Soldiers of the Imperium, page 25
Obeysekera looked back out over the erg and he saw what Gunsur saw.
‘You are right. I did not know there could be so many yellows, either.’
Gunsur jerked and looked to the captain. ‘I didn’t mean to speak aloud, sir.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Obeysekera grinned, although only his eyes showed above his face cloth. ‘I am glad to have had it pointed out to me.’
The captain looked back, at the steep slip face descending before them and the rising and falling waves of sand stretching into the distance with the smoothed-out mounds of the Tabaste on the horizon.
‘You know, sometimes, I think that if only there weren’t so many things trying to kill us all the time, the galaxy could be a beautiful place.’ Obeysekera grinned again, but it was bleaker this time, as his eyes squinted into the distance. ‘But it seems like we were made only for war.’ He nodded towards the Sand Sea. ‘So it’s good to see somewhere that war has left no marks upon, eh, Gunsur?’
The trooper nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’ He hesitated, then continued. ‘You know, sir, I’ve seen some sights in my time – the Kefahuchi Reach, the sun rising over the Caducades, the Twelve Sisters – but this is as pretty as any of them.’ He fell silent for a moment as he stared out at the desert and all its myriad shades of yellow below the vivid blue arch of the sky, then lowered his gaze. ‘You’re right, sir. It’s good to see somewhere peaceful. But now we’re here, I s’pose it won’t stay peaceful for long.’ Gunsur looked back to Obeysekera. ‘Shall I start her up, sir?’
Obeysekera was about to give his permission, when he stopped. He glanced along the ridgetop, at the other two Venators poised there, on a solid but shifting wave, remote from the sound or sight of war.
It was quiet here. Peaceful.
The realisation came upon him as he looked at the Sand Sea.
It was pure, unmarked. If any had perished near them, enemy or Guard, the desert had covered all trace.
In the silence, the only sound the ticking of the plasteel expanding under the sun’s lash, Obeysekera heard the echo of a galaxy at peace. Cadia, lost and broken. Cadia had been the eternal fortress against Chaos, its people the warriors who kept the rest of the Imperium safe through the sacrifice of their lives. He had known nothing but war; his world had known nothing but war until it died. But sitting there in silence, atop the still wave in the Sand Sea, Obeysekera heard a still, small voice, as quiet as his blood, whisper peace.
‘Wait here.’ Obeysekera held his hand up to Gunsur, unstrapped the webbing, then swung his legs out of the Venator and stepped down onto the sand. The dune, softer than sea mud, swallowed his feet up to the ankles.
Inside him, a voice – the voice of discipline and duty and the veteran Guardsmen who had trained him – was muttering madness. But another voice, quieter but more compelling, told him to walk.
Obeysekera walked. Pulling his boots out of the sand, he waded along the ridgetop. As he did so, the sand, pulled and pushed by his passing, started to shift, sliding in small and then greater sheets down the slip face of the dune.
And the sand began to sing.
At first it was gentle, a sound akin to the wind blowing through the paluwood groves of Cadia. Then it grew and deepened, taking on the register of the Caducades Sea breaking upon the hundred-mile-long shingle breakwater that protected the Manhof Reach from the sea’s full fury.
Had protected, Obeysekera corrected himself.
But the sound continued, deepening, broadening, assuming overtones that hearkened to the mournful music of the tsiranope, the ancient pipes of Kasr Gesh, his home.
The desert was singing.
Obeysekera looked up as he walked along the ridge. He had not realised it – and would have taken the other direction if he had – but he was heading towards the Venator that was carrying Commissar Roshant. For a moment, Obeysekera thought of turning round and returning to his vehicle. But he wanted to hear more.
Wading along the ridgetop, the desert singing its bass threnody for the galaxy, Obeysekera walked in wonder.
