Rawne shrugged. “Best case? Our beloved leader has run into seriously shitty trouble and is either dead or about to be. Sorry, was that a trick question?”
“Screw you, Rawne,” Curth sneered.
“I look forward to it,” smiled Rawne, and got to his feet. “Listen up, Ghosts! We wait until tomorrow. Then we do things my way.”
SIX
Night came, and was no safer than the day.
A silence fell. Even the horns went quiet. Spectres haunted the town, snuffling and whining in the dark, and terror stiffened the air. In the deep stone undercroft, the three men waited it out.
At Landerson’s instruction, they had turned the lamp off, and made no sound, uttered no word. Gaunt felt the cold through the thick walls. The undercroft was so massively built it would have withstood an artillery bombardment, but in the dark it felt fragile and insubstantial, as if no more than a canvas field tent sheltered them.
And there were things moving in the night.
The chill ebbed and flowed through the stones, as if transmitted by some fluid, tidal motion outside. Sudden cold spots froze the air, and frost foamed on the dank ceiling. Gaunt heard distant moaning, mumbling noises from the streets outside, the slow slide and squeal of metal blades or claws tracing along tiles and outer walls. Once in a while, there came a long scream or a sudden, truncated shriek.
He tried not to imagine what might be outside, what manner of abomination was loose in Ineuron Town. In the biting dark, his mind played wicked tricks. His hand clamped around the grip of his boltgun. He fought to arrest his own anxious breathing.
Every now and then, they heard marching feet in the distance, the rumble of motor engines, the bark and fuss of hounds. Those were dangers too, but somehow they seemed honest and solid. Dangers they could face down and deal with.
The drifting, half-heard sounds of the spectres were something else again.
Then utter silence fell outside. By his chronometer’s luminous dial, Gaunt saw it was two hours past middle night.
Landerson lit the lamp pack. The sudden brilliance hurt Gaunt’s eyes.
“They’ve called them off,” Landerson announced, speaking for the first time in over eight hours.
“You’re sure?” asked Mkoll. It dismayed Gaunt to see how pale and worried his stoic chief scout looked.
“Sure as I can be,” Landerson replied. “Once they’re summoned, the wirewolves bleed power quickly. They’ve gone for now.”
“Gone?”
“Folded back to replenish their energies.”
“Folded back where?” Mkoll asked.
“Into the warp, I suppose,” Landerson replied. “Oddly enough, I’ve never had the chance to ask.”
He got up on his feet, his head hunched down under the low roof. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve got a window of comparative safety between now and dawn. Let’s not waste it.”
He led them back down the iron rungs into the flooded tunnel, and they churned along through the cold water. The tiny, frail bones of rats floated in the channel, forming a brittle skin. Thousands and thousands of rats, rendered down to buoyant bone litter. The lamp pack’s beam lit them as an undulating white crust.
They reached steps and clambered up out of the cold flow. The steps were slimy and treacherous. Wet-rot clung to the walls.
As they climbed, the steps became drier and the rot receded. They came up through a wooden storm door onto a narrow back street. The night was still, and feeble stars glimmered in the narrow patch of sky visible between the close-leaning roofs above them. To the west was the ruddy glow of the ahenum furnaces.
Landerson beckoned them on, down to a junction between two quiet streets. At a crossroads up ahead, they could see a barrel fire burning, scattering flame-light and shadows back down the cobbles. Two excubitors stood by the fire, chafing their hands.
The trio slipped to the left, and ran down through the darkness of an adjoining street. Then right, up a shallow hill where the cobbles were worn and buckled, and left again into a silent court where ornamental plants had overgrown and wrapped around the brickwork. At Landerson
’s direction, they sprinted across the court and made their way along a sloping alley that ran down between a furniture manufactory and a defunct distillery. There was an iron gate at the end of the alley, fletched with moss and weed. Landerson shooed them down into cover.
