“And nothing to do with any mumbo jumbo ritual, obviously.”
“Well, obviously,” said Kolding, picking up his spoon.
Gaunt and Criid ate their soup and bread sitting under the lights in front of Balopolis.
“You were here, weren’t you?” she asked, mouth full, nodding at the backdrop.
“In another life.”
“Was it as bad as they say?”
“I don’t know,” Gaunt replied. “What do they say?”
“That it was bad,” replied Criid, spooning more soup into her mouth as if there was a race to finish first.
“Then that’s what it must have been,” he said.
He sat back on the couch, and stared at the backdrop for a long time.
“It was something,” he said at length.
“Worse than we’ve seen?” she asked.
“Of course not. With the Ghosts, I’ve walked through bad, and worse, and worse still. Balhaut was just an action. They’re all just actions. Balhaut was a major action. A major action. Of course it sticks in my memory. But it doesn’t define me.”
Criid stared at him. “Oh, I think it does.”
“What?”
“I think Balhaut was hell on a stick, and I think it matters to you because Slaydo mattered to you more than you’d like to admit. I think Balhaut is an old wound for you.”
Gaunt laughed.
“I’m serious,” she went on. “You won a massive victory for the Warmaster here on Balhaut. You and the Hyrkans? The Oligarchy Gate and then the Tower of the Plutocrat? Hello? And what did he do for you? Eh? He died, that’s what he did.”
“That’s not how it happened,” said Gaunt.
“But that’s effectively what happened,” Criid replied, putting down her empty bowl. “You and the Hyrkans fought like furies for Slaydo, but when the dust settled, he was dead, and there was another Warmaster on the ascendant. You got overlooked. A pat on the back and a sideline to some backwater forest world where—”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it?” she asked.
“The Hyrkans were honoured and rewarded. I was rewarded. My own command.”
Criid smiled sadly. “You were Slaydo’s best. His favourite. You should have been his heir. His anointed one.”
Gaunt laughed again. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Tona.”
“I may not have much in the way of book learning or formal schooling,” she replied, “but when you became my commanding officer, I made a point of reading up on you. I studied. You excelled at the Gate and excelled at the Tower. How much older than you is Macaroth?”
“The Warmaster?” Gaunt asked. “He has seven years on me, I think.”
“Not much to split. Two young men. Two young protégés. Little to choose between them. Like brothers, inheriting. Slaydo died. And in death, only in death, Macaroth succeeded him.”
“It wasn’t like that at all,” he scoffed. “Macaroth was a high order commander. I was just a commissar.”
“Slaydo loved you,” she replied. “Think how he favoured you. He gave you the left flank, into the Gate. Yes, I’ve read the accounts. Memorised them. He favoured you into the Gate from the left, not because that was the easy path but because he trusted your ability. You took two impossible obstacles. Bang, bang! Macaroth had taken command of the Balopolis assault simply because everyone above him in rank was dead.”
“He still won it,” said Gaunt.
“And you would have won it too, in his place. Have you ever met him?”
Gaunt looked at her.
“Macaroth?”
“Yes, Macaroth, our beloved Warmaster.”
“No.”
“No, never?”
“Never.”
“So he didn’t get you sidelined to some backwater forest world where—”
“No!” Gaunt snapped.
“Just asking,” Tona smiled.
“Don’t,” said Gaunt.
“For an hour or two there,” she said, turning to point at the cityscape backcloth, “for an hour or two right there, you were on the verge of becoming Warmaster.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, you were.”
“No.”
“You really were.”
“Criid. Enough!”
“Listen,” she said, rising from the couch, “who were Slaydo’s obvious successors? Cybon? Dravere? Blackwood? They were all old, senior men. He gave it to Macaroth. Slaydo was absolutely ready to give the warmastery to someone younger and less qualified than the usual chain of command suggested. Macaroth proves the precedent. You could have been Warmaster! You should have been!” Gaunt looked away. “You weren’t there,” he said.
