[Gaunt's Ghosts 12] - Blood Pact

by Dan Abnett

“Mamzel,” said Blenner. “I’m Vaynom Blenner. I am honoured by your visit.”

  The widow was veiled. She stood waiting for Blenner by the windows of the day room, beyond which the phantom white morning was uncurling. Waiters brought in a tray of caffeine and a large trolley of cakes and desserts.

  “Commissar Blenner, it’s good of you to see me.”

  “Not at all. I knew your husband well, and was damned sorry to hear of his passing. I take it that his memorial is what brings you to Balhaut?”

  “Yes, but it’s not what brings me here today,” she replied.

  Blenner offered her a seat.

  “Drink, perhaps?”

  “No, thank you.” She waited until the club staff had left the room.

  “Something to eat, then?” Blenner gestured towards the trolley. “The crustuko is especially good.”

  Forget the crustuko, Criid thought. Look at the almond sepis. What a glorious thing.

  “Thank you, no,” she said, with great reluctance.

  “How can I help you, then?” he asked.

  “I don’t need your help, but a mutual friend does.”

  “Indeed. Who?”

  “Ibram Gaunt.”

  Blenner stared at her. “Ibram?”

  “That’s who I said.”

  “I say, what’s going on?”

  “Gaunt’s in a difficult position,” Criid said. “You’re the only person he can call on for help. I’m the only means of contacting you.”

  “You’re not Vergule’s widow at all, are you?” asked Blenner.

  “My name’s Criid. I’m one of his Ghosts.”

  “Tanith?”

  “No, Verghast,” she replied.

  Blenner leaned back. “Look this is all rather silly. Is Ibram playing some sort of practical joke? Because I tell you now it doesn’t suit him.”

  “No joke,” said Criid. “There is some necessary subterfuge involved, and for that you have my apologies. I had to get in here to find you.”

  “How do I know this isn’t some trick?” asked Blenner. He was looking decidedly uneasy.

  “Gaunt sent me,” she replied. “He said to say that the day you first met, you lied to him about your father.”

  Blenner snorted. It was true enough. A life time ago in the schola progenium on Ignacius Cardinal, two little boys in a draughty corridor.

  “Very well. What’s going on?” Blenner asked.

  “I’ll explain it as simply as I can,” said Criid. She paused. “I’ve just got to do this first.”

  She got up, and helped herself to a large wedge of sepis from the trolley, yanked back her veil, and began to eat. Blenner watched her with wry amusement.

  “What’s Ibram got himself into now?” he asked.

  She told him, between bites, and detailed the events of the last two days as clearly and simply as she could. Blenner’s amusement turned to concern, and then to something that Criid was alarmed to see looked like fear.

  “On Balhaut?” Blenner asked. “The Archenemy is active on Balhaut?”

  She nodded. Blenner turned pale. He’d cut himself a slice of sepis while she’d been talking, but he now showed no interest in touching it.

  “This is serious,” he said. “We have to take it to Section.”

  “No.”

  “For Throne’s sake!”

  “Haven’t you been listening to me?” Criid asked. “Nothing’s safe. We don’t know how deeply the enemy has infiltrated. Gaunt can only trust people he knows personally. He needs you to meet him.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. You, sir. You and perhaps a small group of Guard that you trust from your regiment. He needs a bodyguard, fire-team strength.”

  “Oh, this just isn’t on!”

  “And transport,” said Criid.

  Blenner rubbed his forehead and punched the bridge of his nose. “He’s going to be the death of me. This is typical of his nonsense. I have a good mind to go straight to the commissar general—”

  “If that’s your decision, sir,” she told him, “you won’t get out of this room.”

  Blenner was silent for a moment.

  “When does he want this meeting?”

  “Four o’clock,” she said.

  “And where?”

  “He said you’d know where,” she replied. “He said you’d know the place that he’d made sure isn’t there.”

  “What? Riddles on top of everything else?”

  “That’s exactly what he told me to say.”

  Blenner rose with a long sigh.

  “You’d better come with me to my barracks. I’ll get things in motion.”

  Side by side, they hurried from the day room down the stairs and out towards the club’s main entrance. In the foyer, Blenner looked around for a staffer to order up his car.

