Or was it snow drifting like dust in a dry valley with—
“Maggs?”
Dust or snow, it hardly mattered. Either would make a deep, insulating blanket that he could lie beneath, lie beneath and be buried by. Snow or dust, it would protect his bones against the heat. It would prevent his blood from boiling.
There was a heat in his blood that would not go away It made a hissing, rustling sound as it squirted around his body, like lace dragging on—
“Maggs?”
Who the feth kept calling his name?
“Maggs? Your name is Maggs, isn’t it?”
Maggs opened his eyes and looked up. The albino freak in the blue-tinted glasses was crouching over him.
“I think you’re sick, Maggs,” the albino said. “I think you’re running a fever. I need to help you—”
“What time is it?” Maggs mumbled, trying to sit up.
“I don’t know,” Kolding replied. “My wrist chron has stopped. It’s day. It’s morning. Mid-morning. It’s light out, but it’s still snowing.”
“Your chron has stopped?” asked Maggs.
“Yes. Why does that matter?”
“Mine’s stopped too. It’s really hot in here, isn’t it?”
Kolding shook his head.
“It’s cold as hell,” he said. “It’s like midwinter, and there’s a draught coming through the window holes.”
Maggs shook his head and sat up.
“It’s really hot. I’m running with sweat.”
“This is what I’m trying to tell you. I think you’re sick. I think you have a fever too.”
“Why? Who else has a fever?”
Kolding blinked.
“Well, your precious prisoner, obviously.”
Maggs got to his feet off the tarpaulin. He was unsteady. Droplets of perspiration splashed off his forehead as he rose. He had a sick feeling in his gut, but it was nothing compared to the burning turmoil in his head. He couldn’t even remember going to sleep.
“I think you should sit down,” said Kolding.
Maggs waved a hand at him.
“I think you should sit down now and let me give you a shot.” Kolding reached out a hand to steady Maggs.
Maggs shook it off.
“I don’t want anything,” he snapped.
The breeze picked up. The refurb’s work curtains swayed in the cold exhalation of the snowstorm. Was that the archway that led through to Jago?
Dry skulls in a dusty valley with all the—
The words made a rustling sound in his head.
Maggs snatched the old gun out of his pocket.
“Oh, Throne!” he hissed. “How long has she been here?”
“Who?” Kolding asked.
“The old dam! The old bitch!” Maggs whispered, circling, and aiming the weapon at random shadows. “Can’t you hear her? Can’t you smell the stink of her?”
“There’s no one here,” Kolding said, rising to his feet. “Please. Please. Put the gun down.”
“She’s right here!” Maggs insisted. “It’s like she’s so close she’s inside my head. That fething black lace gown. The hiss of it!”
“There’s no one here,” Kolding insisted.
Except there was.
The snowstorm gusted again, and the work curtains billowed. The woman stepped quietly through one of the swaying curtains to face them.
Maggs couldn’t see her face. She was wearing a veil. He was glad about the veil. He really, really didn’t want to see her face. Just the idea of it made him shudder. His hands were slick-wet and shaking. Her dress was very long, black lace, and it made a rustling noise as it dragged across the ground.
“How long has it taken you to find me?” Maggs asked her. “How long has it taken you to follow me here?”
“Who are you talking to?” Kolding asked.
“Her. Her!”
“Please, Maggs, there’s no one there.”
Kolding pointed at the empty work curtain swaying in the breeze. The train of it rustled against the rough flooring.
Maggs aimed the old gun at the veiled woman in the black dress.
The pistol that had been left behind banged hard on auto, slamming out its spent cases. Kolding cried out and flinched, covering his ears. The rounds ripped through the work curtain, punching holes in the fabric.
The bullets struck her in the face and the chest. They went through her veil and her torso as if she wasn’t really there.
Baltasar Eyl stepped back as his sister suddenly gasped.
“What is it?” he asked.
The witch’s hands and arms were drenched in blood to the elbows. She had plunged them into the glass sterilising baths to retrieve the strips of leather cut from the limousine’s seats. She was clutching the lank, dripping strips in her scarlet fists like fronds of wet seaweed.
