It took ten seconds for the effects to amplify, boiling through his body like a chemical toxin, or like the burn of a class six hot virus, the sort of monster pathogen a man might contract on a deathworld, and which would kill him in three days.
This took ten seconds. Kreeg began to convulse. He dropped his rifle and staggered, his balance gone. He felt as if he had caught fire inside. Fluid was filling his lungs, choking him. He started to cough, and blood sprayed from his mouth. He hit the wall and collapsed, dragging down one of Mr Jaume’s artful mauve drapes, tearing off its stud pins to reveal a scabbed, unfinished wall surface. Kreeg was bleeding out. Unclotting blood was gushing from his nose, his eyes and his mouth, from his fingertips, from his pores, from every opening of his body. He shuddered one last time, slumped further, and died.
Outside the front door, Gnesh looked on in disbelief as his comrade died in the hall in front of him. He took a step forward to try and help him, but Karhunan Sirdar held him back.
Karhunan pointed down at the doorstep, and Gnesh saw the sigil that had been scratched in the wood and inked with blood: a blood ward, and a lethal booby-trap. Kreeg had stepped right over it.
‘The house is blocked,’ said Gnesh. ‘Can we go around? Is there a side way?’
‘No time,’ said the sirdar. He waved Malstrom up.
They backed away as Malstrom rolled a grenade onto the step, and ducked aside. The blast blew out the rest of the doorframe, dug up the step, and hurled Kreeg’s corpse several metres further down the hall.
It also erased the blood ward, and broke its craft.
‘In!’ Karhunan ordered. ‘Watch for more wards like that. In. In!’
Gaunt and his companions heard the crump of the grenade behind them as they came out through the back of Jaume’s house into the dingy rear yards and dark alleys behind the premises. Undisturbed snow lay thick on the wall-tops and in the yard spaces. Through the slow fog, Gaunt could see lank, frost-stiff laundry hanging from washing lines in neighbouring yards.
‘Do you have a vehicle?’ Gaunt asked Jaume as they ran through the snow to the end of the yard.
Jaume shook his head.
Gaunt had a single clip left in his bolt pistol. He drew the laspistol Criid had left with him, and toggled it to ‘armed’.
‘For Throne’s sake!’ Maggs cried. ‘Let me go and give me the other weapon.’
Gaunt ignored him, and drove them down the high-walled spinal alleyway that connected the back gates of the tenement row. Piles of garbage and junk half-filled the space, smoothed out and shrouded by the recent snow.
They ran as hard as they could, Gaunt bringing up the rear with the weapon in his hand. Twice, he stopped and aimed it at what appeared to be movement behind them.
Then they heard another dull, gritty blast as their pursuers mined out the ward that Mabbon had left on the back step. It was very quickly followed by bursts of las-fire that stripped through the fog, making it swirl and coil.
Gaunt raised his weapon again, but the shooting was just loose and haphazard. He wasn’t going to waste precious shots on a target he couldn’t see.
They had nearly reached a major street adjacent to the one on which Jaume’s house stood.
‘Doctor,’ said Gaunt as they ran, ‘would you please cut Maggs’s bonds? Quickly, please.’
Kolding fumbled a scalpel out of his kit, and ripped through the twine that was securing Maggs’s wrists.
Maggs looked at Gaunt.
‘A weapon?’
‘Wheels,’ Gaunt replied.
Maggs nodded, and ran on ahead of them into the broad avenue and the fog beyond.
Gaunt herded the others out towards the street, moving backwards with his gun braced for any movement in the fog-choked alley behind them.
Maggs came out into the open. In the broader space of the main thoroughfare, the fog was beginning to thin. He could see the roofs of the buildings on the far side of the street, as well as patches of milky blue sky. The sun was burning through the fog like a halogen lamp.
There was some light traffic, and a few pedestrians, wrapped up in coats and scarves against the cold. The shop juniors of nearby merchant houses were clearing snow from the pavements outside their display windows. A little way ahead, two cargo-6 trucks had pulled up to let a municipal work-gang unload sacks of salt for road gritting.
Maggs ran up to the rear truck, and began to climb into the cab.
‘Hey. Hey, you!’ the gang boss yelled out, throwing down his spade and hurrying towards the truck.
‘Imperial Guard!’ Maggs shouted back, fumbling with the ignition. ‘I’m commandeering this vehicle.’
‘Oh, right. Like there’s a war on,’ the boss retorted.
‘There’s always a war on,’ Maggs told him. He started the truck’s engine.
‘Get down from there, now!’ the boss yelled.
Maggs stared out of the driver’s door window.
‘Back off, friend. Don’t make me get out and hurt you.’
The boss saw something in Wes Maggs’s expression that he clearly didn’t like. He backed away sharply, and so did the members of his crew. They watched in bemused wonder as Maggs threw the truck’s transmission into reverse, and jerked the vehicle backwards. Its tyres slipped and scuffed in the snow, and its knifing tail-end knocked down several of the salt sacks unloaded on the curb.
‘Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!’ the boss yelled.
Maggs ignored him, and continued to reverse along the kerb, the cargo-6’s fat tyres spraying up slush as they whipped and churned. He backed up ten metres to meet Gaunt and the others, who were running along the pavement from the alley mouth.
Several loose shots sang out of the alley into the street. Most went wide. One clipped a lamp post, and another blew out the headlight of a passing car. The pedestrians in the street froze, and then scattered in terror. More blind shots sliced out of the alley. The display window of a merchant house opposite fractured, and exploded in a billion slivers of plate glass. The two juniors shovelling snow in front of it ducked and ran.
Gaunt bundled the prisoner up into the back of the truck, and then helped Kolding and Jaume to hoist themselves in. He ran for the passenger door of the cab.
Pedestrians nearby were shouting and screaming as they ran. The work crew had fled. Gaunt turned, and saw the first of their pursuers emerge into the foggy street from the alley, lasrifle raised.
Gaunt lifted his laspistol in a two-handed brace and pinched off two quick shots. Both of them hit the Blood Pact warrior, knocking him back into the shadows of the alley.
Gaunt threw himself into the cab.
‘Go!’ he yelled.
Maggs put his foot down.
The cargo-6 slalomed away across the snow into the main lanes of the street. A flurry of las-fire and hard rounds lit the air around it, and spattered against the bodywork.
‘Keep down!’ Gaunt shouted through the cab’s fanlight.
It was hard to control the heavy truck with any finesse in the snow. Maggs oversteered, and crunched the front end off a stationary car that its owner had abandoned at the first sign of gunfire. Then the truck sideswiped a small cargo van, shunting it into another vehicle. Bodywork buckled, and windows and headlamps smashed.
They were gaining speed. One last clip that bashed a car into the flank of a tram, and they were clear, and turning out at the junction into the next street.
‘Which way?’ Maggs demanded.
‘The Oligarchy.’ Gaunt shouted back. ‘Make for the Oligarchy!’
Eyl led his sister through the fog at a run. He was leading her by the hand, and she was holding up the hem of her long dress. Several members of the philia moved with them.