Dan Abnett - First and Only

He fell silent.

'Then I'll remember not to leave you uninformed,' Gaunt said, reaching for his undershirt.

'I thank you for that. For a chulan, you're a good man, Ibram Gaunt. Like the anroth back home.'

Gaunt froze. 'What did you say?'

Dorden looked round at him sharply. 'Anroth. I said anroth. It wasn't an insult either.'

'What does it mean?'

Dorden hesitated uneasily, unsettled by Gaunt's hard gaze. The anroth… well, household spirits. It's a cradle-tale from Tanith. They used to say that the anroth were spirits from other worlds, beautiful worlds of order, who came to Tanith to watch over our families. It's nothing. Just an old memory. A forest saying.'

'Why does it matter, commissar?' said a new voice.

Gaunt and Dorden looked around to see Milo sat on a bench seat near the door, watching them intently.

'How long have you been there?' Gaunt asked sharply, surprising himself with his anger.

'A few minutes only. The anroth are part of Tanith lore. Like the drudfellad who ward the trees, and the nyrsis who watch over the streams and waters. Why would it alarm you so?'

'I've heard the word before. Somewhere,' Gaunt said, getting to his feet. 'Who knows, a word like it? It doesn't matter.' He went to pull on his undershirt but realised it was ripped and bloody, and cast it aside. 'Milo. Get me another from my quarters,' he snapped.

Milo rose and handed Gaunt a fresh undershirt from his canvas pack. Dorden covered a grin. Gaunt faltered, nodded his thanks, and took the shirt.

Both Milo and the medical officer had noticed the multitude of scars which laced Gaunt's broad, muscled torso, and had made no comment. How many theatres, how many fronts, how many life-or-death combats had it taken to accumulate so many marks of pain?

But as Gaunt stood, Dorden noticed the scar across Gaunt's belly for the first time and gasped. The wound line was long and ancient, a grotesque braid of buckled scar-tissue.

'Sacred Feth!' Dorden said too loudly. 'Where—'

Gaunt shook him off. 'It's old. Very old.'

Gaunt slipped on his undershirt and the wound was hidden. He pulled up his braces and reached for his tunic.

'But how did you get such a—'

Gaunt looked at him sharply. 'Enough.'

Gaunt buttoned his tunic and then put on the long leather coat which Milo was already holding for him. He set his cap on his head.

'Are the officers ready?' he asked.

Milo nodded. 'As you ordered.'

With a nod to Dorden, Gaunt marched out of the infirmary.

FIVE

It had crossed his mind to wonder who to trust. A few minutes' thought had brought him to the realisation that he could trust them all, every one of the Ghosts from Colonel Corbec down to the lowliest of the troopers. His only qualm lay with the malcontent Rawne and his immediate group of cronies in the third platoon, men like Feygor.

Gaunt left the infirmary and walked down the short com-panionway into the barrack deck proper. Corbec was waiting.

Colm Corbec had been waiting for almost an hour. Alone in the antechamber of the infirmary, he had enjoyed plenty of time to fret about the things he hated most in the universe. First and last of them was space travel.

Corbec was the son of a machinesmith who had worked his living at a forge beneath a gable-barn on the first wide bend of the River Pryze. Most of his father's work had come from log-handling machines; rasp-saws, timber-derricks, trak-sleds. Many times, as a boy, he'd shimmied down into the oily service trenches to hold the inspection lamp so his father could examine the knotted, dripping axles and stricken synchromesh of a twenty-wheeled flatbed, ailing under its cargo of young, wet wood from the mills up at Beldane or Sottress.

Growing up, he'd worked the reaper mills in Sottress and seen men lose fingers, hands and knees to the screaming band saws and circular razors. His lungs had dogged with saw mist and he had developed a hacking cough that lingered even now. Then he'd joined the militia of Tanith Magna on a dare and on top of a broken heart, and patrolled the sacred stretches of the Pryze County nalwood groves for poachers and smugglers.

It had been a right enough life. The loamy earth below, the trees above and the far starlight beyond the leaves. He'd come to understand the ways of the twisting forests, and the shifting nal-groves and clearings. He'd learned the knife, the stealth patterns and the joy of the hunt. He'd been happy. So long as the stars had been up there and the ground underfoot.

Now the ground was gone. Gone forever. The damp, piney scents of the forest soil, the rich sweetness of the leaf-mould, the soft depth of the nalspores as they drifted and accumulated. He'd sung songs up to the stars, taken their silent blessing, even cursed them. All so long as they were far away. He never thought he would travel in their midst.

Corbec was afraid of the crossings, as he knew many of his company were afraid, even now after so many of them. To leave soil, to leave land and sea and sky behind, to part the stars and crusade through the Immaterium. That was truly terrifying.

He knew the Absalom was a sturdy ship. He'd seen its vast bulk from the viewspaces of the dock-ship that had brought him aboard. But he had also seen the great timber barges of the mills founder, shudder and splinter in the hard water courses of the Beldane rapids. Ships sailed their ways, he knew, until the ways got too strong for them and gave them up.

He hated it all. The smell of the air, the coldness of the walls, the inconstancy of the artificial gravity, the perpetual constancy of the vibrating Empyrean drives. All of it. Only his concern for the commissar's welfare had got him past his phobias onto the nightmare of the Glass Bay Observatory. Even then, he'd focussed his attention on Gaunt, the troopers, that idiot warrant officer – anything at all but the cavorting insanity beyond the glass.

He longed for soil under foot. For real air. For breeze and rain and the hush of nodding branches.

'Corbec?'

He snapped to attention as Gaunt approached. Milo was a little way behind the commissar.

'Sir?'

'Remember what I was telling you in the bar on Pyrites?'

'Not precisely, sir… I… I was pretty far gone.'

Gaunt grinned. 'Good. Then it will all come as a surprise to you too. Are the officers ready?'

Corbec nodded perfunctorily. 'Except Major Rawne, as you ordered.'

Gaunt lifted his cap, smoothed his cropped hair back with his hands and replaced it squarely again.

'A moment, and I'll join you in the staff room.'

Gaunt marched away down the deck and entered the main billet of the barracks.

The Ghosts had been given barrack deck three, a vast honeycomb of long, dark vaults in which bunks were strung from chains in a herringbone pattern. Adjoining these sleeping vaults was a desolate recreation hall and a trio of padded exercise chambers. All forty surviving platoons, a little over two thousand Ghosts, were billeted here.

The smell of sweat, smoke and body heat rose from the bunk vaults. Rawne, Feygor and the rest of the third platoon were waiting for him on the slip-ramp. They had been training in the exercise chambers, and each one carried one of the shock-poles provided for combat practise. These neural stunners were the only weapons allowed to them during a crossing. They could fence with them, spar with them and even set them to long range discharge and target-shoot against the squeaking moving metal decoys in the badly-oiled automatic range.

Gaunt saluted Rawne. The men snapped to attention.

'How do you read the barrack deck, major?'

Rawne faltered. 'Commissar?'

'Is it secure?'

There are eight deployment shafts and two to the drop-ship hanger, plus a number of serviceways.'