As he approached the waiting Venator, he realised that part of the reason he had kept going was that he wanted to know if they heard the song too. Perhaps he was going mad. But the gestures from Ha and Lerin, and Ensor and Uwais in the back of the Venator, pointing to their ears, told that they too were hearing what Obeysekera was hearing. Some of the faces were looking alarmed, but Obeysekera raised his hands, palms downward, to let them know all was well. With the song resounding in his lungs and in his blood, he was loath to break its music by speaking through the squad vox-channel.
‘What in the Emperor’s name is that cursed moaning sound?’
The voice, all too clear, cut into his ear from the micro-bead in his shoulder pauldron. Obeysekera had a link to the squad vox-channel in his helmet and another embedded into his carapace armour should he have to remove the former.
Obeysekera held up his hand, but Commissar Roshant got out of the Venator and started struggling towards him along the ridgetop. Instead of accepting that each step would see his boot sink into the sand and adopting a wading motion, Roshant was trying to kick a channel through the sand and sinking deeper with each step. Obeysekera waved at Roshant, trying to get him to stop, but the commissar had his head down as he ploughed forwards. He was setting off larger and larger slides of sand down the slip face of the dune. Obeysekera looked beyond Roshant. The sand was slumping towards him, at least two yards of the ridge collapsing towards the desert floor.
It would be like being caught in an avalanche.
A voice, tiny, treacherous, whispered, ‘Let him.’ But Obeysekera pushed forward, trying to run through the sand, and the desert moaned its song as he went, the sound rising to a rumble that sank down into the deep on the far side of the dune. As he rushed onwards, Obeysekera called into his vox-bead, ‘Stay still, you idiot, stay still.’
But Roshant was talking to himself over the vox-channel, not hearing Obeysekera’s order. Some small corner of the captain’s mind, a corner that never could be anything other than an officer of the God-Emperor’s Imperial Guard, noted that he would have to cite the commissar for failure to follow correct vox-protocol. The rest of Obeysekera’s mind, and his body, was occupied with getting to Roshant before the collapsing ridge caught up with him.
The song of the sand grew louder, deeper. As Obeysekera pushed himself forwards, he realised that it had taken on a new tone, a sub-bass note that he felt in his bones as much as he heard. It was the sound of the heart of a world breaking, and he had heard it before.
It was all that he could do to stop the memory overwhelming him, as it had done through so many long night watches, when sleep would only come again if he drank himself into unconsciousness. But now the sound came in the waking hours, under the brightest light, beneath the beat of the sun, and it was rising from the sand: the song of the desert.
Roshant had never heard that sound. But nevertheless he paused, looking around him, suddenly aware that something was happening.
Obeysekera called to him, by voice and vox. ‘Get back from the edge.’
Roshant, hearing him at last, looked towards Obeysekera, now only a few yards away, and then, realisation dawning, back the way he had come just as the collapsing sand reached him.
The commissar threw out a despairing hand as the world fell away beneath him, sucking him down. Obeysekera reached and grabbed the out-thrust arm, fingers locking around Roshant’s wrist. Digging his feet into the ridge, he started to pull the commissar back from the brink.
And then the sand collapsed beneath Obeysekera.
The two men fell, tumbling downwards, the sand falling with them, over them.
Some reflex kept Obeysekera from releasing the one solid grip he had, the hold on Roshant’s wrist, as he fell, although the arm twisted and turned and pulled as Roshant slipped and slid down the face, Obeysekera falling after him.
The sand fell with them, over them, under them.
The world went yellow.
Sand in his face, his ears, his eyes, his mouth. His nose.
Obeysekera, feeling the sand blocking his airways, tried to hold his breath while with his free hand he reached for the rebreather mask. He continued to tumble down the slope, the world turning over, the sand in his eyes and ears, all the while keeping hold of Roshant with one hand while the other pushed the rebreather over his mouth and nose.
The fall was slowing.
They had stopped rolling. Now they were just sliding. But the face of the sand dune was sliding with them, as if they were riding one of the waves of the Caducades as it broke on the shore, the surf washing over them.
The sand, heavy, crushing, immobilising, covered Obeysekera, layering over his legs, his chest, his face, his arm.