A patrol rumbled by. Not excubitors, a military unit. Behind the weeds, cowering, Gaunt saw the grinding treads of a light tank, the pacing feet of the enemy. A searchlight flashed their way, breaking its light on the bars of the iron gate.
Then it was gone, and the patrol had passed on too.
“Come on,” Landerson whispered.
* * * * *
They made their way down around the skirts of the commercia into the depths of the town. On one of the main avenues, a torch-lit parade was winding past, filling the night with the din of drums and cymbals. A mixture of excubitors and battle-troops formed the vanguard. Many of them held aloft spiked, racemose standards and filthy banners on long poles. The bulk of the procession was citizenry, shackled in long, trudging lines, singing and clapping.
These were proselytes. It saddened Gaunt to see so many. Every day, more and more members of the cowed populace elected to convert to the wretched faiths of the enemy. Some saw it, perhaps, as their only chance to survive. Others regarded it as a way of securing a better life, with greater liberties and consents. For the most part, Gaunt thought darkly, they converted because Chaos had swallowed their bewildered souls.
Ordinals led the parade towards the temple. Landerson had told Gaunt that “ordinals” was a blanket term for the senior administrators of the enemy power. Some were priests, others scholars, bureaucrats, financiers, merchants. They wore elaborately coloured robes and headdresses, and their be-ringed fingers hefted ornate staves and ceremonial maces. Some were female, some male, others indeterminate, and many displayed horrifying mutation traits. Gaunt couldn’t tell—didn’t want to tell—what the variations in dress and decoration denoted. They were all enemies. But they intrigued him nevertheless. In his career, he had faced the warriors and the devotees of the Ruinous Powers in many guises, but this was the first time he had properly laid eyes on the dignitaries and officials who ordered their culture and society. These were the fiends who followed the smouldering wake of battle and established rule and control over the territories conquered by their warrior hosts.
Once the parade had passed, the three men hurried on into the low pavements where the town’s administratum buildings had once stood. Here, the faces of the broken walls and chipped plasterwork were covered with paint daubs and scribbles that made nonsense words and strange designs. In one large square, lit by fierce bonfires, hundreds of human slaves laboured under the attentive guns of excubitor squads. The slaves, some on makeshift ladders, were painting more designs on the open walls.
“Petitioners,” Landerson whispered. “Or criminals trying to atone for minor infractions. They labour day and night until they either drop of exhaustion, or make a mark that is deemed true.”
“True?” Mkoll echoed.
“The enemy does not teach its signs and symbols, except to the converted. It is said they believe that those touched with Chaos will know the marks instinctively. So the petitioners make random marks, scribing anything and everything their imagination comes up with. If they make any mark or sign that the ordinals recognise, they are taken away for purification and conversion.”
Amongst the gangs of excubitors, three ordinals lurked, overseeing the insane graffiti. One of them sat astride a mechanical hobbyhorse, a bizarre machine whose body rose above its small wheels on four thin, strut-like legs. The ordinal trundled around on his high perch, shouting orders. He looked like a child with a nursery plaything, as dreamed up in a nightmare. There was nothing childish about the twin stubber pintle-mounted in place of the hobbyhorse’s head, though.
Avoiding the square, they darted from cover across an empt
y street and into the breezeway opposite. This was a narrow rockcrete passage, which smelt of urine. At the far end of it, behind a row of overflowing garbage canisters, was a low hatch.
Landerson glanced at Gaunt. “Let’s pray they haven’t found this one too,” he said.
“Let’s,” Gaunt said, and looked round at Mkoll. At his commander’s nod, Mkoll vanished into the shadows.
Landerson stepped up to the hatch and knocked. After a moment, it opened slightly.
“How is Gereon?” asked an echo from behind the hatch.
“Gereon lives,” Landerson replied.
“Despite their efforts,” the echo responded. The hatch opened.
Landerson and Gaunt stepped into the darkness.
They’d gone no more than five paces into the darkness when rifle snouts poked against their backs.