She watched him. He stared at the floor for a moment, and then looked up into her eyes.
“You weren’t there,” he repeated. “I applaud your imagination, but it wasn’t like that. Believe what you like, the only thing you really need to know is this: I would never have missed the chance of becoming the Ghosts’ commander. Tanith, Verghast, Belladon, it’s been an honour to serve alongside them all.”
They both looked around as Maggs screamed out from the other room. “He’s got a knife!” Maggs was yelling.
Gaunt and Criid ran through to the reception room. The etogaur was on his feet, holding the rite knife. Both Kolding and Jaume had leapt up and were backing away. Maggs was sitting bolt upright on his sofa, his bound hands in front of him as though he were praying.
“He’s got a knife!” Maggs yelled as soon as he saw Gaunt. “Where did he get a knife from?”
Gaunt stared at Mabbon. He wasn’t sure how the prisoner had ended up with the rite knife. Gaunt had probably simply forgotten to take it back from him in the refurb. It was an oversight, a simple oversight.
All that mattered was what the prisoner intended to do with it.
“Give it to me,” Gaunt said. “Give it to me or drop it.”
The prisoner did neither of those things. Criid swept the laspistol out of her waistband, and aimed it at the prisoner in a two-handed grip.
“Do what he told you to do,” she said.
Gaunt raised his hand to ease Criid back.
“Give me the knife,” he said again.
“I’m not going to hurt anybody,” Mabbon replied. “Did you think I was intending to hurt anybody? We simply have to make ourselves safe here.”
“With a knife?”
“The witch will be looking for us,” said the etogaur, looking directly at Gaunt. “All signs of fever seemed to have left him. There was a healthy flush in the scarred pink tissue of his face. This isn’t far, is it?”
“What?”
“This isn’t far from the place we were hiding in before, is it? I don’t really remember. I was still delirious when we moved. I don’t remember how long it took.”
“No, it’s not far. A couple of streets away, if that,” said Gaunt.
“The witch will be looking for us. We shook her off, made her lose the scent, but she will renew her efforts. I was intending to cloak us. Where is the blood?”
“The blood?” Gaunt asked.
“The blood you took out of me and your man there.”
Gaunt looked over at Kolding. “You’ve still got it, haven’t you, doctor?”
“Yes,” said Kolding.
The doctor produced the basin. Mabbon took it, and walked to the front door of the studio. Criid shot a questioning look at Gaunt, but Gaunt shook his head.
At the door, Mabbon used the rite knife to scrape an intricate symbol in the wood of the doorstep, a symbol that Gaunt didn’t care to look at too closely. Then Mabbon filled the scratches with blood from the basin.
Methodically, he repeated the process on the sills of the building’s main windows, and the steps of the back and side doors.
“That’ll keep her blind to us, for a few hours at least,” he said. He handed the basin back to Kolding, who had followed to watch the work warily, and then
offered the knife back to Gaunt.
Gaunt took it, and returned it to his coat pocket.
“Heretic magic,” muttered Kolding, and went to put the basin away in his bag.
“Exactly,” said Mabbon.
Gaunt gazed out into the last hours of the night. The sky above Old Side had gone an odd, pale colour, and the snow had eased off for the first time in two days. Gaunt had, against his better nature, begun to associate the snowstorm with the force of the witch set in opposition to them. The easing of the snow suggested, perhaps quite wrongly, a waning of her power and her influence.
“What do you think?” he asked Criid.
They were sitting by the window in the reception room, sipping caffeine. Mabbon had gone back to sleep, and both Kolding and Jaume had withdrawn into some semblance of slumber. Maggs lay on the sofa, his eyes wide open.
Gaunt had spent the last few minutes outlining an idea to Criid.
“It’s not a great plan,” he admitted.
“It’s not,” she agreed.
“It’s the best I’ve got.”
“You trust him?”
