Blood Pact

ELEVEN The Assault

Section’s main gatehouse faced Viceroy Square. The watch had just changed, and the guards taking up their stations in and around the gate had been on duty for less than five minutes. Those men who were obliged to work outside, in the lea of the arch, performing stop-and-searches and vehicle checks, were still doing up their stormcoats and foul weather capes, and looking sourly at the snowfall.

One trooper, out by the barrier and stamping his feet to warm up, saw it coming, but he was dead before he could raise a cry. In the final few seconds of his life, he saw dark figures, indistinct and ominous, coming towards him through the silence of the square’s gardens, like phantoms conjured by the snow-light. The falling snow that veiled their menacing, steady approach seemed, to the young soldier, to be falling ever more slowly, like a pict-feed set on increasing increments of slow-motion until the feed, and the descending flakes, came to an unnatural, vibrating halt.

He was opening his mouth to remark upon both of these oddities when the blood wolf killed him.

It killed him in passing, with a gesture of its hand. It killed him on its way in through the gatehouse, throwing him aside with such force that the impact of his hurled body against the wall of the gatehouse pulverised most of his bones and left declarative pressure sprays of blood stippled across the snow.

The blood wolf was moving too fast for any human eye to properly follow it. The warp-wash that surrounded it distorted reality, making time run out of step, and the snow hesitate in mid-air. It flew in through the gatehouse, exploding both barrier beams like tinder. It made a keening noise like the bogies of a runaway train drawing sparks from steel rails. The keening caused the windows, even those specially strengthened to resist weapons fire, to shatter explosively. These blizzards of toughened glass, which moved far faster than the blizzards of snow in the gardens outside, shredded all the troopers caught in their blast zones. Two more guards were decapitated beside the inner barrier, and another by the door. Another, who was unfortunate enough to be standing directly in the blood wolf’s path, disintegrated on impact in a spray of gore like a jar of fruit conserve hit by a shotgun round.

A blood wolf is like a missile. You aim it and you fire. In the absence of the explosives that Valdyke had promised to procure, Eyl had been obliged to get his witch to conjure a blood wolf as the focus of the raid.

A sacrifice had therefore been required. Every single man in the philia had volunteered for the combat-honour. Eyl had eventually chosen Shorb, a choice his sirdars had approved. One by one, the men had gathered to say farewell to Shorb’s soul, and then they’d let the witch have him, to cut.

Eyl didn’t understand the process. He generally left such matters to the gore mages, but he understood enough to know that the conjurations that produced a blood wolf were not all that different from the conjurations that wove wirewolves, which were commonly used to police and protect the worlds of the Consanguinity. Those rites put a daemon-spirit into a conductor-body of metal, allowing it to walk abroad. The blood wolf rites put a daemon-spirit into a man’s body.

It was a less precise art. Teams of philia metallurgists and wiresmiths might take months or even years to properly machine the metal chassis of a wirewolf to perfection, inscribing it with the most precise runes and sigils, forging it just-so, so that it could best house the spirit it was designed to capture and harness.

Even with a sharp rite knife, a human body could not be modified so cleanly, especially not at short notice. As a vessel for the burning light of the High Powers, flesh was far too perishable compared to metal, even when the flesh was as devoted as Shorb’s. A wirewolf might last forty or perhaps even fifty minutes before burning out. Eyl had never seen a blood wolf last longer than sixteen.

The blood wolf was a one-use weapon, a flash-bang. It would burn Eyl’s beloved Shorb out and leave him nothing more than charred meat. The trick with a weapon like a blood wolf was to use it fast, and to use it well.

The trick was to use it for maximum effect.

Shorb had become a keening ghost. He was an energised, trembling shape, a shape that had once been a man, leaping and bounding, laughing and surging, like voltage freed from a shorting cable.

As Eyl hefted up his weapon and followed Shorb and the philia in through the gate, he knew that the blood wolf had little more than a few minutes left in it.

They would have to count.

An Imperial Guardsman ran towards Eyl through the hesitating snow, bewildered, his rifle half-raised.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ he demanded.

Eyl lifted his autorifle, and evacuated the Guardsman’s braincase in a brief, but considerable, pink shower.

‘We’ve come for the traitor,’ Eyl told the corpse steaming on the snow as he stepped over it.

The men of the philia spread out into the courtyards as they came through the gate. They moved firmly, with a purpose, passing over the bodies and bloodstains of the Imperials. They were wearing their grotesks, so their iron faces were frozen in silent howls and malign sneers. Their shooting was sporadic: a crackle of gunfire here or there whenever a target presented itself. Munitions were not unlimited. Imperial soldiers were mown from the wall tops and smashed off access staircases. Imrie, brandishing a heavy autorifle that was older than all the men of the philia put together, shot one of their few rifle grenades up through the slot of the guard tower behind the gate. The blast jolted the tower and squirted smoke out through its seams and gaps.