The world went yellow once more, then dark.
He could not move. He was fixed in place, as if rockcrete had been poured over him rather than sand. The only movement he could make was to squeeze the wrist he still held, but there was no response from Roshant.
The rebreather hissed. Its vents were being clogged with sand. Soon, there would be no air.
Obeysekera, with the air he had in his lungs and his body, with the last of the air of the rebreather before it failed, pushed with every muscle, straining upwards; up against the weight of the sand, up towards the light, towards the air. He pushed with all the strength he had, pushing against death.
Nothing moved.
Nothing moved at all.
He was going to die.
A memory of training in the Rossvar Mountains: the old instructor telling his raw Whiteshields that, if caught in an avalanche, they had five minutes before they suffocated, drowning in their own dead air. The old man had smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said, ‘it’s a quiet death.’
Obeysekera did not want to die. Not now. Not here.
But even as fear threatened to unman him, he heard again the song of the sand. Now, with the sand surrounding him, he felt its call in every bone and fibre of his being, so that it seemed that he too was joining in the music of the desert.
Where before fear had surged up hot through his gut, now a great peace flowed through him. He could still feel Roshant’s wrist in his hand and he squeezed it, trying to pass on fellowship and communion to another dying man. Although he disliked the commissar, all Roshant’s privileges had served only to bring him to the same hole in the sand where he would die alongside the low-born son of a kasr. War, at the front line, was nothing if not egalitarian.
As he squeezed Roshant’s wrist, Obeysekera felt a movement, a straining. The commissar was still alive too. It would not be for much longer, though. Obeysekera could feel his mind beginning to fog, as if he were on the point of sleep.
The song of the sand grew louder, more encompassing. Now he could feel the air in his lungs and the air cavities in his face resonating with the low, thrumming sound that enveloped him.
This was the long sleep, the one from which there was no waking.
Random memories played out in Obeysekera’s mind: his mother, holding him by the hand as his father marched off to join the 27th accompanied by the regiment’s drums and tsiranopes; the message of his father’s death, flashing upon the screen; the Caducades Sea, calm after a storm; the sun, huge and livid, setting over the parched plains of Prosan; the face of the first dead man he had seen, mouth still wide with the shock of his dying; the face of the first man he had killed, eyes widening in the realisation that his dark gods had betrayed him; a smile, glimpsed through lho-smoke. A ragtag collection of impressions from a life unnoticed.
A grab, something pulling his arm.
Obeysekera, mind dim and confused, could not understand it. There was something pulling at him. The sound of the sand was growing louder around him, more open, more expansive.
Light.
Yellow, filtered ochre, but light.
Even as his mind fogged over, some deeper level of thought tightened Obeysekera’s grip on the commissar’s wrist.
Sand, running off his face in rivers, blurred shapes behind, digging, scrabbling, pulling.
‘Get the rebreather off.’
Fingers fumbling at his mask, digging into the sand that still cradled his head, pulling the mask off.
Air.
Hot. Gritty. Sandy.
Life.
Obeysekera’s chest heaved as, like a baby new born, he breathed in life.
‘Pull him out.’
His vision was still blurred with tears and sand, but Obeysekera could see the shapes of the men clustered around him, scraping and pulling with their bare hands like human moles. One face resolved into that of Gunsur. Obeysekera grabbed the trooper with his freed hand.
‘Under me. Roshant.’
Gunsur nodded. ‘Dig,’ he yelled to the others.
‘I’ve got him,’ said Obeysekera, his mind coming back to him. ‘Follow my arm down.’
Scrabbling and shoving, flinging sand up and away, the men dug in down the length of Obeysekera’s body, following the track of his arm until he felt their hands close about the wrist that he had never let go.
‘Got him,’ Gunsur said to Obeysekera. ‘You can let go now.’
