‘No wonder he’s such a fethwaste,’ Maggs muttered.
‘Doctor Kolding,’ Gaunt began, ‘I think that I should drive.’
‘Why?’
‘You’re evidently having problems with the snowy conditions. It’s taxing you. I have recent training in cold weather driving.’
‘Do you?’ asked Kolding.
The doctor brought the ambulance to a long, lingering halt, and he and Gaunt got out and crossed sides.
Behind the wheel, Gaunt tested the controls, let out the clutch, and raced them forward.
‘That was a lie, wasn’t it?’ asked Kolding.
‘What?’
‘Your recent training in cold weather driving?’
Gaunt nodded.
‘The lamps hurt your eyes, don’t they?’ he asked. ‘That’s why you are driving at night in dark glasses.’
Kolding didn’t reply.
‘I have a slight advantage,’ said Gaunt. He double-blinked and switched his focal field to high-gain, low light. Streetlamps or no streetlamps, the way ahead lit up for him.
Karhunan retraced his steps up the street, though his steps were almost gone. His boots chuffed in the ever-thickening snow cover.
The damogaur was examining the car their quarry had used. Six members of the philia, under Malstrom’s leadership, stood watch in the street around him.
Eyl looked at Karhunan.
‘They were in the building nearby, magir,’ said the sirdar, ‘but they have gone. Another vehicle. Imrie and Naeme are already following its tracks. If we deploy fast, we will catch up and–’
‘We’ll catch up anyway,’ Eyl replied. ‘No need to go chasing through this weather.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Karhunan.
‘Look what we’ve got,’ Eyl answered. He stroked his fingertips along the back of the car’s driving seat. They came away tacky and dark.
‘Bring my sister here,’ he said. ‘We’ve got their blood.’
When she couldn’t run any more, Tona Criid hid instead. Her muscles were burning as if someone was spiking hot wires into them, and she was close to throwing up.
The shrill sound had gone away at some point, and the constriction had faded. A few streets away from Section, a few streets from Viceroy Square where that veiled thing had been standing under the snow-dusted trees, she forced her way into an empty building.
Though the Oligarchy and Balopolis had been the epicentre of the most brutal fighting during the war for Balhaut, much of the so-called Old Side seemed to have been miraculously spared. Closer inspection put the lie to that. Many of the buildings were shells: gutted structures that had stood empty for a decade and a half with litter collecting in their wind-blown floors. A few had begun to be included in Balhaut’s trudging programme of renewal. In places, old buildings were being demolished and lots cleared to make room for new construction. In others, labour gangs had moved in to renovate and restore the buildings still sound enough to be worth saving.
Criid holed herself up in one of the latter. The windows had been recently covered with whitewashed boards, and there was a strong smell of creosote and young, sawn timber. Dust sheets and protective curtains had been strung between rooms, or erected to close sections where dividing walls had been taken down. The work curtains, heavy and dirty from re-use, stiff with old paint and varnish, swung in the night air, moved by the breath of the snowstorm outside. The day crew had left paint drums, long-handled mop-brushes, sawhorses and stacks of cheap fibreboard behind. An upper floor had been taken away, leaving a space like the interior of an artisan’s church, the vault bridged by a half-skeleton of new joists and crossbeams in clean, yellow wood.
Her heart rate was all over the place, and her breathing was ragged. Her hands were quaking so much that she struggled to use them. She snapped the head off one of the long mop-brushes, and used baler twine to lash her warknife to the end as an improvised spear. No gun, but a little more range than a knife, at least. Then she sat down in a corner behind some stacked fibreboard and rested the spear across her lap.
Her body was in turmoil. She knew that. The chronic tension of life in a warzone bent a person’s biology out of shape, and left it fit for nothing else. It built shortcut response pathways, and bred bad habits. It altered hormone values and metabolic functions to tolerate prolonged and elevated stress. It modified you to get you through, whatever it took, and then left the modifications in you when you returned to what was laughingly referred to as normal life. It left them with corrosive physiological and psychological damage that took a thousand times longer to erase than it had taken to inflict.
The worst part, as she was now discovering, wasn’t coping with the post-combat fall out; it was getting your old, bad self, your combat self, switched back on without warning. She’d gone from nothing to superluminal in a second. The toxic flood of hormones and responses had left her almost stupefied. There was a sheen of sweat on her skin, and she knew that she stank of fear. Her mind was numb except for a little tiny nugget at the heart of it, like the dense metal heart of a neutron star that was screaming with radioactive rage.
She tried to control her breathing. She tried to employ some of the focus techniques that Mkoll had taught her for stealth work. It was futile. It was like trying to grasp water. In the end, she gave up and, with a brittle laugh, decided that she might be better off just surrendering to the tide.
After an hour or more, during which she sank into a fugue state, she roused herself, and felt a little more clarity. The old mindset, the one that allowed you to function in the zone, was back so concretely it was as if it had never gone away. She started to be able to think instead of just react.
In her opinion, the biggest problem was the world outside. She simply couldn’t understand how the debacle at Section could have happened without all hell resulting. Where were the suppression teams? The counter-forces? The security squads with their armoured cars and fear-gas canisters? Where was the PDF and the fething Guard? The city should have been screeching with raid sirens by now. The skies should have been dense with gunships.
It was quiet out there. It was as if the city had gone into traumatic shock, struck dumb and paralysed. It was as if the snowfall had some kind of anaesthetic property. She couldn’t shake the notion that the silent streets were crawling with unchallenged Archenemy soldiers.
She decided she had no choice but to make her way back to Aarlem Fortress. She hadn’t got anything like enough left in her to run the route, but she was confident that if she took it steadily, she could make it back before dawn.
She hadn’t gone far when she heard a vehicle approaching, its engine tone labouring as it coped with the snow. It stood out a mile. There was nothing else around. Criid stopped and listened. Perhaps it was PDF moving in at long last. Perhaps it was the transport component of a relief column advancing into the city’s heart.
Instinct told her it wasn’t. It was just one engine, one machine, and a small one at that. It was someone mysteriously active in the mysteriously empty streets.
She decided to take a look, and closed in on the approaching sound source. When it came in sight, she fell back, clutching her spear. The vehicle, just a dark blob on the snowy thoroughfare, was driving without lights: without lights, at night, in a snowstorm.
That was deliberate, and it was sinister. Swallowing hard, she took one last look, then retreated to hide in an alley long before the occupants could see her.
She waited. The vehicle didn’t go by. It stopped.
She cursed and hefted up the spear. There was no way she’d been spotted, but why had it stopped?