A siren started to wail. A few of the Imperials gathered their wits enough to begin returning fire. Las-bolts cracked and whined across the snowy yards. Three Imperials armed with carbines had grouped inside the entrance of the administration wing, and were shooting towards the gatehouse. Gnesh moved past Eyl, striding with insouciant ease like a man on a recreational stroll. He was the biggest man in the philia, tall and broad-backed, with a lumberhand’s shoulders, and a neck as wide as the skull that sat on it. He had taken the bipod off a heavy lasgun, and cinched the weapon over his right shoulder on a long strap so that he could shoot it from the hip. The chest-pumping pop of each discharge threw a javelin of light out through the smoke and the snow. Gnesh casually aimed at the administration wing. His shots punched a series of deep holes along the facing wall until they found the entrance and wrought catastrophic damage on the three Imperials. Then he aimed a couple more shots into the architrave, and collapsed the entrance onto their smouldering bodies.

Led by Kaylb Sirdar, the first element of the philia had reached the lobby of the main building. The blood wolf had already come through, and the wide marble floor was covered with a crust of glass from the doors, the chandeliers and the hoods of the glow-globes. Kaylb swung his element to the left, and headed towards where the witch had said the secure stairwells were located. An Imperial trooper and a man in a commissar’s long coat tried to fend them off, firing from the cover of some broken furniture. Kaylb killed them both. There was no time to waste, but Kaylb paused for long enough to read the marks their blood had made on the floor and walls. The prognostications were good.

Karhunan brought the second element into the main building through a large, side entrance that Imperial staff called the catering door. It had once given vittallers and suppliers access to the kitchens, in the days when Section had been a private residence. The old kitchens and larders had become a despatch office, a vox station, and a workroom for intelligencers, with access to the principal briefing chambers and the map room. Karhunan’s force met fierce resistance from a group of company officers and commissars who had been meeting in the workroom. Shouting for support, the Imperial men held the main hallway, armed only with the pistols and dress weapons they had been carrying that day. Behind them, groups of unarmed or non-combatant staff fled deeper into the building, away from the assault.

Malstrom took a light wound, the first injury suffered by the philia, but righted himself quickly. He ducked into the hastily abandoned despatch room to evade the determined small arms fire. Las-shots and hard rounds from the Imperial officers pinged and cracked off the inside of the catering door archway.

Karhunan heard Malstrom laugh.

‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What’s so amusing?’

Malstrom reappeared in the doorway of the despatch room. As one of the building’s watch points, the room had been supplied with an emergency weapons locker. Malstrom had smashed the lock with the butt of his carbine.

‘It’s as if the enemy is on our side,’ he told his sirdar. ‘They leave toys for us to play with.’

Malstrom had swung his carbine over his shoulder so that he could slap a shell into the clean, polished grenade launcher that he’d taken from the box.

‘Brace!’ Karhunan bellowed to the other men.

Malstrom leaned out of the doorway and fired the launcher. The fat grenade spat up the hallway, arcing high, smashed off a ceiling light, and began to tumble on its downwards path before detonating. The blast sent a scratchy, concussive clap of smoke and hard air up the hall.

‘Again?’ Malstrom growled. He had a satchel full of shells.

‘Do it again,’ Karhunan agreed.

Malstrom broke the fuming launcher on its hinge, and slapped a second grenade home. He clacked the stocky weapon shut with a snap of his wrist, and fired again.

Again, hard, hot air rasped back down the space. There was grit in it, pieces of glass and chips of stone, and it rattled down like hail.

The Imperials were broken. As the element advanced through the smoke, they found most of them dead, blackened and raw from the blasts. A few, deaf and blind, were convulsing or struggling feebly on their hands and knees. Karhunan and his men put a shot through the head of anyone still moving.

One of the commissars had got clear, dragging an injured colleague with him. When he saw Karhunan emerging through the smoke, he started to spit curses at him. He was yelling like an animal, fuelled by fear and hate. He let the colleague he was dragging flop to the floor, and brought up his pistol.

The gun barked twice. Karhunen felt the double impact, one hit right after the other, striking his right shoulder and the right-hand side of his mask. The collision turned him, twisting his body. Pain seared through his shoulder. His head was wrenched violently to the right. One round had gone through the meat of his shoulder, the other had glanced off the brow-ridge of his iron grotesk. The mask had smashed back into his face, breaking his cheek bone and tearing his lip across his upper teeth. Hot blood filled his mouth.

Karhunan smiled. He lifted his carbine and fired a burst on auto. The commissar jerked backwards, as if he’d been snatched off his feet by a sharp yank on a rope. He bounced off the wall behind him, and landed on his face.

The sirdar moved forward to finish the man’s injured colleague, but the limp body was already dead. Karhunan raised his hand and made some quick pact signs to direct his men.

The element rushed on. Several of the men were wielding clean, new Imperial Guard weapons they had taken from the dead.

Alarms were ringing furiously, and the air was filling with sounds of gunfire and shouting, and the increasingly acrid smell of smoke.

