Nemesis

ONE Object Lesson / Tactics of Deceit / The Star

Gyges Prime was a murdered world, dead now, all but an ashen ember. Around the encampment, porous black rock ranged away under a cowl of low mist, the haze itself the remains of cities pounded into radio-active dust by countless bombardments from orbit. Arsenals of nuclear munitions had been emptied to bring the planet to the executioner’s block, and now the cooling corpse of the world lay swaddled in its own death-shroud, a virulent and silent pall of radiation that smothered everything.

Here, in the canyon where the invaders had made their planetfall, high walls of shield rock did their best to cut the fiery winds from the shattered landscape. Men, such as the soldiers that had crisped and burned like paper in the onslaught, would have died for the sake of living an hour outside in this nightmare, had any of them survived this long. The invaders had no such weaknesses, however.

The lethality they laid over Gyges Prime was to them a minor irritant. Once they were done in this place, they would return to their warcraft high above and clean the stink of the dead planet from their robes and armour as one might wash dried mud from a soiled boot. They would do this and think nothing of it. They would not stop to consider that the air now passing into their lungs was laced with the particulate remains of every man, woman and child that had called Gyges Prime home.

The planet was dead, and it had served a purpose in dying. The dozen other colony worlds of the Gyges system, each of them more valuable, more populous than this one, they would look through their mnemoniscopes and watch this ember cool and fade. Why choose to attack that world and no other? The question they first asked as the warships passed them by had now been answered: for the lesson of it.

Tobeld did not dwell on this, as he moved around the lee of the temporary pergolas set up beneath the wings of the tethered Stormbirds, hearing the mutter of conversation among the warriors around him amid the snap of guyropes and wind-pulled fabric. Messages were already coming in from the ships in orbit. The other worlds, the orbital platforms, the system defence fleet, all were surrendering. Twelve planets teeming with people, giving up their freedom without a single word of defiance. Lesson learned.

The taking of the Gyges system had been a swift and almost cursory thing. Doubtless, in decades to come, it would be less than a postscript in the annals of the war. No casualties of note had been taken by the warfleet, none that mattered to the architect of the conflict that this small venture was but a fragment of. Gyges was merely a stone in the path, a path that began in the Isstvan system and wound its way across the galaxy towards Terra. Gyges was a passing footstep, beneath which the blood of millions left no mark. By conventional battle logic, there was no reason for any of the invaders to even step on to the surface; yet still they had come, in this small party, for reasons that could only be guessed at.

Tobeld stifled a cough with his hand, pushing the thick robe of his hood to his face to muffle the sound. It came away wet and he tasted copper in his mouth. The radiation had killed him the moment he stepped out from the shuttle, him and the other serfs brought down from the flagship in order to serve the invaders. The serfs would all be dead before sunset. He knew he would share that fate, but it was a price worth paying. In the dimness of his dormitory capsule back on the warship, Tobeld had used a quarter of the elements of his weapons kit to fabricate a strong dosage of counter-radiation drugs; the rest he had turned to the building of the compound that nestled inside the finger-long glass vial strapped to the inside of his wrist. He had done his best to dispose of the remnants of the kit, but he was afraid some trace might still be discovered; and the counter-rads were working poorly. He had little time.

He passed behind the engine bells of a drop-ship and through the black haze he spied the largest of the tents, a low pavilion made of non-reflective cloth. For a second, the wind snapped at the entrance flap and showed him a glimpse of things inside. He saw what might have been firelight jumping and moving off slabs of polished ceramite armour, and wet shapes like animated falls of blood. Then the breeze passed on and the sight was lost to him. Still, the confusion of impressions made him shiver.

Tobeld hesitated. He would need to cross open ground to get from the Stormbird to the pavilion, and he could not afford to be challenged. He was entering the terminal stage of his mission now, after so long. There could be no mistakes. No one had come this close before. He could not risk failure.

Tobeld took a shaky, tainted breath. He had sacrificed a solar year of his life to this mission, breaking out from under a cover he had spent half a decade building as a minor Nobilite clan cook-functionary. He had willingly discarded that carefully-crafted disguise to embrace a new one, such was the gravity of his new mission; and through cautious steps, with doses of poisons both subtle and coarse to smooth his path, Tobeld had made his way into service aboard the battle cruiser Vengeful Spirit, the flagship of Horus Lupercal.

Two years had passed since the betrayal at Isstvan, the bloody backstabbing that opened the way to Horus’s insurrection against the Imperium and his father, the Emperor of Mankind. In that time, his steady progression across the galaxy had gathered momentum. As this day showed, every system that passed beneath the keel of Horus’s warships either swore fealty to him, or else they burned. Worlds and worlds, united in the aftermath of the Great Crusade, were now torn between loyalty to a distant Earth and an absent Emperor, or to a victorious Horus and his army of warlords. The glimpses Tobeld got from his lower-decks vantage point showed an armada of turncoat-kindred consolidating power degree by punishing degree. Horus closed his steel grip on sector after sector. One did not need to be a tactician to know that the Warmaster was marshalling his energies for the advance that had to come – an eventual thrust towards Terra herself, and to the gates of the Imperial Palace.

Horus could not be allowed to take that step.

At first it had seemed an unassailable objective. The Warmaster himself, a primarch, a demigod warrior, and Tobeld just a man. A killer of superlative skill and subtlety, indeed, but still a man. To strike directly at Horus aboard the Spirit would have been madness, an impossibility. Tobeld toiled aboard the flagship for almost five months before he even laid eyes upon the Warmaster – and the being he saw that day was one of such magnitude that it set him reeling, the question hard in his thoughts. How do I kill this one?

Conventional poisons were worthless ranged against the physiology of an Astartes; they could ingest the harshest of venoms as Tobeld might sip wine. But Tobeld was here precisely because poison was his weapon of choice. It could be swift; it could be patient, escaping detection, lying dormant. He was one of Clade Venenum’s finest tox-artisans; in his apprenticeship he had manufactured killing philtres from the most base of components, he had terminated dozens of targets and left no trace. And he slowly came to believe that he was capable of this, if fate would only grace him with a single opportunity.

The weapon lay in the vial. Tobeld had created a binary agent, a mixture of molecular accelerant gels suspending a live sample of gene-altered Baalite thirstwater – a virulent fluidic life form that could consume all moisture within living tissues in a matter of seconds. When Horus had announced he would be leading a landing party to the surface of Gyges Prime, Tobeld heard the tolling of fate in the words. His chance. His single chance.

There was rumour and supposition aboard the Vengeful Spirit, down on the lower decks where the human serfs and servitors toiled. Men spoke of strange things afoot on the levels where the Astartes walked, of changes, of apparitions and peculiarities in parts of the vessel. Tobeld heard whispers of the so-called lodges where these changes took place. He listened to stories of rites made on the surfaces of conquered worlds, things that sickened him as much with their nauseating similarity to crude idolatry as with their hints of inhumanity and horror. The men who spoke of these things often vanished soon after, leaving nothing but fear in their wakes.

He concentrated on the weapon, listening for the wind to drop. Horus was there, no more than a dozen steps away, inside the pavilion with his inner circle – Maloghurst, Abaddon and the rest of them – engaging in whatever ritual had brought them to this place. Close now, closer than ever before. Tobeld prepared himself, forcing away the pain in his throat, his joints. Entering the command tent, he would introduce the weapon to the jug of wine at Horus’s side, fill the cups of the Warmaster and his senior battle-brothers. One sip would be enough to infect them… and he hoped it would be enough to kill, although Tobeld held no doubt he would not live to see his mission succeed. His faith in his art would have to be enough.

Time, then. He stepped out from underneath the Stormbird’s wing; and a voice said ‘Is that it?’

A reply, firm and cold, returned from somewhere close at hand in the smoke-haze. ‘Aye.’

Tobeld tried to turn on his heel, but he was already leaving the ground, taken off his feet by a shadow that dwarfed him, a towering man-form in steel-grey armour holding a fistful of his robes. Leering out of the gloom came a hard face that was all angles and barely restrained menace. A patchwork of scarification was the setting for eyes that were wide with black mirth, eyes that bored into him. ‘Where are you going, little man?’ He marvelled at the thought that someone so large had been able to approach him in utter silence.

‘Lord, I…’ It was hard to talk. Tobeld’s throat was as dry as the winds, and the grip the Astartes had on him pulled the material of the robes tight about his neck. He struggled for breath – but he did not struggle too much, for fear the turncoat might think he was making some futile attempt to defend himself and respond in kind.

‘Hush, hush’, said the other voice. A second figure, if anything larger and more lethal in aspect than the first, stepped from the smoke. Tobeld’s eyes instantly fell to the intricate etching and jewelled medallions adorning the other Astartes’s chest, symbols of high rank and seals of loyalty among the Sons of Horus Legion. He knew this warrior immediately, the laughing face and the shock-blond hair, without need to survey the rank sigils upon him, though. Luc Sedirae, Captain of the 13th Company.

‘Let’s not make a song and dance of this,’ Sedirae went on. His right hand flexed absently; he wore no gauntlet upon it, showing to the world where the limb had been lost and replaced by an augmetic in polished brass and anodised black steel. The hand had been taken from him in battle with the Raven Guard at Isstvan, so it was said, and the captain wore the wound proudly, as if it were a badge of honour.

Tobeld’s gaze flicked back to the warrior holding him, finding the symbols of the 13th Company on the other Astartes. Belatedly, he recognised him as Devram Korda, one of Sedirae’s seconds; not that such knowledge would do him any good. He tried again to speak. ‘Lords, I am only doing my duty as–’

But the words seemed to curdle in his throat and Tobeld choked on them, emitting a wet gasp instead.

From behind Korda, following the path that Tobeld had taken around the parked craft, a third Astartes emerged from beneath the shadows cast by the drop-ship. The assassin knew this one, too. Armour the colour of old, dried blood, an aspect like a storm captured in the confines of a man’s face, eyes he could not bring himself to meet. Erebus.

‘His duty,’ said the First Chaplain of the Word Bearers, musing on the thought. ‘That is not a lie.’ Erebus’s voice was soft and almost gentle, raised only slightly above the low keen of the Gyges winds.

Tobeld blinked and felt a tide of terror growing to fill him. He rose on it, caught by the icy certainty of the moment. Erebus knew what he was. Somehow, Erebus had always known. All his careful subterfuges, every piece of flawless tradecraft he had employed – the Word Bearer walked towards him now with a swagger that told the assassin it had counted for nothing.

‘My duty is to serve the Warmaster!’ he blurted, desperate to stall for time, for a moment more of life.

‘Quietly,’ warned Erebus, silencing him before he could say more. The Word Bearer threw a glance towards the command tent. ‘Nothing will be gained by disturbing Great Horus. He will be… displeased.’

Korda turned Tobeld in his grip, like a fisherman evaluating a disappointing catch before tossing it back into the ocean. ‘So weak,’ he offered. ‘He’s dying even as I watch. The boneseekers in the air are eating him inside.’

Sedirae folded his arms. ‘Well?’ he demanded of Erebus. ‘Is this some game of yours, Word Bearer, or is there real cause for us to torment this helot?’ His lips thinned. ‘I grow bored.’

‘This is a killer,’ Erebus explained. ‘A weapon, after a fashion.’

Tobeld belatedly understood that they had been waiting for him. ‘I… am only a servant…’ he gasped. He was losing sensation in his limbs and his vision was starting to fog from the tightness of Korda’s hold.

‘Lie,’ said the Word Bearer, the accusation clicking off his tongue.

Panic broke through what barriers of resolve still remained in Tobeld’s mind, and he felt them crumble. He felt himself lose all sense of rationality and give in to the terror with animal reaction. His training, the control that had been bred into him from his childhood in the schola, disintegrated under no more than a look from Erebus’s cold, cold gaze.

Tobeld flexed his wrist and the vial came into his hand. He twisted wildly in Korda’s grasp, catching the Astartes fractionally off-guard, stabbing downwards with the glassy cylinder. Motion-sensing switches in the crystalline matrix of the vial obeyed and opened a tiny mouth at the blunt end, allowing a ring of monomol needles to emerge. Little thicker than human hairs, the fine rods could penetrate even the hardy epidermis of an Adeptus Astartes. Tobeld tried to kill Devram Korda, swinging at the bare skin of his scarred face, missing, swinging again. He did this mindlessly, in the manner of a mechanism running too fast, unguided.

Korda used the flat of his free hand to swat the assassin, doing it with such force that he broke Tobeld’s jaw and caved in much of the side of his skull. Tobeld’s right eye was immediately crushed, and the shock resonated through him. After a moment he realised he was on the ground, blood flowing freely from his shattered mouth and nose into a growing puddle.

‘Erebus was right, sir,’ Korda said, the voice woolly and distant.

Tobeld’s hand reached out in a claw, scraping at the black sand and smooth rock. Through the eye that still worked, he could see the vial, the contents unspent, lying where it had fallen from his fingers. He reached for it, inching closer.

‘He was.’ Tobeld heard Sedirae echo his battle-brother with a sigh. ‘Seems to be making a habit of it.’

The assassin looked up, the pain caused by the simple action almost insurmountable, and saw shapes swimming in mist and blood. Cold eyes upon him, judging him unworthy.

‘Put an end to this,’ said Erebus.

Korda hesitated. ‘Lord?’

‘As our cousin says, brother-sergeant,’ Sedirae replied. ‘It’s becoming tiresome.’

One of the shapes grew larger, coming closer, and Tobeld saw a steel-plated hand reach for the vial, gather it up. ‘What does this do, I wonder?’

Then the vial glittered in the light as the Astartes brought the assassin’s weapon down and injected the contents of the tube into the bruised bare flesh of Tobeld’s arm.

Sedirae watched the helot perish with the slow, indolent air of one who had seen many manners of death. He watched out of interest to see if this ending would show him something different from all the other kills he had witnessed – and it did, to some small degree.

Korda placed a hand over the man’s mouth to muffle his screams as the helot’s body twitched and drew into itself. On the Caslon Moon during the Great Crusade, the captain of the 13th had drowned a mutant in a freezing lake, holding the freak-thing down beneath the surface of the murky waters until it had perished. He was reminded of that kill now, watching the helot go to his end from the poison. The hooded servile was drowning dry, if such a thing were possible. Where he could see bare skin, Sedirae saw the pallid and rad-burned meat of the man first turn corpse-grey, then lose all definition and become papery, pulling tight over bones and muscle bunches that atrophied as the moments passed. Even the blood that had spilled onto the dark earth became cloudy and then evaporated, leaving cracked deposits bereft of any moisture. Korda eventually took his hand away and shook it, sending a rain of powder from his fingertips off on the winds.

‘A painful death,’ remarked the sergeant, examining his fingers. ‘See here?’ He showed off a tiny scratch on the ceramite of the knuckle joint. ‘He bit me in his last agonies, not that it mattered.’

Sedirae threw a look at the command tent. No one had emerged to see what was going on outside. He doubted Horus and the rest of his Mournival were even aware of the killing taking place. They had so much to occupy them, after all. So many plans and great schemes to helm…

‘I’ll inform the Warmaster,’ he heard himself say.

Erebus took a step closer. ‘Do you think that is necessary?’

Sedirae glanced at the Chaplain. The Word Bearer had a way of drawing attention directly when he wished it, almost as if he could drag a gaze towards him like a black sun would pull in light and matter in order to consume it; and by turns he could do the opposite, making himself a ghost in a room full of people, allowing sight to slide off him as if he were not there. In his more honest moments, Luc Sedirae would admit that the presence of Erebus left him unsettled. The captain of the 13th could not quite shake the disquiet that clouded his thoughts every time the Word Bearer chose to speak. Not for the first time, despite all the fealty he had sworn to the Luna Wolves – now the Sons of Horus in name and banner – Sedirae asked himself why the Warmaster needed Erebus so close in order to prosecute his just and right insurrection against the Emperor. It was one of many doubts that he carried, these days. The burden of them seemed to grow ever greater with each passing month that the Warmaster’s forces dallied out here in the deeps, while the prize of Terra herself remained out of reach.

He gave a low snort and gestured at the corpse. ‘Someone just tried to kill him. Yes, cousin, I think Horus Lupercal might consider that of interest.’

‘Tell me you are not so naïve as to imagine that this pitiful attempt was the first such act against the Warmaster?’

Sedirae narrowed his eyes at Erebus’s light, almost dismissive tone. ‘The first to come so close, I would warrant.’

‘A few steps more and he would have been inside the tent,’ muttered Korda.

‘Distance is relative,’ Erebus replied. ‘Lethality is the key factor.’

Korda stood up. ‘I wonder who sent him.’

‘The Warmaster’s father,’ said Erebus immediately. ‘Or, if not by the Emperor’s direct decree, then by that of his lackeys.’

‘You seem very certain,’ Sedirae noted. ‘But Horus has made many enemies.’

The Word Bearer gave a slight smile and shook his head. ‘None of concern on this day.’ He took a breath. ‘We three ended this threat before it became an issue. It need not become one after the fact.’ Erebus nodded towards the tent. ‘The Warmaster has a galaxy to conquer. He has more than enough to absorb his attention as it is. Would you wish to distract your primarch with this triviality, Sedirae?’ He prodded the corpse with the tip of his boot.

‘I believe the Warmaster should make that choice for himself.’ Irritation flared in Sedirae’s manner and his lip curled. ‘Perhaps–’ He caught himself and fell silent, arresting the train of thought even as it formed.

‘Perhaps?’ echoed Erebus, immediately seizing on the word as if he knew what would have followed it. ‘Speak your mind, captain. We are all kinsmen here. All brothers of the lodge.’

He deliberated for a long moment on the words pushing at his lips, and then finally gave them leave. ‘Perhaps, Word Bearer, if matters such as these were not kept from Horus, then he might wish to move along a swifter path. Perhaps, if he were not kept ignorant of the threats to our campaign, he might–’

‘Push on to the Segmentum Solar, and to Earth?’ Erebus seemed to close the distance between them without actually moving. ‘That is the root of it, am I right? You feel that the measured pace of our advance is too slow. You wish to lay siege to the Imperial Palace tomorrow.’

‘My captain is not alone in that regard,’ said Korda, with feeling.

‘A month would be enough,’ retorted Sedirae, showing teeth. ‘It could be done. We all know it.’

Erebus’s smile lengthened. ‘I am sure that from where the warriors of the 13th Company stand, it doubtless seems that simple. But let me assure you, it is not. There’s still so much to be done, Luc Sedirae. So many pieces to be placed, so many factors not yet ready.’

The captain gave an angry snort. ‘What are you saying? That we must wait for the stars to be right?’

The smile faded and the Word Bearer became grim. ‘Exactly that, cousin. Exactly that.’

The sudden coldness in Erebus’s words gave Sedirae a moment’s pause. ‘Clearly I lack your insight, then,’ he grated. ‘As I fail to see the merit in this leisurely strategy.’

‘As long as we follow the Warmaster, all will be as it should,’ Erebus told him. ‘Victory will come soon enough.’ He paused over the corpse, which had begun to disintegrate into dust, pulled away by the winds. ‘Perhaps even sooner than any of us might expect.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Korda.

‘A truism of warfare.’ Erebus did not look up from his examination of the dead assassin. ‘If a tactic can be used against us, then it can be used by us.’

Dawn brought with it the clouds, and under the mellow amber glow of the rising sun, the bright jewels of the Taebian Stars began to fade away as pure blue washed in to lighten the darkness of lost night. Pressed to one window of the coleopter’s cramped cabin, Yosef Sabrat took a moment to pull the collar of his greatcoat a little tighter around his neck. The long summer season of Iesta Veracrux was well and truly over, and the new autuwinter was on the horizon, coming in slow and careful. Up here, in the cold morning sky, he could feel it. In a matter of weeks, the rains would come in earnest; and not before time, either. This year’s crop would be one for the record books, so they were saying.

The flyer bumped through a pocket of turbulent air and Yosef bounced in his seat; like most of the craft in service with the Sentine, it was an old thing but well cared for, one of many machines that could date back their lineage to the Second Establishment and the great colonial influx. The ducted rotor vanes behind the passenger compartment thrummed, the engine note changing as the pilot put it into a shallow portside turn. Yosef let gravity turn his head and he looked past the two jagers who were the only other passengers, and out through the seamless bowl of glassaic at the empty observer’s station.

Sparse pennants of thin white cloud drifted away to give him a better view. They were passing over the Breghoot Canyon, where the sheer rock face of red stone fell away into deeps that saw little daylight, even at high sun. The terraces of the vineyards there were just opening up for the day, fans of solar arrays on the tiled roofs turning and unfolding like black sails on some ocean schooner. Beyond, clinging to the vast kilometre-long trellises that extended out off the edges of the cliffs, waves of greenery resembled strange cataracts of emerald frozen in mid-fall. Had they been closer, Yosef imagined he would be able to see the shapes of harvestmen and their ceramic-clad gatherer automatons moving in among the frames, taking the bounty from the web of vines.

The coleopter rumbled again as it forded an updraught and righted itself, giving a wide berth to the hab-towers reaching high from the cliff top and into the lightening sky. Acres of white stucco coated the flanks of the tall, skinny minarets, and across most of them the shutters were still closed over their windows, the new day yet to be greeted. Most of the capital’s populace were still slumbering at this dawn hour, and Yosef did in all honesty envy them to great degree. The hasty mug of recaf that had been his breakfast sat poorly in his stomach. He’d slept fitfully last night – something that seemed to be happening more often these days – and so when the vox had pulled him the rest of the way from his dreamless half-slumber, it had almost been a kindness. Almost.

The engine note grew shrill as the flyer picked up speed, coming in swift and low now over the tops of the woodlands that bracketed the capital’s airdocks. Yosef watched the carpet of green and brown flash past beneath him, trying not to get lost in it.

A word from the low, muttered conversation drifting between the jagers came to him without warning. He frowned and dismissed it, willing himself not to listen, concentrating on the engine sound instead; but he could not. The word, the name, whispered furtively for fear of invocation.

Horus.

Each time he heard it, it was as if it were some sort of curse. Those who uttered it would do so in fear, gripped by some strange belief that to speak the name would incur an instant punishment by unseen authority. Or perhaps it was not that; perhaps it was a sickening that the word brought with it, the sense that this combination of sounds would turn the stomach if said too loudly. The name troubled him. For too long it had been a watchword for nobility and heroism; but now the meaning was in flux, and it defied any attempt at categorisation in Yosef’s analytical, careful thoughts.

He considered admonishing the men for a brief moment, then thought better of it. For all the bright sunshine that might fall upon Iesta Veracrux’s thriving society, there were shadows cast here and some of them ran far deeper than many would wish to know. Recently, those shadows ran longer and blacker than ever before, and men would know fear and doubt for that. It was to be expected.

The coleopter rose up to clear the last barrier of high Ophelian pines and spun in towards the network of towers, landing pads and blockhouses that were the capital’s primary port.

The Sentine had dispensation and so were not required to land at a prescribed platform like civilian traffic. Instead, the pilot moved smartly between a massive pair of half-inflated cargo ballutes to touch down on a patch of ferrocrete scarcely the width of the flyer. Yosef and the pair of jagers were barely off the drop-ramp before the downwash from the rotor became a brief hurricane and the coleopter spun away, back up into the blue. Yosef shielded his eyes from the dust and scattered leaves the departure kicked up, watching it go.

He reached inside his coat for his warrant rod on its chain, and drew out the slim silver shaft to hang free and visible around his neck. He ran his thumb absently down the length of it, over the etching and the gold contact inlays that indicated his rank of reeve, and surveyed the area. Unlike the jagers, who only wore a brass badge on street duty or patrol, the reeve’s rod showed his status as an investigating officer.

The men from the flyer had joined a group of other uniforms who were carefully plotting out a search pattern for the surrounding area. Behind them, Yosef saw an automated barrier mechanical ponderously drawing a thick cable lined with warning flags around the edge of the nearest staging area.

A familiar face caught his eye. ‘Sir!’ Skelta was tall and thin of aspect, with a bearing to him that some of the other members of the Sentine unkindly equated to a rodent. The jager came quickly over to his side, ducking slightly even though the coleopter was long gone. Skelta blinked, looking serious and pale. ‘Sir,’ he repeated. The young man had ideas about being promoted beyond street duty to the Sentine’s next tier of investigatory operations, and so he was always attempting to present a sober and thoughtful aspect whenever he was in his superior’s company; but Yosef didn’t have the heart to tell the man he was just a little too dull-witted to make the grade. He wasn’t a bad sort, but sometimes he exhibited the kind of ignorance that made Sabrat’s palms itch.

‘Jager,’ he said with a nod. ‘What do you have for me?’

A shadow passed over Skelta’s face, something that went beyond his usual reticent manner, and Yosef caught it. The reeve had come here expecting to find a crime of usual note, but Skelta’s fractional expression gave him pause; and for the first time that morning, he wondered what he had walked into.

‘It’s, uh…’ The jager trailed off and swallowed hard, his gaze losing focus for a moment as he thought about something else. ‘You should probably see for yourself, sir.’

‘All right. Show me.’

Skelta led him through the ordered ranks of wooden cargo capsules, each one an octagonal block the size of a small groundcar. The smell of matured estufagemi wine was everywhere here, soaked into the massive crates, even bled into the stone flags of the flight apron. The warm, comforting scent seemed cloying and overly strong today, however, almost as if it were struggling to mask the perfume of something far less pleasant.

Close by, he heard the quick barks of dogs, and then a man’s angry shout followed by snarls and yelps. ‘Dockside strays,’ offered the jager. ‘Attracted by the stink, sir. Been kicking them away since before sun-up.’ The thought seemed to disagree with the young man and he changed the subject. ‘We think we have an identity for the victim. Documents found near the scene, papers and the like. Name was Jaared Norte. A lighter drivesman.’

‘You think,’ echoed Yosef. ‘You’re not sure?’

Skelta held up the barrier line for the reeve to step under, and they walked on, into the crime scene proper. ‘Haven’t been able to make a positive match yet, sir,’ he went on. ‘Clinicians are on the way to check for dentition and blood-trace.’ The jager coughed, self-consciously. ‘He… doesn’t have a face, sir. And we found some loose teeth… But we’re not sure they were, uh, his.’

Yosef took that in without comment. ‘Go on.’

‘Norte’s foreman has been interviewed. Apparently, Norte clocked off at the usual time last night, heading home to his wife and son. He never arrived.’

‘The wife report it, did she?’

Skelta shook his head. ‘No, sir. They had some trouble, apparently. Their marriage contract was a few months from expiration, and it was causing friction. She probably thought he was out drinking up his pay.’

‘This from the foreman?’

The jager nodded. ‘Sent a mobile to their house to confirm his take on things. Waiting on a word.’

‘Was Norte drunk when he was killed?’

This time, Skelta couldn’t stop himself from shuddering. ‘For his sake, I hope so. Would have been a blessing for the poor bastard.’

Yosef sensed the fear in the other man’s words. Murder was not an uncommon crime on Iesta Veracrux; they were a relatively prosperous world that was built on the industry of wine, after all, and men who drank – or who coveted money – were often given to mistakes that led to bloodletting. The reeve had seen many deaths, some brutal, many of them sordid, each in their own way tragic; but all of them he had understood. Yosef knew crime for what it was – a weakness of self – and he knew the triggers that would bring that flaw to light. Jealousy, madness, sorrow… But fear was the worst.

And there was much fear on Iesta Veracrux these days. Here out in the ranges of the Ultima Segmentum, across the span of the galaxy from the Throne of Terra, the planet and its people felt distant and unprotected while wars were being fought, lines of battle drawn over maps their home world was too insignificant to grace. The Emperor and his council seemed so far away, and the oncoming storm of the insurrection churning sightless and unseen in the nearby stars laid a pall of creeping apprehension over everything. In every shadowed corner, people saw the ghosts of the unknown.

They were afraid; and people who were afraid easily became people who were angry, directing their terror outwards against any slight, real or imagined. Today’s killing was only the newest of many that had rolled across Iesta Veracrux in recent months; murders spawned from trivialities, suicides, panicked attacks on illusory threats. While life went on as it ever did, beneath the surface there lay a black mood infecting the whole populace, even as they pretended it did not exist. Had Jaared Norte become a victim of this as well? Yosef thought it likely.

They moved around a tall corner of containers and into a small courtyard formed by lines of crates. Overhead, another cargo ballute drifted slowly past, for a moment casting a broad oval shadow across the proceedings. A handful of other jagers were at work conducting fingertip sweeps of the location, a couple from the documentary office working complex forensic picters and sense-nets, another talking into a bulky wireless with a tall whip antenna. Skelta exchanged looks with one of the docos, and she gave him a rueful nod in return. Behind them all, there was a narrow but high storage shed with its doors splayed wide open. The reeve immediately spotted the patches of brown staining the metal doors.

He frowned, looking around at the identical rust-coloured greatcoats and peaked caps of the Sentine officers. ‘The Arbites are inside?’ Yosef nodded towards the shed.

Skelta gave a derisive sniff. ‘The Arbites are not here, sir. Called it in, as per the regulations. Lord Marshal’s office was unavailable. Asked to be kept informed, though.’

‘I’ll bet they did.’ Yosef grimaced. For all the grand words and high ideals spouted by the Adeptus Arbites, at least on Iesta Veracrux that particular branch of the Adeptus Terra was less interested in the policing of the planet than they were in being seen to be interested in it. The officers of the Sentine had been the lawmen and wardens of the Iestan system since the days of the colony’s founding in the First Establishment, and the installation of an office of the Arbites here during the Great Crusade had done little to change that state of affairs. The Lord Marshal and his staff seemed more than happy to remain in their imposing tower and allow the Sentine to function as they always had, handling all the ‘local’ matters. Quite what the Arbites considered to be other than local had never, in twenty years of service, been made clear to Yosef Sabrat. The politics of the whole thing seemed to orbit at a level far beyond the reeve’s understanding.

He glanced at Skelta. ‘Do you have a read on the murder weapon?’

Skelta glanced at the doco officer again, as if asking permission. ‘Not exactly. Bladed weapon, probably. For starters. There might have been, uh, other tools used.’ What little colour there was on the jager’s face seemed to ebb away and he swallowed hard.

Yosef stopped on the threshold of the shed. A slaughterhouse stink of blood and faeces hit him hard and his nostrils twitched. ‘Witnesses?’ he added.

Skelta pointed upwards, towards a spotlight tower. ‘There are security imagers on the lighting stands, but they didn’t get anything. Angle was too shallow for the optics to pick up a likeness.’

The reeve filed that information away; whoever had made the kill knew the layout of the airdocks, then. ‘Canvass every other imager in a half-kilometre radius, pull the memory coils and have some of the recruits sift them. We might get lucky.’ He took a long inhalation, careful to breathe through his mouth. ‘Let’s see this, then.’

He went in, and Skelta hesitantly followed a few steps behind. Inside, the shed was gloomy, lit only by patches of watery sunshine coming in by degrees through low windows and the hard-edged glares of humming portable arc lamps. On splayed tripod legs, a quad of gangly field emitters stood at the corners of an ill-defined square, a faint yellow glow connecting each to its neighbours. The permeable energy membrane allowed objects above a certain mass or kinetic energy to pass through unhindered, but kept particulates and other micro-scale matter in situ to aid with on-site forensics.

Yosef’s brow creased in a frown as he approached the field; the area of open, shadowed floor between the emitters seemed at first glance to be empty. He stepped through the barrier and the stench in the air intensified. Glancing over his shoulder he saw that Skelta had not followed him through, instead remaining outside the line at stiff attention, his gaze directed anywhere but at the scene of the crime.

The stone floor was awash in dark arterial blood, and there were fleshy shapes scattered randomly in the shallow little sea of rippling crimson. Ropes of what had to be intestine, shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pasty-white and streaked with fluid. An array of butcher slab remnants, discarded not in haste but with disinterest.

The reeve felt disgust and confusion in equal measure, but he reined them in and let his sharp eye take the lead. He looked for patterns and impressions. It had been done with care and precision, this. No crime of passion, no murder of opportunity. Cool, calm and without fear of discovery. Yosef peered into the shadows, the first questions forming in his mind.

How had this been done and kept silent enough that no one had heard it? With so much blood shed, had the killer been tainted, left a trace? And where…? Where was…?

Yosef stopped short and blinked. The pool of blood was in gentle motion, small swells crossing it back and forth. He heard tiny hollow splashes here and there. ‘The remains…’ he began, glancing back at Skelta. ‘There’s not enough for a corpse. Where’s Norte’s body?’

The jager had one hand to his mouth, and with the other he gingerly pointed upwards. Yosef raised his eyes to the roof and there he found the rest of Jaared Norte.

The drivesman’s body had been opened in a manner that the reeve had only seen in use by morticians – or rather, in a manner that was an extreme variation on the cuts used for a post-mortem examination. Iron impact rods, the kind of heavy bolts used by building labourers to secure construction work to sheer cliff sides, had been used to nail Norte to the ceiling of the shed. One through each ankle, another through the meat of the forearms, the limbs splayed out in an X-shaped stance. Then, slices across the torso at oblique angles had enabled the killer to peel back the epidermis of the torso, the neck and face. These cuts created pennants of skin that each came to a point; one to the right and to the left, another down across the groin and the last torn up over the bloody grinning mess of the skull to rise over the dead man’s head. Four more impact rods secured the tips of these wet rags of meat in place. From the opened confines of the man’s body, loops of dislodged muscle and broken spars of bone pointed down towards the blood pool, weeping fluid.

‘Have you ever seen anything like that?’ managed Skelta, his voice thick with revulsion. ‘It’s horrific.’

Yosef’s first thought was of a sculpture, of an artwork. Against the dark metal plates of the shed’s roof, the drivesman had been made into a star with eight points.

‘I don’t know,’ whispered the reeve.

TWO The Shrouds / Masked / A Common Blade

The Imperial Palace was more city than stronghold, vast and ornate in the majesty of its sprawling scope, towers, pinnacles and great monoliths of stone and gold that swept from horizon to jagged horizon. Landscapes that in millennia past had been a patchwork of nation-states and sovereignties were now buried beneath the grand unity of the Empire of Humanity, and its greatest monument. The dominions of the palace encompassed whole settlements and satellite townships, from the confines of the Petitioner’s City to the ranges of the Elysium Domes, across the largest star-port in the Sol system and down to the awesome spectacle of the Eternity Gate. Millions toiled within its outer walls in service to the Imperium, many living their lives without ever leaving the silver arcology ziggurats where they were born, served, and died.

This was the shining, beating heart of all human endeavour, the throne and the birthplace of a species that stood astride the galaxy, its splendour and dignity vast enough that no one voice could ever hope to encompass them with mere words. Terra and her greatness were the jewel in the Imperial crown, bright and endless.

And yet; within a metropolis that masqueraded as a continent, there were a myriad of ghost rooms and secret places. There were corners where the light did not fall – some of them created for just that purpose.

There was a chamber known as the Shrouds. Inside the confines of the Inner Palace, if one could have gazed upon the schematics of those bold artisans who laid the first stones of the gargantuan city-state, no trace of the room or its entrances would have been apparent. To all intents and purposes, this place did not exist, and even those who had need to know of its reality could not have pinpointed it on a map. If one could not find the Shrouds, then one was not meant to.

There were many ways to the chamber, and those who met there might know of one or two – hidden passageways concealed in the tromp l’oeil artworks of the Arc Galleries; a shaft behind the captured waterfall at the Annapurna Gate; the blind corridor near the Great Orrery; the Solomon Folly and the ghost switch in the sapphire elevator at the Western Vantage; these and others, some unused for centuries. Those summoned to the Shrouds would emerge into a labyrinth of ever-shifting corridors that defied all attempts to map them, guided by a mech-intellect that would navigate them to the room and never twice by the same route. All that could be certain was that the chamber was atop a tower, one of thousands ranged in sentry rows across the inner bulwarks of the Palace, and even that was a supposition, based on the weak patina of daylight allowed to penetrate the sailcloth-thick blinds that forever curtained the great oval windows about the room. Some suspected that the light might be a deception, a falsehood filtered through trick glass or even totally simulated. Perhaps the chamber was deep underground, or perhaps there were more than one of them, a suite of dozens of identical rooms so exacting in similarity that to tell them apart would be impossible.

