Blood Pact

TWENTY Old Ghosts

Gaunt found Criid watching the refurb’s road access entrance.

‘You need to rest,’ he told her.

She shook her head.

‘You’re no good to me tired,’ he said.

‘I’ve been resting for months,’ she told him quietly. ‘Standing still. This is what I need.’

‘The prospect of a bloody death at the hands of the Archenemy?’ he asked, raising an eyebrow.

She snorted.

‘A purpose,’ she said.

Gaunt looked out onto the snow-heavy street. His wrist chron appeared to have stopped at some point during the night, and he could not shake or wind life back into it. His best guess was that it was approaching mid-morning. They’d been holed up in the refurb for about six hours.

It didn’t look like mid-morning. The Old Side street was silent and empty. Snow was still fleecing down out of the cloud cover, and icing every surface. It had drifted deeply across the pavements and around parked vehicles. There was no sign of life: no traffic, no civilians, no pedestrians, no municipal street workmen or ploughs, no gritting trucks. The sky was as grey as slate, and visibility was severely restricted. The Old Side skyline was a faint black phantom in the flurrying snow. The more he looked at the snow against the sky, the more it looked like static flooding a jammed pict-feed.

The city’s haunted emptiness could be explained by the bad weather, and it could also be put down to a security lock-down following the attack. Either of those explanations suited Gaunt fine.

The third one, at the back of his mind, the idea that it was entirely unnatural, did not. He set it aside, even though there was a yellowish quality to the snow-light, and an odd sensation of brooding in the air, and his wrist chron had stopped dead and refused to work.

‘A purpose is good,’ he said, belatedly.

‘A plan would be better,’ said Criid.

He nodded.

‘Doctor Kolding says the etogaur’s too sick to be moved. He’s running a serious fever. Kolding didn’t want us to move him from his practice in the first place, although our hand was forced. As this place seems a little more secure, I’m loathe to ignore his professional advice.’

Criid shrugged and pouted.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘This man is really that important? Do we really care if he dies?’

‘You’ve seen what the Archenemy has put into motion to silence him,’ Gaunt replied. ‘There’s your answer.’

‘I suppose,’ she replied. ‘It just feels wrong. I mean, we’ve spent most of our careers trying to kill men like him.’

Gaunt sat down on a pile of fibreboard.

‘If we can’t move him, we need to bring help here,’ he said. ‘One of us… you, me, Maggs… could go out and try to raise some help. But just one of us, in case trouble comes calling.’

‘I’ll go,’ said Criid. ‘I’ve been running a lot recently. I can cover some ground. Question is, who do I go to? Who do you trust?’

‘I trust the regiment. But we don’t know how deep the infiltration runs, so I don’t trust any of the standard lines of communication. We need an unimpeachable point of contact. If I could speak directly to Hark or Gol.’

‘We could find a vox.’

Gaunt shrugged.

‘We also need food if we’re going to stay here any length of time,’ she said. ‘Let me scout the area, and see what I can scrounge up. I’ll see if there’s anything moving around out there, while I’m at it.’

Gaunt nodded.

‘Let’s start with that. But be careful.’

Criid slipped out through one of the refurb’s side windows, and ran down to the eerily empty main street. Snowflakes caught in her hair.

She was already spiking again, but it felt good this time, it felt right.

She turned left, and ran along the centre of the road, ignoring the pavements where the snow had drifted into deep banks. She followed the half-buried glitter of the tram rails, and splashed across stretches of meltwater where the snow cover had been heated by pipe-work or power sources under the street’s surface.

She went two junctions east, and then turned south around the church of Saint Sark, where the green iron railings looked as if they’d been dipped in icing sugar. There was a baker’s shop she knew on Londolph Square where she’d be able to get some bread and perhaps some cold meat or cheese. Gaunt had given her all the money he had on him.

That was presuming the baker’s shop was open. If it wasn’t, she’d impose Martial Provisioning Rules and help herself.

