by Dan Abnett
The company’s rite knives — saw-toothed, single-edged blades about the length of a man’s hand, with grips turned from human bone — had been sutured in under the meat and muscle, against the long bones of the arms and legs. Bare and his companion had gouged the first two out, and then used them for the remainder of the fleshwork. Body cavities had been used to stow the company’s iron grotesks.
When Eyl entered the chamber, Bare was using the tip of his rite knife to strip sheets of yellow fat and translucent tissue away from a ribcage so that he could open it. Eyl offered him the larger, cleaver-like packing knife, and Bare took it eagerly. He began to strike the ribs away like a butcher preparing a crown rack. He reached into the cavity he had opened, and lifted out one of the grotesks.
Eyl took the heavy iron mask and turned it over in his hands. From the particular design of the scowling eyes and howling mouth, he recognised that it belonged to Johnas, but Johnas Katogaur was one of the men who hadn’t survived the hibernaculums. The mask would go unused. It would need to be ritually disposed of to appease Johnas and his patron spirits.
“Find mine,” Eyl said.
Samus had already found it. With blood-speckled hands, he offered up the damogaur’s silver mask. Samus’ eyes were filmed blank, and he wore an idiot expression. For many years, Eyl had known Samus by his flesh name, Bezov. Samus was the name of his patron spirit, a particularly noisy thing that had gradually taken up residence in Bezov’s soul. Since then, Bezov had insisted on being known by his spirit name, and the person that Eyl had known had faded behind milk-dull eyes, palsied tics and animal sounds.
Eyl rejoiced that his comrade had been singled out for such a blessing by the High Powers. He took his silver mask. He had missed its cold weight.
The witch had been taken to a dank chamber in the attic levels of the building. Kaylb Sirdar, Eyl’s other headman, had been set to watch her.
“How many?” he asked Eyl when the damogaur reached the upper floor.
“Six didn’t make it,” replied Eyl quietly.
“God’s corpse!”
“Johnas was one.”
Kaylb shook his head and cursed again.
“That leaves thirty-four. We can do the job with thirty-four.”
“Of course. But six. Six!”
“They were the tithe,” Eyl told his old friend. “They were the blood-price to get us into the enemy’s heart unseen.”
“There’s truth in that. When do we move?”
“As soon as we can. As soon as she tells us. Is she ready?”
Kaylb looked through the doorway behind him. In the darkened room beyond, they could see Lady Ulrike Serepa fon Eyl pacing up and down beneath the tattered and faded inspirational posters of the Henotic League. She was still wearing her veil and her mourning dress. She was talking to herself.
“I’ll deal with her,” Eyl told his sirdar. “Go down, arm yourself, help Karhunan with the rites.”
Kaylb nodded, embraced his commander, and then disappeared down the rotting, treacherous staircase.
Eyl entered the attic.
“Sister?”
Ulrike stopped pacing and looked at him. Eyl could feel her eyes behind her veil.
“I do not like this place,” she said.
“We knew we would not like it, sister,” he replied.
“We will all die here,” she declared.
Eyl nodded. She was never wrong, and as for dying on Balhaut, he had never expected anything else. That really wasn’t what mattered.
“Will the Anarch die?” he asked.
“You know that’s the one thing I can’t see,” she replied. She fidgeted with her hands under the long lace cuffs of her weeds.
“Then tell me what you can see,” he said.
She sighed. “I am tired. I do not want to. I am hungry. It’s going to snow again. I don’t like this place.”
“The snow can be damned, and there’ll be time to eat and rest later,” he replied. “You know what I want to see.”
“I am tired!” she repeated, petulantly. “The truth is making my head hurt. Prognostication is tiresome. Don’t make me do it.”
Eyl was suddenly in front of her, his hands, like spring traps, pinning her wrists. She uttered a noise of surprise and pain.
“Do not make me hurt you,” he said quietly, looking directly into the veil. “Do not make me hurt my own blood. This is your purpose. This is why the gore mages of our Consanguinity made you. This is why they bred you and witched you.”