And once within, there was no place on Earth more secure, save for the Emperor’s Throne Room itself. None could listen in upon words spoken in a place that did not exist, that could not be found. The walls of the chamber, dark mahogany panels adorned with minimalist artworks and a few lume-globes, concealed layers of instrumentality that rendered the room and everything in it completely dead to the eyes and ears of any possible surveillance. There were counter-measures that fogged radiation detection frequencies, devices that swallowed sound and heat and light, working alongside slivers of living neural matter broadcasting the telepathic equivalent of white noise across all psychic spectra. There was even a rumour that the chamber was cloaked by a field of disruption that actually dislocated local space-time by several fractions of a second, allowing the room to exist a heartbeat into the future and out of reach of the rest of the universe.

In the Shrouds there was a table, a long octagon of polished rosewood, and upon it a simple hololithic projector casting a cool glow over the assembled men and women gathered there. In deep, comfortable seats, six of them clustered around one end of the table, while a seventh sat alone at the head. The eighth did not sit, but instead stood just beyond the range of the light, content to be little more than a tall shape made up of shadows and angles.

The seven at the table had faces of porcelain and precious metals. Masks covered their countenances from brow-line to neck, and like the room they were in, these outer concealments were far more than they appeared. Each mask was loaded with advanced technologies, data-libraries, sensoria, even microweapons, and each had a different aspect that was the mirror of its wearer; only the man at the head of the table wore a face with no affectation. His mask was simple and silver, as if it had been carved from polished steel, with only the vaguest impression of a brow, eyes, a nose and mouth. Reflected in its sheen, the panes of information shown by the hololith turned slowly, allowing everyone in the room to read them.

What was written there was damning and disappointing in equal measure.

‘Then he is dead,’ said a woman’s voice, the tone filtered through a fractal baffle that rendered her vocal pattern untraceable. Her mask was black and it fit skin-close, almost like a hood made of silk; only the large oval rubies that were her eyes broke the illusion. ‘The report here makes that clear.’

‘Quick to judge, as ever,’ came a throaty whisper, similarly filtered, from a motionless mask that resembled a distended, hydrocephalic skull. ‘We should hold for certainty, Siress Callidus.’

The ruby eyes glared across the table. ‘My esteemed Sire Culexus,’ came the terse reply. ‘How long would you have us wait? Until the revolt reaches our door?’ She turned her jewelled gaze on the only other woman seated at the table, a figure whose face was hidden behind an elegant velvet visor of green and gold, vaned with lines of droplet pearls and dark emeralds. ‘Our sister’s agent has failed. As I said he would.’

The woman in the green mask stiffened, and leaned back in her chair, distancing herself from the ire of Callidus. Her reply was frosty and brittle. ‘I would note that none of you have yet been able to place an operative so close to the Warmaster as Clade Venenum did. Tobeld was one of my finest students, equal to the task he was set upon–’

That drew a derisive grunt from a hulking male behind a grinning, fang-toothed rictus made of bone and gunmetal. ‘If he was equal to it, then why isn’t the turncoat dead? All that time wasted and for what? To give the traitors a fresh corpse at Horus’s doorstep?’ He made a spitting sound.

Siress Venenum’s eyes narrowed behind their disguise. ‘However little you think of my clade, dear Eversor, your record to date gives you no cause to preen.’ She drew herself up. ‘What have you contributed to this mission other than a few messy and explosive deaths?’

The fanged mask regarded her, anger radiating out from the man behind it. ‘My agents have brought fear!’ he spat. ‘Each kill has severed the head of a key insurrectionist element!’

‘Not to mention countless collaterals,’ offered a dry, dour voice. The comment emerged from behind a standard-issue spy mask, no different from the kind issued to every one of the sniper operatives of Clade Vindicare. ‘We need a surgeon’s touch to excise the Archtraitor. A scalpel, not a firebomb.’

Sire Eversor let out a low growl. ‘When the day comes that someone invents a rifle you can fire from the safety of your chair and still hit Horus half a galaxy away, you can save us all. But until then, hide behind your gun sight and stay silent!’

The sixth figure at the far end of the table cleared his throat, cocking his head. His mask, a thing made of glassy layers that reflected granulated, randomised images, flickered in the dimness. ‘If I might address Sire Culexus and Siress Callidus?’ said Sire Vanus. ‘My clade’s predictive engines and our most diligent infocytes have concluded, based on all available data and prognostic simulations, that the probability of Tobeld’s survival to complete his mission was zero point two percent. Margin of error negligible. However, it did represent an improvement in proximity-to-target over all Officio Assassinorum operations to date.’

‘A mile or an inch,’ hissed Culexus, ‘it doesn’t matter if the kill was lost.’

Siress Callidus looked up the table towards the man in the silver mask. ‘I want to activate a new operative,’ she began. ‘Her name is M’Shen, she is one of the best of my clade and I–’

‘Tobeld was the best of the Venenum!’ snapped Sire Vindicare, with sudden annoyance. ‘Just as Hoswalt was the best of mine, just as Eversor sent his best and so on and so on! But we’re throwing our most gifted students into a meat-grinder, sending them in blind and half-prepared! Every strike against Horus breaks, and he shrugs it off without notice!’ He shook his head grimly. ‘Is this what we have been reduced to? Every time we meet, listening to a catalogue of each other’s failures?’ The masked man spread his arms, taking in his five cohorts. ‘We all remember that day on Mount Vengeance. The pact we made in the shadow of the Great Crusade, the oath that breathed life into the Officio Assassinorum. For decades we have hunted down the enemies of our Emperor through stealth and subterfuge. We have shown them there is no safe place to hide.’ Sire Vindicare shot a look at Sire Vanus. ‘What did he say that day?’

Vanus answered immediately, his mask shimmering. ‘No world shall be beyond my rule. No enemy shall be beyond my wrath.’

Sire Culexus nodded solemnly. ‘No enemy…’ he repeated. ‘No enemy but Horus, so it seems.’

‘No!’ snarled Callidus. ‘I can kill him.’ The man in the silver mask remained silent and she went on, imploring. ‘I will kill him, if only you will give me leave to do so!’

‘You will fail as well!’ snarled Eversor. ‘My clade is the only one capable of the deed! The only one ruthless enough to end the Warmaster’s life!’

At once, it seemed as if every one of the masters and mistresses were about to launch into the same tirade, but before they could begin, the silver mask resonated with a single word of command. ‘Silence.’

The chamber became quiet, and the Master of Assassins took a breath before speaking again. ‘This rivalry and bickering serves no purpose,’ he began, his voice level and firm. ‘In all the history of this group, there has never been a target whose retirement required more than one mission to prosecute. To date, the Horus problem has claimed eight Officio operatives across all six of the primary clades. Each of you are the first of your clade, the founders… And yet you sit here and jostle for supremacy over one another instead of giving me the kill we so desperately want! I demand a solution to rid us of the Emperor’s turbulent and wayward son.’

Sire Eversor spoke. ‘I will commit every active agent in my clade. All of them, all at once. If I must spend the lives of every last Eversor to kill Horus, then so be it.’

For the first time since the group had assembled, the silent figure in the hooded robes made a sound; a soft grunt of disagreement.

‘Our visitor has something to add,’ said Sire Vanus.

The Master of Assassins inclined his head towards the shadows. ‘Is that so?’

The hooded man moved slightly, enough that he became better defined by the glow-light, but not so much that his face could be discerned inside the depths of the robe. ‘None of you are soldiers,’ he rumbled, his deep tones carrying across the room. ‘You are so used to working alone, as your occupation demands, that you forget a rule of all conflict. Force doubled is force squared.’

‘Did I not just say such a thing?’ snapped Sire Eversor.

The hooded man ignored the interruption. ‘I have heard you all speak. I have seen your mission plans. They were not flawed. They were simply not enough.’ He nodded to himself. ‘No single assassin, no matter how well-trained, no matter which clade they come from, could ever hope to terminate the Archtraitor alone. But a collective of your killers…’ He nodded again. ‘That might be enough.’

‘A strike team…’ mused Sire Vindicare.

‘An Execution Force,’ corrected the Master. ‘An elite unit hand-picked for the task.’

Sire Vanus frowned behind his mask. ‘Such a suggestion… There is no precedent for something like this. The Emperor will not approve of it.’

‘Oh?’ said Callidus. ‘What makes you so certain?’

The master of Clade Vanus leaned forward, the perturbations of his image-mask growing more agitated. ‘The veils of secrecy preserve all that we are,’ he insisted. ‘For decades we have worked in the shadows of the Imperium, at the margins of the Emperor’s knowledge, and for good reason. We serve him in deeds that he must never know of, in order to maintain his noble purity, and to do so there are conventions we have always followed.’ He shot a look at the hooded man. ‘A code of ethics. Rules of conflict.’

‘Agreed,’ ventured Siress Venenum. ‘The deployment of an assassin is a delicate matter and never one taken lightly. We have in the past fielded two or three on a single mission when the circumstances were most extreme, but then always from the same clade, and always after much deliberation.’

Vanus was nodding. ‘Six at once, from every prime clade? You cannot expect the Emperor to sanction such a thing. It is simply… not done.’

The Master of Assassins was silent for a long moment; then he steepled his fingers in front of him, pressing the apex of them to the lips of his silver face. ‘What I expect is that each clade’s Director Primus will obey my orders without question. These “rules” of which you speak, Vanus… Tell me, does Horus Lupercal adhere to them as strongly as you do?’ He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone brooked no disagreement. ‘Do you believe that the Archtraitor will baulk at a tactic because it offends the manners of those at court? Because it is not done?’

‘He bombed his sworn brethren, his own men even, into obliteration,’ said Sire Vindicare. ‘I doubt anything is beyond him.’

The Master nodded. ‘And if we are to kill this foe, we cannot limit ourselves to the moral abstracts that have guided us in the past. We must dare to exceed them.’ He paused. ‘This will be done.’

‘My lord–’ began Vanus, reaching out a hand.

‘It is so ordered,’ said the man in the silver mask, with finality. ‘This discussion is at an end.’

When the others had taken their leave through the doorways of the Shrouds, and after the psyber eagles nesting hidden in the apex of the ceiling had circled the room to ensure there were no new listening devices in place, the Master of Assassins allowed himself a moment to give a deep sigh. And then, with care, he reached up and removed the silver mask, the dermal pads releasing their contact from the flesh of his face. He shook his head, allowing a grey cascade of hair to emerge and pool upon his shoulders, over the pattern of the nondescript robes he wore. ‘I think I need a drink,’ he muttered. His voice sounded nothing like the one that had issued from the lips of the mask; but then that was to be expected. The Master of Assassins was a ghost among ghosts, known only to the leaders of the clades as one of the High Lords of Terra; but as to which of the Emperor’s council he was, that was left for them to suspect. There were five living beings who knew the true identity of the Officio’s leader, and two of them were in this room.

A machine-slave ambled over and offered up a gold-etched glass of brandy-laced black tea. ‘Will you join me, my friend?’ he asked.

‘If it pleases the Sigillite, I will abstain,’ said the hooded man.

‘As you wish.’ For a brief moment, the man who stood at the Emperor’s right hand, the man who wore the rank of Regent of Terra, studied his careworn face in the curvature of the glass. Malcador was himself once more, the cloak of the Master of Assassins gone and faded, the identity shuttered away until the next time it was needed.

He took a deep draught of the tea, and savoured it. He sighed. The effects of the counter-psionics in the room were not enough to cause him any serious ill-effect, but their presence was like the humming of an invisible insect, irritating the edges of his witch-sight. As he sometimes did in these moments, Malcador allowed himself to wonder which of the clade leaders had an idea of who he might really be. The Sigillite knew that if he put his will to it, he could uncover the true faces of every one of the Directors Primus. But he had never pursued this matter; there had never been the need. The fragile state of grace in which the leaders of the Officio Assassinorum existed had served to keep them all honest; no single Sire or Siress could ever know if their colleagues, their subordinates, even their lovers were not behind the masks they saw about the table. The group had been born in darkness and secrecy, and now it could only live there as long as the rules of its existence were adhered to.

Rules that Malcador had just broken.

His companion finally gave himself up to the light and stepped into full visibility, walking around the table with slow, steady steps. The hooded man was large, towering over the Sigillite where he sat in his chair. As big as a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes, out of the darkness the man who had observed the meeting was a threat made flesh, and he moved with a grace that caused his rust-coloured robes to flow like water. A hand, tawny of skin and scarred, reached up and pulled back the voluminous hood over a shorn skull and queue of dark hair, to reveal a face that was grim and narrow of eye. At his throat, gold-flecked brands in the shapes of lightning bolts were just visible past the open collar.

‘Speak your mind, Captain-General,’ said Malcador, reading his aura. ‘I can see the disquiet coming off you like smoke from a fire pit.’

Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian of the Legio Custodes, spared him a glance that other men would have withered under. ‘I have said all I need to say,’ Valdor replied. ‘For better or for worse.’ The warrior’s hand dropped to the table top and he absently traced a finger over the wood. He looked around; Malcador had no doubts that the Custodian Guardsman had spent his time in this chamber working out where the room might actually be located.

The Sigillite drowned the beginnings of a waxen smile in another sip of the bittersweet tea. ‘I confess, I had not expected you to do anything other than observe,’ he began. ‘But instead you broke open the pattern of the usual parry and riposte that typically comprises these meetings.’

Valdor paused, looking away from him. ‘Why did you ask me here, my lord?’

‘To watch,’ Malcador replied. ‘I wanted to ask your counsel after the fact–’

The Custodian turned, cutting him off. ‘Don’t lie to me. You didn’t ask me to join you in this place just for my silence.’ Valdor studied him. ‘You knew exactly what I would say.’

Malcador let the smile out, at last. ‘I… had an inkling.’

Valdor’s lips thinned. ‘I hope you are pleased with the outcome, then.’

The Sigillite sensed the warrior was about to leave, and he spoke again quickly to waylay him. ‘I am surprised in some measure, it must be said. After all, you are the expression of Imperial strength and nobility. You are the personal guard of the Lord of Earth, as pure a warrior-kindred as many might aspire to become. And in that, I would have thought you of all men would consider the tactics of the Assassinorum to be…’ He paused, feeling for the right word. ‘Underhanded. Dishonourable, even?’

Valdor’s face shifted, but not towards annoyance as Malcador had expected. Instead he smiled without humour. ‘If that was a feint to test me, Sigillite, it was a poor one. I expected better of you.’

‘It’s been a long day,’ Malcador offered.

‘The Legio Custodes have done many things your assassins would think beyond us. The sires and siresses are not the only ones who have marque to operate under… special conditions.’

‘Your charter is quite specific on the Legio’s zone of responsibility.’ Malcador felt a frown forming. This conversation was not going where he had expected it to.

‘If you wish,’ Valdor said, with deceptive lightness. ‘My duty is to preserve the life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. That is accomplished through many different endeavours. The termination of the traitor-son Horus Lupercal and the clear and present danger he represents, no matter how it is brought to pass, serves my duty.’

‘So, you really believe that a task force of killers could do this?’

Valdor gave a slight shrug of his huge shoulders. ‘I believe they have a chance, if the pointless tensions between the clades can be arrested.’

Malcador smiled. ‘You see, Captain-General? I did not lie. I wanted your insight. You have given it to me.’

‘I haven’t finished,’ said the warrior. ‘Vanus was right. This mission will not please the Emperor when he learns of it, and he will learn of it when I tell him every word that was spoken in this room today.’

The Sigillite’s smile vanished. ‘That would be an error, Custodian. A grave misjudgement on your part.’

‘You cannot have such hubris as to believe that you know better than he?’ Valdor said, his tone hardening.

‘Of course not!’ Malcador snapped in return, his temper flaring. ‘But you know as well as I do that in order to protect the sanctity of Terra and our liege-lord, some things must be kept in the dark. The Imperium is at a delicate point, and we both know it. All the effort we have spent on the Great Crusade, and the Emperor’s works, all of that has been placed in most dire jeopardy by Horus’s insurrection. The conflicts being fought at this very moment are not just on the battlefields of distant worlds and in the void of space! They are in hearts and minds, and other realms less tangible. But now, here is the opportunity to fight in the shadows, unseen and unremarked. To have this bloody deed done without setting the galaxy ablaze in its wake! A swift ending. The head of the snake severed with a single blow.’ He took a long breath. ‘But many may see it as ignoble. Use it against us. And for a father to sanction the execution of his son… Perhaps it may be beyond the pale. And that is why some things cannot be spoken of outside this chamber.’

Valdor folded his muscular arms over his chest and stared down at Malcador. ‘That statement has all the colour of an order,’ he said. ‘But who gives it, I wonder? The Master of Assassins, or the Regent of Terra?’

The Sigillite’s eyes glittered in the gloom. ‘Decide for yourself,’ he said.

Before the Emperor’s enlightenment, the Sentine’s precinct house had been a place of idolatry and ancestor worship. Once, the bodies of the rich and those judged worthy had been buried in crypts beneath the main hall, and great garish statuary and other extravagant gewgaws had filled every corner of the building, with cloisters and naves leading here and there to chapels for every deity the First Establishment had brought with them from Old Earth. Now the crypts were cells and memory stacks, armouries and storage lockers. The chapels had different tenants now, icons called security and vigilance, and all the artworks and idols were crushed and gone, a few saved in museums as indicators of a less sophisticated past. All this had taken place a long time before Yosef Sabrat had been born, however. There were barely a handful of living citizens on Iesta Veracrux who could recall any vestiges of a past with religion in it.

The cathedral’s second life as a place of justice served the building well. It was just as impressive a home for the Sentine as it had been for the long-departed priests. Sabrat crossed the long axis of the main hall, past the open waiting quad where citizens queued and argued with the luckless jagers on desk duty, and through the checkpoint where an impassive, watchful gun-servitor licked his face with a fan of green laser light before letting him by. He threw a cursory nod to a group of other reeves from the West Catchment, all of them gathered around a nynemen board with tapers of scrip, waving off an invite to join them in a game; instead he took the spiral stairs up to the second level. The upper floors were almost a building inside a building, a multi-storey blockhouse that had been constructed inside the hangar-like confines of the main hall, and retrofitted into the structure. The room was in the same state of shabby, half-controlled clutter as it ever was, with bales of rough vinepaper and starkly shot picts arranged in loose piles that represented some sort of untidy order, if only one knew how to interpret it. In the centre of the room, a pillar studded with brass communication sockets sprouted thick rubber-sheathed cables that snaked to headsets or to hololiths. One of them ended in a listening rig around the head of Yosef’s cohort, who sat bent over in a chair, listening with his eyes closed, fingers absently toying with a gold aquila on a chain about his wrist.

‘Daig.’ Yosef stopped in front of the man and called his name. When he didn’t respond, the reeve snapped his fingers loudly. ‘Wake up!’

Reeve Daig Segan opened his eyes and let out a sigh. ‘This isn’t sleep, Yosef. This is deep thought. Have you ever had one of those?’ He took off the headset and looked up at him. Yosef heard the tinny twitter of a synthetic voice from the speakers, reading out the text of an incident report in a clicking monotone.

Daig was a study in contrasts to his cohort. Where Sabrat was of slightly above average height, narrow-shouldered, clean-shaven and sandy-haired, Segan was stocky and not without jowls, his hair curly and unkempt around a perpetually dejected expression. He managed another heavy sigh, as if the weight of the world were pressing down upon him. ‘There’s no point in me listening to this a second time,’ he went on, tugging the rig’s jack plug from its socket on the pillar with a snap of his wrist. ‘Skelta’s reports are just as dull with the machine reading them to me as him doing it.’

Yosef frowned. ‘What I saw out there wasn’t any stripe of dull.’ He glanced down and saw a spread of picts from the storage shed crime scene. Even rendered in light-drenched black and white, the horror of it did not lessen. Mirrors of liquid were in every image, and the sight of them brought sense memory abruptly back into the reeve’s forebrain. He blinked the sensation away.

Daig saw him do it. ‘You all right?’ he asked, concern furrowing his brow. ‘Need a moment?’

‘No,’ Yosef said firmly. ‘You said you had something new?’

Daig’s head bobbed. ‘Not so new. More like a confirmation of something we already suspected.’ He searched for a moment through the papers and data-slates before he found a sheaf of inky printout. ‘Analysis of the cutting gave up a pattern that matches a type of industrial blade.’

‘Medical?’ Yosef recalled his impression of the almost clinical lines of the mutilation; but Daig shook his head.

‘Viticultural, actually.’ The other reeve pawed through a box at his feet and produced a plastic case, opening it to reveal a wickedly curved knife with a knurled handle. ‘I brought one up from evidentiary so we’d have an example to look at.’

Yosef recognised it instantly, and his hand twitched as he resisted the urge to reach for it. A harvestman’s blade, one of the most familiar tools on the planet, made by the millions for Iesta Veracrux’s huge army of agricultural workers. Blades exactly like this one were used in every vineyard, and they were as commonplace as the grapes they were used to cut. Being so widespread, of course, they were also the most common tool of murder on Iesta – but Yosef had never seen such a blade used for so ornate a killing as the one at the airdocks. To use the crude tool for so fine a cutting would have required both great skill and no little time to accomplish it. ‘What in Terra’s name are we dealing with?’ he muttered.

‘It’s a ritual,’ said Daig, with a certainty that seemed to come from nowhere. ‘It can’t be anything else.’ He put the blade aside and gestured at the scattered files. As well as the tide of paperwork from the airdock murder, packets of fiche and other picts had arrived from a couple of the sub-precincts in the nearby arroyo territories, automatically flagged by the reports of the incident sent out on the planetwide watch-wire. There had been other deaths, and while the nature of them had not been exactly the same as Jaared Norte’s, elements of similar methodology were expressed in each. Daig had suggested that their killer was ‘maturing’ with each assault, growing more confident in what they wished to convey with their deeds.

This was not Iesta Veracrux’s first serial murder spree. But it seemed different from all the others that had gone before it, in a manner that Yosef could not yet fully articulate.

‘What I don’t fathom,’ began a voice from behind them, ‘is how in Stars the bugger got the poor fool up on the ceiling.’ Yosef and Daig turned to where Reeve Warden Berts Laimner stood, a fan of picts in his meaty paw. Laimner was a big man, dark-skinned and always smiling, even now in a small way at the sight of Norte’s grotesque death; but the warm expression was always a falsehood, masking a character that was self-serving and oily. ‘What do you think, Sabrat?’

Yosef framed a noncommittal answer. ‘We’re looking into that, Warden.’

Laimner gave a chuckle that set Yosef’s teeth on edge and discarded the images. ‘Well, I hope you’ve got a better reply than that up your sleeve.’ He pointed across the room to an entranceway. ‘The High-Reeve is just outside that door. She wants to weigh in on this.’

Daig actually let out a little groan, and Yosef felt himself sag inside. If the precinct commander was putting her hand on this case, then the investigators could be certain that their job was about to become twice as hard.

As if Laimner’s words had been a magical summons, the door opened and High-Reeve Kata Telemach entered the office with an assistant trailing her. Telemach’s appearance was like a shock going through the room, and every reeve and jager scrambled to look as if they were working hard and being diligent. She didn’t appear to notice, instead making a direct line for Yosef and Daig. The woman was wearing a well-pressed dress uniform, and around her neck was a gold rod with one single silver band around it.

‘I was just telling Reeves Sabrat and Segan of your interest, ma’am,’ said Laimner.

The commander seemed distracted. ‘Progress?’ she asked. The woman had a sharp face and hard eyes.

‘We’re building a solid foundation,’ offered Daig, equally as good at giving non-answers as his cohort was. He swallowed. ‘There are some matters of cross-jurisdictional circumstance that might become an issue later, however.’ He was about to say more, but Telemach shot Laimner a look as if to say Haven’t you dealt with this already?

‘That will not be a concern, Reeve. I have just returned from an audience with the Lord Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites.’

‘Oh?’ Yosef tried to keep any sarcasm out of his voice.

Telemach went on. ‘The Arbites have a lot of wine in their glass at the moment. They’re engaged in a few operations across the planet. This… case doesn’t need to be added to that workload.’

Operations. That seemed to be the current word of choice to describe the actions of the Arbites on Iesta Veracrux. A colourless, open term that belied the reality of what they were actually doing – which was quietly dredging the lower cities and the upper echelons alike for the slightest evidence of any anti-Imperial sedition and pro-Horus thinking, ruthlessly stamping out anything that might blossom into actual treason.

‘It’s only bodies,’ noted Laimner, in an off-hand manner.

‘Exactly,’ said the High-Reeve. ‘And quite frankly, the Sentine are better suited for this sort of police work. The Arbites are not native to this world, and we are. We know it better than they ever will.’

‘Just so,’ offered Yosef.

Telemach graced them with a tight smile. ‘I want to deal with this in a swift and firm manner. I think the Lord Marshal and his masters back on Terra could do with a reminder that we Iestans can deal with our own problems.’

Yosef nodded here, partly because he knew he was supposed to, and partly because Telemach had just confirmed for him her real reason for wanting the case closed quickly. It was no secret that the High-Reeve had designs on the rank of Landgrave, head of all Sentine forces across the planet; and for her to get that, the current incumbent – and so the rumours went, her lover – would need to rise to the only role open to him, the Imperial Governorship of the planet. The Landgrave’s only real competition for that posting was the Lord Marshal of the Arbites. Showing a decisive posture towards a crime like this one would count for a lot when the time for new installations was nigh.

‘We’re investigating all avenues of interest,’ said Laimner.

The High-Reeve tapped a finger on her lips. ‘I want you to pay special attention to any connection with those religious fanatics that are showing up in the Falls and out at Breghoot.’

‘The Theoge,’ Laimner offered helpfully, with a sniff. ‘Odd bunch.’

‘With respect,’ said Daig, ‘they’re hardly fanatics. They’re just–’

Telemach didn’t let him finish. ‘Odium spreads wherever it takes root, Reeve. The Emperor did not guide the Great Crusade to us for nothing. I won’t have superstition find purchase in this city or any other on my watch, is that clear?’ She eyed Yosef. ‘The Theoge is an underground cult, forbidden by Imperial law. Find the connection between them and this crime, gentlemen.’

If it exists or not, Yosef added silently.

‘You have an understanding of my interest, then?’ she concluded.

He nodded once more. ‘Indeed I do, ma’am. We’ll do our best.’

Telemach sniffed. ‘Do better than that, Sabrat.’

She walked on, and Laimner fell in step with her, shooting him a weak grin as they moved off.

‘It’s only bodies,’ parroted Yosef, in a pinched imitation of the Warden’s voice as he watched them go. ‘What he means, it’s only little people dead so far. No one he has any interest in.’ He blew out a breath.

Daig’s expression had become more pessimistic than normal. ‘Where does that effluent about the Theoge come from?’ he muttered. ‘What could they possibly have to do with serial murders? Everything Telemach knows about those people comes from rumours, trash based on nothing but hearsay and bigotry.’

Yosef raised an eyebrow. ‘You know better, do you?’

He shrugged. ‘Clearly not,’ said the other man, after a moment.

After he had put Ivak to bed, Yosef returned to the living room and took a seat by the radiator. He smiled to see that his wife had poured a glass of the good mistwater for him, and he sipped it as she set the autolaunder to work in the back room.

Yosef lost himself in the honeyed swirl of the drink and let his mind drift. In the fluids he saw strange oceans, vast and unknown. Somehow, the sight of them rested him, the perturbations soothing his thoughts.

When Renia coughed, he looked up with a start, spilling a drop down the side of the glass. His wife had entered the room and he had been so captured by reverie that he had not even been aware of her.

She gave him a worried look. ‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes.’

Renia was not convinced. Fifteen years of loving someone gave you that kind of insight as a matter of course. And because of that, she didn’t press him. His wife knew his job, and she knew that he did his best to leave it at the precinct every time he came home. Instead she asked him, just once. ‘Do you need to talk?’

He took a sip of the wine and didn’t look at her. ‘Not yet.’

She changed the subject, but not enough for Yosef’s comfort. ‘There was an incident at Ivak’s schola today. A boy taken out of classes.’

‘Why?’

‘Ivak said it was because of a game some of the older children were playing. The Warmaster and the Emperor, they called it.’ Yosef put down the glass as she went on. Somehow, he already knew what Renia was going to say. ‘This boy, he went on about the Warmaster. Ivak’s teachers heard him and they reported it.’

‘To the Arbites?’

She nodded. ‘Now people are talking. Or else they are not talking at all.’

Yosef’s lips thinned. ‘Everyone is uncertain,’ he said, at length. ‘Everyone is afraid of what’s behind the horizon… But this sort of thing… It’s foolishness.’

‘I’ve heard rumours,’ she began. ‘Stories from people who know people on other worlds, in other systems.’

He had heard the same thing, hushed whispers in the corners of the precinct from men who couldn’t moderate the sound of their voices. Rumour and counter-rumour. Reports of terrible things, of black deeds – sometimes the same deeds – attributed to those in service of the Warmaster and the Emperor of Mankind.

‘People who used to talk freely are going silent to me,’ she added.

‘Because I’m your husband?’ Off her nod he frowned. ‘I’m not an Arbites!’

‘I think the Lord Marshal’s men are making it worse,’ she said. ‘Before, there was nothing that could not be said, no debate that could not be aired without prejudice. But now… After the insurrection…’ Her words lost momentum and faded.

Renia needed something from him, some assurance that would ease what troubled her, but as Yosef searched himself for it, he found nothing to give. He opened his mouth to speak, not sure of what he would tell her, and somewhere outside the house glass shattered against bricks.

He was immediately on his feet, at the window, peering through the slats. Raised voices met him. Down below, where the road snaked past the stairs to his front door, he saw a group of four youths surrounding a fifth. They were brandishing bottles like clubs. As he watched, the fifth stumbled backwards over the broken glass and fell to his haunches.

Renia was already opening the wooden case on the wall where the watch-wire terminal sat. She gave him a questioning look and he nodded. ‘Call it in.’

He snatched his greatcoat from the hook in the hall as she shouted after him. ‘Be careful!’

Yosef heard feet on the stairs behind him and turned, one hand on the latch, to see Ivak silhouetted in the gloom. ‘Father?’

‘Go back to bed,’ he told the boy. ‘I’ll just be a moment.’

He put his warrant rod around his neck and went out.

By the time he got to the road, they had started throwing punches at the youth on the ground. He heard yelling and once again, the name rose up at him, shouted like a blood-curse. Horus.

The fifth youth was bleeding and trying to protect himself by holding his arms up around his head. Yosef saw a particularly hard and fast haymaker blow come slamming in from the right, knocking the boy down.

The reeve flicked his wrist and the baton he carried in his sleeve pocket dropped into his palm. With a whickering hiss, the memory-metal tube extended to four times its length. Anger flared inside him and he shouted out ‘Sentine!’ even as he aimed a low sweeping blow at the knees of the nearest attacker.

The hit connected and the youth went down hard. The others reacted, falling back. One of them had a half-brick in his hand, weighing it like he was considering a throw. Yosef scanned their faces. They had scarves around their mouths and noses, but he knew railgangers when he saw them. These were young men from the loading terminals, who by day worked the cargo monorails that connected the airdocks to the vineyards, and by night made trouble and engaged in minor crime. But they were out of their normal patch in this residential district, apparently drawn here by their victim.

‘Bind him!’ shouted one of them, stabbing a finger at the injured youth. ‘He’s a traitor, that’s what he is! Whoreson traitor!’

‘No…’ managed the youth. ‘Am not…’

‘Sentine are no better!’ snarled the one with the half-brick. ‘All in it together!’ With a snarl he threw his missile, and Yosef batted it away, taking a glancing hit on his temple that made him stagger. The railgangers took this as a signal and broke into a run, scattering away down the curve of the street.

For a split second, Yosef was possessed by a fury so high that all he wanted to do was race after the thugs and beat them bloody into the cobbles; but then he forced that urge away and bent down to help the injured youth to his feet. The young man’s hand was wet where he had cut himself on the broken glass. ‘You all right?’ said the reeve.

The youth took a woozy step away from him. ‘Don’t… Don’t hurt me.’

‘I won’t,’ he told him. ‘I’m a lawman.’ Yosef’s skull was still ringing with the near-hit of the brick, but in a moment of odd perceptivity, he saw the lad had rolls of red-printed leaflets stuffed in his pocket. He grabbed the youth’s hand and snatched one from the bunch. It was a Theoge pamphlet, a page of dense text full of florid language and terms that meant nothing to him. ‘Where did you get these?’ he demanded.

In the glare of the streetlights, Yosef saw the youth’s pale face full on; the fear written large there was worse than that he had shown to the thugs with the bottles and bricks. ‘Leave me alone!’ he shouted, shoving the reeve back with both hands.

Yosef lost his balance – the pain in his head helping that along the way – and stumbled, fell. Shaking off the spreading ache, he saw the youth sprinting away, disappearing into the night. He cursed and tried to get to his feet.

The reeve’s hand touched something on the cobbles, a sharp, curved edge. At first he thought it was part of the scattering of broken glass, but the light fell on it a different way. Peering at the object, Yosef saw what it actually was. Discarded in the melee, dropped from the pocket of… who, he wondered?

It was a harvesting knife, worn with use and age.

THREE What Must Be Done / The Spear / Intervention

Stripped to the waist, Valdor strode into the sparring hall with his guardian spear raised high at the crook of his shoulder, the metal of the ornate halberd cool against his bare flesh; but what awaited him in the chamber was not the six combat robots he had programmed for his morning regimen, only a single figure in duty robes. He was tall and broad, big enough to look down at the Chief Custodian, even out of battle armour.

The figure turned, almost casually, from a rack holding weapons similar to the one Valdor carried. He was tracing the edge of the blade that hung beneath the heavy bolter mechanism at the tip of the metal staff, considering its merit in the way that a shrewd merchant might evaluate a bolt of fine silk before a purchase.

For a moment, the Custodian was unsure what protocol he was to observe; by rights, the sparring hall belonged to the Legio Custodes and so it could be considered their territory. For someone, a non-Custodian, to appear there unannounced was… impolitic. But the nature of the visitor – Valdor was loath to consider him an intruder – called such a thing into question. In the end, he chose to halt at the edge of the fighting quad and gave a shallow bow, erring on the side of respect. ‘My lord.’

‘Interesting weapon,’ came the reply. The voice was resonant and metered. ‘It appears overly ornate, archaic even. One quick to judge might even think it ineffective.’

‘Every weapon can be effective, if it is in the right hands.’

‘In the right hands.’ The figure at last gave Valdor his full attention. In the cold, sharp light tracing through the windows, the face of Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, was like chiselled granite.

For a moment, Valdor was tempted to offer Dorn the chance to try the use of the Custodes halberd-gun, but prudence warned him to hold his tongue. One did not simply challenge the master of an entire Astartes Legion to a sparring match, no matter how casually. Not unless one was prepared to take that challenge as far as it would go.

‘Why am I here?’ said Dorn, asking Valdor’s question for him. ‘Why am I here and not attendant to my duties out on the Palace walls?’

‘You wish to speak to me?’

Dorn continued, as if he had not heard his answer. The primarch glanced up at the ornate ceiling above them, which showed a frieze of jetbike-borne Custodians racing across the skyline of the Petitioner’s City. ‘I have blighted this place, Valdor. In the name of security, I have made this palace into a fortress. Replaced art with cannonades, gardens with kill zones, beauty with lethality. You understand why?’

Something in Dorn’s tone made the Custodian’s hand tighten on his weapon. ‘Because of the war. To protect your father.’

‘I take little pride in my defacement,’ Dorn replied. ‘But it must be done. For when Horus comes here, as he will, he must be met by our strength.’ He advanced a step. ‘Our honest strength, Valdor. Nothing less will suffice.’

Valdor remained silent, and Dorn gave him a level, demanding stare. In the quiet moment, the two of them measured one another as each would have gauged the lay of a battlefield before committing to combat.

The Imperial Fist broke the lengthening silence. ‘This palace and I… We know each other very well now. And I am not ignorant of what goes on in its halls, both those seen and those unseen.’ His heavy brow furrowed, as if a choice had been made in his thoughts. ‘We shall speak plainly, you and I.’

‘As you wish,’ said the Custodian.

Dorn eyed him. ‘I know the assassin clades and their shadow-killers are mounting an operation of large scope. I know this,’ he insisted. ‘I know you are involved.’

‘I am not a part of the Officio Assassinorum,’ Valdor told him. ‘I have no insight into their workings.’ It was a half-truth at best, and Dorn knew it.

