The Tanith offenders occupied seven adjacent cages on the fifth bay of Detention Four. The only other prisoners on the bay were a pair of Oudinot drunks, who were still sleeping off the night before, and an ugly fether from one of the Varshide regiments, who occupied the cage next to Rawne’s. The Varshide had volunteered a long and graphic commentary on exactly how pleased he was to see Jessi Banda, and precisely how much more pleased he’d be if they weren’t separated by ceramite bars, until Rawne had leaned close and gently whispered something to him, as a direct result of which the Varshide had shut up and gone to hide in the corner of his cage.
Since the seven Tanith had been brought in the night before, the bay temperature had been fairly constant, but in the last hour it had begun to drop, noticeably. Varl could see his breath in the air in front of him.
No one had talked for a long time. In the first couple of hours of detention there’d been a fair amount of chat and a lot of recriminations, especially from Ban Daur, who was sitting forlornly in his cell with a look on his face that announced that his world had ended. Young Cant, dragged into the scam by peer pressure and the notion that maybe if he grew some, Varl might stop ragging on him, looked dispirited and scared. Meryn, true to form, had started to whine and blame, which had oiled the wheels of an argument between him and Banda that had gone on until the guards told them all to shut up.
Then Hark had shown up from Aarlem in the small hours with a face like murder. He’d reviewed the situation, told them they were all fething idiots, and added that he had no idea how he was going to sort ‘Rawne’s latest shit’ out this time. He told them he’d be back later in the day.
None of them had spoken much after that.
‘Yeah, what’s with this?’ Leyr asked, sitting up on his cot and sniffing the air. ‘Varl’s right. It’s getting really cold.’
‘Do you want me to ask the concierge if he can tweak the heating?’ Meryn asked.
Banda snorted and showed Meryn a very specific number of raised fingers through the cage bars.
‘It is getting colder,’ said Cant. ‘That can’t be right.’
The young trooper shut up the moment he realised what he’d said, but it was too late.
‘No, it can’t, can it, Cant?’ sneered Varl.
‘Everybody give it a rest,’ said Rawne, and they fell silent. Rawne got up and stood very still, as if he were listening.
‘What’s up?’ Varl asked him.
‘You hear that?’ Rawne asked.
Gaunt stepped out of the armoured elevator into the white-tiled cell-block. The combination of artificial lighting and tiles made the air in the block seem sickly and fulminous, like the snow-light outside.
‘You shouldn’t be here, sir,’ said a detention officer, hurrying up to him. ‘It’s not permitted.’
‘I just need to look at the prisoner for a moment,’ Gaunt said.
‘Why, sir?’
‘I just need to look at him,’ Gaunt insisted.
‘On whose authority?’
Gaunt turned to glare at the officer. The man recoiled from the flash of electric green in the colonel-commissar’s eyes.
‘Talk to Edur. Clear it for me.’
‘Yes, sir.’
The man hurried away. Gaunt walked to the door of the observation chamber. He just wanted to look. He didn’t want to talk. He just wanted his eyes to see.
He let himself into the observation room, and looked into a tank cell through a murky one-way mirror.
The sanctioned torturers had left Prisoner B sitting in the cage chair, his face and head uncovered. The prisoner was staring straight ahead, apparently oblivious to his discomfort and prolonged confinement. He seemed to be staring directly at Gaunt, as if the mirror wasn’t one-way at all. In their wire cages, the phosphor lights filled the tank with a bilious green glow.
‘What the hell are you?’ Gaunt murmured, staring into the mirror. He jumped back with a start. The prisoner’s mouth had moved, as if in reply.
Gaunt reached over and threw the switch on the tank intercom.
‘What did you say?’ he demanded. ‘What did you just say?’
In the tank, the prisoner turned his head in several directions, surprised by the voice suddenly coming through the speakers. Then he looked back at the mirror.
‘I said it’s too late,’ he replied. ‘They’re here.’
‘Who’s here?’ asked Gaunt.
The prisoner didn’t reply. Gaunt looked up.
From somewhere in the huge mansion above them came the unmistakable sound of gunfire.
ELEVEN
The Assault
Section’s main gatehouse faced Viceroy Square. The watch had just changed, and the guards taking up their stations in and around the gate had been on duty for less than five minutes. Those men who were obliged to work outside, in the lea of the arch, performing stop-and-searches and vehicle checks, were still doing up their stormcoats and foul weather capes, and looking sourly at the snowfall.
One trooper, out by the barrier and stamping his feet to warm up, saw it coming, but he was dead before he could raise a cry. In the final few seconds of his life, he saw dark figures, indistinct and ominous, coming towards him through the silence of the square’s gardens, like phantoms conjured by the snow-light. The falling snow that veiled their menacing, steady approach seemed, to the young soldier, to be falling ever more slowly, like a pict-feed set on increasing increments of slow-motion until the feed, and the descending flakes, came to an unnatural, vibrating halt.
He was opening his mouth to remark upon both of these oddities when the blood wolf killed him.
It killed him in passing, with a gesture of its hand. It killed him on its way in through the gatehouse, throwing him aside with such force that the impact of his hurled body against the wall of the gatehouse pulverised most of his bones and left declarative pressure sprays of blood stippled across the snow.
The blood wolf was moving too fast for any human eye to properly follow it. The warp-wash that surrounded it distorted reality, making time run out of step, and the snow hesitate in mid-air. It flew in through the gatehouse, exploding both barrier beams like tinder. It made a keening noise like the bogies of a runaway train drawing sparks from steel rails. The keening caused the windows, even those specially strengthened to resist weapons fire, to shatter explosively. These blizzards of toughened glass, which moved far faster than the blizzards of snow in the gardens outside, shredded all the troopers caught in their blast zones. Two more guards were decapitated beside the inner barrier, and another by the door. Another, who was unfortunate enough to be standing directly in the blood wolf’s path, disintegrated on impact in a spray of gore like a jar of fruit conserve hit by a shotgun round.
A blood wolf is like a missile. You aim it and you fire. In the absence of the explosives that Valdyke had promised to procure, Eyl had been obliged to get his witch to conjure a blood wolf as the focus of the raid.
A sacrifice had therefore been required. Every single man in the philia had volunteered for the combat-honour. Eyl had eventually chosen Shorb, a choice his sirdars had approved. One by one, the men had gathered to say farewell to Shorb’s soul, and then they’d let the witch have him, to cut.
Eyl didn’t understand the process. He generally left such matters to the gore mages, but he understood enough to know that the conjurations that produced a blood wolf were not all that different from the conjurations that wove wirewolves, which were commonly used to police and protect the worlds of the Consanguinity. Those rites put a daemon-spirit into a conductor-body of metal, allowing it to walk abroad. The blood wolf rites put a daemon-spirit into a man’s body.