Unless warpcraft had sealed Section in a cone of deceit, and masked the brutal attack, so that the true infamy of the strike was only just seeping out into the world.
Warpcraft, witchcraft: he could smell it and taste it, and he’d had the scent of it ever since he’d been waiting in that anteroom. It explained a lot. It explained how an elite Archenemy strike team had been able to get so close to such a sensitive target so far behind Imperial lines. The man in the silver grotesk and his heathen killers weren’t alone on Balhaut. They had the most infernal support mechanisms guiding them, cloaking them and protecting them. From now on, nothing, not a single stone or snowflake in the world around them, could be properly trusted. The Blood Pact’s unholy shamans were warping a trap shut around them.
“Get off the road.”
Gaunt snapped around. The etogaur was sitting up, much more alert and bright eyed than he had been.
“Get off the road. It isn’t spent. It isn’t spent.”
“What in the God-Emperor’s name are you talking about?” Gaunt demanded.
Prisoner B didn’t reply. Gaunt realised that the etogaur had fallen into some kind of trance, perhaps brought on by wound-shock. He was trembling, his joints stiff and rigid.
Then Gaunt heard the keening sound, the sound he’d last heard in the depths of Section. Something was coming after them.
“Get off the road!” he shouted at Maggs.
“What? Where?”
“Anywhere. A side street!”
Maggs hauled on the steering wheel and swung the heavy car around into a narrow side street between old, age-blackened tenement offices. In the light of the streetlamps, permanently lit in this shadowy thoroughfare, the snow was falling in huge, downy clouds.
Turning had done no good. The keening grew louder.
The blood wolf had their scent.
The thing that had been Shorb wasn’t done. A great deal of energy had burned out of it, and a great deal of its strength had ebbed away, but a hot ingot of determination still glowed in the small part of its mind that remained sentient. It wanted to serve its damogaur. It wanted to serve its philia. It wanted to serve the Consanguinity. It was not going to give up. It was not going to fail them.
The pheguth had fled. He had escaped from under their noses, and was beyond the range of the philia moving on foot, but the blood wolf had the power and speed to catch up. A blood wolf could easily catch a car. It howled around the street corners of the snow-blasted city. It moved like an arctic wind or a leaping electrical arc. It made windows shake in their frames, and streetlamps pop and explode. Reality buckled and twisted in its warp-wash.
Gaunt could hear it coming closer.
He opened the dented back door of the idling staff car and stepped out into the snow. He looked up into the dim sky beyond the buildings that overhung him like silhouetted cliffs, and saw nothing but the billowing flakes.
He could hear it.
“Hide,” said Prisoner B in a small, hoarse voice from the back of the car. “Hide, run. Save yourself.”
With a shriek of tortured air, the blood wolf flew around the corner into the side street. It was two or three storeys up, above the line of the streetlamps, sailing like a bird through the static pattern of the snow. It wasn’t so much there as un-there: a moving blotch of corrupted air, like a stain in water or an imaging flaw in a pict-feed. Reality ulcerated and wept around it, as if the world was trying to reject it, and throw it back into the un-world of the warp from whence it had come.
It swept down at them, keening.
Gaunt raised his bolt pistol and fired. He couldn’t see a target, but he could see its absence. He could see the moving shadow of the warp besmirching the air.
As the blood wolf raced down at them, every streetlamp it passed shattered and darkened. The snow stopped falling and hung, suspended, in the yellow gloom. Gaunt’s shots seemed to hit nothing. He threw himself flat.
The blood wolf swept over them, shaking the staff car violently on its shocks. Several more side windows cracked or blew out. The headlamps exploded. The blood wolf was turning, banking in the air, coming around again.
It came right at Gaunt. He tried to shoot it, and then threw himself desperately out of its path, colliding with the car on his way down. The running board smacked into his wrist, and his bolt pistol spun out of sight. He felt the rush of the blood wolf pass over him, shaking the car again.
The keening was right in his ears.