“Upon my soul,” she replied, “I wish they had not.”
“I know.”
“I really wish they had not.”
“Hush,” he said, letting go of her wrists.
“You want to know where the pheguth is?” she asked.
“You know I do.”
“Have you brought any props for me?”
Eyl nodded. He reached into the pocket of his coat, and brought out a neatly-folded paper chart of Inner Balopolis and the Oligarchy. It was another of Valdyke’s procurements. It had been sitting in an envelope on the top of the munition crates.
Eyl slit the seal on the chart, opened it, and spread it like a cloth on a soot-blackened old side table under the gloomy roof beams. He smoothed it out.
She came over, looked down at it, and ran her fingertips across the paper, tracing the lines of streets and thoroughfares with jerky, rapid gestures.
A cold wind gusted in through the attic’s paneless window, and flapped the overhanging edges of the map.
She shuddered, and made a low moaning sound in her throat, the sound of a feline, mauled and cornered. Eyl held her shoulders, gently but firmly. He could feel the chill of her through his gloves. Her panting breath was showing through her veil as vapour. His own breath was starting to smoke too.
Without warning, she tore free of him, and ran towards the attic window, a black shape against the dull white sky.
Eyl cried out, thinking that she was going to jump, and moved to block her as fast as his enhanced metabolism could carry him.
He caught her in the window, grabbing her by the black silk of her long skirts, but she hadn’t intended to jump at all.
He let go. She stood up on the sill in the window space, and looked out over the Imperial city. It was bone-pale in the winter light, and the sky was the colour of a frozen lake.
He heard her sigh. She reached up and lifted the veil away from her face so that she could look upon the world without any barriers. Eyl didn’t look up. He didn’t wish to see her face. He just wanted to know what she was seeing. He stared out across the towers and stacks, the rooftops. The city was vast, perhaps the biggest he’d ever seen. Its complexity filled the world up from horizon to horizon. In this place, less than a lifetime before, a great strand of fate had been decided. It had seemed like a loss to the Consanguinity at the time, but it had simply been a necessary cost, the birthing pains of a new age. It had allowed the Gaur to rise and take the crown of Archon. It had set a new course for destiny.
Now a second great strand of fate was going to be decided on Balhaut, a strand of fate he clutched in his hands, though it slithered and slipped still. It made the first look insignificant by comparison.
Ulrike laughed. Silent, heavy flakes of snow were floating down out of the gleaming sky.
“I told you it would snow,” she said.
“And I believed you,” he replied, though he was not sure that she hadn’t made it snow.
“Can you see him?” he asked.
“I can,” she said. “Lift me down.”
He put his arms around her thighs and lifted her down off the sill. She had lowered her veil and there were snowflakes melting in the mesh.
“Kaylb’s going to die first. You need to know that.”
“All right,” he said, nodding. He swallowed.
“I mean, Kaylb’s going to die soon. Today, probably.”
“All right,” he said, again.
“Won’t you miss him?”
> “Forever.”
She shrugged and went back to the chart. She traced the streets with her fingertips again.
“So?” Eyl asked. “Where will I find the pheguth?”
“Here,” said the witch, tapping a point on the map with her finger. “He is in this building on Viceroy Square The building is known as… Section.”
TEN
Snow on Snow
The sky above the city had turned a sick yellow, and snow had begun to fall again. The flakes made soft, ticking noises as they struck the glass of the tall windows that overlooked the courtyard, and the ticking became a counterpoint to the heavy, funereal beat of the ornate timepiece on the corner stand.
Gaunt sat for a while, and the began to pace in the anteroom. He stared down into the courtyard where the snowflakes were softly beginning to accumulate. He watched the imperceptible crawl of the hands across the brass dial of the timepiece. He went to the door of the anteroom, and looked out into the cold hallway. People were busy elsewhere. He heard the echo of raised voices in the distance. He went back, sat down in the armchair, and sipped at the cup of now-cold caffeine the duty officer had brought. He took out Eszrah’s copybook, and tried to read another of the Nihtgane folk tales, but his mind wasn’t on it.
