Gaunt let himself be carried over by the surging impetus of Eyl’s attack. He let himself fall onto his back, onto the hard white tiles. He let momentum carry the feverishly determined man in the silver grotesk clean over his head.
Eyl hit the floor with one shoulder just inside the chamber doorway, half-cartwheeled, and landed on the other side of the doorframe.
Gaunt swung up onto one knee and drew his bolt pistol to finish the contest.
The execution chamber hatch slammed shut in his face, putting ten centimetres of steel between him and the man in the silver grotesk. Their entire battle had lasted less than thirty seconds.
Gaunt looked up.
‘You needed to pull this,’ said Prisoner B. There was a heavy brass lever beside the door. Gaunt had missed it entirely. Engage the lever, and the hatch trundled shut on a geared mechanism. Small wonder the hatch had been impossible to budge with his shoulder. Prisoner B was leaning against the lever, and he was still breathing hard.
Fists, and possibly shots, began to bang against the other side of the hatch.
Gaunt rose to his feet.
‘I had him,’ he said. ‘You spoiled my shot.’
‘Yes, that’s right,’ replied the etogaur. ‘You had him.’
‘Is that sarcasm?’
‘Another ten seconds, and the damogaur would have been wearing your windpipe as a necklace.’
Gaunt sniffed, and spat pink saliva onto the white tiles. ‘He would have tried.’
‘He would have succeeded,’ Prisoner B replied.
‘You called him damogaur. You know him?’ asked Gaunt.
Prisoner B shook his head. ‘His mask told me his rank. I don’t know the man personally. They would have sent one of their best.’
‘To silence you?’ asked Gaunt.
‘To silence me.’
Gaunt looked around the execution chamber. Shutting the hatch had simply prolonged the inevitable. Once the Pacted warriors blew it, or broke it off its seal, death would be inescapable.
Gaunt cursed. At the same moment, a blow struck the hatch with such inhuman ferocity that the metal sill began to buckle.
Gaunt looked up. He eyed the ominous black gibbet beam that traversed the ceiling. Generations of ropes had been expertly looped around it by the Section house executioners. He could see the wear marks.
‘You should be glad this has happened,’ he said to Prisoner B.
‘What? This attack?’
‘Yes,’ said Gaunt.
‘Why?’ asked the etogaur.
Gaunt looked at him.
‘Because all of a sudden I’m taking you very seriously,’ he said.
Another blow buckled the hatch frame more significantly.
‘I think it’s time we left,’ said Gaunt.
‘How? There’s only one door.’
Gaunt nodded.
‘Yes, there is,’ he said, ‘but there are two levers.’
Gaunt walked to the other side of the grim chamber, to a second brass lever that matched the door control. The gallows drop, a trapdoor built seamlessly into the white-tiled floor, slammed open. Cold air blew up out of the black void.
They dropped. They dropped where, on a normal day, only the dead dropped, the dead or the split-second-from-dead.
The chute below the execution chamber was too gloomy for them to see or judge the bottom from the trapdoor, and too deep for them to land securely. Both of them fell and rolled, and jarred their bones. Gaunt prayed that neither of them had turned an ankle or broken something significant.
It was cold and dank, and smelled of hard stone. The trapdoor was a dull square of light and white tiles in the shadows above them. They were outside, in the pale snow-light of the yard. They heard the inner hatch of the execution chamber break at last and crash onto the tiles above them. They heard the snarling voices and the clattering feet of the would-be killers.
A tiny part of Gaunt wished they could have closed the trap, and left nothing but a vacant, white-tiled mystery behind them to delay and frustrate the Blood Pact.
There were no convenient brass handles on the dead side of the trapdoor, just a chilly chute in the open air where the bodies of the condemned were cut down and disposed of.
Gaunt hauled Prisoner B to his feet, and dragged him away from the chute’s bottom. Scant seconds later, gunfire blasted down through the trapdoor and sparked off the snow-blown cobbles.
They staggered out into the yard, into the open. The light was sickly yellow, and snow was swirling thickly. Gaunt tasted it on his lips and tongue, and felt it prickle on his face. Their boots crunched on the gathering snow. Somewhere in the building behind them there was a considerable explosion, which blew grit and debris down across the yard. Thick black smoke was pluming the winter sky, and Gaunt could hear flames. The end of Section’s administration wing was on fire. Shrill sirens continued to scratch the glass-cold air like diamonds. Gunfire chattered back and forth, like conversations between machines.
‘Head for the gate!’ Gaunt yelled.
The etogaur nodded, but he was slowing down. He was leaving a little trail of pattered blood across the crusted snow. It felt like a dream out in the yard, a delirious dream where everything was too slow and too bright, and too cold.
Behind them, Eyl and his men began to drop down through the execution trapdoor. They saw the fleeing figures through the billowing snow. Eyl roared a command and ran forwards. A couple of his men took aim.
The black staff car came out of the garage to their left without warning. Its engine was wildly over-revving, and its fat tyres squirmed on the snowy cobbles. Two or three of the Blood Pact’s shots punched into its bodywork. It fishtailed across the yard in an undignified skid, and wrenched to a halt, blocking Gaunt and the etogaur from the direct wrath of their attackers.
‘Get in,’ Wes Maggs yelled. ‘Get in the fething car, sir!’
Gaunt turned, baffled for a second. He saw the staff car, and Maggs leaning out from behind the wheel, shouting, his face red.
Gaunt bundled Prisoner B towards the car, and manhandled him into the back seat. Shots whined close. One destroyed a wing mirror, and another took out a door window in a shower of glass. Gaunt fired his bolt pistol in reply, blasting over the bonnet, and then threw himself in after the etogaur.
‘Go!’ he bellowed.
Maggs let out the clutch, and the big limousine lurched forwards, wheels slipping frantically.
It stalled.
‘For feth’s sake, Maggs!’ Gaunt howled. Las-rounds thumped into the body panels. Two passed clean through the passenger section, leaving neat little dots of daylight in the doors. The rear window shattered.
Maggs turned the engine over once, twice, and then it caught. He found the gear with an ugly grind of metal, and they sped forwards as more shots, both las and hard, smacked into them, punching holes. The car’s engine tone protested, and rose and fell unsteadily. The limousine juddered, and slewed across the inner yard, its wipers beating away the whirling snowflakes. It clipped one of the mechanics’ braziers, and spilled hot coals across the snow. Sparks flew up into the falling snow like luminous flakes.
‘The gate. Head for the gate,’ Gaunt yelled.
Shots were hitting the back of the car with such force that it felt like someone was repeatedly kicking the bodywork. Three hard rounds tore through the back of the canopy, and travelled through the car’s interior before burying themselves in the dashboard. One of them creased Maggs’s skull and sliced the top off his right ear. He howled in pain, and his ear bled with alarming vigour. The other side mirror exploded. The car lurched and wallowed. There was no grip.