He rose, looking for a weapon. The blood wolf was circling for a final pass.
The back door of the staff car hung open. On the back seat, pale with blood loss, Prisoner B sat in an almost catatonic state. Maggs was shouting. Gaunt saw something, just a flash.
Damogaur Eyl’s rite knife was embedded in the rear footwell carpet where he had dropped it.
Gaunt leaned in and grabbed the ugly blade. He turned, raising its dirty, jagged length to meet the blood wolfs warp.
His eyes really saw it. He could see past the warp-wash and the buckled, blistered distortion of reality. He could see the thing inside, the screaming, flaying-raw thing, its energies almost gone, its once-arms outstretched into wing-claws, its once-mouth wide open in a scream. He could see the blood pumping furiously in its exposed veins and arteries. He could see the gristle and tendons of its joints, and the remaining shreds of its skin, shrivelling and blackening like paper as they burned away.
Its mouth opened impossibly wide to bite through Gaunt’s skull. Teeth the size of fingers sprouted like tusks from its receded gums for the purpose.
Gaunt rammed the rite knife into its heart.
The blood wolf screamed, and perished in a clap of un-thunder. There was a fierce pressure drop and a burst of freezing air, as if a cryo-bay hatch had opened and then slammed again. The blast threw Gaunt back into the car with enough force to dent the side panels. Charred gristle, sticky brown meat and bone fragments rained down, littering an area with a five-metre radius.
Gaunt sat up and blinked. The rite knife was cooked black with soot, as if it had been left in a grate.
Its pause suspended, the snow calmly and silently began to fall again.
THIRTEEN
Awry
There was a word for the CO of the Bremenen 52nd, but it wasn’t one Viktor Hark would ever use around ladies.
As he stomped back towards the Tanith barracks in the blowing snow, there were no ladies present, so he used it freely and often.
During the lull triggered by the day’s heavy snowfall, he had trudged across the exercise quad for a quiet word with the commander of the neighbouring regiment, in the hope of patching up some of the bad feeling that had begun to eclipse inter-regimental relations, thanks to months of boredom and escalating practical jokes. Unfortunately, the Bremenen CO had chosen that morning to breakfast on iron filings, have his sense of humour amputated at the neck, and sit down very suddenly on a broom handle, as a consequence of which he was as rigid and unyielding as a sheet of flakboard. His response to Hark’s off-the-record nice-making had been dismissive, and he’d essentially blamed the catalogue of infractions and write-ups entirely on the Tanith “tricksters”. Then he’d given Hark a curt, “Good day to you” to take home with him.
The Bremenen had done their share in the months they’d been stationed side by side. Of course they had. It had been tit for tat every step of the way, and some of the earliest run-ins had been playful and forgivable. Hark knew that, and he knew that the Bremenen CO knew it too, but it had stopped being funny some time before, and Hark understood that the Bremenen CO had simply had a gut-full. He wasn’t going to tolerate it anymore, and part of his not tolerating it was to dump the whole thing on the Tanith.
The wind was bringing the snow in across the quad in huge, smoking clouds like flour caught in a mill’s through-draught. There was a good hand’s depth on just about every surface, and the ice-flakes were stinging his nose and lips, and catching in his eyelashes. Hark had his collar turned up and his hand
s stuffed into his stormcoat pockets. The snow cover was so heavy that the sodium lights around the Aarlem compound had come on in response to the gloom. Snowflakes batted dizzily around the hooded glow of the lights like moths.
It was all turning to crap, and Hark had had a gut-full too. In the years that Hark had been with the Tanith, he’d seen them on the verge of defeat and almost destroyed, but he’d never seen them so close to disintegration. They’d been inert too long. They had become bored and fractious, and spiteful. They’d been without an enemy for so long, they’d invented one, and it was themselves. Their idleness and frustration had turned them into wasters and idlers, and worse.