‘I have always considered you a man of honour, Captain-General,’ said the Primarch. ‘But as I have learned to my cost, it sometimes becomes necessary to revise one’s opinion of a man’s character.’

‘If what you say was true, then you know it would be a matter of utmost secrecy.’

Dorn’s eyes flashed. ‘Meaning, if I am not informed of such a thing, then I should not know of it?’ He advanced again and Valdor stood his ground. The stoic, unchanging expression on the face of the Imperial Fist was, if anything, more disquieting than any snarl of annoyance. ‘I question the purpose of anything so clandestine. I am Adeptus Astartes, warrior by blood and by birth. I do not support the tactics of cowardice.’

Valdor let the guardian spear’s tip drop to the floor. ‘What some consider cowardly others might call expedient.’

Dorn’s expression shifted for a second, with a curling of his lip. ‘I have crossed paths with the agents of the Officio Assassinorum on the battlefield. Those encounters have never ended well. Their focus is always… too narrow. They are tools best suited for courtly intrigue and the games of empire. Not for war.’ He folded his arms. ‘Speak, Custodian. What do you know of this?’

Valdor stiffened. ‘I… can’t say.’

For a moment, the tension on the primarch’s face resonated through the room and Valdor’s knuckles whitened around the haft of his spear; then Dorn turned away. ‘That is unfortunate.’

The Custodian bristled at the warrior-lord’s demeaning tone. ‘We all want the same thing,’ he insisted. ‘To preserve the Emperor.’

‘No,’ Dorn looked up at the windows, and he allowed himself a sigh. ‘Your first remit is to safeguard the life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. Mine, and that of my brothers, is to safeguard the Imperium.’

‘The two are the same,’ said Valdor. There was a flicker of uncertainty in his words that he did not expect.

‘Not so,’ Dorn said, as he left. ‘A narrow view, Custodian.’ The primarch paused on the threshold and spoke one last time, without looking back. ‘This conversation is not ended, Valdor.’

Cirsun Latigue liked to pretend that the aeronef belonged to him. When he left the Iestan capital of a night and took the languid flight back to his home in the Falls, he liked to place himself by the window of the little gondola slung beneath the cigar-shaped ballute and watch the hab-towers flash past, imagining the workadays from the service industries and the vineyards seeing him cruise along by, their faces lit with envy at someone of such importance. The gondola was no bigger than a monorail carriage, but it was opulently appointed with chaises and recessed automata for beverages and other services. For the most part, it served important clients or the urgent travel needs of upper tier management, but for a lot of the time the craft sat at dock, unused.

The aeronef was not his property, however much he wished it so. It belonged, as his wife often told him he did, to the Eurotas Trade Consortium, and while his rank with the company was such that use of the aircraft could be a regular perk of the job, on some level he knew that he would never rise far enough to truly own something of such status.

That wasn’t something he liked to think about, though. Rather like his wife, more often than not. All his not-inconsiderable earnings as a senior datum-clerk, their appealing townhouse in the fashionable end of the suburbs, the private schola for the children… She appreciated none of it. Latigue’s love of the company flyer was a reaction against that. When he was in the aeronef, he felt free, just for a little while. And thanks to the correct application of some bribery and favours in the shape of a few deliberately mislabelled shipping forms, he had learned from one of the Consortium’s technologians how simple it was to adjust the aircraft’s docile, unsophisticated machine-brain in order to take the flyer to other destinations that didn’t show up on the logs. Places like the White Crescent Quarter, where the company was always agreeable, and for a man of Latigue’s means, quite affordable.

He smiled at that, listening to the soft chopping hum of the propeller as the aeronef crossed over Spindle Canyon, and he thought about ordering a change of course. The wife was at some interminable gaming event at one of her ridiculous social clubs, so there would be no judgemental hissing and narrowing of eyes when he came home. Why not stay out a little longer, he wondered? Why not take a cruise towards the White Crescent? The daring of the thought made him smile, and he began to warm to the idea. Latigue leaned forward, reaching for the command panel and licking his lips.

It was then he noticed the object for the first time. On the seat across from him, a peculiar little ball that resembled a seed pod. Gingerly, he reached for it, prodded it with a finger – and blanched. The thing was warm to the touch, and it felt like it was made of flesh.

Latigue’s gorge rose in his throat and he tasted the sour tang of the half-digested meat dish he had eaten at mid-meal; but still he could not stop himself from reaching out once more, this time carefully gathering up the object from where it lay.

In the light cast through the cabin windows, he saw that the ball was lined and strangely textured. He let it roll in his hand, this way and that, finally bringing it closer to his nose to get a better look.

When it opened he let out a yelp. Splitting along its length, the sphere revealed an eye, horribly human in aspect, hidden behind the fleshy covering. It rotated of its own accord and Latigue became aware that it was looking directly at him, and with something that might have been recognition.

Suddenly overcome with disgust, he threw the orb away, and it vanished under a low couch. Confused and sickened, suddenly all he wanted was to be down on the ground. The interior of the gondola was hot and stifling, and Latigue felt sweat gathering around the high collar of his brocade jacket.

He was still trying to process what had just happened when one of the cabin walls began to move. The velvet patterning, the rich claret-red and spun gold of the adornment, flowed and shifted as oil moved on water. Something was extruding itself out of the side of the cabin, making its shape more definite and firm with each passing instant.

Latigue saw a head and a torso emerging, saw hands ending in long-fingered digits. In the places where the shape-thing grew out of the walls, there was a strange boiling effect, and the light caught what appeared to be something like lizard-skin, rippling and throbbing.

Latigue’s reason fled from him. Rather than seek escape, he forced himself into the corner formed by the couch and the far side of the aeronef’s cabin, the window at his back. The head turned to him, drawn by the motion. The skin-camouflage of the velvet walls faded into a tanned, rich crimson that looked like stained leather or perhaps flayed flesh: as the figure pulled itself free of the wall with spindly legs, its head came up to show a patterned skull pointed into a snout, with a peculiar, plough-shaped lower jaw. Teeth made of silver angled back in long, layered rows. There were no eyes in the sockets above, only dark pits.

Latigue coughed as a smell like blood and sulphur enveloped him, emanating from the apparition. He vomited explosively and began to cry like a child. ‘What do you want?’ he begged, abruptly finding his voice. ‘Who are you?’

The reply was husky, distant, and strangely toned, as if it had been dragged up from a great depth. ‘I… am Spear.’ It seemed more like a question than an answer.

The creature took a first step towards him, and in one hand it had a curved blade.

The transport rumbled through the thermals rising from the surface of the Atalantic Plain, and inside the aircraft’s cargo bay, the bare ribs of the walls creaked and flexed under the heavy power of the thruster pods. Beneath the transport’s belly, a blur of featureless desert raced past, torrents of windborne rust-sand reaching up from the dusty ground to snatch at it. In the distant past, thousands of years gone, this region would have been deep beneath the surface of a vast ocean, one of many that stretched across the surface of Terra; all that was left now were a few minor inland seas that barely deserved the name, little more than shrinking lakes of mud ringed by caravan townships. Much of the vast plainslands had been absorbed by the masses of the Throneworld’s city-sprawls, but there were still great swathes of it that were unclaimed and lawless, broken with foothills sculpted by the long-forgotten seas and canyons choked with the wrecks of ancient ships. There were precious few places on Terra that could still truly be considered a wilderness, but this was one of them.

The flyer’s pilot was deft; isolated in the cockpit pod at the prow, she lay wired into a flight couch that translated her nerve impulses into the minute flexions of the transport’s winglets and the outputs of the engine bells. The aircraft’s course was swift and true, crossing the barren zone on a heading towards the distant city-cluster crowded around the peaks of the Ayzor Ridge; she was following a well-traced course familiar to many of the more daring pilots. Those who played it safe flew at much higher altitudes, in the officially-sanctioned sky corridors governed by the agents of the Ministorum and the Adeptus Terra – but that cost fuel and time, and for fringer pilots working on tight margins, sometimes the riskier choice was the better one. The hazards came from the rust storms and the winds – but also from more human sources as well. The vast erg of the Atalantic was also home to bandit packs and savage clans of junkhunters.

At first glance, the cargo being carried by the flyer was nothing remarkable – but one who looked closer would have understood it was only a make-weight, there to bulk out the transport’s flimsy flight plan. The real load aboard the craft was the two passengers, and they were men so unlike to one another, it could hardly be believed they had both been dispatched by the same agency.

Constantin Valdor sat in a gap between two cube-containers of purified water, cross-legged on the deck of the cargo bay. His bulk was hidden beneath the ill-defined layers of a sandcloak which concealed an articulated suit of ablative armour. It was by no means a relative to the elaborate and majestic Custodian wargear that was his normal garb; the armour was unsophisticated, scarred and heavily pitted with use. Over Valdor’s dense form it strained to maintain its shape, almost as if it were trying to hold him in. At his side was a careworn long-las inscribed with Technomad tribal runes and an explorer’s pack containing survival gear and supplies, the latter for show. With his enhanced physiology, Valdor would have been able to live for weeks on the plains on drops of moisture he sucked from the dirt or the sparse meat of insects. The rifle he could use, though. Everything about Valdor’s disguise was there to tell a vague fiction, not enough to hide from a deep analysis but enough to allow him to go on his way without arousing too much suspicion. The Custodian had done this many times before, in blood games and on missions of other import. This was no different, he reflected.

Across the cargo bay, sitting uncomfortably upon a canvas seat that vibrated each time the transport forded a pocket of turbulence, Valdor’s companion on this journey was bent forwards over his right arm. Wearing a sandcloak similar to the Custodian’s, the smaller man was busy with a pane of hololithic text projected from a cybernetic gauntlet clasped around his wrist. With his other hand he manipulated shapes in the hologrammatic matrix, his attention on it total and complete. His name was Fon Tariel; the light of the text threw colour over his pale olive skin and the dark ovals of his eyes. A tight nest of dreadlocks drawing over Tariel’s head did their best to hide discreet bronze vents in the back of his skull, where interface sockets gleamed alongside memory implants and dataphilia. Unlike the cohorts of the Mechanicum, who willingly gave themselves fully to the marriage of flesh and machine, Tariel’s augmentations were discreet and nuanced.

Valdor studied him through lidded eyes, careful to be circumspect about it. The Sigillite had presented Tariel to him in a manner that made it clear no questioning of his choice would be allowed. The little man was Sire Vanus’s contribution to the Execution Force, one of the clade’s newest operatives, with a skull crammed full of data and a willingness to serve. They called Tariel’s kind ‘infocytes’; essentially they were human computing engines, but at the very far opposite of the spectrum from the mindless meat-automata of servitors. In matters of strategy and tactics, the insight of an infocyte was unparalleled; their existence cemented Clade Vanus as the intelligence-gathering faction of the Officio Assassinorum. It was said they had never been known to make an error of judgement. Valdor considered that as little more than disinformation, however; the creation and dissemination of propaganda was also a core strength of the Vanus.

From the corner of his eye, the Custodian saw the movement of a monitor camera high up on the roof of the cargo bay. He had noted earlier that it appeared to be dwelling on him more than it should have, and now the device’s attention seemed solely fixed on him. Without turning his head, Valdor saw that Tariel had moved slightly so that his holoscreen was now concealed by the bulk of his body.

The Custodian’s lip curled, and with a quick motion he was on his feet, crossing the short distance between the two of them. Tariel reacted with a flash of panic, but Valdor was on him, grabbing his arm. The hololith showed the monitor’s point of view, locked onto the Custodian. Data streams haloed his image, feeding out bio-patterns and body kinestics; Tariel had somehow invaded and co-opted the flyer’s internal security systems to satisfy his own curiosity.

‘Don’t spy on me,’ Valdor told the infocyte. ‘I value my privacy.’

‘You can’t blame me,’ Tariel blurted. ‘I wondered who you were.’

Valdor considered this for a moment, still holding him in an immobile grip. They had both boarded the transport in silence, neither speaking until this moment; he was not surprised that the other man had let his inquisitiveness outstrip his caution. Tariel and his kind had the same relationship with raw information that an addict did with their chosen vice; they were enrapt by the idea of new data, and would do whatever they could to gather it in, and know it. Quite how that balanced with the Assassinorum’s obsessive need for near-total secrecy he could not imagine; perhaps it went some way towards explaining the peculiar character of the Vanus clade and its agents. ‘Then who am I?’ he demanded. ‘If I caught you staring at me through that camera, then surely you have been doing that and more since we first left the Imperial City.’

‘Let go of my hand, please,’ said Tariel. ‘You’re hurting me.’

‘Not really,’ Valdor told him, but he released his grip anyway.

After a moment, the infocyte nodded. ‘You are Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Custodian Guard, margin of error less than fourteen percent. I parsed this from physiological data and existing records, along with sampling of various other information streams.’ Tariel showed him; inputs from sources as diverse as traffic routings, listings of foodstuffs purchased by the Palace consumery, the routes of cleaning automata, renovation files from the forges that repaired the robots Valdor had smashed during his morning exercises… To the warrior it seemed like a wall of white noise, but the infocyte manipulated it effortlessly.

‘That is… impressive,’ he offered. ‘But not the work of an assassin, I would think.’

Tariel’s expression stiffened at that. ‘Clade Vanus has removed many of the Imperium’s enemies. We do our part, as you do, Captain-General.’

Valdor leaned in, looming over the man. ‘And how many enemies of Terra have you killed, Fon Tariel?’

The infocyte paused, blinking. ‘In the way that you would consider it a termination? None. But I have been instrumental in the excision of a number of targets.’

‘Such as?’

For a moment, he thought Tariel would refuse to answer, but then the infocyte began to speak, quickly and curtly, as if he were giving a data download. ‘I will provide you with an example. Lord-Elective Corliss Braganza of the Triton-B colony.’

‘I know the name. A delinquent and a criminal.’

‘In effect. I discovered through program artefacts uncovered during routine information-trawling that he was in the process of embezzling Imperial funds as part of a plan to finance a move against several senior members of the Ministorum. He was attempting to build a powerbase through which to influence Imperial colonial policy. Through the use of covert blinds, I inserted materials of an incendiary nature into Braganza’s personal datastacks. The resultant discovery of these fabrications led to his death at the hands of his co-conspirators, and in turn the revelation of their identities.’

Valdor recalled the incident with Braganza; he had been implicated in the brutal murder of a young noblewoman, and after ironclad evidence had come to light damning him despite all his protestations to the contrary, the Triton electorate that had voted him into office had savagely turned against him. Braganza had apparently died in an accident during his transport to a penal asteroid. ‘You leaked the details of his prison transfer.’

Tariel nodded. ‘The cleanest kill is one that another performs in your stead with no knowledge of your incitement.’

The Custodian allowed him a nod. ‘I can’t fault your logic.’ He stepped back and let the infocyte have room to relax. ‘If you have so much data to hand, perhaps you can tell me something about the man we have been sent to find?’

‘Eristede Kell,’ Tariel answered instantly. ‘Clade Vindicare. Currently on an extended duration deployment targeted at the eventual eradication of exocitizen criminal groups in the Atalantic Delimited Zone. Among the top percentile of field-deployed special operatives. Fifty-two confirmed kills, including the Tyrant of Daas, Queen Mortog Haeven, the Eldar general Sellians nil Kaheen, Brother-Captain–’

Valdor held up his hand. ‘I don’t need to know his record. I need to know him.’

The Vanus considered his words for a long moment; but before Tariel could answer, a flash of fire caught Valdor’s eye through one of the viewports, and the Custodian turned towards it, his every warning sense rushing to the fore.

Outside, he glimpsed a spear made of white vapour, tipped with an angry crimson projectile; it described a corkscrew motion as it homed in on the aircraft. Alert sirens belatedly screamed a warning. He had barely registered the light and flame before the transport suddenly resonated with a colossal impact, and veered sharply to starboard. Smoke poured into the cargo bay, and Valdor heard the shriek of torn metal.

Unsecured, the two of them tumbled across the deck as the aircraft spun into the grip of the rusty haze.

A visit to the valetudinarium always made Yosef feel slightly queasy, as if the proximity to a place of healing was somehow enough to make him become spontaneously unwell. He was aware that other people – people who didn’t work in law enforcement, that was – had a similar reaction being around peace officers; they felt spontaneously guilty, even if they had committed no crime. The sensation was strong, though, enough that if ever Yosef felt an ache or a pain that might best have been looked at by a medicae, a marrow-deep revulsion grew strong in him, enough to make him bury it and wait for the issue to subside.

Unfortunate then that a sizeable portion of his duties forced him to visit the capital’s largest clinic on a regular basis; and those visits were always to the most forbidding of its halls, the mortuarium. Winter-cold, the pale wooden floors and panelled walls were shiny with layers of heavy fluid-resistant varnishes, and harsh white light thrown from overhead lume-strips filled every corner of the chamber with stark illumination.

Across the room, the dead stood upright in liquid-filled suspensor tubes that could be raised from compartments in the floor or lowered from silos in the ceiling. Frost-encrusted data-slates showed a series of colour-coded tags, designating which were new arrivals, which had been kept aside for in-depth autopsy and which were free to be released so that their families could perform final rites of enrichment.

Daig took off his hat as they crossed the chamber, weaving in between the medicae servitors and subordinate clinicians, and Yosef followed suit, tucking his brown woollen toque under an epaulette.

They were here to see Tisely, a rail-thin woman with hair the colour of straw, who served as the senior liaison between the mortuarium and the Sentine. She threw them a glance as they approached and gave a glum nod. An accomplished doctor and a superlative pathlogia investigator, Tisely was nevertheless one of the most joyless people Yosef Sabrat had ever met. He struggled to remember a single moment where she had expressed any mood to him but negativity.

‘Reeves,’ she said, by way of greeting, and immediately kept to form. ‘I’m surprised you made it in today. The traffic was very dense this morning.’

‘It’s the weather,’ offered Daig, equally downbeat. ‘Cold as space.’

Tisely nodded solemnly. ‘Oh yes.’ She tapped one of the suspensor tubes. ‘We’ll be filling more of these with those who can’t buy fuel for the winter.’

‘Governor ought to lower the tithe,’ Daig went on, matching her tone. ‘It’s not fair to the elderly.’

The clinician was going to follow on, but before the two of them could enter into a mutually-supporting spiral of circular complaining about the weather, the government, the harvest or whatever subject would come next, Yosef interrupted. ‘You have another body for us?’

Tisely nodded again and changed conversational gears seamlessly. ‘Cirsun Latigue, male, fifty years Terran reckoning. Gutted like a cliffgull.’

‘He died of that?’ Yosef asked, examining the face behind the glass. ‘The cutting?’

‘Eventually.’ Tisely sniffed. ‘It was done slowly, by a single blade, like the others.’

‘And he was laid out like the Norte case? In the star-shape?’

‘Across a very expensive chaise longue, in an aeronef gondola. Not nailed down this time, though.’ She reported the horrific murder in exactly the same tone she had used to complain about the traffic. ‘Quite a troubling one, this.’

Yosef chewed his lip. He’d gone over the abstract of the crime scene report on the way to the valetudinarium. The victim’s wife, who was now somewhere several floors above them in a drugged sleep after suffering a hysterical breakdown, had returned home the previous evening to find the flyer parked on the lawn of their home, the machine-brain pilot diligently waiting for a return-to-hangar command that had never come. Inside the aeronef’s cabin, every square metre of the walls, floor and ceiling was daubed with Latigue’s blood. The eight-point star was repeated everywhere, over and over, drawn in the dead man’s vitae.

Daig was looking at the data-slate, fingering his wrist chain. ‘Latigue had rank, for a civilian. Important, but not too much so. He worked for Eurotas.’

‘Which complicates matters somewhat,’ said Tisely.

She made it sound like a minor impediment, but in fact the matter of Cirsun Latigue’s employer had the potential to send Yosef’s serial murder investigation spiralling out of control. He had hoped that the sketchy report made by the jager on the scene might have been in error, even as some part of him knew that it was not. My luck is never that good, he told himself. Bad enough that the High-Reeve had put her measure into the bottle for all this, but with this latest victim now revealed as a ranking member of the Eurotas Consortium, a whole new layer of problems was opening up for the investigators.

Latigue and all those like him were on the planetside staff of an interstellar nobleman, who was quite possibly the richest man for several light years in any direction. His Honour the Void Baron Merriksun Eurotas was the master of a rogue trader flotilla that plied the spaceways across the systems surrounding Iesta Veracrux. Holding considerable capital and trading concerns on many planets, his consortium essentially controlled all local system-to-system commerce and most interplanetary transportation into the bargain. Eurotas counted high admirals, scions of the Navis Nobilite and even one of the Lords of Terra among his circle of friends; his business clan could trace its roots back to the time of Old Night, and it was said that the hereditary Warrant of Trade held by his family had been personally ratified by the Emperor himself. Such was his high regard that the man served the Adeptus Terra as an Agentia Nuntius, the Imperial Court’s attaché for every human colony in the Taebian Sector.

‘Tisely,’ Yosef lowered his voice and stepped closer, becoming conspiratorial. ‘If we could keep the identity of this victim under wraps, just for a few days, it would help–’

But she was already shaking her head. ‘We tried to keep the information secure, but…’ The clinician paused. ‘Well. People talk. Latigue’s staff saw it all.’

Yosef’s heart sank. ‘So the Consortium know.’

‘It’s worse than that, actually,’ she told him. ‘They’ve reclaimed the aeronef directly from evidentiary after using some pull with the Landgrave.’

‘They can’t do that…’ said Daig, with a grimace.

‘It’s already done,’ Tisely went on. ‘And there are Consortium clinicians on the way to take custody of the luckless Cirsun here.’ She tapped the mist-wreathed tube. ‘They’re probably caught in that cursed traffic, otherwise they’d have been here already and removed him.’

Yosef’s eyes narrowed. ‘This is a Sentine matter. It’s an Iestan matter.’ His annoyance burned cold and slow as he remembered Telemach’s words in the precinct; and yet a day later her superior was sweeping all that aside in favour of doing everything possible to appease the Consortium; because Iesta Veracrux supplied wines to the entire Ultima Segmentum, and without Eurotas, the planet’s economy would die on the vine.

Daig finally swore under his breath, earning him a censorious glare from Tisely. ‘It doesn’t stop there,’ she went on, as if to chastise him. ‘Latigue’s seniors sent an astropathic communiqué to the Void Baron himself. He’s apparently taking a personal interest in the incident.’

Yosef felt the colour drain from his face. ‘Eurotas… He’s coming here?’

‘Oh, I don’t doubt it,’ Tisely told him. ‘In fact, I hear a whisper that some of his personal agents are already in the warp, on their way.’

In spite of himself, that queasy feeling returned to Yosef’s gut and he took a breath of the chilled, antiseptic air. With a sudden jolt of anger, he snatched the data-slate from Daig’s hand and glared at it. ‘This isn’t an investigation any more, it’s a bloody poison chalice.’

Valdor snapped back to awareness with a jerk, and he stifled a reflexive cough. He felt a heavy weight across his torso and thick drifts of sandy matter all around him. There was heat, too, close and intense, searing his skin. He tasted the stink of burning fuel on his lips.

Checking himself, the Custodian found nothing more serious than a minor dislocation among the contusions he had suffered in the crash. With care, he rotated his forearm back into its socket and tested it, the flash of pain ebbing. Valdor placed both hands against the weight holding him down – a section of hull plate, he noted – and forced it up and away.

He came to his feet surrounded by flames and grey smoke. Valdor remembered the moment of the impact only in fleeting impressions; sparks of pain and the spinning of the cargo bay all around him as the wounded flyer slammed into the sand. He had heard Tariel cry out; there was no sign of the infocyte nearby. Valdor moved forward, picking his way over steaming mounds of wreckage, heated by the blazing slick of liquid promethium that had spilled out across the landscape. Sections of the transport lay in a line that vanished off across the ruddy plains, surrounding a black trail carved in the dirt by the craft as it had skidded to a halt, losing pieces of itself along the way.

He saw something that looked familiar; the cockpit pod, the egg-shape of it stove in and crumpled. Blood painted the canopy from the inside, and Valdor knew that the pilot would not have survived the landing. He turned this way and that. The encroaching flames were high and swift, and he had little room to manoeuvre. Sweeping around, he found what seemed to be the thinnest part in the wall of fire and ran at it, his legs pumping. At the last possible second, Valdor leapt into the flames and punched through, the sandcloak around him catching alight.

He landed hard on the other side of the wreckage and came up in a crouch. Snatching at the cloak, he tore it from himself as the fire took hold and threw it as hard as he could. Panting, Valdor looked up; and it was then he realised he was not alone.

‘Well,’ said a rough voice, ‘what have we got here?’

He counted eight of them. They wore the patchwork gear of a junkhunter gang, armour cobbled together from a dozen disparate sources, faces hidden behind breath filters and hoods. All of them were armed with large-gauge weapons – different varieties of stubber guns mostly, but he also spied a couple with twin-barrelled laser carbines, and one with the distinctive shape of a plasma gun held at the ready. Their collection of vehicles was as motley as everything else, a pair of four-legged walker platforms along with fast duneriders on fat knobbled tires, and a single ground-effect truck.

Valdor considered them with the cold tactical precision of a trained warrior. Only eight, eight humans, some of them likely to have reflex enhancements, perhaps even dermal plating, but still only eight. He knew with complete certainty that he would be able to kill them all in less than sixty seconds, and that was if he took his time about it.

There were only two things that gave him a moment’s pause. The first was the figure standing up through a hatch in the GEV’s cab, behind the pintle mount of a quin-barrel multilaser. The gunner had an unobstructed arc of fire that was directly centred on Valdor, and as resilient as he was, without his usual wargear to protect him the heavy weapon would put the Custodian down before he took ten paces.

The second thing was Fon Tariel, his face a mess of blood and bruises, on his knees in front of one of the walkers, with the muzzle of a junkhunter’s rifle pressed to his back.

‘Hah,’ he heard the infocyte say, labouring the words up past his injuries. ‘You’re all going to be sorry now.’

Valdor frowned, and continued to glance around, ignoring the gang and looking off in all directions, squinting towards the near horizon. It was difficult through the low sheen of rust-sand in the air, but his eyes were gene-altered for acuity.

‘Put up your hands,’ buzzed the junkhunter with the plasma gun. Valdor had guessed possession of the powerful weapon made that one the leader, and this confirmed it. He ignored the command, still looking away. ‘Are you deaf, freak?’

In the distance, perhaps a kilometre away, maybe more, the Custodian thought he saw something brief and bright. A glint off a metallic object atop a low butte. He resisted the urge to smile and turned back to the junkhunters, casually positioning himself in such a way that he could see both the flat-topped hill and the bandit crew. ‘I hear you,’ he told the gang leader.

‘He’s a big one,’ ventured one of the riflemen. ‘Some kinda aberrant?’

‘Could be,’ said the leader. ‘That what you are, freak?’

Tariel shouted at him, his voice high with fright. ‘What are you waiting for, man? Help me!’

‘Yeah, help him,’ mocked the GEV gunner. ‘I dare you.’

‘You’ve made a very serious error,’ Valdor began, speaking slowly and carefully. ‘I had hoped we could make a landing in the erg, scout you out for ourselves. But you took the initiative, and I must admire that. You saw prey and you attacked.’ Looking again, the Custodian could see a second, unmanned weapon mount on the rear of the hover-truck. Untended, it pointed the mouth of a surface-to-air missile tube skyward. ‘Lucky shot.’

‘Nothing lucky about it,’ said the leader. ‘You’re not the first. Won’t be the last.’

‘I beg to differ,’ Valdor told him. ‘As I said, you made an error. You’ve drawn the attention of the Emperor.’

The use of the name sent a ripple of fear through the group, but the gang leader stamped on it quickly. ‘Rust and shit, you’re some kind of liar, freak. No one cares what goes on out here, not a one, not a man, not the bloody Emperor hisself. If he cared, he’d come here and share a little of that glory of his with us.’

‘Let’s just kill them,’ said the gunner.

‘Valdor!’ Tariel blurted out his name in fear. ‘Please!’

Unseen by everyone else, the glimmer from the distant hill blinked once, then twice. ‘Let me tell you who I am,’ said the Custodian. ‘My name is Constantin Valdor, Captain-General of the Legio Custodes, and I hold the power of the Emperor’s displeasure in my hands.’

The gang leader snorted with cold amusement. ‘Your brain is broke, that’s what you have!’

‘I will prove it to you.’ Valdor raised his arm and pointed a finger at the gunner behind the multilaser. ‘In the Emperor’s name,’ he said, his tone calm and conversational, ‘death.’

A heartbeat later, the gunner’s upper torso exploded into chunks of meat on a blast of pink fluids.

The fear that the Emperor’s name had briefly conjured returned tenfold. Valdor pointed to the rifleman standing over Tariel. ‘And death,’ he went on. The junkhunter’s body bifurcated at the spine with a wet chug, collapsing to the sand. ‘And death, and death, and death…’ The Custodian let his arm fall, and stood still as three more of the gang were torn apart where they stood.

Tariel dived into the dirt and the rest of the junkhunters broke apart in a terrified scramble, some of them racing towards a vehicle, others desperately trying to find cover. Valdor saw one of them leap into a dunerider and gun the engine, the vehicle surging away. The windscreen shattered in a red blink of blood and the rover bounded into a shallow gulley, crashing to a halt. The others died as they ran.

A furious snarl drew Valdor’s attention back and he looked up as the gang leader came speeding towards him – too fast for a normal human, quite clearly nerve-jacked as he had first suspected. The junkhunter had the plasma gun aimed at the Custodian’s chest; at this close a range, a blast from it would be a mortal wound.

Valdor did nothing, stood his ground. Then, like the work of an invisible trickster god, the gun was ripped from the gang leader’s hand and it spun away into the air, the mechanism torn open and spitting great licks of blue-white sparks.

Only then did Valdor step in and break the man’s neck with a short chopping motion to his throat. The last of the junkhunter band dropped and was still.

The sun was dipping towards the horizon when a piece of the desert seemed to detach itself and transform into the shape of a man. A cameoline cloak shimmered from the colours of the rust-sand to a deep night-black, revealing a muscular figure in a stealthsuit that was faceless behind a gunmetal spy mask. The mask’s green eye-band studied Valdor and Tariel, where the two of them had sought shelter in the lee of the parked GEV truck. A spindly rifle, easily as long as the man was tall, lay across his back.

Valdor gave him a nod. ‘Eristede Kell, I presume?’

‘You are out of uniform, Captain-General,’ said the marksman. ‘I hardly recognised you.’ His voice was low.

Valdor raised an eyebrow. ‘Have we met before?’

The sniper shook his head. ‘No. But I know you. And your work.’ He glanced at the infocyte.

‘Vindicare,’ said Tariel, by way of terse greeting.

‘Vanus,’ came the reply.

‘I’m curious,’ said Kell. ‘How did you know I would be watching?’

‘You’ve been in this sector for some time. It stood to reason you would have seen the crash.’ The Custodian gestured around. ‘I had intended to find some of your prey in order to find you. It seems events altered the order of that but not the result.’

Tariel shot Valdor a look. ‘That’s why you didn’t attack them? You could have dealt with them all, but you did nothing.’ He grimaced. ‘I might have been killed!’

‘I considered letting that happen,’ said the sniper, with a casual sniff. ‘But I dismissed the idea. If a pair as unlikely as you two had come out here, I knew there had to be good reason.’

‘You almost missed that thug with the plasma gun!’ snapped the infocyte.

‘No,’ said Valdor, with a half-smile, ‘he did not.’

The sniper cocked his head. ‘I never miss.’

‘You came to the Atalantic zone without your vox rig,’ Valdor went on.

‘Comm transmissions would have been detected,’ said Kell. ‘It would have given me away to the bandits.’

‘Hence our somewhat unconventional method of locating you,’ continued the Custodian.

Tariel’s eyes narrowed. ‘How did you know when to fire?’

‘His weapon’s scope contains a lip-reading auspex,’ Valdor answered for the sniper. ‘Your assignment was open-ended, I believe.’

‘I’ve been systematically terminating the raider gangs as I find them,’ said Kell. ‘I still have work to do. And it makes good exercise.’

‘You have a new mission now,’ said Tariel. ‘We both do.’

‘Is that so?’ Kell reached up and took off the spy mask, revealing a craggy face with close-cut black hair, sharp eyes and hawkish nose. ‘Who is the target?’

Valdor stood up, and pulled a mag-flare tube from a compartment in his chest plate, aiming it into the sky. ‘All in good time,’ he said, and fired.

Kell’s eyes narrowed. ‘You are leading this mystery mission then, Captain-General?’

‘Not I,’ said the Custodian, shaking his head as the flare ignited, casting jumping shadows all around them. ‘You, Eristede.’

FOUR Blood / Weapons / Face and Name

The coleopter’s chattering rotors made it impossible to have a conversation at normal levels in the cabin, and Yosef was reduced to growling into Daig’s ear in order to get something approximating privacy. ‘It’s the pattern I’m not certain about,’ he said.

Daig had a fan-fold file open on his lap, one hand holding in the slips of vinepaper, the other gripping a thick data-slate. ‘What pattern?’

‘Exactly,’ Yosef replied. ‘There isn’t one. Every time we’ve had a crazed lunatic go on a killing spree like this, there’s been some kind of logic to it, no matter how twisted. Someone is murdered because they remind the killer of their abusive stepfather, or because the voices in their head told them that all people who wear green are evil…’ He pointed a finger at the file. ‘But what’s the link here? Latigue, Norte and the others? They’re from all different walks of life, men and women, old and young, tall and short…’ Yosef shook his head. ‘If there’s a commonality between them, I haven’t seen it yet.’

‘Well, don’t worry,’ Daig said flatly, ‘there will be plenty of people willing to throw in their half-baked theories about it. After Latigue’s death, you can bet the watch-wire will be buzzing with this.’

Yosef cursed under his breath; with everything else that had been on his mind, he hadn’t stopped to think that if the Eurotas Consortium had become involved with the case, then of course the Iestan news services would have got wind of it into the bargain. ‘As if they don’t have enough doom and gloom to put on the watch-wire already,’ he said. ‘By all means, let’s add to everyone’s woes with the fear of a knife in the belly from every dark alleyway.’

Daig shrugged. ‘Actually, it might take people’s minds off the bigger issues. Nothing like a killer of men on the loose in your own backyard to keep you focussed.’

‘That all depends on how large your backyard is, don’t you think?’

‘Good point.’ Yosef’s cohort paged through the panes of data installed on the slate with solemn slowness. He paused on one slab of dense text, his eyes narrowing. ‘Hello. This is interesting.’ He handed the device over. ‘Look-see.’

‘Blood work,’ noted Yosef. It was the analysis reports from the site of the Latigue murder, multiple testing on samples that confirmed, yes, the fluids all over the walls of the gondola had once been contained inside the unfortunate clerk. At least, almost all of them. There was a rogue trace right in the middle of the scan reports, something picked up by chance from one of the medicae servitors. A single blood trace that did not match the others.

Yosef felt a slight thrill as he absorbed this piece of information, but he stamped down on it immediately. He didn’t dare jinx the chance that Daig might have just pointed out something that could be their first important break.

‘It doesn’t tally with any of the previous deaders, either,’ said the other reeve. He reached for the intercom horn. ‘I’ll comm the precinct, get them to run this up to the citizen database…’

But just as quickly as it had lit, Yosef’s brief spark of excitement guttered out and died as he read a notation appended to the bottom of the information pane. ‘Don’t waste your time. Tisely got her people to do that already.’

‘Ah,’ Daig’s expression remained neutral. ‘Should have expected that. She’s efficient that way. No joy, then?’

Yosef shook his head. The notification for a citizen ident read Not Found. That meant that the killer was unregistered, which was a rare occurrence on Iesta Veracrux, or else they were from somewhere else entirely. He chewed on that thought for a moment. ‘He’s an off-worlder.’

‘What?’

‘Our cutter. Not an Iestan.’

Daig eyed him. ‘That’s a bit of a leap.’

‘Is it? It explains why his blood’s not in the database. It explains how he’s doing this and leaving no traces.’

‘Off-world technology?’

Yosef nodded. ‘I admit it’s thin, but it’s a direction. And with Telemach breathing down our necks, we need to be seen to be proactive. It’s that or sit around waiting for a fresh kill.’

‘We could just hold off,’ suggested the other man. ‘I mean, if Eurotas has his own operatives inbound… Why not let them come in and take a pass over it? They’re bound to have better resources than we do.’

