Lose your way. Lose your purpose. It had taken him long enough to find that for himself, and now it seemed he had lost it again. Milo wondered why he felt so angry, and he had a nasty feeling it was because, in the final moments, he had failed.
‘You did a great work, Brin,’ said Captain Auerben.
‘Did I?’ he asked. They sat together in sunlight, on the stone platforms of the palace battlements. She preferred the air outside, the breeze coming in off the city. She breathed more easily, and used her inhaler bulb less.
Auerben nodded. She’d read the confidential after-action report, of course. All the Beati’s staff seniors had.
‘You were there at the kill,’ she said.
‘For the kill,’ he corrected her. ‘I didn’t make it.’
Auerben frowned. She was physically small, too small, it always seemed, to bear such a weight of duty and purpose on her shoulders. But then the same could be said of the Beati. Auerben’s face was angular, framed by dark hair. He’d long since stopped noticing the burn scars.
‘It’s not personal,’ she said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You never struck me as someone looking for medals or recognition,’ she said.
‘I’m not,’ he replied, and meant it.
‘Then why do you care? You were there at the kill. You were part of the kill. You helped make it happen.’
But the killing strike was not mine, he wanted to say. He kept his mouth shut, because he knew it would make him sound petulant, like a child. Like a boy.
But there it was. He hadn’t done it. He’d come close, there on the windswept shingle, but it hadn’t been enough.
Milo had foolishly come to think of it as his purpose. No, more than a purpose, a destiny. He had secretly convinced himself it was the reason the Beati had chosen him to walk at her side, as though, through some miraculous intuition, she’d known from the moment they’d met on the dustscapes of Herodor that he’d be the one. That, one day, he’d be the man who would kill the Anarch.
So she’d been wrong about that, or he had failed. Neither thought made him comfortable.
‘Has she woken?’ he asked, changing the subject.
Auerben smoothed a fold out of her mulberry long coat. She still wore the uniform of her old company, the Jovani Vanguard, just as he still wore the black camos of the Tanith. The Beati’s staff retinue had no uniform of its own. When you joined, you shed the patches and badges of your old regiment, but kept the uniform. The Beati said that this was a mark of respect to the units she had drawn her followers from, a visible demonstration of the idea that she stood for all and any. But Milo knew it was more to do with meagre resources. The retinue was like a scratch company. You wore what you stood up in. You scavenged and salvaged for kit and clothes. You lived humbly, like an esholi, making do and asking for nothing. He’d kept his pipes, his straight silver, his ghost cloak, but all of those were now gone, lost when he was captured by the Archonate at Oureppan. Mkoll had given him the blacks he was wearing, taken from stores on his return.
‘No,’ said Auerben. ‘No, she has not. She sleeps still. Oureppan, and the fight with the woe machine… they sapped her. Her light faded for a while.’
Milo nodded. ‘I’d like to see her,’ he said.
Auerben shook her head. ‘We are considering…’ she began.
‘What?’
‘Taking her back to Herodor Old Hive,’ said Auerben. ‘So she can heal in the holy waters.’
‘I think that’s a good idea,’ said Milo.
‘It is all but agreed,’ said Auerben.
‘When do we depart?’
She glanced at him. ‘No, the retinue. By “we”, I mean the retinue.’
‘Am I not part of that any more?’ he asked.
‘Yes, and always, Brin. But your place is here now.’
‘There is no place here–’
‘With the Ghosts.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I left that life behind, and I was never truly part of it. There is no place to come back to.’
‘She thinks there is,’ said Auerben. ‘This is the path you must walk now. She has said as much to me, and to several others.’
‘You said she was sleeping still, Auerben,’ said Milo. ‘How can she have said anything?’
The captain looked at him. He abruptly became very aware of her burns. They all carried scars and marks. She’d got hers on Morlond, in a pyrochemical attack. Milo had always felt that the scars he bore were the loss of Tanith, but suddenly it seemed he was about to get the real wounds he would be obliged to carry for the rest of his life.