Every day, there was a list of fresh fethery. Hark was running out of options. Some men had crossed the line so often he was hard-pressed to know how to punish them, and just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, some new monster raised its head, and took his breath away. This thing with Rawne and the others, with Daur for feth’s sake! That was a whole new league of crap.
Daur was a yardstick. There wasn’t a straighter man in the regiment. That was how far they’d slipped. Every night when he went to his bed, and every morning when he woke, Viktor Hark offered up a little prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind. It went:
For feth’s sake, post us. Post us today or tomorrow. We need a war.
Peacetime had been remarkably revealing about the Tanith character. Kilo for kilo, they were the best infantry troops Hark had ever seen or had the pleasure of serving with. In the field, they had an abundance of skills and an abundance of courage, and they were, in the strangest way, extraordinarily principled. They took pride in a sort of moral code that entirely forgave any lapses in discipline of conduct. They flourished in adversity.
They were not a garrison force. They were not a regiment you could put into reserve or turnaround, and expect them to sit tight and behave themselves in a safe little barracks compound. They would not spend their time polishing their buttons and practising their parade drill and reading their primers. Well, they would, but it wouldn’t be enough. They would get crazy.
The Tanith (and this quality had spread to the non-Tanith in the First) were a wild force. In the field, you didn’t notice their rough edges. Retire them to Balhaut for a year or two, and they were like caged animals. They wanted to get out, and if they couldn’t get out, they wanted to bite the hand off the next idiot who tried to feed them.
The Bremenen were a garrison force. There was nothing wrong with them; they were a decent, unexceptional, well-drilled infantry outfit. To them, two years turnaround on Balhaut was a sweet deal, the posting they’d been hoping for their entire service. For the Tanith, it was a prison sentence.
Hark stopped in the middle of the quad, tipped his head back, and cursed. He cursed the Bremenen CO, though it wasn’t personal. The Bremenen CO had simply become a hobbyhorse for Hark to take out his frustration on. When he’d finished cursing, he checked to see if he felt any better, and found that he didn’t very much, actually.
He looked at his watch. If he called up a car from the pool, he could be at Section by nightfall. Despite the snow, the roads were still clear enough for a decent run into the city. He could go to Section, and quietly call in a few favours. He could find out how the land lay, and get the inside track on the likelihood of an imminent posting, maybe even seed the idea and get some gears moving. The Munitorum moved at its own pace, but sometimes it didn’t hurt to give it a little shove. He should have done it months ago. Yes, he’d go on up to Section, stick a finger in the air to see which way the wind was blowing, and maybe bend the ear of a couple of senior commissars he knew.
He turned and looked towards the fence in the direction of the city. Even in the snow-light gloom, he could see the immense spread of lights through the chainlink, like a fallen constellation, with the crown of the Oligarchy rising behind it. He was resolved. Doing something, anything, was better than this backbreaking damage control.
Hark sniffed. He realised he might have to revise his travel plans. It looked like worse weather was on the way. From where he was standing, the storm clouds over the Oligarchy looked especially black and menacing, like smoke.
He heard a voice calling his name, and turned to see Ludd thumping across the quad towards him. Now what?
“Excuse the interruption, sir,” Ludd declared as he reached Hark. “Something’s going on.”
“Ludd,” said Hark, brushing snow off his nose, “you realise your sole use to me is to supply meaningful and intelligible nouns and adverbs in place of the word something in sentences like that?”
“Yes,” Ludd shrugged, “but sometimes they don’t issue me with enough nouns from stores.”
“Was that a joke, Ludd?”
“Like a joke, but smaller, sir,” Ludd replied, and handed Hark a message slip. “The vox office sent this through ten minutes ago. Your eyes only.”
A discipline matter. Hark groaned. It had to be a discipline matter, or it would have gone straight to Kolea, or whoever was officer of the watch. What now? What now?
Hark tore the slip open, and sniffed as he unfolded and read it. Snowflakes made little tick noises as they struck the sheet of paper in his gloved hands.
