Blood Pact

SIXTEEN The Other Hunters

Karhunan Sirdar stole down the silent street, following the trail of little black discs where drops of blood had marked the snow. The street was steep, and the buildings on either side were dark and shuttered against the night and the snowstorm, as if they were hiding with their eyes tight shut. He watched the gusting snow billowing like sparks in the light cones of the streetlamps. Not every lamp in the old quarter street worked.

The beloved magir had put a duty upon his soul, but Karhunan was content. The duty was almost done. They had followed, and they had closed. The vehicle they’d found abandoned up the street behind him was definitely the same one that had outrun them at Section. The blood drops on the snow completed the death warrant.

Some of the philia had moved up with him to reconnoitre the street. Samus was standing outside one of the buildings just ahead, staring up the steps at the front door. The building was dark, and betrayed no sign of life. A sign, some kind of pole device that Karhunan half-recognised from the depths of his scarred memory, hung above the door on a brass rail. Samus was shivering and gnawing at his tongue. As the sirdar approached, he made a soft mewling noise and inclined his head towards the door.

Karhunan patted the misshapen man gently on the shoulder. There were little spots of blood leading up the entrance steps, not yet covered by the softly falling snow.

Imrie appeared to Karhunan’s left, and Naeme to his right. They looked eager.

‘Melthorael,’ Naeme muttered, ‘then it is Aroklur, then it is Ultheum.’

‘Quiet,’ Karhunan whispered.

At the sirdar’s nod, Imrie took out the door with a kick, and they swept into the dark wood hallway. The snow came in with them. Flakes settled on a long-case clock standing in the hallway.

Imrie led the way, his weapon level, shoulder-height, hunting. He was the sharpest of them. A long time ago, in what was almost literally another life, Imrie had been, like Karhunan, a Throne soldier. He was a convert, an incomer. The sept word was elterdwelt, which meant ‘other life’ or, more loosely, ‘traded item’. He had sloughed off most of his other life, shed it gladly like a snake sheds an old, tight skin, but some parts of it had remained stubborn. Damogaur Eyl, no elterdwelt, but rather Consanguinity-born, cherished such old traits in the men of his philia. Imrie had been a scout, a hunter. He saw details almost anyone else would miss.

Imrie swept down the hall. He noticed that one of the six bulbs in the hall lamps had blown, and blown a long time before, because its dull glass was coated in dust. He noticed that the long-case clock was not working. He noticed the dried residue of snow-melt footprints on the dark wood floor, all but invisible.

A small kitchen. Three mugs, all half-full, all cold. A stove-top burner where the wrought iron ring still held some heat.

Imrie nodded Samus on. Samus checked a side room, caving the door in with a crash. Naeme was on the stairs, his weapon aimed upwards, peering.

Imrie went down the stone steps into the basement. Karhunan followed him. The basement areas were quite extensive, stone vaults built beneath pavement level. There was a surgical theatre, a storeroom and a cold room for cadavers.

‘There’s nobody here,’ said Karhunan.

‘But there was,’ Imrie replied.

‘You sure?’

‘Sure as blood speckles in the snow,’ Imrie replied. ‘Sure as a stove still warm. Sure as this.’

They were in the theatre. It was clean and tidy, and empty, but Imrie had lifted the lid of the medical waste bin. Karhunan Sirdar peered in. He saw dirty swabs and blood dressings, along with some disposable medicae materials.

Imrie walked over to the tool counter. He unscrewed the lid of one of the glass sterilising baths, and withdrew a scalpel. He sniffed it.

‘Blood,’ he said.

Even after a time in the chemical soak, the smell lingered enough for a man like Imrie.

‘So, where?’ asked Karhunan.

Imrie tilted his head and thought. He could smell something else, something dirty and metallic. He strode out of the theatre into the lower landing. The wood panelled back wall wasn’t a wall at all. It was a screen. He found the recessed brass handle and drew it aside.

A service elevator. Cold, damp mustiness drifted up from below.

Imrie rode the rattling carriage down with his sirdar and Naeme. On arrival, after just a short drop, they swung out, weapons raised.

Snowflakes blew into their faces. The front of the house faced one steep street, but the rear let out three floors down onto another street-level of the escarpment. In Old Side, the buildings and streets were stacked in tiers.

The doors of the small basement garage were open onto the back lane. There were oil marks on the rockcrete floor, and a scent of exhaust in the air.