He gave his cohort an acid look. ‘Remember that engraving on your warrant rod that talks about “to serve and protect”? We’re called investigators for a reason.’

‘Just a thought,’ said Daig.

Yosef sensed something unsaid in his cohort’s words and studied him. To anyone else, Segan’s dour expression would have seemed no different from any of the other dour expressions he wore day in and day out; but the other reeve had been partnered with him for a long time, and he could read moods in the man that others missed completely. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Daig?’ he asked. ‘Something about this case has been gnawing at you since we had it dropped on us.’ Yosef leaned closer. ‘You didn’t do it, did you?’

Daig made a brief spluttering sound that was the closest he ever came to a laugh, but then he sobered almost instantly. After a moment of silence he looked away. ‘We’ve seen some things, you and I,’ he said. ‘This is different, though. It feels different. Don’t ask me to be objective about it, because I can’t. I think there’s more here than just… human madness.’

Yosef made a face. ‘Are you talking about xenos? There’s not an alien alive in this entire sector.’

Daig shook his head. ‘No.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not sure what I’m talking about. But… After Horus…’

Once more, the reeve felt the sudden tension that the name brought with it. ‘If I’m sure of anything, I’m damned sure that he didn’t do it.’

‘There are stories, though,’ Daig went on. ‘People talk about worlds that have declared for the Warmaster, worlds that go silent soon after. Those who make it out before the silence comes down, they’ve said things. Talked about what happened on those planets.’ He tapped a sheaf of crime scene picts. ‘Things like this. I know you’ve heard the same.’

‘It’s just stories. Just scared people.’ Yosef wondered if he sounded convincing. He took a breath. ‘And it has no bearing on what we’re doing here.’

‘We’ll see,’ Daig said darkly.

A thought occurred to Yosef and he reached for the intercom horn. ‘Yes, we will.’ He pressed the stud that would allow him to talk to the coleopter’s pilot. ‘Change of plans,’ he said briskly, ‘we’re not going back to the precinct house. Take us to the Eurotas compound.’

The pilot acknowledged the command and the flyer pivoted into a banking turn, the pitch of the rotors deepening.

Daig gave him a confused look. ‘The trader’s men won’t be here for another couple of days yet. What are you doing?’

‘Everyone wants to keep Eurotas happy, so it seems,’ Yosef told him. ‘I think we should use that to our advantage.’

They landed on a tree-lined transit pad just within the walls of the Consortium’s compound. In a definite attempt to stand out from the more typical Iestan architectural styles of the other great manses in the area, the Eurotas house was modelled on the Cygnus school of design, reminiscent of many reunification-era colony palaces from the early decades of the Great Crusade. It was an open, summery building, full of courtyards and cupolas, with fountains and small pocket gardens that were at odds with the cool pre-winter chill of the day.

The two reeves were barely to the foot of the coleopter’s drop-ramp when they were met by a narrow woman in the bottle-green and silver of the rogue trader’s livery. Standing behind her at a discreet distance were two men in the same garb, but both of them were twice her body mass with faces hidden behind the blank glares of info-visors. Yosef saw no weapons visible on them, but he knew they had to be carrying. One of the many tenets of the Consortium’s corporate sovereignty throughout the Taebian Sector allowed Eurotas to ignore planetside laws the Void Baron considered to be detrimental to his business, and that included Iestan weapon statutes.

The woman spoke before Yosef could open his mouth, firmly determined to set the rules of the impromptu visit immediately. ‘My name is Bellah Gorospe, I’m a Consortium liaison executive. We’ll need to make this quick,’ she told him, with a fake smile. ‘I’m afraid I have an important meeting to attend very shortly.’ The woman had the kind of silken Ultima accent that automatically categorised her as non-native.

‘Of course,’ Yosef said smoothly. ‘This won’t take long. The Sentine require access to the Consortium’s database of passenger and crew manifests for incoming starships to Iesta Veracrux.’

Gorospe blinked. She was actually startled by the directness of his demand, and didn’t say no straight away. ‘Which ship?’

‘All of them,’ Daig added, following his lead.

The automatic denial that she was trained to give came next. ‘That’s impossible. That data is proprietary material under ownership of the Eurotas Trade Consortium. It cannot be released to any local jurisdictional bodies.’ Gorospe said the word local as if it rhymed with irrelevant. ‘If you have a specific request regarding any data pertaining to Iestan citizens, I may be able to accommodate you. Otherwise, I’m afraid not.’ She started to turn away.

‘Did you know Cirsun Latigue?’ said Yosef.

That brought the woman to a halt. She covered her hesitation well. ‘Yes. We had cause to work together on occasion.’ Gorospe’s lips thinned. ‘Is that pertinent?’

‘We’re investigating the possibility that whoever murdered him is following a vendetta against employees of Baron Eurotas.’ That was an outright lie, but it got Yosef the response he wanted. The woman blinked, and she was clearly wondering if she could be next. The reeve had no doubt that by now everyone in the compound, no matter if they were supposed to know or not, knew exactly how horribly Latigue had died. ‘We believe the killer may have arrived on planet aboard a Eurotas-operated vessel,’ he added.

If the murderer was from another planet, then that was undeniable; the Consortium ran every inter-system ship that came to Iesta Veracrux, and as a part of Imperial transit law, all travellers were required to submit to cursory medical checks in order to prevent the spread of any potential biosphere-specific contagions from world to world. That data would exist in the Consortium’s records.

Gorospe was uncertain how to proceed. Her plan to dismiss the Sentine officers and return to whatever her other tasks were had crumbled. Yosef imagined that she was now thinking of a way to deal with this by invoking some higher authority. ‘Sanctioned Consortium security operatives will be arriving in fifty hours. I suggest you return at that time and make your request to them.’

‘It wasn’t a request,’ Yosef told her. ‘And given the frequency of the murders to date, there could be two, perhaps even three more deaths before then.’ He kept his voice level. ‘I think that even the Baron himself would agree that time is of the essence.’

‘The Baron is coming here,’ Gorospe noted, in an absent, distant manner that seemed to be half disbelief.

‘I’m sure he would want as much done as possible towards dealing with this unfortunate circumstance,’ said Daig. ‘And quickly.’

She glanced back at Yosef. ‘Please tell me again what it is that you need, reeve?’

He resisted the urge to smile and instead offered her the data-slate. ‘There’s an unidentified blood trace listed here. I require it to be cross-referenced with the Consortium’s database for any matches.’

Gorospe took the slate and her practised smile reappeared. ‘The Consortium will of course do anything possible to assist the Sentine in the pursuit of their lawful duties. Please wait here.’ She walked swiftly away, leaving the two silent men standing watch.

After a moment, Daig glanced at his cohort. ‘When Laimner finds out you brought us here without authorisation, the first thing he’s going to do is rip you down to foot patrol in the slums.’

‘No,’ said Yosef, ‘the first thing he’s going to do is cover his ample backside with Telemach so she won’t blame him for any fallout. But he won’t be able to pull out anything about jurisdiction if we bring him some actual evidence.’

Daig watched Gorospe vanish into the main house. ‘There is a large chance that she may not have anything we can use, you know.’

Yosef shot him a glare. ‘Well, in that case, our careers are over.’

Daig nodded grimly. ‘Just so we’re both clear on that.’

The night air was as warm as blood, and humid with it. It was still and oppressive, almost a palpable thing surrounding and pressing down on Fon Tariel. He sighed and used a micropore kerchief to dab at his head before returning to the nested layers of hololith panes floating above his cogitator gauntlet.

Across the sparse room, in a pool of shadow at the far window, the sniper sat cross-legged, his longrifle resting across the crook of his arm. Without turning, Kell spoke to him. ‘Are you really in so much discomfort that you cannot sit still for more than a moment? Or is that twitching something common to all Vanus?’

Tariel scowled at the Vindicare. ‘The heat,’ he said, by way of explanation. ‘I feel… soiled by it.’ He glanced around; judging by the detritus scattered all about them, the room had once been the central space of a small domicile, before what appeared to be a combination of fire and structural collapse had ruined it. There were great holes in the roof allowing in the light, tepid rain from the low clouds overhead, and other rents in the floor that emitted smells Tariel’s augmetic scent-sensors classified as human effluent, burned rodent meat and contaminated fusel oils. The building was deep in the ghetto shanties of the Yndenisc Bloc, where low-caste citizens were piled atop one another like rats in a nest.

‘I’m guessing you don’t leave your clade’s sanctum very often,’ said Kell.

‘There hasn’t been the need,’ Tariel said defensively. He and his fellow infocytes and cryptocrats had taken part in many operations, all of them conducted through telepresent means directly from the sanctum, or from aboard an Officio-sanctioned starship. The thought of actually physically deploying into the field was almost an impossibility. ‘This is my, uh, second sortie.’

‘The first being when Valdor brought you looking for me?’

‘Yes.’

Kell gave a sarcastic grunt. ‘What wild stories you’ll have to tell when you go home to your hive, little bee.’

Tariel’s grimace hardened. ‘Don’t mock me. I’m only here because you need me. You won’t find the girl without my assistance.’

The sniper still refused to look his way, eyes locked on the sights of his longrifle. ‘That’s true,’ he offered. ‘I’m just wondering why you have to be here with me to do it.’

Tariel had been asking himself the same thing ever since Captain-General Valdor had given mission command to the Vindicare and ordered them out to the tropics. As far as he could be certain, it seemed that operational confidence for this mission was of such paramount importance that detection of any live in-theatre signals transmitted from the Yndenisc Bloc to the Vanus sanctum could not be risked. He wondered what kind of foe could threaten to defeat the finest information security in the Imperium and found he had no answer; and the fact that such a threat could even exist troubled him in no small degree. ‘The quicker we get it done, then, the quicker we can leave this place and each other’s company,’ he said, with genuine feeling.

‘It will take as long as it takes,’ Kell replied. ‘Wait for the target to come to you.’

The infocyte disagreed but did not voice it. Instead, he returned to the hololiths, leafing through them as if they were pages made of glass hanging suspended in the air. Anyone watching him would have only seen the motions of his hands and nothing else; Tariel had tuned the images to a visual frequency only readable by his enhancile retinal lenses.

The penetration of the local sensor web had presented him with a minor impediment, but nothing that he would have considered challenging. The infocyte sent a small swarm of organic-metal netfly automata out to chew into any opti-cables they found, and parse what rich data flows they located back to him. Each fly was by itself a relatively unsophisticated device, but networked en masse, the information the swarm returned could be cohered into a dense picture of what was happening in the surrounding area. Tariel had already assembled maps of the nearby structures, the flows of foot and vehicular traffic, and he was currently worming his way into the encoding of several hundred monitor beads scattered throughout the zone.

The Yndeniscs called this locale the Red Lanes, and the area was a centre for what one might tactfully describe as hedonistic pursuits. The local confederation of warlords allowed the place a great degree of latitude from their already lax legal codes, and in return reaped a sizeable percentage of profit from the patronage of pleasure-tourists from all across Terra and the Sol system. Quite how a place like this was allowed to exist on the Throneworld was a mystery to Tariel, as much so as the tribes of bandits he had encountered out in the Atalantic Plain. His understanding of Imperial Terra was of a nation-world united and glorious – that was what he saw through the glassy lenses of his monitors from the safety of his workpod in the sanctum. But now, outside… He was quickly realising that there were many dirty, messy, dark corners that did not conform to his view of the Imperium.

A soft chime sounded from the gauntlet. ‘Are you through?’ asked Kell.

‘Working,’ he replied. The netflys had bored into a deep sub-web of imaging coils hidden several layers beneath the more obvious ones, and all at once he was assailed by a storm of images from the shielded rooms in a tall building across the square; images of men, women and other humans of indeterminate gender performing acts upon one another that were as fascinating as they were repulsive. ‘I have… access,’ he muttered. ‘Commencing, uh, image match sweep.’

The facial pattern Valdor had provided to Tariel phased through the images, one after another, like looking for like. The infocyte tried to maintain an objective viewpoint, but the feeds he was seeing made him uncomfortable; if anything, he felt more soiled by them than by the dirt and humidity of the night air.

And then suddenly, she was there, the tawny skin of the girl’s face dark in the lamplight of a red-lit room as the trace program found its target. ‘Location confirmed,’ he said.

‘Good,’ said Kell. ‘Now find me a way to contact her before she gets killed.’

And so Iota found herself in the room after opening her eyes. She had wondered if it would still be there when she looked again, and it was. This confirmed her earlier hypothesis, that the sensations she was experiencing were not hallucinatory but actually real. On some level, that was troubling to accept; perhaps, if she had understood her state more correctly, Iota would not have allowed some of the liberties that had been taken with her physical form to occur. But then again, they had been necessary to secure her cover in the Red Lanes. She remembered those activities distantly, like a half-recalled dream. The persona-implants that had been used to bolster the cover identity were crumbling like sand, and recollection of any particular point of them was difficult.

It wasn’t important. The false overlay was drifting away, and beneath was revealed her real self; such as it was. Iota was not a blank slate, as those who did not fully understand the works of her clade might think. No. She was a fluid in the bottle of herself, a shape without definition, a form needing direction, a space to fill.

She surveyed the crimson room, the walls covered with rich velvet hangings sketched with erotic detail in gold threads, the great oval bed emerging from the deep carpeting. Floating lume-globes provided sultry lighting, with a shuttered window the only entrance for any natural illumination.

The men who ran the doxy-house seemed caught in some peculiar kind of attract-repel balance with her. Iota’s gift made them uncomfortable without them ever knowing exactly why. Perhaps it was the hollow distance in her dark eyes, or the silence that was her habitual mien. However the gift manifested, it was enough to unsettle them. Some liked that, taking pleasure from the thrill of it as they might the tread of a scorpion across their naked flesh; most avoided her, though. She scared them without ever giving form to their fear.

Iota touched the ornamental torc around the dusky flesh of her throat. If only they knew how little of her they really sensed. Without the dampener device concealed in the necklet, the icy void inside her would have spread wide.

She sniffed the perfumed air. Iota felt odd to be out of her suit, but then she always did. The silken shift dress that covered her body was gossamer-thin, and she continually forgot that she was wearing it. Of its own accord, her right hand – her killing hand – reached up and buried itself in the tight cornrows of her shiny black hair. The hand toyed absently with the plaits dangling off her scalp, and she wondered how long it would be until the murder came. Her eyes wandered to the wooden box on the bed, and that was when she had her answer.

The other woman came into the room striding like a man, and around the back of her scalp she wore an emitter crown, the delicate filigree of crystalline psyber-circuits and implant tech glowing with soft light. She towered over the diminutive Iota, nearly two metres tall in elevated boots of shiny blue leather, a full and well-shaped body showing through a bustier-affair outfit that could only have been a few strips of hide if taken off and laid end to end. She carried a device that resembled a bulbous tonfa in one hand, one end of it bladed, the other crackling with energy.

The woman sneered at Iota. The expression was ugly and ill-fitting on her face, and Iota saw the small twitches of the nerves around her lips and nostrils as the crown worked on her. ‘You’re new,’ said the woman. The words were slightly slurred.

Iota nodded, remaining downcast and passive.

‘They tell me there’s something odd about you,’ she said, reaching for Iota’s hand. ‘Different.’ The ugly sneer widened. ‘I do enjoy things that are different.’

Then she knew for certain. There was a small chance it wasn’t going to be him, but the clade had invested too much time and effort into inserting Iota into the right place at the right time for a mistake to happen at this late stage. The voice belonged to the woman, but the words – and the personality animating her at this moment – belonged to Jun Yae Jun, scion of one of the Nine Families of the Yndenisc Bloc and warlord-general. He was also, as intelligence had proven, a deceiver who was disloyal to the Imperial Throne, in violation of the Nikaea Edict, and suspected of involvement in a counter-secular cult.

‘We will play.’ Jun made the woman say the words. He was on the other end of the emitter crown, somewhere nearby, his body in repose while he forced his consciousness onto the flesh of the proxy. It was a game the warlord-general liked a great deal, working a meat-puppet in order to slake his desires. Iota was aware that many of her guardians back at her clade’s holdfast viewed what Jun did with disgust, but she only felt a vague curiosity about him, the same clinical detachment that coloured almost all her interactions with other humans.

Iota wondered if the woman Jun controlled was conscious during the activities, and dispassionately considered the psychological effects that might have; but such thoughts were trivia. She had a murder to focus on. ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I have something for you,’ Iota nodded at the box. ‘A gift.’

‘Give it to me,’ came the demand.

Iota let the shift dress fall from her shoulders, and with Jun’s second-hand gaze all over her, she picked up the box and brought it closer. Bloodlock sensors released the latches and she presented it, holding it up with one hand like a server offering a tray of food. The killing hand went to the torc and unfastened it.

‘What is this?’ A clumsy echo of Jun’s confusion crossed the woman’s face. ‘A mask?’

The lume light fell over the shape of a metallic skull. One eye was a glittering ruby, but the other was a cluster of lenses made from milky sapphire, spiked with stubby vanes and strange antennae. ‘Of a sort,’ Iota explained.

The torc released with a delicate click and Iota felt a sudden rush of cold move through her, as if a floodgate inside her had opened. At least for the moment, she no longer needed to hold it all in, to keep the emptiness inside her bottled up.

Jun made a strange noise through the woman that was half-cry, half-yelp, and then the psychoactive matrix of the crown began to fizz and pop, the tonfa falling from the proxy’s nerveless fingers. With a disordered, tinkling peal, the psionic crystals in the headdress began to shatter and the woman tottered on her spiked heels, stumbling over herself to fall upon the bed. She made moaning, weeping sounds.

Iota cocked her head to listen; the same chorus of wailing was coming from room after room down the corridor of the change-brothel, as the nulling effect of her raw self spread out.

Before the link could fully die, she sprang onto the bed and brought her face to the anguished woman’s, staring into her eyes. ‘I want to kiss you,’ she told Jun.

Through the window, across the companionway from the brothel building, the doors of a nondescript residential slum block had broken open and a tide of panicked figures was spilling onto the street, all of them half-dressed in clothes that marked them too rich to be locals.

Iota nimbly leapt back to the floor and unfurled the stealthsuit lying beneath the skull-helm, stepping into it with careless ease. The mask went on last, and it soothed her as it did so.

The weeping woman coughed out a last, stuttered word as Jun’s hold on her finally disintegrated. ‘Cuh. Cuh. Culexus.’

But Iota did not wait to hear it; instead she threw herself through the window in a crash of glass and wood, spinning towards the other building.

While they waited for Gorospe, Yosef glanced around the landing pad’s surroundings. The fountains, which were usually gushing with coloured water, were silent; and when he looked closer, he noted that the well-tended gardens seemed, if anything, considerably unkempt. There were even dead patches in the otherwise flawless lawns; the Consortium appeared to be slacking on matters of minor maintenance. He wondered what that small detail could mean in the greater scheme of things.

Daig had made an attempt to engage one of the security men in conversation, resorting to his usual gambit of complaining about the weather, but the guard had been disinterested in talking. ‘Nice outfits they have,’ he opined, wandering back to the parked coleopter. ‘Do you think they have to buy their own uniforms?’

‘Considering a career change, then?’

Daig shrugged. ‘Or maybe a sabbatical. A very long one, to somewhere quiet.’ He glanced up into the sky, then away again.

Yosef sensed something in his cohort and found himself asking the question that had been preying on his mind for a time. ‘Do you think he will come here?’

‘The Warmaster?’

‘Who else?’ The air around them seemed suddenly still.

‘The Arbites say the situation will be dealt with by the Astartes.’ Daig’s manner made it clear he didn’t believe that.

Yosef frowned. Now he had asked the question, he found he couldn’t stop thinking about it. ‘I still find it hard to grasp. The idea of one of the Emperor’s sons plotting a rebellion against him.’ The concept seemed unreal, like the rain rebelling against the clouds.

‘Laimner says there is no mutiny at all. He says it’s a disinformation ploy by the Adeptus Terra to keep the planets out in the deeps off-balance, keep them loyal to the Throneworld. After all, a fearful populace is a compliant one.’

‘Our esteemed Reeve Warden is a fool.’

‘I won’t argue that point,’ Daig nodded. ‘But then, is that any more shocking than the idea that the Warmaster would turn against his own father? What possible reason could he have to do that, unless he has some sort of sickness of the mind?’

Yosef felt a chill move through him, as if a shadow had passed over the sun. ‘It’s not a matter of lunacy,’ he said, uncertain as to where the words were coming from. ‘And fathers can be fallible, after all.’

He caught a flash of irritation on Daig’s face. ‘You’re talking about ordinary men. The Emperor is far more than that.’

Yosef considered an answer, but then his attention was drawn away by the return of the Gorospe woman. Her carefully prepared expression of superior neutrality had been replaced by a severe aspect, concern and irritation there in equal measure. He had to wonder what she had found to instigate so profound a shift in her manner. She held the data-slate in her hand, along with a page of vinepaper. ‘You have something for us?’ he asked.

Gorospe hesitated, then tersely dismissed the two security men. When it was just the three of them, she gave the lawmen a firm stare. ‘Before we go any further, there are a number of assurances that I must have from you. No information will be forthcoming if you refuse any of the following conditions, is that understood?’

‘I’m listening,’ said Yosef.

She ticked off the stipulations on her long, elegantly manicured fingers. ‘This meeting did not occur; any attempt to suggest it did at a later date will be denied and may be considered an attempt at slander. Under no account are you to refer to the method in which this information was brought to you in any official records of investigation, now or at a later date in any legal setting. And finally, and most importantly, the name of the Eurotas Trade Consortium will in no way be connected to the suspect of your investigation.’

The two men exchanged glances. ‘I suppose I have no choice but to agree,’ said Yosef.

‘Both of you,’ she insisted.

‘Aye, then,’ said Daig, with a wary nod.

Gorospe handed back the data-slate and unfolded the vinepaper. On it, Yosef saw file text and an image of a thuggish man with heavy stubble and deep-set eyes. ‘There was a match between the blood trace you provided and a single subject listed in our biomedical records. His name is Erno Sigg, and he is known to be at large on Iesta Veracrux.’

Yosef reached for the paper, but she held it away. ‘He was a passenger on one of your ships?’

When the woman didn’t answer straight away, Daig made the connection. ‘That’s a bondsman’s record you have there, isn’t it? Sigg isn’t a passenger. He works for you.’

‘Ah,’ nodded Yosef, suddenly understanding. ‘Well, that clears the mist, doesn’t it? The last thing the Void Baron would want is the good name of his clan being connected to a murderous psychotic.’

‘Erno Sigg is not an employee of the Consortium,’ Gorospe insisted. ‘He has not been a member of our staff for the last four lunars. His bond and his shares were cancelled in perpetuity with the clan, following an… incident.’

‘Go on.’

The woman glanced at the paper. ‘Sigg was cashiered after a violent episode on one of the Consortium’s deep space trading stations.’

‘He stabbed someone.’ Yosef tossed out the guess and the widening of her eyes told him he was right. ‘Killed them?’

Gorospe shook her head. ‘There was no fatality. But a… a weapon was used.’

‘Where is he now?’

‘We have no record of that.’

Daig’s lip curled. ‘So you decided to throw him out, just dump a violent offender on our planet without so much as a warning to the local law enforcement? I think I could find a judiciary who would classify that irresponsible endangerment.’

‘You misunderstand. Sigg was released after a period of detention commensurate with the severity of his misbehaviour.’ Gorospe looked at the paper again. ‘According to notations made by our security staff, he was genuinely remorseful. He voluntarily went into the custody of a charitable rehabilitation group here on Iesta Veracrux. That’s why he asked to be released on this planet.’

‘What group?’ said Daig.

‘The file notes it was part of an informal organisation called the Theoge.’

Yosef swore under his breath and snatched the paper from the woman’s hand. ‘Give me that. We’ll take this from here.’

‘Remember our arrangement!’ she insisted, her cheeks colouring; but the reeve was already stalking away towards the coleopter.

The Warlord Jun Yae Jun bolted upright from the ornate couch where he lay, his robe falling open, scattering the attendants from his sides. He spluttered and snarled, tearing at the web of golden mechadendrites that were wrapped about his head, winding into his ear canals, nostrils and mouth. ‘Get these things off me!’ he bellowed, flailing around, knocking over a hookah and table piled with wine goblets and ampoules.

With an agonised wrench he finally freed himself and glared around, looking for his guardian. Jun could hear the sounds of violence and panic in the halls beyond the room. Something had gone very wrong, and a tide of terror was welling up inside him. He turned it into fury as he found the guardian on his hands and knees, staring into a pool of vomit.

Jun gave him a violent kick. ‘What are you doing down there? Get up! Get up and protect me, you worthless wretch!’

The guardian stood, as shaky as a drunkard. ‘There is darkness,’ he muttered. ‘Black curtains falling.’ The man choked and coughed up bile.

Jun kicked him again. ‘You were supposed to protect me! Why did you fail me?’ His face was crimson with anger. In defiance of Imperial law, without grant or sanction from the Adeptus Terra, the warlord had secured himself a guardian who not only had combatant skills, but was also possessed of a measure of psychic ability. For months, his pet killer had been his most closely-guarded confidence, but now it seemed that his secret was out. ‘There’s a Culexus here! Do you know what that means?’

The guardian nodded. ‘I know.’

When he had first heard the name of the assassin clade spoken, when the story of what the word meant had been told to him, the warlord did not believe it. He understood psykers, the humans gifted – some said cursed – by the touch of the warp. A psyker’s essence burned bright in the realm of the immaterium, forever connecting the world of flesh with the world of the ethereal; but if psykers reflected the far extreme of a spectrum, and ordinary men and women the brief candles of life in the middle ground, then what could represent the opposite end of that balance? The darkness?

They were called pariahs. Chance births, less than one in a billion, children born, so it was said, without a soul. Where a psyker burned sun-bright, they were a black hole. They were antithesis, made manifest. Ice to the fire, darkness to the light.

And as with so many things, the Imperium of Man had found a use for such aberrations. The Clade Culexus harvested pariahs wherever they were found, and rumour suggested that they might even grow them wholesale from synthesis tanks in some secret fleshworks in the wilds of Terra. Jun Yae Jun had never believed in them until this moment, dismissed the very idea as a fiction created to instil fear in the kings and regents who ruled under the aegis of the Emperor. He knew fear now, though, and truth with it.

Jun stumbled towards the doorway, and hands pulled at his robes. ‘Warlord, please,’ said the attendant. The spindly man was speaking rapidly. ‘Stop! The game has not been completed. There is the letting of fluids to be gathered, the sacrament!’

The warlord turned and glared at the attendant. Like all the others who ran this sordid diversion for the masters of the Red Lanes, he was draped in strips of silk and painted with bright inks. He had numerous daubs across his skin, repeating the shape of a disc, a rod and opposed crescents. The design was meaningless to Jun. He tried to shove the man away, but he would not let go.

‘You must not leave!’ snarled the attendant. ‘Not yet!’ He gripped the warlord’s arm and held on tightly.

Jun spat and produced a push-dagger from a pocket. ‘Get off me!’ he roared, and stabbed the man in the throat with three quick moves. Leaving him to die, the warlord forced his way out into the corridor. The guardian stayed with him, his face pale and sweaty. He was mumbling to himself with every step. ‘Vox!’ shouted Jun. ‘Give me your vox!’

The guardian obeyed. A line of blood was seeping from his right eye, like red tears.

Barging his way through the change-brothel’s other clients, slashing a path with the push-dagger, the warlord barked a command string into the mouthpiece of the communicator. ‘Air Guard,’ he shouted. ‘Deploy mobiles for zone strike, now now now!’

‘Location?’ asked the worried voice of the coordinator, back at the Yae clan compound.

‘The Red Lanes!’ he replied. ‘Wipe it off the map!’

‘Lord, are you not in that area?’

‘Do it now!’ It was the only way to be certain of killing the Culexus. He had no other option open to him.

In the ruined apartment, Kell held his breath and listened. Over the disarray in the street below them, his spy mask’s audial sensors had detected the sound of gravity-resist motors. ‘Vanus,’ he said. ‘Do you hear that?’

‘Gunships,’ said Tariel, studying his hololiths. ‘Cyclone-class. I read an attack formation.’

Kell’s face twisted in a grimace, and he ejected the magazine from his weapon, quickly reloading it with a different kind of ammunition.

Crossing the courtyard, the warlord looked up into the rainy night as the first salvo of rockets slammed into the buildings surrounding the square. A massive fist of orange fire and black smoke engulfed the tallest of the shanty-towers, and curls of flame spun away, lighting new infernos wherever they landed.

His guardian was behind him, blinded by a roaring headache, barely able to stagger in a straight line, and with a monumental effort, the psyker bodyguard hauled himself to the groundcar parked near the gates. Dead bodies lay in a circle around the vehicle, shocked to death by the vehicle’s autonomic security system. Recognising him, the car’s driver-servitor opened the gull wing doors to allow the guardian and the warlord inside. Another strike hit home nearby, blasting tiles off the brothel’s roof, sending them down to shatter harmlessly against the vehicle’s armoured skin.

‘Get me out of here,’ demanded Jun. ‘Stop for nothing.’

The guardian, half in and half out of the door, coughed suddenly and blood spluttered from his mouth. He turned, the pain in his skull burning like cold fire, as a figure in glistening black fell the distance from the roof to the courtyard floor. A ring of invisible force radiated out from it, causing a halo of rain to vaporise into mist.

‘Kill her!’ shouted the warlord, his voice high and filled with terror. ‘Kill her!’

The psyker took a foot in the spine and Jun shoved him out of the safety of the car, onto his knees. The gull wing door slammed shut and sealed tight.

The Culexus assassin stepped forwards as the guardian got up again, catching sight of the rain rolling down the contours of her skull-helm, dripping from the orbit of the single ruby eye as if she were weeping. The guardian reached inside himself and went deep, past the blazing pain, past the horrific wave of nothingness that threatened to drown him. He found a breath of fire and released it.

The pyrokinetic pulse chugged into existence, streaming from his twitching fingertips. The blast hit the Culexus dead on, and she backed away, shaking her distended steel head; but the tiny flare of hope the guardian experienced died a second later as the fire ebbed, almost as if it had been pulled into the ribbing of the assassin’s sinister garb.

He was aware of the car moving forwards in fits and starts, but his attention could not stray from the grinning, angular skull. The sapphire eye-clutch shimmered and the punishing gaze of the weapon known as the animus speculum was turned upon him.

Power, raw and inchoate, sucked in from the fabric of the warp and from the guardian’s abortive attack, drawn in like light from the event horizon of a singularity, was now unleashed. A pulse of energy flashed from the psychic cannon and blasted the warlord’s bodyguard backward, slamming him into the wall of the courtyard. As he tumbled to the ground, he combusted from within, the fire consuming his flesh and his screams.

Jun Yae Jun was shouting incoherently at his driver-servitor as it used the bull-bars on the groundcar’s prow to shoulder pedestrians out of the way. The vehicle made it onto the street as fresh salvos of rocket fire tore the Red Lanes into rubble. The servitor gunned the engine and aimed the car towards the bridge that led back towards the Yae compound.

A black blur fluttered in the light of an explosion and the armoured windscreen cracked and crazed as indigo fire lashed across it. Great gobs of polymer glass denatured and collapsed, smothering the servitor in a suffocating blanket of superheated plastic. The car spun out and collided with a bollard.

Jun pulled wildly at the door’s locking handle, then stabbed it with the push-dagger. He was operating on blind panic.

Taking her time, the Culexus clambered in through the destroyed window and disarmed him, almost as an afterthought. The warlord soiled himself as the skull came closer. ‘I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry–’

‘Kiss me,’ she said, her voice devoid of all emotion.

Jun’s lips were pressed to the cold steel of the mask, and agony spiked through him. He fell back, and spat dust. Raw pain boiled at his extremities as his flesh blackened and became thick ash, crumbling before his eyes until those too rotted in their sockets and shrivelled to nothing. Jun Yae Jun’s very energy of life was drawn from him, leached into the force matrix webbing the assassin’s stealthsuit, until there was nothing left of him but a slurry of indeterminate matter.

Iota left the target’s vehicle and the area around her was suddenly drenched in brilliant white light. The downdraught from a gravity drive beat at the ground, stirring up debris and what remained of the warlord. The sensor suite inside her helm registered a gunship’s weapons grid locking on to her silhouette, and she paused, wondering if it were possible for her to die.

In the next moment, she saw a line of light across the infrared spectrum as a single high-impact bullet passed through the armoured canopy of the gunship, beheading both the pilot and the gunner. Suddenly unguided, the Cyclone’s autoflight system kicked in and brought it down to a soft landing.

Presently two men, one in the operations gear of the Vindicare clade and another in a more basic stealth rig, emerged from one of the smouldering buildings. Iota glanced at them, then went back to watching the spreading fires.

As the sniper tipped the corpses from the flyer’s cockpit, the other man warily approached her. ‘Iota?’ he asked. ‘Protiphage, Clade Culexus?’

‘Of course it’s her,’ said the Vindicare. ‘Don’t be obtuse, Tariel.’

‘You have to come with us,’ said the one called Tariel. He indicated the gunship as the sniper took the controls.

Iota ran a finger over the grinning teeth of her skull-mask. ‘Will you kiss me too?’

The man went pale. ‘Perhaps later?’

FIVE Fears / Release / Innocence

‘Husband?’

Renia’s hand on Yosef’s shoulder shocked him out of the dreamless doze he had fallen into at the kitchen table; so much so that he almost knocked over the glass of black tea by his hand. Before it could tip, he snatched it back upright without spilling a drop.

He gave her a weak smile. ‘Heh. Quicker this time.’

Yosef’s wife gathered her thick housecoat around her and took the seat across from him. It was late, deep into the evening, and the house was unlit except for a single lume over the table. It had a sharp-edged shade around it that forced the cast light into a cone, reducing everything beyond it to vague shapes in the shadows.

‘Is Ivak up as well?’

‘No. He’s still asleep, and I’m pleased to see it. With everything that’s been going on, he’s had a lot of bad dreams.’

‘Has he?’ Yosef asked the question and immediately felt a flicker of guilt. ‘I’ve been absent a lot recently…’

‘Ivak understands,’ Renia said, cutting him off. ‘I didn’t hear you come in,’ she noted.

Yosef nodded and resisted the urge to yawn. ‘You and the boy had already turned in. I didn’t want to wake you, so I made tea…’ He sipped at the glass and found the contents had gone cold.

‘And fell asleep in the chair?’ She tutted quietly. ‘You’re doing this too often these days, Yosef.’ Renia brushed some stray threads of copper-coloured hair out of her eyes.

He nodded. ‘I’m sorry. It’s the investigation.’ Yosef sighed. ‘It’s… troubling.’

‘I’ve heard,’ she said. ‘The watch-wire was running stories about it for a while, before the news from Dagonet came in. Now that is all anyone is talking about.’

Yosef blinked. ‘Dagonet?’ he repeated. The planet was a trading partner with Iesta Veracrux, a few light years distant down the spine of the Taebian Sector’s mercantile routes, in a system orbiting a pale yellow sun. By the interstellar scales of the Imperium of Man, Dagonet was practically a neighbour. He asked his wife to explain; Yosef and Daig had both been buried in research on the serial murders all day long, fruitlessly looking for information about Erno Sigg, and neither of them had seen anything that wasn’t a case file or medical report.

For the first time since she had broken his dozing, Yosef realised that Renia was hiding something, and as she talked it became clear. She was worried.

‘Some ships came into the system from Dagonet,’ Renia began. ‘The Planetary Defence Force monitors couldn’t catch them all, there were so many.’

Yosef felt a peculiar thrill of fear in his chest. ‘Warships?’

She shook her head. ‘Transports, liners, that sort of thing. All Dagoneti ships. Some of them barely made it out of the warp in one piece. They were all overloaded with people. The ships were full of refugees, Yosef.’

‘Why did they come here?’ Even as he asked the question, he knew what the answer was most likely to be. Ever since stories of the galactic insurrection had broken out across the sector, Dagonet’s government had been noticeably reticent to commit on the subject.

‘They were running. Apparently, there’s an uprising going on out there. The population are split over their… loyalty.’ She said the word as if it was foreign to her, as if the idea of being disloyal to Terra was a totally alien concept. ‘It’s a revolt.’

