Gaunt found that Mercure was looking at him directly for the first time. It was a look that said: Don’t make me look stupid now, you little shit.
“Absolutely, sir,” said Gaunt.
Rime leaned forwards. He smiled, but the smile was not warm. It was a perfect facsimile of a smile, executed by hundreds of synthi-muscle tensors and subcutaneous micro-motors. He fixed Mercure with his augmetic stare.
“I think the real issue, sir,” he said, “is that the Commissariat Intelligence Division, without reference to, or permission from, any other department or agency, including the holy ordos, has detained a toxic Archenemy prisoner in the heart of one of Balhaut’s cities. It’s an extraordinary risk to take, not to mention fundamentally contrary to the express determination of operational procedure, as set down by the Inquisition and the High Lords of Terra. The Imperium doesn’t do this, Mercure. You don’t do this. The only body qualified and authorised to handle prisoners of this type is the Inquisition.”
“This is too important to waste time on a jurisdictional squabble, Rime,” said Mercure.
“Oh, if only that’s all this was,” the inquisitor replied. “You will hand Prisoner B over to us, and we will evaluate him and dispose of him.”
“But he doesn’t want to talk to you,” said Gaunt.
“What did you just say?” demanded another one of the henchmen.
“Enough, Sirkle!” Rime declared.
Are they all called Sirkle, Gaunt wondered?
“I said he doesn’t want to talk to you,” said Gaunt, gesturing generally at the ordo team. “And he doesn’t want to talk to them either,” he added, with a nod at Mercure and the Section officers. “He wants to talk to me.”
“Is this true?” asked Rime.
“Prisoner B made it known that he would only speak to Colonel-Commissar Gaunt,” said Edur, who was waiting patiently by the door.
“Why?” asked Rime.
“That’s one of the things I intend to find out,” said Gaunt, “if I’m given the chance.”
Mercure dismissed Gaunt, and Edur took him back to the anteroom. The timepiece was still ticking out its deep, regular beat, and snowflakes were still prickling the glass.
“You did well,” said Edur.
“Did I?”
“I think you impressed Mercure.”
“I couldn’t tell,” said Gaunt.
Edur smiled and said, “You never can with him. But I think your bluntness piqued the inquisitor’s interest enough for us to broker some cooperation. Perhaps we can persuade them to let you interview the prisoner with them as observers. At least that way we share anything you find out.”
“The ordos should damn well respect our need for concrete intelligence,” Gaunt growled.
Edur was still smiling.
“You’ve been at the front line a long time, haven’t you Gaunt?” he said. “You’ve forgotten just how total their authority is. We’re lucky they’re even asking us politely. They could have just burst in here and taken him by force. You wouldn’t believe the number of promising subjects the Inquisition has snatched away from us before we’ve been able to get to work.”
“So I’ve just got to wait?” Gaunt asked.
“I’m afraid so,” replied Edur.
The snow was falling more heavily than before, in the yard beside Viceroy House. Wes Maggs started the engine of the staff car again, in the hope of squeezing some warm air out of the heaters. He knew that if he ran the engine for too long, some pen-pusher would garnish the fuel costs from his pay.
Huddled in his jacket, his hands stuffed deep inside the armpits of his vest, Maggs sat in the front passenger seat of the car, and reflected on the suckiness of the duty he’d pulled.
He was cold to the bone, and the waiting was killing him. How many hours had Gaunt been inside? The sky had gone the colour of a bad bruise, and it felt too cold for snow. He wondered about getting out and sweeping away the snow that was accumulating on the car, but he couldn’t face it. He wondered about approaching one of the guards for a chat and a lho-stick to warm his hands, but they were up at the gate or in the guard towers, and looked pretty unapproachable.
Even the mechanics, who had been working on some of the other transports parked in the yard’s garage area nearby, had given up their efforts and had gone to huddle around a pathetic brazier. Maggs wondered if they’d make room for him, but he doubted it. They didn’t look very friendly. In fact, the whole place seemed like the coldest and least-friendly location he’d ever had to spend any time in, and that included some warzones.