“With my life. I’m just sorry you’ll have to go instead of me. I need to stay with the prisoner, and we can’t trust Maggs.”
She nodded. “Makes sense. I can get there fast.”
“We’ll need to get you some clothes from Mr. Jaume’s racks.”
“Really?” she asked.
He nodded. “You won’t get in without them. And you know what to say?”
“I know what to say. What happens if I don’t come back for… for whatever reason?”
“I’ll still be there.”
Criid looked at him. “That’s way too much of a risk.”
“It’s too much of a risk not to be. We need this to be over and done. There could be all sorts of factors preventing you from coming back. I will be there.”
“And if it’s a total fething mess?”
“I’ll fight my way out of it,” said Gaunt.
With a small bag of Mr. Jaume’s dressing up clothes over her shoulder, Criid left the studio on Carnation Street just before dawn. Gaunt watched her run off into silent, empty streets where the snow had stopped falling.
He hoped that the cessation of snowfall was a good omen.
He hope that he’d see her again.
He wasn’t confident about either of those things.
TWENTY-FOUR
Repulse
First, it went dark, then there was a crackle of hot, white noise as Csoni’s men compromised the club’s security countermeasures and crippled the comms.
“The work of an EM charge, and a couple of seconds with a pair of needle-nosed pliers,” Leyr said with grudging admiration. “Nothing too fancy, but they know what they’re doing.”
A red gloom flooded the club premises and, with the power out, the air-circulation systems died. It got stale and warm very rapidly. They could smell the beer-soaked carpets and the cantor-finch shit. In the monitor room, the screens, running on a battery circuit, boiled with static like a snowstorm.
As it had, by then, stopped snowing outside, Rawne considered this to be ironic.
In the red gloom, they waited for sounds of the doors being forced. The loading dock was a given, because they’d seen the men approaching on the monitors. If they were approaching the loading dock, they also had access to the east side of the building.
“Roof,” said Leyr.
Meryn looked at the scout. “You reckon?”
Leyr glanced at Elodie.
“Where’s the main junction box of your comms and cameras, miss?” he asked.
“Behind the main chimney stack on the main roof slope,” she replied.
“Well, that’s where they went to work with the needle-nosed pliers, so someone’s on the roof too,” said Leyr.
“Skylights? Roof access?” Varl asked.
“I can show you,” Elodie said.
“Just tell him,” Daur said firmly.
Elodie explained the upper floor layout and Varl moved out with Cant.
“What now?” asked Elodie.
“Just stay real fething quiet,” Meryn told her.
“Why?”
“Because he’s listening,” replied Meryn, pointing through the gloom at Rawne.
A silhouette in the red darkness, Rawne had his head cocked.
“Metal saw,” he said at last, “portable. That’s the back door. You want to cover that for me, Meryn? I’m sure Leyr will assist.”
Meryn nodded, and got up. Leyr followed him out, the big bolt-action rifle over his shoulder.
“Captain?” asked Rawne.
“Yes, sir?” Daur answered.
“Perhaps you and Banda could cover the front?”
“On it,” Daur said.
“Are you just going to sit here and let us do all the work?” Banda asked.
“No,” Rawne replied.
In preparation for his initially effective, but ultimately disastrous, move on Zolunder’s, Rawne had studied every schematic of the site that he could get his hands on. He’d had Meryn, Varl and Cant visit the Munitorum archive on the Avenue Regnum Khan, and the Oligarchic Library of Architects on Salpeder Square, to procure and request public records and make cheap grease-paper copies. Cant had shown a peculiar propensity for trace copying schematics with forensic precision. Rawne had even pulled a couple of things off the city’s datasheaf.
He’d mixed and matched. He’d overlaid. He superimposed, working to develop the most recent and current plan of the club premises.
He had planned it, and his little circle had executed it, with the same eye for detail that he planned any known target operation. He’d used precisely the same skill set that made him a decorated major in the Imperial Guard, the same skill set that had got him in and out of particular places like the Hagian Doctrinopolis, and Gereon, and trouble in general. He’d assessed the best way in and the best way out, and how to procure transport and dud uniforms.