  A man approached them. He was not wearing club livery.

  “Commissar Blenner,” he said, more of a statement than a question.

  “What about it?”

  “Your association with Ibram Gaunt is a matter of record. We’ve had you under surveillance since yesterday.”

  Criid began to back away. She’d lowered her veil before leaving the day room. She reached down to where her straight silver was taped to her thigh under her bombazine skirts.

  “Who the hell are you?” Blenner asked the man.

  “I think it’s time you came in for questioning,” the man replied. He looked at Criid. “Your friend too.”

  Two more men had closed in behind them from the direction of the cloakroom. To Criid’s horror, they had precisely the same face as the first man.

  “My name is Sirkle,” the man said, showing them his rosette. “Do not try to resist.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  A Place That Isn’t There

  The Inquisition’s Valkyries had been grounded by the bright fog, which capped the summit of Balopolis and the Oligarchy like an arctic ice-shelf half a kilometre thick.

  With the Tanith scouts along its leading edge, the main Imperial sweep had switched its attentions from the central routes of the city, along the main east-west avenues, to the maze of streets and narrow lanes of Northern Old Side. In slow, meticulous fashion, they threaded the lines of the tenements and hab stacks, and searched the under-barns, the lower sinks, and the long, semi-derelict municipal allotments on their suspended irrigation platforms above the highways. The ground was dead-white with almost undisturbed snow, and the air was bright white with pearl fog. Visibility was down to twenty metres in places.

  Kolea and Baskevyl moved with the main force behind the scout line, keeping close to the vox truck that was rolling with the search formation at walking pace, and snorting regular blurts of yellow exhaust from its upright stacks into the smoke-white air.

  The cold made their eyes water and their cheeks flush. Kolea’s nose had turned red, a fact that Baskevyl had seen fit to mention several times. For his part, Kolea kept going on about a particularly good caffeine that was served in a dining hall that he had taken to frequenting on the Aarlem side of the river. They both knew they were talking about nothing, that this idle chat between two men, who had become good friends and comrades in the five years since their regiments had been amalgamated, was all that stood between them and screaming frustration.

  The tension had become unbearable. The progress had become so slow. Every hour or so, they took it in turns to go up to the scouting line and walk with Mkoll or Bonin or Jajjo for a while, just to see how things were going. The frustration there was palpable too. Neither Kolea nor Baskevyl had ever known the famous Tanith scouts to be so adrift. They had both read what amounted to a helpless fury in Mkoll’s eyes.

  “The snow’s lying to us,” he had told them both, separately, and the words had made both of them shiver. The Tanith scout master’s ability to track was legendary. It was almost regarded as preternatural. If something was outfoxing him, if something was deluding his wits and his honed senses, then it had to be seriously unnatural.

&nb
sp; The toxic curse of warpcraft lay heavily across this ancient street.

  Due to their proximity to the search areas, squads of troopers from the Kapaj First had been drafted in from Oligarchy Fortress to assist with canvassing. The men, all young lads with the typical stocky frames and olive skin-tone of the Kapaj, were dutifully and seriously moving from house to house along the search perimeter, knocking on doors and asking the residents if they recognised holo-picts of Gaunt’s face or had seen anything untoward.

  Baskevyl and Kolea chatted about the way the area’s residents seemed to be behaving so oddly. It often took the Kapaj canvassers two or three knocks to get a reply, and the residents were wary and unforthcoming. Scared, pale faces could regularly be spotted looking down on the passing Imperial search party from upper windows. Families had holed up in cellars and vaults as they had done in wartime. Merchants and shop owners had pulled down their shutters, and hidden in their back rooms. Nobody, it seemed, had seen or heard anything since the snows began.

  “Snow’s not rare here, is it?” Baskevyl asked.

  Kolea shook his head. “It’s normal. Seasonal. I think it’s snowed at least once already since we shipped planetside.”

  “So why is everybody treating it like the end of the world?” asked Baskevyl. “Why’s everybody hiding? Why are the streets empty?”

  Kolea didn’t have an answer.