‘What in the name of the Throne is this about?’ Mercure roared as he burst out of the conference room with his agitated aides in tow. There was panic outside. Staff members were fleeing down the corridor without any discipline or composure. Troopers were clattering in the opposite direction, trying to marshal the fleeing personnel, and trying to fathom, like Isiah Mercure, what the hell was happening in the middle of an afternoon at the heart of an Imperial stronghold.

It wasn’t a drill. Mercure knew that immediately. You could ring the alarm bells and raise a hue and cry, and even stand out in the yard and fire a gun into the air to generate an atmosphere of urgency for a shake-down drill, but no one would ever go to the bother of putting that subtle flavour of burning into the wind, and the best drill coordinator couldn’t manufacture the tight look of real fear and bewilderment that Mercure could see on the faces around him.

Besides, a shake-down this big couldn’t be staged without his approval and knowledge, and nobody on the staff was gun-eatingly mad enough to have set something up on an afternoon when Mercure was head-to-head in the main meeting room with grox-loving sons of bitches from the ordos.

Everyone was shouting and gabbling. A squad of soldiers almost knocked Mercure down in their urgency to reach the front of the building.

‘Shut up. Shut up!’ Mercure yelled. ‘I asked a question. Shut up, listen to me, and answer it! What’s going on?’

‘Section is under attack, sir!’ a junior commissar replied in a voice squeaky with anxiety. Mercure punched him in the mouth hard enough to knock him off his feet.

‘I didn’t ask for the bloody obvious!’ Mercure shouted. ‘Give me plain facts. Give me something I can use!’

‘Protocol 258,’ said Commissar Edur, suddenly appearing at Mercure’s side. Edur had a squad of S Company storm-troopers with him, and a look of true and solemn concern in his dark, handsome eyes.

Mercure looked at Edur in disbelief. ‘No. That bad? Edur, tell me!’

‘Protocol 258 is in effect, sir,’ replied Edur. ‘Sergeant Daimer and his men will escort you to the safe area, and evac you if necessary.’

The storm-troopers closed in, shoving the aides aside to get at Mercure. They were big men, armoured in black and green, their shoulder guards bearing the silver flash insignia of S Company, the Commissariat’s close protection detail assigned to guard the most senior personnel. When Protocol 258 was put into effect, you didn’t argue with S Company, not even if you were Isiah Mercure.

‘How bad?’ Mercure demanded as Daimer and his men moved in around him.

‘A significant assault,’ Edur called back. ‘Many casualties. As far as we know, a squad of some size, perhaps as many as twenty or thirty men, hit the main gate four minutes ago. Some are already in the building.’

‘Who the hell are they?’ one of the senior aides demanded. ‘I mean, who the hell attacks Section HQ on Balhaut?’

Hemmed in by the S Company men, Mercure looked at Edur. Their eyes met. Neither of them knew the precise answer to the aide’s frantic question, but they knew enough to realise that the answer wasn’t going to be pleasant.

‘Oh God-Emperor,’ Mercure murmured. ‘Someone’s come for him.’

‘I think so, sir,’ Edur replied.

‘We’ve got to move you now, sir, I’m sorry,’ Sergeant Daimer insisted, and the protection detail started to manhandle Mercure away.

‘They can’t have him, Edur!’ Mercure yelled. ‘You hear me? They can’t have him. You know what to do. No mistakes.’

‘Yes, sir!’ Edur shouted back over the general pandemonium. He was about to add something else when he heard the weird, keening noise. It was coming from somewhere behind him. It sounded like a night wind shrieking down the stack of an old chimney.

The blood wolf burst into the long hallway. Edur turned, and saw it, yet did not see it. He knew something was coming, something that wailed like an old flue, something that bubbled reality around itself, like a cloak of un-being. Edur gagged. He felt bile rise in his throat. He pulled out his bolt pistol. His hand was shaking.

The blood wolf entered the hallway at the far end, and though it was essentially invisible, its passage down the hall towards them was vividly narrated by the carnage it wrought. The wooden doors splintered in an explosive blizzard of pulp and fragments. The carpet scorched and shrivelled. Section personnel, ranged along the hallway, began to die, as if some murderous wave was sweeping through them. Bodies were suddenly severed and collapsed in fountains of blood, as if snipped in two or three or even four by giant, invisible shears. Others burst like blood blisters, or were smashed aside into the walls and ceiling by unseen, demented hands.

The tide of destruction bore down on them. Edur raised his weapon. The S Company storm-troopers opened fire with their hellguns. Droplets of blood from the wolf’s killing spree had filled the air like raindrops, and now hesitated in their descent like the snowflakes outside.

There was a loud bang that jarred Edur’s teeth and hurt his eyes. A beam of force had hit the bubble of tortured light that hid the blood wolf from the side.

The blood wolf was blasted sideways into the hallway wall, leaving a ghastly skidmark of blood smeared across the wallpaper. It fell, scrabbling, wounded, winded, and Edur realised that he could see something properly, for the first time. A human shape was making frenzied animal motions inside the blue of warp-wash, something flayed and bloody that screamed and thrashed its limbs with inhuman violence. Edur saw the white enamel of bared teeth against the bloody mass of the whole. He saw reality blotching and distorting around its clotted, skinned form, and it made him vomit.