A pulse quickened behind his breastbone, the old instinct, harbinger of misfortune.
‘You know how,’ she said quietly.
He did. He knew the way she spoke to those closest to her. In dreams. He had not dreamt like that since his return from hell. He had thought that the lapse was because she was unconscious, and that the dreams would resume as she recovered.
But, no. The others were still dreaming the dreams of islumbine. None for him.
‘Am I cast out because I failed?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Auerben. ‘I don’t think so, Brin, because in my eyes, you did not fail. But I think she has another purpose for you now, and it’s here, not at her side.’
‘Why didn’t she tell me herself?’
Auerben shrugged.
‘I think she is. I’m sorry it feels cruel.’
He rose to his feet and looked away at the distant haze on the horizon. He would not let Auerben see tears in his eyes. He would not show his hurt, his disappointment. He would not seem like a boy.
‘Did you question her choice when you came to walk with her?’ Auerben asked.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Then why question it now?’
‘I want to see her,’ he said.
‘She’s sleeping, Brin. It’s not possible.’
He heard her rise to her feet behind him.
He heard her say, ‘It’s not personal.’
Siprious, the last day of the assault. Engine-kills ablaze across the field below the bulwarks. A scent of islumbine. He sees her, shining like a star, but he can’t reach her. It’s too far, and every time he starts to run–
He woke.
‘Another,’ said the Urdeshi at the bar. ‘Another, and one for my friend here.’
I’m not your friend.
The barman poured fobraki into little glass beakers that looked like jars.
‘You Militarum?’ the Urdeshi asked.
No.
‘You look Militarum,’ the Urdeshi said, pushing one of the beakers along the bar to him. ‘But no unit pins.’
Long lost.
‘Yes, Militarum,’ said Milo, accepting the drink. It was in a jar. A washed and repurposed camo-paint jar. War had left so little intact on Urdesh, they made use of what they could find.
‘Forty-Eighth Urdeshi Light, me,’ said the man, raising his jar and studying the piss-yellow liquor with dulled eyes. ‘Here’s to you, and your service, brother.’
He muttered the toast, so off-hand it could barely be made out, and snatched back his drink.
‘The Emperor protects,’ Milo said, and followed suit.
‘Now, no, you see?’ The Urdeshi said, wiping his mouth on his frayed cuff. ‘He doesn’t. No, sir. You protect yourself. You fight for what’s yours. Tooth and nail.’
‘Of course,’ said Milo.
The man pawed at his arm.
‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘That’s the way of it. Every Urdesh-born soul learns that early. You fight for what’s yours. You’re not going to get given anything. If you want it, you fight for it. Tooth and nail. We have lived too long in the halls of war, we don’t know another way.’
On that, I agree with you.
‘So, which unit? Which unit are you, friend?’ the man asked, waving at the barman for another round.
No unit. No nothing.
‘I asked you,
which unit?’
Say something.
‘Uh, Tanith,’ said Milo. ‘Tanith First.’
The man gripped his arm.
‘Are you taking the piss?’ he asked, hot liquor-breath in Milo’s ear.
‘No.’
‘You’re one of them Tanith? The Big Man’s boys?’
No, and not for a long time, and never properly.
‘Yes.’
The man slid off the bar stool and raised his hands and his voice to the room.
‘Hey! Hey! Shut it!’ he bellowed. ‘This fellow here, this man with me. No, bloody shut up and listen! He’s Tanith! He’s one of them Ghosts! Sitting right here, my friend here! One of Gaunt’s bloody Ghosts!’
There was a commotion of cheering. The man seized Milo’s hand and forced a shake, then pushed on into an unwelcome embrace.
‘You were the ones!’ he cried. ‘You, and your fine High Lord himself! You gave Urdesh back to us!’
No. Not really.
‘Let me shake you by the hand, friend.’
You just did.
‘You’re a saviour, you are. A saviour. I never thought to meet one of you to look in the eye!’
And you still haven’t.
