“Set them down on the table,” Gaunt told him. “You are?”
The man seemed wary of speaking.
“My clerk, Bwelt,” Pater answered for him. “He will not speak. He is training for junior advocacy and must perforce learn the protocols of question and address. Besides, he knows nothing.”
“How do we undertake this?” Gaunt asked the advocate.
Pater cleared his throat. “You will review the matter for my benefit—excluding no detail—you will show me any pertinent transcripts and you will furnish me with a glass of fortified wine.”
Gaunt glanced round at Bwelt. “There’s a bottle on the side table in the bedroom. Fetch him a glass.”
Pater refused to speak further until the crystal glass was in his withered hand and the first sip in his mouth. The cane lay across his lap.
Gaunt began. “An Imperial Guard General—Grizmund of the Narmenian Armour—and four of his staff officers are charged with insubordination. They’re being held in the VPHC stockade, pending prosecution by a VPHC court. The charges are spurious. I want them freed and back to duty immediately. I think the matter founders on a formality—the VPHC cannot prosecute Imperial Guard personnel. If there is a crime to answer, it is an Imperial Commissariat matter. I am the highest representative of that authority on Verghast.”
Pater adjusted his spectacles and studied the data-slate Gaunt handed him.
“Hmm… clear-cut enough, I suppose. You’re citing Imperial Commissariat Edict 4368b. The VPHC won’t like it. Tarrian, in particular, will hate you for it.”
“There’s no love lost between us.”
“Bwelt? What is it? You gurn like a fool or a man with chronic gas.”
“It’s 4378b, Advocate. The edict is 4378b.” Bwelt’s voice was almost a whisper.
“Just so,” Pater said, brushing off the correction and returning his gaze to the slate. “It may come to court. Tarrian has a miserable record of dragging cases through all the due processes, even if he is bound to lose. To him, there’s some satisfaction in prolonging the agony.”
“I want it thrown out before then. We can’t be without Grizmund any longer. In the next few days, Vervunhive’s future may depend upon skilled armour.”
Tricky. But the edict is well-precedented. A brief hearing, perhaps at dawn tomorrow, and we should be able to pull the rug out from under the VPHC Pater looked up at Gaunt. “I’ll derive satisfaction from that. The VPHC have deemed themselves above Imperial Law for many years. It’s been nigh on impossible to practise clean law in the hive. With your prestige involved, we can win.”
“Good. At least we know the VPHC can’t act before then. However they argue it, they know an Imperial Commissar must be present for a tribunal to be conducted.”
“Indeed. Even if they press for a court of their own, we can stall them as long as you refuse to participate. Then—Bwelt? Again, you screw up your face! What now?”
Bwelt paused and seemed to choose every word with great care. “The… tribunal is in session now, advocate. You told me to collate all information relating to this case before we came here and that fact was diarised in the judiciary case-roll.”
“What?”
“Th-they are proceeding… because they have an Imperial commissar present. Commissar Kowle has agreed to represent the Imperial interests and—”
Gaunt’s vicious curse shut Bwelt up and made the old man start. Pulling on his jacket, cap and weapon belt, Gaunt reeled off a colourful and descriptive tirade outlining what he would do to Tarrian, Kowle and the entire VPHC in four-letter words.
“Come with me! Now!” he told the advocate and his trembling clerk, then flew out of the room.
At the eastern edge of the hive, the sky was on fire. From the outer dark of the river bend, enemy shelling had begun to hammer at the damage done to the adamantine Curtain Wall and the ramparts of Mass East Fort by the mines.
Varl stumbled through the firestorm, trying to regroup his men and get them down into the deep-wall bunkers. Zoican assaulters were everywhere. The defenders couldn’t fight this. Varl tried to vox House Command or Tanith control, but the energy flare of the bombardment had scrambled the communication bands.
He got maybe twenty men around him, mostly Ghosts but some Roane and Vervun Primary, and ran them down the tower steps into the bowels of the fort. The stone walls were sweating as the heat of the burning levels above leeched into them. Plaster facings shrivelled and wilted, and the air was oven-hot and hurt the soldiers’ lungs. At one point, a shell-fall punched through the corridor twenty metres behind them and passed on through the opposite wall, slicing stone so it dribbled like heated butter. The superheated air that slammed down the hall from the impart flattened them. They met groups of Zoicans and Varl’s men cut them apart.
Two levels down, they ran into a stream of nearly sixty Vervun Primary and Roane Deepers with Major Rodyin amongst them. Several had bad burns.
“Where’s Willard?” screamed Varl over the klaxons and the explosive hurricane roar.
“Haven’t seen him!” barked Rodyin. One lens of his spectacles was crazed and he had a cut on his cheek.
“We have to get the men down! Down lower!” Varl yelled and the two officers began routing the surviving troops down a back staircase as firestorms billowed down the hallways towards them.
“They mined the Curtain Wall! From inside!” Rodyin bellowed as he and Varl pushed man after man past them onto the stairs.
“I know, feth it! How the hell did they get in?”
Rodyin didn’t answer.
On a section of wall below the mauled fort, Corporal Meryn was leading a straggle of panicking troops to cover. Two squads of Ghosts—Brostin, Ixjgris, Nehn and Mkteeg amongst them—pushed forward past him, but there were twenty or more Vervun Primary soldiers stumbling in their wake. Meryn bawled at them, waving his arms, trying to be heard above the shriek of the shelling and the detonations all around. Flames from the fort were reaching a hundred metres into the sky and billows of soot and burning fabric squalled around them. The heat was overwhelming. Somewhere close, a loader full of ammo had caught fire and heated rounds were firing off wildly, spanking off the stonework and cutting zigzag tracer paths in the air.
A shot hit the Vervun Primary trooper nearest to Meryn and exploded his spiked helmet.
There was a flash and some vast cutting beam drawn up outside the Wall swept over them. Meryn saw it and threw himself flat as the inexorable beam raked the parapet at chest height, vaporising the hurrying line of Vervun troopers in a murderous sequence. They simply vanished in turn, obliterated, leaving nothing but clouds of steam and the occasional smouldering boot behind.
The beam swept right over the prone Tanith Corporal, searing the back of his breeches, jacket and head-hair right off. He winced at the low throb of superficial burns, but he was startled to be alive.