He gazed across the yard through the windscreen and the fluttering snow, and finally worked out the purpose of the odd architecture he’d been staring at for half a day. The side of the main building had a sort of loading dock built into it, overhanging the main yard area. There were no windows.
Maggs realised that he’d parked facing the execution block. The trapdoor in the underside of the dock overlooking the yard was the drop where men’s bodies thumped down when they were hanged. This yard, otherwise used for parking and light maintenance, was where the official witnesses and observers stood.
He shuddered. The place was getting unfriendlier by the moment.
Gaunt had stood up out of the armchair and put Eszrah’s copybook away before it occurred to him to wonder why he’d done either of those things.
Something had prompted his decisive movements, something very clear, but he couldn’t identify what. He stood there, with the timepiece ticking solemnly behind him, and heard the feathery brush of snowflakes against the anteroom’s windowpanes.
He’d seen something. He’d seen something he couldn’t have seen, shouldn’t have seen.
Just for a second, with his attention focused on the pages of Eszrah’s next story, there had been a flash, a little flash behind his eyes, like an electrical flare, like the tremor of aurora lights.
Stupid. It was stupid, really. Just another twinge of his old, traumatised optic nerves. Just another function-glitch of his new, gleaming eyes.
But there was a taste in his mouth. The metallic taste of blood.
He went to the door.
“Do you think they’re deliberately turning the heating down to piss us off?” asked Varl of no one in particular. No one in particular answered him.
The Tanith offenders occupied seven adjacent cages on the fifth bay of Detention Four. The only other prisoners on the bay were a pair of Oudinot drunks, who were still sleeping off the night before, and an ugly fether from one of the Varshide regiments, who occupied the cage next to Rawne’s. The Varshide had volunteered a long and graphic commentary on exactly how pleased he was to see Jessi Banda, and precisely how much more pleased he’d be if they weren’t separated by ceramite bars, until Rawne had leaned close and gently whispered something to him, as a direct result of which the Varshide had shut up and gone to hide in the corner of his cage.
Since the seven Tanith had been brought in the night before, the bay temperature had been fairly constant, but in the last hour it had begun to drop, noticeably. Varl could see his breath in the air in front of him.
No one had talked for a long time. In the first couple of hours of detention there’d been a fair amount of chat and a lot of recriminations, especially from Ban Daur, who was sitting forlornly in his cell with a look on his face that announced that his world had ended. Young Cant, dragged into the scam by peer pressure and the notion that maybe if he grew some, Varl might stop ragging on him, looked dispirited and scared. Meryn, true to form, had started to whine and blame, which had oiled the wheels of an argument between him and Banda that had gone on until the guards told them all to shut up.
Then Hark had shown up from Aarlem in the small hours with a face like murder. He’d reviewed the situation, told them they were all fething idiots, and added that he had no idea how he was going to sort “Rawne’s latest shit” out this time. He told them he’d be back later in the day.
None of them had spoken much af
ter that.
“Yeah, what’s with this?” Leyr asked, sitting up on his cot and sniffing the air. “Varl’s right. It’s getting really cold.”
“Do you want me to ask the concierge if he can tweak the heating?” Meryn asked.
Banda snorted and showed Meryn a very specific number of raised fingers through the cage bars.
“It is getting colder,” said Cant. “That can’t be right.”
The young trooper shut up the moment he realised what he’d said, but it was too late.
“No, it can’t, can it, Cant?” sneered Varl.
“Everybody give it a rest,” said Rawne, and they fell silent. Rawne got up and stood very still, as if he were listening.
“What’s up?” Vari asked him.
“You hear that?” Rawne asked.
Gaunt stepped out of the armoured elevator into the white-tiled cell-block. The combination of artificial lighting and tiles made the air in the block seem sickly and fulminous, like the snow-light outside.
