by Dan Abnett
Gaunt shook his head.
“Sir,” he said, “have we forced you to leave your home for the first time in fifteen years?”
Kolding shrugged again, and said, “It’s all right. I keep myself to myself. It’s just a strange turn of events, that’s all.”
“You’ve been in that house for fifteen years?” Maggs asked incredulously.
“Enough, Maggs,” said Gaunt.
“No wonder he’s such a fethwaste,” Maggs muttered.
“Doctor Kolding,” Gaunt began, “I think that I should drive.”
“Why?”
“You’re evidently having problems with the snowy conditions. It’s taxing you. I have recent training in cold weather driving.”
“Do you?” asked Kolding.
The doctor brought the ambulance to a long, lingering halt, and he and Gaunt got out and crossed sides.
Behind the wheel, Gaunt tested the controls, let out the clutch, and raced them forward.
“That was a lie, wasn’t it?” asked Kolding.
“What?”
“Your recent training in cold weather driving?”
Gaunt nodded.
“The lamps hurt your eyes, don’t they?” he asked. “That’s why you are driving at night in dark glasses.”
Kolding didn’t reply.
“I have a slight advantage,” said Gaunt. He double-blinked and switched his focal field to high-gain, low light. Streetlamps or no street-lamps, the way ahead lit up for him.
Karhunan retraced his steps up the street, though his steps were almost gone. His boots chuffed in the ever-thickening snow cover.
The damogaur was examining the car their quarry had used. Six members of the philia, under Malstrom’s leadership, stood watch in the street around him.
Eyl looked at Karhunan.
“They were in the building nearby, magir,” said the sirdar, “but they have gone. Another vehicle. Imrie and Naeme are already following its tracks. If we deploy fast, we will catch up and—”
“We’ll catch up anyway,” Eyl replied. “No need to go chasing through this weather.”
“What do you mean?” asked Karhunan.
“Look what we’ve got,” Eyl answered. He stroked his fingertips along the back of the car’s driving seat. They came away tacky and dark. “Bring my sister here,” he said. “We’ve got their blood.”
When she couldn’t run anymore, Tona Criid hid instead. Her muscles were burning as if someone was spiking hot wires into them, and she was close to throwing up.
The shrill sound had gone away at some point, and the constriction had faded. A few streets away from Section, a few streets from Viceroy Square where that veiled thing had been standing under the snow-dusted trees, she forced her way into an empty building.
Though the Oligarchy and Balopolis had been the epicentre of the most brutal fighting during the war for Balhaut, much of the so-called Old Side seemed to have been miraculously spared. Closer inspection put the lie to that. Many of the buildings were shells: gutted structures that had stood empty for a decade and a half with litter collecting in their wind-blown floors. A few had begun to be included in Balhaut’s trudging programme of renewal. In places, old buildings were being demolished and lots cleared to make room for new construction. In others, labour gangs had moved in to renovate and restore the buildings still sound enough to be worth saving.
Criid holed herself up in one of the latter. The windows had been recently covered with whitewashed boards, and there was a strong smell of creosote and young, sawn timber. Dust sheets and protective curtains had been strung between rooms, or erected to close sections where dividing walls had been taken down. The work curtains, heavy and dirty from re-use, stiff with old paint and varnish, swung in the night air, moved by the breath of the snowstorm outside. The day crew had left paint drums, long-handled mop-brushes, sawhorses and stacks of cheap fibreboard behind. An upper floor had been taken away, leaving a space like the interior of an artisan’s church, the vault bridged by a half-skeleton of new joists and crossbeams in clean, yellow wood.
Her heart rate was all over the place, and her breathing was ragged. Her hands were quaking so much that she struggled to use them. She snapped the head off one of the long mop-brushes, and used baler twine to lash her warknife to the end as an improvised spear. No gun, but a little more range than a knife, at least. Then she sat down in a corner behind some stacked fibreboard and rested the spear across her lap.
