Blood Pact

NINE Sweet Tooth

That morning, cold and overcast in the west, the enemy was a slice of almonotte. It had a layer of cream, and another of rotchka, and the soft cake was scented with popoi nuts, and capped with a caul of blue sugar icing.

She ran north, along the Wharfblade, her usual route, keeping the river to her right and the glower of the Oligarchy to her left. She crossed the wide rockcrete paddocks where the old markets and commercias had met before the war, and paused overlooking the reservoirs to sip a little rehyde from her flask and flex out her calf muscles.

Overnight, it had snowed. The vast, mesh-covered filtration tanks that processed river water for municipal needs looked like winter-issue camo-nets. In the outhab streets, black lines in the street snow described the routes of early vehicles. When she ran on, her own trail began again.

An outhabber market was assembling on the concourse behind the Polis power mills. She could smell the brazier smoke as she approached. Hundreds of sink-dwellers and stack-rats had gathered, draped in shawls and weatherproofs, to erect the plastic tent roofs for the stalls and lay out their wares. It was a community barter moot, nothing more.

She’d been running the route so regularly, many of them waved to her as she went by. She was the girl who ran past, every morning, sun or snow. She was the girl who sometimes waved back. She was the lean, off-world girl with the cropped blonde hair and the shabby, Guard-issue exercise kit and the long legs.

From the market, she jinked left along Sloman’s Concourse, and then crossed the empty cisterns of the tidal docks on the pedestrian footbridge, enjoying the spring of the metal pans shivering under her running steps. Then she was back on the northern tip of the Wharfblade and heading for the Limecut Bridge.

The slice of almonotte lurked at the back of her mind.

She could see vermin birds mobbing the garbage barges moored out in the middle of the river. Their rasping calls floated to her on the cold air, hard and shrill, like the distant squeal of las-fire.

How far today? Across the bridge and into the Oligarchy proper? That would make the round-and-back to Aarlem more than sixteen kilometres. No one ran that far, except her. The enemy forced her to do it.

Two figures were coming towards her along the tow path, in step, a good rhythm going. It was Vadim and Haller, the only two Ghosts she knew who had a running regime even slightly as rigorous as her own. She saw them on this route every few days. The Limecut Bridge was as far as they ever went.

‘Hey, Tona,’ Haller called out as they came up to her. All three of them jogged on the spot as they stopped to talk.

‘Cold today,’ said Vadim.

‘Yeah, cold and getting colder,’ Criid agreed.

‘How far are you going?’ Haller asked.

She shrugged.

‘Maybe up as far as Tournament Square,’ she said.

Vadim whistled. He and Haller took their training seriously, and the running had kept them in shape on Balhaut, especially Haller, who was a big guy and prone to a little flab. By regular regimental standards, they were super-fit. By their standards, she was a fanatic.

‘You going to swing by Section and wave to Rawne?’ asked Haller with a snort.

‘I don’t get it,’ Criid replied.

‘Didn’t you hear?’ Vadim asked her. ‘Last night?’

She shook her head.

‘Rawne got busted real bad,’ Haller told her, with some glee. ‘That’s what I heard anyway. Hark got called in. It’s going to go to sanctions.’

‘What did he do?’ Criid asked.

‘We don’t know,’ said Vadim, ‘but he wasn’t the only one in it. Meryn. Leyr. Varl.’

‘Gak! You’re kidding?’

‘No, and Daur too.’

‘Daur? Now I know you’re kidding!’

‘Seriously, Tona,’ said Haller. ‘It was some kind of big scam and they got busted hard, and Daur was in it too.’

‘I can’t believe that.’

‘It’s off the leash,’ Vadim agreed.

‘It really is,’ Haller said. Haller was ex-Vervun Primary, and he’d known Ban Daur and his clean-cut ways for a long time. If Haller considered the story genuine, that was good enough for Criid.

‘They took them all up to Section,’ said Haller.

‘I heard they were sent to the Stockade at Braunhem,’ Vadim put in.

‘Section,’ Haller insisted. He looked at Tona and smiled. ‘On the bright side, there may be some promotion slots to fill soon, eh, “Captain” Criid?’

‘Yeah, shut up,’ she replied.

