Blood Pact

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.

Even the things that survived a war, even the things left standing, came out of it with scars.

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.

When he pulled out the copybook, a folded sheet of paper fell out of its pages onto the ground between his legs. It was a letter, with a finely printed letterhead at the top of the sheet. It was a polite introduction from a Mr Jaume, a photographic portraitist.

Gaunt realised that he’d pulled out his own copybook. Eszrah’s, virtually identical, was in the opposite side of his jacket. The letter, the one poor Beltayn had insisted Gaunt had seen and which he’d denied all knowledge of, had been tucked into the cover of his book, probably since the morning it had arrived at Aarlem.

He folded it up to put it away, and noticed the letterhead. The address of Jaume’s studio was listed as ‘137 Carnation Street, off Moat Street’. Moat Street. That’s where he’d seen it. It wasn’t a memory of the Balhaut War at all, just a little speck of driftwood that had got jumbled up in his head.

Eyl stood quietly in the kitchen of Doctor Kolding’s house on Kepeler Place. Though the middle of the night was not long past, a blue twilight was beginning to seep in through the windows. First light, and though the snowstorm had not eased off, the first hint of daylight was being magnified and reflected by the enfolding whiteness.

Apart from Kreeg, who was standing watch inside the front door, and Gnesh, who was minding the lower street access from the ambulance garage, the men of the philia were resting in the upper rooms of the house. Twenty-nine men; his force had been reduced to twenty-nine men. Kaylb Sirdar was gone, the first to die. Eyl had not witnessed the death to place it into any kind of definitive chronology, but he knew his sister couldn’t lie.

Eyl had taken off his grotesk. He relished the pain in his hands, chest and face where the carbine had been exploded in his grasp and left him gashed and burned. The injuries reminded him he was alive, just as they reminded him who had to die.

Time was slipping away. With every passing minute, their mission became harder, the odds greater, the opposition more resolved. The philia had spent its weapon of surprise, and Eyl estimated they had only a few more hours left in which to exploit the enemy’s shock. By morning, he thought, the Imperials will have gathered their wits and rallied. They will have closed the city down and begun the hunt for us.

Until then, Eyl meant to make the best use of his time. The city environs were still caught in an un-state, the sick half-light of the warpcraft that his sister had cast over the metropolis to numb, baffle and confuse. The storm continued unabated, and lent to them its gifts of concealment and mystery. The philia still had enough time to do its work. Once again, his sister was the key.

Eyl picked up one of the half-empty enamel mugs that was standing on the worn kitchen table. Out of curiosity, he sipped the cold, black liquid inside.

It tasted of blood. Everything tasted of blood.

He went downstairs to find his sister.

She was in the small surgical theatre that lay behind the swing doors at the bottom of the stone steps. Eyl pushed the doors open gently. He had no wish to make her jump or disturb her work.

And she was most certainly at work.

Eyl knew that the men of the philia had withdrawn into the house’s upper rooms so that they did not have to linger too close to her witchery. Proximity to Ulrike’s craft caused the skin to prickle and the heart to go frantic.

Eyl swallowed back the bile that had rushed up his throat.

‘Sister?’

She had taken winding sheets of white cloth from a storage cupboard, and pinned them to the theatre’s wood panelled walls using surgical blades, turning the sheets into stretched canvases. Then she’d made blood marks upon them.

She’d located the theatre’s source of blood stock, a refrigerated unit beside the scrub sink, and raided its contents. Empty transfusion packets, torn open and discarded, were scattered across the tiled floor. She’d squirted, shaken and splashed the contents of the packets across the sheets.

As Eyl approached, she was gazing at the marks, her wet, red hands by her sides, dripping on her mourning skirts.

‘What do you see?’ he asked.

‘Nothing. It’s all broken. Disjointed. Incomplete.’

‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘The future doesn’t want me to see it.’

Eyl bent down and picked up one of the emptied blood packets. He read the label.

Synthetic blood supplement.

