‘We?’ asked Corrod.
‘Information supplied by agents of my clave,’ said Jan Jerik.
‘There is certainty?’ asked the leader of the new arrivals.
‘Nothing direct,’ replied Jan Jerik. ‘The Mechanicus, and the other organs of the Imperial machine, keep such data secret. Their belligerent confidences are, of course, part of the problem–’
‘Keep to the point,’ said Corrod. ‘We understand your grievance, ordinate. You help us, and we secure you a better future.’
Jan Jerik nodded. He hadn’t known what to expect of his guests, but Corrod and his companions, and now the newcomers, seemed simply disappointing. Thin and shrivelled, unwashed and stinking from days in the open. They seemed frail and exhausted, and quite unsuited to the task ahead. He was disheartened.
‘It is a matter of reading the hole in the available data,’ he said. ‘Movement and reassignment of specialist Mechanicus adepts from other facilities to this one. These transfers have been made since the arrival in the city of the warship Armaduke. Also, the classification of some data is specific to the ordos. So, by elimination, we can see… specialists moved to this location in the last few days. Higher classification to all data traffic relating to said location. They have masked what they are doing there, but we can see the mask. What you seek is there.’
‘By your estimation,’ said the leader of the new arrivals.
‘The likelihood is high, sir,’ said Jan Jerik. ‘For the bargain we are striking, I aim to be diligent in my part of it. I would say a ninety-five per cent likelihood. There is one other location that might have potential. Here. But this, we think, is not research or analysis. The facility is too small. Prisoner holding, is my guess. The traitor, the pheguth.’
Corrod nodded. ‘The equipment?’ he asked.
‘Laid out, in the sub-levels,’ said Jan Jerik.
‘Well then,’ said Corrod. ‘We can begin. I’ll lead the effort here, at the primary target. You take the secondary one.’
The leader of the new arrivals nodded.
‘We cover both possibilities,’ said Corrod. ‘If the second is the pheguth, then we win some justice.’
He looked at the new arrivals.
‘Take off those damned robes. Burn them.’
The men stripped off their wet, blue silk garments, and pushed past Jan Jerik to stuff them in the mouth of the iron stove.
‘Are you ready, sirdar?’ Corrod asked.
‘Yes, my damogaur,’ replied Hadrel. ‘His voice commands us, and we obey, for his voice drowns out all others.’
Five: Leaving Sadimay
The cloister air smelled of burning: burning history, burning faith, burning tradition. Packsons were in the record house and librarium of the old Basilica, sweeping books off the shelves and bundling them onto bonfires that had been lit in the low stone walk. Mkoll walked past them, his knife-hand pressed into the small of Olort’s back, guiding him. His instructions had been plain, and he’d made them in Olort’s language: draw attention to me and you’re the first to die.
Some of the packsons even threw ritual salutes – the hand across the mouth – to the damogaur and his sirdar as they passed. The sirdar’s uniform was a barely adequate fit. The man had been both taller and broader than Mkoll. But the chief scout made a few adjustments, hoping that dirt and drying blood would cover any discrepancies, and besides, the uniform discipline of the Sons of Sek never seemed that precise to him. They all looked like a mob of filthy, ragged barbarians to him, wasteland raiders who cared little if a button or epaulette was out of place, or a pair of boots unpolished.
But what did he know? He was Imperial bred. He understood and recognised the uniform codes of the Astra Militarum in all its variation. He could tell a Throne trooper from a non-Throne at a glance because of cultural familiarity. But the packs were not his heritage. This ruined island, this world, was no longer his culture. He was deep in the heart of the Archenemy, deeper than he had been on Gereon. What nuances was he supposed to notice, what details might he miss with his unfamiliar eyes? He found himself working obsessively about details. The mud on men’s boots, the blood stains on their patched tunics. Was that just random, just dirt? Or was there some deliberate significance… marks daubed or smeared to signify something?
How was he giving himself away? The customs and habits of the Sanguinary Tribes, from whose far-rimward feral worlds Sek and that bastard Gaur drew their forces, were entirely alien to him.
Mkoll fancied that when, inevitably, he was finally discovered, it would be some ridiculously small detail that would give him way. Some tiny Sanguinary custom that he couldn’t possibly have known.
As they walked along the cloisters, he decided it might be the helmet. He’d buckled it across his face, the foul-tasting leather mask across his nose and mouth. Tanned human hide, a boneless hand, a trophy turned into a chin-strap that symbolised the Sons of Sek’s gesture of humility to their Anarch. That was it. The touch of it against his mouth made him gag. He’d tear it off to be free of it, unmask himself, and be revealed.
They walked out onto a colonnade that overlooked the Basilica’s harbour. The hillside below the Basilica plunged away almost sheer to the docks and stone-built ware barns below. Mkoll made Olort stop beside the low ouslite wall, and looked out.
The day was grey. There was rain in the air. Thirty kilometres ahead of him, across the unwelcoming waters of the strait, lay the mainland, the industrial shorelines and dingy habs of south-west Eltath.
That was where they’d brought him from.
He couldn’t see the city itself. Its bulk, and the massive rise of the city mound and the palace mount were lost behind weather and wind-drawn banners of smoke. The fighting in those south-western wards had been intense. Whole areas were on fire, and the smoke plumes dragged back across the sky for kilometres, dense and dark.
It looked so close. The strait looked swimmable. But he knew the scale was deceiving him. A thirty kilometre crossing, in sub-zero water, with strong currents. If he made that, which he wouldn’t, then it was another forty kilometres on foot through the industrial zones of the Dynastic Claves before he even reached the formal outskirts of Eltath. And that was all enemy ground, held by the Sons of Sek. Even the city fringes were disputed.
Mkoll changed his view. The great black crags and hilltop Basilica of Sadimay Island stood to his right, but over its rugged shoulder, he saw the hazed waters of the channel, and the mauve shapes of other islands. He searched his memory, trying to recall the overheads of charts he’d seen during briefings in the last few weeks. His focus had been on Eltath and its maze of streets and quarters. He’d paid little attention to what lay outside, the greater clave zones, the industrial heartlands, the neighbouring forge-towns. He knew the Strait ran from the bottom of the Great Bay of Eltath southwards, and was a major shipping channel. It separated the island chain from the mainland. Sadimay was one of the principal islands because of its religious centre. There had once been regular ferry links for pilgrims and forge devotees. But it was just one of many. The whole planet was blistered with islands in chains and groups and archipelagos, most of them volcanic. Sadimay was just one of hundreds in this particular chain, some closely spaced, divided by much narrower channels, no more than a couple of kilometres in places. Might he find sanctuary there, perhaps? Just for a while. Get himself to one of the small islands, something the Sons of Sek regarded as strategically unimportant, and just wait it out?
Was that even what he wanted to do?
Mkoll had an idea, a notion, and it made him fret to even think of it. Did it come from madness, or desperation, or some higher calling? He’d never believed in that last thing much, so he put it down to desperation.