Something made her stop running. Afterwards, Tona couldn’t account for it. Something had just clicked in her head. It was intuitive. It was as if Caff had been at her side, and had just reached out and touched her arm.

She stopped running, and found cover behind the snow-caked tombs that filled Saint Sark’s little graveyard. She kept low. Her pulse was beating like a drum.

Three figures appeared a hundred metres away. That was a shock in itself, because the streets were so devoid of life.

They were soldiers. They were carrying weapons. They were hunting.

Fighting to control her breathing, Criid kept down, her hand on the grip of her laspistol. The three soldiers spread out, moving down the broad thoroughfare towards the church in a classic covering pattern. She could see the steam of their breath. She could see the glint as the snow-light caught their iron battle-masks.

The Blood Pact was this close. They were just streets away from Gaunt’s bolthole, and they were closing in, as if they had some scent! How could they know? How could they have the city at their mercy like this?

How many of them could she take, she wondered? Two, probably, then the third would drop her. If she was lucky and accurate, all three, but a hand-braced laspistol, rapid fire, at that range? And what if there was another team, beyond the street corner?

She heard a noise, over in the east. It was the rattling drone of turbofan engines. She adjusted her position, and looked up in time to see two Valkyrie gunships track past, heading west in a paired formation. They went behind the double spires of Saint Sabbat the Martyr, so that put them at least a kilometre away. They vanished into the blowing snow.

The Blood Pact soldiers heard the Valkyries too. They looked up, then scattered off the street, running fast. Criid wasn’t sure where they went, but they broke quickly.

Hunters, and hunters hunting hunters.

Rival forces were closing on Balopolis, and when they finally met, the result wasn’t going to be pretty at all.

Worse still, it reduced her and Gaunt to one thing: prey.

Bread and cold meat and cheese be damned. Criid knew she had to get back to the refurb fast.

‘Maggs?’

A voice had called his name, but Maggs wasn’t sure where from. He’d wandered into part of the refurb that he hadn’t been in before, and discovered, to his bafflement, that it somehow linked to Hinzerhaus. He stepped through an archway, pushing a work curtain aside, and went from the cold grey shadows of the refurb on Balhaut to the warm brown shadows of the house at the end of the world on Jago. On the Jago side, the wind blew the eternal dust like drifting snow.

Or was it snow drifting like dust in a dry valley with–

‘Maggs?’

Dust or snow, it hardly mattered. Either would make a deep, insulating blanket that he could lie beneath, lie beneath and be buried by. Snow or dust, it would protect his bones against the heat. It would prevent his blood from boiling.

There was a heat in his blood that would not go away. It made a hissing, rustling sound as it squirted around his body, like lace dragging on–

‘Maggs?’

Who the feth kept calling his name?

‘Maggs? Your name is Maggs, isn’t it?’

Maggs opened his eyes and looked up. The albino freak in the blue-tinted glasses was crouching over him.

‘I think you’re sick, Maggs,’ the albino said. ‘I think you’re running a fever. I need to help you–’

‘What time is it?’ Maggs mumbled, trying to sit up.

‘I don’t know,’ Kolding replied. ‘My wrist chron has stopped. It’s day. It’s morning. Mid-morning. It’s light out, but it’s still snowing.’

‘Your chron has stopped?’ asked Maggs.

‘Yes. Why does that matter?’

‘Mine’s stopped too. It’s really hot in here, isn’t it?’

Kolding shook his head.

‘It’s cold as hell,’ he said. ‘It’s like midwinter, and there’s a draught coming through the window holes.’

Maggs shook his head and sat up.

‘It’s really hot. I’m running with sweat.’

‘This is what I’m trying to tell you. I think you’re sick. I think you have a fever too.’

‘Why? Who else has a fever?’

Kolding blinked.

‘Well, your precious prisoner, obviously.’