Tona Criid had started running about a month after they’d arrived on Balhaut. It was all down to her past, and the years she’d spent growing up on the bad side of Vervunhive. It was all down to her sweet tooth.

As a sink-kid on Verghast, she’d been raised as much by her peers in the stacks as by her parents. Her parents had been penniless. In fact, they’d been short on a lot of things, including parental instinct, a work ethic, a desire to abide by Imperial Law, an interest in their offspring, or a reliable method of birth control.

She’d learned to fend for herself early on. She’d run with others who’d taught her some life-skills. She’d spent a lot of early years as a sink-kid and a ganger, doing things that she wasn’t especially proud of. War, the ruin of Verghast and Balhaut, had been the making of her.

She could remember the old days, days spent with empty pockets and an emptier belly, when she and some of the others would venture up-hive to try to score a little food or readies. They’d lift a few bill-folds, or bait and switch at a food stall, even menace if the back street was private enough and someone had bothered to bring a blade.

Up-hive was a wonderland. It was big and sparkly, and bustling with people in good clothes with expensive augmetics, people who owned more than her family’s collective wealth in the outfits they were standing up in, people whose conversations, when she overheard them, were about culture and politics and art, and the financial systems, and all sorts of other ridiculous issues that seemed to her a waste of breath. The up-hive commercias were glittering pavilions of luxury merchandise: silks, laces, jewellery, body-augs, xeno-pets, carpets, servitors, crystal ware, spices, gee-gaws, so much stuff, it made her laugh in disbelief. What would make anybody dream of wanting this stuff? And if they did dream, how did they possibly afford those dreams?

She would spend hours pressed against the glass of display windows, gazing at extravagance, until irate shopkeepers chased her away.

She was about nine or ten years old when she first saw the pastry maker’s in the Main Spine Commercia. She never knew its name, because it was written in such ornate golden script on the shop-board that she couldn’t tease out the individual letters. She’d seen luxury food stores before, many times, but the pastry maker’s was something else. Under its candy-stripe canopy display, behind the panes of its window, there were cakes, slices, puffs, timbales, tarts, éclairs, strudels, rosettes, buns, pin-wheels, gems, and a thousand other confections of sugar and art that were every bit as exquisite as the displays in the jewellers’ quarter. The colours, the structures, the decorations, all of these things made her marvel. So did the exotic names handwritten on the cards beside each work of art. And the prices…

If they cost so much, what in the name of the Golden Throne did they taste like?

At the age of nine or ten, Tona Criid could cheerfully scoff at almost all the luxury trappings of up-hive life, but in the pastry maker’s she’d discovered her own dream. To her young mind, the cakes and ices were the epitome of wealthy living, not just their cost or their beauty, but the fact that if you bought one it would not last forever like a bracelet. It would vanish in the time it took you to wolf it down. That was luxury. That was high living.

It became her habit, every week or so, to find one of the up-hive pastry shops or bakers, and spend a few, wet-mouthed moments admiring the unobtainable things in their windows, and wondering what they tasted of.

When the Ghosts came back to Balhaut, Tona Criid was confronted by a life she’d never known before. Before the Guard and the war, she’d been a sink-kid, and then she’d been a Ghost, rattling wearily from one gak-hole zone to another.

Suddenly she was a grown woman, an officer, with responsibilities, and a pretty comfortable billet, and the best part of ten years’ back-pay stagnating in her service account. There was nothing to do except wait and drill, and prep, and sit around and find something to spend your pay on. There was no immediate sign of active deployment in the offing.

Any line veteran can tell you that adjusting to retired life is a hard slog, like kicking a stimm habit. Your body is too used to living on an adrenaline high for months at a time. You grow detached. You get jumpy, antsy, restless. You suffer migraines, dizziness, anxiety. Your sleep suffers. Your hands sweat. If you’re really unlucky, you get phobic or develop anti-social habits. You experience memory flashes cued by something innocent, like the sound of shouting or the smell of a bonfire, and wind up on a medicae scrip taking lithium or some anti-stress pharm cocktail, or in the cage on a formal statement.

Criid had taken to running to burn off the withdrawal.

