by Dan Abnett
Gaunt fired. He missed the leader in the silver mask again, but the round explosively eviscerated the Pacted warrior running at his side. Still running, the silver-masked, leader raised his carbine, and fired from the shoulder like a huntsman. A las-bolt hit the floor. Another went through Gaunt’s coat tail. A third stabbed into Prisoner B’s left shoulder blade.
Prisoner B didn’t fall, but he grunted and stumbled. Gaunt grabbed him to keep him upright, and tried to hustle him on. Shots smacked into the walls around them.
The white-tiled corridor was getting narrower. They struggled past a point where it was actually stepped in on both sides, losing about a quarter of its width. Five metres further, and the corridor stepped in again. The tall, white-tiled corridor had been designed progressively narrower in width.
It had been specifically designed to place increasing restrictions on anyone moving along it: to stop a man from turning or breaking free from the guards flanking him in escort.
Gaunt suddenly realised there wasn’t going to be an exit ahead of them. They had unwittingly run into a dead end, a literal dead end. The narrowing corridor was the long, deliberately confined approach to the execution chamber, the last walk that all capital prisoners of the Commissariat took, the last walk from which there was no turning back.
Baltasar Eyl extended his long stride. His beige coat flew out behind him. The corridor’s overhead lights strobe-flashed off his silver grotesk.
He raised his carbine.
TWELVE
A Place of Execution
Like the narrowing throat of the hallway that had brought them to it, the execution chamber was entirely lined with glossy white tiles. They were easier to wash, easier to hose down. There were small brass drain covers in the floor under the stout gibbet beam set in the ceiling.
Gaunt bundled Prisoner B through the doorway into the hopeless little box of a room. Despite his wound, Prisoner B made no show of pain. Two las-bolts shrieked past their ears and struck the far wall of the chamber. Gaunt turned. The Archenemy leader in the silver grotesk was right on them.
Gaunt fired.
The blast threw their pursuer’s body backwards along the distressingly tight gullet of the execution walk. It crashed into two of the men behind it and brought them all down. The narrow space filled with the stink of charred skin and fyceline.
Gaunt moved to the door, a heavy hatch, and began to swing it shut, hoping to bar or lock it in place. It didn’t seem to want to move.
“Help me!” he snarled, struggling.
Prisoner B was leaning against the wall nearby, breathing hard. The left-hand side of his coat was soaked in blood.
Gaunt ignored him and heaved at the door again. He holstered his bolt pistol to get a good grip on its frame with both hands. It began to budge, very slightly. Gaunt exclaimed in frustration. The wretched thing felt like it was made of stone. Several more las-bolts zipped in through the open doorway and creased off the far wall.
The door moved another couple of reluctant centimetres.
Something crashed into Gaunt and carried him across the execution chamber into the facing wall. The impact squashed the air out of him.
He was grappling with the man in the silver grotesk. The enemy leader’s face and chest were scorched and burned, and his gloved hands were torn and bloody, but he was far from dead. Gaunt’s bolt-round, intended as a hasty body-shot, had struck the carbine in Eyl’s hands and blown it up in his face. The force of the detonation had tossed him backwards into his men, but the round had not killed him.
Eyl forced Gaunt into the wall, and hooked a hand around his throat. Wide-eyed in surprise, his arms too pinned for a proper blow, Gaunt jabbed with an elbow, following it up with a clumsy kick that rocked his attacker back a step.
Gaunt broke the constricting grip around his arms, and smashed Eyl’s hands away. Eyl threw a clawing punch that was supposed to seize Gaunt’s face and twist his head around, but Gaunt deflected it, caught the extended firearm under his armpit, and violently levered Eyl into the chamber wall by way of his straightened arm.
Eyl grunted at the impact. Gaunt tried to slam him into the wall a second time, but Eyl’s left fist came around, catching Gaunt across the jaw. He reeled backwards, losing his grip on Eyl’s right arm.
Eyl immediately went on the offensive again. There was no hesitation. The intense, blow-upon-blow speed of the fight was manic and frantic. Eyl aimed a kick at Gaunt’s ribs, which didn’t properly connect, but, as Gaunt tried to shield himself, Eyl aimed another kick with the other foot.
