The man in the silver grotesk landed on the rear of the car with a thump. With his feet braced on the fender and the rear mudguard, and one hand clinging to the roof edge beading, he struggled to get the back door open.
‘Sacred feth!’ Maggs wailed, wrenching on the wheel. The limousine slewed wildly, but Eyl stayed on. Maggs aimed the car’s nose at the narrow gateway linking the side yard to the main gate yard in the front of the house. Eyl succeeded in pulling the rear door open and leaned in, stabbing at them with his ugly rite knife.
The car ran the narrow gate. The open door mashed against the gate post and slammed on Eyl’s arm. Once they were clear of the gateway, the dented door flapped open again, but Eyl withdrew his arm. He was trying to manoeuvre to get his body in through the door, and attack them face to face.
Maggs raced the car across the gatehouse yard. Men from Eyl’s murderous philia ran after it, rifles and carbines raised, but not risking a shot for fear of hitting their damogaur. The yard was littered with Imperial dead, the men cut down and butchered during the first minutes of the assault. They lay tangled and twisted under thin shrouds of snow. Greasy smoke as dark as gunpowder boiled out of the administration wing, and foamed across the yard in thick, oily ropes. The folds of it, fat and black, swirled up snowflakes like stars in the deep range void. Part of Section’s roof was ablaze. Tongues of vivid yellow flames leapt triumphantly at the snow-blurred sky.
As the car roared towards the main gatehouse, Eyl made one final attempt to get inside. Lurching on the backseat, Gaunt had drawn his pistol. He aimed it up through the canopy at Eyl’s head.
The man in the silver grotesk saw Gaunt’s weapon at the last second and threw himself off the car. The bolt-round punched through the canopy and split the light metal fabric open in great tattered petals like a cycad. Eyl hit the cobbles behind the speeding car in a roll that took several tumbles to arrest. He was getting to his feet as his men ran up to him. Imrie steadied his arm.
The staff car hurtled under the arch of the main gate and out of sight.
Eyl turned to his philia, congregating from all sides through the heavy snow. He noted that there were several missing, and knew that he’d never see them again.
He signalled. They were leaving. They were finished with the place. Their target was moving, and they had to pursue.
The staff car belted along the snow-quiet road, outside the stricken headquarters.
‘Which way?’ Maggs yelled, a note of panic in his voice. He was steering with one hand and pinching his wounded ear with the other. His hand and sleeve were wet with blood.
‘Just keep going,’ Gaunt instructed.
‘But–’
‘Just keep going,’ Gaunt repeated firmly. ‘Any way you like, so long as you keep them squarely behind us.’
‘They looked like Blood Pact!’ Maggs blurted.
‘They were Blood Pact,’ Gaunt replied. ‘Weren’t they?’
He looked at Prisoner B. The etogaur was sagging in the corner of the back seat. His eyes were glazing. When Gaunt moved to him, he found that where his hands touched the dark chestnut leather upholstery, they came away sticky with blood.
‘Throne!’ Gaunt snarled.
‘What is it?’ Maggs shouted over his shoulder.
‘He’s hit,’ Gaunt replied. ‘He’s losing blood.’
‘Who is he?’
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s complicated. All you need to know is that we need him alive. Keep driving.’
Gaunt propped the etogaur up. His eyes fluttered open.
‘You have to stay awake.’
The etogaur nodded.
‘I mean it. You have to stay awake. Do you understand?’ asked Gaunt.
Prisoner B began to close his eyes slowly.
Gaunt slapped him across the face. ‘Stay awake, Throne damn you. You need to stay awake. You need to live!’
The etogaur opened his eyes. There was a little more spark in them.
‘I will,’ he coughed.
The streets were mostly empty, as the snow had driven most people inside. Even so, Maggs’s reckless driving took them straight across a couple of junctions at speed, and traffic had to brake sharply to avoid him. One delivery van veered, mounted the pavement, and clipped a pollarded tree.
Gaunt peered out of the window, watching the old streets whip by. His mind was racing. Where were the security forces? The city-wide alarms? Where were the emergency cordons and the fast deploy reaction teams of the PDF? By now, the whole central area of the Oligarchy ought to have been locked down, the bridges closed, gunships overhead, troop carriers on the streets…
Unless warpcraft had sealed Section in a cone of deceit, and masked the brutal attack, so that the true infamy of the strike was only just seeping out into the world.
Warpcraft, witchcraft: he could smell it and taste it, and he’d had the scent of it ever since he’d been waiting in that anteroom. It explained a lot. It explained how an elite Archenemy strike team had been able to get so close to such a sensitive target so far behind Imperial lines. The man in the silver grotesk and his heathen killers weren’t alone on Balhaut. They had the most infernal support mechanisms guiding them, cloaking them and protecting them. From now on, nothing, not a single stone or snowflake in the world around them, could be properly trusted. The Blood Pact’s unholy shamans were warping a trap shut around them.
‘Get off the road.’
Gaunt snapped around. The etogaur was sitting up, much more alert and bright eyed than he had been.
‘Get off the road. It isn’t spent. It isn’t spent.’
‘What in the God-Emperor’s name are you talking about?’ Gaunt demanded.
Prisoner B didn’t reply. Gaunt realised that the etogaur had fallen into some kind of trance, perhaps brought on by wound-shock. He was trembling, his joints stiff and rigid.
Then Gaunt heard the keening sound, the sound he’d last heard in the depths of Section. Something was coming after them.
‘Get off the road!’ he shouted at Maggs.
‘What? Where?’
‘Anywhere. A side street!’
Maggs hauled on the steering wheel and swung the heavy car around into a narrow side street between old, age-blackened tenement offices. In the light of the streetlamps, permanently lit in this shadowy thoroughfare, the snow was falling in huge, downy clouds.
Turning had done no good. The keening grew louder.
The blood wolf had their scent.
The thing that had been Shorb wasn’t done. A great deal of energy had burned out of it, and a great deal of its strength had ebbed away, but a hot ingot of determination still glowed in the small part of its mind that remained sentient. It wanted to serve its damogaur. It wanted to serve its philia. It wanted to serve the Consanguinity. It was not going to give up. It was not going to fail them.
The pheguth had fled. He had escaped from under their noses, and was beyond the range of the philia moving on foot, but the blood wolf had the power and speed to catch up. A blood wolf could easily catch a car. It howled around the street corners of the snow-blasted city. It moved like an arctic wind or a leaping electrical arc. It made windows shake in their frames, and streetlamps pop and explode. Reality buckled and twisted in its warp-wash.
Gaunt could hear it coming closer.
He opened the dented back door of the idling staff car and stepped out into the snow. He looked up into the dim sky beyond the buildings that overhung him like silhouetted cliffs, and saw nothing but the billowing flakes.
He could hear it.
‘Hide,’ said Prisoner B in a small, hoarse voice from the back of the car. ‘Hide, run. Save yourself.’
With a shriek of tortured air, the blood wolf flew around the corner into the side street. It was two or three storeys up, above the line of the streetlamps, sailing like a bird through the static pattern of the snow. It wasn’t so much there as un-there: a moving blotch of corrupted air, like a stain in water or an imaging flaw in a pict-feed. Reality ulcerated and wept around it, as if the world was trying to reject it, and throw it back into the un-world of the warp from whence it had come.