First and Only (38 page)
‘I know you do. I read that. You liked Boniface’s books. He had so many of them.’
Gaunt froze, tremors of worry plucking at his spine. He felt an ice cold droplet of sweat chase down his brow from his hairline. He felt trapped.
‘How could you know about that?’
‘You know how.’
The temperature in the room had dropped to freezing. Gaunt saw the ice crystals form across the table top, crackling and causing the wood to creak. Gooseflesh pimpled his body.
He leapt up and backed to the door. ‘That’s enough! This interview is over!’
He tried the door, making to leave. It was locked. Or at least, it would not open for him. Something held it shut. Gaunt hammered on it. ‘Inquisitor! Inquisitor Defay! Let me out!’
His voice sounded blunt and hollow in the tiny confines of the freezing room. He was more terrified than he had ever been in his life.
He looked round. The girl was crawling across the floor towards him, her eyes blank and filmed. Spittle welled out of her lolling mouth. She smiled. It was the most dreadful thing young Ibram Gaunt had ever seen.
When she spoke, her voice did not match her mouth. The utterances came from some other, horrid place. Her lips were just keeping bad time with them.
Cowering in a corner, watching her slow, animalistic approach across the icy floor, Gaunt managed to whisper: ‘What do you want from me? What?’
‘Your life.’ A feathery, inhuman voice.
‘Get away from me!’ Gaunt murmured, struggling with the door handle, to no avail.
‘What do you want to know?’ the horror asked, suddenly, calculatingly.
His mind raced. Maybe if he kept it talking, he could slow it down, figure a way out… ‘Will I make commissar?’ he snapped, hammering on the door, not really caring about his question.
‘Of course.’
The lock was straining, starting to give. A few moments more. Keep it talking! ‘Tell me the rest,’ he urged, hoping she would cease her crawl towards him.
She was silent for a few seconds as she thought. Her eyes went blacker. The tremulous, thin voice spoke again. ‘What I told you before. There will be seven. Seven stones of power. Cut them and you will be free. Do not kill them. But first you must find your ghosts.’
Gaunt shrugged, fighting with the lock, still not really listening. ‘What the feth does that mean?’
‘What does “feth” mean?’ she replied plainly.
Gaunt hesitated. He had no idea what the word meant or why he had used it.
‘Your future impinges on you, Ibram. Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.’
Gaunt turned. He’d fight if he had to. The door wasn’t giving and the slack-mouthed freak was getting too close. ‘In my profession I make plenty of those. Tell me something useful.’
‘You’re an anroth.’
‘A what?’
She hissed and stared up at him. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what it means, but I know you are one. Anroth. Anroth. That’s you.’
Gaunt scrabbled across the room to the far wall to put more space between them.
She crawled around slowly.
‘This is all madness! I’m leaving,’ he said.
‘So leave. But one thing before you go.’
He looked back and she smiled terrifyingly at him under her veil of loose black hair.
‘The warp knows you, Ibram Gaunt.’
‘To hell with the warp!’ he barked.
‘Ibram, there will come a day… far off, far away, when something coloured in vermilion will be the most valuable thing you have ever known. Chase it. Find it. Others will seek it, and you will defend it in blood. The blood of your ghosts.’
‘Enough with this!’
She shuffled forward on her knees like an animal. Spit from her mouth splashed the floor.
‘Remember this! Ibram! Ibram! Please! So many will die if you don’t! So many, so very many!’
‘If I don’t what?’ he snapped, trying to find a way out of this hell.
‘Destroy it. You must destroy it. The vermilion thing. Destroy it. It makes iron without souls.’
‘You’re insane!’
‘Iron without souls!’
She clawed at his legs, scratching and pulling at the icerimed cloth.
‘Get off me!’
‘Worlds will die! A warmaster will die! Don’t let any of them have it! Any of them! It is not a matter of the wrong hands! All will be wrong hands! No one has the right to use it! Destroy it! Ibram! Please!’
He threw her off and she fell away from him, sprawling on the frozen floor, crying.
He reached the door, his hand on the latch. It was suddenly unlocked. He turned back to her. She rose from the floor, her dark eyes wet with tears. Her voice was her own again now.
‘Don’t let them, Ibram. Destroy it.’
‘I’ve never heard such rubbish,’ Gaunt said diffidently. He took a deep breath. ‘If you’re truly gifted, why don’t you tell me something real? Something I might actually want to know. Like… like how did my father die?’
She pulled herself up onto the stool. The room went cold again. Fiercely cold. She looked deep into his eyes and Gaunt felt the stare pressing into his brain.
Despite himself, he sat down again on the stool. He looked at her dark eyes. Something told him what was coming.
In her own voice, she began. ‘Your father… you were his first and his only son. First and only…’
She fell silent again for a second, then she continued: ‘Kentaur. It was on Kentaur. Dercius was commanding the main force and your father was leading the elite strike…’
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