Yosef frowned. ‘The Governor on Dagonet won’t let things run out of control. The noble clans won’t let the planet fall into anarchy. If the Imperial Army or the Astartes have to intervene there–’

Renia shook her head and touched his hand. ‘You don’t understand. It’s the Dagoneti clans who started the uprising. The Governor issued a formal statement of support for the Warmaster. The nobles have declared in favour of Horus and rejected the rule of Terra.’

‘What?’ Yosef felt suddenly giddy, as if he had stood up too quickly.

‘The common people are the ones fighting back. They say there is blood in the streets of the capital. Soldiers fighting soldiers, militia fighting clan guards. Those who could flee filled every ship they could get their hands on.’

He sat quietly, letting this sink in. There was, he had to admit, a certain logic to the chain of events. Yosef had visited Dagonet in his youth and he recalled that Horus Lupercal was second only to the Emperor in being celebrated by the people of the planet; statues in the Warmaster’s honour were everywhere, and the Dagoneti spoke of him as ‘the Liberator’. As the historic record went, in the early years of the Great Crusade to reunite the lost colonies of humanity, Dagonet languished under the heel of a corrupt and venal priest-king who ruled the planet through fear and superstition. Horus, at the head of his Luna Wolves Legion, had come to Dagonet and freed a world – accomplishing the deed with only one round of ammunition expended, the single shot he fired that dispatched the tyrant. The victory was one of the Warmaster’s most celebrated triumphs, and it ensured he would be revered forever as Dagonet’s saviour.

Small wonder then, that the aristocratic clans who now ruled the planet would give their banners to him instead of a distant Emperor who had never set foot on their world. Yosef’s brow creased in a frown. ‘If they follow Horus…’

‘Will Iesta follow suit?’ said Renia, completing his question for him. ‘Terra is a long way from here, Yosef, and our Governor is no stronger-willed than the rulers of Dagonet. And if the rumours are true, the Warmaster may be closer than we know.’ His wife reached out again and took both his hands, and this time he noticed that she was trembling. ‘They say that the Sons of Horus are already on their way to Dagonet, to take control of the entire sector.’

He tried to summon a fraction of his firm, steady voice, the manner he had been trained to display as a reeve when the citizens looked to him in time of danger. ‘That won’t happen. We have nothing to be afraid of.’

Renia’s expression – her love for him for trying to protect her there, but intermingled with stark fear – told him that for all his efforts, he did not succeed.

The chemical snows of the Aktick Zone, thick feathery clumps tainted a sickly yellow from thousands of years of atmospheric contaminants, beat at the canopy of the aircraft. Out beyond the bullet-shaped nose of the transport, there was only a featureless cowl of grey sky and the whirling storm. Eristede Kell gave it a glance and then turned away, stepping back from the raised cockpit deck to the small cabin area behind it.

‘How much longer?’ said Tariel, who sat strapped into a thrust couch, a half-finished logica puzzle in his soft, thin fingers.

‘Not long,’ Kell told him, deliberately giving him a vague answer.

The Vanus’s face pinched in irritation, and he fiddled with the complex knot of the logica without really paying attention to it. ‘The sooner we get there, the happier I will be.’

‘Nervous passenger?’ the sniper asked, with mild amusement.

Tariel heard it in his voice and fired him an acid look. ‘The last aircraft I was in got shot down over the desert. That hasn’t exactly made me well-disposed to the whole experience.’ He discarded the logica – which, to his surprise, Kell realised the Vanus had completed without apparent effort – and pulled up his sleeve to minister to his cogitator gauntlet. ‘I still don’t understand why I am needed here. I should have returned with Valdor.’

‘The Captain-General has duties of his own to attend to,’ said Kell. ‘For now on, we’re on our own.’

‘So it would seem.’ Tariel threw a wary look to the far end of the cabin, where the girl Iota was sitting. Tariel had placed himself as far away from her as it was possible to get and still be inside the aircraft’s crew compartment.

For her part, the Culexus appeared wholly occupied with the pattern of the rivets on the far bulkhead, running her long fingers over the surface of them, back and forth. She seemed lost in the repeated, almost autistic actions.

‘Operational security,’ said Kell. ‘Valdor’s orders were quite clear. We assemble the team he wants, and no one must learn of it.’

Tariel paused, and then leaned closer. ‘You know what she is, don’t you?’

‘A pariah,’ sniffed the Vindicare. ‘Yes, I know what that means.’

But the Vanus was shaking his head. ‘Iota is designated as a protiphage. She’s not human, Kell, not like you or I. The girl is a replicae.’

‘A clone?’ The sniper looked back at the silent Culexus. ‘I would not think it beyond the works of her clade to create such a thing.’ Still, he wondered how the genomasters would have gone about it. Kell knew that the Emperor’s biologians were greatly skilled and possessed of incredible knowledge – but to make a living person, whole and real, from cells in a test tube…

‘Exactly!’ insisted Tariel. ‘A being without a soul. She’s closer to the xenos than to us.’

A smile pulled briefly at Kell’s lips. ‘You’re afraid of her.’

The infocyte looked away. ‘In all honesty, Vindicare, I am afraid of most things. It’s the equilibrium of my life.’

Kell accepted this with a nod. ‘Tell me, have you ever been face to face with one of the Eversor?’

Tariel’s face went ashen, the tone of his cheeks paling to match the polar snows outside the flyer’s viewports. ‘No,’ he husked.

‘When that happens,’ Kell went on, ‘then you’ll truly have something to be afraid of.’

‘That’s where we’re going,’ offered Iota. Both of them had thought the girl to be wrapped up in whatever private reality existed inside her mind, but now she turned away from the bulkhead and spoke as if she had been a part of the conversation all along. ‘To fetch the one they call the Garantine.’

Kell’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know that name?’ He had not spoken of the next assassin on Valdor’s list.

‘Vanus are not the only ones who know things.’ She cocked her head to stare at Tariel. ‘I’ve seen them. Eversor.’ Iota’s hand strayed to her skull-helm, where it rested nearby on a vacant passenger couch. ‘Like and like.’ She smiled at the infocyte. ‘They are rage distilled. Pure.’

Tariel glared at the sniper. ‘That’s why we’re out here in this icy wilderness? To get one of them?’ He shuddered. ‘A primed cyclonic warhead would be safer!’

Kell ignored him. ‘You know the Garantine’s name,’ he said to Iota. ‘What else do you know?’

‘Pieces of the puzzle,’ she replied. ‘I’ve seen what he left behind. The tracks of blood and broken meat, the spoor of the vengeance killer.’ She pointed at Tariel. ‘The infocyte is right, you know. More than any one of us, the Garantine is a weapon of terror.’

The matter-of-fact way she said the words made Kell hesitate; ever since Valdor had appeared out there in the deserts with his commands and his authority handed down from the Master of Assassins himself, the Vindicare’s sense of unease had grown greater by the day, and now Iota cut to the heart of it. They were lone killers, all of them in their own ways. This gathering together sat wrongly with him; it was not the way in which things were to be done. And somewhere, deep in the back of his thoughts, Eristede Kell found he was also afraid of what such orders boded.

‘Vindicare!’ He turned as the transport pilot called out his clade’s name. ‘Approach control doesn’t answer. Something is wrong!’

Tariel muttered something about his cursed luck and Kell brushed past him, back into the cockpit. The pilot was already pushing the transport into a steep turn. Below them, distinguished only by a slight change in the tone of the chem-snow, he spotted the mottled lifeless landscape of the Aktick ranges through the spin and whirl of the blizzard-borne ice. There, beneath the craft, was a low blockhouse of heavy ferrocrete, distinguishable only by stripes of weather-faded crimson outlining the edges of it, and the steady blink of locator beacons. But where there should have been the hex-shape of a landing silo, there was only a maw belching black smoke and flickers of fire.

Kell caught the tinny sound of panicked voices coming through the pilot’s vox-bead, and as they banked, he thought he saw the blink of weapons discharges down inside the silo proper. His jaw stiffened; this was no chance accident. He knew exactly what had happened.

‘Oh. They woke him,’ said Iota, from behind, giving voice to his thoughts. ‘That was a mistake.’

‘Take us in,’ Kell snapped.

The pilot’s eyes widened behind his flight goggles. ‘The silo is on fire and there’s nowhere else to set down! We have to abort!’

The Vindicare shook his head. ‘Land us on the ice!’

‘If I put this craft down there, it might never lift again,’ said the pilot, ‘and if–’

Kell silenced him with a look. ‘If we don’t deal with this right now, by sunrise tomorrow every settlement within a hundred kilometre radius will be a slaughterhouse!’ He pointed at the snow fields. ‘Land this thing, now!’

Instead of returning home to the small apartment cluster where he lived alone, out near the western edge of the radial park, Daig Segan took a public conveyor to the old market district. At this time of night, none of the stalls were open to make sales but they were still hives of activity; men and women loaded produce and prepared for the dawn shift, moving crates on dollies this way and that across shiny tiled floors that were slick with sluice-water.

Daig crossed the covered market to the other conveyor halt and took the first ride that came in, irrespective of its destination. As the monorail moved along the line embedded in the cobbled street bed, he gave the carriage a long, careful sweep, running over the faces of the other passengers with a policeman’s wary eye. There were only a handful of people. Three teenagers in loader’s hoods, tired and serious-looking. An old couple, bound for home. Men and women in work-cloaks. None of them spoke. They either stared into the middle distance, or looked blankly out the windows of the conveyor. Daig could sense the tension in them, the unfocussed fear. It manifested in short tempers and hollow gazes, brittle silences and morose sighs. All these people and everyone like them, all were looking to a horizon lit by the distant fires of war, and they wondered – when will it reach us? It seemed as if Iesta Veracrux was holding its collective breath as the shadow of the rebellion drew ever closer. Daig looked away and watched the streets roll by.

He rode for three stops before disembarking once more. He took another conveyor back the way he came, this time stepping off the running board just as it pulled away from the halt before the market. The reeve jogged across the road, throwing a glance over his shoulder to be certain he had not been followed. Then, his toque pulled low to his brow line, Daig vanished into an ill-lit alleyway and found his way to an unmarked metal door.

A shutter opened in the door and a round, florid face peered out at him. Recognition split the face in a broad smile. ‘Daig. We haven’t seen you in a good while.’

‘Hello, Noust.’ He nodded distractedly. ‘Can I come in?’

The door creaked open in reply and he stepped through.

Inside it was warm, and Daig blinked a few times, his eyes watering as the chilled skin of his face thawed a little. Noust handed him a tin cup with a measure of mulled wine in it and the reeve followed the other man down a steel staircase. A breath of gentle music wafted up on the warm air as they descended.

‘I wondered if you might have changed your mind,’ said Noust. ‘Sometimes that happens. People question things after they take on the belief. It’s like buyer’s remorse.’ He gave a dry chuckle.

‘It’s not that,’ said Daig. ‘It’s just that I haven’t been able to get here. It’s the work.’ He sighed. ‘I have to be careful.’

Noust shot him a look over his shoulder. ‘Of course you do. We all do, especially in the current climate. He understands.’

Daig sighed, feeling guilty. ‘I hope so.’

The staircase deposited them in a cellar with a low ceiling. Lumes had been glued to the walls along the long axis of the chamber, and in rough rows there were a collection of seats – some plastiformed things pilfered from office plexes, others threadbare sofas from lost homes, a few little more than artfully cut packing crates – all of them arranged in a semi-circle around a cloth-covered table. Red-printed leaflets lay on some of the chairs.

High-Reeve Kata Telemach would have given much to find this place. It was one of a handful, each concealed in plain sight across Iesta Veracrux. There was no identifying symbol to show it was here, no secret passwords to be spoken or special sign that would grant access. It was simply that those who were called to know these places found them of their own accord, or else they were brought here by the like-minded; and despite what the High-Reeve insisted, despite all the hearsay and foolish gossip that was spread about what took place in such cellars and hidden spaces, there were no horrors, no murderous blood rites or dark ceremonies. There were only ordinary souls that made up the membership of the Theoge, that and nothing more. He thought on this as he rubbed his thumb over the smoothed gold of the aquila talisman about his wrist.

On the table, there was an elderly holographic projector that flickered and hummed; a blue-tinted image of Terra floated above it, a time-lapse loop of the planet’s day-night cycle. At the side of the projector was a book, open at a page of dense text. The book was made of common-quality vinepaper and it had been bound without a cover; Daig understood that a friend of Noust’s who worked the nightshift at an inkworks had used cast-offs from other jobs and downtime between the print runs of paying customers to run out multiple copies of the document.

The pages were careworn from many sets of hands upon them, and he wanted to pick them up and leaf through them, draw comfort from the writings. Daig knew that he only had to ask, and Noust would give him a copy of his own to keep, but to have the book in his home, somewhere it could be discovered by mistake or worse, used to incriminate him by people who didn’t understand the true meaning contained in it… He couldn’t take the risk.

Noust was at his side. ‘You timed it well. We were just about to have a reading. You’ll join us, yes?’

Daig looked up. There were only a few other people in the cellar, some of whom he knew, others not so familiar. He spotted a new face and recognised him as a jager from the precinct; the man returned a wary look, but Daig gave him a nod that communicated a shared confidence. ‘Of course,’ he said to Noust.

A youth with a bandaged hand picked up the book and handed it to Daig’s friend. On the front was the only element of adornment on the otherwise Spartan document.

Picked out in red ink, the words Lectitio Divinitatus.

If the Garantine had once possessed a true name, that time was long ago and of little consequence. The entire concept of a past and a future, these were strange abstracted notions to the Eversor. They were things that – if he had been able to stop to dwell on them – would have only brought tics of confusion; and as with all things about him, rage.

The Eversor existed only in a permanent state of the furious now and matters of before and after were limited to the most transitory of elements. Before, just heartbeats earlier, he had beheaded a guard attempting to down him with some kind of heavy webber cannon. In a moment more, he would leap the distance across the open space where the handling gantry for the flyers did not reach, in order to land among the group of technicians who were fleeing towards a doorway. In these small ways, the Garantine allowed himself to comprehend the nature of past and future, but to go beyond that was pointless.

It was the manner of his life that he existed in the thick of the killing. He had a dim understanding of the other times, the times when he would lie in the baths of amnio-fluids as the patient machines of his clade healed his wounds or upgraded the stimjectors and drug glands throughout his body. The times when, in the dreamless no-sleep between missions, hypnogoge data streams would unfold in his head like blossoms of information, target profiles linked to mood-triggers that would give him bursts of elation for every kill, jolts of pleasure for each waypoint reached, jerks of pain if he deviated off-programme.

These things had not happened here, though. He reflected on that as he completed his leap, his augmented muscles relaxing to take the impact of landing, the sheer force of his arrival killing one of the fleeing technicians immediately. As he spun about, the knife-claws on his hands and feet opening veins, the grinning rictus of his steel skull-mask steaming with splashes of blood, he searched for a programme, for a set of victory conditions.

There was none. Digging deeper, he reached for his stunted past. He remembered back as far as he could – an hour, perhaps? He replayed the moment. A sudden awakening. The transit cocoon that held him in its silent, womb-like space, where he could wait out the non-time until his next glorious release; suddenly broken. An error, or something else? Enemy action? That assumption was the Garantine’s default setting, after all. He reasoned – as much as he was able – that surely if he had been awakened for any other reason, the hypnogoges would have ensured he knew why.

But there was nothing. No parameters, only wakefulness. And for an Eversor, to be awake was to be in the glory of killing. A cocktail of stimulants and battle drugs boiled through his bloodstream, heavy doses of Fury, Spur and Psychon synthesised to order by the compact biofac implants in his abdomen. Under normal circumstances, the Garantine would have been armed with more than just his skinplanted offensive weapons and helm-mask; he would have been sheathed in armour and arrayed with a suite of servo-systems. That he did not have these only served to modify the killer’s approach to his targets. He had taken and employed several light stubber guns, using each until the ammo drum ran dry, then making the weapons into clubs he used to beat his kills to the floor; but the stubbers were only good for a few hits before his violence broke them across the frame and he was forced to discard them.

He punched a man with enough energy that it shattered his skull, and then he vaulted a makeshift barricade, moving faster than the men hiding behind it could aim. He killed them with their own guns and ran on, deeper through the complex.

Parts of the building might have looked familiar to him, if the Garantine had been able to stop the racing pace of his thoughts, if he had been able to slow his kill-need for just a moment; but he could do neither.

In the absence of orders, with no target to aim for, the Eversor did what he was trained to do; and he would go on, killing here and then moving on to the next set of targets, and the next and the next, forever in the moment.

Afterwards, Daig felt refreshed by his experience, but he had not come to the meeting for personal reasons. While some of the others talked amongst themselves, the reeve took Noust to one side and the two men shared cups of the warm wine, and questions.

Noust listened in silence to Daig’s explanation of his caseload, and at length, he gave a nod. ‘I know Erno Sigg. I guessed that might be why you’d come to see me. His face was on the public watch-wire. Said that he was sought after to assist in your “enquiries”.’

Daig suppressed a wince. Laimner, on Telemach’s orders, had deliberately leaked Sigg’s image to the media in a ham-fisted attempt to flush him into the open; but if anything, it appeared to have driven the man deeper into hiding.

Noust continued. ‘He’s a troubled fellow, to be certain. Someone without a compass, you could say. But that’s where the Theoge can be of help to a man. He learned of the text while he was incarcerated, from a ship-hand. Erno found another path with us.’ He looked away. ‘At least, for a time he did.’

Daig leaned in. ‘What do you mean?’

Noust eyed him. ‘Is that you asking, Daig Segan? Or is it the Sentine?’

‘Both,’ he replied. ‘This is important. You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t.’

‘Aye, that’s so.’ Noust sighed. ‘Here’s the thing. For a while, Erno was a regular fixture here, and he was trying to make something of himself. He wanted to make amends. Erno was working to become a better man than the angry, frustrated thug he’d left out there in space. It’s a long road, but he knew that. But then he started to come around less often.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘A few demilunars ago. Two, maybe. When I did see him, he was twitchy. He said that he was going to have to pay for what he had done.’ Noust paused, sorting through his thoughts. ‘I got the impression that someone was… I don’t know, following him? He was irritable, paranoid. All the old, bad traits coming back to the fore.’

Daig rubbed his chin. ‘He may have killed people.’

Noust gave the reeve a shocked look. ‘No. Never. Maybe once upon a time, but not now. He’s not capable of that, not any more. I’d swear that to the God-Emperor himself.’

‘I need to find Erno,’ said Daig. ‘If he’s innocent, we need to prove it. We… I need to protect all this.’ He gestured around. ‘I found my path here. I can’t lose it.’ Daig imagined what might happen if Telemach or Laimner got hold of Sigg, broke him in interrogation and then found the door to this place. In their secular, clinical world there was no place for the revelation of the Imperial Truth, the undeniable reality of the Emperor’s shining divinity. The church, such as it was, and all the others like it would be torn down, burned away, and the words of the Lectitio Divinitatus that had so transformed Daig Segan when he read them would be erased and left unheard. They would use Sigg and the crimes to excuse them as they put a torch to it all.

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Noust.

‘And I’ll help Him do it, if you give me the chance,’ insisted the reeve. ‘Just tell me where Erno Sigg is hiding.’

Noust finished his drink. ‘All right, brother.’

Behind her, she heard the clattering thunder of auto-fire and more screams. Iota skidded to a halt on the cold metal floor and cocked her head, letting her skull-helm’s autosenses take readings and pass the analysis back to her. He was very close; she had attracted his interest by appearing in the middle of a companionway, letting him see her clearly, and then breaking into a run. The Eversor knew another assassin when he saw one, and she was without doubt the most serious threat vector the rage-killer had encountered since his awakening. He was coming for her, but that didn’t stop him from pausing along the way to dispatch any of the facility’s staff who were unlucky enough to cross his path. The murderers of the Clade Eversor were like that; for all their bloody violence and instinct-driven brutality, they were still methodical. They left no witnesses, nothing but corpses.

Iota waited, rocking on her heels, ready to break into a run the moment he spotted her again. From what the infocyte had managed to piece together from the base’s cogitators, it seemed that there had been a catastrophic accident during the retrieval of the Garantine from one of the deep cold iso-stores beneath the mantle of the Aktick ice. The cryopod containing the assassin in his dormant state had cracked a fluid line; the burst conduit sprayed super-chilled methalon across the handlers, flash-freezing them all in an instant. By the time another team had made it down to the transfer area, the pod had drained and the Garantine was already awake. Even in his semi-dormant, unarmed state, they were easily cut down by him.

The clade’s technologians made the fatal mistake of addressing the problem of the coolant leak first – an easy choice to understand, given that this particular facility housed another nine Eversor field operatives down in the iso-stores. Left unchecked, the Garantine’s brethren would have eventually followed him into wakefulness. But the time spent stabilising the storage compartments had allowed the Garantine to fully thaw and begin the business of terminating every living being in the facility.

‘Culexus? Where are you?’ said Tariel, his voice a hiss in her helmet vox.

‘Area eight, tier one, facing west,’ she replied. ‘Waiting.’

‘I’ve accessed the main systems library,’ he told her, clearly impressed with his own achievement. ‘I’m closing the pressure hatches behind him as he moves.’

Iota glanced down at the multi-barrelled combi-needler fixed to her right wrist, considering it. ‘He’s not an animal, Vanus. He’ll know if you’re trying to herd him.’

‘Just keep him reactive,’ came the reply.

She didn’t say any more, because at that moment the Garantine came storming around the bend in the corridor, his thickset, densely-muscled body rippling with exertion. Chugs of white vapour puffed into the cold air from behind his metal mask, and as he moved, Iota saw the places where his bare skin showed and the shapes of implants beneath. The Garantine was covered from head to toe with daubs of human blood. He halted, rumbling like an engine, and eyed her with a low chuckle. In one hand he had a stubber carbine, liquid dripping from the blunt maw of the barrel.

She thought for a fleeting instant about attempting to reason with him, then dismissed the idea just as quickly. There were rumours that every Eversor had an abeyance meme encoded into their brains, a nonsense string of words that would lull them into inaction, or even send them into neuro-death if spoken aloud; but if this were so, Iota was sure that the rage-killer would have made certain any technologians in the base who knew the code were no longer able to voice it.

The Garantine pointed the broken gun at her. ‘You,’ he said thickly. ‘Quick.’

Perhaps it was a threat – a promise that he was going to end her swiftly – or perhaps it was a compliment on her agility, acknowledging Iota as the first real challenge he had come across since awakening. It mattered little; in the next second he was coming at her, charging like an enraged grox.

She fired a blast of glassaic needles at him, describing a seamless back flip to open the distance between them. The glittering shots clattered across the Eversor’s torso, burying themselves in the meat of his chest, but the rage-killer only grunted and batted them away.

Iota spun to a halt in front of a large oval exterior hatchway, as Tariel’s voice reached her once more. ‘Is he there?’ came the urgent question. ‘I… I am having difficulty reading the location of the Garantine…’

She nodded to herself. Among the many implants beneath the flesh of an Eversor were passive sensing baffles that could confuse the detector heads of many conventional scanners. ‘Oh, he’s here,’ Iota told him. ‘He will murder me in less than one hundred and ten seconds.’ The prediction was based on observing the other kills the Garantine had made.

‘Working,’ said the infocyte, a new urgency in his words.

‘Take your time,’ she replied.

The Eversor halted and cocked his head, considering her. Iota took a breath and drew in on herself. She let the force matrix built into the structure of her stealthsuit come alive, allowing it to reach its web of influence beyond the real and into the etherium of the warp; but the process was slow. Had she been fighting a psyker, she could have drained them dry in a moment, siphoned off their power for herself. But here and now, there was nothing but the commonplace energy of air and heat and life. She felt the eye of the animus speculum slowly iris open – but even as it did she knew it would not be ready in time.

The other assassin grunted out a laugh and stooped to rip a short stanchion pole from a support pillar, tearing it off in a flutter of sparks. He brandished the steel rod like a club and went for her.

At once, the hatch at Iota’s back groaned on heavy hydraulics and fanned open with a clatter of fracturing ice. A blast of polar air and windborne snow thundered in around her from outside. For a moment, the snowstorm whirled into the corridor, filling the space with whiteness.

The energy inside the animus was approaching readiness, but as she had predicted, the Garantine killer had her range and he did not hesitate again. Before Iota could release even a fraction of the psy-weapon’s potential, he slammed the bar into her chest with such force that she flew backwards, out into the snow-filled courtyard. Iota noted the snapping of several of her ribs with a disconnected understanding. She landed badly in a shallow drift of white and coughed up a stream of bloody spittle into her helmet. The fact she wasn’t dead made it clear he wanted to toy with her first.

They called him the Garantine because it was said he hailed from the Garant Span, an Oort cloud collective on the near side of the Perseus Null. A natural psychotic, he had killed everyone on his home asteroid, and all this as a child barely able to read. It was no wonder the Clade Eversor had been delighted to take ownership of him.

Iota struggled to get up, and through the optics of her skull-helm she looked to see another grinning rictus come into view. The Garantine grabbed her by the ankle and effortlessly threw her across the courtyard. This time the impact was lessened by a deep snow bank, but still the shock vibrated through her. She let out a tiny cry of pain. In her ear, the Vanus was jabbering something about closing the hatch, but that had no consequence to her. Iota focussed on bringing the animus to a firing state. If their plan failed, she would have to be the one to kill him, crushing his fevered mind with a blast of pure warp energy.

The Eversor bounded towards her, laughing, and at the last moment he leapt into the air. Time seemed to thicken and slow, the hazy man-shape falling down towards her; then she was distantly aware of a heavy report and suddenly the Garantine’s fall was deflected. He jerked away at a right angle, as if pulled on an invisible cord.

Iota saw the steaming wound in the rage-killer’s chest as he stumbled back to his clawed feet, shaking off the strike. Her head swimming, the Culexus searched and then found the source of the attack. A shimmering white figure stood up atop one of the nearby blockhouses, a longrifle in his grip. The white colouration faded into ink-black as the Vindicare deliberately reset his cameoline cloak to a null mode, allowing the Eversor to see him clearly. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as the rage-killer roared at him, and for the moment Iota was apparently forgotten.

The Eversor charged again, and the rifle shouted. The first shot had been a kinetic impact round, the kind of bullet that could shatter the engine block of a hover truck or reduce an unarmoured man to meat; that had been enough to attract the Garantine’s attention. The next shot whistled through the frigid air, blurring as it impacted the Eversor’s chest. The round was a heavy dart, fashioned from high-density glassaic. It contained a reservoir of gel within, pressure-injected into the target’s flesh on impact; but it was not a drug or philtre. An Eversor’s body was a chemical hell of dozens of interacting combat medicines, and no poison, no sedative could have been enough to slow it. The gel-matter in the rounds was a myofluid with a very different function; when exposed to oxygen it created a powerful bioelectric charge, a single hit strong enough to stun an ogryn.

It was a non-lethal attack, and the Garantine seemed incensed by that, as if he were insulted that so trivial a weapon was being used on him. He tore out the dart and came on. Kell fired again, flawlessly striking the same spot, and then again, and then a third time. The Eversor did not falter, even as crackles of blue sparks erupted from the weeping wound in his chest.

For one moment, Iota felt a rare stab of fear. How many rounds did the Vindicare have in the magazine of his longrifle? Would it be enough? She ignored the Vanus shouting in her ear and watched, as the crash of shot after shot was swallowed up by the hush of the falling snows.

The Eversor leapt up to where the Vindicare stood and swung a taloned hand at him, but his balance faltered, the warshot of a dozen darts pinning his flesh. The blow smashed Kell’s rifle in two and sent the pieces spinning. Iota was on her feet, aiming the animus; if she fired now, the Vindicare would be caught in the nimbus of the psi-blast.

But then the fight ebbed from the Eversor assassin, and the Garantine staggered backward, finally succumbing to all the hits he had taken. He made a last swipe at Kell and missed, the force of the blow carrying him back off the roof of the blockhouse and down into the courtyard.

Iota approached him carefully, loping low across the ground. She was not convinced. Behind her, the marksman came in to survey his work.

‘Is he down?’ she heard Tariel ask.

‘For our sake,’ Kell muttered, ‘I bloody hope so.’

Daig halted the groundcar at the foot of the hill and killed the engine. ‘We walk from here,’ he said, the weak pre-dawn light giving his face a ghostly cast.

Yosef studied him. ‘Tell me again how you came across this lead?’ he said. ‘Tell me again why you had to drag me out of my bed – a bed I’ve hardly had leave to be in these last few days, mind – to come out to a derelict vineyard while the rest of the city is sleeping?’

‘I told you,’ Daig said, with uncharacteristic terseness, ‘a source. Come on. We couldn’t risk coming in by flyer in case Sigg gets spooked… and he may not even be here.’

Yosef followed him out into the cold air, pausing a moment to check the magazine in his pistol. He looked up the low hill. On the other side of heavy iron gates, what had once been the Blasko Wine Lodge was now a tumbledown husk of its former self. Gutted by fire a full three seasons ago, the site on the southerly ridges had yet to be reopened, and it stood empty and barren. In the dampness of the dawn air, the tang of fire-damaged wood could still be scented, drawn out by the moisture. ‘If you think Sigg is in there,’ Yosef went on, ‘we should at least have some support.’

‘I don’t know for sure,’ Daig replied.

‘Not an overly reliable source, then,’ said Yosef.

That earned him a sullen look. ‘You know what will happen if I breathe a word of this at the precinct. Laimner would be all over it like a blight.’

He couldn’t disagree with that; and if Laimner was involved and Daig’s tip came to nothing, it would be the two reeves who would suffer for it. ‘Fine. But don’t keep me in the dark.’

When Daig looked at him again, he was almost imploring him. ‘Yosef. I don’t ask much of you, but I’m asking now. Just trust me here, and don’t question it. All right?’

He nodded at length. ‘All right.’

They got into the vineyard through a broken stand of fencing, and followed the driveway up to the main building. Small branches and drifts of wet leaves dotted the ground. Yosef glanced to his right and saw where unkempt, blackened ground ranged away down the steep terraces. Before the fire, those spaces had been thick with greenery, but now they were little more than snarls of wild growth. Yosef frowned; he still had a ten-year bottle of Blasko caskinport at home. It had been a good brand.

‘In here,’ whispered Daig, motioning him towards an outbuilding.

Yosef hesitated, his eyes adjusted to the dimness now, and his sight picking out what did not fit. Here and there he saw signs of recent motion, places where dirt had been disturbed by human movement. Looking up from the gates, an observer would have seen nothing, but here, close up, there was evidence. Yosef thought about the Norte and Latigue murders, and he reached into the pocket of his coat for the butt of his gun, comforting himself with the steady presence of the firearm.

‘We take him alive,’ he hissed back.

Daig shot him a look as he drew a thermal register unit from inside his jacket, panning it around to scan for a heat return. ‘Of course.’

They found their suspect asleep inside the cooper’s shack, lying in the curve of a half-built barrel. He heard their approach and bolted to his feet in a panic. Yosef put the brilliant white glare of his hand lantern on him and took careful aim with the pistol.

‘Erno Sigg!’ he snapped, ‘We are reeves of the Sentine, and you are bound by law. Stand where you are and do not move.’

The man almost collapsed, so great was his terror. Sigg flailed and stumbled, falling against the side of his makeshift shelter, before catching himself with an obvious physical effort. He held up his shaking hands, in the right gripping the handle of an elderly fuel-lamp. ‘H-have you come to kill me?’ he asked.

It wasn’t the question Yosef had expected. He had faced killers of men before, more often than he might have liked, but Sigg’s manner was unlike any of them. Dread came off him in waves, like heat from a naked flame. Yosef had once rescued a young boy held prisoner for weeks in a wine cellar; the look on the boy’s face as he saw light for the first time was mirrored now in Erno Sigg’s expression. The man looked like a victim.

‘You are suspected of a high crime,’ Daig told him. ‘You’re to come with us.’

‘I paid for what I did!’ he retorted. ‘I’ve done nothing else since!’ Sigg looked in Daig’s direction. ‘How did you find me? I hid well enough so even he couldn’t know where I was!’

Yosef wondered who he might be as Daig answered. ‘Don’t be afraid. If you are innocent, we will prove it.’

‘Will you?’ The question was weak and fearful, like the words of a child.

Then Daig said something that seemed out of place in the moment, and yet the words were like a calmative, immediately easing the tension in Sigg’s taut frame. Daig said ‘The Emperor protects.’

When Yosef looked back to Sigg, the man was staring directly at him. ‘I’ve done many things I’m not proud of,’ he told him. ‘But no longer. And not those things the wire accuses me of. I’ve never taken a man’s life.’

‘I believe you, Erno,’ said Yosef, the words leaving his mouth before he was even aware of them forming in his thoughts; and the strangeness of it was, he did believe him, with a totality that surprised the reeve with its strength. On some instinctual level, he knew that Erno Sigg was telling the truth. The fact that Yosef could not fathom where this abrupt conviction had come from troubled him deeply; but he did not have time to dwell upon it.

The roof of the cooper’s shack was a shell of corrugated metal and glass, some of it warped or shattered by the passage of the old inferno. From nowhere, as the dawn wind changed direction, the musty air was suddenly full of noise. Yosef recognised the rattling hum of coleopter rotors a split-second before harsh sodium light drenched the floor with white, the glare from spotlamps blazing down through the smoke-dirty glass and the holes in the roof. An amplified voice echoed Yosef’s original challenge to Sigg, and then there was movement.

The reeve looked up, shielding his eyes, and made out the blurs of jagers dropping from the hovering flyers, heavy guns in their grips at they fell on descender lines.

He looked back and saw pure fury on Sigg’s face. ‘Bastards!’ he spat venomously, ‘I would have come! But you lied! You lied!’

Daig was reaching out to him. ‘No, wait!’ he cried out. ‘I didn’t bring them! We came alone–’

Sigg cursed them once again and threw the fuel-lamp in his hand with a savage jerk. The lantern hit the ground and split in a crash of glass and fire, even as overhead the intact portions of the roof were breached by the jagers. As pieces of the roof rained down from above, the lamp’s burning oils kissed the soiled matter and old spills on the floor and a pulse of smoky flame erupted. Yosef pushed Daig aside as the new blaze rolled out, chewing on the piles of rotting wood and discarded sacks all around them.

Daig tried to go after Sigg, but the fire had already built a wall between them, and the droning throb of the coleopter blades fed it, raising it high. Sigg vanished into the heat and the smoke.

The jagers were disentangling themselves from their ropes as Yosef stormed over to them; one was already on the wireless for a firefighter unit. The reeve saw Skelta’s face among the men and grabbed him by his collar.

‘Who ordered you in?’ he shouted, over the sound of the rotors. ‘Who’s the shit who ruined this?’

But he knew the answer before he heard it.

SIX Ultio / Lies and Murder / The Death of Kings and Queens

The Officio presented the ship to them without ceremony. Like those it served, the vessel had a fluid identity; at the present moment, as it made its way towards the orbit of Jupiter, its pennants and beacons declared it to be the Hallis Faye, an oxygen tanker out of Ceres registered to a Belter Coalition habitat. Its codename, revealed to Kell and the others as they boarded, was Ultio.

Outwardly, the Ultio resembled the class of light bulk transport ships that travelled a thousand different sublight intrasystem space lanes across the Imperium. It was a design so commonplace that it became almost invisible in its ubiquity; a perfect blind for a craft in service to the Officio Assassinorum. Small by the standards of the mammoth starcruisers that comprised the fleets of the Imperial Navy and the rogue trader baronage, the Ultio was every inch a lie. A stubby trident, the shaft of the main hull – what appeared to be space for cargo – was in fact filled with the mechanisms and power train for an advanced design of interstellar warp motor. The craft had been constructed around the old engine, the origins of which were lost to time, and it was only the forward arrowhead-shaped section of the ship that was actually given over to cabins and compartments. This module, swept back and curved like an aerodyne, was capable of detaching itself from the massive drives to make planetfall like a guncutter. Inside, the crew sections of the Ultio were cramped and narrow, with sleeping quarters no larger than prison cells, hexagonal corridors and a flight deck configured with advanced gravity simulators so that every square centimetre of surface area could be utilised.