Commissar Edur reappeared, and shut the anteroom door behind him.
“What’s going on, Edur?” Gaunt asked, rising to his feet. “When can I resume the interview?”
“In a short while, I trust,” Edur replied.
“You heard what he said to me, Edur,” Gaunt snapped. “It’s vital I keep talking to him. Why in the name of the God-Emperor did you pull me out of there?”
“There are complications,” said Edur, evasively.
“What kind of complications?”
Edur looked particularly awkward.
“I want to talk to him,” Gaunt said.
“We want you to talk to him,” Edur assured him.
“Then why aren’t I doing that right now?” asked Gaunt.
“You’re going to have to wait a little longer,” said Edur. He flexed his chin, as if there was much more he wanted to say that he simply couldn’t.
Gaunt stared at him, and then slowly sat down again.
“In the meantime, is there anything I can arrange to have brought to you?” asked Edur. “Some refreshment? Or perhaps you’d like to see your men?”
“My men?”
Edur hesitated, and took a copybook out of his jacket pocket. He flicked through the pages and consulted a memo.
“Uhm, a Major Rawne, is it? Him and six others were brought in last night. They’re downstairs in detention. I thought, as you had time to kill, you might—”
“Major Rawne has been a pain in my arse for twelve years,” said Gaunt. “I don’t know what sort of trouble he’s got himself into now. I hardly care. He can stay downstairs in detention, and rot until I feel like being bothered. It might teach him not to get into trouble in the first place, though I doubt it.”
Edur cleared his throat and put the notebook away. “It was merely a suggestion,” he said.
He turned to leave, but the door opened. A duty officer stepped in and whispered something to Edur, who nodded and turned back to Gaunt.
“Come with me,” he said.
Gaunt followed Edur out into the hallway. He had to stride purposefully to keep up with Edur’s brisk pace.
“Listen carefully,” Edur said to Gaunt, quietly and urgently, as they strode along. “Late last night, the ordos got wind of what was happening here. They’re insisting we hand Prisoner B over to them. Section is protesting our jurisdictional claim to hold and interrogate the prisoner, but the Inquisition is getting rather heavy-handed about it.”
“I can imagine,” replied Gaunt.
“They’re talking about a legal challenge to the Commissariat’s authority, and a ground-up investigation by the Ordo Hereticus. Mercure is trying to head them off. He’s arguing that this is entirely within our remit.”
“Mercure? You mean Isiah Mercure, head of the Intelligence Division?”
“Yes.”
Gaunt whistled. They turned a corner together, and, maintaining their pace, started down another hallway. Several armed guards flanked a pair of imposing doors at the far end.
“He’s called you in,” said Edur. “Answer all the questions put to you simply and clearly. Don’t play games with these people. This is not a moment for showboating.”
“Understood,” replied Gaunt.
“I hope so,” said Edur. The guards snapped to attention as the two commissars strode up.
“How did they find out?” asked Gaunt.
“What?”
“How did the ordos find out about Prisoner B?”
Edur stopped in his tracks, and glanced at Gaunt.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It didn’t come up.”
“You ought to find out,” said Gaunt. “If the ordos can find out, the information is not secure.”
Edur stepped past the guards, knocked emphatically on the doors, and then opened one of them. He held it open to usher Gaunt inside.
“Colonel-Commissar Gaunt,” he announced.
Gaunt stepped into the room and made the sign of the aquila. There were about twenty Commissariat officers and clerks in front of him, along with several representatives of the Imperial Inquisition. They were arranged on either side of a large table, lit by the wan snow-light coming through the large windows. The way everyone turned to glare at him when he entered made Gaunt feel as if he had walked in at an especially delicate point in the conversation.
