‘You would?’
‘You can’t have insubordination like that, Gaunt. You’re meant to have some authority. Don’t stand for it. Have the man drummed up and down the quad, and then maybe tied to something heavy while the rest of us throw blunt objects at him.’
‘So, in your opinion, this man’s definitely out of line?’ asked Gaunt.
‘Absolutely, categorically, inexcusably out of line. He needs to be certified fit, and he knows it. It’s just pure bloody-mindedness, is what it is. He has to be made to follow the rules down to the letter of the– Waitaminute. It’s me, isn’t it?’
‘It is,’ said Gaunt.
‘Hmm,’ said Zweil. ‘That was very sly of you.’
‘I know. Will you go and see Dorden?’
‘I suppose.’
‘What’s the problem?’
Zweil rocked his head from side to side and shrugged. ‘I’ve never liked doctors. Yurk. Poking their noses in places where noses weren’t supposed to fit. I won’t have it.’
‘You’ll have this.’
Zweil stuck his tongue out at Gaunt.
‘What are you afraid they’ll find?’ Gaunt asked.
‘I’m old. I’m very, very old. What aren’t they going to find?’
Gaunt smiled. ‘Tomorrow morning, please. Don’t make me have this conversation with you again.’
Zweil scowled.
‘Now bless me.’
Zweil waved some half-hearted business with his hands. ‘Bless you, in the name of the God-thingumy, blah blah.’
‘Thank you.’
Zweil returned to the conversation he had been having with Bool. Haller was waiting to ask a question of his own. Gaunt wandered over to the seat where Eszrah was working. The Nihtgane was patiently writing in a copybook. He was concentrating, threading the pen across the paper in a slow, exact hand.
‘Histye, soule,’ Gaunt said.
Eszrah looked up. ‘Histye.’
Gaunt sat down beside him. ‘Busy?’
Eszrah nodded. He carefully blotted out the paragraph he had already written, using a square of tan blotting paper.
‘The father, he asked of me to written down stories that have belonged to my regiment,’ he said.
‘Zweil asked you?’
Eszrah nodded. By regiment, Eszrah meant his people, the Nihtgane of the Gereon Untill. His vocabulary was expanding every day, often with nuanced meanings, but he understood the word regiment in a very particular way. He could not be encouraged to use ‘tribe’ or ‘people’ or even ‘community’ in relation to the Nihtgane, nor could he be persuaded of the specific military definition of regiment. The Tanith First was a regiment and, to Eszrah, it exhibited precisely the same dynamics of loyalty and collective reliance as a tribe or a family.
‘He’s asked you to record Nihtgane stories? Do you mean histories?’
Eszrah shook his head. ‘Not of things that were done, but of older than things.’
‘You mean like folklore?’ Gaunt asked.
Eszrah shrugged. ‘Soule not know word.’
‘I mean legends. Myths,’ Gaunt said.
Eszrah smiled. ‘Aye. That is word how the father says it.’
‘Do the Nihtgane have many myths?’ Gaunt asked.
Eszrah puffed out his lips and turned his eyes up to indicate the level of Gaunt’s understatement.
‘They have belong many, many,’ he said. ‘There is the story of the sleeping walker, which I have writ here, and the story of the moth and the jar, and the story of the snake and the branch, which I have writ here and writ here both. Also there is the story of the walking sleeper, and the story of the old sun, and the story of the hunter and the beast–’
‘How many have you written?’
‘Four and ten,’ said Eszrah. He looked at the open copybook. ‘This I am written, it is the story of the hunter and the pool. It will make five and ten. The hunter, he walks in many of my regiment their stories.’
‘Can I read them?’
Eszrah nodded willingly, and then hesitated. ‘But I must need the book to written down more of them.’
‘Here’s what,’ said Gaunt. ‘Why don’t I get you a second copybook. You write a story down in one book while I’m reading another, then we’ll swap. How’s that?’
Eszrah seemed quite satisfied by this compromise. Abruptly, he touched Gaunt on the sleeve and nodded towards the door of the temple house.
Beltayn had just entered, followed by Nahum Ludd, the regiment’s junior commissar. Ludd was in full uniform, and thawing snowflakes speckled his stormcoat.
‘There he is,’ said Beltayn.
Gaunt got up. ‘Something awry, Bel?’
Beltayn gestured to Ludd. The junior commissar drew an envelope from his coat. Gaunt could see that it was trimmed with a blue stripe, indicating an order despatch from the Commissariat.
‘A courier just brought this in, sir,’ said Ludd. ‘It’s come direct from Section, for your eyes only.’
Gaunt slit the envelope open quickly, took out the tissue-thin sheet inside and opened it to read it.
‘You’re going to have to reschedule Mr Jaume, Bel,’ he said.
‘How come, sir?’
‘Because I’ve got to report to Section at daybreak tomorrow.’
‘Does it say why?’ asked Ludd.
‘No,’ said Gaunt, ‘it doesn’t say anything else at all.’
FIVE
Ennisker’s Perishables
Long after the last of the clock towers in the Oligarchy, and away down the hill below in the sprawl of Balopolis, had finished chiming midnight, the men in Ennisker’s Perishables began to die.
The night was as cold and hard as quenched iron, and flurries of snow came and went under the yellow street lighting. Traffic on the New Polis Bridge and the Old Crossing lit up the skeletal girderwork with their headlights, and caught the snowflakes like dust in sunlight. Light rippled across the oil slick river.
Ennisker’s Perishables was a meat-packing plant on the north bank, a large outcrop of ouslite and travertine that dominated the city wall in the shadow of the New Polis Bridge. There was ground access to the place through the warren of streets threading the land-side of the city wall, and water access via pulleys and cage-lifts on the river side.
The plant was grim, and smelled of dank stone. The ooze-breath of the river pushed up into it through its deep basements, and through the vent holes that dotted its stained facade above the waterline like arrow slits in the curtain wall of a donjon. It had been essentially derelict since the war. The Henotic League, a beneficial order founded for the relief of veterans and unhabs, had used it as a hostel for a few years until they had secured larger and less miasmal accommodations up near Arkwround Square. The phantom remnants of a notice announcing this shift of venue, and inviting lost and needy souls to come looking for the ‘hall with the yellow doors’ on Arkwround, still lingered on one of the plant’s paint-scabbed loading doors. A subsequent attempt to revive the plant’s fortunes as a meat-packing site had foundered badly in ’81, but the power, waterlines and heating systems installed at the time had never been disconnected, a fact that Valdyke had noticed with satisfaction while sourcing the venue for his employer.
Nado Valdyke had come recommended by a man who knew a man who knew a man. His reputation was as a fixer, an arranger. A lack of scruples, and a willingness to get on with a job no matter how sound its legality, rounded out his resumé nicely. Though he had enjoyed correspondence with his employer, a series of letters that set out the employer’s requirements in some detail, Valdyke had not met his employer personally.
His employer was from off-world.
When Valdyke received notice that, after a long and arduous voyage, his employer had finally arrived at Balhaut Highstation, Valdyke left his apartment in the Polis stacks and set out to make sure all the arrangements were in place.