Imrie hurried to the garage doors and looked out.

Nothing had been left behind, except the ghost of squirming tyre tracks.

‘It’s just an idea, but could you try going faster?’ asked Maggs.

‘Quiet,’ Gaunt warned him. Maggs sighed, and sat back in the rear of the little private ambulance. It was a rickety thing that patently hadn’t been used in years. Gaunt was in the cab with Kolding. Maggs was in the back with the unconscious prisoner. The ambulance was creeping through the night at what felt like a mollusc’s crawl, except that it was also managing to slide and wheel-spin too.

‘Gently,’ Gaunt said to Kolding, who was hunched low, glaring over the top of the wheel.

‘I’m trying my best,’ Kolding replied.

‘When was the last time you took this vehicle out?’ Gaunt asked.

‘A while.’

‘At night?’

‘A while.’

‘Who drove then, doctor?’

Kolding shrugged and found another gear. ‘My father.’

Gaunt shook his head.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘have we forced you to leave your home for the first time in fifteen years?’

Kolding shrugged again, and said, ’It’s all right. I keep myself to myself. It’s just a strange turn of events, that’s all.’

‘You’ve been in that house for fifteen years?’ Maggs asked incredulously.

‘Enough, Maggs,’ said Gaunt.

‘No wonder he’s such a fethwaste,’ Maggs muttered.

‘Doctor Kolding,’ Gaunt began, ‘I think that I should drive.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re evidently having problems with the snowy conditions. It’s taxing you. I have recent training in cold weather driving.’

‘Do you?’ asked Kolding.

The doctor brought the ambulance to a long, lingering halt, and he and Gaunt got out and crossed sides.

Behind the wheel, Gaunt tested the controls, let out the clutch, and raced them forward.

‘That was a lie, wasn’t it?’ asked Kolding.

‘What?’

‘Your recent training in cold weather driving?’

Gaunt nodded.

‘The lamps hurt your eyes, don’t they?’ he asked. ‘That’s why you are driving at night in dark glasses.’

Kolding didn’t reply.

‘I have a slight advantage,’ said Gaunt. He double-blinked and switched his focal field to high-gain, low light. Streetlamps or no streetlamps, the way ahead lit up for him.

Karhunan retraced his steps up the street, though his steps were almost gone. His boots chuffed in the ever-thickening snow cover.

The damogaur was examining the car their quarry had used. Six members of the philia, under Malstrom’s leadership, stood watch in the street around him.

Eyl looked at Karhunan.

‘They were in the building nearby, magir,’ said the sirdar, ‘but they have gone. Another vehicle. Imrie and Naeme are already following its tracks. If we deploy fast, we will catch up and–’

‘We’ll catch up anyway,’ Eyl replied. ‘No need to go chasing through this weather.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Karhunan.

‘Look what we’ve got,’ Eyl answered. He stroked his fingertips along the back of the car’s driving seat. They came away tacky and dark.

‘Bring my sister here,’ he said. ‘We’ve got their blood.’

When she couldn’t run any more, Tona Criid hid instead. Her muscles were burning as if someone was spiking hot wires into them, and she was close to throwing up.

The shrill sound had gone away at some point, and the constriction had faded. A few streets away from Section, a few streets from Viceroy Square where that veiled thing had been standing under the snow-dusted trees, she forced her way into an empty building.

Though the Oligarchy and Balopolis had been the epicentre of the most brutal fighting during the war for Balhaut, much of the so-called Old Side seemed to have been miraculously spared. Closer inspection put the lie to that. Many of the buildings were shells: gutted structures that had stood empty for a decade and a half with litter collecting in their wind-blown floors. A few had begun to be included in Balhaut’s trudging programme of renewal. In places, old buildings were being demolished and lots cleared to make room for new construction. In others, labour gangs had moved in to renovate and restore the buildings still sound enough to be worth saving.

Criid holed herself up in one of the latter. The windows had been recently covered with whitewashed boards, and there was a strong smell of creosote and young, sawn timber. Dust sheets and protective curtains had been strung between rooms, or erected to close sections where dividing walls had been taken down. The work curtains, heavy and dirty from re-use, stiff with old paint and varnish, swung in the night air, moved by the breath of the snowstorm outside. The day crew had left paint drums, long-handled mop-brushes, sawhorses and stacks of cheap fibreboard behind. An upper floor had been taken away, leaving a space like the interior of an artisan’s church, the vault bridged by a half-skeleton of new joists and crossbeams in clean, yellow wood.