“Right, Gaunt,” said the senior Commissariat officer. “Don’t just stand there, man. Approach please.”
Gaunt did as he was told. No one had returned his salute. No one had stood back or vacated a seat for his benefit. A couple of Section officers shuffled their chairs aside so that Gaunt could stand next to the table beside the senior officer.
It was Isiah Mercure. Gaunt recognised him well enough from dozens of high-level briefings, though the two of them had never spoken. Gaunt was ordinarily far beneath Mercure’s notice. Mercure dealt with Crusade business at sector level, and kept the company of system governors, lord generals, and the Warmaster. There was very little room for advancement left to him within the Commissariat. Gaunt had heard it suggested that Mercure’s future might include a lord militancy, or even the mastery of some significant theatre.
Mercure was a robust man with greying dark hair, and his strong features managed to be both craggy and fleshy. He was not a handsome man at all. His skin was a bad colour and pock-marked, and the bulk of his torso spoke of excessive high living, but he had exceptional presence. His voice was deep and his manner somehow reassuringly coarse and unaffected.
“You’ve interviewed Prisoner B, right?” Mercure asked Gaunt without really looking at him.
“Briefly, sir.”
“First impressions?”
“We shouldn’t execute him, not until we’ve got everything we can from him.”
Mercure nodded. He still wasn’t bothering to look at Gaunt. Half of his attention seemed to be caught up in leafing through the paperwork spread on the table in front of him. The other half seemed to be considering the being seated opposite him.
This individual was, without doubt, a servant of the ordos. He wore dark body armour, and a mantle with a trim of white fur. His physique was long-limbed and lithe. He occupied the chair like a dancer at rest, or a mannequin that had been artfully posed as an artist’s model. He had a striking, leonine mane of hair swept back from his forehead, and his features were almost perfect in their refined construction: his eyes, for instance. It occurred to Gaunt that he’d seen eyes like that before. He’d seen them in his own face. The inquisitor’s eyes were extravagantly machined replicas, and it wasn’t just the eyes. The aesthetics of his face, the lines of the jaw and cheek and nose, were all too noble, too magnificently handsome to be true. At some point, the inquisitor had had his enti
re face rebuilt by the Imperium’s finest augmeticists.
“What exactly do you think we can get from him?” the inquisitor asked, staring at Gaunt.
“Information vital to the prosecution of this crusade,” Gaunt replied.
“What qualifies you as an expert on the analysis of such information?”
Gaunt hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Who am I addressing?”
There were half a dozen men in black bodygloves standing behind the inquisitor’s chair. His agents, Gaunt presumed, his team, his henchmen. Like their master, they were lean and lithe, and stood like a troupe of dancers, limbered up and ready to perform. Even unarmed, none of them looked like the sort of man you’d choose to tangle with. There was something curious about them that Gaunt couldn’t quite identify. They bristled at Gaunt’s question.
“Watch your tone,” one of them began.
The inquisitor raised his hand.
“That’ll do, Sirkle,” he said.
The henchman, Sirkle, backed down slightly, but his hard gaze didn’t leave Gaunt’s face. Studying Sirkle and his cronies, Gaunt realised what was so disconcerting about them.
They all wore their master’s face.
Hair colour, eye colour and even details of complexion were different from face to face, but the basic elements of the physiognomy were identical and unmistakable. The faces of the inquisitor’s agents had all been augmetically remodelled to echo the heroic perfection of his own.
An odd piece of vanity in the first place, Gaunt thought, but doubly odd when the face you’re immortalising is an artifice to begin with.
“I am Handro Rime,” the inquisitor said. “I am here today in the service of the Ordo Hereticus. My question was, what qualifies you as an expert?”
“Gaunt’s expertise isn’t up for debate, Rime,” Mercure cut in. “He’s got extensive experience of the Gereon Campaign, and that’s where we dredged up Prisoner B. If Gaunt says there’s something in this, I trust him. He’s my man on this. Aren’t you, Gaunt?”