Her body was in turmoil. She knew that. The chronic tension of life in a warzone bent a person’s biology out of shape, and left it fit for nothing else. It built shortcut response pathways, and bred bad habits. It altered hormone values and metabolic functions to tolerate prolonged and elevated stress. It modified you to get you through, whatever it took, and then left the modifications in you when you returned to what was laughingly referred to as normal life. It left them with corrosive physiological and psychological damage that took a thousand times longer to erase than it had taken to inflict.
The worst part, as she was now discovering, wasn’t coping with the post-combat fall out; it was getting your old, bad self, your combat self, switched back on without warning. She’d gone from nothing to super-luminal in a second. The toxic flood of hormones and responses had left her almost stupefied. There was a sheen of sweat on her skin, and she knew that she stank of fear. Her mind was numb except for a little tiny nugget at the heart of it, like the dense metal heart of a neutron star that was screaming with radioactive rage.
She tried to control her breathing. She tried to employ some of the focus techniques that Mkoll had taught her for stealth work. It was futile. It was like trying to grasp water. In the end, she gave up and, with a brittle laugh, decided that she might be better off just surrendering to the tide.
After an hour or more, during which she sank into a fugue state, she roused herself, and felt a little more clarity. The old mindset, the one that allowed you to function in the zone, was back so concretely it was as if it had never gone away. She started to be able to think instead of just react.
In her opinion, the biggest problem was the world outside. She simply couldn’t understand how the debacle at Section could have happened without all hell resulting. Where were the suppression teams? The counter-forces? The security squads with their armoured cars and fear-gas canisters? Where was the PDF and the fething Guard? The city should have been screeching with raid sirens by now. The skies should have been dense with gunships.
It was quiet out there. It was as if the city had gone into traumatic shock, struck dumb and paralysed. It was as if the snowfall had some kind of anaesthetic property. She couldn’t shake the notion that the silent streets were crawling with unchallenged Archenemy soldiers.
She decided she had no choice but to make her way back to Aarlem Fortress. She hadn’t got anything like enough left in her to run the route, but she was confident that if she took it steadily, she could make it back before dawn.
She hadn’t gone far when she heard a vehicle approaching, its engine tone labouring as it coped with the snow. It stood out a mile. There was nothing else around. Criid stopped and listened. Perhaps it was PDF moving in at long last. Perhaps it was the transport component of a relief column advancing into the city’s heart.
Instinct told her it wasn’t. It was just one engine, one machine, and a small one at that. It was someone mysteriously active in the mysteriously empty streets.
She decided to take a look, and closed in on the approaching sound source. When it came in sight, she fell back, clutching her spear. The vehicle, just a dark blob on the snowy thoroughfare, was driving without lights: without lights, at night, in a snowstorm.
That was deliberate, and it was sinister. Swallowing hard, she took one last look, then retreated to hide in an alley long before the occupants could see her.
She waited. The vehicle didn’t go by. It stopped.
She cursed and hefted up the spear. There was no way she’d been spotted,
but why had it stopped?
A figure suddenly appeared at the end of the alleyway, framed by the snow-light. It was a soldier, one of the raiders, one of the invaders. She weighed her choices. Stay back, and wait for it to come to her, so she could kill it quietly in the private darkness of the alley, or go to it and take it down fast before it got her cornered.
The figure took a step towards her, as if it knew she was there, as if it could see right into the shadows with its warpcraft. She couldn’t just sit there.
She charged.
It recoiled in surprise as she flew out of hiding. She had the spear lowered to impale it through the gut. She let out an incoherent scream.
With a cry of its own, the figure jerked to one side, evading the thrust of the long Tanith blade. It grabbed the spear’s haft with one hand, and tried to use Criid’s momentum to bring her over. She wrenched back, refusing to lose control of the weapon. Her attacker was strong. He crashed her backwards into the alley wall, trying to pin her. She screamed and kicked out.