A second beam of force hit it, and made it writhe backwards. The keening increased in pitch.

Handro Rime, the inquisitor, had emerged from the meeting room. His mane of hair was lifting in a wind that seemed to be affecting only him. He was brandishing a sceptre, an ornate metal rod the length of a walking cane that looked as though it had been fashioned from chromium steel. It fizzled with power, as if a charge was running through it. The top end was shaped like a winged human skull.

There was a third, painful bang. Another beam of force, like a needle of light, spat from the skull-top of the sceptre that Rime was holding and struck the baying blood wolf. This time, the beam was continuous, pinning the thing to the ground. Rime’s henchmen spread out around him and drew their weapons. Edur could see the strain on Rime’s face. Several ripples of warp-vapour crackled out of the gibbering thing, and then all the blood droplets hanging in the air fell at once, in real time, and covered the floor with a million tiny splashes like the first few seconds of a monsoon.

‘I believe I have it contained,’ Rime yelled through gritted teeth. ‘Get Senior Commissar Mercure to a place of safety!’

Edur shook himself and turned to obey. He fell in with the storm-troopers, and they began to hurry Mercure away. Mercure was staring in ashen disgust at the thing the inquisitor was attempting to ensnare, and at the bloody horror that it had left in its wake.

‘Get downstairs!’ Mercure stammered at Edur. ‘Get downstairs and see to it!’

Edur shoved Mercure and his escort onwards with one hand, and turned to make for the nearest staircase. He saw a drop of blood, a single drop of blood, hovering and wobbling in the air, its gleaming surface tension undulating. He realised it was hanging there, in virtual freeze frame, and that his own limbs and movements had run slow, and that time was disjointed again.

The blood wolf ripped free from the spear of energy with which Inquisitor Rime had staked it to the floor. The sceptre was wrenched from his grip and whirled away across the blood-soaked floor. Rime was slammed back into the wall and pinned there, his legs kicking. His mantle of white fur caught fire, and then his hair did too. In a second, his entire head was engulfed in raging flames. He was screaming. The blood wolf let him go. He slid down the wall, found his feet somehow, and then staggered forwards, ablaze from the shoulders up.

His henchmen tried to close with the beast. Edur saw one disembowelled and another flung away like a broken doll. Rime fell to his knees, and then collapsed on his face, his head and shoulders still engulfed. The keening grew loud again.

Edur ran.

Gaunt stared at the ceiling, listening. He could hear gunfire. It was distant, but there was a lot of it. He’d heard at least two significant explosions, and a great deal of commotion. A lot of voices were echoing down to him, muffled through the floors.

He glanced at the prisoner, who was as still and silent as before, and then headed to the door. There was no one in the corridor outside. He could still hear the shouting and the shooting from above.

A detention officer suddenly ran into view, red-faced and out of breath.

‘What’s going on?’ Gaunt asked.

The man didn’t stop.

‘Get this area secure!’ he yelled as he ran past.

‘Don’t give me orders!’ Gaunt shouted after him. ‘What’s going on? Hey!’

The officer ran out of sight.

‘Hey!’

Gaunt wondered why he was asking the question. He knew what was happening. He knew in his bones and in his heart. He’d seen it. He’d seen what was coming.

He knew how fast and how bad things were going to get, and it scared him to think how he might know that.

He knew what he had to do.

He drew his bolt pistol and walked to the door of the holding cell.

The carbine in Kaylb Sirdar’s hands retched twice and spat ugly blades of red light. They punched into the Imperial trooper coming up the staircase towards him, hurling him backwards with a strangled cry. The trooper crunched and cartwheeled down the stairs, and ended up face down on the landing below.

Kaylb barked commands to his element, and they clattered on down the stairwell. Emergency lights had come on, and the smell of smoke was getting stronger. Behind the plaintive wail of the sirens, they could all hear the keening.

There were two exits on the landing.

‘Which way?’ asked Barc. Weapons ready, the men waited for instructions, covering the staircase access, up and down.

There were signs. Kaylb traced his finger across the letters and tried to make the unfamiliar words in his mouth. It was hard to know. He dragged up his left sleeve and consulted the blood map that the witch had put in his forearm. She’d given one to both sirdars and to Eyl too, a little schematic plan of the target building mapped from her divination, and formed by raised veins and swollen capillaries under the skin. As the element advanced through the area, the blood map on the patch of skin moved with them. Kaylb ran his filthy fingertips over the bumps and ridges.

‘That way,’ he pointed. ‘The left-hand hatch.’

‘Holy Throne,’ Meryn whispered. ‘Holy fething Throne!’

He was right up against the bars of his cell in Detention Four, his hands clamped around them.

‘Rawne?’ he hissed.

‘What?’

Rawne cast a look at Meryn with hooded eyes. The fear they were all feeling was most obviously etched on Captain Meryn’s face. It wasn’t a fear of fighting, because they’d all done more than their share of that in their lives, nor was it a fear of death.

