‘What must?’ Gaunt asked.
‘Well, we’ve all done our bit over the years, and we’ve all had our moments, but your track record puts most of us to shame. If I’d done half the things you’ve done, I’d have taken a marshal’s baton and a seat at high command years ago.’
‘Not my style.’
‘Oh, and this is? Like I said, it must be very strange for you, this easy life, these leisurely meals, the evenings at the club. It must be odd to accept that your active service is done, and this is the end of it, mentoring new-founds and growing a paunch while you fly a desk towards semi-retirement.’
‘What’s the matter?’ Blenner asked, catching up with Gaunt. He had found the elusive glove.
‘Nothing.’
‘Don’t give me that, Ibram. There’s a look on your face. Zettsman was here, just a moment ago. I saw him walking away. What did he say to you?’
‘Nothing,’ said Gaunt, again.
‘I’ll wrestle you to the ground, don’t think I won’t.’
Gaunt looked at Blenner. Blenner still hadn’t quite got used to the flash in his old friend’s new eyes.
‘Zettsman just said something,’ Gaunt replied. ‘He didn’t mean anything by it. It was just something I hadn’t really thought of before.’
‘Well, what?’ asked Blenner. ‘That you owe your entire career to my inspirational example?’
‘That part obviously came as a shock,’ said Gaunt. He smiled, but there was frost on it. ‘No, he just assumed that I was done. Didn’t give it a second thought. There was no malice meant. He just took for granted the idea that I’d done my part, and that my front-line career was over.’
‘Ah,’ said Blenner.
‘I have always assumed that, in due course, the routing order will come through, and I’ll take the First and Only back to the line. Crusade main front, secondary front, I don’t care. It never occurred to me it would be any other way.’
‘You worry too much,’ said Blenner.
‘I will get posted again, won’t I?’
‘You worry too much.’
‘But–’
‘Look, old man,’ said Blenner, patting Gaunt on the sleeve, ‘you were on the line a bloody long time. You and the Ghosts, how long was it?’
‘From the Founding? Twelve years.’
‘Twelve bloody years, old man! Twelve bloody years without rotation out of the line! Most regimental commanders would have been sending formal complaints to the top of the chain!’
‘I’d thought about it.’
‘And thank goodness they rotated you out before you had to.’
‘It’s been two years since Jago, Vay.’
‘You needed that long to recover, you old devil. The bastards nearly murdered you.’
Gaunt shrugged.
‘We’re rested now,’ he said. ‘We’ve come all this way back to Balhaut, to a world I never expected to see again, and we’ve sat around for a year, getting fat and bored and out of shape, and none of those things have filled me with anxiety, because I’ve been expecting the routing order any day.’
‘It’ll come,’ said Blenner.
‘Will it?’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ll send me back?’
‘Throne’s sake, Ibram, you’re the bloody poster boy for ridiculous Imperial heroism. They won’t be able to do without you at the front line for much longer.’
Gaunt nodded.
‘If you ask me,’ said Blenner, heading for the door, ‘I don’t know why you’re in such a bloody rush.’
Outside, there was a winter chill as hard as Gaunt’s mood. There was a touch of pink in the sky, and the light had turned the cityscape a pale, floury white. They stood on the steps and pulled on their gloves, their breath fuming.
‘I’m sorry for the delay, sirs,’ said the doorman. Gaunt’s staff car had yet to appear. Hargiter was down on the pavement, waiting for his own limousine to arrive from the parking garage. They joined him.
Hargiter was studying the skyline. So many of the spires and domes were still clad in scaffolding and canvas lids. Like a gap-toothed smile, there were pieces missing.
‘You were here, weren’t you?’ Hargiter asked.
‘Oh, it was all very different then,’ said Blenner. ‘I remember the Tower of the Plutocrat–’
‘You weren’t here, Vay,’ said Gaunt. ‘You and the Greygorians were on Hisk.’
‘Fair play,’ pouted Blenner. ‘If you had let me finish, I was going to say “I remember the Tower of the Plutocrat from the many mezzotints and engravings I have seen”. Yes, Ibram was here. In fact, I believe he’s the principal reason there isn’t a Tower of the Plutocrat any more.’
‘I doubt you recognise the place,’ said Hargiter. ‘It took such a pounding, there can’t be much left that was standing when you were here.’
‘No,’ Gaunt agreed. ‘Time passes and things change. You tend to see things with different eyes.’
‘Of course, in his case,’ said Blenner, ‘he means that literally.’
THREE
Captain Daur and the Jack of Cups
He walked to the end of Selwire Street and then, on a drafty corner, checked the directions that had been written on the scrap of paper. Daylight was bleeding away fast, and it felt as if it was taking the heat with it. He wondered if there was going to be snow. He wondered if it was going to be as heavy as the trouble he was getting into.
Left at the corner, the instructions read, along an underwalk, and then across a small court hidden behind a merchant’s townhouse and a busy garmentfab loft. Follow the six steps down from street level, the ones with a black iron handrail ending in a gryphon’s beak. There’ll be a red door, the colour of a victory medal’s ribbon.
Also, he thought, the colour that tended to edge the pages of a Commissariat charge-sheet.
There was no point thinking like that. He’d come too far to turn back. He went down the steps, and pressed the ivory button of the bell. He waited. The court above was lit by the lights of the garmentfab loft. They were working late. He could hear the clatter of stitching machines and thread-runners, like distant stub-fire.
The door opened, and a handsome woman in a green dress looked out at him. She seemed faintly amused, as if someone he couldn’t see had told her something funny just before she’d opened the door.
‘Captain,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ he replied.
‘I take it you haven’t rung the wrong bell by mistake?’
‘Not if this is Zolunder’s,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t say so above the door,’ she replied, ‘but it is. You’ll need two things to get in.’
He showed her the fat roll of bills that had been sitting like a hot coal in his trouser pocket.
‘That’s one,’ she said. ‘The other’s a name.’
‘Daur,’ said Ban Daur.
The hostess took him along a chilly corridor and downstairs into the main area of the parlour. The air smelled of quality spice from the burners, and music was provided by the cantor-finches fluttering and trilling in their delicate, suspended cages. Zolunder’s was several levels removed from the common gaming dens and rowdy-houses where enlisted men lost their pay. It was demure and exclusive, catering for officers and aristocrats.
Three games were in progress around the broad, lacquer-work tables arranged in bays around the room. Attentive girls in long gowns drifted about with trays of drinks.
‘Why did you need my name?’ Daur asked the hostess, but he knew why. Zolunder’s had an illegal hardwire link to the Munitorum database, which they used to check identities. To get past the red door and the hostess in green, you had to be who you said you were. Deception did not go down at all well.