Throne take them, they might even have the skill to drive Macaroth’s Crusade back out of these stars.
And that, very simply, is what Sek wanted. He reviled Gaur for his success. Sek wanted, yearned, longed, to be named Archon. He was biding his time, playing the part of a loyal magister to the most high Archon. But he prized that rank as his own. He felt he deserved it. He was, by any measure, a finer leader than Gaur.
And the first step along the way was to build a Blood Pact of his own. A fully and finely trained military force as good as, if not better than, the Blood Pact.
This was the delicate matter Mabbon Etogaur had spoken to him about. Mabbon—and how very much the pheguth had warmed to the fellow—was a traitor in his own right. Etogaur was a Blood Pact rank. Mabbon had, by means the pheguth could not imagine, been tempted away from Gaur’s service and employed by Sek to use his knowledge of the Blood Pact’s workings to forge a similar force.
Gereon was the base for this work. The pheguth, with his intimate knowledge of the Imperial Guard, an invaluable tool. Alongside Mabbon, the pheguth was to use his skills, training and abilities to build the Sek’s force.
Mabbon had given it a name during their conversation on the windy terrace: the Sons of Sek. A force of warriors that would eclipse the Blood Pact and defeat, without quarter, the vaunted Imperial Guard.
“Pheguth?” Desolane said. The hatch stood open.
“Are they ready for me?” the pheguth asked.
Desolane nodded.
“Desolane… please understand, I do so want them to learn my secrets,” the pheguth said. “It’s just this.
“Mindlock,” answered Desolane. The life-ward tapped one finger against its own bronze mask as if to indicate the skull beneath. The taps sounded alarmingly hollow, as if the bronze mask was empty.
The pheguth stepped through the hatch and walked into the small stone chamber. He sat down in his seat. It had been scrubbed and sterilised since his last visit. He settled. The electric cuffs snapped down over his wrists and ankles. The chair rotated backwards until he was staring at the arched roof.
“Pheguth,” a voice whispered.
“Hello,” he replied.
“Again, we begin.”
The pheguth could not see the alien psykers, but he could hear them shuffling close. The chamber went cold.
Icicles formed above him. He braced himself, and his augmetic hand clenched hard against the steel restraints. The psykers edged closer.
Scabby hands reached up and plucked the little rubber plugs from the pre-drilled holes in his skull.
“Gods, how I hate this…” the pheguth murmured.
There was a mechanical whine of servos, and a high pitched shrill. The delicate psi-probe needles, mounted on a bio-mechanical armature, approached his shaved skull and slipped into the holes.
The pheguth convulsed. His mouth opened wide.
“Let us start again at the beginning,” the psi-voice commanded.
“Gaaaah!” the pheguth responded.
“Your rank?”
“Ngghh! General! Lord general!”
“Your name?”
“Nghhh! I can’t… I can’t remember! I- aghhh!”
“Unlock! You must unlock! Unlock!” the voices called.
“Nyaaaaa! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!”
Desolane listened for a while, then when the screaming became too much for even the life-ward to bear, it closed the hatch on the transcoding chamber and walked away.
TEN
Following Cirk’s guidance, they drove north, avoiding Ineuron Town and its outlying agri-habs, and joined a major arterial route that ran in a long, straight line across a flat immensity of pasture land. Varl drove, quickly becoming accustomed to the quad-track’s spare, functional controls.
There was little traffic. They passed a couple of slow convoys of vittaler wagons plodding towards Ineuron, and a few battered trucks running errands for the occupation with consented locals at their wheels. Once in a while, they sighted figures on the dusty road ahead—
refugees and vagabonds—but these ragged souls fled into hiding in the overgrown pastures at the sight of a military transport.
They’d been going for about an hour when Larkin, sharp-eyed as ever, warned them that a vehicle was coming up behind them. Gaunt told Varl to maintain speed and took a look. It was an armoured car, a STeG 4, lighter and faster than the quad-track. The Ghosts immediately checked their weapons.
Thundering along on its four, big wheels, the STeG came up behind them and sounded its horn.
