Cuu was a bad ploin and no mistake. A competent trooper, with abilities that could probably take him into either sniper or scout speciality, but he had a mean streak as deep and obvious as the scar that split his face from top to bottom. At Cirenholm, he’d been accused of the brutal rape-murder of a civilian and had come within sniffing distance of a firing squad before Gaunt had got him off. Innocent of that, perhaps, but guilty of so many other things. The plain fact was that he liked killing things. You got troopers like that in the Guard sometimes.

  Gaunt had considered transferring Cuu out of ten platoon but knew that would undermine Criid’s authority. The Ghosts would read that as him giving Criid an easy ride. He’d told her she’d have to deal with him.

  Criid took Cuu’s gaze without blinking. ‘Let’s review,’ she said, slowly and clearly. ‘You’re a member of ten platoon. I’m the squad officer. I’ve just given Ten a direct order to make use of this transit time to service kit and weapons, and everyone else is happy to do that. Aren’t you? Lubba?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ grunted the gang-tattooed flamer bearer.

  ‘Nessa?’

  The squad’s sniper, permanently deaf from shell-damage at the hive, signed back ‘yes’.

  ‘Jajjo? Hwlan? Any problems with my order?’

  Jajjo, a mixed-race Verghastite with dark brown skin and darker eyes shrugged and smiled. Ten platoon’s Tanith scout Hwlan nodded with a brisk ‘Yes, m-sarge!’

  ‘Only you seem to have a problem, Cuu.’

  ‘Seems so. Sure as sure.’ He smiled. It was the most unsettling smile in the Imperium. The most evil servants of Chaos would have killed to have a smile that lethal.

  Tona Criid was not smiling. Deep inside, she was trembling. Her greatest fear was not death or torture or grievous injury. It was failure. Failure to live up to the opportunity Gaunt had given her. She would make this platoon her own. Or die trying. And die trying, seemed more likely the case.

  ‘Do it now,’ she said.

  Cuu deliberately dropped his pack and weapon onto the floor and took out a lho-stick, which he lit with a tinder box. ‘You know what I hate,’ he said, blowing smoke at her. ‘What I hate is the fact that you talk to me like I was one of your gakking kids.’

  ‘Oh feth me!’ Trooper Vril whispered to Hwlan. ‘There’s gonna be a fight now.’

  ‘Sure as sure,’ Hwlan whispered back sarcastically.

  Unless you were going to make nice, you didn’t mention Criid’s kids. Yoncy and Dalin. They weren’t hers biologically, just war-waifs she’d rescued from the killing grounds at Vervunhive and looked after ever since. She and her man Caffran were parents to them, and when they were off in action, the two kids were looked after by the regiment’s camp followers. It was the Tanith First’s one little happy-ending tale. Criid and Caffran, true love, kids saved from death… you couldn’t make feth like that up.

  ‘What did you say, trooper?’ asked Criid.

  ‘Here we go,’ murmured Vril.

  ‘Ah feth it,’ whispered Hwlan. He slid the haft of his nine seventy out to use as a baton. If it came to fists, he’d get in on Criid’s side. Cuu was a vicious worm. The scout saw that DaFelbe and Skeen both looked ready to jump in, and Nessa had got to her feet too.

  But if it went off, Hwlan thought, would it help to get involved? Would Criid thank them? Probably not. She’d want to assert her command over Cuu alone, to make the point. Hwlan could feel Vril’s hand on his arm, pulling him down. Vril clearly thought the same way too.

  Cuu picked smoke-weed off his lip. ‘I said I don’t like it when you talk to me like I was one of your kids. Why? Did that upset you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Criid smoothly. ‘But I notice you haven’t shown respect to my rank since this conversation began. Would a “sergeant” or a “ma’am” really kill you?’

  ‘Gakked if I’m gonna find out,’ Cuu said, winking at the troopers around them.

  ‘Don’ you talk that way,’ said a voice from the back of the wagon.

  ‘What?’ sneered Cuu.

  ‘Don’ talk that way. Don’ be doin’ that.’ It was Kolea. He’d risen, slowly, and was staring at Cuu. There was a vague animosity in his eyes, but his face was blank. The headwound he’d taken at Ouranberg had made him very slow and direct. His mouth slurred words.