  One thing that Baskevyl and Kolea didn’t chat about was the Kapaj regiment itself. The Kapaj First was a new founding, nothing exceptional, reasonably promising. Gaunt had been appointed to the regiment as visiting instructor as part of his retirement duties on Balhaut. He’d taken quite a shine to them, and took his mentoring responsibilities seriously, visiting them upwards of two or three times a week. Sometimes, he’d even taken his senior officers with him to brief the young men, none of whom had seen any combat, about the actual niceties of war. Baskevyl had been up to Oligarchy Fortress with Gaunt twice, Kolea three times.

  There had been rumours that Gaunt was going to get the Kapaj command permanently. The Kapaj First, all told, was nearly fifteen thousand strong. Someone had started the gossip that the Kapaj was going to be Gaunt’s ticket to the rank of general or general marshal, a significant step on the ladder to a full high-staff position, such as an appointment militant or a marshallcy of guard. The Kapaj First would be his new First and Only. The gossip also suggested that if Gaunt were to be elevated in this way, the Tanith First would be broken up, and rendered into discrete specialist teams to supervise training or operate as special advisors. This, the gossip declared, was why the Ghosts had been retired to Balhaut in the first place: a slow and thorough dismantling, the assets of the regiment stripped.

  Gaunt had heard the gossip. At a senior staff dinner, just a week earlier, he’d torpedoed the rumours with such phlegmatic humour and outrageous disrespect for the system that all the officers around the long tables, Baskevyl and Kolea included, had been quite crippled by mirth.

  Baskevyl and Kolea didn’t chat about the Kapaj simply because the Kapaj reminded them of Gaunt. The Kapaj weren’t an idle-enough subject for chat. They were too heavily freighted with notions of their missing commander and future possibilities. In the friendless, foggy streets of Old Side, where they could taste the ice crystals in the air, and the cold bladed around them, there were no possible futures anymore, except for a grim resolution in some mouldering tenement.

  Kolea tapped Baskevyl on the arm, and Baskevyl turned. A black, unmarked cargo-8 with armoured bodywork had driven up out of the surrounding fog to join the tail-end of the search formation. It had flashed its headlights as it rumbled in behind the vox truck.

  “Look,” said Baskevyl.

  Up ahead, one of the apparently numerous men called Sirkle had alerted his master to the vehicle’s approach. Inquisitor Handro Rime turned and began striding back towards the black truck.

  Kolea and Baskevyl changed course to intercept him. Commissar Edur got there first.

  “News?” he asked Rime, walking backwards to match Rime’s stride and remain face to face.

  “Maybe,” Rime replied.

  “Who’s in the truck, inquisitor?” asked Edur.

  “Persons of interest to this investigation,” Rime replied curtly.

  “Going to reveal any identities?” Edur asked.

  “We’ll see,” said Rime.

  “Please get out of the inquisitor’s way,” said one of the Sirkles.

  “Oh, now,” said Edur, “the inquisitor and I have an understanding, don’t we, sir?”

  Rime stopped in his tracks and glared at Edur.

  “When this is done, Edur—” he began.

  “What?” asked Edur, with a wink. “Are you talking dinner? I don’t know, I’m not that sort.”

  Rime let out a quiet curse of rage. One of the Sirkles stepped towards Edur.

  Edur put his hand quickly on the butt of his pistol.

  “Uh uh,” he warned. “An understanding, remember?”

  “What’s in the big black truck, inquisitor?” Kolea asked as he and Baskevyl arrived.

  “Yes, inquisitor,” said Edur, “what’s in the big, black truck?”

  “I’ll tell you as soon as I’ve completed the questioning process,” said Rime, and pushed past them.

  “He’s a friendly soul,” said Kolea.

  “Lovely manners,” said Baskevyl.

  Edur watched Rime stride away. A Sirkle unlocked the rear of the cargo-8, and Rime hoisted himself into the back.

  “It’s quite possible this is all going to get very ugly indeed,” Edur remarked.

  “That’s fine,” said Kolea.

  “Just say when,” said Baskevyl.

  “Ugly is what we do best,” said Kolea.

  “My name is Rime,” said Rime as he climbed into the back of the armoured truck and sat down on one of the grille seats.

