THIRTY-TWO

The last of the outposts had fallen, though they had been poorly manned and defended. A nuisance, no more than that, but each one a small cut, a little bleed to sap Imperial strength and leave it weak.

Or that had been the intent.

After a few weeks the South Army had swept away all resistance, imbued with a resilience and determination not seen in many months. Not since Voke’s catastrophe. It was nothing short of miraculous.

Deep into Pact territory, tall stakes lined Gannad Road. Men had been tied to them, set afire and left for the raptors to feast on. The wretched saurian birds fled at the sight and sound of the armoured column, flocking into the air with disconsolate shrieking and the flapping of leathery wings.

The rugged terrain shook the chassis of the Salamander command tank, shook its occupants too, the armoured tracks crunching the debris of destroyed buildings and human bone. Not all the bodies were Pact either. Ahead of the vehicle column, a pyre had been raised across the road and was still burning. A cohort of Diggers had set about it with shovels and picks. No corpse was buried. No rites afforded. The dead were left to smoulder on the roadside, and in the wake of the tanks the raptors returned with squawking hunger.

Darian could still smell the burning flesh on the air, though it was miles hence. As he stood up in the flatbed of the command tank, he breathed deeply to try to clear the stench from his nostrils but Agria had changed over the passing weeks. Gone were the scents of wood and earth, of leaf and stone. In their place, smoke, the tang of char, promethium and scorched human meat. It choked him, almost as much as the silver gorget around his neck and the matching cuirass clamping his body.

The thought of it, his fine trappings, drew his mind back to Lenna. He hadn’t seen her since that evening in the camp and the look in her eyes, of shame, even fear, still haunted him.

What would she think of me now? he wondered, longing for his old life and the drudgery that came with it. He had entertained a fancy, that he would take Lenna with him somehow, fix her to the coat-tails of his advancement, and she would rise with him. Reality had revealed that as a fiction dreamt of by a boy, a foolish and romantic notion. Lenna had her place, and Darian his. Rensaint had taught him that at least. Their orbits had shifted, parting like two celestial bodies never destined to realign.

The sword rattling at his side brought him back. The weapon had belonged to his father, or so he had been told. A cavalryman’s sabre, it had a chased gold hilt and an inlaid ruby pommel. A Blueblood captain had given it to him, though he had no idea how she came to have it. In any event, it was his sword now, a part of his trappings, as well as his rank. Both it and the sword hung awkwardly but the thought was short-lived as the calls came back from the line, interrupting Darian’s meditations.

Agrian sappers ranged ahead, the last of the Ohrek and the paltry scraps of the Talpa acting as guards. A hefty-looking Centaur pushed aside the largest chunks of debris, its ploughing dozer blade like a knife cutting through rock. The sappers swept for mines beforehand, and cut the coils of razor wire that would otherwise have ensnared the Centaur, shovelling aside the dead and the ruins of a sundered civilisation.

‘You should sit, captain.’ Rensaint’s words were collegiate but firm enough to be considered a command.

Darian hadn’t earned that rank. Privately, he wondered if his father had pulled strings from his deathbed. Rensaint had told him it was nominal but also necessary. The men would not aspire to a private or corporal. They would not follow a lowly trooper. But he felt it was dishonest, as wrong as the privilege the Bluebloods enjoyed over their lessers.

I am no hypocrite, thought Darian, eager to voice his discontent but ultimately deciding not to.

Instead, he asked, ‘How far to Gannad?’

‘Eight miles, give or take.’

‘Then this is our last march before we reach it?’

‘Does that scare you?’

‘I don’t fear war or death,’ he said truly, the stark evidence of it surrounding him. ‘I only want this to be over.’

‘As we all do, but please,’ Rensaint insisted gently, ‘won’t you sit?’

‘Are you worried a sniper’s bullet will kill me?’

‘Frankly, yes.’

Darian sat down.

The lord commissar had crafted a compelling narrative, the son of a beloved general of a noble house, claiming his birthright by winning the war for Agria. At every small victory, Rensaint had been present, ready with a flag to thrust into Darian’s hand, as he had done at Lodden when all of this had started. Back then, he had been a mil-serve masquerading as a soldier, his thoughts awash with aspirations of glory. He had accepted the flag without question and in a daze of self-adulation. That had changed, and now all Darian could see was the mendacity of it all. His deeds were amplified, transmuted by Rensaint’s cunning alchemy into hero worship by the ranks. An endless propaganda reel, projected against reality and designed to obscure it.

