by Dan Abnett
Even Daur couldn’t suppress the grin on his face.
Meryn entered the parlour.
“And then Meryn walks in and spoils it all,” said Rawne. The laughter died away.
“What?” asked Meryn.
“Give us the bad news,” said Rawne. “I can tell it’s going to be bad news from the look on your face.”
Meryn pointed at Csoni.
“That chump’s EM bomb screwed everything,” he said.
“How?” asked Rawne.
“The vox is down and dead. We’ve lost contact with Aarlem, and I think it’s permanent.”
Hark was snoring. Ludd tugged his sleeve.
“What?” Hark asked. “I’m not asleep, Ludd.”
“Of course not, sir,” said Ludd.
“What time is it?” Hark asked, sitting up. It was gloomy in the temple house, with just the glow of the vox-caster dials and the snow-light coming in through the windows.
“Early,” said Ludd, “and late. Beltayn’s taken over from Rerval.”
“And something’s awry?” asked Hark.
“Beltayn tried to make the scheduled check in,” said Ludd. “He’s tried six times in the last half an hour. No joy. Major Rawne’s signal has gone dark.”
Ana Curth woke up in the middle of utter darkness with a gasp.
She steadied herself. She was in her cot in Aarlem.
She’d been dreaming about Zweil and how she’d break the news to him. In her dream, he wouldn’t listen to reason. She understood denial. It was one of the recognised stages.
She got out of bed in her single billet, a luxury reserved for only the most senior officers. Gaunt had secured her room for her. The deck was cold under her bare feet. Outside, it seemed to have stopped snowing at last. The night sky was oddly grey, flowing with departing clouds.
She’d talked to Dorden, and they’d decided that the news would be better coming from her. Zweil liked Curth, he treated her with affertion and concern. Better from her.
But how to do it?
Ana Curth knew all about denial, because she’d denied herself everything, including the hope of salvation, in the time she’d spent on Gereon. She knew what a death sentence felt like, too, because Gereon had all but killed her.
How could she break it to the dear old ayatani and make him understand? She got dressed, and let herself out of her room.
She needed guidance. She decided she’d sit herself down in the temple house and reflect. The calm darkness would soothe her, and allow her mind to rally. No one would be in the temple house at this hour.
She pushed open the door into the temple, but was stopped in her tracks.
Hark, Beltayn and Ludd looked around at her with guilty faces from the glow of a vox-caster propped up on a pew.
“What the-?” she asked.
“Ah,” said Hark, rising to his feet. “Ana, this is going to be a little awkward.”
The snowstorm had died off, and left in its vacuum a deadness of thick darkness, a stagnant hollow of night that had swallowed the whole city.
The sky had cleared, and the stars came out like static snowflakes, but the air temperature had dropped so sharply that engine fluids began to freeze. Spotter Valkyries and search birds were called down to wait for dawn. The Tanith hunt elements were recalled, unwillingly, to Section, to wait for first light.
In the empty streets of Old Side, the philia kept hunting. Eyl’s men threaded corners and side turnings in the vicinity of the refurb, their breath wisping into the glassy air from the mouth slits of their masks. Like the night, the trail had gone cold.
Eyl and the witch sheltered nearby.
“Find him,” he told his sister.
She shrugged. She was sitting on the floor in a heap of her folded skirts.
“I can’t!” she hissed through her veil.
They’d broken into the house together. It was a nothing special place, just a residence on the by-road, a home to six members of the same family and two servants, shuttered in because of the snowstorm.
Ulrike had killed them all. Like a daemon, like a fury, she had cut them down. The image of her frenzy made Eyl shudder, and he had done his share of things in his time. What disturbed him was the mania of it, and the fact that Ulrike had been able to make cuts like sword wounds with the merest flicks of her fingers.
So much blood had been spilled, with sufficient frenzy, that the walls had become pressure-painted, and the air was still dewed with aspirated molecules of blood. There was a blood mist in the house.