“On your faces! Down! Now! On your faces!”
“Wait, we—” Landerson began. He grunted as a rifle stock rammed his neck.
“Down! Now! Now!”
They got down. Hands clawed at them, fishing out weapons, forcing shoulders flat. Boots came in and kicked their legs apart.
“Get on your faces, you bastards!” a voice barked.
A lamp pack suddenly flicked on and bathed the chamber in light.
“I so, so wouldn’t be doing that if I were you,” Mkoll said from the doorway, his lasrifle aimed.
“My apologies, colonel-commissar,” said Major Cirk.
“Not necessary,” Gaunt replied. “I understand the rigorous nature of your security.”
She shrugged. “Your man would have had us dead even so.”
They looked across as Mkoll, who was sitting with his back against the chamber wall and his rifle across his lap, observing the scene.
“Yes, he would,” said Gaunt. “But as far as I know, he’s the best there is, so don’t beat yourself up.”
The chamber was small, and lit by a single chemical fire in the corner. Six ragged resistance fighters sat in a huddle with Landerson, talking quietly. Another two, armed with homemade charge-guns, watched the door.
“The scare today,” Cirk asked. “Did you trigger it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Gaunt replied. “We got into a duel with a couple of patrols. We were trying to make contact.”
She nodded. “They’ve closed a lot of our outlets down. After last night.”
“What was last night?” Gaunt asked.
Cirk sighed. She was a tall woman in her early forties, with cropped brunette hair and a face made fabulous by high cheekbones and a full mouth. She might once have been beautiful, voluptuous. Food shortages had thinned her frame, drawing her face and emphasizing her breasts and hips. Her fatigues were ill-fitting. “Last night,” she said, “we staged a diversion.”
“A diversion?”
“To get you in, sir.”
Gaunt nodded. The idea stuck painfully.
“The cell deployed, and staged attacks at various key locations to occupy the attention of the archenemy forces. The idea was to draw focus away from the team contacting you. We were successful.”
“Define success.”
“Three tactical targets hit. Forty per cent casualties. The reprisals shut down a lot of our active houses. Four out of nine in Ineuron Town. Another half dozen in the agri-burbs.”
“How many dead?”
“Dead? Or captured, sixty-eight.”
“I was supposed to link up with a colonel called Ballerat,” Gaunt said.
“Dead,” she replied. “Killed last night in the firebomb raid on the Iconoclave. I’m cell leader now.”
There was no emotion in her voice, and nothing on show in her face. Like Landerson, like everyone on Gereon, Cirk had been through too many miseries to register much of anything any more.
“We’ve actually closed up shop here,” Cirk said. Ineuron’s too hot now. What’s left of the underground here has fled. Except for a few skeleton units like mine.”
Gaunt nodded. “Waiting for us.”
She nodded back. “Contacting and aiding you was a vital function. That much was passed down the line to Ballerat and me.”
“From where?” Gaunt asked.
“Not for me to say, sir. The underground only survives by compartmentalising its strengths. No one gets more than they need to know. That way, if anyone is captured…”
She let it hang.
“I understand,” said Gaunt. “And I’m grateful to you.”
“Don’t be,” she said simply.
“All right. But understand that my gratitude comes from a much higher place.”
“That’s enough for me,” said Cirk. “So, what do you need?”
“Immediately? I need to get word to the rest of my outfit. Let them know we’re good.”
“Are they voxed?” she asked.
Gaunt nodded.
“All right, we have access to a set. I don’t like to use it, but it’s better that than trying to get a runner out of the town just now. Can your message be short?”
“Yes. Two words. ‘Silver’ and ‘standby’.”
“Good. Channel?”
“Anything between two-four-four and three-one on the tight high-band.”
Cirk beckoned over one of her team, a thin blonde girl who looked no more than a teenager.
She gave her careful instructions, and the girl slipped out into the night.
“Right,” said Cirk. “What else?”
