Blood Pact, page 30
‘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.
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.
Outside the front door, Gnesh looked on in disbelief as his comrade died in the hall in front of him. He took a step forward to try and help him, but Karhunan Sirdar held him back.
Karhunan pointed down at the doorstep, and Gnesh saw the sigil that had been scratched in the wood and inked with blood: a blood ward, and a lethal booby-trap. Kreeg had stepped right over it.
‘The house is blocked,’ said Gnesh. ‘Can we go around? Is there a side way?’
‘No time,’ said the sirdar. He waved Malstrom up.
They backed away as Malstrom rolled a grenade onto the step, and ducked aside. The blast blew out the rest of the doorframe, dug up the step, and hurled Kreeg’s corpse several metres further down the hall.
It also erased the blood ward, and broke its craft.
‘In!’ Karhunan ordered. ‘Watch for more wards like that. In. In!’
Gaunt and his companions heard the crump of the grenade behind them as they came out through the back of Jaume’s house into the dingy rear yards and dark alleys behind the premises. Undisturbed snow lay thick on the wall-tops and in the yard spaces. Through the slow fog, Gaunt could see lank, frost-stiff laundry hanging from washing lines in neighbouring yards.
‘Do you have a vehicle?’ Gaunt asked Jaume as they ran through the snow to the end of the yard.
Jaume shook his head.
Gaunt had a single clip left in his bolt pistol. He drew the laspistol Criid had left with him, and toggled it to ‘armed’.
‘For Throne’s sake!’ Maggs cried. ‘Let me go and give me the other weapon.’
Gaunt ignored him, and drove them down the high-walled spinal alleyway that connected the back gates of the tenement row. Piles of garbage and junk half-filled the space, smoothed out and shrouded by the recent snow.
They ran as hard as they could, Gaunt bringing up the rear with the weapon in his hand. Twice, he stopped and aimed it at what appeared to be movement behind them.
Then they heard another dull, gritty blast as their pursuers mined out the ward that Mabbon had left on the back step. It was very quickly followed by bursts of las-fire that stripped through the fog, making it swirl and coil.
Gaunt raised his weapon again, but the shooting was just loose and haphazard. He wasn’t going to waste precious shots on a target he couldn’t see.
They had nearly reached a major street adjacent to the one on which Jaume’s house stood.
‘Doctor,’ said Gaunt as they ran, ‘would you please cut Maggs’s bonds? Quickly, please.’
Kolding fumbled a scalpel out of his kit, and ripped through the twine that was securing Maggs’s wrists.
Maggs looked at Gaunt.
‘A weapon?’
‘Wheels,’ Gaunt replied.
Maggs nodded, and ran on ahead of them into the broad avenue and the fog beyond.
Gaunt herded the others out towards the street, moving backwards with his gun braced for any movement in the fog-choked alley behind them.
Maggs came out into the open. In the broader space of the main thoroughfare, the fog was beginning to thin. He could see the roofs of the buildings on the far side of the street, as well as patches of milky blue sky. The sun was burning through the fog like a halogen lamp.
There was some light traffic, and a few pedestrians, wrapped up in coats and scarves against the cold. The shop juniors of nearby merchant houses were clearing snow from the pavements outside their display windows. A little way ahead, two cargo-6 trucks had pulled up to let a municipal work-gang unload sacks of salt for road gritting.
Maggs ran up to the rear truck, and began to climb into the cab.
‘Hey. Hey, you!’ the gang boss yelled out, throwing down his spade and hurrying towards the truck.
‘Imperial Guard!’ Maggs shouted back, fumbling with the ignition. ‘I’m commandeering this vehicle.’
‘Oh, right. Like there’s a war on,’ the boss retorted.
‘There’s always a war on,’ Maggs told him. He started the truck’s engine.
‘Get down from there, now!’ the boss yelled.
Maggs stared out of the driver’s door window.
‘Back off, friend. Don’t make me get out and hurt you.’