Ulrike was trying to read the blood. She had eviscerated all the corpses, so as to read their prognostications.
She flung the clotted ropes of meat aside, and stamped her feet furiously in the growing lake of blood.
“I can’t see him!” she shrilled. “I can’t see him. He’s hiding from me!”
“How can he do that?” Eyl asked her, holding her hands to calm her down. “Is he a witch too?”
“No,” she breathed, “he’s just a man. No witchery, no witchery. He just seems to know a few tricks.”
“You can get through tricks,” Eyl said, stroking the back of her veil as he held her close. “You can get to him. You can do anything.”
“I can,” she nodded. “I know I can.”
TWENTY-FIVE
The Net Closes
The night was nearly done. The first grey stains of day had begun to soak into the sky. The cold, glass-clear night that had followed the snowstorm had bred, by morning a translucent fog that hung upon the silent, snowbound city like the breath of a winter daemon. From the windows of Jaume’s studio, the street was a smoky ghost.
Ghosts hiding in a ghost town.
After Criid’s departure, Gaunt had been unable to rest. He’d paced the studio, and the grim rooms adjoining it, while the others slept. He flicked through more of Jaume’s albums, and studied the eyes of faces that would never come home, as if they might offer him some advice or wisdom.
He thought about what Criid had said, and the foolishness of it made him smile again, but it also made him think about Slaydo, and Hyrkans, and the Gate, and so the smile quickly vanished.
Jaume had a large old desk in the room next to his studio. Like everything else beyond the public rooms of his premises, it was cluttered and untidy. Gaunt sat at it, and picked through the stacks of yellowing paper for the sake of distraction. There were bundles of letters tied with ribbon, sheaves of communications, and orders and requests, miserable, grief-strangled messages from widows and bereaved families. These were the fuel of Jaume’s business. Gaunt wasn’t sure how he felt about it anymore. He wasn’t sure if he thought Jaume was some kind of ghoul making money out of other people’s loss, or if he was actually, in some counter-intuitive way, offering them some real comfort. The comfort wasn’t authentic, but perhaps the effect was.
On one side of Jaume’s desk was a battered old manual rubricator. Beside it was a deep pile of papers that Gaunt, at first, presumed to be invoices, or perhaps handbill brochures.
They were something else entirely. They were epitaphs. They were short, descriptive obituary notices, recording the heroic deeds of dead men. Each one was addressed, and Jaume had clearly composed each account individually. Gaunt began to read them.
“Those are private papers,” said Jaume. He wandered into the room, and found Gaunt at the desk.
Gaunt nodded, but kept reading.
“How much do you get for each one?” he asked.
“The cost isn’t the issue,” said Jaume.
“It’s a price, not a cost,” said Gaunt. “How much? A crown? Two crowns? Five crowns for a particularly lurid exploit or a mention in dispatches?”
“I charge a standard rate of two crowns,” Jaume admitted.
“And how many can you churn out in a sitting?” Gaunt asked, leafing through the stack. “A dozen? Twenty?”
“I don’t churn them out,” said Jaume.
“Maybe, but it’s not what you’d call hard work, is it?
” asked Gaunt. “I mean, two crowns a letter, that’s good money, considering there’s no research to do.”
Jaume didn’t reply.
Gaunt held up one letter.
“There was no Cantical Gate. Good name, though.” He gestured with another. “In the zone you mention here, there was no ‘valiant fighting on the sixth day’, because the action was over in four. In this one? The commanding officer is an invention. In this one, you’ve actually awarded a medal that doesn’t exist.”
He looked over at Jaume.
“You just make it all up, at two crowns a notice. It’s just like the portraits. You just make it all up.”
“The content doesn’t matter,” Jaume answered quietly. “Who’s going to care? Who’s going to know? Who’s ever going to spot the contrivance or point out an error?”
“Well, me?” Gaunt suggested.
