Gaunt’s Ghosts: The Tanith First and Only

Some regiments are founded. One was orphaned on the day of its birth. On the night the forest world of Tanith sent its sons to war, the sky caught fire, and a single commissar gave the order that saved a regiment and abandoned a planet. Its soldiers have never entirely forgiven him. They follow him anyway, through the burning worlds of the Sabbat Crusade, and they call themselves Ghosts. Why men would follow the officer who left their world to die is the riddle at the heart of this chronicle, reader, and I intend to answer it.

A World Where the Forests Walked

Tanith was an evergreen forest world, dense and strange, and the strangest thing about it was that its forests would not keep still. The nalwood trees that covered it were motile: they uprooted, replanted and repositioned themselves after the sun and the rains, so that a track through the nal-forest might vanish overnight and open anew somewhere else. There was, as one Ghost later put it, no frame of reference for location on Tanith. Generation after generation, its people learned to carry the map inside them, and grew an instinct for direction, tracking and scouting that no drill-sergeant could teach.

It was a quiet, agrarian world, trading seasoned timber off-world, its capital Tanith Magna a high-walled city of dark stone towers rising out of the emerald canopy. Its people were pale-skinned and dark-haired, many of them tattooed, and they spoke with a soft, sing-song lilt; they even kept a word of the old tongue, chulan, for an outsider. Their Elector assured the Imperium that Tanith bred resolute and cunning men whose particular strengths were scouting and stealth. He was right. Few of his people lived to see how right.

The Night of the Founding

Tanith had never before raised a regiment for the Imperial Guard. Just after the great victory at Balhaut, it mustered three at once — the First, Second and Third of Tanith — to join the Warmaster’s crusade. Command of them was given to a commissar, Ibram Gaunt, as a reward for his service to Warmaster Slaydo. That was itself unusual, for commissars are political officers, not field commanders; it is why Gaunt’s rank reads colonel-commissar. He arrived to find a scruffy mob of soft-voiced woodsmen and set about making them soldiers.

He had no time. On the very day of the Founding, a Chaos fleet slipped through the interdiction of the Segmentum Pacificus Navy and fell upon Tanith. Orbital bombardment tore white-hot holes in the ancient forests and melted the walls of Tanith Magna, and Gaunt, reading the situation with a commissar’s cold arithmetic, made his decision. “Tanith is already dead,” he told his staff: they could die with it, or salvage every fighting man they could and spend them somewhere they would do some good. He ordered the regiments off-world. Only the First made it. Two whole regiments died with their planet, and the survivors, men without a home, began to call themselves Ghosts.

The First and the Only

The regiment’s name is its epitaph. It is the Tanith First, the first regiment Tanith ever raised, and it is the only one: there will never be a second. The regimental pin carries the wound openly. It once showed a skull backed by three daggers, one for each founded regiment; on the pins the Ghosts wear, the outer two have been snapped away. Even the toast has a bitter edge. When Colm Corbec raised a glass to Gaunt with ‘First and Last’, Gaunt answered him softly: ‘First and Only.’

The name Gaunt’s Ghosts, by the regiment’s own telling, was born before their first blooding, when Gaunt addressed the Tanith First-and-Only and someone in the ranks murmured the phrase — Mad Larkin, Corbec was sure. Gaunt smiled and accepted it. Yet the Ghosts’ debt to their commander was never simple. Many hated him for cheating them of the chance to fight and die for their world; the records of the Imperium note that among some Ghosts the resentment still simmers years later. When the Tanith officers first came to him, he greeted them by observing that the men of Tanith wanted him dead. ‘Perfectly true,’ said Major Rawne.

Ibram Gaunt, the Commissar Who Stayed

Gaunt was the son of a soldier. His father died when he was a boy, and he was sent to the Schola Progenium on Ignatius, the institution that raises the Imperium’s orphans into its servants. As a cadet he served under Commissar-General Oktar with the Hyrkans, a stern mentor who became almost a father to him, and for eight years he was political officer to the Hyrkan 8th, from its founding to the victory at Balhaut. He was, by one account, one of Slaydo’s brightest — and he never played the glittering game of patronage that such brilliance invites.

That is the first half of the answer to my riddle. Gaunt is a commissar, but not the executioner of legend. He wears the Tanith camo-cloak, awkwardly, because he promised their colonel he would as a show of unity. He learns the names that go with the faces. And he explains himself: a commissar is charged with keeping the Emperor’s fighting legions able and intact, and he will not let his men die for nothing. That, he tells Rawne, is why he saved the Tanith from the destruction of their world. Rawne answers that he will never see it that way. Gaunt keeps him alive regardless.

Ghosts in the Undergrowth

The Tanith First fight as they lived: as light infantry, scouts and infiltrators. Their camo-cloaks let a whole company drop out of sight in a heartbeat, so that an officer who glances away finds his men have simply become part of the landscape. Their lasguns carry nalwood furniture, and every man bears a long silver Tanith blade — ‘straight silver’, in the regiment’s phrase — which scouts dull with ash so it will not catch the light. When Gaunt volunteered them for the darkest assault of their first campaign, he did so because of their well-recognised stealth and scout attributes. ‘My boys specialise in rat-mazes,’ he told one allied colonel, and he meant it as the highest praise.

The moving forests made them. A people who could never trust a path learned to read ground, sound and shadow in ways heavier regiments cannot, and the Guard, which usually spends its soldiers by the million, found in the Ghosts something rarer: a precise instrument. They are no less mortal for it. They are simply harder to find.