‘This isn’t real blood,’ he said. ‘It’s artificial. Made in a vat.’

She nodded.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I can read. I thought it would work.’

She squinted again at the blood marks on the sheets, the blackberry darkness of the blood, the yellow-pink halo stains of the plasma.

‘I’ll have to use real blood. Bleed myself. Give me your rite knife, brother.’

‘I lost it,’ he admitted.

She turned to him. He could feel the heat of her gaze from behind the veil.

‘Upon my soul,’ she said, ‘that is unfortunate.’

‘It is what it is,’ he replied, though he knew she was right. ‘Tell me about the real blood.’

Striding like a headstrong child, she went over to the counter immediately. She’d emptied and washed a couple of the glass sterilising baths, and filled them with blood product. Suspended in the red liquid, Eyl could see the strips of bloodstained leather that Malstrom and Barc had cut from the upholstery of the limousine.

‘Where did the blood come from?’ he asked.

‘From the synthetic store,’ she replied. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just a medium. It’s not as reactive as blood, but it’s better than water, and that’s what I thought I’d be forced to use.’

‘And?’

‘I can sense him already,’ she said.

Using a surgical tool, she’d scratched a grid and accompanying symbols into the worktop, and placed the glass baths at the centre. Arcane mechanisms were at work.

‘You can?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll have his location soon. His heartbeat. There was a lot of blood on the leather. He bled all over the seats.’

She looked up at him.

‘He might be dead already, Baltasar.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘The pheguth might be dead already,’ she continued. She laced her arms around him, and rested the side of her veiled head against his chest. ‘Our work might be done. We could slip away and–’

He pulled her arms off him.

‘I must have a confirmed kill,’ he said. ‘Besides, you know we can’t. We can’t slip away from this. This world will end us. This mission will undo us. A day more, perhaps two, that’s the measure of our lifetimes. We knew this when we accepted the burden upon our souls.’

‘You did. Not me,’ she replied.

‘We were made for this, sister, we–’

‘I was made. I was made for this. The gore mages wove me for this very purpose. You volunteered, Baltasar. Proud warrior, great damogaur, you volunteered for the glory of this mission. I was never offered a choice, and I wish I had been. That is one of my truths.’

He nodded sadly.

‘If you’d had the choice, would you have chosen this?’ he asked.

‘I cannot lie,’ she replied. ‘Sometimes I wonder what life is like. I mean, what it is like to lead a life: to be born and grow up, and make choices and follow paths. I wish I could have done that. I wonder what choices I’d have made. But I know what I am, brother. A witched instrument. No childhood, no life, no choices. Bred for just one purpose. Even so–’

‘Even so?’

‘I would have chosen this. The pheguth must die.’

‘And the Anarch?’ Eyl asked. ‘Will the Anarch die?’

‘Brother, you know that’s the one thing I can’t see,’ she said.

‘What’s the matter?’ Maggs asked.

He’d woken up suddenly, cold and stiff on the hard bed of the tarpaulin, with no idea of time or location. It had taken a panicky moment or two for him to remember.

His clipped ear hurt like a fether. The wound had begun to ache and throb, like any flesh wound after the initial sting and shock has worn off. Worse, the fear and stress that he’d accumulated the previous day was still flooding his system, the last thing he needed.

Gaunt was asleep. The bastard could sleep anywhere. Criid was undoubtedly prowling the perimeter. Doctor Death was kneeling beside the patient. Maggs could tell that something was up.

‘What’s the matter?’ he repeated. It was bone cold in the blue darkness of the refurb, and Maggs saw his breath smoking out in front of his face. The patient, under the blankets on the stretcher, was trembling and murmuring.

‘He’s taken a fever,’ Kolding replied.

‘A fever?’ asked Maggs.

‘That’s what I said.’

‘What kind of fever?’ Maggs asked.

Kolding looked up at him in the gloom.

‘There is only one kind,’ he replied.

‘The bad kind?’

‘Yes.’

‘Uh huh. What do we do?’

