‘The driver,’ he said.
‘Yes. He’s the one I’ve got,’ said Ulrike. ‘I am upon his soul. And he’s fighting back.’
‘Can you dispose of him?’
The witch smiled at her brother. Her veil was down, but he could feel the smile, like the hot leak of lethal radiation.
‘I can do better than dispose of him,’ she replied. ‘I can use him.’
‘What are you doing?’ Kolding cried.
Maggs turned and struck the doctor across the temple with the old gun. Kolding barked out a cry and fell hard. He tried to get up. Maggs kicked him, and then clubbed him across the back of the head with the butt of the gun.
Kolding dropped and lay still.
Still shaking, and sweating hard, his body stricken with the furnace of his fever, Maggs staggered over to the prisoner.
The etogaur was trembling beneath his heaped blankets. Sweat pasted his face. His eyes had rolled back, showing just whites.
Maggs poked the muzzle of the old gun against the etogaur’s head and pulled the trigger.
TWENTY-ONE
Bleed
Mkoll paused. He turned in a slow circle, reading the snow-covered ground.
He shook his head.
On the empty, winter street behind him, Preed and Jajjo were checking side turnings for traces. The chief scout was pretty sure they wouldn’t find anything either.
The signs had been there. From the gatehouse at Section, out into the streets, they’d been easy to track, as clear as day. It was snowing, for Throne’s sake! An absolute gift to any tracker. Gaunt might as well have left a trail of taper flares, or blood.
Something had begun to outfox the acute senses of the Tanith scouts. Something was deceiving Mkoll’s eyes and wits, and it was deceiving his best men too.
This snow was different. It wasn’t like any snow he’d ever read. It teased and it flirted, and promised to reveal all manner of secrets, but it was uncooperative. It blurred and it blended. It covered and it erased. It forgot more than it remembered.
It didn’t behave like snow.
Mkoll was certain, stone-cold certain, that there was something in the storm, some ugly influence in the bad weather that was deliberately blinding them and confounding them.
Silent as any ghost, Eszrah came up beside him.
Mkoll looked at the Nihtgane and shrugged.
Eszrah narrowed his eyes.
‘Close, he ys,’ he said.
Mkoll nodded. ‘Except it’s just so… you must have noticed it too, Ez. The trail’s wrong. The snow’s lying to me.’
Mkoll looked up. The distant, thudding shapes of the Valkyries were swinging around for another pass.
‘Jago,’ Eszrah replied.
Mkoll shrugged. ‘You’re right. You and me, we followed him across the dust of Jago and found him. We can find him again.’
Commissar Edur watched the progress of the search teams.
‘I hate to sound remotely impatient,’ he said to the Tanith officers, Kolea and Baskevyl, ‘but I expected a little more from the vaunted Ghost scouts.’
‘You’re not the only one,’ replied Kolea bluntly. ‘It’s not like Mkoll to be this much off his game.’
‘Explanation?’
Baskevyl shrugged. ‘Colonel-Commissar Gaunt has gone to ground. He’s an intelligent man, and he may have covered his tracks well. He knows how Mkoll and the scouts operate. He knows how to hide the signs they would look for.’
Edur pursed his lips. ‘Which begs the question: is he hiding to stay alive, or hiding because he’s guilty of something?’
He noted the expressions on the faces of Kolea and Baskevyl.
‘Just thinking aloud,’ he assured them. ‘The problem being that the inquisitor’s capacity for patience is going to be far less than mine.’
The three of them turned to look together. Further down the street, Rime and his circle of henchmen were grouped in quiet discussion. The displeasure on Rime’s face was readable even at a distance.
‘If he orders us out,’ said Edur, ‘we lose all control. Then, I’m afraid, Gaunt’s going to wind up dead, whether he’s guilty or not.’
Maggs fired. He fired and fired again. Nothing was coming out of the albino’s old gun. He’d used up everything in the gun’s clip shooting at the old dam.
Maggs tossed the empty pistol aside and bent down. He clamped his hands around the etogaur’s throat and twisted.
Gaunt slammed into him from the side, and tore him off the etogaur. Locked together in a tangle of limbs, Gaunt and Maggs rolled heavily across the partly boarded floor of the refurb, and collided painfully with a stack of fibreboard.
‘What are you trying to do?’ Gaunt yelled at the Belladon as he attempted to pin him and subdue him. The gunshots had brought Gaunt running.
Maggs didn’t reply in any properly articulate way. He shrugged his shoulders backwards violently, breaking Gaunt’s grip. The back of his skull butted into Gaunt’s cheek.
‘Maggs! Stop it,’ Gaunt warned, rolling clear.
Maggs made a gurgling, inhuman noise. He was back on his feet, hunched low, like an ape or an ursid. He drove at Gaunt. His teeth were bared in a snarling grimace: an animal’s threat display.
Gaunt couldn’t do much other than try to absorb the feral charge. Maggs ran into him, bear-hugging him, and they struck the pile of fibreboard together, again, this time on their feet. Gaunt had seen Maggs’s eyes. He knew the man had lost his mind. He could feel the grease of sweat on Maggs’s skin, the fever-heat throbbing out of him.
Maggs wrestled Gaunt into the fibreboards a third time, and tried to crush him into them. Gaunt jabbed his elbow down onto the back of Maggs’s neck. He had to repeat the ruthless blow several times before Maggs flinched away from the source of pain and released his grip.
As Maggs sprang away, Gaunt threw a punch that caught the Belladon’s jaw, and lurched him sideways into a pile of paint pails, buckets and loose timbers. Metal containers clattered as they fell. Trying to keep his feet, Maggs ploughed through the wood and the buckets with his arms milling and clawing, scattering the obstacles out of his way.
Gaunt moved forward to restrain him. He called out the Belladon’s name again, in the hope that it might snap some sense or recognition into the man.
Maggs came up, out of his stumbling collision with the paint pails, clutching a fat plank of timber. He hefted it like a bat or a club, and swung it. Gaunt had to jerk back to avoid being hit.
‘For Throne’s sake, Maggs.’
Maggs advanced on him, swinging the timber hard. Maggs was making a whining, sobbing noise.
‘Maggs!’
Gaunt tried to dodge around Maggs, but Maggs caught him across the shoulder with the makeshift club, and Gaunt fell sideways into one of the work curtains. He clutched at it for support, and the top edge tore away from its iron fixings with a sharp, rending sound. Maggs came at him again, the plank raised over his head in both hands, ready to slam across Gaunt’s skull.
Gaunt tried to shield himself. He twisted hard, wrapping the heavy curtain tarp around him and over his head. He felt the blow, but the lethal force of it was soaked up by the taut curtaining.
Gaunt scrambled free of the curtain, and stumbled into the adjoining chamber of the refurb. The curtain’s thick, waxy seams caught on the buttons of his uniform, tangling him, and he was forced to pull free of his coat to get clear. The contents of his pockets, upended, scattered onto the floor.
Maggs wrenched his way through the work curtain after Gaunt. He was still clutching the plank, and he was still whining and sobbing, the thick, wet sounds mixing with rapid panting noises. His eyes were pink and bloodshot. He blinked, trying to focus, trying to see where Gaunt had gone.