Obeysekera released his hold. His body free of the sand, he began to slide down the slope, and for a moment the memory of the first panicked fall came back to him. But the slide stopped and, lying spent and exhausted on his back, he looked up from the trough of the sand wave and saw the sky as blue as he had ever seen it, untouched by cloud or smoke.
He turned his head, just a little, and saw the men gathered around the pit they were digging, and the figure emerging from it, like a sculpture appearing as the sculptor pared away the rock. Obeysekera tried to call up, to ask if the commissar lived, but his voice had dried away to a husk under the sand and only a whisper breathed from his lips.
Then he saw Sergeant Malick turning to him, his face breaking into a smile, and the thumbs-up gesture he sent down to him.
The commissar was alive.
As Obeysekera drifted on the edge of consciousness beneath an endless sky, it occurred to him that he had never before seen Guardsmen so pleased to see that their commissar was still alive. The sand shifted beneath him, then settled into silence. The music was over. Now the only sound was the coughing of the commissar and the few words of his men, faced with a recovering political officer and not sure what to do or say next.
Captain Bharath Obeysekera of the God-Emperor’s Imperial Guard forced himself to sit up. He was in command. He had better do some commanding.
He tried to stand up. It did not work. Instead he sat, coughing, the phlegm gritty with sand. His mouth and throat were rough with it, his ears half-blocked.
He tried to stand again, and this time staggered to his feet. The sand felt firm beneath him. He looked up. The slip face of the dune rose a hundred feet and more above him, but here, in the wave’s trough, the sand was hard-packed. If only the troughs turned in the direction they were going, the way would become so much easier.
As he stood, still swaying, the men started bringing Commissar Roshant down the short distance to the bottom of the slope, half carrying him and half sliding him, with shears of sand following. But their initial fall had dislodged the greater part of loose sand on the slip face; what slipped and slid now posed no danger.
Trooper Gunsur was beside Roshant, Sergeant Malick had hold of him on the other side, and the rest of the troops who had come down to dig them out – Obeysekera noted with approval that Ha, Lerin and Prater had remained with the Venators – slid and waded down the slope beside them.
As they came closer, Obeysekera saw that the commissar had turned yellow. His immaculate greatcoat – how he had kept it so clean in the desert was a mystery to Obeysekera – was now streaked and stained, with trails of sand leaking like yellow oil from every crease and crevice. His cap was gone, still buried under the sand. His hands, clutching convulsively on the men helping him down the slope, were as yellow as a wedge of picogiallo cheese, apart from a band around his right wrist where Obeysekera had been holding him. And his face was the colour of curdled starch-milk, streaked with the trails of tears and spit and phlegm from eyes and mouth and nose.
The men slid Roshant down to the base of the slope, where he sat, not moving. Obeysekera went over to the commissar.
In the yellow that was his face, Roshant’s eyes were islands of white and blue, but the whites were traced with red. The commissar was staring into a distance only he could see. Squatting down on the sand in front of Roshant, Obeysekera put himself into the commissar’s line of sight, but still the far focus of his eyes did not change.
‘Commissar. Commissar Roshant.’
There was no flicker of acknowledgement on Roshant’s face.
Obeysekera reached out and grasped Roshant’s wrist, the wrist he had held when they were buried. At his touch, the commissar started.
‘No, no, no.’
He started to pull away, but Obeysekera tightened his grip and pulled Roshant back towards him so that their faces were almost touching.
‘You’re out,’ he said. ‘You’re out.’
Slowly, Roshant’s gaze returned from the far distance where it had been lost and focused on the man right in front of him.
The commissar nodded. ‘Yes. Out.’ The words were thick, barely audible.
‘Permission to spit,’ said Obeysekera.
Roshant turned his head, hawked and spat a yellow glob of mucus into the sand. Then, putting his free hand on Obeysekera’s shoulder, he levered himself back onto his feet.
Obeysekera stood up in front of the commissar and stared into his face. ‘Commissar Roshant?’
The sand crust on Roshant’s face began to crack. Little trails of yellow particles streamed down from his forehead, down his cheeks, his chin.
