A man approached them. He was not wearing club livery.
‘Commissar Blenner,’ he said, more of a statement than a question.
‘What about it?’
‘Your association with Ibram Gaunt is a matter of record. We’ve had you under surveillance since yesterday.’
Criid began to back away. She’d lowered her veil before leaving the day room. She reached down to where her straight silver was taped to her thigh under her bombazine skirts.
‘Who the hell are you?’ Blenner asked the man.
‘I think it’s time you came in for questioning,’ the man replied. He looked at Criid. ‘Your friend too.’
Two more men had closed in behind them from the direction of the cloakroom. To Criid’s horror, they had precisely the same face as the first man.
‘My name is Sirkle,’ the man said, showing them his rosette. ‘Do not try to resist.’
TWENTY-SIX
A Place That Isn’t There
The Inquisition’s Valkyries had been grounded by the bright fog, which capped the summit of Balopolis and the Oligarchy like an arctic ice-shelf half a kilometre thick.
With the Tanith scouts along its leading edge, the main Imperial sweep had switched its attentions from the central routes of the city, along the main east-west avenues, to the maze of streets and narrow lanes of Northern Old Side. In slow, meticulous fashion, they threaded the lines of the tenements and hab stacks, and searched the under-barns, the lower sinks, and the long, semi-derelict municipal allotments on their suspended irrigation platforms above the highways. The ground was dead-white with almost undisturbed snow, and the air was bright white with pearl fog. Visibility was down to twenty metres in places.
Kolea and Baskevyl moved with the main force behind the scout line, keeping close to the vox truck that was rolling with the search formation at walking pace, and snorting regular blurts of yellow exhaust from its upright stacks into the smoke-white air.
The cold made their eyes water and their cheeks flush. Kolea’s nose had turned red, a fact that Baskevyl had seen fit to mention several times. For his part, Kolea kept going on about a particularly good caffeine that was served in a dining hall that he had taken to frequenting on the Aarlem side of the river. They both knew they were talking about nothing, that this idle chat between two men, who had become good friends and comrades in the five years since their regiments had been amalgamated, was all that stood between them and screaming frustration.
The tension had become unbearable. The progress had become so slow. Every hour or so, they took it in turns to go up to the scouting line and walk with Mkoll or Bonin or Jajjo for a while, just to see how things were going. The frustration there was palpable too. Neither Kolea nor Baskevyl had ever known the famous Tanith scouts to be so adrift. They had both read what amounted to a helpless fury in Mkoll’s eyes.
‘The snow’s lying to us,’ he had told them both, separately, and the words had made both of them shiver. The Tanith scout master’s ability to track was legendary. It was almost regarded as preternatural. If something was outfoxing him, if something was deluding his wits and his honed senses, then it had to be seriously unnatural.
The toxic curse of warpcraft lay heavily across this ancient street.
Due to their proximity to the search areas, squads of troopers from the Kapaj First had been drafted in from Oligarchy Fortress to assist with canvassing. The men, all young lads with the typical stocky frames and olive skin-tone of the Kapaj, were dutifully and seriously moving from house to house along the search perimeter, knocking on doors and asking the residents if they recognised holo-picts of Gaunt’s face or had seen anything untoward.
Baskevyl and Kolea chatted about the way the area’s residents seemed to be behaving so oddly. It often took the Kapaj canvassers two or three knocks to get a reply, and the residents were wary and unforthcoming. Scared, pale faces could regularly be spotted looking down on the passing Imperial search party from upper windows. Families had holed up in cellars and vaults as they had done in wartime. Merchants and shop owners had pulled down their shutters, and hidden in their back rooms. Nobody, it seemed, had seen or heard anything since the snows began.
‘Snow’s not rare here, is it?’ Baskevyl asked.
Kolea shook his head. ‘It’s normal. Seasonal. I think it’s snowed at least once already since we shipped planetside.’
‘So why is everybody treating it like the end of the world?’ asked Baskevyl. ‘Why’s everybody hiding? Why are the streets empty?’
Kolea didn’t have an answer.
One thing that Baskevyl and Kolea didn’t chat about was the Kapaj regiment itself. The Kapaj First was a new founding, nothing exceptional, reasonably promising. Gaunt had been appointed to the regiment as visiting instructor as part of his retirement duties on Balhaut. He’d taken quite a shine to them, and took his mentoring responsibilities seriously, visiting them upwards of two or three times a week. Sometimes, he’d even taken his senior officers with him to brief the young men, none of whom had seen any combat, about the actual niceties of war. Baskevyl had been up to Oligarchy Fortress with Gaunt twice, Kolea three times.
There had been rumours that Gaunt was going to get the Kapaj command permanently. The Kapaj First, all told, was nearly fifteen thousand strong. Someone had started the gossip that the Kapaj was going to be Gaunt’s ticket to the rank of general or general marshal, a significant step on the ladder to a full high-staff position, such as an appointment militant or a marshallcy of guard. The Kapaj First would be his new First and Only. The gossip also suggested that if Gaunt were to be elevated in this way, the Tanith First would be broken up, and rendered into discrete specialist teams to supervise training or operate as special advisors. This, the gossip declared, was why the Ghosts had been retired to Balhaut in the first place: a slow and thorough dismantling, the assets of the regiment stripped.
Gaunt had heard the gossip. At a senior staff dinner, just a week earlier, he’d torpedoed the rumours with such phlegmatic humour and outrageous disrespect for the system that all the officers around the long tables, Baskevyl and Kolea included, had been quite crippled by mirth.
Baskevyl and Kolea didn’t chat about the Kapaj simply because the Kapaj reminded them of Gaunt. The Kapaj weren’t an idle-enough subject for chat. They were too heavily freighted with notions of their missing commander and future possibilities. In the friendless, foggy streets of Old Side, where they could taste the ice crystals in the air, and the cold bladed around them, there were no possible futures anymore, except for a grim resolution in some mouldering tenement.
Kolea tapped Baskevyl on the arm, and Baskevyl turned. A black, unmarked cargo-8 with armoured bodywork had driven up out of the surrounding fog to join the tail-end of the search formation. It had flashed its headlights as it rumbled in behind the vox truck.
‘Look,’ said Baskevyl.
Up ahead, one of the apparently numerous men called Sirkle had alerted his master to the vehicle’s approach. Inquisitor Handro Rime turned and began striding back towards the black truck.
Kolea and Baskevyl changed course to intercept him. Commissar Edur got there first.
‘News?’ he asked Rime, walking backwards to match Rime’s stride and remain face to face.
‘Maybe,’ Rime replied.
‘Who’s in the truck, inquisitor?’ asked Edur.
‘Persons of interest to this investigation,’ Rime replied curtly.
‘Going to reveal any identities?’ Edur asked.
‘We’ll see,’ said Rime.