  “A rhyme for what?” asked Blenner.

  “What?”

  “A rhyme for what?” Blenner repeated.

  “You misheard me, sir,” said Rime. “My name is Rime. Handro Rime, of the Inquisition.”

  He opened his heavy leather wallet and displayed his rosette.

  “Oh, my mistake,” said Blenner.

  It was airless in the back of the truck. The portly commissar, who thought himself so amusing, was sweating, and the veiled widow beside him was resolutely saying nothing.

  The datasheaf link had already told Rime more about Vaynom Blenner than Blenner would ever care to divulge. A Sirkle in the Balopolis Administratum had pulled Blenner’s dossier and sent it to the Sirkle surveying the Mithredates.

  “You know why you’re here?” Rime asked.

  “I don’t even know where here is, frankly, so ‘why’ is a whole separate enigma,” Blenner replied.

  Rime tried to assess if Blenner was just an idiot, or if he was playing some kind of clever game. On the grille bench beside Blenner, Criid was wondering precisely the same thing.

  “You’re a person of interest to us,” Rime said, “a long-time associate of Ibram Gaunt. You met at school, I believe?”

  “I try to forget that part of my life, to be honest,” said Blenner. “I was hopeless at games, and the other boys used to bully me. Wait though… I think one of them might have been named Gaunt. Basher Gaunt we used to call him, and he—”

  “Shut up,” said Rime. “We know you know Gaunt. Our records are fairly detailed. Schola progenium, Ignatius Cardinal, and then several periods of contact, the last and longest since school being here on Balhaut during the last eighteen months or so. You meet regularly. You are both members of the Mithredates Club. He paid off your club dues last month because you were financially embarrassed.”

  “Wait… Is he a short, fat man with a beard?” Blenner asked.

  “You last ate together three days ago,” Rime said. “Gaunt signed the tab. He’s fond of you, evidently. You’re a childhood friend. Very few people in the service or the Guard have childhood friends anymore. H
e looks after you when your gambling problems get out of hand.”

  “I don’t have any gambling problems,” said Blenner.

  “Do you want me to send for an audit of your fiscal affairs?” Rime asked. “There’s one available, fresh off the sheaf. I hear it’s a shameful mess.”

  Blenner fell silent.

  “You know Gaunt,” said Rime. “The fact is well-documented. That’s why we put a watch on you, as a person of interest. Less than twelve hours before Ibram Gaunt went missing with a high-value asset, and Section was attacked, you had lunch with him. What did you talk about, Vaynom?”

  “Oh, you know,” said Blenner, “the usual chit-chat. How to recruit reliable Archenemy troopers this far into Imperial territory, the best way to storm the gatehouse, etcetera. All that blather—”

  Rime’s fist caught him across the face, and smashed him off the grille seat into the side wall of the truck. Blenner’s head and shoulder met the metal wall, and he fell down hard.

  Criid rose to her feet.

  “Leave him alone,” she said.

  “You bastard,” Blenner was moaning from the deck.

  Rime rose to face Criid. “What did you say?”

  “Leave him alone,” Criid repeated slowly.

  “Protective, are you?” asked Rime. “Protective? Sergeant Criid? Oh, yes, we know who you are too. Palm-scans don’t lie. Conveying a message to Gaunt’s good friend, were you?”

  Criid pulled off her veil, and glared at Rime.

  “Interesting,” Rime said, not breaking eye contact. “You’re not what I imagined from the first female officer of the Tanith Ghosts.”

  “What did you imagine?” she asked.

  “Something rather more masculine,” he said.

  Criid kicked him in the face. Despite the heavy trains of her slighted mourning, she rotated enough to smash her foot into his mouth. He crashed backwards into the truck’s wall. Criid raked up her hopelessly stupid skirts to get at her straight silver.

  Rime came back at her. He was laughing. It was a nasty laugh, the sort of laugh a man would utter if he were playing games and liked a little rough stuff. He punched Criid in the shoulder, hard enough to make her cry out, then slammed a rising forearm into her mouth so hard that it tumbled her into the cab wall of the truck’s back space.