“You shouldn’t be here, sir,” said a detention officer, hurrying up to him. “It’s not permitted.”
“I just need to look at the prisoner for a moment,” Gaunt said.
“Why, sir?”
“I just need to look at him,” Gaunt insisted.
“On whose authority?”
Gaunt turned to glare at the officer. The man recoiled from the flash of electric green in the colonel-commissar’s eyes.
“Talk to Edur. Clear it for me.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man hurried away. Gaunt walked to the door of the observation chamber. He just wanted to look. He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted his eyes to see.
He let himself into the observation room, and looked into a tank cell through a murky one-way mirror.
The sanctioned torturers had left Prisoner B sitting in the cage chair, his face and head uncovered. The prisoner was staring straight ahead, apparently oblivious to his discomfort and prolonged confinement. He seemed to be staring directly at Gaunt, as if the mirror wasn’t one-way at all. In their wire cages, the phosphor lights filled the tank with a bilious green glow.
“What the hell are you?” Gaunt murmured, staring into the mirror. He jumped back with a start. The prisoner’s mouth had moved, as if in reply.
Gaunt reached over and threw the switch on the tank intercom.
“What did you say?” he demanded. “What did you just say?”
In the tank, the prisoner turned his head in several directions, surprised by the voice suddenly coming through the speakers. Then he looked back at the mirror.
“I said it’s too late,” he replied. “They’re here.”
“Who’s here?” asked Gaunt.
The prisoner didn’t reply. Gaunt looked up.
From somewhere in the huge mansion above them came the unmistakable sound of gunfire.
ELEVEN
The Assault
Section’s main gatehouse faced Viceroy Square. The watch had just changed, and the guards taking up their stations in and around the gate had been on duty for less than five minutes. Those men who were obliged to work outside, in the lea of the arch, performing stop-and-searches and vehicle checks, were still doing up their stormcoats and foul weather capes, and looking sourly at the snowfall.
One trooper, out by the barrier and stamping his feet to warm up, saw it coming, but he was dead before he could raise a cry. In the final few seconds of his life, he saw dark figures, indistinct and ominous, coming towards him through the silence of the square’s gardens, like phantoms conjured by the snow-light. The falling snow that veiled their menacing, steady approach seemed, to the young soldier, to be falling ever more slowly, like a pict-feed set on increasing increments of slow-motion until the feed, and the descending flakes, came to an unnatural, vibrating halt.
He was opening his mouth to remark upon both of these oddities when the blood wolf killed him.
It killed him in passing, with a gesture of its hand. It killed him on its way in through the gatehouse, throwing him aside with such force that the impact of his hurled body against the wall of the gatehouse pulverised most of his bones and left declarative pressure sprays of blood stippled across the snow.
The blood wolf was moving too fast for any human eye to properly follow it. The warp-wash that surrounded it distorted reality, making time run out of step, and the snow hesitate in mid-air. It flew in through the gatehouse, exploding both barrier beams like tinder. It made a keening noise like the bogies of a runaway train drawing sparks from steel rails. The keening caused the windows, even those specially strengthened to resist weapons fire, to shatter explosively. These blizzards of toughened glass, which moved far faster than the blizzards of snow in the gardens outside, shredded all the troopers caught in their blast zones. Two more guards were decapitated beside the inner barrier, and another by the door. Another, who was unfortunate enough to be standing directly in the blood wolfs path, disintegrated on impact in a spray of gore like a jar of fruit conserve hit by a shotgun round.
A blood wolf is like a missile. You aim it and you fire. In the absence of the explosives that Valdyke had promised to procure, Eyl had been obliged to get his witch to conjure a blood wolf as the focus of the raid.
A sacrifice had therefore been required. Every single man in the philia had volunteered for the combat-honour. Eyl had eventually chosen Shorb, a choice his sirdars had approved. One by one, the men had gathered to say farewell to Shorb’s soul, and then they’d let the witch have him, to cut.