It was a fear of being trapped. It was a fear of helplessness.

‘This is definitely not good,’ said Leyr.

‘The building’s under attack,’ stammered Meryn. ‘I mean, it’s under assault. You can hear it. You can smell it.’

‘You can shut up,’ said Rawne.

Meryn was right. For several minutes, they’d been able to hear the muffled scream of alarms from somewhere above them. The alarms had begun just after it had got really cold. Then, straining, they’d begun to hear the other sounds, coming very faintly through the reinforced walls and floors of the detention level: cries, shots, detonations.

‘We’ve got to get out of these cages,’ said Meryn.

Rawne looked at him, looked at the ceramite bars, and then looked back again.

‘I mean it,’ Meryn barked.

‘He means it,’ said Varl.

‘Yeah, well unless you’ve got a key made out of solid wishes,’ said Rawne.

Meryn got on his knees and started to examine the lock mechanism of his cage door again.

Ban Daur was still sitting back on his cot, his arms folded, a sour look on his face.

‘That’s a good idea, Meryn,’ he said. ‘Brilliant. The locks in the detention blocks of Commissariat sections are famously easy to pick, especially if you’re only using fingernails and nostril hair.’

‘Shut the feth up, you superior son of a bitch!’ Meryn yelled, turning on Daur. ‘You do something. You think of something! We’re stuck in here, and something bad’s coming. We’re stuck in here and, when it comes, we will be helpless, and we’ll die like fething rats!’

Daur swung to his feet and faced Meryn through the bars. He was taller than Meryn. He looked down on him in almost every way.

‘We’re stuck in here because we were stupid,’ Daur said. A twitch of his head showed that he meant that to include everyone. ‘We were stupid, and this is what happens to stupid people.’

‘Oh, you feth-head,’ said Meryn. ‘This is your philosophy, is it, Mr Goody-fething-two-shoes? Be a man and face your punishment?’

‘Pretty much,’ replied Daur.

‘You’re fething unbelievable!’ retorted Meryn.

‘And you’re an idiot,’ said Daur. ‘You’re crapping yourself over nothing. This is a drill.’

‘A drill?’ asked Meryn in disbelief.

‘Yes, of course it is!’ said Daur. ‘Come on, they’re blasting the sirens and shooting off some dummy ammo. It’s a shake-down. It’ll be over in another five minutes.’

He looked around at the other Ghosts. Everyone was looking at him.

‘What? Come on, it’s got to be, right?’

Daur looked at Leyr, and the big scout looked uncomfortable. Daur looked at Varl, but Varl sniffed and looked at the floor. He looked at Cant. The young trooper just looked scared.

‘This is Balhaut!’ Daur declared. ‘This is gakking Balhaut, for Throne’s sake. We’re so far from the front line it’s not even worth joking about. Who the gak’s going to attack Commissariat Section in the middle of Balopolis…’

His voice trailed off. He looked at Banda. She looked back at him, smiled a little sad smile, and shook her head.

He looked at Rawne.

‘Major? Come on, help me out here,’ said Daur.

Rawne looked at him.

‘It’s not a drill,’ Rawne said.

Daur opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

‘Feth,’ he said, eventually.

The cell bay door clanged opened. A detention officer burst in and stared at them all for a moment, his eyes flicking from one cage to the next: the seven Ghosts, the slumbering Oudinot, and the lone Varshide in the cell next to Rawne’s.

The detention officer looked scared and bewildered. His hair was messed up and his jacket was buttoned up wrong. He looked like someone who had just woken from a bad dream.

Through the open bay door behind him, they could all hear the sirens much more clearly.

The detention officer took a last look at them, as if he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be doing.

‘Stay here,’ he told them, and ran back out, pulling the hatch shut behind him.

Varl looked through the bars at Rawne.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘sometimes people say the stupidest things.’

The shots outside made them start and tense: two shots, just on the other side of the hatch. Instinctively, all of the Ghosts backed away from the fronts of their cages.

‘What the hell’s happening?’ the Varshide trooper mumbled.

The cell bay hatch opened again. From outside, they could hear shouting, clattering footsteps and repeated gunfire.

Kaylb Sirdar swung in through the detention block hatchway, his carbine raised.

Prisoners. The sirdar saw prisoners, just prisoners in cages, all staring at him in pathetic terror. Check them. Find the pheguth. Kill the pheguth. Kill anyone who wasn’t the pheguth. The men of his element were spreading out through the bays of the cellblock doing just that. He could hear the shots.

The sirdar stepped forward. He saw the eyes staring back at him, wild, animal eyes; caged men who recognised death when it approached.

Rawne watched the man approach. He took in the ragged, dirty combat gear, second- or third-hand at least, the purposeful pose, the confident, well-trained advance. Only one detail mattered. The scowling iron mask that the man was wearing over his face identified him very clearly. It was the fighting grotesk of a Blood Pacted warrior.

He heard Cant whisper, ‘Holy Throne.’