‘Another drink! Another drink for my fine and brave friend here!’
The barman poured more. Even the barman was flushed and smiling.
‘On the house,’ he said.
The Urdeshi raised his jar and toasted Milo.
Ask him.
‘What is that pledge?’
‘What?’
‘The thing you say when you drink?’ Milo asked. ‘I’ve heard it a lot, but I don’t know it.’
‘Here’s blood in your eyes?’
‘No, the other thing.’
‘Oh, from there to here? You mean that? From there to here. It doesn’t mean anything. Just a thing.’
Milo raised his jar.
‘From there to here.’
What was the path? It was measured in battles, in passing worlds, one scrap-fight after another. Herodor, of course, the start… Brachis City, the rimwalls of Tenzia, Ashwarati Valley, the Flood Plains, the trench lines of Eboris and of Gant Hive, the long winter on Khan III, the Siprious Assault, the ravening of Cygnus City, then Pinnacle Spire in Oureppan.
Others too. Others he had forgotten. Herodor was always the start, as it seemed to him, the start of a life he felt he’d actually chosen and not merely stumbled into. Before Herodor, nothing seemed to matter, not even Tanith. And after Pinnacle Spire, nothing mattered either.
At the Spire, he’d come close, and failed. Afterwards, at Coltrice Fastness, and then at Orchidel Island, he’d merely been present.
He dreamed of them all. They mingled, decomposed, one place decaying into another, like bodies in a shallow grave, obeying dream logic instead of factual sense. His life as an esholi, at her side. From Herodor to Urdesh. His life as an instrument of purpose. From there to here.
He didn’t dream of her. He hadn’t since Orchidel.
Or if he did, she never spoke.
He woke.
The billet was a fine set of rooms off the Circular Court of the Urdeshic Palace that had been deemed appropriate for the personal brigade of the Lord Executor. It was quiet, a blue gloom of cots in rows. Men slept, a few snoring. The place was half-empty. Several companies had been given furlough, and had gone down into Eltath to enjoy the celebration of the city’s liberation. The coloured flash of fireworks blinked at the billet windows now and then.
Milo rose. He didn’t know these people. There were far too many new faces, and pitifully few old ones. The Tanith seemed outnumbered by hard-faced Verghastites and coolly professional Belladon. It was the Tanith First, but it wasn’t. If you changed the blade and the handle, was it still the same warknife?
Too many old faces had gone. Too much of the past left buried in shallow graves on a multitude of worlds. And the faces he did know didn’t seem to know him. Varl, Ifvan, Elam, Raglon… the rest, the long-timers, the survivors… time had passed differently for them. Milo had heard the story. A transit accident on the return from Salvation’s Reach. Missing, presumed lost, adrift in the warp-ocean, ten years passing in real time.
Ten years that Milo had lived out. He was as old as them now, older than some. Full-grown, tall, a stranger. Certainly not the boy they had known, the company mascot, the lucky charm, the only civilian survivor of Tanith. He knew their faces, but they didn’t know his, and it made them awkward around him, unsure of what to say.
He’d always been a stranger.
Only the fish tattoo over his eye seemed familiar to them.
Milo walked down the row between the cots, silent as a ghost, and opened the billet door. He stepped into the night air.
It wasn’t just the separate lives they had led, nor the dislocation of lifetimes, which had returned him to them as a man they didn’t know, older than he was supposed to be. It was personal. War bred a comradeship, an intimacy that could not be faked. They had all been through wars, but not the same ones. They could all compare wounds and stories, but they weren’t the same wounds and they certainly weren’t the same stories. He could tell them of Brachis City and Ashwarati, and all the rest – not that he had much desire to do so – and they would listen, and they would be interested, but they wouldn’t know. And they, in turn, could tell him of Ancreon Sextus, and Jago, of Salvation’s Reach and even of the Tulkar Batteries here in Eltath, and he would be keen to hear, but he wouldn’t know either.
