Blood Pact

TEN Snow on Snow

The sky above the city had turned a sick yellow, and snow had begun to fall again. The flakes made soft, ticking noises as they struck the glass of the tall windows that overlooked the courtyard, and the ticking became a counterpoint to the heavy, funereal beat of the ornate timepiece on the corner stand.

Gaunt sat for a while, and then began to pace in the anteroom. He stared down into the courtyard where the snowflakes were softly beginning to accumulate. He watched the imperceptible crawl of the hands across the brass dial of the timepiece. He went to the door of the anteroom, and looked out into the cold hallway. People were busy elsewhere. He heard the echo of raised voices in the distance. He went back, sat down in the armchair, and sipped at the cup of now-cold caffeine the duty officer had brought. He took out Eszrah’s copybook, and tried to read another of the Nihtgane folk tales, but his mind wasn’t on it.

Commissar Edur reappeared, and shut the anteroom door behind him.

‘What’s going on, Edur?’ Gaunt asked, rising to his feet. ‘When can I resume the interview?’

‘In a short while, I trust,’ Edur replied.

‘You heard what he said to me, Edur,’ Gaunt snapped. ‘It’s vital I keep talking to him. Why in the name of the God-Emperor did you pull me out of there?’

‘There are complications,’ said Edur, evasively.

‘What kind of complications?’

Edur looked particularly awkward.

‘I want to talk to him,’ Gaunt said.

‘We want you to talk to him,’ Edur assured him.

‘Then why aren’t I doing that right now?’ asked Gaunt.

‘You’re going to have to wait a little longer,’ said Edur. He flexed his chin, as if there was much more he wanted to say that he simply couldn’t.

Gaunt stared at him, and then slowly sat down again.

‘In the meantime, is there anything I can arrange to have brought to you?’ asked Edur. ‘Some refreshment? Or perhaps you’d like to see your men?’

‘My men?’

Edur hesitated, and took a copybook out of his jacket pocket. He flicked through the pages and consulted a memo.

‘Uhm, a Major Rawne, is it? Him and six others were brought in last night. They’re downstairs in detention. I thought, as you had time to kill, you might–’

‘Major Rawne has been a pain in my arse for twelve years,’ said Gaunt. ‘I don’t know what sort of trouble he’s got himself into now. I hardly care. He can stay downstairs in detention, and rot until I feel like being bothered. It might teach him not to get into trouble in the first place, though I doubt it.’

Edur cleared his throat and put the notebook away. ‘It was merely a suggestion,’ he said.

He turned to leave, but the door opened. A duty officer stepped in and whispered something to Edur, who nodded and turned back to Gaunt.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

Gaunt followed Edur out into the hallway. He had to stride purposefully to keep up with Edur’s brisk pace.

‘Listen carefully,’ Edur said to Gaunt, quietly and urgently, as they strode along. ‘Late last night, the ordos got wind of what was happening here. They’re insisting we hand Prisoner B over to them. Section is protesting our jurisdictional claim to hold and interrogate the prisoner, but the Inquisition is getting rather heavy-handed about it.’

‘I can imagine,’ replied Gaunt.

‘They’re talking about a legal challenge to the Commissariat’s authority, and a ground-up investigation by the Ordo Hereticus. Mercure is trying to head them off. He’s arguing that this is entirely within our remit.’

‘Mercure? You mean Isiah Mercure, head of the Intelligence Division?’

‘Yes.’

Gaunt whistled. They turned a corner together, and, maintaining their pace, started down another hallway. Several armed guards flanked a pair of imposing doors at the far end.

‘He’s called you in,’ said Edur. ‘Answer all the questions put to you simply and clearly. Don’t play games with these people. This is not a moment for showboating.’

‘Understood,’ replied Gaunt.

‘I hope so,’ said Edur. The guards snapped to attention as the two commissars strode up.

‘How did they find out?’ asked Gaunt.

‘What?’

‘How did the ordos find out about Prisoner B?’

Edur stopped in his tracks, and glanced at Gaunt.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It didn’t come up.’

‘You ought to find out,’ said Gaunt. ‘If the ordos can find out, the information is not secure.’

Edur stepped past the guards, knocked emphatically on the doors, and then opened one of them. He held it open to usher Gaunt inside.

‘Colonel-Commissar Gaunt,’ he announced.

Gaunt stepped into the room and made the sign of the aquila. There were about twenty Commissariat officers and clerks in front of him, along with several representatives of the Imperial Inquisition. They were arranged on either side of a large table, lit by the wan snow-light coming through the large windows. The way everyone turned to glare at him when he entered made Gaunt feel as if he had walked in at an especially delicate point in the conversation.

