Rawne glared at Mkoll. ‘I’m a major,’ he snapped. ‘I can do what I fething like.’

  ‘And therein, so often, lies our problem,’ Mkoll replied coldly. Everyone looked round. With the possible exception of Mkvenner, Mkoll was the most collected, reserved man in the Ghosts. No one had ever heard him rise to the bait and throw out a jibe like that.

  ‘You say something?’ Rawne said, taking a step forward. Mkoll’s chair scraped back and he got to his feet. Rawne was a good deal taller than Mkoll, but their eyes locked murderously.

  ‘Do you honestly want some, you asshole?’ Mkoll breathed.

  Mkvenner and Bonin had both risen, flanking Rawne from behind. Surrounded by three of the most dangerous men in the Tanith First, Rawne seemed utterly unfazed. His eyes never leaving Mkoll’s, he said, ‘You know, feth-face, I believe I do.’

  ‘Oh for feth’s sake!’ Beltayn cried, so loudly it made them all start. ‘What’s the matter with you, major? Is it your plan to pick a fight with everyone on the mission team before we’re done?’

  All four men looked at him sharply. Beltayn shrank back, raising his hands. ‘Or I could just carry on minding my own business.’

  His expression made Bonin snigger.

  Rawne’s shoulders relaxed slightly. ‘Boy’s right. Feth’s sake,’ he murmured. ‘What am I doing?’

  Mkoll backed off too, staring at the floor, his fingers to his temples. ‘Holy Throne,’ he said. ‘That was me, wasn’t it? That was me.’ He looked up at Rawne. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where that came from.’

  Rawne bit his lip and shook his head sadly. ‘It’s all of us,’ he said. ‘It’s all of us.’

  ‘Transfer’s complete,’ Beltayn called. He started to uncouple his equipment and stow his kit.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Rawne said.

  ‘To quote my friend the vox-man,’ Bonin said. ‘Something’s awry.’

  A truck, painted in the livery of the Occupation forces, had pulled up in the yard while they had been idiotically facing off. Four men had jumped down and, under the supervision of a fifth, an obese, older man in a sirdar’s uniform, they were loading the bundles of propaganda pamphlets onto the flatbed from the pile.

  ‘This we didn’t need,’ Bonin remarked.

  Rawne took a look. ‘Emperor kiss my arse,’ he sighed. ‘It’s going to take them ages to get that crap loaded. We’re stuck here until they’ve finished.’

  ‘Or until someone comes looking for the messenger,’ Mkoll said.

  ‘Or until we go out there and kill them,’ suggested Beltayn. ‘Not me, obviously. You guys are the mean, tough types who do that sort of thing.’

  ‘Last thing we want now is a fight that could escalate,’ Mkoll said.

  Twilight was sliding into night now. The curfew had sounded, and the streets were clearing. Mkoll’s team was taking far too long.

  Gaunt had withdrawn the rest of them from the alley, where they were too exposed, and they’d holed up in the back parlour of a derelict tailor’s store a few doors down. Larkin was covering the front, Varl the back, and Criid was lookout on the side door of the premises. Gaunt waited with Cirk, Landerson, Feygor, Curth and Brostin in a room full of headless fitting dummies, dusty cloth samples and crinkled paper patterns. Eszrah ap Niht lurked in one corner, slowly leafing through a heavy catalogue book, his grey fingers tracing in wonder across the pictures of fine gentlemen and ladies modelling the styles of the latest season.

  ‘What did you mean, I left?’ Curth said suddenly.

  ‘Not now, Ana,’ Gaunt said.

  ‘No. What did you mean?’

  Gaunt got up quickly and walked away. He went into the back hall. ‘Anything?’ he called down to Criid.

  She shook her head.

  ‘Dammit,’ he said and turned back. Cirk had followed him out. She was blocking the doorway.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Your woman didn’t leave,’ she said quietly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I left, Ibram.’

  Gaunt stared at her. He was about to reply, when his micro-bead blipped. Rawne had been told only to use the link in an emergency.

  ‘One?’

  ‘This is two. We’ve got the stuff. But we’re pinned in the annexe. Some idiots are loading a truck in the yard.’

  ‘Can you deal, two?’