Kolding laughed a little, odd laugh, and said, ‘Why, sir, we take him at once to the Oligarchy Municipal Medicae Hospice on the Avenue Regnum Khulan, so they can begin intensive isolyte therapy… Except, oh, we can’t do that, can we?’

Maggs shook his head.

‘The fever came on suddenly,’ said Kolding. ‘I found rainwater caught in that sheeting over there. I’m trying to keep his face cool.’

‘Is he going to die?’ asked Maggs.

‘We’re all going to die, sir,’ Kolding replied.

‘I meant now,’ Maggs snapped.

‘Possibly. I think his wound has become infected. Hardly surprising, given the circumstances.’

‘Look, Doc, I don’t like this any more than you do,’ Maggs said. He paused and then started suddenly.

Kolding stared at him.

‘Are you all right, soldier?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ Maggs replied, shaking his head. ‘Why?’

‘You look pale, sweaty,’ said Kolding.

Maggs didn’t feel good at all, but he knew there wasn’t time for any self-indulgence. Feeling like crap was his problem.

‘I’m fine,’ he said.

‘I think you might be running a temperature too.’

‘Just look after freak-face, all right, Doc?’ Maggs said.

He realised that his hands were shaking. His knees felt soft. He watched the doctor in the half-light as Kolding mopped the prisoner’s brow.

‘Where’s Criid?’ Maggs asked.

‘Who?’

‘The girl, the woman,’ Maggs said, frustrated.

‘I think she went out to check the street,’ Kolding replied.

Maggs reached for his weapon. Criid had his las. Doctor Death’s automatic pistol was wedged in his pocket. He drew it.

‘What’s the matter?’ Kolding asked, suddenly apprehensive as he saw the weapon come out.

‘Nothing,’ Maggs replied, but that wasn’t the truth. The truth was he’d just remembered the dream that had woken him in the first place.

The siege of Hinzerhaus, on the fortress world of Jago, had been an awful ordeal. It had also been the Ghosts’ last major action before their retirement. Good men had died at Hinzerhaus, and one way or another Wes Maggs hadn’t been one of them.

The place had haunted them during the siege. Ghosts had walked amongst the Ghosts. Everyone had fireside stories, stories about returning old friends or lost comrades, or pieces of childhood, or driftwood memories made flesh. According to the old Tanith, men like Mad Larkin and Shoggy Domor, the ghosts that had come to them on Jago had taken the form of actual lost souls like Bragg and Corbec, men who’d been dead and dust long before Maggs and the Belladon had joined the First. Maggs had little idea who Bragg and Corbec were, but the reappearance of their shades seemed to matter a feth of a lot to the Tanith-born troopers.

Maggs’s personal ghost had been called the old dam. That was the name he’d given her. Some ancient, forgotten matron from Hinzerhaus’s dust-erased past, she’d stepped down out of one of the old, time-ravaged oil paintings and followed Maggs around the gloomy, satin-brown halls. She had worn a long, black lace gown, which rustled as she moved. Her face… Feth, her face had been a meat wound, the kind of thing that even a professional soldier didn’t care to look at for long.

When Hinzerhaus’s spell had finally broken (and the rumour was, it had been psyker magic all along), the old dam had left Maggs alone, once and for all. A last hiss of her black dress against the satin brown floor, and she’d gone.

For the two years since then, every morning, Maggs had given quiet thanks that she wasn’t stalking him any more.

Two years. Two years. For the first time since Hinzerhaus, Maggs realised he’d dreamed about the old dam. He’d dreamed about her long, black rustling dress and the face he did not want to behold.

Why had she come back? It wasn’t fair! Why now?

Why had she come back?

Maggs’s hands shook. The old gun felt slick in his grip. If the old dam had come back, he wasn’t going to let her get him. He’d kill her. Ghost or no ghost, he’d fething kill her.

Droplets of sweat were beading his forehead. Maggs didn’t feel good at all.

But he had a gun, and he wasn’t afraid to use it.