‘Right, Gaunt,’ said the senior Commissariat officer. ‘Don’t just stand there, man. Approach please.’

Gaunt did as he was told. No one had returned his salute. No one had stood back or vacated a seat for his benefit. A couple of Section officers shuffled their chairs aside so that Gaunt could stand next to the table beside the senior officer.

It was Isiah Mercure. Gaunt recognised him well enough from dozens of high-level briefings, though the two of them had never spoken. Gaunt was ordinarily far beneath Mercure’s notice. Mercure dealt with Crusade business at sector level, and kept the company of system governors, lord generals, and the Warmaster. There was very little room for advancement left to him within the Commissariat. Gaunt had heard it suggested that Mercure’s future might include a lord militancy, or even the mastery of some significant theatre.

Mercure was a robust man with greying dark hair, and his strong features managed to be both craggy and fleshy. He was not a handsome man at all. His skin was a bad colour and pock-marked, and the bulk of his torso spoke of excessive high living, but he had exceptional presence. His voice was deep and his manner somehow reassuringly coarse and unaffected.

‘You’ve interviewed Prisoner B, right?’ Mercure asked Gaunt without really looking at him.

‘Briefly, sir.’

‘First impressions?’

‘We shouldn’t execute him, not until we’ve got everything we can from him.’

Mercure nodded. He still wasn’t bothering to look at Gaunt. Half of his attention seemed to be caught up in leafing through the paperwork spread on the table in front of him. The other half seemed to be considering the being seated opposite him.

This individual was, without doubt, a servant of the ordos. He wore dark body armour, and a mantle with a trim of white fur. His physique was long-limbed and lithe. He occupied the chair like a dancer at rest, or a mannequin that had been artfully posed as an artist’s model. He had a striking, leonine mane of hair swept back from his forehead, and his features were almost perfect in their refined construction: his eyes, for instance. It occurred to Gaunt that he’d seen eyes like that before. He’d seen them in his own face. The inquisitor’s eyes were extravagantly machined replicas, and it wasn’t just the eyes. The aesthetics of his face, the lines of the jaw and cheek and nose, were all too noble, too magnificently handsome to be true. At some point, the inquisitor had had his entire face rebuilt by the Imperium’s finest augmeticists.

‘What exactly do you think we can get from him?’ the inquisitor asked, staring at Gaunt.

‘Information vital to the prosecution of this crusade,’ Gaunt replied.

‘What qualifies you as an expert on the analysis of such information?’

Gaunt hesitated. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Who am I addressing?’

There were half a dozen men in black bodygloves standing behind the inquisitor’s chair. His agents, Gaunt presumed, his team, his henchmen. Like their master, they were lean and lithe, and stood like a troupe of dancers, limbered up and ready to perform. Even unarmed, none of them looked like the sort of man you’d choose to tangle with. There was something curious about them that Gaunt couldn’t quite identify. They bristled at Gaunt’s question.

‘Watch your tone,’ one of them began.

The inquisitor raised his hand.

‘That’ll do, Sirkle,’ he said.

The henchman, Sirkle, backed down slightly, but his hard gaze didn’t leave Gaunt’s face. Studying Sirkle and his cronies, Gaunt realised what was so disconcerting about them.

They all wore their master’s face.

Hair colour, eye colour and even details of complexion were different from face to face, but the basic elements of the physiognomy were identical and unmistakable. The faces of the inquisitor’s agents had all been augmetically remodelled to echo the heroic perfection of his own.

An odd piece of vanity in the first place, Gaunt thought, but doubly odd when the face you’re immortalising is an artifice to begin with.

‘I am Handro Rime,’ the inquisitor said. ‘I am here today in the service of the Ordo Hereticus. My question was, what qualifies you as an expert?’

‘Gaunt’s expertise isn’t up for debate, Rime,’ Mercure cut in. ‘He’s got extensive experience of the Gereon Campaign, and that’s where we dredged up Prisoner B. If Gaunt says there’s something in this, I trust him. He’s my man on this. Aren’t you, Gaunt?’

Gaunt found that Mercure was looking at him directly for the first time. It was a look that said: Don’t make me look stupid now, you little shit.

‘Absolutely, sir,’ said Gaunt.

Rime leaned forwards. He smiled, but the smile was not warm. It was a perfect facsimile of a smile, executed by hundreds of synthi-muscle tensors and subcutaneous micro-motors. He fixed Mercure with his augmetic stare.