‘I thought I was going to die.’
‘You are right. I did not know there could be so many yellows, either.’
Gunsur jerked and looked to the captain. ‘I didn’t mean to speak aloud, sir.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Obeysekera grinned, although only his eyes showed above his face cloth. ‘I am glad to have had it pointed out to me.’
The captain looked back, at the steep slip face descending before them and the rising and falling waves of sand stretching into the distance with the smoothed-out mounds of the Tabaste on the horizon.
‘You know, sometimes, I think that if only there weren’t so many things trying to kill us all the time, the galaxy could be a beautiful place.’ Obeysekera grinned again, but it was bleaker this time, as his eyes squinted into the distance. ‘But it seems like we were made only for war.’ He nodded towards the Sand Sea. ‘So it’s good to see somewhere that war has left no marks upon, eh, Gunsur?’
The trooper nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’ He hesitated, then continued. ‘You know, sir, I’ve seen some sights in my time – the Kefahuchi Reach, the sun rising over the Caducades, the Twelve Sisters – but this is as pretty as any of them.’ He fell silent for a moment as he stared out at the desert and all its myriad shades of yellow below the vivid blue arch of the sky, then lowered his gaze. ‘You’re right, sir. It’s good to see somewhere peaceful. But now we’re here, I s’pose it won’t stay peaceful for long.’ Gunsur looked back to Obeysekera. ‘Shall I start her up, sir?’
Obeysekera was about to give his permission, when he stopped. He glanced along the ridgetop, at the other two Venators poised there, on a solid but shifting wave, remote from the sound or sight of war.
It was quiet here. Peaceful.
The realisation came upon him as he looked at the Sand Sea.
It was pure, unmarked. If any had perished near them, enemy or Guard, the desert had covered all trace.
In the silence, the only sound the ticking of the plasteel expanding under the sun’s lash, Obeysekera heard the echo of a galaxy at peace. Cadia, lost and broken. Cadia had been the eternal fortress against Chaos, its people the warriors who kept the rest of the Imperium safe through the sacrifice of their lives. He had known nothing but war; his world had known nothing but war until it died. But sitting there in silence, atop the still wave in the Sand Sea, Obeysekera heard a still, small voice, as quiet as his blood, whisper peace.
‘Wait here.’ Obeysekera held his hand up to Gunsur, unstrapped the webbing, then swung his legs out of the Venator and stepped down onto the sand. The dune, softer than sea mud, swallowed his feet up to the ankles.
Inside him, a voice – the voice of discipline and duty and the veteran Guardsmen who had trained him – was muttering madness. But another voice, quieter but more compelling, told him to walk.
Obeysekera walked. Pulling his boots out of the sand, he waded along the ridgetop. As he did so, the sand, pulled and pushed by his passing, started to shift, sliding in small and then greater sheets down the slip face of the dune.
And the sand began to sing.
At first it was gentle, a sound akin to the wind blowing through the paluwood groves of Cadia. Then it grew and deepened, taking on the register of the Caducades Sea breaking upon the hundred-mile-long shingle breakwater that protected the Manhof Reach from the sea’s full fury.
Had protected, Obeysekera corrected himself.
But the sound continued, deepening, broadening, assuming overtones that hearkened to the mournful music of the tsiranope, the ancient pipes of Kasr Gesh, his home.
The desert was singing.
Obeysekera looked up as he walked along the ridge. He had not realised it – and would have taken the other direction if he had – but he was heading towards the Venator that was carrying Commissar Roshant. For a moment, Obeysekera thought of turning round and returning to his vehicle. But he wanted to hear more.
Wading along the ridgetop, the desert singing its bass threnody for the galaxy, Obeysekera walked in wonder.
As he approached the waiting Venator, he realised that part of the reason he had kept going was that he wanted to know if they heard the song too. Perhaps he was going mad. But the gestures from Ha and Lerin, and Ensor and Uwais in the back of the Venator, pointing to their ears, told that they too were hearing what Obeysekera was hearing. Some of the faces were looking alarmed, but Obeysekera raised his hands, palms downward, to let them know all was well. With the song resounding in his lungs and in his blood, he was loath to break its music by speaking through the squad vox-channel.