Worst of all, it was working. And Rensaint knew it. Throne, the lord commissar had told him what he would do and Darian had agreed to all of it.

‘It suits you,’ said the lord commissar, referring to Darian’s armour. A hefty belt cinched the waist, a gilded buckle in the shape of a gryfon’s head clasped it tight. Darian adjusted it, though it still didn’t sit right.

‘Belt’s a little much,’ he remarked, somewhat sourly.

‘You are a talisman,’ said Rensaint, ‘I’ve told you this many times, and a vital piece of the war effort.’

Darian looked up from his fidgeting. ‘I have to look the part, is that it?’

‘You have to be the part.’

‘I feel like a fraud.’

Aside from the crew, who were inside, the vehicle’s only other occupant was Gannika, though the commissar cadet kept her own counsel, her eyes ahead and clear of judgement as she had been taught by her drill-abbots at the Schola Progenium.

Rensaint patted Darian on the shoulder, his comrade, his mentor. His master.

‘You asked for my help, and I gave it to you. Purpose. A place. I know this is strange, but you lit a spark in these soldiers. You inspired them. A victory at Lodden, another at Mireland. Now this. Momentum is with us.’

‘I only ever wanted to serve. To fight. For Volpone, for the Imperium.’

‘And you have done. Well. You have your father’s blood, Darian,’ said Rensaint, wafting a small snuffbox under his nose to ward off the worst of the befouled air. He offered it to Darian but he politely refused.

‘Then why haven’t I seen him? If I have fought well and now inspire these men,’ he said, turning to Rensaint, ‘why has he not asked for me?’ A part of him wished he had sought out his father’s billet that night he had met with Rensaint, instead of his aimless wanderings.

The commissar’s expression darkened. ‘Illness plagues your father, Darian. I fear the Emperor will call him to His side soon. But,’ he said more warmly, ‘I know he is proud of everything you have achieved.’

‘Is he?’ Darian replied acidly. ‘I have never met him to ask it of him.’ He faced forward, his gaze alighting on the tanks in the vanguard.

Grussman rode out in front, the general’s vehicle a few places further along the convoy. Whatever he thought about Rensaint using Darian as the army’s talisman, he didn’t say. At least not to anyone’s face. Instead, he stared at the road ahead as if imagining his manifest destiny coming ever closer.

Outriders in Tauros jeeps ranged either side of the column and behind the command vehicles, a long train of armoured transports ferrying the entirety of the Volpone host and their auxiliaries. At the rear were the last of the Pavis, comprising a handful of Conquerors, heavy mortars and a reduced battalion of flame tanks.

Several of the men straddled the outer hulls of the transports, hanging on guide rails or swathes of rigging. Few spoke, consumed with their own thoughts. But many did look to him and in their eyes Darian saw something that terrified him more than any other horror he had witnessed in this war. He saw them regard him with hope.

Overhead, a Valkyrie flew in low, drawing his and everyone’s eye skywards. Another litter drop. Rensaint had them making passes all over Agria, across every warfront.

Too late now did Darian realise his notions of war and glory were falsehoods. Lie layered upon lie, every true and ugly deed muddied through the lens of propaganda, that vital engine that kept war oiled and filled men with as much hate and vainglory as they could hold. Burgeoning vessels, all of them, bound for the grind, and most a pointless death in a land with an unfamiliar sky. And here he was, the crux of that pitiless wheel.

The leaflets descended like paper planes, fluttering and riffling on the breeze. One landed on the front glacis of the Salamander and Darian reached for it. A waxy scrap of parchment printed in grainy sepia declaimed, Liberation for Agria! Victory is near!

And then Darian saw himself, arrayed in armoured panoply, a Volpone banner snapping from the standard in his hand. An artist’s rendering, idealised, distorted and propagandist in the extreme. A halo shone around Darian’s head, a laurel wreath crowning his skull. A cloak draped his shoulders like the mantle of a ruler. And beneath his slightly upraised boot – though why all heroes needed to be depicted as such, he did not know – the decapitated head of a Blood Pact damogaur, its mask cracked down the middle.

