Colm Corbec

Colonel Colm Corbec was Gaunt's second from the founding of the Tanith First, a big man from the Magna militia who had to learn that ordering friends to die was the job and then did it without becoming a bastard. The Ghosts liked him the way soldiers like a roof.

He held the regiment when Gaunt was elsewhere, from Caligula to Menazoid Epsilon, and kept drinking with Larkin and Dorden because rank was not a reason to forget who had delivered him as a baby. Lijah Cuu murdered him on Herodor. The shrine world got a saint's war and lost the Ghosts' favourite colonel in the same week.

Tanith is ash. Corbec was the part of it that still laughed. Gaunt called him a brother. The First still fights as if he might come around the nalwood line and tell them to get up.