“For feth’s sake, Tona,” Gaunt yelled. “It’s me!”
SEVENTEEN
Blood for the Blood God
“Who is he?” Criid asked.
“He’s the reason all this is happening,” Gaunt replied.
“He was on Gereon with us?”
“We never met him,” Gaunt said to her, “but he was the one hunting us.”
Criid stared down at the sleeping face of the man on the stretcher. He wore his scars where anyone could see them. Gereon, probably more than anywhere else, had left the deepest scars inside her, invisible. Gereon was the chief reason she had a stress migraine behind her eyes and such an adrenaline spike that her sweat tasted of sour metal.
They had taken shelter in the refurb block where she had hidden earlier. The night air was still moving the heavy, soiled work curtains that partitioned the structure. The smell of cold, wet sawdust was intense. Maggs and Criid had pried open one of the boarded doorways, and Gaunt had driven the ambulance inside. Maggs was busy putting the panelling back in place so it looked as if it hadn’t been disturbed.
“You saw me, in the dark,” Criid said to Gaunt.
He nodded.
“Those eyes of yours,” she remarked.
“You’d be amazed the things I’m seeing these days,” he replied.
“How far does this go?” Criid asked. “Have they taken the city? Is it that big? Is he that important?”
“You know as much as we do,” said Gaunt.
Kolding was hovering beside the prisoner, checking the state of his dressings. They’d had to leave in a hurry. Kolding had protested, and his protests had all been on medical grounds. He didn’t want the patient moved or disturbed. The patient needed post-operative rest and a chance to stabilise his vital signs. Gaunt had looked him in the face and told him how close the Blood Pact were and, rather more graphically, what would happen when they stormed the house.
“How is he?” Gaunt asked.
Kolding looked up at Gaunt. His eyes were unreadable behind his blue-tinted lenses.
“It’s better now he’s not being shaken and jolted. I don’t want the wound reopening. His core temperature is low, however, and his pulse is thready. Can we risk a fire in here?”
“No,” said Criid.
Gaunt shook his head too.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “With them hunting us, that’s not an option.”
Kolding stood up. “Then I’ll get some more blankets out of the ambulance. I believe there are some old thermal packs in there too, which might still work.”
He walked away towards the battered old van.
“Where did you find him?” whispered Criid.
“Make sure you show him some respect,” Gaunt replied. “Without him, the Blood Pact would have won already.”
Maggs returned. He looked exhausted, and the dried blood on his ear and neck made it look as if he’d been in a brawl.
“We’re secure, as it goes,” he said.
“Unless things change, let’s rest here for an hour or so. Anyone know where here is, by the way?”
“Moat Street,” replied Kolding as he came back from the ambulance with an armful of blankets. Criid moved to help him wrap the patient.
“Someone needs to stand watch,” said Maggs.
“I’ll do it, Wes,” Criid called back. “I’m way too jaggy to sleep.”
Maggs tossed her his laspistol. She caught it neatly, tucked it into her waistband, and crouched down beside Kolding.
“What’s up?” Maggs asked Gaunt.
Gaunt shook his head, and said, “Moat Street. It rings a bell. I think I may have been here before.”
“When?”
“Fifteen years ago.”
Maggs whistled.
“Really?” he asked.
“I can’t be sure. We advanced down a lot of streets in Old Side to get at the Oligarchy. Most of them were rubble or burning or both. The name’s familiar, that’s all.”
“I thought you’d remember every last detail of a show like that,” said Maggs.
“I thought I had,” Gaunt replied. “I’ve never thought much about it, actually. Never felt much need to reflect on it. But I’ve always assumed that my memories of that time were pretty complete, that they were there if I needed them. Now…”
He paused and shrugged. “Now I come to look back, to search for the memories, I’m finding they’re actually a bit of a blur. They’ve all run together.”
Maggs nodded.
