So, she’d let the impulse bring her back towards Section. It had begun to snow by then. The snow was heavy, the sky was a sick colour, and there was a funny feeling to the afternoon. It wasn’t even that cold. Snow was settling in her hair and on her nose, but she was sweating like a grox in her exercise kit.
She was coming up Viceroy Square when she first realised that things weren’t right. What she’d taken to be heavy snow clouds turned out to be smoke. She could smell it. The building was on fire. There were sirens. There was gunfire, full-on gunfire from inside the walls. She came up into the tree-line of the gardens in the square, and saw bodies in the road beside the gatehouse.
She got down into the cover of the trees, her eyes wide in disbelief, her pulse banging in her ear for the first time in months. It was the old adrenaline high, the combat rush, conquering her with such fury that she couldn’t resist it. Every bit of conditioning she’d kept suppressed or contained since the Tanith had retired sprang back into place. She red-lined. All the old habits, all the old crazy tics, reasserted themselves, larger than life, as if they’d never gone. She could taste the sour saliva in her mouth. The lime tang of the soforso was long gone. She could smell the smoke, and it smelled like Hinzerhaus. She wanted, more than anything else, for there to be a weapon to hand, a rifle that she could arm and sight. Her hands felt ridiculously useless and empty, like numb paddles, miming the act of holding a rifle.
She tried to control her breathing. She tried to back away a little, without disturbing the snow on the bushes and shrubs around her. She tried to decide on the best course of action.
Raise the alarm: that was all she could think. Something this big, the whole city had to be aware of it, but there was no sign of people rushing in, of reinforcements, of support or relief.
It was as if the whole city had become snow-blind and was ignoring the drama unfolding at Section.
Criid began to crawl her way back through the gardens. The far side of the square would put her back on a main thoroughfare. She could run then. At full stretch, it was about ten minutes to the guardhouse at Zannen Street, and she was sure there was a PDF defence shelter closer than that. Failing either of those things, she’d find a Magistratum station or somewhere with a working vox.
She’d just risen in a crouch, about to risk a run across the snow-covered lawns to the gate of the gardens, when she realised there was someone under the trees nearby.
She turned to look. It was another bystander, she thought, someone who, like her, had come upon this scene of bloodshed by accident.
It was a woman. She was wearing a long mourning dress of black silk and crepe. Her face was covered by a veil of black gauze. She was standing under the trees, the boughs above her head weighed down by the increasing freight of snow upon them. She seemed to be staring at the main building of Section. Criid wondered if she ought to go to her, and offer to escort her to a safe distance away from the gunfire.
Something made her hesitate. It might have been her increasing awareness of a soft, high-pitched sound, like a drawn-out wail, that seemed to be emanating from the woman. It may have been a preternatural sense of self-preservation triggered by the abrupt return of her old adrenaline high.
Something simply made her hesitate. Something told her that taking another step towards the woman in the black silk dress was a Very Bad Idea.
The woman turned to look at Tona Criid. Her veil obscured her face, and Tona was instantly glad of that, because she instinctively knew that she didn’t want to see the woman’s face, ever.
The shrill sound was coming from the woman. It was just rushing out of her with no allowance for breath.
The snow had stopped falling. Tona realised it had stopped falling in mid-air. Snowflakes hung around her in a constellation, suspended in the act of descent.
She began to back away. The woman in the black dress stared at her. Tona took a step forwards.
The shrill sound continued to come out of the woman. She raised her right hand to lift the corner of the veil.
Criid let out an anguished cry, and turned. She started to run. The world was slow, like glue, like treacle. The shrill sound was in her ears. Suspended snowflakes puffed into powder as her flailing arms collided with them. Her feet churned the snowy grass underfoot, and she went down, falling hard.
The shrill sound was in her ears. It was louder. Criid knew it was louder because the woman was getting closer. She also knew it was louder because the woman had lifted the veil. She thrashed, trying to rise. Her legs kicked at the snow. She felt something close around her pumping frantic heart, and grip it, like a ghostly fist. It began to squeeze, constricting the muscles. She knew that unless she got up and started running, that unless she ran and ran until she was out of its reach, it would keep squeezing until her heart burst like a blister.
Her limbs thrashed, sending snow flying. She got up. Her chest was so tight, and the shrill sound in her ears was so loud. She didn’t look back. She didn’t want to look back.
She didn’t dare look back.
She started to run. She started to run more seriously than she had ever run in her life.
Maggs took a battered old tin out of one of the cupboards, took off the lid, sniffed inside, and then tilted the tin towards Gaunt.
‘Caffeine,’ he said.
‘Make some,’ said Gaunt. ‘Enough for three cups.’
Maggs nodded, and began to look around the small kitchen for a suitable pan. Gaunt sat down at the kitchen table. The table top was lined and worn. It had been, Gaunt felt, the location of many solitary suppers.
The kitchen stood off the landing over the steps down to the theatre. There had been no sound from below for a long time.
‘So, this is pretty fething insane, then, isn’t it?’ said Maggs, by way of striking up a conversation. They hadn’t said much to one another since their panicked flight from Section.
Gaunt nodded.
‘That was Blood Pact?’
‘Yes.’
‘Really? Here?’
‘Yes, Maggs.’
Maggs whistled. He ignited one of the sooty old stove’s burners and set a pan of water on it.
‘Pardon me for asking, sir,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he was delicately skirting a thorny issue, ‘shouldn’t we contact someone? I mean, summon help, alert the authorities?’
Gaunt looked at him.
‘Who do we contact, Maggs? Who should we trust, do you suppose?’ he asked.
Maggs opened his mouth to answer, and then closed it again.
‘The Blood Pact have infiltrated an ostensibly secure crown world,’ said Gaunt. ‘They’ve done so with enough confidence and ability to stage a frontal assault on the Commissariat’s headquarters. They’ve got warpcraft on their side. We have absolutely no idea how far their reach and influence extends. Let’s say we were to head back to Aarlem, or to company command, or say we take him to the Imperial hospital for treatment. We could be walking into a trap. Until I know what’s going on, I’m not going to trust anyone.’
Maggs shrugged. He was spooning out the ground caffeine powder into a cup.
‘You’re trusting this doctor chap.’
‘Necessity. That’s all. We had no choice. Better a backstreet clinic like this than a big, central facility.’