War was the only life that he and any of them had lived. It was a constant, and it was an inclusive bond. But the respectful fellowship of veteran soldiers was not the same as the blood-bond of comrades in arms who had endured in the same places together. It wasn’t a matter of details, or particular specifics, or even private jokes. To go through a battle with others, and trust them with your life, was to be tempered in the same fire. Since Herodor, he and the Ghosts had been forged in different flames. The fires looked the same to outsiders, but they burned differently and left unique patinas on mettle.
It was hard to explain unless you had known war. The experience of a soldier, of a Guardsman, of a common lasman, was universal, but it was also entirely personal. You never, and could not, love someone as much as the souls that had been through the same fire with you.
It was a blood-bond. Stronger than birthplace, stronger than a company banner, stronger than family, like an unspoken and unbreakable oath taken through experience. A bond, a pact. A blood pact.
Milo laughed at where the words in his mind had gone.
‘Laughing in the dark. Not the best indicator of sanity.’
He looked around. She’d been there all the time, sitting by a pillar in the dark. He hadn’t seen her. He didn’t know her either.
‘Something amused me,’ he said. ‘And no, it’s not.’
‘You’re Milo,’ she asked, but it wasn’t really a question. ‘I’ve heard about you. They talk about you. The boy.’
‘Not any more,’ he said.
‘Clearly.’ She got up. Her accent, that was Verghast.
‘I hated being called the boy,’ he said.
‘But you were a boy. A child.’
‘Yes. But I hated it. And it’s the only thing I haven’t managed to lose.’
‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘You obviously haven’t lost your ability to feel sorry for yourself.’
He blinked. ‘What? I’m not– Feth you.’
‘Just an observation.’
‘Feth you anyway.’
She stepped closer. She was slender and athletic, her black hair tied back. She held out her hand.
‘Zhukova,’ she said. So this was the infamous Zhukova. He’d heard of her. A Verghast-intake officer who’d accepted a demotion so she could join the scout cadre. First woman they’d let in, and it had been by Mkoll’s invitation.
He shook her hand.
‘They talk about you too,’ he said.
‘Oh, they alw
ays have,’ she replied. She paused. ‘Who’s “they”?’
He shrugged. ‘Mach Bonin. Caober. The chief mentioned you.’
The list was short, now he came to think of it. The only Ghosts he’d had any real conversations with since his return had been the scouts. Mkoll had brought Milo back in, saved him at Coltrice, done the deed when Milo had failed on the beach at Orchidel. Mkoll had brought him back, so the scouts had automatically accepted him, given him a cot, scared him up some kit. But the scouts were all loners at heart, conditioned to silence, so the conversations hadn’t been of any real substance. They hadn’t questioned him about his time with the Beati. They had just carried on, with him among them, as if he’d never been away. Was that supposed to reassure him, or was it just the detached indifference of the career scout? Mkoll was a great man, but he was hardly the expressive, paternal type.
‘In my experience,’ Zhukova said, ‘self-pity has no value. Self-recrimination, it rots you inside.’
‘Why are you telling me that?’
‘Because you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Because you feel like shit, and you don’t know who to blame. Because the world’s against you, and you’re taking it out on the only person you can. Which is you, by the way.’
‘I didn’t say anything about–’
‘You didn’t have to, it’s obvious,’ she said. She stood beside him and stared out into the midnight gloom of the court. Coloured flashes underlit the streaks of night cloud. ‘You lurk about the place like you don’t belong. You keep to yourself. You don’t smile.’
‘You’ve been watching me?’
‘Everyone’s been watching you. Most of us because we don’t know you, and we’ve heard the stories. The boy with the second sight. The piper who went to march at the Saint’s side. But your friends, the ones who remember you–’
‘I don’t really have any friends,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘They remember you,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard them talk. I’ve talked to them. Larkin and Rafflan. Obel. Bray. Shoggy. They don’t know what to say to you. They don’t know how to approach you. They want to, but there’s a look in your eyes that keeps them at bay.’
‘Look, I appreciate you’re trying to do something… I don’t know what… but you really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.
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