The sirdar moved forward to finish the man’s injured colleague, but the limp body was already dead. Karhunan raised his hand and made some quick pact signs to direct his men.
The element rushed on. Several of the men were wielding clean, new Imperial Guard weapons they had taken from the dead.
Alarms were ringing furiously, and the air was filling with sounds of gunfire and shouting, and the increasingly acrid smell of smoke.
‘What in the name of the Throne is this about?’ Mercure roared as he burst out of the conference room with his agitated aides in tow. There was panic outside. Staff members were fleeing down the corridor without any discipline or composure. Troopers were clattering in the opposite direction, trying to marshal the fleeing personnel, and trying to fathom, like Isiah Mercure, what the hell was happening in the middle of an afternoon at the heart of an Imperial stronghold.
It wasn’t a drill. Mercure knew that immediately. You could ring the alarm bells and raise a hue and cry, and even stand out in the yard and fire a gun into the air to generate an atmosphere of urgency for a shake-down drill, but no one would ever go to the bother of putting that subtle flavour of burning into the wind, and the best drill coordinator couldn’t manufacture the tight look of real fear and bewilderment that Mercure could see on the faces around him.
Besides, a shake-down this big couldn’t be staged without his approval and knowledge, and nobody on the staff was gun-eatingly mad enough to have set something up on an afternoon when Mercure was head-to-head in the main meeting room with grox-loving sons of bitches from the ordos.
Everyone was shouting and gabbling. A squad of soldiers almost knocked Mercure down in their urgency to reach the front of the building.
‘Shut up. Shut up!’ Mercure yelled. ‘I asked a question. Shut up, listen to me, and answer it! What’s going on?’
‘Section is under attack, sir!’ a junior commissar replied in a voice squeaky with anxiety. Mercure punched him in the mouth hard enough to knock him off his feet.
‘I didn’t ask for the bloody obvious!’ Mercure shouted. ‘Give me plain facts. Give me something I can use!’
‘Protocol 258,’ said Commissar Edur, suddenly appearing at Mercure’s side. Edur had a squad of S Company storm-troopers with him, and a look of true and solemn concern in his dark, handsome eyes.
Mercure looked at Edur in disbelief. ‘No. That bad? Edur, tell me!’
‘Protocol 258 is in effect, sir,’ replied Edur. ‘Sergeant Daimer and his men will escort you to the safe area, and evac you if necessary.’
The storm-troopers closed in, shoving the aides aside to get at Mercure. They were big men, armoured in black and green, their shoulder guards bearing the silver flash insignia of S Company, the Commissariat’s close protection detail assigned to guard the most senior personnel. When Protocol 258 was put into effect, you didn’t argue with S Company, not even if you were Isiah Mercure.
‘How bad?’ Mercure demanded as Daimer and his men moved in around him.
‘A significant assault,’ Edur called back. ‘Many casualties. As far as we know, a squad of some size, perhaps as many as twenty or thirty men, hit the main gate four minutes ago. Some are already in the building.’
‘Who the hell are they?’ one of the senior aides demanded. ‘I mean, who the hell attacks Section HQ on Balhaut?’
Hemmed in by the S Company men, Mercure looked at Edur. Their eyes met. Neither of them knew the precise answer to the aide’s frantic question, but they knew enough to realise that the answer wasn’t going to be pleasant.
‘Oh God-Emperor,’ Mercure murmured. ‘Someone’s come for him.’
‘I think so, sir,’ Edur replied.
‘We’ve got to move you now, sir, I’m sorry,’ Sergeant Daimer insisted, and the protection detail started to manhandle Mercure away.
‘They can’t have him, Edur!’ Mercure yelled. ‘You hear me? They can’t have him. You know what to do. No mistakes.’
‘Yes, sir!’ Edur shouted back over the general pandemonium. He was about to add something else when he heard the weird, keening noise. It was coming from somewhere behind him. It sounded like a night wind shrieking down the stack of an old chimney.
The blood wolf burst into the long hallway. Edur turned, and saw it, yet did not see it. He knew something was coming, something that wailed like an old flue, something that bubbled reality around itself, like a cloak of un-being. Edur gagged. He felt bile rise in his throat. He pulled out his bolt pistol. His hand was shaking.
The blood wolf entered the hallway at the far end, and though it was essentially invisible, its passage down the hall towards them was vividly narrated by the carnage it wrought. The wooden doors splintered in an explosive blizzard of pulp and fragments. The carpet scorched and shrivelled. Section personnel, ranged along the hallway, began to die, as if some murderous wave was sweeping through them. Bodies were suddenly severed and collapsed in fountains of blood, as if snipped in two or three or even four by giant, invisible shears. Others burst like blood blisters, or were smashed aside into the walls and ceiling by unseen, demented hands.
The tide of destruction bore down on them. Edur raised his weapon. The S Company storm-troopers opened fire with their hellguns. Droplets of blood from the wolf’s killing spree had filled the air like raindrops, and now hesitated in their descent like the snowflakes outside.
There was a loud bang that jarred Edur’s teeth and hurt his eyes. A beam of force had hit the bubble of tortured light that hid the blood wolf from the side.
The blood wolf was blasted sideways into the hallway wall, leaving a ghastly skidmark of blood smeared across the wallpaper. It fell, scrabbling, wounded, winded, and Edur realised that he could see something properly, for the first time. A human shape was making frenzied animal motions inside the blue of warp-wash, something flayed and bloody that screamed and thrashed its limbs with inhuman violence. Edur saw the white enamel of bared teeth against the bloody mass of the whole. He saw reality blotching and distorting around its clotted, skinned form, and it made him vomit.
A second beam of force hit it, and made it writhe backwards. The keening increased in pitch.
Handro Rime, the inquisitor, had emerged from the meeting room. His mane of hair was lifting in a wind that seemed to be affecting only him. He was brandishing a sceptre, an ornate metal rod the length of a walking cane that looked as though it had been fashioned from chromium steel. It fizzled with power, as if a charge was running through it. The top end was shaped like a winged human skull.
There was a third, painful bang. Another beam of force, like a needle of light, spat from the skull-top of the sceptre that Rime was holding and struck the baying blood wolf. This time, the beam was continuous, pinning the thing to the ground. Rime’s henchmen spread out around him and drew their weapons. Edur could see the strain on Rime’s face. Several ripples of warp-vapour crackled out of the gibbering thing, and then all the blood droplets hanging in the air fell at once, in real time, and covered the floor with a million tiny splashes like the first few seconds of a monsoon.
‘I believe I have it contained,’ Rime yelled through gritted teeth. ‘Get Senior Commissar Mercure to a place of safety!’
Edur shook himself and turned to obey. He fell in with the storm-troopers, and they began to hurry Mercure away. Mercure was staring in ashen disgust at the thing the inquisitor was attempting to ensnare, and at the bloody horror that it had left in its wake.
‘Get downstairs!’ Mercure stammered at Edur. ‘Get downstairs and see to it!’