‘I think the real issue, sir,’ he said, ‘is that the Commissariat Intelligence Division, without reference to, or permission from, any other department or agency, including the holy ordos, has detained a toxic Archenemy prisoner in the heart of one of Balhaut’s cities. It’s an extraordinary risk to take, not to mention fundamentally contrary to the express determination of operational procedure, as set down by the Inquisition and the High Lords of Terra. The Imperium doesn’t do this, Mercure. You don’t do this. The only body qualified and authorised to handle prisoners of this type is the Inquisition.’

‘This is too important to waste time on a jurisdictional squabble, Rime,’ said Mercure.

‘Oh, if only that’s all this was,’ the inquisitor replied. ‘You will hand Prisoner B over to us, and we will evaluate him and dispose of him.’

‘But he doesn’t want to talk to you,’ said Gaunt.

‘What did you just say?’ demanded another one of the henchmen.

‘Enough, Sirkle!’ Rime declared.

Are they all called Sirkle, Gaunt wondered?

‘I said he doesn’t want to talk to you,’ said Gaunt, gesturing generally at the ordo team. ‘And he doesn’t want to talk to them either,’ he added, with a nod at Mercure and the Section officers. ‘He wants to talk to me.’

‘Is this true?’ asked Rime.

‘Prisoner B made it known that he would only speak to Colonel-Commissar Gaunt,’ said Edur, who was waiting patiently by the door.

‘Why?’ asked Rime.

‘That’s one of the things I intend to find out,’ said Gaunt, ‘if I’m given the chance.’

Mercure dismissed Gaunt, and Edur took him back to the anteroom. The timepiece was still ticking out its deep, regular beat, and snowflakes were still prickling the glass.

‘You did well,’ said Edur.

‘Did I?’

‘I think you impressed Mercure.’

‘I couldn’t tell,’ said Gaunt.

Edur smiled and said, ‘You never can with him. But I think your bluntness piqued the inquisitor’s interest enough for us to broker some cooperation. Perhaps we can persuade them to let you interview the prisoner with them as observers. At least that way we share anything you find out.’

‘The ordos should damn well respect our need for concrete intelligence,’ Gaunt growled.

Edur was still smiling.

‘You’ve been at the front line a long time, haven’t you Gaunt?’ he said. ‘You’ve forgotten just how total their authority is. We’re lucky they’re even asking us politely. They could have just burst in here and taken him by force. You wouldn’t believe the number of promising subjects the Inquisition has snatched away from us before we’ve been able to get to work.’

‘So I’ve just got to wait?’ Gaunt asked.

‘I’m afraid so,’ replied Edur.

The snow was falling more heavily than before, in the yard beside Viceroy House. Wes Maggs started the engine of the staff car again, in the hope of squeezing some warm air out of the heaters. He knew that if he ran the engine for too long, some pen-pusher would garnish the fuel costs from his pay.

Huddled in his jacket, his hands stuffed deep inside the armpits of his vest, Maggs sat in the front passenger seat of the car, and reflected on the suckiness of the duty he’d pulled.

He was cold to the bone, and the waiting was killing him. How many hours had Gaunt been inside? The sky had gone the colour of a bad bruise, and it felt too cold for snow. He wondered about getting out and sweeping away the snow that was accumulating on the car, but he couldn’t face it. He wondered about approaching one of the guards for a chat and a lho-stick to warm his hands, but they were up at the gate or in the guard towers, and looked pretty unapproachable.

Even the mechanics, who had been working on some of the other transports parked in the yard’s garage area nearby, had given up their efforts and had gone to huddle around a pathetic brazier. Maggs wondered if they’d make room for him, but he doubted it. They didn’t look very friendly. In fact, the whole place seemed like the coldest and least-friendly location he’d ever had to spend any time in, and that included some warzones.

He gazed across the yard through the windscreen and the fluttering snow, and finally worked out the purpose of the odd architecture he’d been staring at for half a day. The side of the main building had a sort of loading dock built into it, overhanging the main yard area. There were no windows.

Maggs realised that he’d parked facing the execution block. The trapdoor in the underside of the dock overlooking the yard was the drop where men’s bodies thumped down when they were hanged. This yard, otherwise used for parking and light maintenance, was where the official witnesses and observers stood.

He shuddered. The place was getting unfriendlier by the moment.

Gaunt had stood up out of the armchair and put Eszrah’s copybook away before it occurred to him to wonder why he’d done either of those things.

Something had prompted his decisive movements, something very clear, but he couldn’t identify what. He stood there, with the timepiece ticking solemnly behind him, and heard the feathery brush of snowflakes against the anteroom’s windowpanes.