Gaunt deflected it with his forearm, but wasn’t fast enough to catch the heel or ankle. Changing step, Eyl tried a third kick, from the original angle that had grazed Gaunt’s ribs. Warding off the successive kicks was driving Gaunt across the small chamber towards the doorway.
This time, Gaunt caught the raider’s heel. It smacked into his palm with a satisfying slap. He yanked and dragged the foot upwards, kicking Eyl’s other leg out from under him.
Eyl slammed over onto his back on the white tiles, but broke free and executed an alarmingly agile flick of his body that whipped him back onto his feet. He was upright in time to meet Gaunt’s fist coming the other way.
Gaunt was aiming for the throat, but he misjudged, and caught his knuckles across the edge of the silver grotesk. Eyl’s misdirected response drove a fist into Gaunt’s left collar bone. As Gaunt recoiled, Eyl went for his throat. Eyl was tall, with a long reach, and he was astonishingly strong, but it wasn’t his strength so much as his solidity that was a problem for Gaunt. He was an unyielding force, like a weight or a gravitic wave. It was as if he was made of some substance far denser than human matter. Gaunt had never tackled a man so implacable or so hard to unseat.
Eyl’s iron-hard hands brushed Gaunt’s fists aside and closed around his neck. As he felt his windpipe shut, and the tendons of his throat throttle and grind, Gaunt responded with instinct rather than any coherent plan. His gut verified that the only remaining thing he could use against his attacker was his attacker.
Gaunt let himself be carried over by the surging impetus of Eyl’s attack. He let himself fall onto his back, onto the hard white tiles. He let momentum carry the feverishly determined man in the silver grotesk clean over his head.
Eyl hit the floor with one shoulder just inside the chamber doorway, half-cartwheeled, and landed on the other side of the doorframe.
Gaunt swung up onto one knee and drew his boltgun to finish the contest.
The execution chamber hatch slammed shut in his face, putting ten centimetres of steel between him and the man in the silver grotesk. Their entire battle had lasted less than thirty seconds.
Gaunt looked up.
“You needed to pull this,” said Prisoner B. There was a heavy brass lever beside the door. Gaunt had missed it entirely. Engage the lever, and the hatch trundled shut on a geared mechanism. Small wonder the hatch had been impossible to budge with his shoulder. Prisoner B was leaning against the lever, and he was still breathing hard.
Fists, and possibly shots, began to bang against the other side of the hatch.
Gaunt rose to his feet.
“I had him,” he said. “You spoiled my shot.”
“Yes, that’s right,” replied the etogaur. “You had him.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“Another ten seconds, and the damogaur would have been wearing your windpipe as a necklace.”
Gaunt sniffed, and spat pink saliva onto the white tiles. “He would have tried.”
“He would have succeeded,” Prisoner B replied.
“You called him damogaur. You know him?” asked Gaunt.
Prisoner B shook his head. “His mask told me his rank. I don’t know the man personally. They would have sent one of their best.”
“To silence you?” asked Gaunt.
“To silence me.”
Gaunt looked around the execution chamber. Shutting the hatch had simply prolonged the inevitable. Once the Pacted wa
rriors blew it, or broke it off its seal, death would be inescapable.
Gaunt cursed. At the same moment, a blow struck the hatch with such inhuman ferocity that the metal sill began to buckle.
Gaunt looked up. He eyed the ominous black gibbet beam that traversed the ceiling. Generations of ropes had been expertly looped around it by the Section house executioners. He could see the wear marks.
“You should be glad this has happened,” he said to Prisoner B.
“What? This attack?”
“Yes,” said Gaunt.
“Why?” asked the etogaur.
Gaunt looked at him.
“Because all of a sudden I’m taking you very seriously,” he said.
Another blow buckled the hatch frame more significantly.
“I think it’s time we left,” said Gaunt.
“How? There’s only one door.”
Gaunt nodded.
“Yes, there is,” he said, “but there are two levers.”
Gaunt walked to the other side of the grim chamber, to a second brass lever that matched the door control. The gallows drop, a trapdoor built seamlessly into the white-tiled floor, slammed open. Cold air blew up out of the black void.