“Summon the senior staff,” he said to Ludd.
“Sir?”
“Summon the senior staff. Five minutes.”
“Well, Rawne’s in jail, and the colonel’s off-site. Do we have any senior staff left?” Ludd asked.
“This isn’t even slightly the time for jokes, Ludd,” said Hark.
Ludd saw the look on Hark’s face, and his grin quickly vanished.
“Right, sir. At once,” he said, and ran off through the snow towards the Tanith blockhouses.
“And take us to Active Pending, please!” Hark yelled after him.
Ludd stopped and looked back.
“Active Pending?” he asked.
“You heard me, Ludd.”
“Yes, sir!”
Ludd turned back and started running again.
Hark looked back down at the paper. Where the snowflakes had hit it, they had turned into drops of water and run, smudging the crude black ink of the printout. They looked like tears from a woman’s eyes, causing her make-up to streak. They looked like blood leaking from bullet holes.
“Feth!” he cried. “Feth! Feth!.”
Just when he thought morale and behaviour were at their lowest, a whole new universe of bad had opened up.
Active Pending. The regiment woke up fast. It shook and galvanised itself to stand to, the pre-transit or pre-combat prepped status. Activity boiled through the Tanith barracks. Everything was suddenly bustling. Beltayn hurried along the main link corridor carrying the day-book and the other logs. Ghosts ran past him in both directions, scrambling for their assigned stations.
“Is this a drill?” Dalin Criid asked Beltayn as he went past.
“What?” Beltayn replied, looking up from the logs that he was reading as he walked.
“It’s a drill, right?” asked Dalin. He was with several young troopers from his company.
“Just get on with it, trooper,” Beltayn said.
Dalin shrugged and hurried away with his comrades.
Beltayn tutted and resumed his reading. A thought struck him.
“Wait! Criid!” he shouted after the departing soldiers.
Dalin turned and ran back to him.
“Yes?”
“You need to attend senior staff.”
“Why? Did I get a promotion?”
“Don’t be a feth-head, Criid,” said Beltayn wearily. “You’re E Company adjutant.”
“For my sins,” Dalin agreed.
“Well, Captain Meryn is off-site.”
“Captain Meryn’s banged up in jail, that’s what I heard,” Dalin said. The look on his face suggested that he didn’t think it could have happened to a more deserving soul.
“Captain Meryn’s status is not your business, trooper,” Beltayn said, “so let’s ditch the
lip. His absence is your business. As his adjutant, you have to attend and gather all the relevants for him, or for whoever ends up in charge of your fething shower.”
“Really?”
“Two minutes, please, in the temple house.”
Dalin let out an oath and ran off.
Beltayn turned and resumed his course. As he swept past medicae, he stopped, rapped on the door, and stuck his head in.
“Senior staff, two minutes, doctor,” he called.
Dorden looked up from his desk.
“Thank you, adjutant,” he said.
Beltayn nodded and went out, closing the door behind him.
“It seems I’m called away,” said Dorden.
“Well, that’s a gigantic shame,” replied Father Zweil. The ayatani was sitting across the desk from the chief medic.
“It really is,” Dorden agreed. “I finally get you to show up here for your examination, and I’m called out.”
“We can finish at a later date,” said Zweil.
“We’re almost done as it is,” said Dorden. He was busily writing up the notes that would accompany the little phials of blood and tissue samples he’d collected. “Can you be patient for a moment longer?”
“Patient or patient?” asked Zweil.
Dorden smiled, and got up. He walked through to the adjoining room, where Ana Curth was loading stainless steel instruments into the autoclave.
“Can you finish up for me?” he asked.
“With Zweil?”
“Yes. Just finish writing up the notes, ask him the green slip questions, and bag the samples and documents with his signature.”
She nodded, and said, “I can take them over to the pharmacon if you like.”
“Thanks. Some kind of staff meeting’s been called.”
“I know,” she smiled. “I think it’s a drill. We’ve gone to Active Pending.”