He’d seen something. He’d seen something he couldn’t have seen, shouldn’t have seen.

Just for a second, with his attention focused on the pages of Eszrah’s next story, there had been a flash, a little flash behind his eyes, like an electrical flare, like the tremor of aurora lights.

Stupid. It was stupid, really. Just another twinge of his old, traumatised optic nerves. Just another function-glitch of his new, gleaming eyes.

But there was a taste in his mouth. The metallic taste of blood.

He went to the door.

‘Do you think they’re deliberately turning the heating down to piss us off?’ asked Varl of no one in particular. No one in particular answered him.

The Tanith offenders occupied seven adjacent cages on the fifth bay of Detention Four. The only other prisoners on the bay were a pair of Oudinot drunks, who were still sleeping off the night before, and an ugly fether from one of the Varshide regiments, who occupied the cage next to Rawne’s. The Varshide had volunteered a long and graphic commentary on exactly how pleased he was to see Jessi Banda, and precisely how much more pleased he’d be if they weren’t separated by ceramite bars, until Rawne had leaned close and gently whispered something to him, as a direct result of which the Varshide had shut up and gone to hide in the corner of his cage.

Since the seven Tanith had been brought in the night before, the bay temperature had been fairly constant, but in the last hour it had begun to drop, noticeably. Varl could see his breath in the air in front of him.

No one had talked for a long time. In the first couple of hours of detention there’d been a fair amount of chat and a lot of recriminations, especially from Ban Daur, who was sitting forlornly in his cell with a look on his face that announced that his world had ended. Young Cant, dragged into the scam by peer pressure and the notion that maybe if he grew some, Varl might stop ragging on him, looked dispirited and scared. Meryn, true to form, had started to whine and blame, which had oiled the wheels of an argument between him and Banda that had gone on until the guards told them all to shut up.

Then Hark had shown up from Aarlem in the small hours with a face like murder. He’d reviewed the situation, told them they were all fething idiots, and added that he had no idea how he was going to sort ‘Rawne’s latest shit’ out this time. He told them he’d be back later in the day.

None of them had spoken much after that.

‘Yeah, what’s with this?’ Leyr asked, sitting up on his cot and sniffing the air. ‘Varl’s right. It’s getting really cold.’

‘Do you want me to ask the concierge if he can tweak the heating?’ Meryn asked.

Banda snorted and showed Meryn a very specific number of raised fingers through the cage bars.

‘It is getting colder,’ said Cant. ‘That can’t be right.’

The young trooper shut up the moment he realised what he’d said, but it was too late.

‘No, it can’t, can it, Cant?’ sneered Varl.

‘Everybody give it a rest,’ said Rawne, and they fell silent. Rawne got up and stood very still, as if he were listening.

‘What’s up?’ Varl asked him.

‘You hear that?’ Rawne asked.

Gaunt stepped out of the armoured elevator into the white-tiled cell-block. The combination of artificial lighting and tiles made the air in the block seem sickly and fulminous, like the snow-light outside.

‘You shouldn’t be here, sir,’ said a detention officer, hurrying up to him. ‘It’s not permitted.’

‘I just need to look at the prisoner for a moment,’ Gaunt said.

‘Why, sir?’

‘I just need to look at him,’ Gaunt insisted.

‘On whose authority?’

Gaunt turned to glare at the officer. The man recoiled from the flash of electric green in the colonel-commissar’s eyes.

‘Talk to Edur. Clear it for me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

The man hurried away. Gaunt walked to the door of the observation chamber. He just wanted to look. He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted his eyes to see.

He let himself into the observation room, and looked into a tank cell through a murky one-way mirror.

The sanctioned torturers had left Prisoner B sitting in the cage chair, his face and head uncovered. The prisoner was staring straight ahead, apparently oblivious to his discomfort and prolonged confinement. He seemed to be staring directly at Gaunt, as if the mirror wasn’t one-way at all. In their wire cages, the phosphor lights filled the tank with a bilious green glow.

‘What the hell are you?’ Gaunt murmured, staring into the mirror. He jumped back with a start. The prisoner’s mouth had moved, as if in reply.

Gaunt reached over and threw the switch on the tank intercom.

‘What did you say?’ he demanded. ‘What did you just say?’

In the tank, the prisoner turned his head in several directions, surprised by the voice suddenly coming through the speakers. Then he looked back at the mirror.

‘I said it’s too late,’ he replied. ‘They’re here.’

‘Who’s here?’ asked Gaunt.

The prisoner didn’t reply. Gaunt looked up.

From somewhere in the huge mansion above them came the unmistakable sound of gunfire.