“With respect,” Jaume replied, “in fifteen years, you’re the first person to set foot in here, who was actually on Balhaut at the time. No, sir, the details don’t matter. To the bereaved and the grieving, to the heartbroken and the inconsolable, the details aren’t remotely important. All that matters is a handsome portrait of the soul they’ve lost and, if it helps, a few lines that speak to good character, sound duty, and a minimum of suffering. Two crowns, sir, is a small price to pay for that kind of easement and solace.”
Gaunt shook his head, and dropped the sheaf of notices back onto the desk.
“I must remember,” he said, “to remind my men the next time we go into battle that the details don’t matter.”
Jaume snorted.
“I think you’re being rather naive, sir,” he said. “Why do you suppose I was so eager to secure the commission to make your portrait?”
“I would imagine there was two crowns in it for you,” Gaunt replied.
Jaume laughed humourlessly.
“This is my living, colonel-commissar, this is my trade. I stalk a city that almost died on a world that almost died memorialising those who were lost. I never get to meet the living. I never get to meet the men who won the war and came through that fire alive.”
Gaunt didn’t reply.
“You think I trivialise it,” said Jaume. “Perhaps I do. I manufacture heroes. I’ve never met a real one before.”
“I’m no hero, Jaume,” said Gaunt.
Jaume laughed.
“If you’re not, then God-Emperor help us all.”
“I appreciate your understanding in this,” said Hark to Curth quietly. They stood in the temple house, watching Beltayn and Rerval work the caster. Nothing had come through from Rawne in a very long time. Dawn was on them, and impatience was beginning to turn into irritation.
“I’m surprised you would even question my response, Viktor,” Curth replied. “I was on Gereon with Gaunt. I was on Gereon for longer than anyone. I appreciate the grey areas of this more than anyone, and my loyalty to Gaunt is absolute. You could have trusted me earlier.”
“It wasn’t a question of trust,” said Hark. “I didn’t want to put anybody in a difficult position unless it was necessary.”
“How long are you going to give it?” Curth asked, nodding to the vox-caster.
Hark shrugged.
“And if you can’t raise Rawne, what else can we do to reach out to Gaunt and help him?”
“Short of taking on the agents of the Inquisition, disobeying direct orders and bursting out of Aarlem Fortress by force if necessary you mean?”
“Those would certainly be less favourable options,” she replied.
“Then I really have no idea,” he replied.
The Imperial hunters set out again from Section, at daybreak, into a city-hazed white with thick winter fog. The fog blurred but magnified the sun, creating a strange, luminous glare in the air.
Less than four kilometres from the Imperials, within the projected sweep radius, the philia circled and re-circled the small patch of city turf in the vicinity of the refurb, worrying like a pack of blood hounds at a scent trail that had been strong and was suddenly gone.
In his bolt hole, Eyl knew that time was draining away. They needed success fast before their luck ran out altogether. Every time Karhunan or one of the other men checked back to the house with a negative report, Eyl’s agony increased.
His sister was at work in the back room of the house. She’d been labouring all night, weaving ugly witchcraft in a corpse room rank with blood. He kept hearing her squeal and moan as frustration followed frustration.
Just after dawn, she called out to him. He went into the corpse room. She had laid out the chart of Inner Balopolis and the Oligarchy, the chart that Valdyke had provided, and which she’d used to pinpoint Section. She had spread it on the floor, and it was soaked with blood.
“Have you found him?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered, and shook her head under her veil. “I cannot see him at all.”
She pointed to one tiny part of the map that the spattered blood had curiously not blemished.
“But I can see where I can’t see,” she said.
Criid approached her destination well before dawn, on the cusp of the change from frost-glass cold to phantom fog. Gaunt had told her there wasn’t much point making a direct approach before mid-morning.
The snow-thick streets were quiet, though at this end of town, there was more activity than in the unnaturally still thoroughfares of Old Side, beneath the Blood Pact’s warp-crafted spell.
