want as I place the censer down. The dust’s invisible on that rusty surface of course. But the scam is, I always know which hole it’s going to come out of. I choose every time: the first few rounds to let you win, and then when you’re confident you’ve got me on the ropes and start wagering everything, I play to win.”

Lilith got up smartly, crushing the bug underfoot with a deliberate heel. It left a brown stain on one beak of the Imperial crest. She turned to Gaunt.

“Get him out of here. I will report to Bulledin and Sturm. This matter is closed.”

Gaunt nodded and led Milo to the doorway.

“Commissar!” she called out after them. “He might not be a witch, but if I were you I’d think twice about having a devious and underhand little cheat like him anywhere near me.”

“I’ll take that under advisement, Inquisitor Lilith,” Gaunt replied and they left.

They walked back together through the hallways of the hexathedral. Night cycle was coming to an end, and dawn prayers and offerings were being made in the echoing chapels and chambers around. Incense and plainsong filled the air.

“Well done. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“You thought she’d get me, didn’t you?” Milo asked.

“I’ve never doubted the goodness or honesty in you, Brin, but I’ve always been uneasy about your knack of anticipating things ahead of time. I always feared that someone would take exception to it and that you would land us all in trouble.”

“You’d have shot me though, right?”

Gaunt stopped in his tracks. “Shot you?”

“If I’d let you down and landed the Ghosts in trouble. If I’d been… what she thought I was.”

“Oh.” They walked on. “Yes, I would. I would have had to.”

Milo shrugged.

“That’s what I thought you’d say,” he murmured.

Gaunt woke, and remembered that he had been dreaming of Tanith. That wasn’t unusual in itself; the visions of the fall of that world stalked his dreams regularly. But this time, for the first time, it seemed to him that he had been dreaming about the world as it had been: alive, flourishing, thriving.

The dream disquieted him, and he would have dwelt on it, had there been time. But then he realised that an urgent commotion had roused him. Outside, the pre-dawn gloom of Monthax was riven with shouts and alarms and the distant, eager sounds of warfare. Someone was hammering on the door of the command centre. Gaunt could hear Milo’s insistent voice.

He pulled on his boots and went outside, the cool morning air stiffening the night-sweat soaking his tight undershirt and breeches. He blinked at the cold glare, batting aside a persistent insect, as he half-listened to Milo’s hasty reports, half-read the vox-caster print-outs and data-slates the boy handed him. Gaunt’s eyes looked westward. Pink and amber flashes under-lit the low night clouds to the west, like a false dawn, every now and then punctured by the brief, trailing white star of a flarecharge, or the brighter, whiter flashes of some powerful energy support weapon.

Gaunt didn’t need Milo or the printed communiqués to know that the major offensive had begun at last. The enemy was moving, in force.

He ordered the platoon leaders to ready their men — though most had begun to do so already — and summoned the senior officers for a tactical meeting in the command centre. He sent Milo away in search of his cap and jacket, and his weapons.

In under ten minutes, Corbec brought Rawne, Lerod, Mkoll, Varl and the other seniors to the centre, to find Gaunt, now dressed, spreading out the communiqués on the camp table. There were no preliminaries.

“Orbital reconnaissance and forward scouting has shown a massed, singular column of Chaos moving through the territory to the west.”

“Objective?” Corbec asked.

Gaunt shrugged. It was a disarming gesture from one usually so confident. “Unclear, colonel. We’ve been expecting a major attack for days, but this doesn’t seem to focus any strength on our positions at all. Early reports show the enemy have cm through — well, destroyed, in fact — a battalion-strength force of Kaylen Lancers. But I have a hunch that’s only because the lancers were in the way. It’s as if our enemy has another objective, one they’re determined to achieve. One we don’t know about.”

Mkoll was eyeing the charts carefully. He’d scouted and mapped the area in question thoroughly during the previous week. His sharp tactical mind saw no obvious purpose to the assault either. He said as much.

