Rime was on her in a second, before she could rise, before she could stop her head spinning. Somehow, the bastard had got her knife.
He put it against her throat.
“No more fighting from you,” he said. He looked over at Blenner.
Blenner had crawled into a corner of the cabin space on his arse, dabbing the blood that was weeping from his nose.
“Last chance, Vaynom,” Rime called. He had Criid’s own straight silver pressed against her exposed throat. The blade was already welling blood.
“Last chance. What did he tell you? What message did he have this bitch bring to you?”
“I think the message ran, ‘Screw you, inquisitor’,” said Blenner, “although I can’t be sure.”
Criid laughed out loud. Rime drew the knife deeper.
A long rivulet of blood streamed down Criid’s neck, and began to soak into the collar of her dress. She made no sound.
“Really, Vaynom, the very last chance. What did he say?”
“He wants to meet me,” Blenner cried.
“When?”
“Today at four! Please stop cutting her!”
“Where?” asked Inquisitor Rime.
“That’s the thing, I don’t know!” cried Blenner. “He said I’d know the place, but I can’t make head nor tail of it. Please, stop it!”
“What did he say?” asked Rime, very slowly and precisely.
“He said I’d know the place that… that he’d made sure isn’t there.”
Rime jumped down out of the truck, and the nearest Sirkle secured the door.
The other two Sirkles closed with their master.
“Blenner’s an idiot,” Rime told them quietly. “He really hasn’t the wit for subterfuge, so Gaunt must be desperate to try to use him. Gaunt’s tried to arrange a meet, but Blenner is confused by the coded nature of the location.”
“Perhaps he’s acting dumb?” a Sirkle suggested.
Rime shook his head.
“If that’s the case, he deserves an award from the Theatrum Imperialis.”
“What about the female?” asked the other Sirkle.
“I believe Gaunt didn’t tell her the meaning so she couldn’t betray it. But she’s smart. She may have figured it out.”
“Should we submit her for deep purpose interrogation?”
“We’ve only got until four o’clock,” Rime replied. “The female is extremely resilient. You can tell that just by looking at her. She would most likely hold out until the time frame had passed. We have to cut through the marrow of this, and we can’t afford to be fussy.”
Rime took out a data-slate and quickly copied down the key phrase. He handed the slate to one of the Sirkles.
“Run this against Gaunt’s file. See what comes up.”
The Sirkle nodded.
“We were using the Tanith to find their commander,” said Rime. “I suggest we continue with that policy. Contact our agents at the Tanith HQ and see if the phrase means anything to them. Have them quiz the Tanith especially. The Tanith core of the regiment has been with him longest, and knows him best.”
“Oh, and get rid of this,” Rime added, and passed Criid’s straight silver to his agent. The Sirkle hurried away.
The other agents waited for their master’s next decision. Rime looked over his shoulder, and spotted the Tanith officers standing with Edur, watching him from a distance.
“What is your will?” one of the Sirkles asked.
Rime began to talk towards them.
“Let’s ask them the question too,” he said.
“Here he comes again,” muttered Kolea to Baskevyl.
“You saw what he had?” Baskevyl whispered back.
“Oh, yes.”
“What?” asked Edur quietly. “What did he have?”
“He brought a Tanith warknife out of the truck,” said Kolea, “and there was blood on it. I want to know who’s in there and what he’s done to them.”
Mabbon, the prisoner, the pheguth, was awake.
Gaunt found him standing in front of one of the studio’s windows. He’d opened the shutter a little to peer at the luminous white nothingness of the foggy daylight outside.
“Your woman, she’s gone?” Mabbon asked.
“She’s not my woman,” Gaunt replied, sipping a cup of caffeine he’d made for himself.
“I wasn’t suggesting you were sexually involved,” said Mabbon. “She’s your woman. She serves you. She’s one of your Ghosts, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“She was on Gereon, wasn’t she?”
Gaunt nodded.
“It’s funny,” Mabbon murmured.