The sirdar reached the first cage. He had the carbine’s stock tucked up against his shoulder, aimed down and wary. He stared at the blinking Varshide trooper through the bars.

‘Who are you supposed to be?’ the Varshide slurred.

Kaylb fired between the bars of the cage. The two shots hit the Varshide in the chest, and threw him against the back wall of the cage. His corpse overturned the cot and the covered chamber pot beside it as it crumpled onto the cell floor. The sour smell of stale urine filled the cell bay, and mingled with the acrid reek of scorched flesh and cooked blood.

The next cage in line was Rawne’s. Rawne didn’t move as the killer advanced towards him. He kept his eyes locked on the grotesk.

Kaylb looked the next prisoner up and down quickly, and then raised the carbine to execute him.

‘Voi shet, magir!’ Rawne said.

Kaylb froze.

‘Ched qua?’ he replied.

‘Voi shet, magir,’ Rawne repeated, stepping closer to the bars, his hands open and visible. ‘Eswer shet edereta kyh shet.’

Kaylb came closer, the gun still aimed at Rawne’s chest.

‘Shet atraga gorae haspa?’ he demanded. ‘Voi gorae haspa?’

Rawne smiled, and said, ‘Fuad gahesh drowk, magir.’

‘Ched?’ the sirdar queried.

‘Abso-fething-lutely,’ said Rawne and shot his arms out through the cage. His left hand grabbed the carbine’s barrel and yanked it in between the bars. The weapon fired, but the shot struck the back wall of the cell, harmlessly. Rawne’s right hand had seized the sirdar by the collar. Taken by surprise, the sirdar found himself being dragged headfirst into the cage door. Rawne slammed him into the cage so they were face to face with only the bars between them. Though the sirdar still had his right hand clamped to the carbine, most of the weapon was pulled through the bars and wedged against them by Rawne’s vicing left-hand grip. The weapon fired again. Two more futile las-bolts left scorch marks on the back wall.

It was all happening too fast for the sirdar. Kaylb started to cry out, to fight back. He clawed at Rawne through the bars with his left hand.

Teeth bared, Rawne began to slam the sirdar’s face against the bars with his right hand. His grip on the collar was so tight that he was already choking off the man’s air. In a furious, steady, almost mesmeric motion, Rawne began to pump his right arm in and out, smashing the iron-masked face of the pinned man off the bars over and over again. It was like the action of an industrial stamping press. Rawne didn’t have the time, space, opportunity or means for a single clean killing blow, so he compensated with frenetic quantity.

By the eighth blow, the sirdar had begun to struggle with real fury, and the carbine fired again. By the tenth, his teeth were broken, and there was blood spattering out of his shuttling head. By the twelfth, there was blood and nicks on the bars. By the fifteenth, the grotesk had cracked, and the sirdar’s head had become a limp, lolling punch bag, snapping to and fro.

Kaylb Sirdar finally tore free, somewhere around the seventeenth blow. He staggered backwards, drunken and swaying, howled a curse to the Kings of the Warp, and shot Rawne.

Except he was no longer holding his carbine. Rawne still had it in his hand.

Rawne swept the weapon in between the bars, rotated it end-over like a piece of show-off parade ground drill, aimed, and fired out of the cage without hesitation.

The las-bolt hit Kaylb Sirdar in the forehead, and hammered him back into the bay wall. The grotesk split in half, and the two pieces flew off his face and bounced away across the deck in opposite directions.

The sirdar slid down the wall, and finished up, dead, in a sitting position, his head tilted to one side. He had left a long streak of blood down the wall above him. If he had been alive to see it, Kaylb Sirdar would have recognised that the prognostications of the blood mark were not good.

Rawne lowered the carbine.

‘Holy shit,’ breathed Meryn.

‘Wh-where did you learn to talk that language?’ Cant whispered.

‘Yeah, Cant, this is really the time for that conversation,’ said Banda.

Rawne poked the snout of the carbine into the cage lock and pulled the trigger twice, enough to blow the mechanism. He swung his cage door open and headed for the exit.

‘Hey. Hey!’ Meryn yelled. ‘Where the feth are you going? What about us?’

‘He’s going to check we’re secure, and then he’s going to get the keys,’ said Varl calmly. ‘Feth, Meryn, what are you, a child?’

Rawne reached the bay hatch and peered out, the carbine ready. There was a lot of shooting going on outside, quite close by. The smell of burning was intense. He could see smoke in the air now. He could hear screams. In the neighbouring cell bays, prisoners were being slaughtered.

He pushed the hatch to, and opened the wall box where the detention officers kept the cage keys. They jingled as he shook them out in his hand and hurried back to the cage row.

‘Unlock and get out, fast,’ he said passing the keys to Varl, the first in line. ‘We’re getting out of here.’

‘But what about–’ Daur began.

‘If we stay here, we die,’ Rawne said, cutting Daur off. ‘We get out, and find out what the feth’s going on. Then we worry about the consequences.’