“Could their intelligence be wrong?” Varl asked. “Maybe they’ve made their play at positions they think we hold.”

“I doubt that,” Mkoll answered. “They’ve seemed well informed up to now. Still, it’s a possibility. They’ve committed a huge portion of their strength to a mistake if that’s true.”

“If it’s a mistake, we’ll use it. If they have some dark and secret purpose, well, we’ll do ourselves no favours by waiting to find out what it is.” Gaunt paused and scratched his chin thought fully.

“Besides,” he said, “our orders are clear. General Thoth is sending us in, as soon as we’re ready, on orders from Lord Militant General Bulledin himself. The Tanith will form one arm of a counter assault. Upwards of sixty thousand men from various regiments are to be deployed against the enemy. Because of the peculiar, not to say perplexing orientation of their advance, we’ll catch them side on. The Ghosts will cover a salient about nine kilometres long.” Gaunt indicated their area of the new front on the chart, marking little runic symbols on the glass plate with his wax pencil. “I don’t want to sound over-confident, but if they’ve presented laterally to us by mistake, or if they’re driving towards something else, we should be able to do a lot of damage to their flank. Thoth has demanded a main force assault, what the beloved and devout Chapterhouses like to call a meat-grinder. Rip into them along the flank and try, if nothing else, to break their column and isolate parts of it.”

“Begging your pardon, commissar,” Rawne’s sibilant tones whispered through the centre’s close humidity like a cold draught. “The Tanith aren’t heavy troops. Main force, without playing to our strengths? feth, that’ll get us all killed.”

“Correct, major.” Gaunt fixed the man with a tight stare. “Thoth has given the regimental commanders some discretion. Let’s remember the depth of ground cover and jungle out there. The Ghosts can still use their stealth and cunning to get close, get in amongst them if need be. I’ll not send you in en masse. The Ghosts will deploy in platoon sections, small scattered units designed to approach the foe unseen through the glades. I think that way we will give as good an account of ourselves as any massed charged of armoured infantry.”

The briefing was over, save to agree platoon order and position. The officers filed out.

Gaunt stopped Mkoll. “This notion they’ve made a mistake: you don’t hold with it?”

“I gave my reasons, sir,” Mkoll said. “It’s true, these jungles are dense and confusing, and we can use that. But I don’t believe they’ve made a mistake, no, sir. I think they’re after something.”

“What?”

“I wouldn’t like to guess,” Mkoll said, but he gestured down at the chart. Just off centre in the middle of the area mapped out as the new front, Gaunt saw what he was pointing to. A mark on the map representing the estimated position of the prehuman ruins Mkoll had found while scouting just a few days before.

“I never did get a look at that, first hand. I… couldn’t find it again.”

“What? Say that again?”

Mkoll shrugged. “I saw it from a distance on patrol — that’s when I reported it to you. But since then, I’ve been unable to relocate it. The men think I’m slipping.”

“But you think…” Gaunt let the silence and Mkoll’s expression finish the sentence.

Gaunt began to strap on his holster belt. “When we get in there, prioritise getting a good assessment of that ruin. Find it again, priority. Keep this between us. Report it back to me directly.”

“Understood, colonel-commissar. To be frank, it’s an honour thing now. I know I saw it.”

“I believe you,” Gaunt said. “Feth, I trust your senses more than my own. Let’s move. Let’s go and do what they sent us here to do.”

The stone walls were lime quartz, smooth, perfectly finished, lambent. They enclosed the Inner Place like walls of water, like a section cut through the deepest ocean. As if some sublime power had cut the waters open and set aside a dry, dark place for him to walk in, unmolested by the contained pressure of the flood.

He was old, but not so old that such an idea couldn’t touch him with the feeling of older myth. It warmed his dying bones somehow. Not a thrill as such, but a powerful reassurance. To be in tune with such an ancestral legend.

The Inner Place was silent, except for the distant chiming of a prayer bell. And beyond that, a muffled clamour, far away, like an eternally restless god, or the rumble of a deep, primeval star.