“What is?”
“On Gereon, if I’d won, if I’d been successful in my mission, you’d be dead, and so would she. Yet here you are, risking your lives to protect me.”
Gaunt scowled.
“Yes,” he said. “Ironic, isn’t it?”
“Is there any more of that?” Mabbon asked, pointing at Gaunt’s cup.
Gaunt nodded, and Mabbon followed him into Jaume’s rancid cubicle of a kitchen. Gaunt poured another cup.
“Can I trust Maggs?” Gaunt asked. “I could really do with an extra pair of hands.”
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes.”
Mabbon shrugged, and sipped from his cup. “I’d trust him.”
“I’m not you,” Gaunt said.
“Well, if I was you, I’d never trust him again,” said Mabbon. “I’d probably kill him, to be sure.”
“Throne,” Gaunt breathed.
Mabbon suddenly put down his cup, and scratched at the back of his head.
“They’re closing in,” he said.
“The Blood Pact?”
Mabbon nodded.
“You can feel them?”
Mabbon looked at Gaunt.
“You ever serve on a tropic world so wet-hot the dust flies tap at your eyeballs faster than you can blink?”
“Yes, I’ve been there.”
Mabbon took up his cup and breathed deeply before sipping again.
“That’s what it feels like. Micro-contact in my arms, at the base of my spine, deep down. Something touching my eyes.”
“And this tells you they’re close?”
“Close and closing,” said Mabbon Etogaur.
Gaunt blinked. Once again, he could see it, as clear as day: the Blood Pact, dripping in wet gore, stepping over the threshold into Jaume’s premises.
His new eyes had been showing him an awful lot in the last couple of days.
Every step of the way, he’d dismissed the images as system errors, as glitches, as imaging artifacts, as optical reconciliations, as patterns of accustomisation.
But he’d seen such things through his new eyes. He’d seen his driver’s bad attitude. He’d seen the attack on Section before it had come. If truth be told, he’d seen Maggs trying to kill the etogaur. It hadn’t been the wild shots of the gun that had been left behind that had alerted him.
He’d already been running before the gun had started firing.
“How close are they?” he asked.
“Very close,” Mabbon replied.
Gaunt looked at his pocket chron. It had stopped.
“We have to move anyway,” he said. “We’ve got an appointment.”
“The phrase doesn’t mean anything in particular to me,” Hark told Sirkle. “But I’ll give it some careful consideration. It may be more obvious than it sounds.”
Sirkle nodded.
“Of course,” Hark went on, “if the message was intended for Commissar Blenner as you suggest, it might be very specific to his relationship with Gaunt. They’ve known each other for a long time. It might reference something that none of us have any knowledge of.”
With a sour look that suggested he thought Hark was being less than entirely helpful, Sirkle walked away to continue his questioning. Ordo agents were already moving through the main barrack-rooms, quizzing the rank and file.
“You know what it is, don’t you, sir?” Ludd asked Hark quietly.
“Remind me never to play cards with you, Ludd,” Hark murmured. With Dalin and Merrt in tow, they turned and began to walk briskly in the direction of the temple house.
“You do know what it is,” said Ludd.
“Of course I do, Ludd. It’s hardly vermillion-level cryptography. A place that Gaunt has made sure isn’t there? Anyone?”
“The Tower of the Plutocrat,” said Dalin.
Hark stopped in his tracks and looked at the young adjutant.
“Give the boy a medal! Well done, Criid.”
Dalin coloured up. “My mother — I mean, Sergeant Criid, she has studied the colonel-commissar’s career in some detail. I grew up on the stories.”
Hark clapped Dalin on the shoulder, and then resumed his stride towards the temple.
They entered the temple. Rerval, his arms folded, was standing beside the vox-caster while Beltayn worked at it.
“Anything?” Hark asked.
Rerval shook his head.
“It’s still dead. It’s like Major Rawne has just dropped out of existence.”
“Shame,” Hark replied, “because we’ve now got something to tell him. Keep trying. Where did Doctor Curth go?”