Her heart rate was all over the place, and her breathing was ragged. Her hands were quaking so much that she struggled to use them. She snapped the head off one of the long mop-brushes, and used baler twine to lash her warknife to the end as an improvised spear. No gun, but a little more range than a knife, at least. Then she sat down in a corner behind some stacked fibreboard and rested the spear across her lap.

Her body was in turmoil. She knew that. The chronic tension of life in a warzone bent a person’s biology out of shape, and left it fit for nothing else. It built shortcut response pathways, and bred bad habits. It altered hormone values and metabolic functions to tolerate prolonged and elevated stress. It modified you to get you through, whatever it took, and then left the modifications in you when you returned to what was laughingly referred to as normal life. It left them with corrosive physiological and psychological damage that took a thousand times longer to erase than it had taken to inflict.

The worst part, as she was now discovering, wasn’t coping with the post-combat fall out; it was getting your old, bad self, your combat self, switched back on without warning. She’d gone from nothing to superluminal in a second. The toxic flood of hormones and responses had left her almost stupefied. There was a sheen of sweat on her skin, and she knew that she stank of fear. Her mind was numb except for a little tiny nugget at the heart of it, like the dense metal heart of a neutron star that was screaming with radioactive rage.

She tried to control her breathing. She tried to employ some of the focus techniques that Mkoll had taught her for stealth work. It was futile. It was like trying to grasp water. In the end, she gave up and, with a brittle laugh, decided that she might be better off just surrendering to the tide.

After an hour or more, during which she sank into a fugue state, she roused herself, and felt a little more clarity. The old mindset, the one that allowed you to function in the zone, was back so concretely it was as if it had never gone away. She started to be able to think instead of just react.

In her opinion, the biggest problem was the world outside. She simply couldn’t understand how the debacle at Section could have happened without all hell resulting. Where were the suppression teams? The counter-forces? The security squads with their armoured cars and fear-gas canisters? Where was the PDF and the fething Guard? The city should have been screeching with raid sirens by now. The skies should have been dense with gunships.

It was quiet out there. It was as if the city had gone into traumatic shock, struck dumb and paralysed. It was as if the snowfall had some kind of anaesthetic property. She couldn’t shake the notion that the silent streets were crawling with unchallenged Archenemy soldiers.

She decided she had no choice but to make her way back to Aarlem Fortress. She hadn’t got anything like enough left in her to run the route, but she was confident that if she took it steadily, she could make it back before dawn.

She hadn’t gone far when she heard a vehicle approaching, its engine tone labouring as it coped with the snow. It stood out a mile. There was nothing else around. Criid stopped and listened. Perhaps it was PDF moving in at long last. Perhaps it was the transport component of a relief column advancing into the city’s heart.

Instinct told her it wasn’t. It was just one engine, one machine, and a small one at that. It was someone mysteriously active in the mysteriously empty streets.

She decided to take a look, and closed in on the approaching sound source. When it came in sight, she fell back, clutching her spear. The vehicle, just a dark blob on the snowy thoroughfare, was driving without lights: without lights, at night, in a snowstorm.

That was deliberate, and it was sinister. Swallowing hard, she took one last look, then retreated to hide in an alley long before the occupants could see her.

She waited. The vehicle didn’t go by. It stopped.

She cursed and hefted up the spear. There was no way she’d been spotted, but why had it stopped?

A figure suddenly appeared at the end of the alleyway, framed by the snow-light. It was a soldier, one of the raiders, one of the invaders. She weighed her choices. Stay back, and wait for it to come to her, so she could kill it quietly in the private darkness of the alley, or go to it and take it down fast before it got her cornered.

The figure took a step towards her, as if it knew she was there, as if it could see right into the shadows with its warpcraft. She couldn’t just sit there.

She charged.

It recoiled in surprise as she flew out of hiding. She had the spear lowered to impale it through the gut. She let out an incoherent scream.

With a cry of its own, the figure jerked to one side, evading the thrust of the long Tanith blade. It grabbed the spear’s haft with one hand, and tried to use Criid’s momentum to bring her over. She wrenched back, refusing to lose control of the weapon. Her attacker was strong. He crashed her backwards into the alley wall, trying to pin her. She screamed and kicked out.

‘For feth’s sake, Tona,’ Gaunt yelled. ‘It’s me!’