Prisoner B turned his head to look at Gaunt as he entered the sick green light of the tank cell. He looked at the bolt pistol in Gaunt’s hand without a blink or the sign of an expression.

Then he turned his head again and sat looking straight ahead.

‘There’s no time for a conversation,’ Gaunt said.

‘I know,’ said the etogaur.

‘We have an understanding?’ asked Gaunt.

‘Just do it,’ the prisoner replied.

With his free hand, Gaunt began to unbuckle the shackle cuff pinning Prisoner B’s left arm to the chair. Prisoner B looked around at him, startled.

‘What?’ asked Gaunt.

‘I thought–’

‘What?’

‘I thought you were going to execute me.’

‘I will. Give me the slightest excuse, and I will,’ Gaunt said, working at the next set of buckles. He kept glancing over his shoulder at the door.

‘I will give you no reason to–’

‘You wanted us to trust you,’ Gaunt snapped. ‘You wanted me to trust you. I don’t and I probably won’t. But you wanted my help to stay alive because you swore you could help us. One chance. Do not test me.’

‘I will not, Gaunt.’

‘Don’t use my name either.’

‘Of course,’ said Prisoner B.

Gaunt unclasped the body straps and shook them off the etogaur’s shoulders.

‘Are your hands numb? Your fingers?’

‘No,’ said Prisoner B.

‘Then get the buckles on the leg straps undone,’ said Gaunt.

Prisoner B leaned over in the restraint chair and diligently began to undo the heavy iron buckles on the leather straps binding his legs. Gaunt crossed back to the heavy tank door and peered around it. The hallway outside was empty, but he heard a loud burst of full auto-fire, close by. Somewhere else, someone was screaming.

He could smell smoke, and he could hear some kind of… keening sound.

He ducked back into the tank cell, and looked over at Prisoner B. The prisoner had managed to free one leg.

‘Hurry up!’ Gaunt yelled.

There was a noise outside. He went back to the door. Looking around its rim, he was in time to see a detention officer and a sanctioned torturer fly in through the door at the far end of the interrogation unit. The detention officer was backing up, frantically blasting a lasrifle from the hip at unseen targets beyond the door. The torturer was simply running for his life, hurtling along the white-tiled hallway towards the heavy door half-concealing Gaunt.

Answering fire hammered in through the doorway, and cut down the detention officer, who simply crumpled and collapsed. Two or three more stray shots whined in, and then an armed man burst through the door, bounding over the dead detention officer. He was armed with an old lasrifle and dressed in shabby combat gear. A man dressed just like him appeared on his heels.

Both were wearing black-iron grotesks.

The first of them raised his rifle and pinked off a shot that hit the fleeing torturer in the spine, bringing him down hard. Belly down in a pool of blood that looked glossy, like spilled enamel paint against the polished white of the corridor’s tiling, the torturer tried to drag himself forward. His legs were useless.

He saw Gaunt behind the heavy, open cell door ahead of him.

‘Help me!’ he gurgled.

A las-round took the top of his head off.

Gaunt swung out from behind the door and fired his bolt pistol. The shot hit the first of the Pacted raiders square in the sternum, and exploded his torso. Blood and meat suddenly decorated a considerable section of the corridor’s white-tiled surfaces.

The other Pacter yelled something and began firing.

Gaunt ducked back behind the tank cell door as the auto fire ripped past. He felt it spank hard against the other side of the hefty door, driving it back against his body. He tried to keep it wedged open. If it slammed shut, the lock might engage, and if the lock engaged, he and Prisoner B would be trapped, and that would be the endgame.

More wild shots whacked against the door shielding him. The impacts were beginning to drive the door into him with enough force to bruise his shoulder and arm. Gaunt could hear shouting from the far end of the hall. Someone was shouting words in a hard, ugly language that he, thankfully, hadn’t heard much since Gereon.

With a curse, Gaunt kicked the door wide open and opened fire again, his bolt pistol braced in a two-handed grip. Three wailing bolt-rounds seared down the hallway, and detonated against the tiled walls, blowing clouds of tile fragments and plaster in all directions. The masked raiders, and there were three of them in sight, ducked frantically, and pulled back into the cover of the end door.

Gaunt fired another two shots with his great cannon of a pistol to keep them ducking, and turned back into the tank cell.

Prisoner B was standing right behind him.

Gaunt leapt back and brought his gun up, but Prisoner B just stood there.

‘Don’t sneak up on me!’ he ordered.

‘I didn’t mean–’ the etogaur said.

A flock of las-rounds cracked past. Gaunt winced and turned back, firing two more bolts that scattered the raiders sniping at them from the far hatchway.

‘Move!’ Gaunt yelled. He took off down the corridor with Prisoner B behind him. He could hear the raiders behind them shouting. What was that word?

Pheguth.

‘Come on!’ Gaunt yelled. Two las-bolts clipped the wall beside him, chipping the tiles.

Four metres more. A hatch on the left.