The ship had three permanent crewmembers, in addition to the growing numbers of the Execution Force, but none of them were what could be considered wholly human. As Kell walked towards the stern, he was aware that beneath his feet the ship’s astropath lay sleeping inside a null chamber, having deliberately shocked itself into a somnambulant state; similarly, the Ultio’s Navigator, who habitually remained far back among the systemry of the drive section, had also opted to drop into sense-dep slumber inside a similar contrapsychic chamber. Both of them had expressed grave displeasure at Iota’s arrival on board, but their requests that she be sequestered or drugged into stasis were denied. Kell could only guess at how the delicate psionic senses of the warp navigator and the astro-telepath would be perturbed by the ghostly negative aura cast by the Culexus; even he, without a taint of the psyker about him, found it profoundly unsettling to be around the pariah girl for too long. She had agreed to wear her dampener torc for the duration, but even that device could not block the eerie air that followed Iota wherever she went.

The third member of the Ultio’s crew was the least human of them all. Kell could still see the strange look of mingled horror and fascination on Tariel’s face as they had met the starship’s pilot. There was no body to the pilot, not any more; like the venerable dreadnoughts of the Adeptus Astartes, a being that had once been a man many centuries ago was now only a few pieces of flesh interred inside a body of iron and steel. Somewhere deep inside the block of computational hardware that filled the rear section of the crew deck, parts of a brain and preserved skeins of nerve ganglia were all that remained. Now he was the Ultio, and the Ultio was him, the hull his skin, the fires of the fusion core his beating heart. Kell tried to comprehend what it might be like to surrender one’s self to the embrace of a machine, but he could not. He was, on some base level, appalled by the very idea of such a merging; but what he thought counted for nothing. The pilot, the Navigator, the astropath and all the rest of them, they were here to serve the interest of the Assassinorum – to do, and not to question.

He halted outside a hatchway, his boots ringing on the metal-grilled deck. ‘Ultio,’ he asked the air, ‘Is the Garantine awake?’

‘Confirmed.’ The pilot-cyborg’s voice came from a speaker grille above his head. It had the flat tonality of a synthetic vocoder.

‘Open it,’ he ordered.

‘Complying,’ came the reply. ‘Hazard warning. Increased gravity field ahead. Do not enter.’

The hatch fell into the deck, and a waft of stale air, reeking of chemical sweat, wandered into the corridor. Inside, the Eversor sat uncomfortably on the floor, his breathing laboured. With visible effort, the rage-killer lifted his head and glared at Kell. ‘When I get out of here,’ he said, forcing the words from his mouth, ‘I am going to rip you apart.’

Kell’s lips thinned. He didn’t approach any closer. Although the Garantine was not tethered to the deck by any chains or fetters, there was no way he could have come to his feet. The gravitational plates beneath the floor of the Eversor’s compartment were operating well above their standard setting, confining the assassin to the floor with the sheer weight of his own flesh. Veins stood out from his bare skin as his bio-modified physiology worked to keep him alive; an unaugmented human would have died from collapsed lungs or crushed organs within an hour or so.

The Garantine had been in the room for two days now, enduring a regimen of anti-psychotics and neural restoratives.

Kell studied him. ‘It must be difficult for you,’ he began. ‘The doubt. The uncertainty.’

‘There’s no hesitation in me,’ gasped the Eversor. ‘Let me up and you’ll see.’

‘The mission, I mean.’ That got him the smallest flash of hesitation from behind the Garantine’s skull-face. ‘To wake without direction… That can’t have been easy on you.’

‘I will kill,’ said the Eversor.

‘Yes,’ agreed the Vindicare. ‘And kill and kill and kill, until you are destroyed. But it will be for nothing. Worthless.’

With an agonised grunt, the Garantine tried to lurch forward, clawing towards the open doorway. ‘I’ll kill you,’ he grated. ‘Worth something.’

Kell resisted the reflex to step back. ‘You think so?’

‘Broke your gun, back there,’ muttered the Eversor, the sweat thick on his bare neck. ‘Pity. Were you… attached to it?’

Kell didn’t rise to the bait; his prized longrifle had been custom-made by Isherite weaponsmiths, and it had served him well for years. ‘It was just a weapon.’

‘Like me?’

He spread his hands. ‘Like all of us.’ Kell paused, then went on. ‘The accident that woke you early… The Vanus Tariel tells me that it would take too long to put you under again, to go through all the hypno-programming and conditioning. So we either vent you to space and start anew with another one of your kindred, or we find–’

‘A different way?’ The rage-killer gave a coughing chuckle. ‘If I was chosen by my clade for whatever is planned, I’m the one you need. Can’t do it without me.’

‘I’m compelled to agree.’ Kell gave a thin smile. The Garantine was no mindless thug, appearances to the contrary. ‘I was going to say we would find an understanding.’

The other assassin laughed painfully. ‘What can you offer me that would be richer than tearing your head from your neck, sniper?’

The Vindicare stared into the Eversor’s wide, bloodshot eyes. ‘Nothing has been said yet, but the directors can only be bringing us together for one reason. One target. And I think you’d like to be there when he dies.’

He said the name, and behind his fanged mask the Garantine grinned.

Yosef’s hands were tight fists, and it was all he could do not to haul back and smack that weak half-smile off the face of Reeve Warden Laimner. For a giddy moment, he pictured himself with Laimner’s greasy curls in his hand, smashing his face against the tiled floor of the precinct house, beating him into a broken ruin. The potency of the anger was startlingly strong, and it took an effort to rein himself in.

Laimner was waving his hand in Daig’s face and going on and on about how all of this was Segan’s fault for not following proper channels, for not calling in backup units. He had been singing the same song all the way back from the Blasko lodge.

‘You lost the suspect,’ the warden bleated, ‘you had him and you lost him.’ Laimner glared at Yosef. ‘Why didn’t you take a shot? Leg hit? Put him down, even?’

‘I could have walked Sigg in through the front door,’ Daig grated. ‘He was going to surrender!’

Laimner rounded on him. ‘Are you an idiot? Do you really believe that?’ He stabbed at a pile of crime scene picts on the desk before him. ‘Sigg was playing you. He wanted to make meat-toys out of you both, and you almost let him do it!’

Yosef found his voice and bit out a question. ‘How did you know where we were?’

‘Don’t be stupid, Sabrat,’ said the warden. ‘Do you think the High-Reeve would let you off on a major case like this without having you tracked every second?’

Yosef saw Daig go pale at that, but he didn’t remark on it. Instead, he pressed on. ‘We had a solid lead, from a… a reliable source! We could have brought Sigg to book, but you came in mob-handed and ruined it!’

‘Watch your tone, reeve!’ Laimner shot back. He ran a deliberate finger down his warrant rod to emphasise his rank. ‘Remember who you’re talking to!’

‘If you want to run this case, then do it,’ Yosef continued. ‘But otherwise don’t second-guess the investigating officers!’

The warden’s sneering smile returned. ‘I was following Telemach’s orders.’

Yosef’s lip curled. ‘Well, thanks for making that clear. I thought it was just your impatience and poor judgement that would make this case fall apart, but it seems like the problem is further up the line.’

‘You insubordinate–!’

‘Sir!’ Skelta burst into the wardroom before Laimner could finish his sentence. ‘He’s here! The, uh, man. The baron’s man.’

Laimner’s attitude transformed in the blink of an eye. ‘What? But they’re not supposed to be here until tomorrow morning.’

‘Um,’ Skelta gestured at the door. ‘Yes. No.’

Yosef turned to see two figures entering behind the jager. The first was an ebon-skinned man who matched Sabrat for height, but was broader across the chest, with the thickset look of a scrumball player. He had ash-coloured hair that fell to his shoulders and an oblong data monocle that almost hid a faint scar over his right eye. At his side was a pale, thin woman with a bald head covered in intricate tattoos. Both of them wore the same green and silver livery Yosef had seen on Bellah Gorospe, but the man’s cuffs bore some kind of ornate flashing that had to be indicative of rank. The woman had a golden brooch, he noted, in the shape of an open eye. As he looked at her she raised her head to meet his gaze and he saw the unmistakable shape of an iron collar around her neck, like one that might be used to tether a dangerous animal. It seemed crude and out of place on her.

The man surveyed the room; something in his manner told Yosef he had heard every word of the argument that had preceded his entrance. The woman – it was hard to determine her age, he noted – continued to stare at him.

Laimner recovered well and gave a shallow bow. ‘Operatives. It’s a pleasure to have you here on Iesta Veracrux.’

‘My name is Hyssos,’ said the man. His voice was solemn. He indicated his companion. ‘This is my associate, Perrig.’

Daig was gawking at the woman. ‘She’s a psyker,’ he blurted. ‘The eye. That’s what it means.’ He tapped his lapel in the same place where Perrig’s brooch was pinned.

Yosef saw that the eye design was subtly repeated in among the woman’s tattoos. His first reaction was denial; it was common knowledge, even on the most parochial of worlds, that psykers were forbidden. The Emperor himself, at a council called on the planet Nikaea, had outlawed the use of psionic sensitives, even among the Legions of his own Space Marines. While some stripes of psyker were approved under the tightest reins of Imperial control – the gifted Navigators who guided ships through the immaterium or the telepaths who carried communications between worlds, for example – most were considered mind-witches, dangerous and unstable aberrants to be corralled and neutered. Yosef had never been face to face with a psyker before this day, and Perrig unnerved him greatly. Her gaze upon him made him feel like he was made of glass. He swallowed hard as at last she looked away.

‘My lord baron has sanction from the Council of Terra to employ an indentured psionic,’ Hyssos explained. ‘Perrig’s talents are extremely useful in my line of work.’

‘And what work is that?’ said Daig.

‘Security, Reeve Segan,’ he replied. Hyssos’s manner made it clear he knew the name of every person in the room.

Yosef nodded to himself. He knew that the Eurotas clan wielded great power and influence across the Ultima Segmentum, but he had never guessed it had such reach. To be granted dispensation against so rigid a ruling as the Decree of Nikaea was telling indeed; he couldn’t help but wonder what other rules the Void Baron was free to ignore.

‘I had expected you to go straight to the Eurotas compound,’ Laimner ventured, trying to recover control of the conversation. ‘You’ve had a long journey–’

‘Not so long,’ replied Hyssos, still sweeping the room with his gaze. ‘The baron will arrive very soon. He will want a full accounting of the situation. I see no reason to delay.’

‘How… soon?’ managed Skelta.

‘A day,’ Hyssos offered, his answer drawing Laimner up short. ‘Perhaps less.’

The Reeve Warden licked his lips. ‘Well. In that case, I’ll have a briefing prepared.’ He gave a weak smile. ‘I will make myself available to the baron on his arrival for a full and thorough–’

‘Forgive me,’ Hyssos broke in. ‘Reeves Sabrat and Segan are the lead investigators in the case, are they not?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Laimner, clearly uncertain of how he should behave towards the Eurotas operative. ‘But I am the senior precinct officer, and–’

‘But not an investigating officer,’ Hyssos went on, his tone level and firm. He gave Yosef a brief glance through his monocle. ‘The baron prefers to have information delivered to him as directly as possible. From the men closest to it.’

‘Of course,’ the warden said tightly, catching up to the realisation that he was being dismissed. ‘You must proceed as you see fit.’

Hyssos nodded once. ‘You have my promise, Reeve Warden. Perrig and I will help Iesta Veracrux to bring this murderer to justice in short order. Please pass that assurance on to the High-Reeve and the Landgrave in my stead.’

‘Of course,’ Laimner repeated, his smile weak and false. Without another word, he left the room, shooting Yosef a final, acid glare as he closed the door behind him.

Yosef felt wrung out by the events of the day even though it had hardly begun. He sighed and looked away, only to find the woman Perrig watching him again.

When she spoke, her voice had a melody to it that was at odds with the fire in her eyes. ‘There is a horror here,’ she told them. ‘Darkness clustering at the edges of perception. Lies and murder.’ The psyker sighed. ‘All of you have seen it.’

Yosef broke her gaze with no little effort on his part and gave Hyssos a nod. ‘Where do you want to start?’

‘You tell me,’ said the operative.

Ultio drifted into the gravity well of the gas giant, crossing the complex web of orbits described by Jupiter’s outer moons. It was almost a solar system in miniature, with the gas giant at its core rather than the blazing orb of a sun. The cloud of satellites and Trojan asteroids surrounding it were full of human colonies, factories and forges, powered by drinking in the radiation surging from the mammoth planet, feeding on mineral riches that in centuries of exploitation had yet to be fully exhausted. Jupiter was Terra’s shipyard, and its sky was forever filled with vessels. Centred around Ganymede and a dozen other smaller moons, spacedocks and fabricatories worked ceaselessly to construct everything from single-crew Raven interceptors up to the gargantuan hulls of mighty Emperor-class command-carrier battleships.

In a zone so dense with spacecraft and orbitals of every kind, it should have been easy for the Ultio to become lost in the shoals of them; but security was tight, and suspicion was at every point of the compass. In the opening moves of the insurrection, an alliance of turncoats, men of the Mechanicum and traitors from the Word Bearers Legion, had assembled in secret a dreadnought called the Furious Abyss, constructing it in a clandestine berth on the asteroid-moon Thule. The small Jovian satellite had been obliterated during the ship’s explosive departure and the ragged clump of its remains still orbited far out at the edges of the planetary system; but the shockwave from Thule’s destruction and the Abyss incident was still being felt.

Thus, the Ultio moved with care and raised no uncertainties, doing nothing to draw attention to itself. Secure in its falsehood, the vessel passed under the shadow of the habitats at Iocaste and Ananke and then deeper into the Galiliean ranges, passing the geo-engineered ocean-moon of Europa and Io’s seething orange mass. It followed a slow and steady course in across the planet’s bands of dirty orange, umber and cream-grey clouds, down towards the Great Red Spot.

A vast spindle floated there, bathed in the crimson glow; Saros Station resembled a crystal chandelier severed from its mountings and cast free into the void, turning and catching starlight. Unlike the majority of its industrial and colonial cohorts, Saros was a resort platform where the Jovian elite could find respite and diversion from the works of the shipyards and manufactories. It was said that only the Venus orbitals could surpass Saros Station for its luxury. Avenues of gold and silver, acres of null-g gardens and auditoriums; and the finest opera house outside the Imperial Palace.

The station filled the view through the Ultio’s canopy as the ship drifted closer.

‘Why are we here?’ asked Iota, with an idle sullenness.

‘Our next recruit,’ Tariel told her. ‘Koyne, of the Clade Callidus.’

At the rear of the flight deck, the Garantine bent his head to avoid slamming it against the ceiling. He made a rasping, spitting noise. ‘What do we need one of them for?’

‘Because the Master of Assassins demands it,’ Kell replied, without turning.

The Vanus glanced up from the displays fanned out around his gauntlet. ‘According to my information, there is an important cultural event taking place. A recital of the opus Oedipus Neo.’

‘The what?’ sniffed the Eversor.

‘A theatrical performance of dance, music and oratory,’ Tariel went on, oblivious to his derision, ‘It is a social event of great note in the Jovian Zone.’

‘Must have lost my invite,’ the Eversor rumbled.

‘And this Koyne is down there?’ Iota wandered to the viewport and pressed her hands to it, staring at Saros. ‘How will we know a faceless Callidus among so many faces?’

Kell studied the abstract contact protocols he had been provided and frowned. ‘We are to… send flowers.’

Gergerra Rei wept like a child as Jocasta went to her death.

His knuckles turned white as he held on to the balustrade around the edge of the roaming box the theatre had provided. Behind him, the machine-sentries in his personal maniple stood motionless and uncomprehending as their master’s lips trembled in a breathy gasp. Rei leaned forward, almost as if he could will her not to take the steel noose and place it over her supple neck. A cry was filling his throat; he wanted to call to her, but he could not.

The nobleman had seen the opera before, and while it had always held his attention, it had never touched him as much as it had this night. Every biannual performance of Oedipus Neo was a lavish, sumptuous affair orbited by dozens of stately dinners, parties and gatherings, but at the core it was about the play.

Everyone in the Jovian set shared the same fears about this year’s act; at first it had only been dreary naysayers who claimed it should not be put on because of the conflicts, but then after the diva Solipis Mun had perished in a tragic airlock accident… Many more had felt the opera should not have continued, as a mark of respect to her.

But if he was honest, Rei did not miss Mun onstage. As Jocasta, she had played the part with gusto and power, indeed, but after so many repetitions her investment in the character had grown careworn and flat. But now this new queen, this new Jocasta – a woman from the Venusian halls, as he understood it – had taken the part and breathed new life into it. In the first act, she seemed to mimic Mun’s style, but soon she blossomed into her own interpretation of the role, and with it, she eclipsed the late diva so completely that Rei had all but forgotten her predecessor as the opera rolled towards its conclusion. The new actress had also brought with her new direction, and the performance had been shifted from the usual modern-dress style to a strangely timeless mode of costume, all in metallic colours and soft curves that Rei found quite alluring.

And now, with the stage drenched in blood-coloured light and flickers of lightning from the Red Spot beyond the skylights, the character of Jocasta took her own life as the orchestra struck an ominous chord. Against reason, Rei hoped that the play might suddenly diverge from the story he knew so well; but it did not. As the actress’s body melted away into the wings and the final scenes of the opera unfolded, he found he could not focus on the fate of poor, blinded Oedipus, the lead actor giving his all in a finale that brought the audience to its feet in a storm of applause.

It was only as the floating viewing box returned to the high balcony with a silken thud that Rei regained a measure of composure, pulling himself back from a daze.

She had truly moved him. It had almost been as if this new Jocasta were performing only to Rei; he could swear that even in the moment of her drama’s suicide, she had looked directly to him and wept in unison.

Rei’s ranking meant that he had, as a matter of course, an invitation to the post-show gathering in the auditorium proper. Usually he declined, preferring the company of his machines to those of the venal peacocks who drifted about Jupiter’s entertainment community. Tonight, however, he would not decline. He would meet her.

The party was jubilant, high with the thrill of the performance’s energy as if it still resonated around the theatre even after the last note of music had faded. Critics from the media took turns to congratulate the director and the actor who had played the tortured king, but all of them did so while looking about in hopes of catching a glimpse of the true star of the show; the queen of this night, the new Jocasta.

Under the aegis of this, the invited nobles alternated between praising the opera and discussing the matters of the moment; and the latter meant discussion of the rebellion and of the pressures upon Jupiter and her shipyards. The wounds opened by the incident at Thule had not been healed, despite assurances from the Council of Terra, despite the quiet purges and the laying of blame. But accusations still crossed back and forth, some decrying the Warmaster for such perfidy and base criminality, others – those who spoke in hushed tones – wondering if the Emperor had let this thing occur just so he might tighten his grip on the Jovians. Every heartbeat of their forges was now turned to the construction of a military machine designed to break the turncoat advance, but many felt it was bleeding Jupiter white. Those who questioned this questioned other things as well; they asked exactly how it was that a force of Mechanicum Adepts and Astartes with traitorous intentions had been able to build a warship of the scope of the Furious Abyss, without alerting anyone to their duplicity.

Was it possible that Jupiter harboured rebel sympathisers? It had happened with the Mechanicum of Mars, and so some whispered, even among the warlords of Earth’s supposedly united nation-states. The questions turned and turned, but they faded when Gergerra Rei entered the room.

Resplendent in the circuit-laced robes of a Mech-Lord, Rei’s high status as master of Kapekan Sect of the Legio Cybernetica was known to all. Two full cohorts of combat mechanoids were under his personal command, and they had fought in many battles of note during the Great Crusade alongside the Luna Wolves and the Warmaster.

Like many of the Cybernetica, Rei eschewed the gross cyborg augmentations of his colleagues in the Mechanicum in favour of subtle enhancements that did not disfigure or dilute his outwardly human aspect; but those who knew Rei knew that whatever humanity he did show was rare and fleeting.

Behind him, moving with fluidity, his bodyguards were a three-unit maniple of modified Crusader-class robots. Painted as works of art, each insect-like machine was a stripped-down variant of its battlefield standard, armed with a discreetly sheathed power-rapier and a lasgun. A fourth mechanical, this one custom-built to resemble a female form rendered in polished chrome, walked at his side and served as his aide.

No one asked questions about loyalty when Rei was nearby. His machines could hear a whisper among a roaring crowd, and those who dared to suggest aloud that Rei was anything less than the Emperor’s obedient servant lived to regret it.

The Mech-Lord took a schooner of an indifferent Vegan brandy and pecked at a few small sweetmeats from ornamental serving trays offered by menials, allowing his mechanoid aide to delicately sniff at each before he ingested it; the robot’s head was filled with sensing gear capable of picking up any particulate trace of poison. The machine shook its head each time, and so he ate and drank but none of the rich foodstuffs sated the real hunger in him. Rei engaged in a moment or two of small talk with the director of the opera house, but it was a perfunctory and hollow exchange. Neither of them wanted to spend time with one another – Rei was simply uninterested and the director was doubtless wracked with worry over the reason why the Kapekan general had decided to take up his long-ignored invite – but both of them had to fake the genial nothings of greeting, for the sake of propriety.

‘My Lord Rei?’ He turned as a servant approached, a young man in the Saros livery with a wary cast to his face. He nervously side-stepped the Crusaders and offered a card to the Mech-Lord; and that was his error. The servant did not wait to be addressed, but instead proffered the card before it was acknowledged.

Rei’s aide stepped in to meet him with a faint hiss of hydraulics, and in one fluid motion took the hand holding the card and broke it at the wrist. The bone cracked wetly and the servant went white with shock, staggering. He would likely have fallen if the machine had not been holding him up.

‘What is this?’ he asked.

The servant spoke through gritted teeth. ‘A… A message for you, sir…’ He gasped and gave him a pleading look. ‘Please, I only did as the lady asked me to…’

‘The lady?’ Rei’s heart thumped in his chest. ‘Give it to me.’

His aide took the card and held it to her chromium lips. She licked it with a disconcertingly human-looking tongue, paused, then handed it on to her master. Had there been any contact toxins on the surface, she would have destroyed it.

The Mech-Lord fought off a tremor in his hands as he read the languid, flowing script written across the white card. It was a single word: ‘Come’. He turned it over and saw it listed a location in the apartments reserved for the opera house’s performers.

‘Is something amiss?’ said the director, his face pinched in concern.

Rei pressed his half-empty brandy glass into the man’s hand and walked away. His robots followed, and behind them the servant staggered down to his knees, clutching at his ruined wrist.

The apartments were a short pneu-car ride up three levels to Saros Station’s most exclusive residential decks. Rei had his own orbital out by Callisto and did not keep rooms here, but he had visited the chambers in the past during one of his many affairs and so he knew where to go. The presence of his maniple made sure that no one dared to waylay him, and presently he reached the room. His aide knocked on the door and it opened on silent servos.

From within came that silken voice. ‘Come,’ she said.

Rei took a step – and then hesitated. He pulse was racing like that of a giddy youth in the first blush of infatuation, and he had to admit, as much as he was enjoying the sensation of it, he was still the man he was. Still distrustful of everything on some deep level. His enemies had tried to use women as weapons against him before, and he had buried them; could this be one more attempt to do the same? His throat went dry; he hoped it would not be so. The strange, ephemeral connection he felt with the actress seemed so very real, and the thought that it might be a thing brought into existence just to hurt him cut deeply.

For a long moment, he wavered on the threshold, contemplating turning about and leaving, taking the pneu-car back to the docks and his yacht, leaving and never coming back.

Just making the thought felt like razors in his gut; and then she spoke again. ‘My lord?’ He heard the mirror of his own questions and fears in her words.

His aide walked in ahead of him and Rei went to follow, but again he hesitated. Even if what he hoped for would come about in this glorious evening, he could not afford to lose sight of the realities of his life. He turned to the Crusaders and spoke a string of command words. The robots immediately took up sentry positions around the door to the apartment, weapons ready, bowing their mantis-like heads low so that they would not damage the lamps hanging from the ceiling above.

Rei entered the room and became overcome by a vision.

His first thought was; she is not dead! But of course that was true. It had only been a play, and yet it had seemed so real to him. The woman stood, still dressed in her queenly costume, the sweep of her lithe and flawless skin visible through the diaphanous silver of the dress. Metallic glitter accented her cheekbones and the almond curves of her dark eyes. She bowed to him and looked away shyly. ‘My lord Rei. I feared you would not visit me. I feared I might have presumed too much…’

‘Oh no,’ Rei said, dry-throated. ‘No. It is my honour…’ He managed a smile. ‘My queen.’

She looked up at him, smiling too, and it was magnificent. ‘Will you call me that, my lord? May I be your Jocasta?’ She toyed with a thin drape of silk that curtained off one section of the apartments from another.

He was drawn to her, crossing the white pile of the anteroom’s rich carpeting. ‘I would like that very much,’ he husked.

The woman – his Jocasta – threw a look towards his mechanoid. ‘And will she be joining us?’

The open invitation in her reply made Rei blink. ‘Uh. No.’ He turned and spoke tersely to the robot. ‘Wait here.’

His Jocasta smiled again and vanished into the room beyond. Grinning, Rei paused and unbuttoned his tunic. Glancing around, he saw a spray of fresh Saturnine roses still in their delivery wrappings; he tossed his jacket down next to them and then followed her into the bedchamber.

Jocasta did not weep as Gergerra Rei went to his death.

The queen enveloped him in long, firm arms as he stepped in, bringing her body up to meet his, pressing her breasts to his chest, moulding herself to him. The Mech-Lord’s dizzy smile was shaky and he gasped for air. His reactions were perfect; his flawless new love for Jocasta – for that was what it was, the most pure and exact rendition of neurochemical release – was the final product of weeks of carefully tailored pheromone bombardment. Tiny amounts of metadopamine and serotonin analogues had been introduced to Rei over time, the dosages light enough that even the ultra-sensitive scanners of his machine-aide would not detect them. The cumulative amounts had pushed him into something approaching obsession; and combined with a physiological template based on his taste in female bed partners, the trap had been set and laden with honey.

Jocasta bent Rei’s head down to meet hers and pressed her lips to his. He shuddered as she did it, surrendering to her. It was so easy.

Gergerra Rei had been involved in the creation of the Furious Abyss. Not in a way that could be proven without doubt in a court of law, not in a way that connected him through any direct means, but enough that the guardians of the Imperium were certain of it. Whatever his crime, perhaps the transfer of certain bribes, the diversion of materials and manpower, the granting of passage to ships that should have been denied, the Kapekan Mech-Lord had done the bidding of the traitor Horus Lupercal.

The small weapon concealed between Jocasta’s tongue and the base of her mouth was pushed up, held in place by clenched teeth. A lick of the trigger plate was all that was needed to fire the kissgun. The needle-sized round penetrated the roof of Rei’s mouth and fragmented, allowing the threads of molecule-thin wire to explode outward. The threads whirled through the meat of his nasal cavity and up into his forebrain, shredding everything they touched. He lurched backwards and fell to the bed, blood and brain matter drooling from his lips and nostrils. Rei sank into the silken sheets, his corpse dragging them awry, revealing beneath the body of the actress whose face he had loved so ardently.

His killer moved quickly, shrugging off the illusion of the dead woman even as the target’s corpse began to cool.

Flesh shifted in small ways, the Jocasta-face slipping to become less defined, more like a sketch upon paper. The killer spat out the kissgun and discarded it, then drew sharp nails along the inside of a muscular thigh. A seam in the skin parted to allow a wet pocket to open, and long fingers drew out a spool and handle affair from within. The killer gently shook the device and padded towards the silk curtains. Rei had died silently but the machine-aide was clever enough to run a passive scan for heartbeats every few seconds; and if it detected one instead of two…

The spool unwound into a thin taper of metal, which rolled out to the length of a metre. Once fully extended, the weapon became rigid; it was known as a memory sword, the alloy that comprised the blade capable of softening and hardening at the touch of a control.

Koyne liked the memory sword, liked the gossamer weight of it. Koyne liked what it could do, as well. With a savage slash, the blade sliced down the thin silk curtain and the motion alerted the mechanoid – but not quickly enough. Koyne thrust the point into the aide’s chromium chest and through the armour casing around the biocortex module that served as the robot’s brain. It gave a faint squeal and became a rigid statue.

Leaving the sword in place, Koyne took a moment to prepare for the next template. Koyne knew Gergerra Rei as well as the actress who played Queen Jocasta, and would adopt him just as easily. The Callidus despised the term ‘mimicry’. It was a poor word that could not encompass the wholeness with which a Callidus would become their disguises. To mimic something was to ape it, to pretend. Koyne became the disguise; Koyne inhabited each identity, even if it was for a short while.

The Callidus was a sculpture that carved itself. Bio-implants and heavy doses of the shapeshifter drug polymorphine made skin, bone and muscle become supple and motile. Those who could not control the freedom it gave would collapse and turn into monstrosities, things like molten waxworks that were little more than heaps of bone and organs. Those with the gift of the self, though, those like Koyne, they could become anyone.

Concentrating, Koyne shifted to neutrality, a grey, sexless form that was smooth and almost without features. The Callidus did not recall any birth-gender; that data was irrelevant when it was possible to be man or woman, young or old, even human or xenos if the will was there.

It was then Koyne saw the flowers. They had been delivered by courier shortly before Rei had arrived. The assassin picked at the plants and noted the colour and number of the petals on the roses. Something like irritation crossed the killer’s no-face and Koyne paused at the vox-comm alcove in the far wall, inputting the correct sequence of encoding that the flower arrangement signified.

The reply was almost immediate, meaning that there was a ship nearby. ‘Koyne?’ A male voice, gruff with it.

The Callidus immediately copied the tonality and replied. ‘You have broken my silent protocol.’

‘We’re here to help you conclude your mission as quickly as possible. You have new orders.’

‘I have no idea who you fools are, or what authority you may think you have. But you are compromising my operation and getting in my way.’ Koyne grimaced. It was an ugly expression on the grey face. ‘I don’t require any help from you. Don’t interrupt me again.’ The Callidus cut the channel and turned away. Such behaviour was totally unprofessional. The clade knew that once committed, an assassin’s cover should not be compromised except in the direst of circumstances – and someone’s impatience was certainly not reason enough.

Koyne sat and concentrated on Gergerra Rei, on his voice, his gait, the full sense of the man. Skin puckered and moved, thickening. Implants slowly expanded to add mass and dimension. Moment by moment, the killer changed.

But the task was still incomplete when the three Crusaders crashed in through the doorway, searching for a target.

Kell glared at the vox pickup before him. ‘Well. That was discourteous,’ he muttered.

‘Arrogance is a noted character trait of many of the Clade Callidus,’ Iota offered.

The Garantine looked at Kell from across the Ultio’s cramped bridge. ‘What are we supposed to do? Take in a show? Have a little dinner?’ The hulking killer growled in irritation. ‘Put me down on the station. I’ll bring the slippery changer freak back here in pieces.’

Before Kell could reply, a sensor telltale on one of the consoles began to blink. Tariel motioned at the hololiths around his gauntlet and his expression grew grave. ‘The ship reads energy weapon discharges close to Koyne’s location.’ He looked up, out past the nose of the ship to where the hull of Saros Station drifted nearby. ‘The Callidus may be in trouble.’

‘We should assist,’ said Iota.

‘Koyne didn’t want any help,’ Kell replied. ‘Made that very clear.’

Tariel gestured at his display. ‘Auspex magno-scan shows multiple mechanoid units in the area. War robots, Vindicare. If the Callidus becomes trapped–’

Kell held up a hand to silence him. ‘The Master of Assassins chose this one for good reason. Let’s consider this escape a test of skill, shall we? We’ll see how good this Koyne is.’

The Garantine gave a rough snort of amusement.

Koyne made it into the enclosed avenue outside the apartments with only minor injuries. The Callidus had been able to recover the memory sword from the steel corpse of the aide, realising far too late that there had to have been a failsafe backup biocortex inside the machine, one that broadcast an alert to the rest of Rei’s bodyguard maniple. Koyne did not doubt that other robots were likely vectoring to this location from the Mech-Lord’s ship, operating on a kill-switch protocol that activated with the death of their master. The core directive would be simple – seek and destroy Gergerra Rei’s murderer.

If only there had been more time. If Koyne could have completed the change into Rei, then it would have been enough to fool the auto-senses of the machines, long enough to reach the extraction point and exfiltrate. Rei and the actress would have been found days later, along with all the evidence that Koyne had prepared to set the scene for a murder-suicide shared by a pair of doomed lovers. It had a neatly theatrical tone that would have played well to Saros Station’s intelligentsia.

All that was wasted now, though. Koyne limped away, pain burning from a glancing laser burn in the leg. The Callidus looked like an unfinished model in pinkish-grey clay, caught halfway between the neutral self-template and the form of the Mech-Lord.

There was a cluster of revellers coming the other way, and Koyne made for them, fixing the nearest with a hard gaze and imagining their identity as the assassin’s own. The Callidus heard the heavy stomp of the spindly Crusader robots as they scrambled in pursuit, chattering to one another in machine code.

The small crowd reacted to the new arrival, the merriment of the group dipping for a moment in collective confusion. Koyne pressed every grain of mental control into adopting the face of the civilian – or at least something like it – and swung into the mass of the group.

The robots stood firm and blocked the avenue, guns up, the faceted eyes of their sensor modules sweeping the crowd. The revellers lost some of their good humour as the threat inherent in the maniple of machines became clear.

Koyne knew what would happen next; it was inevitable, but at least the hesitation would buy the assassin time. The Callidus searched for and found a side corridor that led towards an observation cupola, and began pushing through the people towards it.

This was the moment when the machines opened fire on the crowd. Unable to positively identify their target among the group of people, yet certain that their master’s murderer was in that mass, the Crusaders made the logical choice. Kill them all and leave no doubt.

Koyne ran through the screaming, panicking civilians, laser bolts ripping through the air, cutting them down. The assassin vaulted into the corridor and ran to the dead end of it. Red light from the giant Jovian storm seeped in through the observation window, making everything blurry and drenched in crimson.

Time, again. Little enough time. The Callidus concentrated and retched, opening a secondary stomach to vomit up a packet of white, doughy material. With shaking hands, Koyne ripped open the thin membrane sheathing it and allowed air to touch the pasty brick inside. It immediately began to blacken and melt, and quickly the assassin pressed it to the glassaic of the cupola.

The robots were still coming. The shooting had stopped and the Crusaders were advancing down the corridor. Koyne saw the shadows of them jumping on the curved walls, lurching closer.

The assassin sat down in the middle of the room and drew up into a foetal ball, forgetting the face of the civilian, forgetting Gergerra Rei and the Queen Jocasta, remembering instead something old. Koyne let the polymorphine soften flesh into waxen slurry, let it flow and harden into something that resembled the chitin of an insect. Air was expunged, organs pressed together. By turns the body became a mass of dark meat; but still not quickly enough.

The Crusader maniple advanced into the observation cupola just as the package of thermo-reactive plasma completed its oxygenation cycle and self-detonated. The blast shattered the glassaic dome and everything inside the cupola was blown out into space. Rei’s guardian machines spun away into the vacuum even as safety hatches fell to seal off the corridor. Koyne’s body, now enveloped in a cocoon of its own skin, went with them into the dark.

Outside, the Ultio hove closer.

SEVEN Storm Warning / An Old Wound / Target

Yosef Sabrat was out of his depth.

The audience chamber was big enough that it would have swallowed the footprint of his home three times over, and decorated with such riches that they likely equalled the price of every other house in the same district put together. It was a gallery of ornaments and treasures from all across the southern reaches of the Ultima Segmentum – discreet holographs labelled sculptures from Delta Tao and Pavonis, tapestries and threadwork from Ultramar, art from the colonies of the Eastern Fringes, triptychs of stunning picts in silver frames, glass and gold and steel and bronze… The contents of this one chamber alone shamed even the most resplendent of museums on Iesta Veracrux.

Thinking of his home world, Yosef reflexively looked up at the oval window above his head. The planet drifted there in stately silence, the dayside turning as dawn passed over the green-blue ribbons of ocean near the equator. But for all its beauty, he couldn’t shake the sense of it hanging over him like some monumental burden, ready to fall and crush him the moment his focus slipped. He looked away, finding Daig by his side. The other reeve glanced at him, and the expression on his cohort’s face was muted.

‘What are we doing up here?’ Daig asked quietly. ‘Look at this place. The light fittings alone are probably worth a governor’s ransom. I’ve never felt so common in my entire life.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Yosef replied. ‘Just stay quiet and nod in the right places.’

‘Try not to show myself up, you mean?’