  ‘I’d say “Bragg” to that, sir. We could take them, but it could get complicated fast. However, we don’t want to be sitting here much longer either.’

  ‘Understood, Stand by. When you hear “silver”, get out into the alley. One out.’

  ‘Problem?’ Cirk asked. She reached out a hand and placed it against Gaunt’s chest. He brushed it aside.

  ‘Not now, Sabbatine. We’ll talk about this later.’

  ‘What’s to talk about?’ she asked.

  ‘Stop it.’ Gaunt walked back into the parlour. ‘Everyone up,’ he said. ‘It seems to be time for one of those events Major Cirk dreads.’

  ‘A planetary invasion?’ she quipped smartly.

  ‘A diversion,’ he replied.

  ‘Throne’s sake!’ she growled, her jaw stuck out pugnaciously. ‘Fine, just so long as it doesn’t involve your pyromaniac.’

  ‘Bad news part two,’ said Gaunt. ‘Brostin, you’re up. That fething burner work yet?’

  ‘We’ll see, sir,’ Brostin replied, pulling the harness of the hefty weapon over his wide shoulders.

  ‘Varl?’ Gaunt called.

  Varl responded quickly, running back into the parlour with his lasrifle ready.

  ‘I’m going out front with Brostin. Gather the team, get out into the alley, and wait for Rawne’s bunch. Cirk?’

  ‘Yes, Ibram?’

  He ignored the familiarity. ‘The next stage is up to you and Mr Landerson. The Leafering cell. How do we find them?’

  ‘Things may have changed, but there used to be a contact point at the Temple of the Beati, just west of here,’ Cirk replied.

  The Temple of the Beati, Gaunt smiled. How entirely appropriate. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Talk to Varl, explain how to get to it. I want the two of you ready to lead the team through as soon as we rejoin you. If you hear the code word… uh… “Sabbat”, let’s use “Sabbat”… if you hear that, go on without us. No questions. Varl, at that point, the senior ranking officer has command of the mission.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Stop smiling, Varl,’ Gaunt said. ‘If things go arse-up now, it could be you.’

  ‘The Emperor protects,’ Varl said sweetly. ‘And also dumps on us from a very great height.’

  Gaunt led Brostin out through the shop front onto the empty street. The public lighting was poor in this area, though streetlamps glowed beyond the street corner, flooding the boulevard that the station house fronted. They could hear motor traffic and, somewhere, a gong beating.

  That was all right. There were several sounds Gaunt didn’t want to hear, and foremost amongst them was the howling of wirewolves. He never wanted to hear that particular noise ever again.

  ‘What’s the plan?’ Brostin whispered.

  Gaunt was about to reply when a figure came up behind them. He wheeled round, his silenced auto aimed.

  It was Eszrah.

  ‘Go back!’ Gaunt hissed. ‘Go back with the others!’

  The Sleepwalker frowned, not comprehending. Clearly his bond was with Gaunt specifically, not with the party in general. Gaunt owned Eszrah ap Niht, and therefore Eszrah ap Niht would go wherever Gaunt went.

  ‘Preyathee, soule… uh…’ Gaunt began. ‘Ah, feth it. Come on. Aversye wherall!’

  Eszrah nodded. Gaunt didn’t bother trying to say ‘and be quiet’. The partisan seemed incapable of being anything else.

  The trio hurried up the street. As they passed the open gateway of the yard, they peered in and saw the troopers loading the truck by the light of the vehicle’s stablight.

  Gaunt waved Brostin and Eszrah on and they dashed across the opening and up towards the main boulevard.

  ‘That one,’ said Gaunt, pointing to another derelict shop that faced the station house across the street.

  ‘That one what?’ Brostin asked.

  ‘I want you to burn it down, Brostin.’

  A huge smile split Brostin’s face. ‘Sir, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.’

  They went over to the shop’s doorway, and Gaunt forced the door. It was a cloth merchant’s – evidently, this was the haberdashers’ quarter of the town.

  ‘All right?’ he asked.

  ‘Perfect,’ replied Brostin. ‘Plenty of ignition sources, plenty of wick.’

  ‘Wick?’

  ‘It’s an arsonist thing. Don’t worry. Just be set to go when I say.’