We shall overcome! it declared.

He wanted to destroy it, to crush it in his fist. He would have shed these trappings, pulled on a trooper’s uniform, taken up a lasgun and marched into the fields with the rest of the hopeful damned.

‘Wars are won with the fist,’ said Rensaint, watching him, ‘but they are waged in the heart and in the mind.’

Darian didn’t answer. He let the parchment go and it caught on the wind, dragged around in circles until it spiralled down and was ground underneath heavy tracks.

Culcis snatched a piece of parchment from the air and turned it over to look at it.

‘They are saying he slew Vauga with one blow,’ whispered Rake, peeking over the lieutenant’s shoulder. ‘Fought the damogaur single-handed.’

He half leaned from the open side hatch of the Chimera, the chill breeze lessening the heat of the inner hold.

‘Why are you whispering, you idiot?’ snapped Dresk, the dim interior lighting contorting his face so it appeared even more irritated.

‘I don’t know,’ Rake replied, scowling, ‘it sounds more scurrilous.’

‘Why is that better?’

‘I don’t know,’ he repeated, louder. ‘Why does it matter?’

‘The Emperor’s hand guides him, I think,’ said Hanmar, eyes down, rocking gently in his seat. His utterance prompted the others, even Culcis, to make the sign of the aquila.

Almost thirty Blueblood soldiers sat in companionable quietude, their minds on the war ahead.

‘Do you believe it, sir?’ asked Greiss, the burly sergeant glad to be back amongst his comrades and they glad to have him, despite their protestations to the contrary about his snoring and general odour. His wounds had healed well, the medics had said, though Culcis had seen a slight tremor to the man’s left hand that would be with him until he died. He could shoot, fight, kill. That was all that mattered.

‘It doesn’t matter what I believe,’ Culcis told them. ‘It’s glory, isn’t it. And who would not want to revel in that? “I was there,” they will say. “I was there when the son of Horator Deviers slew Vauga and won the battle of Mireland.” Men worship heroism.’

‘That’s a cold assessment, lieutenant.’

Culcis cursed silently. Aramis had the ears of a felid. She turned her stern, matriarchal gaze on him and he tried not to wither before it.

‘Perhaps these men merely wish to believe in something greater than themselves, some purpose at hand. Hope, lieutenant.’

Culcis wasn’t certain Aramis believed in any of what she’d just said, but it was an officer’s job to maintain morale as well as discipline in her troops. Her troops. Not Regara’s. His demotion, for what other word could be used to describe what had been done to him, had landed like a frag grenade, causing confusion and spitting shrapnel everywhere.

Shiller had laughed. In the three weeks since they had struck camp at Mireland, Culcis had heard him chuckling to himself ceaselessly, a rival’s misery another man’s balm to his own hurts. His mirth had lessened when he had found out Aramis had been promoted above him, but Shiller was a pragmatist and knew he had reached his ceiling. He took what he could get.

‘I didn’t say it hadn’t done good, major. The army is galvanised. For the first time in a long time, the troops believe we can win.’

‘Will win,’ she corrected him. ‘Will.’

‘Of course, sir,’ he said, folding the parchment and putting it into his breast pocket. Imperious as the artist had made Darian look in the propaganda piece, something else struck Culcis about the lad’s eyes. Sadness. He had envied Darian at Lodden, and could scarcely reconcile the affable mil-serve who had stripped and reassembled Greiss’ lasgun in the barrack house, but now he pitied him.

‘It doesn’t matter much now,’ offered the sergeant, meticulously checking his weapon’s scope and barrel. ‘He is Rensaint’s creature. He belongs to the Prefectus.’

‘A morale officer will always seek that which motivates the troops around them,’ said Aramis. ‘They will employ one of two methods – fear or inspiration. We should feel fortunate that the lord commissar has chosen the latter.’

‘It’s been effective so far,’ Hanmar conceded, opening his eyes.

‘We’ll know soon enough,’ said Aramis, her own gaze fixed on Culcis as if seeing his doubts laid bare. ‘Gannad awaits.’