He hadn’t done any of it because he was that fussed about getting rich. Rawne had done it because he was getting terminally bored.
The most useful schematics had come from the Balopolis Archive of Reconstruction, which itemised all post-war refurb, rebuild and reclaim. The knot of sub-street buildings, now known as Zolunder’s, had once been a vaguely successful dining hall. It had taken two anti-tank rounds through its eastern wall during the war, and the bulk of it had burned out or been looted.
Rawne knew how the refurb had gone. He knew that Zolunder’s had kept the dining hall’s old freight access and front access, and added a service gate in the east during the rebuild.
Urbano, or one of his low-life business chums, had sealed off and locked out the service gate when they’d taken the place over, and turned it into a club that they could rinse for a couple of years before selling on. They’d wanted to minimise the number of entry points, which made good sense from a security point of view. It was what Rawne would have done if he’d been running the place.
It was, however, a dormant vulnerability. It wasn’t as if Urbano and his ilk had actually bricked the service gate up. It was still there.
Studying the schematics before running his boredom-banishing operation, Rawne had noticed the service gate, and seriously considered it as an option. In the end, he’d gone another route, the “Ban Daur is so innocent that doves nest in his hat” route.
Rawne knew it never paid to underestimate an opponent. He was quite sure that Lev Csoni, a man he’d never met, let alone heard of, was a bastard piece of work, and smart with it. If Rawne knew about the service gate, then Lev Csoni knew about the service gate, supposing he had the common dog sense he was born with.
For safety’s sake, Rawne simply presumed Lev Csoni was approaching the problem of Zolunder’s the way he had done.
That is why he took up his weapon and went to cover the service gate.
Up on the top floor, Varl hushed Cant. He could hear men moving around on the roof, making
furtive rat-sounds, scuffles and scrapes. It reminded Varl unpleasantly of the high galleries of Hinzerhaus, where the Blood Pact had climbed up out of the dust of the mountains, onto the ramparts, to prise open the metal casemates. He held his shotgun ready, staring upwards. It was stifling in the dark. He’d have given a great deal for a pair of no-light goggles or a scope like Mad Larkin’s.
Light appeared before him. A pale blue band of light had begun to slant down from the ceiling, as broad and thin as a sheet of paper. It was like a holy vision, a shaft of ghostly, ethereal light spearing down from on high into the infernal gloom of the airless building.
Someone was opening a skylight, and soft, cold snow-light was penetrating the darkness.
Cant had seen it too. He took cover across the walkway from Varl, crouching behind a jardiniere that supported a dead fern in a glazed pot.
The ladder of blue light broadened. Varl caught the first, wet-raw whiff of snow on the air, just a hint in the breathless warmth. There was a muffled thump, and the light increased dramatically.
They just lifted the skylight too far, thought Varl, and all the snow-weight on the top of it slumped off onto the roof. The panes of the skylight had been blocked, and now they aren’t.
Varl heard the first man about to drop in. He caught Cant’s attention with a gesture, and signalled to him to hold his fire until they had at least two targets.
Framed in the pale, chill shaft of snow-light, a dark figure began to lower himself through the skylight frame. The intruder was trying to be stealthy, but it was a terribly clumsy effort. Somebody was evidently on the roof above, playing out a line or lowering him in a hand lock. It was the most feth-awful manoeuvre Varl had seen in a long time. He realised that, though they might well be dealing with violent, vicious men, the Ghosts weren’t dealing with competent, professional soldiers. Any decent Guardsman or ex-Guardsman would have known that the quickest and quietest mode of entry through the skylight would have been to simply jump down to a hand-arrest, and then drop the rest of the way. The skylight wasn’t especially high. Jump down, brace, drop: quick and simple. Forget this dangling and grunting with your legs waving around, trying to brace a foot hold.