They dropped. They dropped where, on a normal day, only the dead dropped, the dead or the split-second-from-dead.
The chute below the execution chamber was too gloomy for them to see or judge the bottom from the trapdoor, and too deep for them to land securely. Both of them fell and rolled, and jarred their bones. Gaunt prayed that neither of them had turned an ankle or broken something significant.
It was cold and dank, and smelled of hard stone. The trapdoor was a dull square of light and white tiles in the shadows above them. They were outside, in the pale snow-light of the yard. They heard the inner hatch of the execution chamber break at last and crash onto the tiles above them. They heard the snarling voices and the clattering feet of the would-be killers.
A tiny part of Gaunt wished they could have closed the trap, and left nothing but a vacant, white-tiled mystery behind them to delay and frustrate the Blood Pact.
There were no convenient brass handles on the dead side of the trapdoor, just a chilly chute in the open air where the bodies of the condemned were cut down and disposed of.
Gaunt hauled Prisoner B to his feet, and dragged him away from the chute’s bottom. Scant seconds later, gunfire blasted down through the trapdoor and sparked off the snow-blown cobbles.
They staggered out into the yard, into the open. The light was sickly yellow, and snow was swirling thickly. Gaunt tasted it on his lips and tongue, and felt it prickle on his face. Their boots crunched on the gathering snow. Somewhere in the building behind them there was a considerable explosion, which blew grit and debris down across the yard. Thick black smoke was pluming the winter sky, and Gaunt could hear flames. The end of Section’s administration wing was on fire. Shrill sirens continued to scratch the glass-cold air like diamonds. Gunfire chattered back and forth, like conversations between machines.
“Head for the gate!” Gaunt yelled.
The etogaur nodded, but he was slowing down. He was leaving a little trail of pattered blood across the crusted snow. It felt like a dream out in the yard, a delirious dream where everything was too slow and too bright, and too cold.
Behind them, Eyl and his men began to drop down through the execution trapdoor. They saw the fleeing figures through the billowing snow. Eyl roared a command and ran forwards. A couple of his men took aim.
The black staff car came out of the garage to their left without warning. Its engine was wildly over-revving, and its fat tyres squirmed on the snowy cobbles. Two or three of the Blood Pact’s shots punched into its bodywork. It fishtailed across the yard in an undignified skid, and wrenched to a halt, blocking Gaunt and the etogaur from the direct wrath of their attackers.
“Get in,” Wes Maggs yelled. “Get in the fething car, sir!”
Gaunt turned, baffled for a second. He saw the staff car, and Maggs leaning out from behind the wheel, shouting, his face red.
Gaunt bundled Prisoner B towards the car, and manhandled him into the back seat. Shots whined close. One destroyed a wing mirror, and another took out a door window in a shower of glass. Gaunt fired his bolt pistol in reply, blasting over the bonnet, and then threw himself in after the etogaur.
“Go!” he bellowed.
Maggs let out the clutch, and the big limousine lurched forwards, wheels slipping frantically.
It stalled.
“For feth’s sake, Maggs!” Gaunt howled. Las-rounds thumped into the body panels. Two passed clean through the passenger section, leaving neat little dots of daylight in the doors. The rear window shattered.
Maggs turned the engine over once, twice, and then it caught. He found the gear with an ugly grind of metal, and they sped forward as more shots, both las and hard, smacked into them, punching holes. The car’s engine tone protested, and rose and fell unsteadily. The limousine juddered, and slewed across the inner yard, its wipers beating away the whirling snowflakes. It clipped one of the mechanics’ braziers, and spilled hot coals across the snow. Sparks flew up into the falling snow like luminous flakes.
“The gate. Head for the gate,” Gaunt yelled.
Shots were hitting the back of the car with such force that it felt like someone was repeatedly kicking the bodywork. Three hard rounds tore through the back of the canopy, and travelled through the car’s interior before burying themselves in the dashboard.. One of them creased Maggs’ skull and sliced the top off his right ear. He howled in pain, and his ear bled with alarming vigour. The other side mirror exploded. The car lurched and wallowed. There was no grip.
