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picked it up, more and more, until the hold shook with applause.
    Gaunt eyed the crowd. Maybe there was a future here, after all. A regiment worth the leading, a prize worth chasing all the way to glory.
    His eyes found Major Rawne in the crowd. Their eyes fixed. Rawne was not applauding.
    That made Gaunt laugh. He turned to Milo and gestured to the Tanith pipes cradled in his aide’s hands.
    “ Now you can play something,” he told him.
     
    Gaunt walked the line through the early morning, the stink of the Monthax jungle swards filling and sickening his senses. Tanith, working stripped to the waists, digging the wet ooze with entrenching tools to fill sacking, paused to nod at his greetings, exchange a few words with him, or ask cautious questions about the fight to come.
    Gaunt answered as best he could. As a commissar, a political officer, charged with morale and propaganda, he could turn a good, pompous phrase. But as a colonel, he felt a duty of truth to his men. And the truth was, he knew little of what to expect. It would be bitter, he knew that much, though the commissar part of him spared the men that thought. Gaunt spoke of courage and glory in general, uplifting terms, talking softly and firmly as his mentor, Commissar-General Oktar, had taught him all those years ago when he was just a raw cadet with the Hyrkans. “Save the yelling and screaming for battle, Ibram. Before that comes, build their morale with gentle encouragement. Make it look like you haven’t a care in the world.”
    Gaunt prided himself on knowing not only the names of all his men, but a little about each of them too. A private joke here, a common interest there. Oktar’s way, tried and tested, Emperor rest his soul these long years. Gaunt tried to memorise each muddy, smiling face as he passed along. He knew his soul would be damned the day he was told Trooper so-and-so had fallen and he couldn’t bring the man’s face to mind. “The dead will always haunt you,” Oktar had told him, “so make certain the ghosts are friendly.” If only Oktar had known the literal truth of that advice.
    Gaunt paused at the edge of a dispersal gully and smiled to himself at the memory. Beyond, some troopers were kicking a balled sack of mud around in an impromptu off-watch game. The “ball” came his way, and he hoisted it back to them on the point of his boot. Let them have their fun while it lasts. How many would be alive to play the game again tomorrow?
    How many indeed? There were losses and losses. Some worthy, some dreadful, and some plain unnecessary. Still the memories dogged his mind in these crawling hours of waiting. Praise be the Emperor that Gaunt’s losses of brave, common troopers would never be as great, as wholesale or as senseless as that day on Voltemand, a year before…

TWO
A BLOODING
     
     
    They were a good two hours into the dark, black-trunked forests of the Voltemand Mirewoods, tracks churning the filthy ooze and the roar of their engines resonating from the sickly canopy of leaves above, when Colonel Ortiz saw death.
    It wore red, and stood in the trees to the right of the track, in plain sight, unmoving, watching his column of Basilisks as they passed along the trackway. It was the lack of movement that chilled Ortiz. He did a double take, first seeing the figure as they passed it before realising what it was.
    Almost twice a man’s height, frighteningly broad, armour the colour of rusty blood, crested by recurve brass antlers. The face was a graven death’s head. Daemon. Chaos Warrior. World Eater.
    Ortiz snapped his gaze back to it and felt his blood drain away. He fumbled for his radio link.
    “Alarm! Alarm! Ambush to the right!” he yelled into the set. Gears slammed and whined, and hundreds of tons of mechanised steel shuddered, foundered and slithered on the muddy track, penned, trapped, too cumbersome to react quickly.
    By then the Chaos Space Marine had begun to move. So had its six comrades, each emerging from the woods around