Aether Halberdier

The Aether Halberdier on the Vanguard's Citadel roll is Reach-Sergeant Piet Hallorin, age twenty-seven, seven years on the line and the only reach-fighter on the muster whose spear-tip gap has been measured at exactly one inch for four consecutive years. The Vanguard's armourers issue the halberd with the tip floating free of the shaft on blue magnetism, and their standing position — held above the rank of armourer-captain and rarely written down — is that the width of the gap is the aether's opinion of the bearer: wider for the confident, closing for the doubtful, touching the shaft for a man who should not be holding it. Most gaps drift. Piet's does not. He measures it every morning with a brass gauge he made himself, and the armourers have asked, twice, to see the gauge, and have twice been told it is calibrated to him and would read wrong in anyone else's hand.

His combat-grant is reach: the Aegis line-doctrine of spacing, extension and the retreat-step, applied by a man who treats anything inside six feet as a spacing error. The ceramic plate he wears is fired in the Aegis kilns, light enough to keep the step quick and brittle enough to crack rather than dent; he has replaced fourteen plates in seven years, and he keeps the shards in a box under his bunk, sorted by engagement, because — he says — ceramic remembers where it was struck and steel only pretends to. The line-sergeant has noted the box as 'a personal discipline.' The line-sergeant has also noted that formations with Hallorin at the reach-post take fewer wounds at the shoulder and more at the shin, and has not decided what to do with that.

He stands two posts down from Line-Guard Ansel Tarrow on the inner gate and considers the young guard's shield-cover a spacing error he has chosen to tolerate; Ansel considers the Reach-Sergeant's opinion a form of respect, which it is. Piet is on measured terms with Master-Breaker Rusk of the Empire's sapper corps when the formations are co-deployed — the two have argued the correct gap between a gauntlet and a wall for three engagements running and have not resolved it — and on quietly admiring terms with Adaeze Fenwick on the ridge, whose three floating lenses he considers the only other instrument on the muster that keeps its own distance. He has not told her this. The gauge, he says, would read wrong in her hand too.