“Feth!” Varl said. “Do they want me to pull over?”
He dropped his speed slightly and edged over towards the gutter. The armoured car immediately accelerated and went round them, blasting its horn again. Two armoured troopers stood in the top of the SteG’s cabin well and waved salutes to their “comrades” in the quad as they overtook. Standing up in the quad-track, Bonin waved back. He was wearing the borrowed helmet and shoulderguards. His lasrifle was just out of sight behind the handrail.
The armoured car quickly shot past and pulled away, leaving pink dust in its wake.
The pasture flashing by on either hand was, like so much of the fecund agri-world’s premium land, sadly neglected. The grasses had grown out, springing tall and lank, and had dried to straw. The pastures appeared bleached, like silver wire. Profusions of weed flowers had flourished: hot red emberlies like spatters of blood, and millions of white grox-eye daisies. Gaunt stared at the passing view. The archenemy had broken Gereon, and tainted it, but even in its undoing there was accidental beauty like this. A transient glory, seen by very few, had been produced by miserable neglect. Not for the first time, Gaunt reflected that whatever the actions of mankind and the foes of mankind, the cosmos asserted its own nature in the strangest ways.
The afternoon began to fade. The seared sky became a darker, acid green, and then dark clouds began to heap in the west. Thunderstorms fizzled into life, and mumbled in the distance. The air became heavy and charged.
They drove on for another half hour, until Varl was forced to switch on the transport’s running lights. The sky had now bruised a dark, unhealthy brown. There was rain in the wind. They drove through several burned-out villages, and then the land became more hilly and they reached the fringes of a belt of forest.
“We’re just crossing into Edrian Province,” Cirk said. “A little further, and we should stop for the night.”
During the invasion, fighting had been fierce along the province’s borders. The roadway had been repaired in many places. Stretches of forest had been bombed or burned flat and the road wound through scorched wildernesses where only the splintered, black trunks of trees poked from the ash. They saw the wreckage of abandoned war machines, most of them PDF armour, and dry, shrivelled heaps that had once been bodies. Elsewhere, the forest had been mutilated by acid rain. The team aboard the quad had been chatting amiably on the open road, but now they fell silent, their faces solemn.
They had just reached another village on the woodland road when the rains began. Beltayn and Criid raised the tarp roof over the transport crew compartment, and they heard the caustic rain sizzling as it ate at the treated canvas.
Drum fires had been lit along the roadway. Ahead, beside a grim ouslite customs house, a roadblock had been set up. A small queue of vehicles was drawn up to it, headlamps on and engines running as the guards checked consent papers and imagos.
Varl slowed down. “What now?” he asked.
“Just a routine inspection post,” said Landerson. Cirk nodded agreement.
“Go round,” she said. “Follow my lead.” She picked up the helmet and shoulderguards Bonin had used. Varl downshifted the transmission, and rolled the quad-track round the tail-end of the queue. Peering out, Gaunt could see a lot of hostiles on the ground under the awnings of the checkpoint. Excubitors and occupation troops. Several officers. He wondered if they had dogs, or worse. By the roadside just ahead, the rotting cor
pses of executed law-breakers hung on display from a wooden scaffold.
Varl overtook the line of waiting trucks and came up to the barrier. A trooper in a rainslicker poncho approached, holding up one mailed hand.
“Voi shet! Ecchr Anark setriketan!” he shouted above the drumming downpour.
Cirk stood up, disguise in place. “Hyeth, voi Magir!” she called, pitching her voice low. “Elketa sirdar shokol Edrianef guhun borosakel.”
“Anvie, Magir!” the trooper replied, and waved them through at once. The checkpoint barrier lifted smartly, and Varl gunned the quad forward.
“What did you tell him?” Gaunt asked Cirk as she sat down next to him and pulled the helmet off.
“That my commanding officer was late for a meeting in Edrian thanks to the damn rain, and was in the mood to shoot the next idiot who delayed him.”
Gaunt nodded and then thought for a moment. “Major?”
“Yes?”
“How did you tell him that?”
