‘Find mine,’ Eyl said.
Samus had already found it. With blood-speckled hands, he offered up the damogaur’s silver mask. Samus’s eyes were filmed blank, and he wore an idiot expression. For many years, Eyl had known Samus by his flesh name, Bezov. Samus was the name of his patron spirit, a particularly noisy thing that had gradually taken up residence in Bezov’s soul. Since then, Bezov had insisted on being known by his spirit name, and the person that Eyl had known had faded behind milk-dull eyes, palsied tics and animal sounds.
Eyl rejoiced that his comrade had been singled out for such a blessing by the High Powers.
He took his silver mask. He had missed its cold weight.
The witch had been taken to a dank chamber in the attic levels of the building. Kaylb Sirdar, Eyl’s other headman, had been set to watch her.
‘How many?’ he asked Eyl when the damogaur reached the upper floor.
‘Six didn’t make it,’ replied Eyl quietly.
‘God’s corpse!’
‘Johnas was one.’
Kaylb shook his head and cursed again.
‘That leaves thirty-four. We can do the job with thirty-four.’
‘Of course. But six. Six!’
‘They were the tithe,’ Eyl told his old friend. ‘They were the blood-price to get us into the enemy’s heart unseen.’
‘There’s truth in that. When do we move?’
‘As soon as we can. As soon as she tells us. Is she ready?’
Kaylb looked through the doorway behind him. In the darkened room beyond, they could see Lady Ulrike Serepa fon Eyl pacing up and down beneath the tattered and faded inspirational posters of the Henotic League. She was still wearing her veil and her mourning dress. She was talking to herself.
‘I’ll deal with her,’ Eyl told his sirdar. ‘Go down, arm yourself, help Karhunan with the rites.’
Kaylb nodded, embraced his commander, and then disappeared down the rotting, treacherous staircase.
Eyl entered the attic.
‘Sister?’
Ulrike stopped pacing and looked at him. Eyl could feel her eyes behind her veil.
‘I do not like this place,’ she said.
‘We knew we would not like it, sister,’ he replied.
‘We will all die here,’ she declared.
Eyl nodded. She was never wrong, and as for dying on Balhaut, he had never expected anything else. That really wasn’t what mattered.
‘Will the Anarch die?’ he asked.
‘You know that’s the one thing I can’t see,’ she replied. She fidgeted with her hands under the long lace cuffs of her weeds.
‘Then tell me what you can see,’ he said.
She sighed. ‘I am tired. I do not want to. I am hungry. It’s going to snow again. I don’t like this place.’
‘The snow can be damned, and there’ll be time to eat and rest later,’ he replied. ‘You know what I want to see.’
‘I am tired!’ she repeated, petulantly. ‘The truth is making my head hurt. Prognostication is tiresome. Don’t make me do it.’
Eyl was suddenly in front of her, his hands, like spring traps, pinning her wrists. She uttered a noise of surprise and pain.
‘Do not make me hurt you,’ he said quietly, looking directly into the veil. ‘Do not make me hurt my own blood. This is your purpose. This is why the gore mages of our Consanguinity made you. This is why they bred you and witched you.’
‘Upon my soul,’ she replied, ‘I wish they had not.’
‘I know.’
‘I really wish they had not.’
‘Hush,’ he said, letting go of her wrists.
‘You want to know where the pheguth is?’ she asked.
‘You know I do.’
‘Have you brought any props for me?’
Eyl nodded. He reached into the pocket of his coat, and brought out a neatly-folded paper chart of Inner Balopolis and the Oligarchy. It was another of Valdyke’s procurements. It had been sitting in an envelope on the top of the munition crates.
Eyl slit the seal on the chart, opened it, and spread it like a cloth on a soot-blackened old side table under the gloomy roof beams. He smoothed it out.
She came over, looked down at it, and ran her fingertips across the paper, tracing the lines of streets and thoroughfares with jerky, rapid gestures.
A cold wind gusted in through the attic’s paneless window, and flapped the overhanging edges of the map.
She shuddered, and made a low moaning sound in her throat, the sound of a feline, mauled and cornered. Eyl held her shoulders, gently but firmly. He could feel the chill of her through his gloves. Her panting breath was showing through her veil as vapour. His own breath was starting to smoke too.
Without warning, she tore free of him, and ran towards the attic window, a black shape against the dull white sky.
Eyl cried out, thinking that she was going to jump, and moved to block her as fast as his enhanced metabolism could carry him.
He caught her in the window, grabbing her by the black silk of her long skirts, but she hadn’t intended to jump at all.
He let go. She stood up on the sill in the window space, and looked out over the Imperial city. It was bone-pale in the winter light, and the sky was the colour of a frozen lake.
He heard her sigh. She reached up and lifted the veil away from her face so that she could look upon the world without any barriers. Eyl didn’t look up. He didn’t wish to see her face. He just wanted to know what she was seeing. He stared out across the towers and stacks, the rooftops. The city was vast, perhaps the biggest he’d ever seen. Its complexity filled the world up from horizon to horizon. In this place, less than a lifetime before, a great strand of fate had been decided. It had seemed like a loss to the Consanguinity at the time, but it had simply been a necessary cost, the birthing pains of a new age. It had allowed the Gaur to rise and take the crown of Archon. It had set a new course for destiny.
Now a second great strand of fate was going to be decided on Balhaut, a strand of fate he clutched in his hands, though it slithered and slipped still. It made the first look insignificant by comparison.
Ulrike laughed. Silent, heavy flakes of snow were floating down out of the gleaming sky.
‘I told you it would snow,’ she said.
‘And I believed you,’ he replied, though he was not sure that she hadn’t made it snow.
‘Can you see him?’ he asked.
‘I can,’ she said. ‘Lift me down.’
He put his arms around her thighs and lifted her down off the sill. She had lowered her veil and there were snowflakes melting in the mesh.
‘Kaylb’s going to die first. You need to know that.’
‘All right,’ he said, nodding. He swallowed.
‘I mean, Kaylb’s going to die soon. Today, probably.’
‘All right,’ he said, again.
‘Won’t you miss him?’
‘Forever.’
She shrugged and went back to the chart. She traced the streets with her fingertips again.
‘So?’ Eyl asked. ‘Where will I find the pheguth?’
‘Here,’ said the witch, tapping a point on the map with her finger. ‘He is in this building on Viceroy Square. The building is known as… Section.’
TEN
Snow on Snow
The sky above the city had turned a sick yellow, and snow had begun to fall again. The flakes made soft, ticking noises as they struck the glass of the tall windows that overlooked the courtyard, and the ticking became a counterpoint to the heavy, funereal beat of the ornate timepiece on the corner stand.
Gaunt sat for a while, and then began to pace in the anteroom. He stared down into the courtyard where the snowflakes were softly beginning to accumulate. He watched the imperceptible crawl of the hands across the brass dial of the timepiece. He went to the door of the anteroom, and looked out into the cold hallway. People were busy elsewhere. He heard the echo of raised voices in the distance. He went back, sat down in the armchair, and sipped at the cup of now-cold caffeine the duty officer had brought. He took out Eszrah’s copybook, and tried to read another of the Nihtgane folk tales, but his mind wasn’t on it.