Eyl didn’t understand the process. He generally left such matters to the gore mages, but he understood enough to know that the conjurations that produced a blood wolf were not all that different from the conjurations that wove wirewolves, which were commonly used to police and protect the worlds of the Consanguinity. Those rites put a daemon-spirit into a conductor-body of metal, allowing it to walk abroad. The blood wolf rites put a daemon-spirit into a man’s body.
It was a less precise art. Teams of philia metallurgists and wiresmiths might take months or even years to properly machine the metal chassis of a wirewolf to perfection, inscribing it with the most precise runes and sigils, forging it just-so, so that it could best house the spirit it was designed to capture and harness.
Even with a sharp rite knife, a human body could not be modified so cleanly, especially not at short notice. As a vessel for the burning light of the High Powers, flesh was far too perishable compared to metal, even when the flesh was as devoted as Shorb’s. A wirewolf might last forty or perhaps even fifty minutes before burning out. Eyl had never seen a blood wolf last longer than sixteen.
The blood wolf was a one-use weapon, a flash-bang. It would burn Eyl’s beloved Shorb out and leave him nothing more than charred meat. The trick with a weapon like a blood wolf was to use it fast, and to use it well.
The trick was to use it for maximum effect.
Shorb had become a keening ghost. He was an energised, trembling shape, a shape that had once been a man, leaping and bounding, laughing and surging, like voltage freed from a shorting cable.
As Eyl hefted up his weapon and followed Shorb and the philia in through the gate, he knew that the blood wolf had little more than a few minutes left in it.
They would have to count.
An Imperial Guardsman ran towards Eyl through the hesitating snow, bewildered, his rifle half-raised.
“What the hell’s going on?” he demanded.
Eyl lifted his autorifle, and evacuated the Guardsman’s braincase in a brief, but considerable, pink shower.
“We’ve come for the traitor,” Eyl told the corpse steaming on the snow as he stepped over it.
The men of the philia spread out into the courtyards as they came through the gate. They moved firmly, with a purpose, passing over the bodies and bloodstains of the Imperials. They were wearing their grotesks, so their iron faces were frozen in silent howls and malign sneers. Their shooting was sporadic: a crackle of gunfire here
or there whenever a target presented itself. Munitions were not unlimited. Imperial soldiers were mown from the wall tops and smashed off access staircases. Imrie, brandishing a heavy autorifle that was older than all the men of the philia put together, shot one of their few rifle grenades up through the slot of the guard tower behind the gate. The blast jolted the tower and squirted smoke out through its seams and gaps.
A siren started to wail. A few of the Imperials gathered their wits enough to begin returning fire. Las-bolts cracked and whined across the snowy yards. Three Imperials armed with carbines had grouped inside the entrance of the administration wing, and were shooting towards the gatehouse. Gnesh moved past Eyl, striding with insouciant ease like a man on a recreational stroll. He was the biggest man in the philia, tail and broad-backed, with a lumberhand’s shoulders, and a neck as wide as the skull that sat on it. He had taken the bipod off a heavy lasgun, and cinched the weapon over his right shoulder on a long strap so that he could shoot it from the hip. The chest-pumping pop of each discharge threw a javelin of light out through the smoke and the snow. Gnesh casually aimed at the administration wing. His shots punched a series of deep holes along the facing wall until they found the entrance and wrought catastrophic damage on the three Imperials. Then he aimed a couple more shots into the architrave, and collapsed the entrance onto their smouldering bodies.
Led by Kaylb Sirdar, the first element of the philia had reached the lobby of the main building. The blood wolf had already come through, and the wide marble floor was covered with a crust of glass from the doors, the chandeliers and the hoods of the glow-globes. Kaylb swung his element to the left, and headed towards where the witch had said the secure stairwells were located. An Imperial trooper and a man in a commissar’s long coat tried to fend them off, firing from the cover of some broken furniture. Kaylb killed them both. There was no time to waste, but Kaylb paused for long enough to read the marks their blood had made on the floor and walls. The prognostications were good.