It swept down at them, keening.
Gaunt raised his bolt pistol and fired. He couldn’t see a target, but he could see its absence. He could see the moving shadow of the warp besmirching the air.
As the blood wolf raced down at them, every streetlamp it passed shattered and darkened. The snow stopped falling and hung, suspended, in the yellow gloom. Gaunt’s shots seemed to hit nothing. He threw himself flat.
The blood wolf swept over them, shaking the staff car violently on its shocks. Several more side windows cracked or blew out. The headlamps exploded. The blood wolf was turning, banking in the air, coming around again.
It came right at Gaunt. He tried to shoot it, and then threw himself desperately out of its path, colliding with the car on his way down. The running board smacked into his wrist, and his bolt pistol spun out of sight. He felt the rush of the blood wolf pass over him, shaking the car again.
The keening was right in his ears.
He rose, looking for a weapon. The blood wolf was circling for a final pass.
The back door of the staff car hung open. On the back seat, pale with blood loss, Prisoner B sat in an almost catatonic state. Maggs was shouting. Gaunt saw something, just a flash.
Damogaur Eyl’s rite knife was embedded in the rear footwell carpet where he had dropped it.
Gaunt leaned in and grabbed the ugly blade. He turned, raising its dirty, jagged length to meet the blood wolf’s warp.
His eyes really saw it. He could see past the warp-wash and the buckled, blistered distortion of reality. He could see the thing inside, the screaming, flaying-raw thing, its energies almost gone, its once-arms outstretched into wing-claws, its once-mouth wide open in a scream. He could see the blood pumping furiously in its exposed veins and arteries. He could see the gristle and tendons of its joints, and the remaining shreds of its skin, shrivelling and blackening like paper as they burned away.
Its mouth opened impossibly wide to bite through Gaunt’s skull. Teeth the size of fingers sprouted like tusks from its receded gums for the purpose.
Gaunt rammed the rite knife into its heart.
The blood wolf screamed, and perished in a clap of un-thunder. There was a fierce pressure drop and a burst of freezing air, as if a cryo-bay hatch had opened and then slammed again. The blast threw Gaunt back into the car with enough force to dent the side panels. Charred gristle, sticky brown meat and bone fragments rained down, littering an area with a five-metre radius.
Gaunt sat up and blinked. The rite knife was cooked black with soot, as if it had been left in a grate.
Its pause suspended, the snow calmly and silently began to fall again.
THIRTEEN
Awry
There was a word for the CO of the Bremenen 52nd, but it wasn’t one Viktor Hark would ever use around ladies.
As he stomped back towards the Tanith barracks in the blowing snow, there were no ladies present, so he used it freely and often.
During the lull triggered by the day’s heavy snowfall, he had trudged across the exercise quad for a quiet word with the commander of the neighbouring regiment, in the hope of patching up some of the bad feeling that had begun to eclipse inter-regimental relations, thanks to months of boredom and escalating practical jokes. Unfortunately, the Bremenen CO had chosen that morning to breakfast on iron filings, have his sense of humour amputated at the neck, and sit down very suddenly on a broom handle, as a consequence of which he was as rigid and unyielding as a sheet of flakboard. His response to Hark’s off-the-record nice-making had been dismissive, and he’d essentially blamed the catalogue of infractions and write-ups entirely on the Tanith ‘tricksters’. Then he’d given Hark a curt, ‘Good day to you’ to take home with him.
The Bremenen had done their share in the months they’d been stationed side by side. Of course they had. It had been tit for tat every step of the way, and some of the earliest run-ins had been playful and forgivable. Hark knew that, and he knew that the Bremenen CO knew it too, but it had stopped being funny some time before, and Hark understood that the Bremenen CO had simply had a gut-full. He wasn’t going to tolerate it any more, and part of his not tolerating it was to dump the whole thing on the Tanith.
The wind was bringing the snow in across the quad in huge, smoking clouds like flour caught in a mill’s through-draught. There was a good hand’s depth on just about every surface, and the ice-flakes were stinging his nose and lips, and catching in his eyelashes. Hark had his collar turned up and his hands stuffed into his stormcoat pockets. The snow cover was so heavy that the sodium lights around the Aarlem compound had come on in response to the gloom. Snowflakes batted dizzily around the hooded glow of the lights like moths.
It was all turning to crap, and Hark had had a gut-full too. In the years that Hark had been with the Tanith, he’d seen them on the verge of defeat and almost destroyed, but he’d never seen them so close to disintegration. They’d been inert too long. They had become bored and fractious, and spiteful. They’d been without an enemy for so long, they’d invented one, and it was themselves. Their idleness and frustration had turned them into wasters and idlers, and worse.
Every day, there was a list of fresh fethery. Hark was running out of options. Some men had crossed the line so often he was hard-pressed to know how to punish them, and just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, some new monster raised its head, and took his breath away. This thing with Rawne and the others, with Daur for feth’s sake! That was a whole new league of crap.
Daur was a yardstick. There wasn’t a straighter man in the regiment. That was how far they’d slipped. Every night when he went to his bed, and every morning when he woke, Viktor Hark offered up a little prayer to the God-Emperor of Mankind. It went:
For feth’s sake, post us. Post us today or tomorrow. We need a war.
Peacetime had been remarkably revealing about the Tanith character. Kilo for kilo, they were the best infantry troops Hark had ever seen or had the pleasure of serving with. In the field, they had an abundance of skills and an abundance of courage, and they were, in the strangest way, extraordinarily principled. They took pride in a sort of moral code that entirely forgave any lapses in discipline of conduct. They flourished in adversity.
They were not a garrison force. They were not a regiment you could put into reserve or turnaround, and expect them to sit tight and behave themselves in a safe little barracks compound. They would not spend their time polishing their buttons and practising their parade drill and reading their primers. Well, they would, but it wouldn’t be enough. They would get crazy.
The Tanith (and this quality had spread to the non-Tanith in the First) were a wild force. In the field, you didn’t notice their rough edges. Retire them to Balhaut for a year or two, and they were like caged animals. They wanted to get out, and if they couldn’t get out, they wanted to bite the hand off the next idiot who tried to feed them.
The Bremenen were a garrison force. There was nothing wrong with them; they were a decent, unexceptional, well-drilled infantry outfit. To them, two years turnaround on Balhaut was a sweet deal, the posting they’d been hoping for their entire service. For the Tanith, it was a prison sentence.