  Gaunt grabbed Eszrah by the arm and pulled him back to the doorway. Brostin circled the shop front, touching bales of cloth and dusty bolts of material as if assessing them for value. He settled on a thick, velvet fabric.

  ‘Here we go,’ he said.

  He nursed the feed trigger of his flamer so that liquid promethium spilled out of the snout and dribbled the fuel across the bale, and the others beside it. Almost daintily, he dabbed spots of fuel on other bundles, and trailed it down the shop’s walls.

  Then he backed off to the doorway, leaving a track of liquid fuel across the floor behind him. He pushed his flamer around behind his back, pulled out his tinderbox and crouched down.

  ‘You’re not going to use the flamer?’ Gaunt asked from behind him.

  ‘A burst of flamer would take this place up like a furnace. I was assuming you wanted it to look like an accident.’

  Gaunt nodded.

  ‘Say hello to Mister Yellow,’ Brostin murmured, and struck his match. It fizzled between his fingers. ‘And get ready to run like hell.’

  Brostin flicked his hairy, tattooed arm, not so hard that it would extinguish the match, but hard enough to send it flying. It landed on the prom trail on the shop floor. And took immediately.

  Crackling, flames leapt up and raced along the fuel path towards the bales of soaked fabric.

  ‘I’d love to stay and watch,’ Brostin muttered. ‘But we should go. Running will help.’

  They ran back down the street towards the mouth of the alley behind the yard. Behind them, there was a sucking sound and then a hard bang that blew the glass out of the shop front. A swirl of fire engulfed the shop’s ground floor, and rippled up into the night air through the broken windows.

  Gaunt, Brostin and Eszrah slid into cover behind the wall end. Already they could hear shouting above the crackle of the fierce flames. Figures rushed out of the yard, shouting cries of alarm. Two, three, five. The obese sirdar was the last to emerge.

  ‘Silver,’ Gaunt voxed.

  Firebells began to ring. Brostin stood at the wall end and watched the conflagration eating into the facade of the old shop.

  ‘Now isn’t that just lovely,’ he breathed.

  ‘Will you come the feth on?’ Gaunt barked.

  Regrouped, the mission team ran through the dark alleys, leaving the furious fire behind them. More firebells were ringing now, and the glow lit up the night sky.

  ‘You got it?’ Gaunt asked Rawne.

  ‘We got it. But there are three bodies back there that will raise some questions.’

  ‘Understood. Cirk? Where’s this temple?’

  ‘This way!’ she called.

  They crossed two more side-streets, and then ran down an empty boulevard for twenty metres. Abruptly, Cirk and Varl pulled them into cover. They cowered in the shadows, pulses thumping. Half-seen, a glyf drifted past the head of the road, its obscene light reflecting off the polished flagstones. Curth had to jam her hands across Feygor’s mouth to stop him crying out.

  The glyf was gone. They started to move again, footsteps clattering over the hard cobbles.

  ‘Oh, crap!’ said Varl.

  Five excubitors had suddenly rounded the end of the street. They blinked at the gang of figures before them and then began to raise their las-locks.

  ‘Cover!’ Gaunt cried. Everyone split left and right.

  Everyone except Eszrah ap Niht. He’d seen these creatures before. He raised his reynbow and planted an iron dart through the forehead of the lead figure. The excubitor flew backwards and fell down. Eszrah reloaded. The iron quarrel made a clinking noise as it rattled backwards down the bow’s barrel, pulled into place by the powerful magnets. He fired again.

  A second excubitor tumbled down, its arms flailing. It made a heavy sound as it hit the flagstones, and its las-lock snapped under its weight.

  Calmly, the partisan reloaded again. Sklink-ptup.

  The remaining excubitors were firing now. Their weapons cracked and sizzling lock-bolts kissed past the tall grey figure. He didn’t even flinch.

  Criid and Varl, enjoying the best of the street-side cover, leaned out and let go with their auto-pistols. The stammering, silenced bursts slammed two more excubitors over on their backs.

  The last excubitor started to run. Eszrah took a step or two forward, settled his aim and fired.

  It was a long shot. The excubitor had all but disappeared around the street corner. The poisoned quarrel smacked into the back of its shaved skull and dropped it on its face with a bone-breaking crack.