The boss saw something in Wes Maggs’s expression that he clearly didn’t like. He backed away sharply, and so did the members of his crew. They watched in bemused wonder as Maggs threw the truck’s transmission into reverse, and jerked the vehicle backwards. Its tyres slipped and scuffed in the snow, and its knifing tail-end knocked down several of the salt sacks unloaded on the curb.
‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’ the boss yelled.
Maggs ignored him, and continued to reverse along the kerb, the cargo-6’s fat tyres spraying up slush as they whipped and churned. He backed up ten metres to meet Gaunt and the others, who were running along the pavement from the alley mouth.
Several loose shots sang out of the alley into the street. Most went wide. One clipped a lamp post, and another blew out the headlight of a passing car. The pedestrians in the street froze, and then scattered in terror. More blind shots sliced out of the alley. The display window of a merchant house opposite fractured, and exploded in a billion slivers of plate glass. The two juniors shovelling snow in front of it ducked and ran.
Gaunt bundled the prisoner up into the back of the truck, and then helped Kolding and Jaume to hoist themselves in. He ran for the passenger door of the cab.
Pedestrians nearby were shouting and screaming as they ran. The work crew had fled. Gaunt turned, and saw the first of their pursuers emerge into the foggy street from the alley, lasrifle raised.
Gaunt lifted his laspistol in a two-handed brace and pinched off two quick shots. Both of them hit the Blood Pact warrior, knocking him back into the shadows of the alley.
Gaunt threw himself into the cab.
‘Go!’ he yelled.
Maggs put his foot down.
The cargo-6 slalomed away across the snow into the main lanes of the street. A flurry of las-fire and hard rounds lit the air around it, and spattered against the bodywork.
‘Keep down!’ Gaunt shouted through the cab’s fanlight.
It was hard to control the heavy truck with any finesse in the snow. Maggs oversteered, and crunched the front end off a stationary car that its owner had abandoned at the first sign of gunfire. Then the truck sideswiped a small cargo van, shunting it into another vehicle. Bodywork buckled, and windows and headlamps smashed.
They were gaining speed. One last clip that bashed a car into the flank of a tram, and they were clear, and turning out at the junction into the next street.
‘Which way?’ Maggs demanded.
‘The Oligarchy.’ Gaunt shouted back. ‘Make for the Oligarchy!’
Eyl led his sister through the fog at a run. He was leading her by the hand, and she was holding up the hem of her long dress. Several members of the philia moved with them.
The witch began laughing.
‘What?’ Eyl asked.
‘We’ve made contact!’ she cried, pulling her hand out of his so she could clap delightedly. ‘Karhunan Sirdar’s element has made contact. The pheguth is running, but we have the trail again, strong and fresh!’
She turned her veiled face to look at her brother.
‘He’s out in the open again,’ she said. ‘We have his trail. Upon my soul, he is finished.’
Inquisitor Rime snapped the dossier shut and slapped it back into Sirkle’s hands.
‘It’s so obvious,’ he said, shaking his head and chuckling. ‘So damn obvious. I was over-thinking it.’
‘Sir?’
‘I was assuming that Gaunt’s message was an oblique reference to some private matter. It’s far less sophisticated than that.’
Rime began to pace up through the search group towards the front of the line, calling for the senior Tanith officers and the commanders of the S Company brigade. The Sirkles hurried after him.
‘Re-disposition!’ he shouted. ‘We’re moving towards the Oligarchy.’
‘The Oligarchy?’ asked Edur. ‘But there’s no evidence to suggest–’
‘That’s where he’s going,’ Rime snapped. ‘The Tower of the Plutocrat. Look it up on Gaunt’s record. I was an idiot not to make the connection before. How’s the fog looking?’
‘Clearing fast, sir,’ reported one of the Sirkles.
‘Put the birds back up. I want marksmen covering us overhead. Only the best.’
One of the Sirkles hurried off to do Rime’s bidding. Another two escorted Blenner and Criid over from the armoured truck.
‘Feth!’ Kolea whispered. ‘He’s got Tona. And isn’t that Gaunt’s commissar buddy?’
Baskevyl nodded. ‘When we get moving, we’d better stay near the front. We don’t want Rime getting there first.’