“She took a break, sir,” said Beltayn. “I don’t think she could stand the tension. She said she’d be back. She said she had something important to do.”
“You look funny,” said Zweil.
“Charming,” Curth replied. She sat down opposite him. The closed folder lay on the desk in front of her.
“I mean, there’s a funny look on your face,” Zweil said. “Get on with it, will you? I don’t like doctors’ offices. They don’t agree with me. Besides, I’ve got things to do. Urgent things. I’ve got hymnals to re-cover. In hessian, which is the best I could come up with. And there’s half a bottle of altar wine that won’t just drink itself.”
“The results of your medical examination have come back,” she said.
“Really?” he mocked. “I didn’t think you’d called me in here to tell me I’d been promoted to general.”
She opened the folder.
“This is very difficult, father. Difficult for me to say and difficult for you to hear.”
Zweil didn’t reply. He stared at her.
“The pharmacon report has revealed a concern.”
“I said it would,” Zweil snapped. “No good ever came of tests. No good at all. Ignorance, you see? It’s better not to know. People generally underestimate the power of ignorance.”
“I’m sure they do, father,” she said gently. “However, in the circumstances, we need to discuss this.”
“Has it got a long name?”
“Yes, father.”
“Don’t tell me what it is!” Zweil cried, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to know. I don’t want to make friends with it. We will refer to it only as The Concern.”
“If that’s what you want.”
He nodded. “I’m assuming the length of The Concern’s real name is inversely proportional to the length of time it’s going to leave me with?”
“Sort of,” she replied. She swallowed. It was very hard to stay professional.
“So where’s it lurking? In my head? My liver? My lungs?”
“It’s in your blood, actually. It’s a haematological c—”
“Bup-bup-bub!” Zweil interrupted, making an urgent shushing gesture. “I don’t want long words. I don’t want to have a conversation with it!” He dropped his voice to a hiss. “In fact, we should whisper. I don’t want it to hear us. I don’t want it to know I know about it.”
He looked her in the eyes.
“I don’t want the fething thing to know I’m scared,” he whispered.
Curth opened her desk drawer to find a tissue.
“And crying is a complete giveaway,” he scolded her.
Curth nodded and blew her nose.
“So,” Zweil whispered, “how long?”
“We can administer palliative treatment to retard the progress of—”
“I don’t want drugs. I don’t want nurses and tests and monitors. I’ll just keep going on the way I am, if you don’t mind, for as long as I can, for as long as it will let me. How long?”
“Without treatment,” she said, “no more than three months.”
Zweil blew a raspberry.
“That’s absolutely shitty,” he said. “I assume there’s no possibility that the test results are wrong?”
She shook her head. “I’m so sorry.”
The old priest sat back, deflated. Then a new expression crossed his face. Since the start of their conversation, he’d shown little more than anger. Now he wore an expression of shock.
“Oh, crap,” he murmured.
“What?”
“I’ve just thought of something,” he said. “I’ve just thought of one tiny detail that makes this business a thousand times worse.”
The philia slipped through the mist. The city was still veiled in luminous swathes of white, like high-altitude cloud, but the sun was beginning to burn it off. A hard, bright, clear day threatened to become a reality.
Karhunan Sirdar was confident their holy business would be done and finished by the time the fog departed. They had faced a canny foe, who had thrown them off the trail more than once. But they were Blood Pact, and they were sworn and driven. They had the resolution of the Consanguinity behind them, and they had sworn to perform this duty upon their souls.
They were tired, and they were hungry, and the approaching prospect of their collective, violent doom, though a glorious destiny, touched many of them with fear. However, none of them, not a single one, harboured even the slightest thought of giving up. They all loved the damogaur and, as the warp was their witness, they would not fail him, not in this life.
