‘Not you,’ said Mkoll.
Olort shrugged. ‘Nen. Not me. I’d be dead. You’d cut my throat for my silence before you attempted such misadventure. But someone would.’
‘Shut up,’ said Mkoll.
‘Give up now,’ said Olort. ‘Give up these dreams, Mah-koll. You won’t be killed. This, I swear. You are special. You are enkil vahakan. We would transport you to where deliverance awaits. You would share words with he that speaks all truth. Life would be yours, if you repudiate and pledge. This, I can promise you.’
‘You’re not really in a position to make or keep any promises.’
‘Oh, I am, despite the knife at my back,’ said Olort.
‘Don’t pretend that you care whether I live or die,’ said Mkoll.
‘I do not,’ said Olort with a surprisingly honest shake of his head. ‘You are the archenemy. I would that I could bless you – vahooth ter tsa. Take your light from this world. But I think of myself. You are enkil vahakan. You have value, and such value may be transmitted to those who find you and deliver you. Our voice told us to be alert for you.’
‘So you’d benefit?’ asked Mkoll.
Olort shrugged again, diffidently, as if it was of no consequence.
‘Bringing me,’ said Mkoll. ‘That would be a good mark for you? Raise your status? Win you favour? What would you get? A promotion? Etogaur Olort?’
Olort winced in distaste at the sound of the word on an enemy’s lips.
‘Kha,’ he admitted, grudgingly. ‘I would be elevated. Perhaps receive a bounty.’
‘Money? Blood money?’
Olort frowned.
‘The things your kind place value on, Ghost,’ he muttered. ‘Money. The elevation of rank. We do not chase these foolish nothings. I mean a gift would be bestowed. A passport – is that the word? A passport to the elite. A command posting. Responsibility. Authority. Presence. Or even perhaps a gift of reworking.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The great blessing of the Eight Ways. A reshaping of form, an influx of holy gifts. To be wrought and reworked by our magir’s ingeniants. To be chosen and changed, perhaps even as a Seneschal of Ways, or as a Qimurah.’
‘A what? I don’t know that word.’
‘The chosen of chosen. The blessed reworked.’
Mkoll chewed his lip and studied the damogaur’s smiling face.
‘You’re an ambitious little feth, aren’t you?’
‘I go where the voice calls me to go, Ghost, and I ascend through my devotion.’
Mkoll glanced back at the grey waters below. He had a choice. Either way, there was no coming back. A desperate, perhaps suicidal flight to find safety, or something even more insane.
‘You found an enkil vahakan today, damogaur,’ he said. ‘If you’d kept control of him, if he hadn’t got a knife at your back, what would you have done? Where would you have taken this special prisoner?’
‘To the Fastness,’ said Olort.
‘Where’s that?’
Olort gestured to their right. The island chain.
‘So you’d have taken me to the voice?’ Mkoll asked.
‘Yes,’ said Olort.
The rusting barge was an old agriboat that had long passed the end of its useful life. The sirdars running the quays had pressed all available watercraft into service. Its deck and flanks were a corroded mess, and it stank of rot and mildew. Almost seventy packsons were crammed aboard, along with a dozen manacled and terrified Imperial prisoners.
The barge chattered out of Sadimay harbour, engines groaning and rumbling, leaving the drab rock of the sea cliffs to aft. High above, the Basilica had been put to the torch. A crown of flames clung to the clifftops, lifting a thick pall of black smoke into the sea air. Soot and cinders fluttered down, as gently as snow.
The agriboat was one of eight in a small, puttering flotilla, barges and tub-hulks. One was even being towed by another on a long, caulked hawser. They nudged out into the Strait, wallowing in the chop, sluggish and heavy as a funeral procession. The men aboard held on to the side rails or to wire stanchions to stay upright in the churning swell.
They cleared Sadimay and its burning crown, and chugged south into the Strait. A couple of kilometres ahead, they could see other small flotillas like their own, turning south into the paler waters of the channel. Beyond that, islands, some crags and atolls, some larger bars of purple in the wet haze.
