Otami dropped the gory brazier. ‘Is it over?’ she asked.
Toshimichi looked over at her. ‘For now,’ he said. ‘Until another hundred years has passed and Yorozuya rises again from his grave.’ He glanced at Baron Eiji’s body. ‘He was right, Yorozuya couldn’t hurt the last Nagashiro.’ Toshimichi returned his gaze to Otami. ‘But I don’t understand. You should have been the last of our blood.’
Otami shook her head. ‘No, you were the last,’ she said. ‘You see, Baron Eiji was right about something else.’
‘I don’t think his brother really cared for women,’ she said, a sad look in her gaze.
Toshimichi thought of all the dead littered throughout the castle. ‘That is for the best. Any family you had would have simply perpetuated the curse.’ He stared at the spot where the wraith’s essence had disintegrated. ‘I am now the last. The Nagashiro line will end with me.’
‘Then Yorozuya will have no reason to again rise from the underworld.’
Vardan IV, Astra Militarum Advance Firebase Theta 82
Three months ago
Sergeant Rachain read the names of the Missing in Action to the platoon every morning.
Every morning, the list was longer than it had been the day before.
‘Emperor’s grace,’ Corporal Cully muttered to himself as the reeking, poisonous rain beat down hot around him, pounding on the canvas covering of the muster tent overhead. ‘There won’t be any of us left before we get out of here at this rate.’
‘What say, corporal?’
That was Moonface, from Three Section. Cully looked at the boy’s fat, sweating face, and he could see the fear written there in the premature lines around his young eyes.
‘Nothing, trooper,’ he said. ‘Old Cully’s just muttering to himself, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.’
Cully had no idea what Moonface’s real name was, but it didn’t really matter. On Vardan IV it didn’t really matter what anyone’s name was, at least not until they had survived their first firefight. Most of them didn’t, after all.
The steaming jungles were infested with orks, and the Reslian 45th were chewing through new recruits as fast as the troop ships could deliver them. Cully, though, he’d been deployed there for the last two years. So had Rachain, of course.
They were tight, the pair of them, and Sergeant Drachan and Corporal Gesht and the others from Two Section. They were the old guard, the backbone of Alpha Platoon, D Company. The hardened veterans.
The survivors.
Corporal Rikkards and his mob were all right too, he supposed, especially that huge lad who Cully called Ogryn, but never where he might hear him. Lopata, he thought the man’s name was. Still, they were in Beta Platoon and tended to keep themselves to themselves and didn’t mingle much with the others, so to the warp with them.
No, it was the old guard who mattered. Rachain and Cully, Drachan and Gesht. Veteran sergeants and their top corporals, that was what made a platoon. Rachain was lead sergeant of Alpha Platoon. He was top canid in D Company, and Cully was his right hand man and his best friend.
That was how you ran an army, Cully thought. Lieutenants were only there to do paperwork and take the blame if the wheels fell off an operation, and who even knew what captains did. Anyone higher up than that might as well not exist, in Cully’s opinion. It was boots in the mud that won wars, not generals polishing chairs with their arses.
‘It’s a lot of names, corporal,’ Moonface said.
Cully had forgotten the boy was there. He blinked and looked at him.
‘This is war, Moonface,’ he said. ‘People go missing, in the jungle. People die. That’s what we’re here for, in case it had escaped the memory capacity of the tiny brain that hides behind that enormous face of yours. We’re the Imperial Guard. Dying is what we’re for.’
‘Yes, corporal,’ Moonface said, and that really was the only right answer he could have given.
Cully headed up One Section, Alpha Platoon, and that made him Rachain’s top canid. No recruit boot from a lower section was going to answer him back, not if they knew what was good for them.
‘Corporal,’ a voice rasped behind him, sounding like it was coming straight out of an open grave.
That was Steeleye, Cully knew. He turned and looked at the veteran sniper. Steeleye had been in One Section since even before Cully’s time, and ever since she got her naming wound she had refused to answer to her real name anymore. Cully respected her capability enormously, but that didn’t make her any easier to look at.
‘What is it?’ he asked, feigning nonchalance as his eyes took in the ruin of the woman’s face.
Steeleye had met an ork up close, once. Very close indeed.
It had bitten her face off.
Her left eye socket had been crushed too badly for the medicae to be able to do anything except seal over the collapsed mess of broken skull with hideously shiny synthetic skin, giving her whole head a disturbingly lopsided appearance. Her right eye had been replaced with the bulbous metallic augmetic from which she took her name. She had no nose, just a ragged open snout from which thick green snot ran almost constantly, and the bone was exposed along the length of the left side of her jaw where the synth-skin had refused to take.
She carried a specially customised long-las over her shoulder, topped with a scope that interfaced so perfectly with her augmetic eye that the entire weapon became part of her body. She had recorded eight hundred and thirty seven confirmed kills on Vardan IV.
‘Stop winding the poor brat up,’ Steeleye said, nodding sideways at Moonface. ‘You ain’t been listening to the list.’
Cully shrugged. He hadn’t been listening to the morning list for the last eighteen months.
‘So?’
‘Drachan made it.’