“I used their language, colonel-commissar. You pick it up. It’s essential for underground work.”
“Right,” said Gaunt. He leaned back, not at all reassured. Rawne sat across the compartment from him, facing him. Gaunt knew the look in his number two’s eyes. Vouchsafe?” Rawne mouthed.
Gaunt shook his head.
Plower, one of Cirk’s people, got up and took a look out ahead into the dismal night. “Next turning left leads to the Baksberg ornithons. We can find shelter and a good place to lie low.”
Cirk agreed. “Give Mr Varl instructions,” she said, then turned to look at Gaunt. “If that’s all right with you.”
“Carry on,” said Gaunt.
The track turning led them off the main arterial into the festering darkness of the woodlands. The heavy rain had turned the track into a mire, but the quad’s big tread sections coped well. White smoke drifted from the acid-bitten trees around them, and there was a pungent stink of halides and sulphur.
The headlamps picked out a cluster of buildings up ahead. The ornithon, typical of the poultry farms common in that woodland region, comprised a low-gabled main house, stores, feed bins and the long, mesh-walled hutches of the batteries. The place was ruined. A loading tractor, stripped to its bare metal by months of corrosive rain, slumped in the main yard on decomposing tyres.
The main house had lost its roof, but the batteries were still intact and relatively dry. They reeked of birdlime and decay. The mission team and its allies dismounted and dashed into the shelter. While the scouts checked the area for security, Larkin, Criid and Feygor cleared some floor space of the foul-smelling straw, and Brostin set up a few lamps. Beltayn went to work preparing food. Landerson and Plower volunteered to help him, setting up the portable stove, and fetching water from the outside pump for purification. Cirk sat down in a corner, in deep conversation with Purchason and Acreson. Lefivre settled alone in the shadows, lost in his own thoughts.
“Check everyone,” Gaunt told Curth. She nodded. “Including our associates,” he added.
“What do I tell them?” she asked.
“Tell them I’m concerned for the health of everyone in my team.”
Curth began to prepare her kit.
Varl came in from the rain, having parked and shut down the quad-track. He was heading for the stove to warm his hands, but Gaunt caught him by the sleeve as he went by.
“Sir?”
“Find a good reason to lurk in earshot of Cirk. I want to know what they’re talking about.”
“You got it,” Varl said.
Gaunt turned to Rawne. “Arrange a watch. But make sure everyone gets a decent rest.”
“Right,” said Rawne. He paused.
“Something else on your mind?”
Rawne shrugged. “I was just thinking,” he whispered. “If we didn’t need their help so badly, I’d kill them all.”
“But we do need their help.”
“Maybe,” Rawne said. “Keep your eye on that one, though,” he said quietly, indicating Lefivre with a roll of his eyes. “I mean, Landerson seems all right, and Cirk knows what she’s about, it would seem. But that one…”
“Strung out?”
“And then some.”
“I noticed. Landerson seems to be carrying him, as if he’s close to losing his nerve.”
“One word, that’s all it takes. One word from you.”
“I know,” said Gaunt. “For what it’s worth, major, I’m inclined to agree. If we didn’t need their help so badly, I think I’d kill them too.”
“Who’s in charge here?” Uexkull growled as he burst into the room. The light from the hovering glow-globes shone off his ribbed copper armour. Chief Sirdar Daresh rose quickly to his feet, scraping back his chair. He put his fork down next to his half-finished supper and hurried to swallow the mouthful he was chewing.
“I am, lord,” he said. The dining hall of Occupation Headquarters, Ineuron, fell silent, and the other officers sprang to their feet from the long table in a terrified hush. Rain beat against the shutters. Uexkull was so massive he’d had to turn his shoulders sideways to pass through the doorway.
“You are an incompetent weakling,” Uexkull said, and shot Daresh through the head with his bolt pistol. The single shot made a deafening boom in the close confines of the chamber. Daresh’s almost headless corpse cannoned backwards from the end of the table, knocking over his chair. A blizzard of blood and tissue spattered the officers standing to attention at the table. They winced, but none of them dared move, not even to wipe clots of brain matter from their faces.