  ‘Sit down, you dimwit,’ said Cuu archly. ‘Go hunt for your brain. I hear the loxatl have it in a little glass trophy box.’

  Lubba, staunchly loyal to Kolea, threw himself at Cuu with a snarl, but Criid blocked him and kicked him down on his arse.

  ‘Full marks for heart,’ she told him. ‘But I won’t have brawling in this platoon.’

  ‘Yes ma’am,’ Lubba said.

  ‘Why you bein’ so bad?’ Kolea asked Cuu. He shuffled forward, screwing up his eyes in confusion.

  ‘It’s all right, Gol. You sit down,’ Criid said.

  ‘Sit down, sarge?’

  ‘Yeah, you go sit down and I’ll deal with this.’

  Kolea wavered. ‘You sure, sarge? This… this man here was being bad.’

  Criid knew that Kolea had been struggling to remember Cuu’s name, and had failed. She also knew he only called her ‘sarge’ because he could see her pins.

  ‘Sit down, Trooper Kolea.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Criid looked back at Cuu. ‘Follow my order and service your kit.’

  ‘Or what?’

  Criid pushed a hand out towards Cuu’s face, and he dodged back, but it was a ruse. The real sting was Criid’s left leg, sweeping round at knee height.

  Cuu crashed over onto the straw-covered floor, hard. Criid was on him in a heartbeat, one hand gripping his hair and yanking his head back, one knee in the small of his back.

  ‘Or I exert my authority,’ she said.

  Cuu responded with a gender-related obscenity. In reply, the base of her hand against the back of his head, she smashed him nose-first into the decking. There was a crack that made them all wince, and it wasn’t wood.

  ‘You gakking bitch!’ Cuu coughed as she yanked his head back again by the hair. Blood was running from his broken nose.

  ‘You wanna go again, Trooper Cuu?’

  ‘Gakking b–OW!’

  Another headslam.

  ‘Oooh, that’s gonna smart!’ Vril gasped.

  ‘I can keep going until we get to where we’re headed and then hand you off to Gaunt…’ said Criid, digging her knee into his spine and making him cry out, ‘…or you can service your kit and your weapon and call me by rank. What do you say, Cuu? What do you gakking say?’

  ‘I’ll service my kit, sergeant!’

  ‘…is the right answer. Get up.’

  She got off him and he rolled over, his face dripping with blood.

  ‘Off you go, Cuu.’

  Cuu got up, and took his pack and lasgun off to the farthest corner of the wagon. The members of the platoon slow-handclapped and Criid performed a little bow.

  ‘What don’t you do?’ she asked.

  ‘Mess with you!’ Lubba called out.

  ‘Excellent. Carry on.’

  ‘Everything okay in here?’ Feygor called, pushing open the dividing shutter between the wagons.

  ‘Just fine,’ said Criid.

  ‘What’s wrong with Cuu?’ Feygor asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Should he be bleeding like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Feygor shrugged. ‘Rawne says keep it down.’

  ‘We are.’

  ‘Okay then,’ said Feygor and left.

  Criid walked down the rocking wagon and sat herself beside Kolea. ‘That was nice what you did,’ she said.

  ‘What’d I do?’ he asked, puzzled.

  ‘Never mind,’ she sighed.

  Gaunt rode the A train. His carriage had once been a coach-class car, but its luxury days were long passed. Even so, he knew that the worn upholstery of the compartments was a fething sight sweeter than the transit arrangements of his Ghosts.

  He sat in a compartment with Buzzel, Chief Medic Dorden, Hark and the regiment’s chaplain, ayatani Zweil. Gaunt’s adjutant, Corporal Beltayn, waited at the door.

  Zweil and Hark were arguing about something, but Gaunt wasn’t paying attention. He gazed out of the window, watching the vales and fields and woods and townships of Mittel Aexe flicker past.

  Doc Dorden leaned over and tapped Gaunt’s knee.

  ‘Credit for them?’

  Gaunt smiled at the grey-haired medicae. ‘Not a lot of anything, to be honest. Just trying to focus.’

  ‘An empty mind is like a pot for Chaos to piss in,’ said Zweil. Buzzel looked shocked.

  ‘Just kidding,’ said the old priest, chortling into his long, wispy beard. He took out a clay pipe and began to stoke it with weed.

  ‘This is a non-smoking area,’ said Buzzel.

