‘This was strictly a one-time thing, Meryn,’ Daur replied.
‘Oh, they all say that,’ said Varl. ‘They absolutely all say that.’
The truck began to slow down. Rawne leaned over and rapped his fist against the partition.
‘Leyr? Cant? Why are we slowing down?’ he called.
‘Looks like the road’s shut, boss,’ Leyr’s voice came back from the cab. ‘We’re going to go left instead.’
The truck swung around.
‘As I was saying,’ said Varl, waggling a cheeky finger at Daur. ‘You have the poise of a master conman.’
Daur was about to respond when the truck slammed to a halt.
‘What the feth?’ asked Varl. ‘What the feth’s the matter, Cant?’ he shouted through the partition into the cab.
‘Roadblock!’ Trooper Cant’s voice answered.
‘What?’
‘It’s only the fething Commissariat!’ they heard Cant yell. ‘The real one, I mean!’
Rawne looked at Meryn, Varl, Banda and Daur.
‘Oh, not good,’ said Varl.
‘Yeah,’ said Rawne, ‘this is absolutely what not good feels like.’
FOUR
Aarlem Fortress
It was dark by the time the limousine brought him back to Aarlem Fortress. As they raced down the hill road, he looked out at the sodium lights flashing past, the perimeter line, and the blur of chain-link and razorwire. Snowflakes caught the light, and turned the air into white noise.
Beyond the ditch and double fence, like a theatre’s stage brilliantly lime-lit for a performance, he could see the main exercise quad fringed with lights, and the strings of pole-lamps radiating off the quad, lighting the rows of modular sheds. Aarlem Fortress was so named because a fortress called Aarlem had once stood on the spot. It had been razed during the Famous Victory, and the garrison erected on its rendered foundations.
It had been their home for a year.
Gaunt had never expected to go back to Balhaut, and he certainly hadn’t expected to be stationed there for any length of time. He divided, arbitrarily, he supposed, his life into three parts: his cadet-ship, his service with the Hyrkans, and his command of the Ghosts. Balhaut was the end-stop of the Hyrkan period, before the Tanith watershed. It was like revisiting a past life.
Then again, everything had been like revisiting a past life since Jago.
They’d given him skin-grafts, significant skin-grafts, and somehow patched his brutalised organs back together. It was the organ damage that had come closest to ending him in the weeks after his rescue from the hands of the Archenemy torturers, and it had come fething close half a dozen times.
The eyes, oddly, were the most superficial injuries. Augmetics could be easily fitted into emptied sockets. General Van Voytz, perhaps nagged by guilt, had authorised particularly sophisticated implants of ceramic and stainless steel. In terms of performance, they were better than Gaunt’s original eyes. He had greater range and depth perception, and appreciably enhanced cold-light and latent-heat vision. And they sat in his face well enough. They looked like… eyes. A little like the porcelain eyes of an expensive doll, he often thought when he saw them in a mirror, but at least they were alive, not dull like a doll’s. When you caught them right, there was a flash of green fire in them.
It was the eyes, though, that bothered him most, more than the months of itching grafts, and more than the regime of drugs and procedures to heal his sutured innards. The eyes didn’t hurt, they worked perfectly, and they didn’t scare children; they just weren’t his.
And every now and then, he saw…
It wasn’t entirely clear what it was he saw. It was too fast, too subliminal. Doc Dorden said the phenomenon wasn’t anything to do with his new eyes at all. It was a memory of the trauma of losing his old eyes. The memory was haunting his optic nerves.
This seemed likely. Gaunt couldn’t remember much about what the Blood Pact had done to him, and the glimpses conveyed more of a feeling than anything visual, but he could taste pain in them. He was convinced that the intermittent glimpses were flashes of the very last thing his old eyes had seen.
The limousine’s tyres drummed over the ribbed decking of the ditch bridge, and they swung up to the main gate. The headlamps picked up the black-and-yellow chevrons of the barrier as they rose like the jaws of a beast.
The Tanith barracks were on the west side of the quad, facing the drab blockhouses used by the 52nd Bremenen. It was still snowing lightly, though nothing had settled. The fat snowflakes looked yellow as they milled down into the amber glow of the sodium lamps. The air was full of a raw, metal cold that you could taste in the back of your lungs.
Gaunt got out of the limousine beside the steps of the command post. The Munitorum driver held the door for him.
‘What time tomorrow, sir?’ the driver asked.
‘Don’t bother,’ Gaunt replied. He looked at the man, who stiffened suddenly. ‘I’ll be requesting another driver.’
‘Sir?’ the man mumbled. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You kept me waiting,’ said Gaunt.
‘I… I have apologised about that, sir,’ the man said, standing rigidly to attention and trying not to catch Gaunt’s ceramic eyes. ‘There was a delay at the parking garage, and–’
‘There was a card school at the parking garage. You and the other drivers. A good hand you didn’t want to toss in, so you kept me waiting.’
The man opened his mouth, but then shut it quickly. It was bad enough to get a notice of reprimand from a commissar, far worse to be caught by a commissar in a lie.
‘That’ll be all,’ said Gaunt.
The man saluted, got back into the motor, and drove away.
Gaunt walked up the steps into the post. The card school had been a lucky guess. Where had that come from? Were these idiots getting so predictable in their malingering and incompetence, or was he just getting too old and cynical? He’d seen it all before. He’d made an educated guess.
Except, it felt as if he’d somehow witnessed the man’s crime: the drivers, hunched around an upturned crate beside a brazier in the chilly garage, the cards going down, a steward from the club coming in, calling out the numbers for the staff cars requested, a dismissive wave of the hand and the words, ‘Let the bastard wait a minute.’
Clear as day.
He laughed. Too many years a discipline officer: he knew all the tricks and dodges. He’d seen them all a thousand times.
Captain Obel had the watch. He got up from his desk beside the clerical pool, which was empty for the night, and saluted. The troopers stationed at the doors snapped to attention.
Gaunt waved an ‘at ease’ in their direction as he came in, pulling off his gloves.
‘What’s on the scope tonight, Obel?’ he asked.
Obel shrugged.
‘Square root of feth all, sir,’ he said.
‘Can I see the log?’
Obel reached towards his desk, and passed Gaunt the data-slate holding the regiment’s day-book and activity log. Gaunt sped through it.
‘Major Rawne off-base?’
‘Three-day pass, sir.’
Gaunt nodded. ‘Yes, I remember signing it. You got the whole night?’
‘I’m on till two; Gol Kolea has lates. Did your adjutant find you, by the way?’
Gaunt looked up at Obel. ‘Beltayn? He was looking for me?’
‘Yes, sir. Earlier on.’
‘Know what it was about?’ Gaunt asked.
Obel shook his head. ‘He didn’t say, sir. Sorry.’
Gaunt handed the log back to Obel. ‘Anything I should know about?’