The voyage lasted three hours, passing islands and rock slopes on either side, until a great section of the sky ahead, what had appeared for some time to be the lowering black form of an approaching westerly storm, resolved and solidified.
Another island. High cliffs as black as the rich loam of the lost Tanith forests. It was huge, many times larger than Sadimay, its towering sides like the ramparts of some keep raised by the titans of old myth. There were rainbow slicks of promethium on the approach waters, and the air stank of bulk machines and heavy industry.
The chugging flotilla came in over the shadow of the cliff wall. There was a huge inlet, an arch like a sea cave a couple of kilometres wide. The barges followed the channel in, until they began to pass under the arch of rock, the island consuming them.
It grew dark. The noise of the flotilla’s weary engines echoed louder in the wide confines of the rock-roofed passage.
Mkoll stood at the barge’s stern, beside the rail. His hand at Olort’s back. The darkness slid across him, blotting out the sky.
There was no going back.
Six: Protection
‘You’re conducting a Hereticus investigation of my regiment?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Your specificity is wrong, Lord Executor,’ replied Inquisitor Laksheema. ‘It is a more–’
‘You’re running an investigation?’ Gaunt asked more firmly. The sharpness of his question stilled the room. They sat across a table in an empty ward room a short distance along the hall from Gaunt’s chambers. Daur had claimed the ward room for what clearly had to be a private meeting.
Daur sat at Gaunt’s side, his face impassive. Colonel Grae sat beside the inquisitor. Hark occupied a chair at the table’s end, as if he was somehow moderating the discussion. He had chosen the seat himself. His eyes were narrow. He could see how Laksheema was testing Gaunt’s patience, just as she had tested his.
Gol Kolea sat alone on a low-backed chair in the corner, staring at the floor.
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Laksheema. The burnished golden sections of her partly augmetic head glowed in the lamplight. She was impossible to read. Was she smirking? Annoyed? Amused? Viktor Hark knew there was no way of telling. Her face was a mask. That made her very good at her job. It was probably why she’d had herself rebuilt that way, after whatever grievous damage she’d suffered.
No doubt deserved, Hark thought.
There was no misreading Gaunt’s annoyance.
‘An investigation of my regiment? And of the Astra Militarum dispositions on Urdesh?’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘Without approval? Without notifying anyone in high command?’ asked Gaunt.
‘The matter is sensitive–’
‘So high command itself is under suspicion?’
‘I didn’t say–’
‘You’re not saying much, inquisitor,’ said Gaunt. ‘But you would have informed senior staff militant unless you thought senior staff were also potentially complicit.’
‘I am informing you now, lord,’ said Laksheema. ‘I have come to you directly.’
‘Not directly,’ said Gaunt. ‘First, you detained one of my officers.’ He looked at Kolea, whose attention remained resolutely fixed on the floor. ‘Then you come to me with questions, and not through official channels. That’s not informing me. My man, my regiment. I fall within the compass of your investigation too, don’t I?’
‘Lord, this is
a formality to expedite the–’ Colonel Grae began.
‘I don’t think it is, colonel,’ said Gaunt. Grae closed his mouth. Gaunt turned his unnerving stare back to the inquisitor.
‘Ask. Speak. Inform,’ he said. ‘If you wish to expedite, get on with it and I’ll cooperate.’
‘You are correct, my lord,’ said Laksheema calmly. ‘We have issues of concern that involve the Tanith First and so, by extension, you. Those concerns stretch into other departments of the Astra Militarum and other regiments, and simply due to your status, to high command.’
‘Lay these concerns out for me,’ said Gaunt.
‘There are issues of strict confidence that–’
‘No,’ said Gaunt. ‘You’re cleared, Grae is cleared, and I am cleared, all at the highest level. Because of my status, which you so delicately point out, the officers of my regiment present are also, by extension, authorised.’
Laksheema shrugged slightly.