  ‘I know that!’ snapped Zweil testily, though he clearly didn’t. He got up. ‘I’m off to bless the poor bastards,’ he announced, and stomped off down the connecting corridor.

  ‘Your chaplain is an… unusual man,’ said Buzzel.

  ‘No kidding,’ said Hark.

  Gaunt returned his gaze to the landscape outside. Low, hilly country broken by stands of trees and small lakes. It would have been almost picturesque if not for the weather. Rain splashed along the windows of the speeding train.

  ‘We’re heading for Rhonforq, you say?’ Dorden asked Buzzel.

  ‘Yes, doctor.’

  ‘Which is the gateway to the Naeme Valley?’

  Buzzel nodded. ‘The Naeme roughly demarcates the front line in the central sector.’

  ‘It’s dug-in?’ Hark asked.

  ‘Extensively,’ said Buzzel, ‘and has been for a long time.’

  Hark scratched an earlobe. ‘So the front’s as stagnant as we’ve been told?’

  ‘We make advances,’ Buzzel said firmly.

  ‘And so do they,’ said Gaunt. ‘As I understand it, there’s a stretch of territory thirty kilometres wide and a thousand long that has remained disputed for forty years. That’s one hell of a no-man’s land.’

  Buzzel shrugged. ‘It’s been a hard war.’

  ‘An impasse,’ said Hark. ‘Which we’re going to break. I take it you’ll be using the Tanith to their strength as stealth infiltrators?’

  Buzzel looked confused. ‘I understood you were front-line troops. That’s where you’re being sent. The front line.’

  Hark looked at Dorden and both men sighed. Gaunt beckoned Beltayn through the compartment window.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Can you patch me a link to the lord general?’

  ‘’Fraid not, sir. Something’s awry. Vox is down.’

  ‘When we get to Rhonforq, find Mkoll and tell him to move a recon team forward to the line. I want a detailed intelligence capture before we proceed.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  Gaunt looked at Buzzel. ‘My Ghosts will fight to the last: harder, braver and stronger than any soldiers you have ever seen. But I will not see them wasted in the meatgrinder of a slow trench war. They have skills, and I’ll have them use those skills.’

  Buzzel smiled amiably. ‘I’m sure the supreme commander understands that, sir,’ he said.

  The train slowed. Outside, Gaunt saw that the landscape had begun to change. The vegetation looked grey and sick, and acres of farmland had been rutted down to nothing but spongy brown waste. Stands of woodland had been felled leaving acres of dead stumps like badly planned cemeteries. They passed at least one team of timbermen denuding a hillside, their big, blacked-iron logging engine sheeting sparks and woodpulp up into the overcast sky. The roads were thick with drab motor transport and heavy carts drawn by oxen and hippines.

  Towns and villages were scruffy and neglected, windows shuttered and boarded. Some had earthworks or pales raised around their eastern fringes, one in five had the steel mast of a shield generator rising from its midst. Apart from the masts and the motor vehicles, there was no other sign of metal in commonplace use.

  They passed through one village where bells and horns were sounding. The westerly wind was bringing down not only rain but also a thin, yellowish smoke. Townsfolk in the street went about their business in canvas masks and rebreathers.

  They clanked on through mercy stations – tent cities raised to cope with the exodus of injured, generated at the front. By Gaunt’s estimation, they were still over a hundred kilometres from the real front. The war was so old, so chronic, it had spilled back this far.

  He could smell it. War has its own smell. Not fyceline, not promethium, not water or mud or blood, not rank soil or ordure, not even the pungent decay of death itself. All of those scents were in the air.

  War had a metallic tang. You could almost isolate it. A mineral smell quite subtracted from the diverse secondary odours it generated. A smell of steel and hate. Pure, repellent, universal.

  Gaunt had smelled it on Balhaut, on Voltemand, on Caligula, Fortis Binary, Bucephalon, Monthax, Verghast, Hagia, Phantine and all the others. That diamond-tough scent of pure war, lurking behind the sweaty, more obvious perfumes that decorated human conflict.

  This was going to be hard. Aexe Cardinal was going to cost them. It was in the air.

  War. Waiting for them. Old and hard and cunning, like a wily, immortal beast, ready to pounce.

  Ready to kill.