Maggs got to his feet off the tarpaulin. He was unsteady. Droplets of perspiration splashed off his forehead as he rose. He had a sick feeling in his gut, but it was nothing compared to the burning turmoil in his head. He couldn’t even remember going to sleep.

‘I think you should sit down,’ said Kolding.

Maggs waved a hand at him.

‘I think you should sit down now and let me give you a shot.’ Kolding reached out a hand to steady Maggs.

Maggs shook it off.

‘I don’t want anything,’ he snapped.

The breeze picked up. The refurb’s work curtains swayed in the cold exhalation of the snowstorm. Was that the archway that led through to Jago?

Dry skulls in a dusty valley with all the–

The words made a rustling sound in his head.

Maggs snatched the old gun out of his pocket.

‘Oh, Throne!’ he hissed. ‘How long has she been here?’

‘Who?’ Kolding asked.

‘The old dam! The old bitch!’ Maggs whispered, circling, and aiming the weapon at random shadows. ‘Can’t you hear her? Can’t you smell the stink of her?’

‘There’s no one here,’ Kolding said, rising to his feet. ‘Please. Please. Put the gun down.’

‘She’s right here!’ Maggs insisted. ‘It’s like she’s so close she’s inside my head. That fething black lace gown. The hiss of it!’

‘There’s no one here,’ Kolding insisted.

Except there was.

The snowstorm gusted again, and the work curtains billowed. The woman stepped quietly through one of the swaying curtains to face them.

Maggs couldn’t see her face. She was wearing a veil. He was glad about the veil. He really, really didn’t want to see her face. Just the idea of it made him shudder. His hands were slick-wet and shaking. Her dress was very long, black lace, and it made a rustling noise as it dragged across the ground.

‘How long has it taken you to find me?’ Maggs asked her. ‘How long has it taken you to follow me here?’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Kolding asked.

‘Her. Her!’

‘Please, Maggs, there’s no one there.’

Kolding pointed at the empty work curtain swaying in the breeze. The train of it rustled against the rough flooring.

Maggs aimed the old gun at the veiled woman in the black dress.

The pistol that had been left behind banged hard on auto, slamming out its spent cases. Kolding cried out and flinched, covering his ears. The rounds ripped through the work curtain, punching holes in the fabric.

The bullets struck her in the face and the chest. They went through her veil and her torso as if she wasn’t really there.

Baltasar Eyl stepped back as his sister suddenly gasped.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

The witch’s hands and arms were drenched in blood to the elbows. She had plunged them into the glass sterilising baths to retrieve the strips of leather cut from the limousine’s seats. She was clutching the lank, dripping strips in her scarlet fists like fronds of wet seaweed.

‘The blood,’ she said. Her words seemed to etch into the unnaturally chilly air of the theatre as if they’d been drawn in acid.

‘What about it?’

‘It wasn’t all his.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Some of it was the pheguth’s, but some of it came from one of the men with him. One of them must also have been injured.’

Eyl remembered clinging to the side of the car as it sped towards the gate. He remembered, like a snap-shot, his half view of the driver’s head and neck, running with blood.

‘The driver,’ he said.

‘Yes. He’s the one I’ve got,’ said Ulrike. ‘I am upon his soul. And he’s fighting back.’

‘Can you dispose of him?’

The witch smiled at her brother. Her veil was down, but he could feel the smile, like the hot leak of lethal radiation.

‘I can do better than dispose of him,’ she replied. ‘I can use him.’

‘What are you doing?’ Kolding cried.

Maggs turned and struck the doctor across the temple with the old gun. Kolding barked out a cry and fell hard. He tried to get up. Maggs kicked him, and then clubbed him across the back of the head with the butt of the gun.

Kolding dropped and lay still.

Still shaking, and sweating hard, his body stricken with the furnace of his fever, Maggs staggered over to the prisoner.

The etogaur was trembling beneath his heaped blankets. Sweat pasted his face. His eyes had rolled back, showing just whites.

Maggs poked the muzzle of the old gun against the etogaur’s head and pulled the trigger.