‘What in the Emperor’s name is that cursed moaning sound?’
The voice, all too clear, cut into his ear from the micro-bead in his shoulder pauldron. Obeysekera had a link to the squad vox-channel in his helmet and another embedded into his carapace armour should he have to remove the former.
Obeysekera held up his hand, but Commissar Roshant got out of the Venator and started struggling towards him along the ridgetop. Instead of accepting that each step would see his boot sink into the sand and adopting a wading motion, Roshant was trying to kick a channel through the sand and sinking deeper with each step. Obeysekera waved at Roshant, trying to get him to stop, but the commissar had his head down as he ploughed forwards. He was setting off larger and larger slides of sand down the slip face of the dune. Obeysekera looked beyond Roshant. The sand was slumping towards him, at least two yards of the ridge collapsing towards the desert floor.
It would be like being caught in an avalanche.
A voice, tiny, treacherous, whispered, ‘Let him.’ But Obeysekera pushed forward, trying to run through the sand, and the desert moaned its song as he went, the sound rising to a rumble that sank down into the deep on the far side of the dune. As he rushed onwards, Obeysekera called into his vox-bead, ‘Stay still, you idiot, stay still.’
But Roshant was talking to himself over the vox-channel, not hearing Obeysekera’s order. Some small corner of the captain’s mind, a corner that never could be anything other than an officer of the God-Emperor’s Imperial Guard, noted that he would have to cite the commissar for failure to follow correct vox-protocol. The rest of Obeysekera’s mind, and his body, was occupied with getting to Roshant before the collapsing ridge caught up with him.
The song of the sand grew louder, deeper. As Obeysekera pushed himself forwards, he realised that it had taken on a new tone, a sub-bass note that he felt in his bones as much as he heard. It was the sound of the heart of a world breaking, and he had heard it before.
It was all that he could do to stop the memory overwhelming him, as it had done through so many long night watches, when sleep would only come again if he drank himself into unconsciousness. But now the sound came in the waking hours, under the brightest light, beneath the beat of the sun, and it was rising from the sand: the song of the desert.
Roshant had never heard that sound. But nevertheless he paused, looking around him, suddenly aware that something was happening.
Obeysekera called to him, by voice and vox. ‘Get back from the edge.’
Roshant, hearing him at last, looked towards Obeysekera, now only a few yards away, and then, realisation dawning, back the way he had come just as the collapsing sand reached him.
The commissar threw out a despairing hand as the world fell away beneath him, sucking him down. Obeysekera reached and grabbed the out-thrust arm, fingers locking around Roshant’s wrist. Digging his feet into the ridge, he started to pull the commissar back from the brink.
And then the sand collapsed beneath Obeysekera.
The two men fell, tumbling downwards, the sand falling with them, over them.
Some reflex kept Obeysekera from releasing the one solid grip he had, the hold on Roshant’s wrist, as he fell, although the arm twisted and turned and pulled as Roshant slipped and slid down the face, Obeysekera falling after him.
The sand fell with them, over them, under them.
The world went yellow.
Sand in his face, his ears, his eyes, his mouth. His nose.
Obeysekera, feeling the sand blocking his airways, tried to hold his breath while with his free hand he reached for the rebreather mask. He continued to tumble down the slope, the world turning over, the sand in his eyes and ears, all the while keeping hold of Roshant with one hand while the other pushed the rebreather over his mouth and nose.
The fall was slowing.
They had stopped rolling. Now they were just sliding. But the face of the sand dune was sliding with them, as if they were riding one of the waves of the Caducades as it broke on the shore, the surf washing over them.
The sand, heavy, crushing, immobilising, covered Obeysekera, layering over his legs, his chest, his face, his arm.
The world went yellow once more, then dark.