“The blood,” she said. Her words seemed to etch into the unnaturally chilly air of the theatre as if they’d been drawn in acid.
“What about it?”
“It wasn’t all his.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some of it was the pheguth’s, but some of it came from one of the men with him. One of them must also have been injured.”
Eyl remembered clinging to the side of the car as it sped towards the gate. He remembered, like a snap-shot, his half view of the driver’s head and neck, running with blood.
“The driver,” he said.
“Yes. He’s the one I’ve got,” said Ulrike. “I am upon his soul. And he’s fighting back.”
“Can you dispose of him?”
The witch smiled at her brother. Her veil was down, but he could feel the smile, like the hot leak of lethal radiation. “I can do better than dispose of him,” she replied. “I can use him.”
“What are you doing?” Kolding cried.
Maggs turned and struck the doctor across the temple with the old gun. Kolding barked out a cry and fell hard. He tried to get up. Maggs kicked him, and then clubbed him across the back of the head with the butt of the gun.
Kolding dropped and lay still.
Still shaking, and sweating hard, his body stricken with the furnace of his fever, Maggs staggered over to the prisoner.
The etogaur was trembling beneath his heaped blankets. Sweat pasted his face. His eyes had rolled back, showing just whites.
Maggs poked the muzzle of the old gun against the etogaur’s head and pulled the trigger.
TWENTY-ONE
Bleed
Mkoll paused. He turned in a slow circle, reading the snow-covered ground.
He shook his head.
On the empty winter street behind him, Preed and Jajjo were checking side turnings for traces. The chief scout was pretty sure they wouldn’t find anything either.
The signs had been there. From the gatehouse at Section, out into the streets, they’d been easy to track, as clear as day. It was snowing, for Throne’s sake! An absolute gift to any tracker. Gaunt might as well have left a trail of taper flares, or blood.
Something had begun to outfox the acute senses of the Tanith scouts. Something was deceiving Mkoll’s eyes and wits, and it was deceiving his best men too.
This snow was different. It wasn’t like any snow he’d ever read. It teased and it flirted, and promised to reveal all manner of secrets, but it was uncooperative. It blurred and it blended. It covered and it erased. It forgot more than it remembered.
It didn’t behave like snow.
Mkoll was certain, stone-cold certain, that there was something in the storm, some ugly influence in the bad weather that was deliberately blinding them and confounding them.
Silent as any ghost, Eszrah came up beside him.
Mkoll looked at the nihtgane and shrugged.
Eszrah narrowed his eyes.
“Close, he ys,” he said.
Mkoll nodded. “Except it’s just so… you must have noticed it too, Ez. The trail’s wrong. The snow’s lying to me.”
Mkoll looked up. The
distant, thudding shapes of the Valkyries were swinging around for another pass.
“Jago,” Eszrah replied.
Mkoll shrugged. “You’re right. You and me, we followed him across the dust of Jago and found him. We can find him again.”
Commissar Edur watched the progress of the search teams.
“I hate to sound remotely impatient,” he said to the Tanith officers, Kolea and Baskevyl, “but I expected a little more from the vaunted Ghost scouts.”
“You’re not the only one,” replied Kolea bluntly. “It’s not like Mkoll to be this much off his game.”
“Explanation?”
Baskevyl shrugged. “Colonel-Commissar Gaunt has gone to ground. He’s an intelligent man, and he may have covered his tracks well. He knows how Mkoll and the scouts operate. He knows how to hide the signs they would look for.”
Edur pursed his lips. “Which begs the question: is he hiding to stay alive, or hiding because he’s guilty of something?”
He noted the expressions on the faces of Kolea and Baskevyl.
“Just thinking aloud,” he assured them. “The problem being that the inquisitor’s capacity for patience is going to be far less than mine.”
The three of them turned to look together. Further down the street, Rime and his circle of henchmen were grouped in quiet discussion. The displeasure on Rime’s face was readable even at a distance.