Gaunt paused. He thought for a moment about the bitter wranglings he’d already had with Landerson. “Let me ask, first of all, what are your thoughts about liberation?”
Cirk stared at him. She was truly beautiful, he realised, but the mix of lingering pain and beauty was almost too hard to look at. The stigma mark cut into her cheek both marred her beauty and reminded Gaunt of the poison infecting Gereon. “I understand it’s not coming any time soon, sir,” she said.
“You do?”
“First off, I’m not a fool. Second, Ballerat briefed me. We didn’t share the information with too many of the cell members. Bad for security and bad for morale. But I know you’re here for an insertion mission, not as the vanguard of some glorious counter invasion.”
Gaunt sighed. “I’m relieved. Breaking that to Landerson
was hard. I’d have hated to see the same disappointment on your face.”
“Why?” she asked, interested.
“Not for me to say,” he replied.
She smirked and sat back. “So what is next?”
“You don’t know what we’re here for?”
“Compartmentalised, remember? Ballerat and I were privy to the fact you were an insertion mission, but I don’t think even he knew what that might be.”
“I’m here to kill someone,” Gaunt said quietly.
“Anyone in particular?” she asked. “From what I’ve heard Landerson say, you’ve been clocking up quite a body count already.”
“Yes,” said Gaunt. “Someone very particular. An old friend.”
Cirk stroked her cheek and grinned. “There were inverted commas around that word, if I’m not mistaken.”
“You’re not.”
“Who is he?”
“I didn’t even say it was a he.”
“Compartmentalising, colonel-commissar?”
“Indeed.”
“Fine. I’d rather not know, actually. This old ‘friend’… I imagine you want to find him?”
“I do,” said Gaunt. “I need the underground to furnish me and my team with passage into the Lectica heartlands.”
She exhaled heavily. “Shit! You don’t want much, do you?”
“Is that going to be a problem?”
Cirk leaned forward again. He could smell her stale sweat and the grease in her cropped hair. “If you needed to get into the heartlands, you could have picked a better starting point than Ineuron Town.”
“Because?” asked Gaunt.
“Because you’re about three hundred kilometres south of where you
want to be.”
“I know,” Gaunt replied. “But this is a slow-burn operation. Guard Intelligence was conferring secretly with the Gereon underground for months before we set off. A safe drop point was the first priority. The underground advised that the marshes south of Shedowtonland would be the safest territory to make a rapid drop from a lander. Anything closer to Lectica would have been too hazardous.”
“True enough,” she said. “You came in by lander?”
“By grav-chute from a low flyby over the marshes, actually.”
“Holy crap, that can’t have been any fun.”
“It wasn’t. When the time came, my marksman refused at the hatch. His name’s Larkin. He’s not the most together man in my command.”
“What did you do?” asked Cirk.
“I had Brostin—the biggest man in the team—throw Larkin out of the lander. He’s come to terms since then.”
Cirk laughed. He liked her laugh.
“What were you, Cirk? Before the enemy came, I mean?”
She hesitated and looked at the flames of the pallid chemical fire. “I was a farm-owner, sir. My family held two thousand hectares west of the town. Canterwheat and soft fruit. The bastards torched my orchards.”
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“I’m Major Cirk of the Ineuron undergr—”
“I asked your name. Mine’s Ibram.”
“My name is Sabbatine Cirk,” she said.
Gaunt paused, as if he had been slapped.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Named after the Saint, I imagine?”
“Of course,” she said.
“Everywhere I go, she’s there to lead me…” Gaunt murmured.
“Sir?”
“Nothing. So, what about Lectica?”
“I’ll see what I can do. We have a line of contact with the Edrian cell. They might be able to get you cross country and into Lectica. After that, we’ll be relying on their contacts in the field.”
“That’s a start,” Gaunt said.
SEVEN
Another day rose, languid, above the bastion. The pheguth had been undergoing transcoding for the better part of the morning. Desolane had heard his screams rolling up and down the windy halls.