He could not move. He was fixed in place, as if rockcrete had been poured over him rather than sand. The only movement he could make was to squeeze the wrist he still held, but there was no response from Roshant.
The rebreather hissed. Its vents were being clogged with sand. Soon, there would be no air.
Obeysekera, with the air he had in his lungs and his body, with the last of the air of the rebreather before it failed, pushed with every muscle, straining upwards; up against the weight of the sand, up towards the light, towards the air. He pushed with all the strength he had, pushing against death.
Nothing moved.
Nothing moved at all.
He was going to die.
A memory of training in the Rossvar Mountains: the old instructor telling his raw Whiteshields that, if caught in an avalanche, they had five minutes before they suffocated, drowning in their own dead air. The old man had smiled. ‘Don’t worry,’ he had said, ‘it’s a quiet death.’
Obeysekera did not want to die. Not now. Not here.
But even as fear threatened to unman him, he heard again the song of the sand. Now, with the sand surrounding him, he felt its call in every bone and fibre of his being, so that it seemed that he too was joining in the music of the desert.
Where before fear had surged up hot through his gut, now a great peace flowed through him. He could still feel Roshant’s wrist in his hand and he squeezed it, trying to pass on fellowship and communion to another dying man. Although he disliked the commissar, all Roshant’s privileges had served only to bring him to the same hole in the sand where he would die alongside the low-born son of a kasr. War, at the front line, was nothing if not egalitarian.
As he squeezed Roshant’s wrist, Obeysekera felt a movement, a straining. The commissar was still alive too. It would not be for much longer, though. Obeysekera could feel his mind beginning to fog, as if he were on the point of sleep.
The song of the sand grew louder, more encompassing. Now he could feel the air in his lungs and the air cavities in his face resonating with the low, thrumming sound that enveloped him.
This was the long sleep, the one from which there was no waking.
Random memories played out in Obeysekera’s mind: his mother, holding him by the hand as his father marched off to join the 27th accompanied by the regiment’s drums and tsiranopes; the message of his father’s death, flashing upon the screen; the Caducades Sea, calm after a storm; the sun, huge and livid, setting over the parched plains of Prosan; the face of the first dead man he had seen, mouth still wide with the shock of his dying; the face of the first man he had killed, eyes widening in the realisation that his dark gods had betrayed him; a smile, glimpsed through lho-smoke. A ragtag collection of impressions from a life unnoticed.
A grab, something pulling his arm.
Obeysekera, mind dim and confused, could not understand it. There was something pulling at him. The sound of the sand was growing louder around him, more open, more expansive.
Light.
Yellow, filtered ochre, but light.
Even as his mind fogged over, some deeper level of thought tightened Obeysekera’s grip on the commissar’s wrist.
Sand, running off his face in rivers, blurred shapes behind, digging, scrabbling, pulling.
‘Get the rebreather off.’
Fingers fumbling at his mask, digging into the sand that still cradled his head, pulling the mask off.
Air.
Hot. Gritty. Sandy.
Life.
Obeysekera’s chest heaved as, like a baby new born, he breathed in life.
‘Pull him out.’
His vision was still blurred with tears and sand, but Obeysekera could see the shapes of the men clustered around him, scraping and pulling with their bare hands like human moles. One face resolved into that of Gunsur. Obeysekera grabbed the trooper with his freed hand.
‘Under me. Roshant.’
Gunsur nodded. ‘Dig,’ he yelled to the others.
‘I’ve got him,’ said Obeysekera, his mind coming back to him. ‘Follow my arm down.’
Scrabbling and shoving, flinging sand up and away, the men dug in down the length of Obeysekera’s body, following the track of his arm until he felt their hands close about the wrist that he had never let go.
‘Got him,’ Gunsur said to Obeysekera. ‘You can let go now.’
Obeysekera released his hold. His body free of the sand, he began to slide down the slope, and for a moment the memory of the first panicked fall came back to him. But the slide stopped and, lying spent and exhausted on his back, he looked up from the trough of the sand wave and saw the sky as blue as he had ever seen it, untouched by cloud or smoke.