She’d been on Balhaut about a week and a half when she’d found the bakery, during an exercise loop around the Old Side of Balopolis. The window display had stopped her, and made her jog backwards to peer in. The work of a high-class pastry maker was spread out before her, a memory flash to her childhood in the Vervunhive commercias.

This time, she had enough money to just walk right in and buy a slice.

The counter-staff had regarded the lean, tough-looking woman in sweat-damp gear with a great deal of suspicion.

It was a treat she repeated three or four times in the following weeks. Running was mindless, but a bakery gave her a destination, a point. She began to scout out others, increase her range, vary her routes. She noticed, to her disgust, that she was putting on a little weight, so she started adding distance to counteract the calories she was ingesting. Long, hard runs became obsessively long, hard runs. A strict, controlling part of her mind, an unhealthy part, she was pretty fething certain, required her to run until she was almost lost in fatigue and muscle pain every time she gobbled down another intricate sugar creation. It was a penance. It was punishment for her sweet tooth. Robbed of a conventional foe to fight, the confections had become her nemesis.

Tona Criid was not a stupid woman. She was well aware that the pathology was pretty twisted, which is why she hadn’t shared its details with anybody. She counselled herself that it was a reward system, that it kept her fit, and that it beat descending into the hell of stimm abuse, or drink, or much, much worse.

She upped her pace and went across the Limecut Bridge, smelling the cold metal scent of the river beneath her. The sky was the colour and texture of a jammed pict-feed. Once on the Oligarchy side of the river, she turned east along the causeways and industrial paths that followed the north bank all the way through the old wharf area to the New Polis Bridge. A greater part of the area was derelict: old warehouses and fab-shops fallen into decay and disuse, invaded by vermin and wind-gathered refuse, their windows dimmed with cataracts of dirt, their roofs patched and punctured, their breath sour with mildew, rot and stagnant rainwater. That morning, the sills and eaves and rooflines were all crowned with snow, like ermine trim, like a dusting of icing sugar.

The area could be a little rough, but Criid kept her straight silver strapped under her vest. She wanted to head east, and then turn up into the centre of the Oligarchy. Her original plan had been to run to Tournament Square, and eat a slice of almonotte at Zinvan’s on the parade behind the Ministorum College.

She’d ditched that idea. She was going to head to Section, like Haller had suggested. She was going to take a look: just a look. There was a place a few streets from Section where she could get a passable lime soforso.

The box skeleton of the Old Crossing and, behind it, the New Polis Bridge, loomed up ahead.

Any line veteran can tell you that adjusting to retired life is a hard slog. That morning, Criid felt particularly twitchy. It could have been the news about Rawne, but her palms were damp, and there was a coppery taste in her mouth. It felt like adrenaline, combat adrenaline, the feeling you got in the zone, the feeling of being on all the time. She hadn’t had it this bad in weeks, and it seemed to be getting worse and worse as she jogged in under the shadow of the bridge.

She came to a halt, pulse thumping, and looked around. For an overwhelming few seconds, it felt as if she was back on the line, advancing through some hab burb, knowing the enemy was behind every wall and window. She had to fight back a desire to duck for cover.

What was doing it? What had set her off? She looked around, turning a full circle, but there was nothing to see and no one around. She was hyper-aware of the distant hum of traffic, the iron shadow of the bridge, the sky like arctic camo, the crusts of snow, hard and bright in the morning sun, the languid lap of a river running glossy with ice mush, the drab black of the dank stone walls, the ouslite and travertine, the smells of river-rot and sewage outfall and gnawed stone, the fume of her breath in the air, the beat of her heart, a golden aquila on a steeple across the river catching the light, and the flaked and faded paint of the name Ennisker’s Perishables on a nearby building.

Nothing.

She sniffed a breath, and took off again, running east.

Baltasar Eyl relaxed his grip on the handle of the packing knife. There had been someone right outside, and he had braced himself to deal with an intruder.

Whoever it was, whatever it was, it had gone now. Eyl climbed up into one of the crumbling arches that overlooked the riverside walk. There was no one down there. He kept watch for another minute, and then went back down to the loading dock.