“If he orders us out,” said Edur, “we lose all control. Then, I’m afraid, Gaunt’s going to wind up dead, whether he’s guilty or not.”
Maggs fired. He fired and fired again. Nothing was coming out of the albino’s old gun. He’d used up everything in the gun’s clip shooting at the old dam.
Maggs tossed the empty pistol aside and bent down. He clamped his hands around the etogaur’s throat and twisted.
Gaunt slammed into him from the side, and tore him off the etogaur. Locked together in a tangle of limbs, Gaunt and Maggs rolled heavily across the partly boarded floor of the refurb, and collided painfully with a stack of fibreboard.
“What are you trying to do?” Gaunt yelled at the Belladon as he attempted to pin him and subdue him. The gunshots had brought Gaunt running.
Maggs didn’t reply in any properly articulate way. He shrugged his shoulders backwards violently, breaking Gaunt’s grip. The back of his skull butted into Gaunt’s cheek.
“Maggs! Stop it,” Gaunt warned, rolling clear.
Maggs made a gurgling, inhuman noise. He was back on his feet, hunched low, like an ape or an ursid. He drove at Gaunt. His teeth were bared in a snarling grimace: an animal’s threat display.
Gaunt couldn’t do much other than try to absorb the feral charge. Maggs ran into him, bear-hugging him, and they struck the pile of fibre-board together, again, this time on their feet. Gaunt had seen Maggs’ eyes. He knew the man had lost his mind. He could feel the grease of sweat on Maggs’ skin, the fever-heat throbbing out of him.
Maggs wrestled Gaunt into the fibreboards a third time, and tried to crush him into them. Gaunt jabbed his elbow down onto the back of Maggs’ neck. He had to repeat the ruthless blow several times before Maggs flinched away from the source of pain and released his grip.
As Maggs sprang away, Gaunt threw a punch that caught the Belladon’s jaw, and lurched him sideways into a pile of paint pails, buckets and loose timbers. Metal containers clattered as they fell. Trying to keep his feet, Maggs ploughed through the wood and the buckets with his arms milling and clawing, scattering the obstacles out of his way.
Gaunt moved forward to restrain him. He called out the Belladon’s name again, in the hope that it might snap some sense or recognition into the man.
Maggs came up, out of his stumbling collision with the paint pails, clutching a fat plank of timber. He hefted it like a bat or a club, and swung it. Gaunt had to jerk back to avoid being hit.
“For Throne’s sake, Maggs.”
Maggs advanced on him, swinging the timber hard. Maggs was making a whining, sobbing noise.
“Maggs!”
Gaunt tried to dodge around Maggs, but Maggs caught him across the shoulder with the makeshift club, and Gaunt fell sideways into one of the work curtains. He clutched at it for support, and the top edge tore away from its iron fixings with a sharp, rending sound. Maggs came at him again, the plank raised over his head in both hands, ready to slam across Gaunt’s skull.
Gaunt tried to shield himself. He twisted hard, wrapping the heavy curtain tarp around him and over his head. He felt the blow, but the lethal force of it was soaked up by the taut curtaining.
Gaunt scrambled free of the curtain, and stumbled into the adjoining chamber of the refurb. The curtain’s thick, waxy seams caught on the buttons of his uniform, tangling him, and he was forced to pull free of his coat to get clear. The contents of his pockets, upended, scattered onto the floor.
Maggs wrenched his way through the work curtain after Gaunt. He was still clutching the plank, and he was still whining and sobbing, the thick, wet sounds mixing with rapid panting noises. His eyes were pink and bloodshot. He blinked, trying to focus, trying to see where Gaunt had gone.
Gaunt had ducked to the right, just inside the doorway. Maggs only saw him at the very last moment. Gaunt had found a workman’s mop, and swung it like a bat of his own. It caught Maggs across the shoulder blades, and the old handle snapped in half, but the force of the blow was sufficient to knock Maggs sprawling onto his hands and knees. The fat plank of wood clattered out of his grip. Maggs tried to grab for it, but Gaunt struck it out of reach with the splintered end of his mop handle. Gaunt brought the mop handle around as a baton, aiming it at Maggs’ head, but Maggs, still on his knees, intercepted it with his right hand, and stopped it dead.