Uexkull walked down the length of the table, his armour’s hydraulics clicking and whirring. The wooden floor creaked under his great weight. Two of his warriors took up positions at the doorway.
Uexkull reached the head of the table. He rolled Daresh’s limp body out of the way with his foot, and set the chair upright. Then he sat down on it. The chair groaned under the monster’s bulk.
Uexkull put his engraved bolt pistol on the table beside the place setting. Pale wisps of smoke still fluted from the muzzle.
“Who is,” Uexkull asked, his voice like the slither of dry scales, “second in command? Say, for instance, if the garrison commander is suddenly deprived of brain activity?”
There was a nervous silence. Uexkull picked up Daresh’s fork, speared a piece of fatty meat off the half-finished plate, and popped it into his mouth, oblivious to the speckles of fresh blood that dotted the food, the fork, the plate and the table.
He chewed. Swallowed. “Do I look like I have all night?” he creaked.
“I… I am, lord,” said the officer standing to his left.
“Are you? Name?”
“Erod, Vice Sirdar.”
Uexkull nodded, toying with his fork. Then he swung round and impaled Erod through the throat with it. Erod staggered backwards, hands to his neck, face contorted, and collapsed backwards, writhing and vomiting blood.
“Lesson number one,” Uexkull said over the sounds of a man drowning in his own body fluids. “When I ask a question, I expect an immediate answer. Vice Sirdar Erod would not be in that pretty fix now if he’d just spoken up when asked. I am not, by nature, a dangerous man.”
The warriors at the door sniggered.
“Oh, all right. I am. I really am. I am bred, trained and equipped for one purpose. To kill the enemy. I understand that I lack subtlety. Subtlety was not part of my training. I am not a governor, an ordinal, an arbiter of laws, a calculator of tariffs. The Plenipotentiary keeps me here as part of the Occupation force for a single reason. To kill the enemies of the Anarch.”
There was a long pause.
“Who is third in command?” Uexkull asked.
“I am, lord,” said the officer to his right, an older trooper whose face was heavily spotted with Daresh’s blood.
“Good,” Uexkull nodded. “Quick. Obedient. And your name is?”
“Second Vice Sirdar Eekuin, lord.”
“You answered pr
omptly, Eekuin. You have learned. I will not kill you. Unless you are an enemy of the Anarch. Are you, perhaps, an enemy of the Anarch, Eekuin?”
“I am not, lord. I am true to the Anarch, whose word we serve—”
“And whose word drowns out all others,” Uexkull finished, raising one hand to cover his mouth. “Eekuin, you’re now in charge. Command of the Ineuron Town occupation is in your hands. Your first task will be to explain to me why the enemy insurgents have not been located and destroyed.”
“Lord, we have searched the town. During the night, the wirewolves were roused and they found nothing either. Checks have been doubled, house to house—”
Uexkull raised his hand. “I have been in the town now for three hours. I have seen the patrols, the search sweeps. I know what’s being done. What concerns me is what is not being done.”
“Yes, lord.”
Uexkull slid a data-slate out of his belt pouch and speed read the display. “An excubitor patrol slaughtered at the Shedowtonland Crossroads. A terrorist campaign. Bombings. A firefight in the midtown areas yesterday that left the better part of two more excubitor squads dead. Las weapons used. This is not the work of the resistance cells.”
“No, lord. I did not suppose it was.”
“So… something more dangerous than a resistance cell has been active in this backwater. Call me old-fashioned, but wouldn’t that make it a priority for the senior staff here to find the interlopers and obliterate them?”
“I believe it would, lord,” Eekuin replied.
“Yet… and yet, you’re sitting down to dinner.”
Eekuin risked lifting his right hand to wipe away blood that was beginning to trickle into his eye. “I request permission, lord, to rectify that at once and organise the senior staff into a hunting pattern.”
“That would be good,” said Uexkull. “Permission granted.”
Eekuin stepped back from the table, saluted, and turned to issue an order to the frozen officers around him. Uexkull picked up his bolt pistol.