In the dock space, both containers were open, and all those who would ever wake had been woken. One of Eyl’s two headmen, his sirdar Karhunen, was supervising the revival of the philia in the fluttering naphtha light. Some of the company, the most recently roused, were just sitting and shivering, too numb to do anything except rock and stare blankly. Others had become more mobile, flexing their sore limbs to get the circulation going, or prostrating themselves in prayer and offering fierce words of thanks to the Kings of the Warp.

A few were injecting stimm shots from what remained of the medicae’s pack. Valdyke’s medicae had done everything in his power to bring the men out of their hibernation torpor. Karhunen had eventually decided that the medicae’s blood was more useful to them than his skills, and had found a packing knife of his own.

The most alert members of the philia had begun their duties. Ritual marks of gratitude to the High Powers were finger-drawn on their cheeks and foreheads with the blood of the medicae, Valdyke and his minders. The men greeted Eyl with deep bows and firm embraces as he walked amongst them. Shorb was renewing the pact-marks on his left hand with a rite knife. He made a firm incision in Eyl’s honour and held the hand up, palm out, to his damogaur.

Eyl kissed the bloody palm.

‘We should remake all the vows upon our souls as we step on this earth, damogaur,’ Shorb said. ‘The old rites must be performed.’

‘They must, they should,’ Eyl agreed, ‘but time is bleeding away. Duty comes first. The philia must hit the ground and move.’

‘Do we know the location of the pheguth?’ Imrie asked.

‘Soon,’ Eyl assured him.

Imrie nodded. He was binding his foot. Freezerbite had reduced most of the toes to blackened pegs.

Malstrom, Gnesh and Naeme were seeing to the weapons. Eyl had listed his exact requirements in the messages he had sent ahead, and Valdyke seemed to have supplied everything that had been asked for. The materiel was all Guard issue, packed in khaki munition boxes that Valdyke had brought in and unloaded long before dawn. There were assorted lasguns, autorifles, pistols, a few heavier pieces and a fair quantity of ammunition.

‘What’s the quality like?’ Eyl asked.

Malstrom shrugged, checking the action of a carbine he had picked from the crates.

‘Beggars can’t be choosers, Eyl Damogaur,’ he said. ‘It’s old. Surplus, most of it. Sourced through illegal markets and decommission plants.’ He tilted his head back and held the weapon up to examine it better by the light of the naphtha flares. His teeth were pink with blood.

‘Good enough, though?’

‘Mostly. I’ll need to clean and bless a few pieces.’

‘Do it quickly.’

Malstrom nodded.

‘Upon my soul, magir,’ he replied.

Naeme was pulling laspistols from another crate, checking them deftly, and snapping power cells into their receivers. As ever, he was muttering his list of names.

‘Utaleth, then it is Sharhoek, next it is Muulm…’

He looked up as Eyl approached, and offered him one of the loaded pistols. Eyl took it.

‘How goes the pedigree?’ he asked.

The old soldier smiled.

‘I wake today in this strange place and find, upon my soul, I’m nearer the end,’ he said. He paused, and looked away, as if hearing a distant voice. He began to mutter again. ‘Next it is Hjeve, then it is Umeth…’

It was Naeme’s chosen rite, one he had taken as a burden upon his soul as a young man first pacted. He would attempt to utter, in his lifetime, every single one of the uncounted names of Death, and having said them all, would become Death. The Pedigree of Death was a popular rite amongst the philias of the Blood Pact, though Eyl had never met a soldier who had progressed so far through the holy catalogue.

Malstrom uttered a quiet curse, and Eyl looked back at him.

‘There’s no explosive, damogaur,’ Malstrom said.

‘Have you checked?’

‘All the boxes. There are a few grenades, but no charges.’

Eyl thought for a moment. Valdyke hadn’t been so reliable after all. It was a setback.

‘We’ll have to use a blood wolf,’ said Gnesh.

Eyl nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we will.’

In the chamber beside the loading dock, Barc and Samus were stripping down the corpses that had been used to pack and ritually seal the containers. The mission profile had relied on there being weapons available at the target area, because a munition payload of any decent size would have been too visible to Imperial sensors. Nevertheless, it had been vital to bring certain items, and these had been packed inside the spare carcasses to minimise their traces.

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. Barc 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, Barc 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 Barc 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’s 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.’