“I get that,” he said. “I get the same thing with Hinzerhaus, you know? I remember what happened, I remember what shade of hell it was. I just don’t seem to have any of the details left.”
A strong gust of wind lifted the edges of the work curtains, and blew up a pile of wood shavings so that they scurried and drifted like thick snow.
“You know what’s to blame, don’t you?” Maggs said.
“Tell me,” said Gaunt.
“War,” said Maggs. “It feths up your head. It feths it up in terrible ways. And the longer you’re exposed to it, the worse it’ll get.”
“I hear that,” said Criid as she walked off to take watch.
“Get some sleep,” Gaunt said to Maggs.
Maggs nodded, and went in search of some tarpaulin to curl up on.
Gaunt prowled around the site, pulling aside work curtains, and stepping into new spaces, blue darknesses that smelled of young wood and paint. Moat Street, Moat Street… Had he been here? Probably not in this very building, but outside on the street, moving from cover to cover with the Hyrkans as tracer-fire licked down out of the smoke-wash. Was that a genuine memory, or just a simulation his mind had amalgamated from driftwood pieces in his subconscious?
He heard a light tapping: the fleck of snowflakes being driven against the window-boarding by the wind. He parted another curtain and stepped through into the next area. Plastek sheeting crackled as the draught inhaled and exhaled it against the fibreboard panelling. He adjusted his eyes. Both the front and back walls of the chamber were being rebuilt. Cut stone was waiting to be laid, and the street walls were temporarily formed by wooden boards. Fifteen years ago, something had punched clean through this part of the building. On the interior walls that remained, he found ragged scratch marks running along the stone at about shoulder height. He traced them with his hand until he identified them. A tank, or similar armoured machine, had come through here, flattening the front and back walls under its treads, and raking both side walls with the skirts of its hull.
The strange thing was, it wasn’t the first time he’d seen this. He’d been on Balhaut a year. He’d moved through its streets and gone about his business. How many times had he seen a street corner notched and ragged at shoulder height? Or a stretch of wall scratched with a long, ugly gouge? He’d seen it hundreds of times, and only now did he recognise it for what it was: the traces left by the iron shoulders of the predatory giants that had stalked Balhaut in its darkest days.
He went back to the chamber where the others were holed up. Maggs was asleep, and Kolding was sitting quietly beside the swaddled prisoner on the stretcher. Criid was watching the street from an unboarded side window.
“Anything?” he asked her.
“It’s very quiet,” she replied. “I think they’ve got the whole town bewitched.”
Gaunt shook his head.
“Don’t think of it that way,” he said. “Don’t make them bigger monsters than they are. They’re tough, and they’ve got unholy warpcraft, but there can’t be that many of them. I’m pretty sure this is an insertion, not a full-scale invasion. The snowstorm is just bad timing, a coincidence.”
“Really?”
“We’re not going to beat them unless we can beat them in our heads first. Don’t hand them that advantage.”
Criid nodded, and flashed a grin, but she didn’t look altogether convinced.
Gaunt went back to the ambulance and sat with his back against one of the wheel arches to rest. He was sore and bruised from the day’s endeavours, especially from the feral brawl with the maniacal damogaur. Criid and Maggs were both jumpy, but only now did he realise how far back down he had had to come himself. The day had plunged him back into a life or death world that he hadn’t visited in two years. It had been unpleasant: a shock, yet horribly familiar. His jaw muscles were clenched, his spine and the small of his back were damp, and there was a stale taste in his mouth. Just the day before, in the Mithredates with Blenner, he’d been complaining about how impatient he was to go out and re-acquaint himself with war.
He’d never expected it to come and find him.
He fished inside his coat for Eszrah’s copybook, intending to steady his nerves by reading another of the nihtgane’s painstakingly transcripted myths. They were fascinating. They contained old wisdoms about hunting and warcraft. He would, he resolved, when circumstances allowed, examine them carefully, and perhaps even learn from them. He had not, so far, been able to give them the attention they deserved.