The man in the silver grotesk landed on the rear of the car with a thump. With his feet braced on the fender and the rear mudguard, and one hand clinging to the roof edge beading, he struggled to get the back door open.
“Sacred feth!” Maggs wailed, wrenching on the wheel. The limousine slewed wildly, but Eyl stayed on. Maggs aimed the car’s nose at the narrow gateway linking the side yard to the main gate yard in the front of the house. Eyl succeeded in pulling the rear door open and leaned in, stabbing at them with his ugly rite knife.
The car ran the narrow gate. The open door mashed against the gate post and slammed on Eyl’s arm. Once they were clear of the gateway, the dented door flapped open again, but Eyl withdrew his arm. He was trying to manoeuvre to get his body in through the door, and attack them face to face.
Maggs raced the car across the gatehouse yard. Men from Eyl’s murderous philia ran after it, rifles and carbines raised, but not risking a shot for fear of hitting their damogaur. The yard was littered with Imperial dead, the men cut down and butchered during the first minutes of the assault. They lay tangled and twisted under thin shrouds of snow. Greasy smoke as dark as gunpowder boiled out of the administration wing, and foamed across the yard in thick, oily ropes. The folds of it, fat and black, swirled up snowflakes like stars in the deep range void. Part of Section’s roof was ablaze. Tongues of vivid yellow flames leapt triumphantly at the snow-blurred sky.
As the car roared towards the main gatehouse, Eyl made one final attempt to get inside. Lurching on the backseat, Gaunt had drawn his pistol. He aimed it up through the canopy at Eyl’s head.
The man in the silver grotesk saw Gaunt’s weapon at the last second and threw himself off the car. The bolt-round punched through the canopy and split the light metal fabric open in great tattered petals like a cycad. Eyl hit the cobbles behind the speeding car in a roll that took several tumbles to arrest. He was getting to his feet as his men ran up to him. Imrie steadied his arm.
The staff car hurtled under the arch of the main gate and out of sight.
Eyl turned to his philia, congregating from all sides through the heavy snow. He noted that there were several missing, and knew that he’d never see them again.
He signalled. They were leaving. They were finished with the place. Their target was moving, and they
had to pursue.
The staff car belted along the snow-quiet road, outside the stricken headquarters.
“Which way?” Maggs yelled, a note of panic in his voice. He was steering with one hand and pinching his wounded ear with the other. His hand and sleeve were wet with blood.
“Just keep going,” Gaunt instructed.
“But—”
“Just keep going,” Gaunt repeated firmly. “Any way you like, so long as you keep them squarely behind us.”
“They looked like Blood Pact!” Maggs blurted.
“They were Blood Pact,” Gaunt replied. “Weren’t they?”
He looked at Prisoner B. The etogaur was sagging in the corner of the back seat. His eyes were glazing. When Gaunt moved to him, he found that where his hands touched the dark chestnut leather upholstery, they came away sticky with blood.
“Throne!” Gaunt snarled.
“What is it?” Maggs shouted over his shoulder.
“He’s hit,” Gaunt replied. “He’s losing blood.”
“Who is he?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s complicated. All you need to know is that we need him alive. Keep driving.”
Gaunt propped the etogaur up. His eyes fluttered open.
“You have to stay awake.”
The etogaur nodded.
“I mean it. You have to stay awake. Do you understand?” asked Gaunt.
Prisoner B began to close his eyes slowly.
Gaunt slapped him across the face. “Stay awake, Throne damn you. You need to stay awake. You need to live!”
The etogaur opened his eyes. There was a little more spark in them.
“I will,” he coughed.
The streets were mostly empty, as the snow had driven most people inside. Even so, Maggs’ reckless driving took them straight across a couple of junctions at speed, and traffic had to brake sharply to avoid him. One delivery van veered, mounted the pavement, and clipped a pollarded tree.
Gaunt peered out of the window, watching the old streets whip by. His mind was racing. Where were the security forces? The city-wide alarms? Where were the emergency cordons and the fast deploy reaction teams of the PDF? By now, the whole central area of the Oligarchy ought to have been locked down, the bridges closed, gunships overhead, troop carriers on the streets…