  TWO

  The wounded river

  ‘From Bassin to Seronne, the rural valley commends itself to the visitor, and in clement season there are many rewards to be had: the old parish churches, the cafes and inns, and the undemanding footpaths and bridle ways of the tranquil riverbanks.’

  – Fweber’s Touring Guide to Mittel Aexe, 720th edition

  The ground was peppered with ancient, rain-filled shell holes for as far as he could see. A pock-marked surface, like the cratered plain of some dead moon. The wet soil was greenish grey and the pools were dark emerald or black, though some were skinned with frothy white scum. Nothing seemed to stand taller than the height of a man’s shoulder. A few poles and staves jutted from the mud, the occasional scourged remains of a tree, iron hoop-stakes and piquets and coils of barbed wire.

  The sky was leaden and bulging with creased blotches of grey and yellow clouds. To the east, a dark haze of rain fuzzed the horizon into a filthy smudge.

  Mkoll lowered his field scope and spat on the ground. The air was heavy with a dusty, chalky smell that got into the back of the throat. He could feel the grit abrading his teeth. It was the smell of dead land, of earth that had been disturbed and pulverised and thrown over so many times that it leaked its powdered essence into the air.

  ‘Well, this is fething lovely,’ muttered Bonin sarcastically. Mkoll glanced round at him and nodded. It was disturbing, this place. Tanith scouts had an unerring sense of direction, but the sheer featureless morass around them made it feel like they were nowhere at all. All of his men seemed uneasy: the usually cheerful Bonin, Caober from Gaunt’s own platoon, Hwlan from ten, Baen from Varl’s mob. Even Mkvenner, Corbec’s lean, taciturn scout from two platoon, normally the model of composed calm, seemed unsettled.

  Caober had a small map that Gaunt had given him. He held it up, flicking his index finger against the paper in frustration. ‘Sitwale Wood,’ he said at last.

  ‘Sitwale Wood?’ Hwlan echoed, stressing the second word.

  Caober shrugged. ‘The levelling glories of field artillery,’ he said, ‘beneath which all things are rendered equal.’

  There was a track of sorts, rutted and mired. The scout party moved off behind Mkoll, following it north-east. About a kilometre further on, and the track made a crossroads marked by a temporary sign. ‘55th/9th rg’ pointed one arm. ‘916th/88/ac’ read another. ‘R’forq ASHQ & 42nd rg’ announced the arm that pointed the way they had come. The last one, pointing west, read ‘Real Life’.

  ‘Company!’ Baen called. There were lights on the track behind them, and the sound of labouring engines. Mkoll waved his men off the track.

  A jolting field truck, smeared in mud, rumbled past, turning east. Behind it came a staggering file of artillery tractors towing 0.12 feldkannone pieces. Aexe Alliance infantry in filthy green greatcoats walked beside the column. Their heads were covered with canvas bag-hoods with rough-cut slits for eyes and mouths. Most carried metal pry-bars or coils of wire matting to free up wheels when they bogged in. The hooded men reminded Bonin of the scarecrows used on the fruit farms back home in County Cuhulic. No one paid any attention to the Tanith team.

  Twenty tractors, thirty, thirty-five, then twelve high-sided haycarts piled with shells that had been jacketed for protection in wicker sleeves. The carts were drawn by hippine teams, ten to a cart. These beasts were thin and wild-eyed, and stank of disease as they whinneyed and snorted along, every step a struggle.

  After the slow carts came infantry, trudging under the weight of full field kit, their heads wrapped up in their dirty scarves. Mkoll watched an officer step out of file and stand by the signpost waving his troops around in the right direction.

  After a few minutes, the officer turned and walked over to the Tanith. His greatcoat was stiff with mud and when he pulled the scarf away from his dirty face, Mkoll was shocked to see how young he was.

  ‘Lost?’ he began. Then he noticed Mkoll’s rank pins and made a more formal salute.

  ‘No,’ said Mkoll, stepping up. ‘Sergeant Mkoll, Tanith First.’

  ‘You’re from the Imperial expedition?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Lieutenant Fevrierson, 30th battalion, Genswick Foot.’ His accent was tight and clipped. Aexegarian. ‘It’s a pleasure to see you. Where is your main force?’

  ‘Moving into reserve,’ replied Mkoll. ‘Our commander’s sent us up to scope the leading edge.’