Gaunt skidded up in front of it, grabbed Prisoner B by the shoulder, and physically shoved him through the doorway out of the line of fire. He turned to fire one more hefty round at the raiders advancing along the corridor towards them, and then dived through the hatchway before he’d had time to see if he’d hit anything.

On the other side of the hatch, in the small access way adjacent to the main corridor of the interrogation unit, Prisoner B had come to a halt.

The Blood Pact soldier facing him had hesitated in surprise for a second. Now, his rifle was coming up to fire.

Gaunt fired past the etogaur’s shoulder and blew the raider’s head apart. Gore spattered across Prisoner B’s face. He didn’t flinch. He wiped it away with the back of his hand.

Gaunt slammed the hatch behind them shut, and wound the locking ring.

‘Move,’ he said to Prisoner B.

‘Which way?’

‘This way,’ said Gaunt.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ll find a way out,’ said Gaunt.

The raiders started beating on the other side of the locked hatch. Gaunt ejected his smoking bolt pistol’s clip. It was spent. Ten rounds. He was only carrying three spares in the pouches of his uniform belt.

‘They won’t let you go,’ said Prisoner B.

‘Pheguth,’ Gaunt replied.

‘What?’

‘They called you pheguth.’

‘What other word would they have for me?’ asked Prisoner B.

‘It’s what you people called Sturm,’ said Gaunt slamming a fresh load home and racking the mechanism.

‘What other word would they have for either of us?’ Prisoner B asked.

Gaunt shrugged.

‘This way,’ he said. Above the sound of the sirens, and the clamour of hammering and shouting from the other side of the hatch, he could still make out the curious keening noise. He looked back at Prisoner B.

The etogaur was looking down at the blood-soaked corpse of the raider at his feet. Specifically, he was staring at the fallen rifle.

Without any attempt at misdirection, he bent down to pick it up.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Gaunt.

‘What?’ asked the etogaur, his pink, scarless hand about to close on the rifle’s grip.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting a weapon. Two weapons are better than one.’

‘Forget it,’ said Gaunt.

‘We have to fight our way out.’

‘I said forget it.’

‘But–’ Prisoner B began.

‘I’m not arming you. You can forget it. I am not arming you,’ said Gaunt.

The etogaur straightened up. He nodded.

‘I understand,’ he said.

They set off down the access way. There were sounds of fighting all around them, from the floors above them and below, and from areas nearby. They crossed over a cell bay where all the cages had gunshot-riddled corpses sprawling in them. Pistol raised, braced, Gaunt led the way.

Another hatchway took them into another long, white-tiled corridor, the trademark style of the detention levels, it seemed. There were no doors and no windows, just a long, gleaming white tunnel.

‘Which way?’ asked Prisoner B.

Raiders appeared down the tunnel to their right, and made the decision for them.

They started to run. As shots began to streak their way, Gaunt turned and fired, bundling Prisoner B ahead of him. He hit someone, and made the others duck back.

‘Move!’ Gaunt yelled.

Baltasar Eyl stepped over the bloody mess that had once been one of his men.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘This way, upon my soul!’ Naeme declared, pointing down the hallway.

‘You sure it’s him?’

‘I saw him,’ said Imrie.

Eyl pushed past them and started to run. He had trodden in the blood of his dead comrade, and he left bloody footprints on the white tiles.

They were coming after them. Gaunt could see them every time he looked back. They were giving chase. One of them, a big man in a beige leather coat, was leading the way, a carbine in his hands. His grotesk was silver.

The officer, Gaunt thought, the mission leader.

Shoving Prisoner B on, Gaunt turned again and fired. The screaming bolt-round barely missed the Blood Pact officer on their heels, but the man in the silver mask didn’t even flinch.

He’s sworn to this deed, Gaunt thought. He doesn’t care about his own life. He is resolute.

Gaunt fired. He missed the leader in the silver mask again, but the round explosively eviscerated the Pacted warrior running at his side. Still running, the silver-masked leader raised his carbine, and fired from the shoulder like a huntsman. A las-bolt hit the floor. Another went through Gaunt’s coat tail. A third stabbed into Prisoner B’s left shoulder blade.

Prisoner B didn’t fall, but he grunted and stumbled. Gaunt grabbed him to keep him upright, and tried to hustle him on. Shots smacked into the walls around them.

The white-tiled corridor was getting narrower. They struggled past a point where it was actually stepped in on both sides, losing about a quarter of its width. Five metres further, and the corridor stepped in again. The tall, white-tiled corridor had been designed progressively narrower in width.

It had been specifically designed to place increasing restrictions on anyone moving along it: to stop a man from turning or breaking free from the guards flanking him in escort.

Gaunt suddenly realised there wasn’t going to be an exit ahead of them. They had unwittingly run into a dead end, a literal dead end. The narrowing corridor was the long, deliberately confined approach to the execution chamber, the last walk that all capital prisoners of the Commissariat took, the last walk from which there was no turning back.

Baltasar Eyl extended his long stride. His beige coat flew out behind him. The corridor’s overhead lights strobe-flashed off his silver grotesk.

He raised his carbine.