‘Certain ratification would be necessary,’ she said. ‘For Commissar Hark, Captain Daur and Major Kolea… paperwork and disclosure approval–’
Gaunt shook his head. ‘Again, dissembling. If your investigation encompasses the entire Astra Militarum on Urdesh, who stands outside that purview to warrant and approve such authorisation? You’re hiding behind the rules you’re seeking to subvert, asking us to chase our tails through the Administratum, knowing we’d never get an answer. Let’s be clear. I am ratifying them. Right now. With these words.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Laksheema.
‘And you are clearing them with yours, on behalf of the ordos,’ Gaunt added.
‘Yes, my lord,’ said Laksheema. ‘We will consider them cleared to both our satisfactions.’
‘Good,’ said Gaunt. ‘Begin.’
‘There has been a crisis on Urdesh for some time,’ said Laksheema, ‘one that existed before your return. The obvious challenge of overcoming the Anarch’s military threat, matched by a lack of understanding of his tactics. This is now, for the most part, resolved. It is clear that the Anarch’s strategy on Urdesh was a mirror of our own, to whit, the enticement, containment and elimination of the opposing leaders. The obliteration of the warmaster and his high command. The neutering of this crusade.’
‘I think we can agree that the Lord Executor played no small part in the revelation of that stratagem,’ Grae said to Laksheema. ‘He saw Sek’s trap, and prevented it from springing shut, and–’
‘Please, don’t,’ said Laksheema.
‘Don’t what?’ asked Grae.
‘Attempt to flatter and support these men,’ said Laksheema. ‘They are of your institutions, Grae, not mine. I serve the Throne, directly. My intentions are not filtered through the strata of a vast and hidebound organisation like the Astra Militarum.’
‘I advise you not to push that point,’ said Hark quietly. ‘Say your fething piece or get your fething arse out of the door.’
Laksheema looked at Gaunt. ‘Will you not reprimand your man for such–’
‘I find,’ said Gaunt, ‘as I grow older, the Astra Militarum indeed to be a vast and hidebound organisation, inquisitor. Starched with needless formality and protocol, and strangled by the chains of command. So, in this room, Viktor can speak his mind with my entire support. Say your fething piece.’
Laksheema sat back, her eyes fixed on Gaunt.
‘Whatever your accomplishments in revealing the truth of the Anarch’s stratagem,’ she said, ‘I do not believe it is ended or even halfway done.’
‘Then we agree on something,’ said Gaunt.
‘And your very return is an issue,’ Laksheema said. ‘For it changed the nature of things. Of the crisis. Whatever long game Sek is trying to win on Urdesh, it altered overnight to accommodate you.’
‘Me?’
‘The material you brought with you from Salvation’s Reach,’ said Laksheema. ‘Its import is unknown to us, but it is clearly of great significance to the enemy. Such significance, in fact, that he is willing to abandon – or at least, delay and modify – a scheme of war that he has been preparing and executing over a period of years.’
‘The eagle stones,’ said Gaunt.
‘Yes, those artefacts,’ said Laksheema.
‘Apparently, a Glyptothek–’ Grae began.
‘Whatever,’ said Gaunt. He looked at Laksheema. ‘Again, agreed. I believe the late assault on Eltath was as much about recovering said items as it was about annihilating high command.’
‘The attack was repulsed,’ said Daur.
‘Was it, captain?’ asked Laksheema.
‘Yes, Ban, was it?’ Gaunt said, glancing at Daur. ‘The main assault was repulsed. Perhaps. It certainly fell back without warning. Secured objectives were not capitalised on. It may have been a feint. A cover for some clandestine objective now invisibly secured.’
‘But the Beati struck a blow at Sek at Ghereppan,’ said Daur. ‘That surely was the decisive factor? The timing was no coincidence.’
‘It seems likely,’ said Gaunt. ‘He may have been disadvantaged by the Beati’s work. Feth knows, he may even be dead. But his strategy isn’t. My gut says so. Sek wasn’t defeated four nights ago. He didn’t walk away from Eltath and Ghereppan empty-handed with his arse whipped. Whatever it cost him, he achieved something.’
‘And we don’t know what it is?’ said Daur.
‘And we don’t know what it is,’ said Gaunt. ‘But like an enemy under cover of darkness, we don’t need to know where he is. We just need to prepare.’
