‘Well, that’s not strictly accurate,’ said Gaunt.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Mabbon may be his name, though I doubt it’s his given one. It’s probably a saint name he adopted when he took his pact.’
‘A saint name?’ asked Edur.
‘They have saints too, Edur,’ replied Gaunt. He looked at the prisoner again. ‘Etogaur isn’t a name. It’s his rank. He gave you his name and rank. An etogaur is roughly the equivalent of a general.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s a senior rank in the army of the Blood Pact.’
‘Anything else?’ asked Edur.
Gaunt nodded. ‘Yes. For all that, he’s not Blood Pact.’
‘He isn’t?’
‘The ritual scarring on the face and the scalp, those are pact-marks, definitely, but look at his hands.’
They looked through the mirror wall. The prisoner’s forearms were buckled to the arms of the cage chair. His hands were resting, limp and open, against the ends of the chair-arms.
‘I don’t see anything,’ said Edur.
‘Exactly.’
Edur glanced sideways at Gaunt. ‘If you know something, say it.’
‘There are no scars on his hands,’ said Gaunt, still staring at the silent prisoner. ‘None on the backs, none on the palms. Of all the pact-marks, the hand scars are the most significant. When a warrior of the Blood Pact makes his oath, he slices the palms of his hand against the sharpened edges of his heathen master’s armour. That solemnises the pact. That is the pact. This man has no scars.’
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Edur.
Gaunt narrowed his eyes to peer harder. ‘It’s hard to tell in this light, but the flesh of his hands looks new. It’s unblemished. A little smooth. I can’t be sure, but I’d wager he’s had grafting done to conceal or remove the rite scars. The chances are, this man was Blood Pact, but he isn’t any more.’
‘So you suppose he has renounced his pact?’
‘Quite possibly. He’s a man of significance in their world, and he’s gone to a lot of trouble and expense to have those grafts to erase his scars. It’s quite a statement.’
‘Could he not just be concealing what he really is?’
Gaunt shook his head. ‘This isn’t about concealment. He’d have had the rite scars on his head done, otherwise. They show his connection to the Sanguinary Worlds clearly enough. No, the hands are telling. He’s not hiding his scars, he’s deleting them. He’s actively rejecting the pact.’
‘What does that make him?’
‘It could make him any number of things, Edur, but at the very least it makes him a traitor. A traitor general.’
‘Interesting,’ said Edur.
‘Not really. You know all of this already,’ Gaunt replied.
Edur raised his eyebrows. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘Oh, come on, commissar,’ Gaunt sighed. ‘The idea that you, and our invisible handlers, and the whole of Section’s intelligence division hadn’t already worked all of that out is frankly insulting. We’ve been studying the Pact for years. This was all about you finding out how much I know.’
Edur smiled and raised his hands submissively. ‘Fair play, Gaunt. You can’t blame us.’
‘So how did I do?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Not bad at all. What else can you tell me?’
Gaunt took a deep breath and looked back at the prisoner. ‘The key thing, I suppose, is that he’s changed sides. That’s a huge psychological marker. He is capable of being sworn to something, to be absolutely committed to it, and then to switch away and renounce it. If he’s done it once, he can do it again. It’s like infidelity.’
Edur chuckled. ‘What sort of switch are we talking about, do you think?’
Gaunt shrugged. ‘An awful lot of Blood Pact start out as Imperial Guard or PDF. Most of the time, it’s a “join us or die” dynamic, but sometimes the choice is rather more personal. Like all converts, willing or not, they can often be the most radical, the most zealous. This man may have been Imperial once. Then he took the blood pact. Then he renounced that too. For some reason, he’s serially unfaithful.’
‘What do you suppose he is now?’ Edur asked.
‘It’s just a hunch,’ Gaunt replied, ‘but I think he’s one of the Sons of Sek.’
‘Explain your logic,’ said Edur.
‘The Blood Pact is a warrior cadre sworn to the personal service of the Archon. Magister Sek, called by some the Anarch, is Archon Gaur’s foremost lieutenant. It’s a king and prince dynamic, a father and son thing. Sek is ambitious, and envies the Gaur’s Blood Pact shamelessly. When I was on Gereon, we heard that Sek’s agents had set out to build a Blood Pact of their own, the Sons of Sek. Just as the Blood Pact have stolen bodies from the Imperial Guard over the years, so the Sons have begun to pilfer from the Pact. Officers, particularly, men with experience to help them shape the Sons quickly and robustly. This man says he’s an etogaur, and the Sons have pretty much the same rank system. It’s the best reason I can think of to explain why he still holds the rank, but has erased the scars from his palms.’
Edur smiled and nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s exactly what we thought.’
‘Two questions stand, then,’ said Gaunt. ‘What does our etogaur know, and why does he want to talk to me about it?’
‘Indeed,’ Edur replied.
‘So, do you want me to talk to him?’ asked Gaunt. ‘Or am I too great a liability?’
Edur hesitated.
The vox-plate mounted on the tiled wall beside the mirror jangled suddenly. Edur lifted the handset before it could complete its first ring.
‘Yes?’ he said. Gaunt waited. He could just hear a whisper of voices talking on the other end of the line.
‘Very well. Thank you.’
Edur hooked the handset back on its cradle. He looked at Gaunt.
‘You can go in,’ he said.
EIGHT
Etogaur
‘I’m Gaunt.’
The prisoner, clamped into his seat, turned his head to look. He stared at Gaunt for a long while, expressionless. The tank door closed behind Gaunt with an anvil clang. It was airless in the cell.
The prisoner began to speak. His voice sounded dry, almost dusty, as if it had been left neglected and unused for years.
‘I never met you,’ he said. ‘On Gereon. I never met you in person. I will need some… verification.’
Prisoner B’s command of Low Gothic was excellent, but he had an accent, an out-worlds accent that put a burr on the words, and made each syllable sound as though it was draped in razor-wire.
Gaunt walked around the cage chair once, and came to a halt facing the prisoner. The prisoner made direct and immediate eye contact without flinching. His eyes seemed to loom at Gaunt in the phosphor-green glow of the tank. Gaunt could see–
Nothing. There was nothing there to see!
Gaunt cleared his throat.
‘My unit eliminated the traitor general Noches Sturm at Lectica Bastion,’ he said, skidding matter-of-factly through the account as if it was a summary of how he’d spent an idle morning off-duty. ‘The headshot that ended him was self-inflicted, a last moment of honour in an otherwise despicable life. Out of respect for that, I covered his face with a cloth from his bed chamber before I left the body. The cloth was green silk.’
The prisoner nodded.
‘Now how do you know me?’ asked Gaunt. It was still and airless in the tank cell. Gaunt wanted to rap on his side of the one-way mirror and urge Edur to crank up the air-cycling.
‘I was a senior officer in the occupation forces of Gereon,’ the prisoner replied in that voice of dust and barbed wire. ‘My remit was to examine Sturm and, by means of interrogation and interview, extract as much useful intelligence from him as I could. After his death, a great effort was made to identify, locate and execute his killers.’