Faces Among the Ghosts

Colonel Colm Corbec is the regiment’s heart: a big, hairy, cigar-chewing man from County Pryze, loud in camp and quietly devastated by memories of home. Major Elim Rawne is his opposite — handsome, cold, with a star tattooed by one eye, once a junior officer in the militia of Tanith Attica, and a man in whom Corbec suspected a murderous, ruthless streak. Rawne wanted Gaunt dead for Tanith. Yet it was Rawne who, when Gaunt was slipping from a tilting shelf of broken ice into a freezing sea, hurled his own knife into the ice to give the commissar a handhold.

Sergeant Mkoll heads the scout platoon, a man whose hearing turns a trained enemy’s stealth into a careless march, and who can stand beside his commander unnoticed. Larkin — Mad Larkin — is the regiment’s marksman, a superb shot and one of the least stable men ever to pass recruitment screening; the story goes that after his psyche evaluation, a marksman’s rating was the only dispensation Corbec could win to keep his old friend in the company. And there is Brin Milo, a boy of about seventeen who played the Tanith pipes: the only non-soldier saved from the ruins of Tanith, and to some of the regiment a living reminder of the brothers, wives and children who were not.

The Sabbat Worlds Crusade

The Ghosts’ war is the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. After his triumph on Khulen, Warmaster Slaydo was charged by the High Lords of Terra with liberating the Sabbat Worlds, a cluster of nearly one hundred inhabited systems at the edge of the Segmentum Pacificus. Nearly a billion Guardsmen advanced, supported by the Adeptus Astartes and the Adeptus Mechanicus. The region takes its name from Saint Sabbat, a herdsman’s daughter from the world of Hagia who, moved by visions of the Emperor, led a crusade of her own some six thousand years earlier.

After ten years of hard advance, Slaydo won his great victory at Balhaut — and died there. Lord High Militant General Dravere had expected to succeed him, but Slaydo had chosen the younger Macaroth, and the crusade pushed on under a new Warmaster into ever worse theatres of war. Gaunt, one of Slaydo’s protégés, arrived on Tanith in the shadow of that succession.

First Campaigns: Fortis Binary to Necropolis

First and Only opens on Fortis Binary, a forge world of nineteen billion workers where a Chaos cult called the Shriven had risen among the engineers and artisans. Its trench war leads the Ghosts into a deeper plot. Gaunt carries a coded crystal, entrusted to him by the agent Fereyd, and comes to suspect that Dravere means to usurp Macaroth. The trail leads to Menazoid Epsilon, a deathworld reckoned a shrine to the Dark Powers, where the Ghosts must fend off the rival Jantine regiment and discover an intact Standard Template Constructor, a relic of lost human technology.

Ghostmaker turns to the men themselves, its tales moving through the regiment’s early battles to the swamps of Monthax and an eldar temple. In one episode, a trick of the mind lets some forty Ghosts believe for a few hours that they are fighting for Tanith at last; afterwards Milo tells Gaunt that it exorcised a few ghosts. Necropolis is war on a vast scale: the hive city of Vervunhive on Verghast, besieged by its rival hive Zoica under the Heritor Asphodel. When the local general tried to slip away among the refugees, Gaunt took command, and survived Asphodel’s bolt only because it struck a steel rose he had been given to wear. Under the Act of Consolation, upwards of forty thousand survivors chose to join the Guard — among them many new Ghosts, such as Tona Criid.

So, reader, the answer to my riddle. The Ghosts follow Gaunt not because he saved them — many of them wish he had not — but because he has made their survival mean something, battle after battle, and because he knows their names. A regiment without a world carries its world within it: in the lilt of its voices, the nalwood of its rifles, the silver of its knives. Tanith is ash. The Tanith First and Only are what remains, and while one Ghost still walks, the forests have not entirely stopped moving.

Questions from the Archive

Who are Gaunt’s Ghosts?

Gaunt’s Ghosts are the Tanith First and Only, an Imperial Guard regiment of light infantry from the forest world of Tanith, commanded by Colonel-Commissar Ibram Gaunt. They are the only regiment to escape their homeworld’s destruction on the day of its founding, and they became famed across the Sabbat Worlds Crusade for scouting, stealth and infiltration. They are the heroes of Dan Abnett’s long-running novel series.

Why did Gaunt abandon Tanith?

A Chaos fleet slipped past the Navy’s interdiction and struck Tanith on the very day of its first founding. Gaunt judged the world already lost: the regiments could die with it, or he could save as many fighting men as possible and spend them where they would do some good. He ordered the evacuation, and only the Tanith First made it off-world. Many Ghosts hated him for it.

Why is the regiment called the First and Only?

Tanith raised three regiments at its founding — the First, Second and Third — but only the First escaped when the world died. The Tanith First is therefore the first regiment Tanith ever raised and the only one it ever will. Their regimental pin still shows the scars: it once bore three daggers, and two have been snapped away.

Where should I start reading Gaunt’s Ghosts?

Start with First and Only, the first novel, published in 1999, or with The Founding omnibus, which collects First and Only, Ghostmaker and Necropolis with short stories. Ghostmaker fills in the regiment’s origins and its key characters, and Necropolis is a full-scale hive siege. After that, The Saint omnibus continues the series with books four to seven.

Are Gaunt’s Ghosts canon?

Yes. The Gaunt’s Ghosts novels are published by Black Library, Games Workshop’s own fiction imprint, and the Tanith First and Only have appeared in Games Workshop’s rules material too — the 2003 Chapter Approved annual tells the story of Tanith’s fall. The Sabbat Worlds Crusade is an established campaign in the Warhammer 40,000 setting, with its own sourcebook and anthologies.