  ‘The temple?’ Gaunt urged Cirk.

  ‘Down here,’ she said.

  The temple was empty and silent. It was the saddest thing Gaunt had yet seen on Gereon. Labour gangs from the local Iconoclave had rendered its icons to debris and shattered the statuary. The murals had been defaced with obscenities.

  Guns ready, the team prowled in through the shadows. Ragged bodies, long decayed, lay on the marble floor of the inner shrine where they had been killed months before. Women and children, craving sanctuary from the Saint. Gaunt closed his eyes.

  That was exactly what they were doing now.

  He walked towards the ruined altar and sank to his knees. The face of the Beati was just visible through the daubings and smears the Occupation forces had inscribed.

  ‘Please,’ Gaunt whispered to the defaced image. ‘Please.’

  ‘She’s not listening,’ Cirk snapped, and walked past him. ‘I’m the only one here.’ Cirk took hold of a battered golden candelabrum, and swung it so it faced north.

  ‘Now we hide and we wait,’ she said.

  A temple priest came in just after midnight, to perform his furtive, unconsented worship. When he saw the candelabrum, he made the sign of the aquila and retreated fast.

  An hour later, he returned.

  ‘Hello?’ he called. He was hunched and old, and his voice was thin. ‘Hello? Is anyone here?’

  Gaunt rose to his feet and slid out of the shadows.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  TWENTY-SIX

  ‘This is unacceptable,’ said Colonel Noth. ‘Quite simply unacceptable.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’re going somewhere with this,’ Gaunt replied. ‘But I wish you’d get there fast.’

  They were in the basement of a municipal store in the north-west of Leafering. The local cell, fifty-strong and surprisingly well armed, had brought them out of the temple into hiding. The mission team was all around, relaxing, sleeping or drinking the broth that had been prepared over the basement’s crackling drum-fires.

  Maxel Noth was a short, well-built man in his late forties. His black hair was long and dank, and tied back in a ponytail.

  ‘You come here with this incredible story. Incredible. And you have the gall to ask me to believe you?’

  ‘You might want to have a word with Major Cirk there,’ Gaunt suggested. ‘She’s cell too.’

  ‘So she says. Of the Ineuron cell. But it’s common knowledge that the Ineuron cell was exposed and annihilated over a week ago. You could be anyone. You could be well-briefed informers.’

  ‘Noth,’ Gaunt said wearily. ‘I need your help. I am here to do the Emperor’s work. I need friends.’

  ‘To do what?’ the cell leader asked bluntly. ‘You claim to be Guard. Are you here to liberate my world?’

  ‘Not this again…’ Gaunt sighed.

  Landerson came over. ‘Colonel Noth? I think we should square this away. The colonel-commissar and his squad are here on a mission of extreme priority.’

  ‘What sort of mission?’ Noth asked.

  ‘I have no idea. I haven’t been told. But I trust him, sir. Ballerat himself ordered me to bring him and his team in.’

  ‘Ballerat, eh? A good man.’

  ‘He’s dead, sir,’ Landerson said.

  ‘Is he? Dead?’

  ‘Died getting Gaunt’s people in, so that should tell you something of the importance he placed on them.’

  Noth shrugged. ‘That’s not the point. We’re on the anvil here in Leafering as it is. We can’t be expected to–’

  ‘The Emperor expects, sir,’ Gaunt said.

  Noth glared at him. ‘Understand this, sir. We have been engaged in covert fighting these last months. We have used our anonymity to target grain stores, trackway junctions and power plants. Nothing we have done has been… vulgar or visible. Vulgarity and visibility lead to discovery and death. Now, tonight, you have blundered into Leafering, set fires, killed Occupation officers by your own admission. It’s a wonder the wolves are still slumbering. Throne, sir! You’ll reveal us all.’

  ‘Maybe he will,’ said Cirk, sitting down beside Gaunt. ‘Colonel, it’s hard to hear… believe me, I know… but you have to understand that the colonel-commissar is here for a reason that’s much bigger than you or me. Much bigger than this cell. Much bigger than Gereon. By the Emperor’s will, we might all go to our deaths, and it would still be worth it if Gaunt succeeds. Please, take this seriously. This is about the Imperium, and if Gereon burns to make it happen, then so be it.’