The fever had bred an astonishing power inside Wes Maggs. He only had one hand on the broken handle compared to Gaunt’s two, and he was kneeling where Gaunt was better braced on both feet. With a grunt of exertion, he tore the handle out of Gaunt’s hands.
He rose. Gaunt backed away.
Gaunt expected Maggs to attack him with the mop handle, but Maggs threw the broken shaft aside.
Gaunt saw why. On his hands and knees, Maggs had found a better weapon. He had found the damogaur’s soot-caked rite knife. It had fallen out of Gaunt’s coat pocket.
Maggs took a step forwards, holding the jagged knife low and ready. His breathing had become really laboured. He lunged, and Gaunt jumped back. Maggs lunged again, sweeping the knife around. Gaunt barely avoided the second blow.
The third blow — a vicious, front-on stab — came closest of all. Gaunt had almost run out of space to back up. There was a wall close behind him. Maggs was boxing him in. The ground was uneven. There was no space in which to turn. Gaunt wondered if he could feint left or right. He was fairly certain that the panting, sweating, blood-shot Belladon would be too quick.
He had run out of choices. The only option remaining was the one he wanted to avoid most of all.
He drew his bolt pistol and aimed it at Maggs.
“Stop it,” he warned. “Stop it, Maggs. Drop the blade and stop this.”
Maggs growled.
“Don’t make me finish it this way, Wes,” Gaunt whispered. His finger tensed on the hard curve of the trigger. He wasn’t getting through. He could feel another lunge about to come his way.
There was a loud and dull metallic impact. Maggs swayed, and then collapsed sideways. He hit the ground bonelessly and lay still.
There was an ugly bruise on Doctor Kolding’s temple. He lowered the dented metal bucket he’d swung into the back of Maggs’ head.
“Are you all right?” Gaunt asked him.
Kolding didn’t answer.
Gaunt ducked forward and plucked the rite knife out of Maggs’ limp fingers. Maggs was deeply unconscious.
“We need to tie him up,” said Gaunt. “Throw me that bolt of twine. Over there, doctor.”
As if slightly dazed, Kolding put the dented bucket down, and fetched the twine. Gaunt
quickly began to bind Maggs’ wrists together.
“I thought he’d killed you,” Gaunt said.
“He hit me,” said Kolding. “He hit me hard. I’m not a soldier. I don’t know how to fight. Once I went down I decided to stay down for my own good.”
“That was probably very wise,” said Gaunt.
“It doesn’t feel very courageous,” said Kolding. “Not now, and not when I was sixteen.”
“You saved my life,” said Gaunt, “and for that, and more besides, you have my thanks.”
Kolding pointed at Maggs. “He is running an awful fever. I think that may have driven him to this. He was seeing things. They were things that he was evidently scared of.”
“It’s more than that,” said Mabbon Etogaur.
The prisoner looked like an upright corpse. The fever was still upon him, and his breathing was as laboured as Maggs’. He was leaning in the doorway behind them, holding onto both the torn work curtain and the doorpost for support.
“You should not be on your feet,” said Kolding, striding towards him. “Help me get him settled again,” he added, over his shoulder, to Gaunt.
They supported the prisoner and walked him back to the bed that Kolding had set up for him in the adjoining room. The prisoner was leaden and unsteady. There was a sort of diseased smell coming off him that Gaunt did not like at all.
“He woke me,” said Mabbon. “He woke me from my fever dream, tearing at my throat. He was trying to break my neck.”
“Don’t waste your strength,” said Gaunt.
They settled him back. “I tried to move. To call out.”
He looked at Kolding, who was preparing another shot from his case.
“Are you a doctor?” he asked.
“You were wounded. We found a doctor to help us,” said Gaunt.
“I would have died,” Mabbon said to Kolding.
“You may still die,” Kolding replied tersely. “I’ve treated your wound, but you have developed a secondary infection, probably due to the less than ideal circumstances of your post-operative recovery. The fever—”