‘This is the thinking of high command?’ asked Laksheema.
‘This is my thinking,’ said Gaunt. ‘That’s enough.’
Laksheema was about to speak when there was a knock at the door.
‘Ignore it,’ said Gaunt.
The knock came again. Both Daur and Hark were in the process of rising, but Gaunt shoved back his chair and strode to the doorway.
Sancto and the other bodymen stood in the hallway outside. Nearby stood Beltayn and Merity and the members of Laksheema’s entourage, waiting where they had been told to wait, along with the tactician Biota and several Officio Tacticae officials Gaunt didn’t know. Behind them stood two officers from the command echelon, their braid denoting them as members of Van Voytz’s staff.
‘My lord–’ Sancto began.
‘Not now,’ snapped Gaunt, and slammed the door in his face.
He walked back to his seat slowly.
‘What are the eagle stones?’ he asked.
‘We don’t know,’ said Laksheema. ‘They are currently subject to detailed analysis.’
‘Where are the eagle stones?’ asked Gaunt, sitting down and straightening his chair.
‘Secure,’ said Laksheema.
‘Where?’
‘That’s classified.’
‘But they are of strategic significance?’
‘My lord,’ said Laksheema, ‘they could be lumps of broken brick, but if the enemy considers them significant, we must too. Even if they are sacred objects of no intrinsic value or power, they may still provoke the Archenemy into action and response, to our disadvantage.’
She paused.
‘We believe, however,’ she said, ‘that they are malign.’
‘Malign?’
‘My inquiry into their nature and purpose revealed a connection to your Major Kolea, which is why I had him detained for interview. Major Kolea has revealed, reluctantly, that he knows more about the stones and adjacent matters than he has admitted to you, or to anyone.’
Gaunt looked over at Kolea. Kolea was still staring at the floor. Gaunt saw the muscles of his jaw clench.
‘A malign influence,’ said Laksheema, ‘one that has been exerting its power over your man there, and by extension your entire regiment, since you first obtained the objects. By the reckoning of
world-time, Lord Executor, that’s ten years. Some of the precarious events of your odyssey home may be connected to it. Your warp-translation accident… the curious sparing of your vessel by the Archenemy battlecruiser, which surely failed to annihilate a clearly identified enemy because it knew something valuable was aboard… even the replenishment drop to Aigor 991, a mission Major Kolea was personally involved with.’
‘So,’ said Gaunt, ‘you wish to arraign the Lord Executor for heretical contamination?’
‘My lord,’ said Laksheema, ‘you and your regiment have a worrying record of straying outside the safety of approved behaviour. I might cite your mission to Gereon in 774, and the suspicions that followed your return from that mission, that you had spent too long in the tainted environment of a Chaos-held world.’
‘Cite all you like,’ said Gaunt. ‘Those matters are closed. We have been determined as loyal and true. I was reinstated, and my regiment returned to me, despite the naysayers.’
‘Dirt and rumours cling to a man,’ she replied, ‘even one of your rank.’
‘Perhaps you should discuss this with Warmaster Macaroth,’ said Gaunt. ‘He appointed me to this station. He has faith in me.’
‘Your unorthodox reputation goes back a long way, lord,’ said Laksheema. Her haunting non-smile ignited. ‘Your unusual career path of colonel and commissar. Reports from 765 and thereabouts – I have Inquisitor Abfequarn’s files at my disposal – suspicions that, for a considerable period, you sheltered in your regiment, and close to you, a suspected psyker. An unregistered boy. Also, the business of a Major Soric–’
‘A boy? You mean Brin Milo,’ said Gaunt. ‘I haven’t seen him in years. He left my company on Herodor, and joined the personal retinue of the Beati. I think that’s a fairly glowing reference for his good standing. Or do you intend to interview the Saint when you’re done with the warmaster?’
‘I do not,’ said Laksheema.
Gaunt sat back. He watched her. She betrayed nothing.
He got up.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Stay here please, all of you. I want to talk with Major Kolea. In private.’
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