She circled the target twice, assessed it, and then looked for somewhere to rest. A small public chapel, dedicated to the beati herself, occupied a street corner close by, and Criid found that it was the sort of place left unlocked at all hours of the day or night.
She clunked open the heavy wooden door and let herself in out of the bitter cold of the empty night. The place was old and uneven, stone built with heavy wooden beams, and a fading painted ceiling. Glow-globes had been left lit up in the vault, casting a soft yellow light, and the last flames of votive candles lit the day before were sputtering out in the metal rack in front of the beati’s effigy.
Criid curled up in one of the choir stalls, and used the pack containing her change of clothes as a pillow. She got a couple of hours of uneasy sleep.
When she woke, the chapel was bathed in a soft, white luminescence. The sun had come up, and brought the fog up with it, and strange, diffuse white light was glowing in through the chapel’s windows.
She picked up her pack and went through into the small rooms at the rear of the chapel where the ayatani priests kept their sacraments and some of the holy codices. It was a drab, cobwebby place that was obviously seldom visited. She lit a glow-globe, and began to get changed into the clothes in the bag. The clothes had all come from Jaume’s dressing up racks, as had the small, battered case of make-up. Criid couldn’t remember the last time she’d had to apply any face paint that wasn’t camo or black-out. It wasn’t a talent she’d ever developed, growing up, and she was concerned that she might overdo it and end up looking like one of those frightful transvestite castrati at the Circe du Khulan. She set the make-up case to one side, unopened.
Jaume had helped her pick out the clothes. He had shown some interest in her choices. Apparently, a widow’s dress was called weeds, and the best were made of bombazine, crepe and fine lace. Criid had run her hands across the jet silk of one of the dresses that Jaume was showing her, and thought how ironic it was that she was selecting clothes to allow her to play the part of a widow, when, inside, she’d been a widow since the Gereon Liberation.
Jaume had suggested a particular dress in purple, which, he said, was slighted mourning. The colour change from black to purple denoted that the mourning period had lasted more than three years. The widow was no longer obliged to wear her veil all the time, and she could make sparing use of marginally more decorative keepsake jewellery. A further slighting, to mauve, followed after another year, and signalled the eventual return to the world.
Criid put on the sli
ghted mourning, and the shoes and gloves that Jaume had selected, and then the veil. She decided that the widow she had become was so anguished that she had no time for fripperies like make-up, so she went without.
Commissar Blenner had only just been seated at his regular table when the visitor was announced.
It was a dreadful morning, with the snow still thick, and a hellish fog like artillery smoke, and that on top of a couple of days when the city had been quite turned upside down. He’d heard the most appalling stories about some business up at Section that had sealed the centre of the city off.
At least the snowstorm had stopped. Blenner had a zero tolerance approach to barracks food, so he slipped his driver the usual bonus to convey him through the elemental murk to the Mithredates for a late breakfast of tanzato pastry and thick, sludgy caffeine.
There was hardly anyone there. The staff, in their liveries of crimson, black and gold, seemed glad of something to do, and his breakfast arrived in record time.
“There is a visitor to see you,” the majordomo said as he was tucking in.
“Really?”
“A lady, sir.”
“Good show.”
“She’s asking for you by name.”
“Twas ever thus.” Blenner dabbed his mouth with a napkin. “Did she say who she was, by any chance?”
The major domo nodded.
“She says you knew her husband, sir. His name was Vergule.”
Blenner frowned. “Vergule? I never even knew the man was married. Well I never. All right, you’d better bring her over.”
“I’m sorry to have to remind you, sir, that ladies are not permitted in the main rooms of the Mithredates,” said the major domo, “but if sir so desires, I can arrange for her to be conducted to the day room so you can greet her there?”
Blenner glanced down at the breakfast he had barely touched.
“Oh, all right,” he said, scraping his chair back, “but can you have some caffeine brought through to the day room? And, maybe, the dessert trolley?”
