No one spoke.
‘In fact,’ said Rawne, ‘this is the most fun I’ve had in ages.’
He began to chuckle. Leyr began to chuckle too.
After a moment, the chuckling had become proper laughter, and Banda had joined in.
Even Daur couldn’t suppress the grin on his face.
Meryn entered the parlour.
‘And then Meryn walks in and spoils it all,’ said Rawne. The laughter died away.
‘What?’ asked Meryn.
‘Give us the bad news,’ said Rawne. ‘I can tell it’s going to be bad news from the look on your face.’
Meryn pointed at Csoni.
‘That chump’s EM bomb screwed everything,’ he said.
‘How?’ asked Rawne.
‘The vox is down and dead. We’ve lost contact with Aarlem, and I think it’s permanent.’
Hark was snoring. Ludd tugged his sleeve.
‘What?’ Hark asked. ‘I’m not asleep, Ludd.’
‘Of course not, sir,’ said Ludd.
‘What time is it?’ Hark asked, sitting up. It was gloomy in the temple house, with just the glow of the vox-caster dials and the snow-light coming in through the windows.
‘Early,’ said Ludd, ‘and late. Beltayn’s taken over from Rerval.’
‘And something’s awry?’ asked Hark.
‘Beltayn tried to make the scheduled check in,’ said Ludd. ‘He’s tried six times in the last half an hour. No joy. Major Rawne’s signal has gone dark.’
Ana Curth woke up in the middle of utter darkness with a gasp.
She steadied herself. She was in her cot in Aarlem.
She’d been dreaming about Zweil and how she’d break the news to him. In her dream, he wouldn’t listen to reason. She understood denial. It was one of the recognised stages.
She got out of bed in her single billet, a luxury reserved for only the most senior officers. Gaunt had secured her room for her. The deck was cold under her bare feet. Outside, it seemed to have stopped snowing at last. The night sky was oddly grey, flowing with departing clouds.
She’d talked to Dorden, and they’d decided that the news would be better coming from her. Zweil liked Curth, he treated her with affection and concern. Better from her.
But how to do it?
Ana Curth knew all about denial, because she’d denied herself everything, including the hope of salvation, in the time she’d spent on Gereon. She knew what a death sentence felt like, too, because Gereon had all but killed her.
How could she break it to the dear old ayatani and make him understand? She got dressed, and let herself out of her room.
She needed guidance. She decided she’d sit herself down in the temple house and reflect. The calm darkness would soothe her, and allow her mind to rally. No one would be in the temple house at this hour.
She pushed open the door into the temple, but was stopped in her tracks.
Hark, Beltayn and Ludd looked around at her with guilty faces from the glow of a vox-caster propped up on a pew.
‘What the–?’ she asked.
‘Ah,’ said Hark, rising to his feet. ‘Ana, this is going to be a little awkward.’
The snowstorm had died off, and left in its vacuum a deadness of thick darkness, a stagnant hollow of night that had swallowed the whole city.
The sky had cleared, and the stars came out like static snowflakes, but the air temperature had dropped so sharply that engine fluids began to freeze. Spotter Valkyries and search birds were called down to wait for dawn. The Tanith hunt elements were recalled, unwillingly, to Section, to wait for first light.
In the empty streets of Old Side, the philia kept hunting. Eyl’s men threaded corners and side turnings in the vicinity of the refurb, their breath wisping into the glassy air from the mouth slits of their masks. Like the night, the trail had gone cold.
Eyl and the witch sheltered nearby.
‘Find him,’ he told his sister.
She shrugged. She was sitting on the floor in a heap of her folded skirts.
‘I can’t!’ she hissed through her veil.
They’d broken into the house together. It was a nothing special place, just a residence on the by-road, a home to six members of the same family and two servants, shuttered in because of the snowstorm.
Ulrike had killed them all. Like a daemon, like a fury, she had cut them down. The image of her frenzy made Eyl shudder, and he had done his share of things in his time. What disturbed him was the mania of it, and the fact that Ulrike had been able to make cuts like sword wounds with the merest flicks of her fingers.
So much blood had been spilled, with sufficient frenzy, that the walls had become pressure-painted, and the air was still dewed with aspirated molecules of blood. There was a blood mist in the house.
Ulrike was trying to read the blood. She had eviscerated all the corpses, so as to read their prognostications.
She flung the clotted ropes of meat aside, and stamped her feet furiously in the growing lake of blood.
‘I can’t see him!’ she shrilled. ‘I can’t see him. He’s hiding from me!’
‘How can he do that?’ Eyl asked her, holding her hands to calm her down. ‘Is he a witch too?’
‘No,’ she breathed, ‘he’s just a man. No witchery, no witchery. He just seems to know a few tricks.’
‘You can get through tricks,’ Eyl said, stroking the back of her veil as he held her close. ‘You can get to him. You can do anything.’
‘I can,’ she nodded. ‘I know I can.’
TWENTY-FIVE
The Net Closes
The night was nearly done. The first grey stains of day had begun to soak into the sky. The cold, glass-clear night that had followed the snowstorm had bred, by morning a translucent fog that hung upon the silent, snow-bound city like the breath of a winter daemon. From the windows of Jaume’s studio, the street was a smoky ghost.
Ghosts hiding in a ghost town.
After Criid’s departure, Gaunt had been unable to rest. He’d paced the studio, and the grim rooms adjoining it, while the others slept. He flicked through more of Jaume’s albums, and studied the eyes of faces that would never come home, as if they might offer him some advice or wisdom.
He thought about what Criid had said, and the foolishness of it made him smile again, but it also made him think about Slaydo, and Hyrkans, and the Gate, and so the smile quickly vanished.
Jaume had a large old desk in the room next to his studio. Like everything else beyond the public rooms of his premises, it was cluttered and untidy. Gaunt sat at it, and picked through the stacks of yellowing paper for the sake of distraction. There were bundles of letters tied with ribbon, sheaves of communications, and orders and requests, miserable, grief-strangled messages from widows and bereaved families. These were the fuel of Jaume’s business. Gaunt wasn’t sure how he felt about it any more. He wasn’t sure if he thought Jaume was some kind of ghoul making money out of other people’s loss, or if he was actually, in some counter-intuitive way, offering them some real comfort. The comfort wasn’t authentic, but perhaps the effect was.
On one side of Jaume’s desk was a battered old manual rubricator. Beside it was a deep pile of papers that Gaunt, at first, presumed to be invoices, or perhaps handbill brochures.
They were something else entirely. They were epitaphs. They were short, descriptive obituary notices, recording the heroic deeds of dead men. Each one was addressed, and Jaume had clearly composed each account individually. Gaunt began to read them.