‘Something like that.’ A few metres away, Hyssos was mumbling quietly to the air; Yosef guessed that the operative had to have some sort of communicator implant that allowed him to subvocalise and send vox messages as easily as the jagers of the Sentine used a wireless. It had been clear to him the moment the Consortium shuttlecraft had landed in the precinct courtyard, the elegant swan-like ship making a point-perfect touchdown that barely disturbed the trees; Eurotas’s riches clearly bought the baron and his clan the best of everything. Still, that didn’t seem to sit squarely with the neglect he’d seen at the trader’s compound a day ago. He thought on that for a moment, making a mental note to consider it further.

The shuttle had swiftly brought them into deep orbit, there to meet the great elliptical hulk of the Iubar, flagship of the Eurotas Consortium and spaceborne palace of the rogue trader who led it. A handful of other smaller ships attended the Iubar like handmaidens around a queen; and Yosef only thought of them as smaller because the flagship was so huge. The support craft were easily a match for the tonnage of the largest of the system cruisers belonging to the Iestan PDF.

The psyker Perrig remained on the surface, having insisted on being taken to the Blasko lodge to take a sensing. Hyssos explained that the woman had the ability to divine the recent past of objects by the laying on of hands, and it was hoped that she would find Erno Sigg’s telepathic spoor at the location. Skelta drew the job of being her escort, and the silent panic on the jager’s face had been clear as daylight. The reeve marvelled how Hyssos seemed completely unconcerned by Perrig’s preternatural powers. He spoke of her as Yosef or Daig would discuss the skills of the documentary officers at a crime scene – as no more than a fellow investigator with unique talents all their own.

In the hours after his arrival – and his blunt dismissal of Laimner – Hyssos had thrown himself fully into the serial murder case, absorbing every piece of information he could get his hands on. Yosef knew that the man had already been briefed as fully as the Eurotas Consortium could – how else could he have known the names of everyone in the precinct without prior instruction from Gorospe and her offices? – but he was still forming his view of the situation.

Daig took a few hours to sleep in the shift room, but Yosef was caught up by Hyssos’s quiet intensity and sat with him, repeating his thoughts and impressions to him. The operative’s questions were all insightful and without artifice. He made the reeve think again on points of evidence and supposition, and Yosef found himself warming to the man. He liked Hyssos’s lack of pretence, his direct manner… and he liked the man for the way he had seen right through Berts Laimner at first glance.

‘There’s more to this,’ Hyssos had said, over a steaming cup of recaf. ‘Sigg murdering and playing artist with the corpses… That doesn’t add up.’

Yosef had agreed; but then the message had come down from command. The Void Baron had arrived, and the Governor was in a fit. Normally, a visitation from someone of Baron Eurotas’s rank would be a day of great import, a trade festival for Iesta’s merchants and moneyed classes, a diversion for her workers and commoners – but there had been no time to prepare. Even as the shuttle had taken them up to meet Hyssos’s summons, the government was in turmoil trying to throw together some hasty pomp and ceremony in order to make it seem like this had been planned all along.

Laimner tried one last time to get a foot on the shuttle. He said that Telemach had ordered him to give the baron the briefing, that he could not in good conscience remain behind and let a lesser officer take the responsibility. He’d looked at Yosef when he said those words. Yosef imagined that Telemach was probably unaware of the shuttle or the summons, probably too busy fretting with the Landgrave and the Imperial Governor and the Lord Marshal to notice. But again, Hyssos had firmly blocked the Reeve Warden from using this as any way to aggrandise himself, and left him behind as he took the two lowly reeves up into orbit.

It was an experience that Daig was never to forget; it was his first time off-world, and his usual manner had been replaced with something that approximated stoic dread.

Hyssos beckoned them towards the far end of the wide gallery, where a dais and audience chairs were arranged before a broad archway. Inside the arch was a carved frieze made of red Dolanthian jade. The artwork, easily the size of the front of Yosef’s house, showed a montage of interstellar merchants about their business, travelling from world to world, trading and spreading the light of the Imperium. In the centre, a sculpture of the Emperor of Mankind towered over everything. He was leaning forward, holding out his hand with the palm down. Kneeling before him was a man in the garb of a rogue trader patriarch, who held up an open book beneath the Emperor’s hand.

Daig saw the artwork and gasped. ‘Who… Who is that?’

‘The first of the Eurotas,’ said Hyssos. ‘He was the commander of a warship that served the Emperor many centuries ago, a man of great diligence and courage. As a mark of respect for his service, the Emperor granted him the freedom of space and made him a rogue trader.’

‘But the book…’ said Daig, pointing. ‘What is he doing with the book?’

Yosef looked closer and saw what Daig was talking about. The artwork clearly showed what could only be a cut upon the Emperor’s downturned palm and a drip of blood – rendered here from a single faceted ruby – falling down towards the page of the open tome.

‘That is the Warrant of Trade,’ said a new voice, as footsteps approached from behind them. Yosef turned to see a hawkish, imperious man in the same cut of robes as the figure in the frieze. A group of guardsmen and attendants walked in lockstep behind him, but the man paid them no mind. ‘The letter of marque and statement granting my clan the right to roam the stars in the name of humanity. Our liege lord ratified it with a drop of his own blood upon the page.’ He gestured around. ‘We carry the book in safety aboard the Iubar as we have for generation after generation.’

Daig glanced about him, as if for a moment thinking he might actually see the real thing; but then disappointment clouded his face and his jaw set in a thin line.

‘My lord,’ said Hyssos, with a bow that the reeves belatedly imitated. ‘Gentlemen. Allow me to introduce his lordship Merriksun Eurotas, Void Baron of Narvaji, Agentia Nuntius of the Taebian Sector and master of the Eurotas Trade Consortium–’

‘Enough, enough,’ Eurotas waved him into silence. ‘I will hear that a thousand times more once I venture down to the surface. Let us dispense with formality and cut to the meat of this.’ The baron gave Yosef and Daig a hard, measuring stare before he spoke again. ‘I will make my wishes clear, gentlemen. The situation on Iesta Veracrux is delicate, as it is on many worlds among the Taebian Stars. There is a storm coming. A war born of insurrection, and when it brushes these planets with the heat of its passage there will be fire and death. There will be.’ He blinked and paused. For a moment, a note of strange emotion crept into his words, but then he flattened it with a breath of air. ‘These… killings. They serve only to heap tension and fear upon a populace already in the grip of a slow terror. People will lash out when they are afraid, and that is bad for stability. Bad for business.’

Yosef gave a slow nod of agreement. It seemed the rogue trader understood the situation better than the reeve’s own commanders; and then he had a sudden, chilling thought. Was the same thing happening on other planets? Had Eurotas seen this chain of events elsewhere in the Taebian Sector?

‘I want this murderer found and brought to justice,’ Eurotas concluded. ‘This case is important, gentlemen. Complete it, and you will let your people know that we… that the Imperium… is still in power out here. Fail, and you open the gateway to anarchy.’ He began to turn away. ‘Hyssos will make available to you any facilities you may need.’

‘Sir?’ Daig took a step after the rogue trader. ‘My, uh, lord baron?’

Eurotas paused. When he looked back at the other reeve, he did so with a raised eyebrow and an arch expression. ‘You have a question?’

Daig blurted it out. ‘Why do you care? About Iesta Veracrux, I mean?’

The baron’s eyes flashed with a moment of annoyance, and Yosef heard Hyssos take a sharp breath. ‘Dagonet is falling, did you know that?’ Daig nodded and the baron went on. ‘And not only Dagonet. Kelsa Secundus. Bowman. New Mitama. All dark.’ Eurotas’s gaze crossed Yosef’s and for a moment the nobleman appeared old and tired. ‘Erno Sigg was one of my men. I bear a measure of responsibility for his conduct. But it is more than that. Much more.’ Yosef felt the rogue trader’s gaze pinning him in place. ‘We are alone out here, gentlemen. Alone against the storm.’

‘The Emperor protects,’ said Daig quietly.

Eurotas gave him an odd look. ‘So they tell me,’ he replied, at length; and then he was walking away, the audience at an end and Yosef’s thoughts clouded with more questions than answers.

When the gull wing hatch of the flyer opened, the first thing that Fon Tariel experienced was the riot of smells. Heady and potent floral scents flooded into the interior of the passenger compartment, buoyed on warm air. He blinked at the daylight streaking in, and with wary footsteps he followed Kell out and into… wherever this place was.

Unlike the Eversor, who had not been afraid to provide the group with the location of one of their Terran facilities, the Clade Venenum made it clear in no uncertain terms that the members of the Execution Force would not be free to come to them of their own accord. The Siress had been most emphatic; only two members of the group were granted passage to the complex, and both were required to be unarmed and unequipped.

Tariel was learning Kell’s manner by and by, and he could see that the Vindicare was ill at ease without a gun on him. The infocyte was sympathetic to the sniper; he too had been forced to leave his tools behind on board the Ultio, and he felt strangely naked without his cogitator gauntlet. Tariel’s hand kept straying to his bare forearm without his conscious awareness of it.

The journey aboard the unmarked Venenum flyer had done nothing to give them any more clue to the whereabouts of the complex called the Orchard. The passenger compartment had no windows, no way for them to reckon the direction of their flight. Tariel had been dismayed to learn that his chronometer and mag-compass implants were being suppressed, and now as he stepped out of the craft they both flickered back to life, giving him a moment of dizziness.

He glanced around; they stood on a landing pad at the top of a wide metal ziggurat, just shy of the canopies of tall trees with thick leaves that shone like dark jade. The jungle smells were stronger out here, and the olfactory processor nodes in his extended braincase worked furiously to sift through the sensoria. Tariel guessed that they were somewhere deep in the rich rainforests of Merica, but it was only a speculative deduction. There was no way to know for sure.

A man in a pale green kimono and a domino mask emerged from a recessed staircase on the side of the ziggurat and beckoned them to follow him. Tariel was content to let Kell lead the way, and the three of them descended. The sunshine attenuated as they dropped below the line of the upper canopy, becoming shafts of smoky yellow filled with motes of dust and the busy patterns of flying insects.

A pathway of circular grey stones awaited them on the jungle floor, and they picked their way along it, the man in the kimono surefooted and confident. Tariel was more cautious; his eyes were drawn this way and that by bright, colourful sprays of plants that grew from every square metre of ground. He saw small worker mechanicals moving among them; what seemed at first glance to be wild growth was actually some sort of carefully random garden. The robotics were ministering to the plants, harvesting others.

He paused, studying one odd spindly blossom he did not recognise emerging from the bark of a tall tree. He leaned closer.

‘I would not, Vanus.’ The man in the kimono placed a gentle hand on his shoulder and reeled him back. Before he could ask why, the man made an odd knocking noise with his lips and in response the blossom grew threadlike legs and wandered away, up the tree trunk. ‘Mimical spiders, from Beta Comea III. They adapt well to the climate here on Terra. Their venom causes a form of haemorrhagic fever in humans.’

Tariel recoiled and blinked. Looking again, he drew up data from his memory stacks, classifying the plant life. Castor, nightshade and oleander; Cerbera odollam, digitalis and Jerusalem cherry; hemlock and larkspur and dozens of others, all of them brimming with their own particular strains of poisons. He kept his hands to himself from then on, not wavering at all from the pathway until it deposited them in a clearing – although clearing was hardly the word, as the place was overgrown with vines and low greenery. In the middle of the area was an ancient house, doubtless thousands of years old; it too was swamped by the jungle’s tendrils, and Tariel noted that such coverage would serve well as a blind for orbital sensors and optical scopes.

‘Not what I expected,’ muttered Kell, as they followed the man in the kimono towards an ivy-covered doorway.

‘It appears to be a manse,’ said the infocyte. ‘I can only estimate when it was built. The rainforest has reclaimed it.’

Inside, Tariel expected the place to show the same level of disarray as the exterior, but he was mistaken. Within, the building had been sealed against the elements and wildlife, and care had been taken to return it to its original form. It was only the gloom inside, the weak and infrequent sunlight through the windows, that betrayed the reality. The Vanus and the Vindicare were taken to an anteroom where a servitor was waiting, and the helot used a bulbous sensing wand to scan them both, checking everything down to their sweat and exhalations for even the smallest trace of outside toxins. The man in the kimono explained that it was necessary in order to maintain the balance of poisons in the Orchard proper.

From the anteroom, they went to what had once been a lounge. Along the walls there were numerous cages made of thin glassaic, rank upon rank of them facing outward. Tariel’s skin crawled as he made out countless breeds of poisonous reptiles, ophidians and insects, each in their own pocket environment within the cases. The infocyte moved to the middle of the room, instinctively placing himself at the one point furthest from all the cage doors.

A thing with a strange iridescent carapace flittered in its confinement, catching his eye, and the sheen of the chitin recalled a recent memory. The flesh of the Callidus had looked just the same when they had pulled Koyne out of the vacuum over Jupiter; the shapeshifting assassin had done a peculiar thing, turning into a deformed, almost foetus-like form in order to survive in the killing nothingness of space. Koyne’s skin had undergone a state change from flesh to something like bone, or tooth. Tariel recalled the disturbing sensation of touching it and he recoiled once again.

He looked away, towards Kell. ‘Do you think the Callidus will live?’

‘His kind don’t perish easy,’ said the Vindicare dryly. ‘They’re too conceited to die in so tawdry a manner.’

Tariel shook his head. ‘Koyne is not a “he”. It’s not male or female.’ He frowned. ‘Not any more, anyway.’

‘The ship will heal… it. And once our poisoner joins us, we will have our Execution Force assembled…’ Kell trailed off.

Tariel imagined he was thinking the same thing as the sniper; and what then? The question as to what target they were being gathered to terminate would soon be answered – and the Vanus was troubled by what that answer might be.

It can only be–

The thought was cut off as the man in the kimono returned with another person at his heels. Tariel determined a female’s gait; she was a slender young woman of similar age to himself.

‘By the order of the Director Primus of our clade and the Master of Assassins,’ said the man, ‘you are granted the skills of secluse Soalm, first-rank toxin artist.’

The woman looked up and she gave a hard-edged, defiant look at the Vindicare. Kell’s face shifted into an expression of pure shock and he let out a gasp. ‘Jenniker?’

The Venenum drew herself up. ‘I accept this duty,’ she said, with finality.

‘No,’ Kell snarled, the shock shifting to anger. ‘You do not!’ He glared at the man in the kimono. ‘She does not!’

The man cocked his head. ‘The selection was made by Siress Venenum herself. There is no error, and it is not your place to make a challenge.’

Tariel watched in confused fascination as the cool, acerbic mien Kell had habitually displayed crumbled into hard fury. ‘I am the mission commander!’ he barked. ‘Bring me another of your secluses, now.’

‘Are my skills in question?’ sniffed the woman. ‘I defy you to find better.’

‘I don’t want her,’ Kell growled, refusing to look at Soalm. ‘That’s the end of it.’

‘I am afraid it is not,’ said the man calmly. ‘As I stated, you do not have the authority to challenge the assignment made by the Siress. Soalm is the selectee. There is no other alternative.’ He pointed back towards the doorway. ‘You may now leave.’ Without another comment, the man exited the room.

‘Soalm?’ Kell hissed the woman’s surname with undisguised anger. ‘That is what I should call you now, is it?’

It was slowly dawning on Tariel that the two assassins clearly shared some unpleasant history together. He looked inward, thinking back over what he had managed to learn about Eristede Kell since the start of their mission, looking for some clue. Had these two been comrades or lovers, he wondered? Their ages were close enough that they could have both been raised in the same schola before the clades drew them for individual selection and training…

‘I accepted the name to honour my mentor,’ said the woman, her voice taking on a brittle tone. ‘I started a new life when I joined my clade. It seemed the right thing to do.’

Tariel nodded to himself. Many of the orphan children selected for training by the Officio Assassinorum entered the clades without a true identity to call their own, and often they took the names of their sponsors and teachers.

‘But you dishonoured your family instead!’ Kell grated.

And then, for a brief moment, the woman’s mask of defiance slipped to reveal the regret and sadness behind it; suddenly Tariel saw the resemblance.

‘No, Eristede,’ she said softly, ‘you did that when you chose to kill innocents in the name of revenge. But our mother and father are dead, and no amount of bloodshed will ever undo that.’ She walked by Kell, and past a stunned Tariel, stepping out into the perfumed jungle.

‘She’s your sister,’ Tariel blurted it out, unable to stay silent, the data rising up from his memory stack in a rush. ‘Eristede and Jenniker Kell, son and daughter of Viceroy Argus Kell of the Thaxted Duchy, orphaned after the murder of their parents in a local dispute–’

The Vindicare advanced on him with a livid glare in his eyes, forcing Tariel back against a cage filled with scorpions. ‘Speak of this to the others and I will choke the life from you, understand?’

Tariel nodded sharply, his hands coming up to protect himself. ‘But… The mission…’

‘She’ll do what I tell her to,’ said Kell, the anger starting to cool.

‘Are you sure?’

‘She’ll follow orders. Just as I will.’ He stepped back, and Tariel glimpsed a hollowness, an uncertainty in the other man’s eyes that mirrored what he had seen in the Vindicare’s sister.

The Iubar had decks filled with cogitator engines that hummed and whirred like patient cats, gangs of progitors moving back and forth between them with crystalline memory tubes and spools of optic coil. According to Hyssos, the devices were used to gather financial condition data from the various worlds along the Eurotas trade routes, running prognostic models to predict what goods a given planet might require months, years, even decades into the future.

‘What are we to do with these things?’ asked Daig. He’d never been comfortable with the thought of machines that could do a man’s job better.

Hyssos nodded at one of the engines. ‘I’ve been granted use of this module. Various information sources from Iesta Veracrux’s watch-wire are being collated and sifted by it.’

‘You can do that from up here?’ Yosef felt an odd stab of concern he couldn’t place.

The operative nodded. ‘The uptake of data is very slow due to the incompatibility of the systems, but we have some level of parity. Enough to check the capital’s traffic patterns, compare information on the suspect with the movements of his known associates, and so on.’

‘We have jagers on the ground doing that,’ Daig insisted. ‘Human eyes and ears are always the best source of facts.’

Hyssos nodded. ‘I quite agree. But these machines can help us to narrow our fields of inquiry. They can do in hours what would take your office and your jagers weeks to accomplish.’ Daig didn’t respond, but Yosef could see he was unconvinced. ‘We’ll tighten the noose,’ continued the operative. ‘Sigg won’t slip the net a second time, mark my words.’

Yosef shot him a look, searching the comment for any accusation – and he found none. Still, he was troubled, and he had to voice it. ‘Assuming Sigg is our killer.’ He remembered the man’s face in the cooper’s shack, the certainty he had felt when he read Erno Sigg’s fear and desperation. He looked like a victim.

Hyssos was watching him. ‘Do you have something to add, Reeve Sabrat?’

‘No.’ He looked away and found Daig, his cohort’s expression unreadable. It wasn’t just Sigg he was having his doubts about; Yosef thought back to what the other man had said in the ruined lodge, and the recent changes in his manner. Daig was keeping something from him, but he could not think of a way to draw it out. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Not now.’

What the others called the ‘staging area’ was really little more than a converted storage bay, and Iota saw little reason why the name of it made so much difference. The Ultio was a strange vessel; she was still trying to know it, and it wasn’t letting her. The ship was one thing pretending to be another, an assemblage of rare technologies and secrets that had been stitched into a single body; given a mission, thrown out into the darkness. It was like her in that way, she mused. They could almost have been kin.

The mind inside the ship spoke to her when she spoke to it, answering some of her questions but not others. Eventually, Iota became bored with the circular conversations and tried to find another way to amuse herself. As a test of her stealth skills, she took to exploring the smallest of the crawlspaces aboard the Ultio or spying on the medicae compartment where the Callidus was recovering inside a therapy pod. When she wasn’t doing this or meditating, Iota spent the time hunting down spiders in shadowed corners of the hull, catching and collecting them in a jar she had appropriated from the ship’s mess. So far, her hopes of encouraging the arachnids to form their own rudimentary society had failed.

She spotted another of the insects in the lee of a console and deftly snared it; then, with a cruelty born of her boredom, she severed its legs one by one, to see if it could still walk without them.

Kell entered the chamber; he was the last to arrive. The infocyte Tariel had been working at the hololith projector and he seemed uncharacteristically muted. The Vanus’s mood had been like this ever since he and the Vindicare had returned from Terra with the last of the recruits, the woman who called herself Soalm. The new arrival didn’t speak much either. She seemed rather delicate for an assassin; that was something that many thought of Iota when they first laid eyes on her, but the chill of her preternatural aura was usually enough to destroy that illusion within a heartbeat. The Garantine’s bulk took up a corner of the room, like an angry canine daring any one of them to crowd into his space. He was playing with a sliver of sharpened metal – the remains of a tool, she believed – dancing the makeshift blade across his thick fingers with a striking degree of dexterity. He was bored too, but annoyed with it; then again, Iota had come to understand that every mood of the Eversor was some shade of anger, to a greater or lesser extent. Koyne sat in a wire-frame chair, the Callidus’s smoothed-flat features like an unfinished carving in soapstone. She watched the shade for a few moments, and Koyne offered Iota a brief smile. The Callidus’s skin darkened, taking on a tone close to the tawny shade of Iota’s own flesh; but then the moment was broken by Kell as he rapped his gloved hand on the support beams of the low ceiling.

‘We’re all here,’ said the Vindicare. His gaze swept the room, dwelling briefly on all of them; all of them except Soalm, she noted. ‘The mission begins now.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Koyne, in a voice like Iota’s.

Kell nodded to Tariel. ‘It’s time to find out.’

The infocyte activated a code-key sequence on the projector unit and a haze of holographic pixels shimmered into false solidity in the middle of the chamber. They formed into the shape of a tall, muscular man in nondescript robes. He had a scarred face and a queue of close-cut hair over an otherwise bare skull, and if the image was an accurate representation, then he was easily bigger than the Garantine. The hologram crackled and wavered, and Iota recognised the tell-tale patterns of high-level encoding threading through it. This was a real-time transmission, which meant it could only be coming from another ship in orbit, or from Terra itself.

Kell nodded to the man. ‘Captain-General Valdor. We are ready to be briefed, at the Master’s discretion.’

Valdor returned the gesture. ‘The Master of Assassins has charged me with that task. Given the… unique nature of this operation, it seems only right that there be oversight from an outside party.’ The Custodian surveyed all of them with a measuring stare; at his end of the communication, Iota imagined he was standing among a hololithic representation of the room and everyone in it.

‘You want us to kill him, don’t you?’ the Garantine said without preamble, burying his makeshift knife in the bulkhead beside his head. ‘Let’s not be precious about it. We all know, even if we haven’t had the will to say it aloud.’

‘Your insight does you credit, Eversor,’ said Valdor, his tone making it clear his compliment was anything but that. ‘Your target is the former Warmaster of the Adeptus Astartes, Primarch of the Luna Wolves, the Archtraitor Horus Lupercal.’

‘They are the Sons of Horus now,’ muttered Tariel, disbelief sharp in his words. ‘Throne’s sake. It’s true, then…’

The Venenum woman made a negative noise in the back of her throat. ‘If it pleases my lord Custodes, I must question this.’

‘Speak your mind,’ said Valdor.

‘Every clade has heard the rumours of the missions that have followed this directive and failed it. My clade-cohort Tobeld was the last to be sent on this fool’s errand, and he perished like all the others. I question if this can even be achieved.’

‘Cousin Soalm has a compelling point,’ offered Koyne. ‘This is not some wayward warlord of which we are speaking. This is Horus, first among the Emperor’s sons. Many call him the greatest primarch that ever lived.’

‘You’re afraid,’ snorted the Garantine. ‘What a surprise.’

‘Of course I am afraid of Horus,’ replied Koyne, mimicking the Eversor’s gruff manner. ‘Even an animal would be afraid of the Warmaster.’

‘An Execution Force like this one has never been gathered,’ Kell broke in, drawing the attention of all of them. ‘Not since the days of the first masters and the pact they swore in the Emperor’s service on Mount Vengeance. We are the echo of that day, those words, that intention. Horus Lupercal is the only target worthy of us.’

‘Pretty words,’ said Soalm. ‘But meaningless without direction.’ She turned back to the image of Valdor. ‘I say again; how do we hope to accomplish this after so many of our Assassinorum kindred have been sacrificed against so invulnerable an objective?’

‘Horus has legions of loyal warriors surrounding him,’ said Tariel. ‘Astartes, warships, forces of the Mechanicum and Cybernetica, not to mention the common soldiery who have come to his banner. How do we even get close enough to strike at him?’

‘He will come to you.’ Valdor gave a cold, thin smile. ‘Perhaps you wondered at the speed with which this Execution Force has been assembled? It has been done so as to react to new intelligence that will place the traitor directly in your sights.’

‘How?’ demanded Koyne.

‘It is the judgement of Lord Malcador and the Council of Terra that Horus’s assassination at this juncture with throw the traitor forces into disarray and break the rebellion before it can advance on to the Segmentum Solar,’ said Valdor. ‘Agents of the Imperium operating covertly in the Taebian Sector report a strong likelihood that Horus is planning to bring his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, to the planet Dagonet in order to show his flag. We believe that the Warmaster’s forces will use Dagonet as a foothold from which to secure the turning of every planet in the Taebian Stars.’

‘If you know this to be so, my lord, then why not simply send a reprisal fleet to Dagonet instead?’ asked Soalm. ‘Send battle cruisers and Legions of Astartes, not six assassins.’

‘Perhaps even the Emperor himself…’ muttered Koyne.

Valdor gave them both a searing glare. ‘The Emperor’s deeds are for him alone to decide! And the fleets and the loyal Legions have their own battles to fight!’

Iota nodded to herself. ‘I understand,’ she said. ‘We are to be sent because there is not certainty. The Imperium cannot afford to send warfleets into the darkness on a mere “likelihood”.’

‘We are only six,’ said Kell, ‘but together we can do what a thousand warships have failed to. One vessel can slip through the warp to Dagonet far easier than a fleet. Six assassins… the best of our clades… can bring death.’ He paused. ‘Remember the words of the oath we all swore, regardless of our clades. There is no enemy beyond the Emperor’s wrath.’

‘You will take the Ultio to the Taebian Sector,’ Valdor went on. ‘You will embed on Dagonet and set up multiple lines of attack. When Horus arrives there, you will terminate his command with extreme prejudice.’

‘My lord.’ Efried bowed low and waited.

The low mutter of his primarch’s voice was like the distant thunder over the Himalayan range. ‘Speak, Captain of the Third.’

The Astartes looked up and found Rogal Dorn standing at the high balcony, staring into the setting sun. The golden light spilled over every tower and crenulation of the Imperial Palace, turning the glittering metals and white marble a striking, honeyed amber. The sight was awesome; but it was marred by the huge cube-like masses of retrofitted redoubts and gunnery donjons that stood up like blunt grey fangs in an angry mouth. The palace of before – the rich, glorious construct that defied censure and defeat – was cheek-by-jowl with the palace of now – a brutalist fortress ranged against the most lethal of foes. A foe that had yet to show his face under Terra’s skies.

Efried knew that his liege lord was troubled by the battlements and fortifications the Emperor had charged him to build over the beauty of the palace; and while the captain could see equal majesty in both palace and fortress alike, he knew that in some fashion, Great Dorn believed he was diminishing this place by making it a site fit only for warfare. The primarch of the Imperial Fists often came to this high balcony, to watch the walls and, as Efried imagined, to wait for the arrival of his turncoat brother.

He cleared his throat. ‘Sir. I have word from our chapter serfs. The reports of preparations have been confirmed, as have those of the incidents in the Yndenisc Bloc and on Saros Station.’

‘Go on.’

‘You were correct to order surveillance of the Custodes. Captain-General Valdor was once again witnessed entering closed session at the Shrouds, with an assemblage of the Directors Primus of the Assassinorum clades.’

‘When was this?’ Dorn did not look at him, continuing to gaze out over the palace.

‘This day,’ Efried explained. ‘On the conclusion of the gathering a transmission was sent into close-orbit space, likely to a vessel. The encryption was of great magnitude. My Techmarines regretfully inform me it would be beyond their skills to decode.’

‘There is no need to try,’ said the primarch, ‘and indeed, to do so would be a violation of protocols. That is a line the Imperial Fists will not cross. Not yet.’

Efried’s hand strayed to his close-cropped beard. ‘As you wish, my lord.’

Dorn was silent for a long moment, and Efried began to wonder if this was a dismissal; but then his commander spoke again. ‘It begins with this, captain. Do you understand? The rot beds in with actions such as these. Wars fought in the shadows instead of the light. Conflicts where there are no rules of conduct. No lines that cannot be crossed.’ At last he glanced across at his officer. ‘No honour.’ Behind him, the sun dipped below the horizon, and the shadows across the balcony grew.

‘What is to be done?’ Efried asked. He would obey any command his primarch had cause to utter, without question or hesitation.

But Dorn did not answer him directly. ‘There can only be one target worth such subterfuge, such a gathering of forces. The Officio Assassinorum mean to kill my errant brother Horus.’

Efried considered this. ‘Would that not serve our cause?’

‘It might appear so to those with a narrow view,’ replied the primarch. ‘But I have seen what the assassin’s bullet wreaks in its wake. And I tell you this, brother-captain. We will defeat Horus… but if his death comes in a manner such as the Assassinorum intend, the consequences will be terrible, and beyond our capacity to control. If Horus falls to an assassin’s hand there will be a gaping vacuum at the core of the turncoat fleet, and we cannot predict who will fill it or what terrible revenges they will take. As long as my brother lives, as long as he rides at the head of the traitor Legions, we can predict what he will do. We can match Horus, defeat him on even ground. We know him.’ Dorn let out a sigh. ‘I know him.’ He shook his head. ‘The death of the Warmaster will not stop the war.’

Efried listened and nodded. ‘We could intervene. Confront Valdor and the clade masters.’

‘Based on what, captain?’ Dorn shook his head again. ‘I have only hearsay and suspicion. If I were as reckless as Russ or the Khan, that might be enough… But we are Imperial Fists and we observe the letter of Imperial law. There must be proof positive.’

‘Your orders, then, sir?’

‘Have the serfs maintain their observations,’ Dorn looked up into the darkening sky. ‘For the moment, we watch and we wait.’

EIGHT Cinder and Ash / Toys / Unmasked

The room in the compound they had given over for Perrig’s use was of a reasonable size and dimension, and the last of four that had been offered. The other three she had immediately rejected because of their inherent luminal negativity or proximal locations to undisciplined thought-groupings. The second had been a place where a woman had died, some one hundred and seven years earlier, having taken her own life as the result of an unplanned pregnancy. The adjutant, Gorospe, had looked at Perrig with shock and no little amount of dismay at that revelation; it seemed that no one among the staff of the Eurotas Consortium had had any idea the building on Iesta had such a sordid history.

But this room was quiet, the buzzing in her senses was abating and Perrig was as close to her equilibrium as she could be in a place so filled with droning, self-absorbed minds. Running through her alignment exercises, Perrig gently edited them out of her thoughtscape, eliminating the disruption through the application of a gentle psionic null-song, like a counter-wave masking an atonal sound.

She absently touched the collar around her neck as she did this. It was just metal, just a thing, secured only with a bolt that she herself could undo with a single twist. It had meaning, though, for those who looked upon it, for those who might read the words from the Nikaea Diktat acid-etched into the black iron. It was a slave’s mark, after a fashion, but one she wore only for the benefit of the comfort of others. It was not a nullifier, it could not hold her back; it was there so those who feared her ability could have her at their side and still sleep soundly, convinced by the lie that it would protect them from her unearthliness. The texture of the cool metal gave her focus, and she let herself draw inward.

The last thing she looked at before she closed her eyes was the chronometer on a nearby desk; Hyssos and the local lawmen had returned from the Iubar several hours ago, but she hadn’t seen any of them since the audience with the Void Baron. She wondered what Hyssos would be doing, but she resisted the urge to extend a tendril of thought out to search for him. Her telepathic abilities were poor and it was only her familiarity with his mind that allowed her to sense him with any degree of certainty. In truth, Perrig’s desire to be close to Hyssos only ever brought her melancholy. She had once looked into his thoughts as he slept, once when he had let down his guard, and there she saw that he had no inkling of the strange devotion the psyker had for her guardian; no understanding of this peculiar attachment that could not be thought of as love, but neither as anything else. It was better that way, she decided. Perrig did not wish to think of what might happen if he knew. She would be taken away from him, most likely. Perhaps even returned to the Black Ships from where Baron Eurotas had first claimed her.

Perrig suffocated the thoughts and returned to her business at hand, eyes tightly shut, her calm forced back into place like a key jammed into a lock.

The psyker knelt on the hard wooden floor of the room. Arranged in a semi-circle around her were a careful line of objects she had picked from the debris of the old wine lodge. Some stones, a brass button from a greatcoat, sticky grease-paper wrapping from a meat-stick vendor and a red leaflet dense with script in the local dialect of Imperial Gothic. Perrig touched them all in order, moving back and forth, lingering on some, returning to others. She used the items to build a jigsaw puzzle image of the suspect, but there were gaping holes in the simulacra. Places where she could not sense the full dimension of who Erno Sigg was.

The button had fear on it. It had been lost as he fled the fire and the howl of the coleopters.

The stones. These he had picked up and turned in his hands, used them in an idle game of throws, tossing them across the shack and back again, boredom and nervous energy marbling their otherwise inert auras.

The grease-paper was laden with hunger, panic. The image here was quite distinct; he had stolen the food from the vendor while the man’s back was turned. He had been convinced he would be caught and arrested.

The leaflet was love. Love or something like it, at least in the manner that Perrig could understand. Dedication, then, if one were to be more correct, with almost a texture of righteousness about it.

She dithered over the piece of paper, looking through her closed lids at the emotional spectra it generated. Sigg was complex and the psyker had trouble holding the pieces she had of him in her mind. He was conflicted; buried somewhere deep there was the distant echo of great violence in him, but it was overshadowed by two towering opposite forces. On one hand, a grand sense of hope, even redemption, as if he believed he would be saved; and on the other, an equally powerful dread of something hunting him, of his own victimhood.

Perrig’s psychometry was not an exact science, but in her time as an investigator she had developed a keen sense of her own instincts; it was this sense that told her Erno Sigg did not kill for his pleasures. As that thought crystallised inside her mind, Perrig felt the first fuzzy inklings of a direction coming to her. She allowed her hand to pick up the stylus at her side and moved it to the waiting data-slate on the floor. It twitched as the auto-writing began in spidery, uneven text.

Her other hand, though, had not left the leaflet. Her fingers toyed with the edges of it, playing with the careworn paper, seeking out the places where it had been delicately folded and unfolded, time and time again. She wondered what it meant to Sigg that he cared so much for it, and sensed the ghost of the anguish he would feel at its loss.

That would be how she would find him. The sorrow, fluttering from him like a pennant in the wind. The scribbling stylus moved of its own accord, back and forth across the slate.

Confidence rose in her. She would find Erno Sigg. She would. And Hyssos would be pleased with her–

Her heart jumped in her chest and she gasped. The stylus, gripped beyond its tolerances, snapped in two and the broken ends dug into her palm. Perrig was suddenly trembling, and she knew why. At the back of her mind there had been a thought she had not wanted to confront, something she took care to avoid as one might favour an ugly, painful bruise upon the skin.

But now she was drawn to it, touching the discoloured edges of the psychic contusion, flinching at the tiny ticks of pain it gave off.

She had sensed it after their arrival on Iesta Veracrux. At first, Perrig imagined it was only an artefact of the transition of her mind, from the controlled peace of her domicile aboard the Iubar to the riotous newness of the planet’s busy city.

Correction; she had wanted to believe it was that.

The trembling grew as she dared to focus on it. A dark shadow at the edges of her perception, close at hand. Closer than Erno Sigg. Much, much closer, more so than Hyssos or any of the Iestan investigators suspected.

Perrig felt a sudden wetness at her nostrils, on her cheek. She smelled copper. Blinking, she opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was the leaflet. It was red, deep crimson, the words printed on it lost against the shade of the paper. Panting in a breath, Perrig looked up from where she knelt and saw that the room, and everything in it, was red and red and red. She let the broken stylus fall and wiped at her face. Thick fluid came away from the corners of her eyes. Blood, not tears.

