Cully could have kicked himself for a fool for bringing it up. That had been before.
Before Drachan made the list.
Before Gesht lost her mind to grief.
‘Don’t mean anything,’ he assured her. ‘We’re good.’
‘We’re good,’ Gesht agreed, and the moment passed.
Cully remembered the day Steeleye had come and told him Drachan had made the list. He remembered going to Gesht’s tent with his illicit flask of sacra, to see how she was.
Deranged, that was how she had been. He had found her field-stripping her lasgun and anointing its few moving parts with her own blood as she recited the Emperor’s Litany of Vengeance over and over again. She’d had plenty of blood to work with, what with the mess she had made of her left arm.
The scars were still plain to see even now, hard ridges of white tissue against her tanned skin where she had half-flensed her own forearm with her combat knife in a furious outpouring of grief and rage. Cully had had to restrain her, he remembered, pin her down before she bled to death, and call in a very private favour from their squad medic to keep it quiet. He had drunk the sacra himself, afterwards.
He had kept her secrets, for all that he should have made a report, and he honestly thought that was the only thing that had stopped her from killing him in his sleep when she was nominally recovered. He had seen her in her weakness, in her shame and her torment, and he knew that didn’t sit easy with her.
She had never been quite right in the head since, all the same.
He keyed the vox to the platoon channel.
‘Cully to Rachain,’ he said. ‘One Section, coming up on your eight.’
‘Two Section,’ Gesht said. ‘Five hundred to the nine, closing.’
‘Three Section,’ Corporal Dannecker chimed in. ‘Closing on the four, eight hundred.’
‘Acknowledged,’ Rachain said. ‘Form up on the command squad.’
The patrol fan began to close in on the command position, the veterans moving silent as ghosts through the crushing humidity of the jungle. The fresh recruits in each unit, the raw boots who had yet to earn their names, made enough noise for everyone.
Cully winced as he heard Webfoot from his own section trip over an exposed root and land in a stinking pool with a splash. He turned with an angry gesture, but Steeleye already had the stupid boot back up on his feet with her iron-hard arm around his throat. She jabbed him hard in the ribs, doubling him over, and met the corporal’s eyes over the boy’s back. There was no emotion on her ruined face, but Cully caught her meaning all the same.
Emperor’s sake! that look said, and Cully had to agree with her.
Webfoot eventually stopped gagging, and they moved on.
He didn’t trip again.
The whole patrol platoon made camp together that night, on a relatively dry knoll that rose above the endless mud and filth of the jungle floor. Rachain had ordered a double watch, and Cully supposed that was sensible even if it meant no one got anywhere near enough sleep that night.
Double watch or not, though, come the dawn Webfoot was dead all the same.
Cully was roused from his bedroll by Hangnail screaming.
She was a boot from Two Section, one of Gesht’s, and she was the one who found him.
You poor bitch, Cully thought. Welcome to the sodding Guard.
Cully himself was a hardened veteran and he had seen worse, but not by much. Hangnail wasn’t, and she hadn’t, and she was on her knees puking even as the platoon came to full alert all around her.
Webfoot had been disembowelled.
He was hanging from a great tree, maybe a hundred yards from the camp, with his intestines dangling from his open belly in great stinking purple ropes. His hands had been bound in front of his chest with the stiffening fingers spread in an awful travesty of the sign of the Aquila.
They had set a double guard, and still no one had heard a thing.
‘Orks ain’t quiet like that,’ Corporal Dannecker said softly to Cully, when there was no one else close enough to hear. ‘No ork did that.’
Cully just nodded slowly. He had been thinking much the same thing, and he would have bet a month’s pay that Rachain was thinking it too.
‘Don’t be saying things like that in front of the boots,’ he cautioned the junior corporal. ‘They’re spooked enough as it is. The first person I hear so much as whisper eldar is getting my bayonet up his arse, you understand me?’
‘So what are we saying it was, then?’ Rachain asked from behind them.
Cully managed not to jump. Dannecker didn’t.
Rachain could move quiet as the night, when he wanted to.
‘Don’t know, sergeant,’ Dannecker said, too quickly.
Cully winced. That wasn’t the right answer.
Rachain belted Dannecker in the guts almost too fast to see, knocking the younger man to his knees in the mud.
‘Orks, you bloody idiot,’ he said. ‘What else could it be? It was orks. We’re here fighting orks, scouting orks, so it was orks. Is that abundantly clear, you stupid bastard?’
‘Yes, sergeant,’ Dannecker wheezed, trying to get his breath back.