The witch had done her work. The damogaur had told the men that the pheguth had concealed himself. The witch was unable to read him. However, after a lengthy process of arcane elimination and prayer, the damogaur’s infernal sister had identified the one part of the Imperial city that she could not see into. One small location had been made blank to her. The logic was simple. The target was hiding in the place she couldn’t see into.
The witch swore to this fact, and Karhunan Sirdar had no reason to doubt her. She could not lie. Only truth ever passed her lips.
Up ahead, Imrie came to a halt at a street corner. He pointed up at the black metal sign on the wet brick wall.
Carnation Street. This was the place.
“Take me with you,” Maggs insisted.
Gaunt shook his head.
“No.”
“Look, I don’t know what happened,” Maggs protested. “Untie me and let me help.”
“I don’t really know what happened either, Maggs,” said Gaunt, “and that’s why I can’t untie you or bring you along. You’re staying here with Mr Jaume. When this is all done, I’ll come back for you.”
Maggs stared at him. There was a great deal unspoken in the stare.
Gaunt looked at Jaume, who was standing nearby.
“Thanks for your hospitality, Mr. Jaume. We’ll try not to inconvenience you much longer.”
Jaume shrugged.
“Can I come with you? Help you in anyway?”
“Thank you, no. I’d like to keep you out of danger.”
Over in the corner, Kolding was finishing re-packing his medical bag. He was ready to go. Gaunt was already risking the life of one civilian, and that was one too many.
“Hey,” Mabbon called out. He was at the front window, looking out at the street through a gap in the shutters. “I think our plans just altered.”
Gaunt went over to join him.
Outside, the fog was thick. Slowly and silently, dark figures were emerging from its brilliant depths. Gaunt counted three, four…
They approached slowly, spaced out a distance from each other. They were coming straight for the house.
&nb
sp; Gaunt could see that they were armed. Their weapons were held low but ready.
They stopped on the snowy pavement and looked up at the house’s shuttered windows. Now, he could see their masks too.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Famous Battlefields of the Balhaut War
“Move!” Gaunt ordered. “The back way, all of us. No one can stay here.” Everybody began to move out into the hall and up the short, rickety flight of steps into the rear of the house. Gaunt saw fear on Jaume’s face.
He was swept up in it now, the real thing. “Undo my hands,” Maggs hissed. “Be quiet,” Gaunt told him.
Outside in the luminous fog, Karhunan nodded. Gnesh stepped up, facing the front door of the old tenement. He flexed his broad shoulders to settle the strap of his heavy lasgun, and opened fire. He hosed the doorway from the hip, pumping fat bolts of las into the door, the frame and the brick surround. The door shredded, puncturing like a desiccated autumn leaf. The frame ripped and burst in spiking clumps of splinters and wood pulp. The brickwork fractured and cratered, vomiting clouds of brick dust. Some shots tore through into the reception hall behind the door, and detonated furniture or dug up floorboards.
His burst finished, Gnesh stepped back, and Kreeg ran in past him to lead the assault. Kreeg barely needed to kick to take down the ruins of the door. Lasrifle up and aiming, he came in over the threshold, hunting for a target.
He got less than a metre into the hallway when he began to tremble. The sensation was mystifying. Kreeg was almost more troubled by the sudden onset of the ailment than by the discomfort it brought him. He swayed, and his gunsight dropped.
It took ten seconds for the effects to amplify, boiling through his body like a chemical toxin, or like the burn of a class six hot virus, the sort of monster pathogen a man might contract on a deathworld, and which would kill him in three days.
This took ten seconds. Kreeg began to convulse. He dropped his rifle and staggered, his balance gone. He felt as if he had caught fire inside. Fluid was filling his lungs, choking him. He started to cough, and blood sprayed from his mouth. He hit the wall and collapsed, dragging down one of Mr. Jaume’s artful mauve drapes, tearing off its stud pins to reveal a scabbed, unfinished wall surface. Kreeg was bleeding out. Unclotting blood was gushing from his nose, his eyes and his mouth, from his fingertips, from his pores, from every opening of his body. He shuddered one last time, slumped further, and died.