Even the things that survived a war, even the things left standing, came out of it with scars.
He went back to the chamber where the others were holed up. Maggs was asleep, and Kolding was sitting quietly beside the swaddled prisoner on the stretcher. Criid was watching the street from an unboarded side window.
‘Anything?’ he asked her.
‘It’s very quiet,’ she replied. ‘I think they’ve got the whole town bewitched.’
Gaunt shook his head.
‘Don’t think of it that way,’ he said. ‘Don’t make them bigger monsters than they are. They’re tough, and they’ve got unholy warpcraft, but there can’t be that many of them. I’m pretty sure this is an insertion, not a full-scale invasion. The snowstorm is just bad timing, a coincidence.’
‘Really?’
‘We’re not going to beat them unless we can beat them in our heads first. Don’t hand them that advantage.’
Criid nodded, and flashed a grin, but she didn’t look altogether convinced.
Gaunt went back to the ambulance and sat with his back against one of the wheel arches to rest. He was sore and bruised from the day’s endeavours, especially from the feral brawl with the maniacal damogaur. Criid and Maggs were both jumpy, but only now did he realise how far back down he had had to come himself. The day had plunged him back into a life or death world that he hadn’t visited in two years. It had been unpleasant: a shock, yet horribly familiar. His jaw muscles were clenched, his spine and the small of his back were damp, and there was a stale taste in his mouth. Just the day before, in the Mithredates with Blenner, he’d been complaining about how impatient he was to go out and re-acquaint himself with war.
He’d never expected it to come and find him.
He fished inside his coat for Eszrah’s copybook, intending to steady his nerves by reading another of the Nihtgane’s painstakingly transcripted myths. They were fascinating. They contained old wisdoms about hunting and warcraft. He would, he resolved, when circumstances allowed, examine them carefully, and perhaps even learn from them. He had not, so far, been able to give them the attention they deserved.
When he pulled out the copybook, a folded sheet of paper fell out of its pages onto the ground between his legs. It was a letter, with a finely printed letterhead at the top of the sheet. It was a polite introduction from a Mr Jaume, a photographic portraitist.
Gaunt realised that he’d pulled out his own copybook. Eszrah’s, virtually identical, was in the opposite side of his jacket. The letter, the one poor Beltayn had insisted Gaunt had seen and which he’d denied all knowledge of, had been tucked into the cover of his book, probably since the morning it had arrived at Aarlem.
He folded it up to put it away, and noticed the letterhead. The address of Jaume’s studio was listed as ‘137 Carnation Street, off Moat Street’. Moat Street. That’s where he’d seen it. It wasn’t a memory of the Balhaut War at all, just a little speck of driftwood that had got jumbled up in his head.
Eyl stood quietly in the kitchen of Doctor Kolding’s house on Kepeler Place. Though the middle of the night was not long past, a blue twilight was beginning to seep in through the windows. First light, and though the snowstorm had not eased off, the first hint of daylight was being magnified and reflected by the enfolding whiteness.
Apart from Kreeg, who was standing watch inside the front door, and Gnesh, who was minding the lower street access from the ambulance garage, the men of the philia were resting in the upper rooms of the house. Twenty-nine men; his force had been reduced to twenty-nine men. Kaylb Sirdar was gone, the first to die. Eyl had not witnessed the death to place it into any kind of definitive chronology, but he knew his sister couldn’t lie.
Eyl had taken off his grotesk. He relished the pain in his hands, chest and face where the carbine had been exploded in his grasp and left him gashed and burned. The injuries reminded him he was alive, just as they reminded him who had to die.
Time was slipping away. With every passing minute, their mission became harder, the odds greater, the opposition more resolved. The philia had spent its weapon of surprise, and Eyl estimated they had only a few more hours left in which to exploit the enemy’s shock. By morning, he thought, the Imperials will have gathered their wits and rallied. They will have closed the city down and begun the hunt for us.
Until then, Eyl meant to make the best use of his time. The city environs were still caught in an un-state, the sick half-light of the warpcraft that his sister had cast over the metropolis to numb, baffle and confuse. The storm continued unabated, and lent to them its gifts of concealment and mystery. The philia still had enough time to do its work. Once again, his sister was the key.
Eyl picked up one of the half-empty enamel mugs that was standing on the worn kitchen table. Out of curiosity, he sipped the cold, black liquid inside.
It tasted of blood. Everything tasted of blood.
He went downstairs to find his sister.
She was in the small surgical theatre that lay behind the swing doors at the bottom of the stone steps. Eyl pushed the doors open gently. He had no wish to make her jump or disturb her work.
And she was most certainly at work.
Eyl knew that the men of the philia had withdrawn into the house’s upper rooms so that they did not have to linger too close to her witchery. Proximity to Ulrike’s craft caused the skin to prickle and the heart to go frantic.
Eyl swallowed back the bile that had rushed up his throat.
‘Sister?’
She had taken winding sheets of white cloth from a storage cupboard, and pinned them to the theatre’s wood panelled walls using surgical blades, turning the sheets into stretched canvases. Then she’d made blood marks upon them.
She’d located the theatre’s source of blood stock, a refrigerated unit beside the scrub sink, and raided its contents. Empty transfusion packets, torn open and discarded, were scattered across the tiled floor. She’d squirted, shaken and splashed the contents of the packets across the sheets.
As Eyl approached, she was gazing at the marks, her wet, red hands by her sides, dripping on her mourning skirts.
‘What do you see?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. It’s all broken. Disjointed. Incomplete.’
‘Why?’
She shrugged. ‘The future doesn’t want me to see it.’
Eyl bent down and picked up one of the emptied blood packets. He read the label.
Synthetic blood supplement.
‘This isn’t real blood,’ he said. ‘It’s artificial. Made in a vat.’
She nodded.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I can read. I thought it would work.’
She squinted again at the blood marks on the sheets, the blackberry darkness of the blood, the yellow-pink halo stains of the plasma.
‘I’ll have to use real blood. Bleed myself. Give me your rite knife, brother.’
‘I lost it,’ he admitted.
She turned to him. He could feel the heat of her gaze from behind the veil.
‘Upon my soul,’ she said, ‘that is unfortunate.’
‘It is what it is,’ he replied, though he knew she was right. ‘Tell me about the real blood.’
Striding like a headstrong child, she went over to the counter immediately. She’d emptied and washed a couple of the glass sterilising baths, and filled them with blood product. Suspended in the red liquid, Eyl could see the strips of bloodstained leather that Malstrom and Barc had cut from the upholstery of the limousine.