He turned his head, just a little, and saw the men gathered around the pit they were digging, and the figure emerging from it, like a sculpture appearing as the sculptor pared away the rock. Obeysekera tried to call up, to ask if the commissar lived, but his voice had dried away to a husk under the sand and only a whisper breathed from his lips.
Then he saw Sergeant Malick turning to him, his face breaking into a smile, and the thumbs-up gesture he sent down to him.
The commissar was alive.
As Obeysekera drifted on the edge of consciousness beneath an endless sky, it occurred to him that he had never before seen Guardsmen so pleased to see that their commissar was still alive. The sand shifted beneath him, then settled into silence. The music was over. Now the only sound was the coughing of the commissar and the few words of his men, faced with a recovering political officer and not sure what to do or say next.
Captain Bharath Obeysekera of the God-Emperor’s Imperial Guard forced himself to sit up. He was in command. He had better do some commanding.
He tried to stand up. It did not work. Instead he sat, coughing, the phlegm gritty with sand. His mouth and throat were rough with it, his ears half-blocked.
He tried to stand again, and this time staggered to his feet. The sand felt firm beneath him. He looked up. The slip face of the dune rose a hundred feet and more above him, but here, in the wave’s trough, the sand was hard-packed. If only the troughs turned in the direction they were going, the way would become so much easier.
As he stood, still swaying, the men started bringing Commissar Roshant down the short distance to the bottom of the slope, half carrying him and half sliding him, with shears of sand following. But their initial fall had dislodged the greater part of loose sand on the slip face; what slipped and slid now posed no danger.
Trooper Gunsur was beside Roshant, Sergeant Malick had hold of him on the other side, and the rest of the troops who had come down to dig them out – Obeysekera noted with approval that Ha, Lerin and Prater had remained with the Venators – slid and waded down the slope beside them.
As they came closer, Obeysekera saw that the commissar had turned yellow. His immaculate greatcoat – how he had kept it so clean in the desert was a mystery to Obeysekera – was now streaked and stained, with trails of sand leaking like yellow oil from every crease and crevice. His cap was gone, still buried under the sand. His hands, clutching convulsively on the men helping him down the slope, were as yellow as a wedge of picogiallo cheese, apart from a band around his right wrist where Obeysekera had been holding him. And his face was the colour of curdled starch-milk, streaked with the trails of tears and spit and phlegm from eyes and mouth and nose.
The men slid Roshant down to the base of the slope, where he sat, not moving. Obeysekera went over to the commissar.
In the yellow that was his face, Roshant’s eyes were islands of white and blue, but the whites were traced with red. The commissar was staring into a distance only he could see. Squatting down on the sand in front of Roshant, Obeysekera put himself into the commissar’s line of sight, but still the far focus of his eyes did not change.
‘Commissar. Commissar Roshant.’
There was no flicker of acknowledgement on Roshant’s face.
Obeysekera reached out and grasped Roshant’s wrist, the wrist he had held when they were buried. At his touch, the commissar started.
‘No, no, no.’
He started to pull away, but Obeysekera tightened his grip and pulled Roshant back towards him so that their faces were almost touching.
‘You’re out,’ he said. ‘You’re out.’
Slowly, Roshant’s gaze returned from the far distance where it had been lost and focused on the man right in front of him.
The commissar nodded. ‘Yes. Out.’ The words were thick, barely audible.
‘Permission to spit,’ said Obeysekera.
Roshant turned his head, hawked and spat a yellow glob of mucus into the sand. Then, putting his free hand on Obeysekera’s shoulder, he levered himself back onto his feet.
Obeysekera stood up in front of the commissar and stared into his face. ‘Commissar Roshant?’
The sand crust on Roshant’s face began to crack. Little trails of yellow particles streamed down from his forehead, down his cheeks, his chin.
‘I thought I was going to die.’