Propelled by a surge of fright, she came to her feet, her boot catching the data-slate and crushing the glassy screen beneath the heel. The room seemed humid and stifling, every surface damp and meat-slick. Perrig lurched towards the only window and reached for the pull to drag back the curtains so she might open it, get a breath of untainted air.

The drapes were made of red and shadows, and they parted like petals as she came closer. Something approximating the shape of a human being opened up there, suspended by spindly feet from the ceiling overhead. The heavy velvets thumped to the wooden floor and the figure unfolded, wet and shiny with oils. Its name impressed itself on the soft surfaces of her mind and she was forced to speak it aloud just to expunge the horror of it.

‘Spear…’

A distended maw of teeth and bone barbs grew from the head of the monstrosity. Stygian flame, visible only to those with the curse of the witch-sight, wreathed the abstract face and the black pits that were its eyes. In an instant, Perrig knew what had made all those kills, what hands had delicately cut into Jaared Norte, Cirsun Latigue and all the others who had perished at its inclination.

She backed away, her voice lost to her. More than anything, Perrig wanted to cover her eyes and look away, find somewhere to hide her face so that she would not be forced to see the Spear-thing; but there was nowhere for her to turn. Even if she clawed the orbs from her sockets, her witch-sight would still remain, and the aura of this monstrous creature would continue to smother it.

Horribly, she sensed that the killer wanted her to look upon it, with all the depth of perception her psychic talents allowed. It projected a need for her to witness it, and that desire drew her in like the pull of gravity from a dark sun.

Spear muttered to itself. When Perrig had touched the minds of other killers in the past, she had always flinched at the awful joy with which they pursued their craft; she did not see that here, however. Spear’s psyche was a pool of black ink, featureless and undisturbed by madness, lust or naked fury. It was almost inert, moving under the guidance of an unshakable certainty. It reminded her for one fleeting instant of Hyssos’s ordered mindset; the killer shared the same dogged, unflinching sense of direction towards its goals… almost as if it were following a string of commands.

And still it let her in. She knew if she refused it, Spear would tear her open then and there. She tried desperately to break past the miasma of cold that lay around her, projecting as best she could a panicked summons towards her absent guardian; but as she did this, she also let her mind fall into Spear, stalling for time, on some level repulsed and fascinated by the monster’s true nature.

Spear was not coy; it opened itself to her. What she saw in there sickened her beyond her capacity to express. The killer had been made this way, taken from some human stock now so corrupted that its origin could not be determined, sheathed with a skein of living materials that seemed cut from the screaming depths of the warp itself. Perhaps a fluke of cruel nature, or perhaps a thing created by twisted genius, Spear was soulless, but unlike any stripe of psionic null Perrig had ever encountered.

It was a Black Pariah; the ultimate expression of negative psychic force. Perrig had believed such things were only conjecture, the mad nightmare creations of wild theorists and sorcerous madmen – yet here it stood, watching her, breathing the same air as she wept blood before it.

And then Spear reached out with fingers made of knives and took Perrig’s hand. She howled as burning pain lanced through her nerves; the killer severed her right thumb with insolent ease and drew it up and away, toying with its prize. Perrig gripped her injured hand, vitae gushing from the wound.

Spear took the severed flesh and rolled it into its fanged maw, crunching down the bone and meat as if it were a rare delicacy. Perrig sank back to the blood-spattered floor, her head swimming as she caught the edges of the sudden psionic shift running through the killer.

The black voids of its eyes glared down at her and they became smoky mirrors. In them she saw her own mind reflected back at her, the power of her own psionic talents bubbling and rippling, copied and enhanced a thousandfold. Spear had tasted her blood, the living gene-code of her being – and now it knew her. It had her imprint.

She scrambled backwards, feeling the humming chorus of her mind and that of the killer coming into shuddering synchrony, the orbits of their powers moving towards alignment. Perrig cried out and begged it to stop, but Spear only cocked its head and let the power build.

It had not killed in this manner for a long time, she realised. The other deaths had been mundane and unremarkable. It wanted to do this just to be sure it was still capable, as a soldier might release a clip of ammunition to test the accuracy of a firearm. Belatedly Perrig understood that she was the only thing for light years around that could have been any kind of threat to it; but now, too late.

And then, they met in the non-space between them. Beyond her ability to stop it, Perrig’s psionic ability unchained itself and thundered against Spear’s waiting, open arms. The killer took it all in, every last morsel, and did so with the ease of breathing.

In stillness, Spear released its burden and reflected back all that Perrig was, the force of her preternatural power returning, magnified into a silent, furious hurricane.

The woman became ashes and broke apart.

Through the coruscating, unquenchable fires of the immaterium, the Ultio raced on, passing through the corridors of the warp and onwards beyond the borders of the Segmentum Solar. The ship’s sight-blind Navigator took it through the routes that were little known, the barely-charted passages that the upper echelons of the Imperial government kept off the maps given to the common admiralty. These were swift routes but treacherous ones, causeways through the atemporal realm that larger ships would never have been able to take, the soul-light glitter of their massive crews bright enough that they would attract the living storms that wheeled and turned, while Ultio passed by unnoticed. The phantom-ship was barely there; its Geller fields had such finely-tuned opacity and it engines such speed that the lumbering, predatory intelligences that existed inside warp space noted it only by the wake it left behind. As days turned and clocks spun back on Terra, Ultio flew towards Dagonet; by some reckonings, it was already there.

On board, the Execution Force gathered once more, this time in a compartment off the spinal corridor that ran the length of the starship’s massive drives.

Kell watched, as he always did.

The Garantine was still toying with his makeshift blade. He had continued to craft it into a wicked shiv that was easily the length of a man’s forearm. ‘What do you want, Vanus?’ he asked.

Tariel gave a nervous smile and indicated a large cargo module that replaced one whole wall of the long, low compartment. ‘Uh, thank you for coming.’ He glanced around at Kell, Iota and the others. ‘As we are now mission-committed, I have leave to continue with the next stage of my orders.’

‘Explain,’ said Koyne.

The infocyte rubbed his hands together. ‘I was given a directive by the Master of Assassins himself to present these materials to you only after the group had been completely assembled and only after the Ultio had left the Sol system.’ He moved to a keypad on the cargo module and tapped in a string of symbols. ‘I am to address the matter of your equipment.’

The Eversor assassin’s head snapped up, his mood instantly changing from insolence to laser-like intensity. ‘Weapons?’ he asked, almost salivating.

Tariel nodded. ‘Among other things. This unit contains the hardware for our mission ahead.’

‘Did you know about this?’ demanded the Garantine, glaring at Kell. ‘Here I am playing with scraps and there’s a war-load right here on board with me?’

Kell shook his head. ‘I assumed we’d be equipped on site.’

‘Why did someone fail to tell me there was an armoury aboard this tub?’ Tariel ducked as the Garantine threw his shiv and it buried itself in a stanchion close by. ‘Give me a weapon, now! Feels like I’m bloody naked here!’

‘What a delightful image,’ murmured Soalm.

‘He needs it,’ said Iota, distractedly. ‘He actually feels a kind of emotional pain when separated from his firearms. Like a parent torn from its child.’

‘I’ll show you torn,’ grated the hulking killer, menacing the Vanus. ‘I’ll do some tearing.’

‘Open!’ Tariel fairly shouted the word and the mechanism controlling the lock hissed on oiled hydraulics. The pod split along its length and rolled back, presenting brackets of guns, support equipment and other wargear.

The Garantine’s face lit up with something approximating joy. ‘Hello, pretty pretty,’ he muttered, drawn to a rack where a heavy pistol, ornate and decorated with metallic wings and sensor probes, lay waiting. He gathered it up and hefted it in one hand. Cold laughter fell from his lips as gene-markers tingled through him, briefly communing with the lobo-chips implanted in his brain, confirming his identity and purpose.

‘The Executor combi-pistol,’ said Tariel, blinking rapidly as he drew the information up from a mnemonic pool in his deep cortex. ‘Dual function ballistic bolt weapon and needle projectile–’

‘I know what it is!’ snarled the Garantine, before he could finish. ‘Oh, we are very well acquainted.’ He stroked the gun like it was a pet.

Kell spoke up. ‘All of you, take what you need but make sure you use what you take. Go back to your compartments and prepare your gear for immediate deployment. We have no idea how long we may have between our arrival and the target’s.’

‘He may already be there waiting for us,’ offered Koyne, drifting towards a different rack of weapons. ‘The tides of the warp often flow against the ebb of time.’

The Garantine greedily gathered armfuls of hardware, taking bandoliers of melta-grenades, a wickedly barbed neuro-gauntlet and the rig for a sentinel array. With another guttural laugh, he snagged a heavy, blunt-ended slaughterer’s sword and placed it under his arm. ‘I’ll be in my bunk,’ he sniggered, and wandered away under his burden.

Iota watched the Eversor go. ‘Look at him. He’s almost… happy.’

‘Every child needs its toys,’ said Soalm.

The Culexus gave the racks a sideways look, and then turned away. ‘Not me. There’s nothing here that I need.’ She shot the Venenum poisoner a look, tapping her temple. ‘I have a weapon already.’

‘The animus speculum, yes,’ said Soalm. ‘I’ve heard of it. But it is an ephemeral thing, isn’t it? Its use depends on the power of the opponent as much as that of the user, so I am led to believe.’

Iota’s lips pulled tight in a small smile. ‘If you wish.’

Tariel nervously approached them. ‘I… I do have an item put aside for your use, Culexus,’ he said, offering an armoured box covered with warning runes. ‘If you will?’

Iota flipped open the lid and cocked her head. Inside there were a dozen grenades made of black metal. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Explosives. How ordinary.’

‘No, no,’ he insisted. ‘This is a new technology. An experimental weapon not yet field-tested under operational conditions. A creation of your clade’s senior scienticians.’

The woman plucked one of the grenades from the case and sniffed it. Her eyes narrowed. ‘What is this? It smells like the death of suns.’

‘I am not permitted to know the full details,’ admitted the infocyte. ‘But the devices contain an exotic form of particulate matter that inhibits the function of psionic ability in a localised area.’

Iota studied the grenade for a long moment, toying with the activator pin, before finally giving Tariel a wan look. ‘I’ll take these,’ she said, snatching the box from his hand.

‘What do you have for the rest of us in your delightful toy box?’ Koyne asked lightly, playing with a pair of memory swords. They had curved, graceful blades that shifted angles in mid-flight as the Callidus cut the air with them.

‘Toxin cordes.’ The Vanus pressed a control and a belt threaded with glassy stilettos extended from a sealed drum marked with biohazard trefoils.

Koyne put up the swords and reached for them, only to see that Soalm was doing the same. The Callidus gave a small bow. ‘Oh, pardon me, cousin. Poisons are of course your domain.’

Soalm gave a tight, humourless smile. ‘No. After you. Take what you wish.’

Koyne held up a hand. ‘No, no. After you. Please. I insist.’

‘As you wish.’ The Venenum carefully retrieved one of the daggers and turned it in her fingers. She held it up to the light, turning it this way and that so the coloured fluids inside the glass poison blade flowed back and forth. At length, she sniffed. ‘These are of fair quality. They’ll work well enough on any man who stands between us and Horus.’

The Callidus picked out a few blades. ‘But what about those who are not men? What about Horus himself?’

Soalm’s lips thinned. ‘This would be the bite of a gnat to the Warmaster.’ She gave Tariel a look. ‘I will prepare my own weapons.’

‘There’s also this,’ offered the Vanus, passing her a pistol. The weapon was a spindly collection of brass pipes with a crystalline bulb where a normal firearm might have had an ammunition magazine. Soalm took it and peered at the mesh grille where the muzzle should have been.

‘A bact-gun,’ she said, weighing it in her hand. ‘This may be useful.’

‘The dispersal can be set from a fine mist to a gel-plug round,’ noted Tariel.

‘Are you certain you know how to use that?’ said Kell.

Soalm’s arm snapped up into aiming position, the barrel of the weapon pointed directly at the Vindicare’s face. ‘I think I can recall,’ she said. Then she wandered away, turning the pistol over in her delicate, pale hands.

Meanwhile, Koyne had discovered a case that was totally out of place among all the others. It resembled a whorled shell more than anything else, and the only mechanism to unlock it was the sketch of a handprint etched into the bony matter of the latch – a handprint of three overlong digits and a dual thumb.

‘I have no idea what that may be,’ Tariel admitted. ‘The container, I mean, it looks almost as if it is–’

‘Xenos?’ said Koyne, with deceptive lightness. ‘But that would be prohibited, Vanus. Perish the thought.’ There was a quiet cracking sound as the Callidus’s right hand stretched and shifted in shape, the human digits reformed and merging until they became something more approximate to the alien handprint. Koyne pressed home on the case and it sighed open, drooling droplets of purple liquid on to the decking. Inside the container, the organic look was even more disturbing; on a bed of fleshy material wet with more of the liquid rested a weapon made of blackened, tooth-like ceramics. It was large and off-balance in shape, the front of it grasping a faceted teardrop crystal the sea-green colour of ancient jade.

‘What is it?’ Tariel asked, his disgust evident.

‘In my clade it has many names,’ said Koyne. ‘It rips open minds, tears intellect and thought to shreds. Those it touches remain empty husks.’ The Callidus held it out to the Vanus, who backed away. ‘Do you wish to take a closer look?’

‘Not in this lifetime,’ Tariel insisted.

A pale tongue flickered out and licked Koyne’s lips as the assassin returned the weapon to the shell. Gathering it up, the Callidus bowed to the others. ‘I will take my leave of you.’

As Koyne left, Kell glanced back at the Vanus. ‘What about you? Or do those of your clade choose not to carry a weapon?’

Tariel shook his head, colour returning to his cheeks. ‘I have weapons of my own, just not as obvious as yours. An electropulse projector, built into my cogitator gauntlet. And I have my menagerie. The psyber eagles, the eyerats and netfly swarms.’

Kell thought of the pods he had seen elsewhere aboard the Ultio, where Tariel’s cybernetically-modified rodents and preybirds and other animals slept out the voyage in dormancy, waiting for his word of command to awaken them. ‘Those things won’t keep you alive.’

The Vanus shook his head. ‘Ah, believe me, I will make sure that nothing ever gets close enough to kill me.’ He sighed. ‘And in that vein… There are also weapons for you.’

‘My weapon was lost,’ Kell said, with no little venom. ‘Thanks to the Eversor.’

‘It has been renewed,’ said Tariel, opening a lengthy box. ‘See.’

Every Vindicare used a longrifle that was uniquely configured for their biomass, shooting style, body kinestics, even tailored to work with the rhythm in which they breathed. When the Garantine had smashed Kell’s weapon into pieces out in the Aktick snows, it was like he had lost a part of himself; but there inside the case was a sniper rifle that resembled the very gun that had been his constant companion for years – resembled it, but also transcended it. ‘Exitus,’ he breathed, stooping to run a hand over the flat, non-reflective surface of the barrel.

Tariel indicated the individual components of the weapon. ‘Spectroscopic polyimager scope. Carousel ammunition loader. Nitrogen coolant sheath. Whisperhead suppressor unit. Gyroscopic balance stabiliser.’ He paused. ‘As much of your original weapon as possible was salvaged and reused in this one.’

Kell nodded. He saw that the grip and part of the cheek-plate were worn in a way that no newly-forged firearm could have been. As well as the longrifle, a pistol of similar design lay next to it on the velvet bedding of the weapon case. Lined up along the lid of the container were row after row of individual bullets, arranged in colour-coded groups. ‘Impressive. But I’ll need to sight it in.’

‘We’ll doubtless all have many opportunities to employ our skills before Horus shows his face,’ said Soalm. She hadn’t left the room, but stood off to one side as the sniper and the infocyte talked.

‘We will do what we have to,’ Kell replied, without looking at her.

‘Even if we destroy ourselves doing it,’ his sister replied.

The marksman’s jaw hardened and his eyes fell to a line of words that had been etched into the slender barrel of the rifle. Written in a careful scrolling hand was the Dictatus Vindicare, the maxim of his clade; Exitus Acta Probat.

‘The outcome justifies the deed,’ said Kell.

What he saw in the room was like no manner of death Yosef Sabrat had ever conceived of. The killings of Latigue in the aeronef and Norte at the docks, while they were horrors that sickened him to his core, had not pressed at his reason. But not this, not this… deed.

Black ashes were scattered in a long pool across the middle of Perrig’s room, cast out of a set of clothes that lay splayed out where they had fallen. At the top of the cascade of cinders, a small hill of the dark powder covered an iron collar, the bolt holding it shut still secure, and in among the pile there were the silver needles of neural implants glittering in the lamplight.

‘I… don’t understand.’ The Gorospe woman was standing a few steps behind the investigators, outside in the corridor with Yosef where the jagers milled around, uncertain how to proceed. ‘I don’t understand,’ she repeated. ‘Where did the… the woman go to?’

She had almost said the witch. Yosef sensed the half-formed word on her lips, and he shot her a look filled with sudden fury. Gorospe looked up at him with wide, limpid eyes, and he felt his hands contract into fists. She was so callous and dismissive of the dead psyker; he fought back a brief urge to grab her and slam her up against the wall, shout at her for her stupidity. Then he took a breath and said ‘She didn’t go anywhere. That’s all that is left of her.’

Yosef walked away, pushing past Skelta. The jager gave him a wary nod. ‘Heard from Reeve Segan, sir. They called him in from his off-shift. He’s on his way.’

He returned Skelta’s nod and took a wary step through the field barrier and into the room, careful not to disturb the cluster of small mapping automata that scanned the crime scene with picters and ranging lasers. Hyssos was crouching, looking back and forth around the walls, staring towards the windows, then back to the ashen remains. He had his back to the doorway and Yosef heard him take a shuddering breath. It was almost a sob.

‘Do you… need a moment?’ As soon as he said the words, he felt like an utter fool. Of course he did; his colleague had just been brutally murdered, and in an abhorrent, baffling manner.

‘No,’ said Hyssos. ‘Yes,’ he said, an instant later. ‘No. No. There will be time for that. After.’ The operative looked up at him and his eyes were shining. ‘Do you know, I think, at the end… I think I actually heard her.’ He fingered one of the braids among his hair.

Yosef saw the semi-circle of objects on the floor, the stones and the paper. ‘What are these?’

‘Foci,’ Hyssos told him. ‘Objects imbued with some emotional resonance from the suspect. Perrig reads them. She read them.’ He corrected himself absently.

‘I am sorry.’

Hyssos nodded. ‘You will let me kill this man when we find him,’ he told Yosef, in a steady, measured voice. ‘We will make certain, of course, of his guilt,’ he added, nodding. ‘But the death. You will let me have that.’

Yosef felt warm and uncomfortable. ‘We’ll burn that bridge after we cross it.’ He looked away and found the places on the far wall behind him where the markings had been made. On his entry into the room, he hadn’t seen them. Like the paintings in blood inside the aeronef or the shape that Jaared Norte’s body had been cut into, there were eight-point stars all over the light-coloured walls. It seemed that the killer had used the residue of Perrig as his ink, repeating the same pattern over and over again.

‘What does it mean?’ Hyssos mumbled.

The reeve licked his lips; they were suddenly dry. He had a strange sensation, a tingling in the base of his skull like the dull headache brought on by too much recaf and not enough fresh air. The shapes were all he could see, and he felt like there was an answer there, if only he could find the right way to look at them. They were no different from the mathematical problems in Ivak’s schola texts, they just needed to be solved to be understood.

‘Sabrat, what does it mean?’ said Hyssos again. ‘This word?’

Yosef blinked and the moment vanished. He looked back at the investigator. Hyssos had removed something from among the ashen remains; a data-slate, the screen spiderwebbed and fractured. Incredibly, the display underneath was still operating, flickering sporadically.

Gingerly, Yosef took it from him, taking care to avoid touching the powder-slicked surfaces of the device. The touch-sensitive screen still remembered the words that had been etched upon it, and flashed them at him, almost too quickly to register.

‘One of the words is “Sigg”,’ Hyssos told him. ‘Do you see it?’

He did; and beneath that, there was a scribble that appeared to be the attempt to form another string of letters, the shape of them lost now. But above the name, there was another clearly-lettered word.

‘Whyteleaf. Is that a person’s name?’

Yosef shook his head, instantly knowing the meaning. ‘Not a person. A place. I know it well.’

Hyssos was abruptly on his feet. ‘Close?’

‘In the low crags, a quick trip by coleopter.’

The investigator’s brief flash of grief and sorrow was gone. ‘We need to go there, right now. Perrig’s readings decay over time.’ He tapped the broken slate. ‘If she sensed Sigg was in this place, every moment we waste here, we run the risk he will flee again.’

Skelta had caught the edge of their conversation. ‘Sir, we don’t have any other units in the area. Backup is dealing with a railganger fight that went bad out at the airdocks and security prep for the trade carnival.’

Yosef made the choice then and there. ‘When Daig gets here, tell him to take over the scene and keep Laimner occupied.’ He moved towards the door, not looking back to see if Hyssos was following. ‘We’re taking the flyer.’

The operative had lost colleagues before, and it had been difficult then as it was now; but Perrig’s death was something more than that. It came in like a bullet, cutting right into the core of Hyssos’s soul. Losing himself in the rush of the dark, low clouds outside the windows of the coleopter, he tried to parse his own emotional reactions to the moment without success. Perrig had always been a good, trusted colleague, and he liked her company. She had never pressured him to talk about his past or tried to worm more information out of him than he wanted to give. Hyssos had always felt respected in her presence, and rewarded by her competence, her cool, calm intelligence.

Now she was dead; worse than dead, not a corpse even, just dark cinders, just a slurry of matter that did not bear any resemblance to the human being he had known. He felt a hard stab of guilt. Perrig had always given him her complete and total trust, and he had not been there to protect her when she needed it. Now this investigation had crossed from the professional to the personal, and Hyssos was uncertain of himself.

Looking from the outside in, had he been a passive observer, Hyssos would have immediately insisted that an operative in his circumstances be withdrawn from the case and a new team assigned from the Consortium’s security pool. And that, he knew, was why he had not yet sent an official report on Perrig’s death to the Void Baron, because Eurotas himself would say the same.

But Hyssos was here, now, and he knew the stakes. It would take too long to bring another operative up to speed. As competent as locals like Sabrat were, the reeve’s seniors couldn’t be trusted to handle this with alacrity.

Yes. All those were good lies to tell himself, all gilded with the ring of truth, when in fact all he wanted at this moment was to put Perrig’s killer down like a rabid animal.

Hyssos clasped his hands together to stop them making fists. Outwardly his icy calm did not shift, but inside he was seething. The operative glanced at Sabrat as the flyer began to circle in towards a landing. ‘What is this Whyteleaf?’

‘What?’ Sabrat turned suddenly, snapping at him with venom, as if Hyssos had called out some grave personal insult. Then he blinked, the strange anger ebbing for a moment. ‘Oh. Yes. It’s a winestock. Many of the smaller lodges store vintage estufagemi here, holding barrels of it for years so it can mature undisturbed.’

‘How many staff?’

Sabrat shook his head distractedly. ‘It… It’s all automated.’ The flyer’s skids bumped as the craft landed. ‘Quickly!’ said the reeve, bolting up from his seat. ‘If the coleopter dwells, Sigg will know we’re on to him.’

Hyssos followed him down the drop ramp, into a cloud of upswept dust and leaves caught in the wake of the aircraft. He saw Sabrat give the pilot a clipped wave and the coleopter rattled back into the sky, leaving them ducking the sudden wind.

As the noise died away, Hyssos frowned. ‘Was that wise? We could use another pair of eyes.’

The reeve was already walking on, across the top of the shallow warehouse where they had been deposited. ‘Sigg ran the last time.’ He shook his head. ‘Do you want that to happen again?’ Sabrat said it almost as if it had been the operative’s fault.

‘Of course not,’ Hyssos said quietly, and drew his gun and a portable auspex from the pockets inside his tunic. ‘We should split up, then. Search for him.’

Sabrat nodded, crouching to open a hatch in the roof. ‘Agreed. Work your way down the floors and meet me on the basement level. If you find him, put a shot into the air.’ Before Hyssos could say anything in reply, the reeve dropped through the hatch and into the dark.

Hyssos took a deep breath and moved forward, finding another accessway at the far end of the warehouse. Pausing to don a pair of amplifier glasses, he went inside.

There was little light inside the winestock, but the glasses dealt with that for him. The pools of shadow were rendered into a landscape of whites, greys, greens and blacks. Reaching the decking of the uppermost tier, Hyssos saw the shapes of massive storage tanks rising up around him, the curves of towering wooden slats forming the walls of the great jeroboams. The smoky, potent smell of the wine was everywhere, the air thick and warm with it.

He walked carefully, his boots crunching on hard lumps of crystallised sugar caught in the gaps between the planks of the floor, the wood giving with quiet, moaning creaks. The auspex, a small device fashioned in the design of an ornate book, was open on a belt tether, the sensing mechanism working with a slow pulse of light. The unchanged cadence indicated no signs of human life within its scan radius. Hyssos wondered why Sabrat wasn’t registering; but then this building was dense with metals and the scanner’s range was limited.

The operative’s thoughts kept returning to the data-slate that Perrig had left behind. From the positioning of it among the psyker’s ashes, he supposed that it might have been in her hand when she met her end. She had seen Erno Sigg through the foci objects gathered from the Blasko Wine Lodge and tracked him here through the etherium – but the other word, the third line of letters on the slate… What meaning did they have? What had she been trying to say? How had she died in such a manner?

Finally, he could not let the question lie and he used his free hand to pull the smashed slate from his pocket.

Another error in judgement, said a voice in the back of his thoughts. The data-slate was evidence, and yet he had taken it from a crime scene. Pushing back the glasses to his forehead, Hyssos studied the broken screen in the dimness. The scribble of letters there were barely readable, but he knew Perrig’s steady, looping handwriting of old. If he could just find a way to see it afresh, to look with new eyes, perhaps he could intuit what she had been trying to write–

Spear.

It hit him like a splash of cold water. A sudden snap of comprehension. Yes, he was sure of it. The spin of the consonants and the loop of the vowels… Yes.

But what did it mean?

The next step he took made a wet ripping noise and something along the line of his boot dragged at him, as if a thick layer of glue carpeted the floor.

Hyssos sniffed the air, wondering if one of the mammoth wine casks had leaked; but then the stale, metallic smell rose up to smother the cloying sweetness all around. He dropped the slate back into his pocket and gingerly slid the goggles down over his eyes once more.

And there, rendered in cold, sea-green shades, was a frieze made of meat and bones. Across the curve of a wooden storage tank, beneath a wide stanchion and in shadow where the light of Iesta’s days would never have fallen, the display of an eviscerated corpse was visible to him.

The body was open, the skin cut so that the innards, the skeleton and the muscle were free for removal. The fleshy rags that remained of the victim were nailed up in the parody of a human shape; organs and bones had been taken and arranged in patterns, some of them reassembled together in horrible new fusions. Ribs, for example, fanned like daggers sticking into the wet meat of a pale liver. A pelvic bone dressed with intestines. The spongy mass of a lung wrapped in coils of stripped nerve. All about him, the blood was a matted, dried pool, a sticky patina that had mixed with wine spillages and doubtless seeped down through the floor of this level and the next. Thousands of gallons of carefully matured liquor was tainted, polluted by what had been done here.

At the edges of the ocean of vitae where the fluid ran away, eight-point stars dotted the bland wooden panels. Amid it all, Hyssos’s eyes caught a shape that focussed his attention instantly; a face. He gingerly stepped closer, his gorge rising as his boots sucked at the flooring. Narrowing his eyes, the operative drew up the auspex, turning its sensoria on the blood slick.

It was Erno Sigg’s face, cut from the front of his skull, lying like a discarded paper mask.

The chime of the auspex drew his gaze from the horror. Hyssos had been trained by the Consortium’s technologians on the reading of its outputs, and he saw datums unfurl on its small screen. The blood, it told him, was days old; perhaps even as much as a week. This atrocity had been done to Erno Sigg well before Perrig’s execution, of that there was no doubt. The auspex could not lie.

Swallowing his revulsion, Hyssos let the scanning device drop on its tether and raised his gun upwards, finger tightening on the trigger. His hand was trembling, and he could not seem to steady it.

But then the footsteps reached him. From across the other side of the lake of dried blood, a shadow detached from the darkness and came closer. Hyssos recognised the purposeful gait of the Iestan reeve; but he moved without hesitation, straight across the middle of it, boots sucking at the glutinous, oily mess.

‘Sabrat,’ called the operative, his voice thick with repugnance, ‘What are you doing, man? Look around, can’t you see it?’

‘I see it,’ came the reply. The words were paper-dry.

The amplifier glasses seemed like a blindfold around his head and Hyssos tore them off. ‘For Terra’s sake, Yosef, step back! You’ll contaminate the site!’

‘Yosef isn’t here,’ said the voice, as it became fluid and wet, transforming. ‘Yosef went away.’

The reeve came out of the dimness and he was different. There were only black pits glaring back at Hyssos from a shifting face that moved like oil on water.

‘My name is Spear,’ said the horror. The face was eyeless, and no longer human.

NINE Dagonet / Assumption / Falling

The orbits above Dagonet were clogged with the wreckage of ships that had tried too hard to make it off the surface, vessels that were built as pleasure yachts or shuttlecraft, suborbitals and single-stage cargo barges for the runs to the near moons. Many of them had fallen foul of the system frigates blockading the escape vectors, torn apart under hails of las-fire; but more had simply failed. Ships that were overloaded or ill-prepared for the rigours of leaving near-orbit space had burned out their drives or lost atmosphere. The sky was filled with iron coffins that were gradually spiralling back to the turning world below them. At night, those on the planet could see them coming home in streaks of fire, and they served as a reminder of what would happen to anyone who disagreed with the Governor’s new order.

The Ultio navigated in on puffs of thruster gas, having left the warp in the shadow of the Dagonet system’s thick asteroid belt. Cloaked in stealth technologies so advanced they were almost impenetrable, it easily avoided the ponderous turncoat cruisers and their nervous crews, finding safe harbour inside the empty shell of an abandoned orbital solar station. Securing the drive section in a place where it – along with Ultio’s astropath and Navigator – would be relatively safe, the forward module detached and reconfigured itself to resemble a common courier or guncutter. The pilot’s brain drew information from scans of the traitorous ships to alter the electropigments of the hull, and by the time the assassin craft touched down at the capital’s star-port, it wore the same blue and green as the local forces, even down to the crudely crossed-out Imperial aquila displayed by the defectors.

Kell had Koyne stand by the vox rig, ready to talk back to the control tower. The Callidus had already listened in on comm traffic snared from the airwaves by Tariel’s complex scanning gear, and could perform a passable imitation of a Dagoneti accent – but challenge never came.

The tower was gone, blown into broken fragments, and all across the sprawling landing fields and smoke-wreathed hangars, small fires were burning and wrecked ships that had died on take-off lay atop crumpled departure terminals and support buildings. Gunfire and the thump of grenade detonations echoed to them across the open runways.

Kell advanced down the ramp and used the sights on his new longrifle to sweep the perimeter.

‘Fighting was recent,’ said the Garantine, following him down. The hulking rage killer took a deep draught of air. ‘Still smell the blood and cordite.’

‘They’ve moved on,’ said the sniper, sweeping his gaze over corpses of soldiers and civilians who lay where they had fallen. It was difficult to be sure who had been shooting at who; Dagonet was in the middle of a civil war, and the lines of loyalist and turncoat were not yet clear to the new arrivals. A blink of laser fire from inside one of the massive terminals caught his eye and he turned to it as the crack of broken air reached them a moment later. ‘But not too far. They’re fighting through the buildings. Lucky for us the place is still contested. Leaves us with less explaining to do.’

He shouldered the rifle as Tariel ventured a few wary steps down the ramp. ‘Vindicare? How are we to proceed?’

Kell walked back up a way. The rest of the Execution Force were gathered on the lower deck, watching him intently. ‘We need to gather intelligence. Find out what’s going on here.’

‘Dagonet’s extrasolar communications went dark some time ago,’ noted Tariel. ‘Perhaps if you could secure a prisoner for interrogation…’

Kell nodded and beckoned to Koyne. ‘Callidus. You’re in charge until we get back.’

‘We?’ said Soalm pointedly.

He nodded towards the Garantine. ‘The two of us. We’ll scout the star-port, see what we can find.’

‘Ah, good,’ said the Eversor, rubbing his clawed hands together. ‘Exercise.’

‘Are you sure two will be enough?’ Soalm went on.

Kell ignored her and moved closer to Koyne. ‘Keep them alive, understand?’

Koyne made a thoughtful face. ‘We’re all lone wolves, Vindicare. If the enemy come knocking, my first instinct might be to run and leave them.’

He didn’t rise to the bait. ‘Then consider that order a test of your oath over your instincts.’

Sabrat’s longcoat whirled as the horror coiled, leaping into the air towards Hyssos. The operative heard it snapping like sailcloth in a stiff breeze and recoiled, firing shots that should have struck centre-mass but instead hit nothing but air.

The thing that called itself Spear landed close to him and he took a heavy blow that threw him off his feet. Hyssos slammed into a tall pile of Balthazar bottles that tumbled away with the impact, rolling this way and that. Pain raced up his spine as he twisted and tried to regain his footing.

Spear tossed the coat away and then, with care that seemed strange for something so abhorrent in appearance, deftly unbuttoned the white shirt beneath and set it aside. Bare from the waist up, Hyssos could see that the creature’s flesh was writhing and changing, cherry-red like tanned leather. He saw what looked like hands pressing out from inside the cage of the monster’s chest, and the profile of a screaming face. Yosef Sabrat’s face.

The bare arms distended and grew large, their proportions ballooning. Fingers merged into flat mittens of meat, grew stiff and glassy. Hands became bone blades, pennants of pinkish-black nerve tissue dangling from them.

Hyssos aimed the gun and fired at the place where a man’s heart would have been, but down came the arms and the shot was deflected away. He smelled a slaughterhouse stink coming off the creature, saw the sizzling pit in the limb from the impact as it filled with ooze and knit itself shut.

The body of the thing was in chaos. It writhed and throbbed and pulsed in disgusting ways, and the operative was struck by the conviction that something was inside the meat of it, trying to get out.

As the eyeless face glared into him, the distended jaws opening wide to let droplets of spittle fall free, Hyssos found his voice. ‘You killed them all.’

‘Yes.’ The reply was a gurgling chug of noise.

‘Why?’ he demanded, retreating back until he was trapped against the fallen bottles. ‘What in Terra’s name are you?’

‘There is no Terra,’ it bubbled, horrible amusement shading the words. ‘Only terror.’

Hyssos saw the shape of the face again, this time pressing from the meat of Spear’s bloated shoulders. He was sure it was crying out to him, imploring him. Run, it mouthed, run run run run–

He raised the gun, shaking, his blood turning to ice. Hands tightening on the grip, aiming for the head. In his time, Hyssos had seen many things that defied easy explanation – strange forms of alien life, the impossible vistas of warp space, the darkest potentials of the human character – and this creature was first among them. If hell was a place, then this was something that had been torn out of that infernal realm and thrust into the real world.

Spear raised its sword-arms and rattled their hard surfaces off one another. ‘One more,’ it intoned. ‘One step closer.’

‘To what?’ The question was a gasp. It came at him again, and Hyssos shot it in the face.

Spear shrugged it off. The first downward slash cut away Hyssos’s right hand across the forearm, the gun falling with it. The second stabbing motion pierced skin, ribcage and lung before emerging from his back in a splatter of dark arterial crimson.

Hyssos was not quite dead as Spear began to cut him into pieces. His last awareness was of the sound of his own flesh being eaten.

Shots and cries of pain sounded distantly as they drew closer to the engagement. The crackling drone of an emplaced autocannon sounded every few moments from down in the open plaza.

They had found plenty of dead along the way, and to begin with the Eversor paused at the sight of each clash, looking around to see if any of the combatants had perished carrying weapons of any particular note. But he found nothing he wanted to salvage, all of it basic Nire-pattern stubbers and the occasional lasgun. The Garantine didn’t like lasers; too fragile, too lightweight, too prone to malfunction when worked hard. He liked the heavy certainty of a ballistic gun, the comforting shock of recoil when it fired, the deep bass note of the shells crashing from the muzzle or the whickering sizzle of needle rounds. The bulky combi-weapon in his mailed fist was a perfect fit; it was his intention rendered in gunmetal.

Crouching in the lee of a tall, broken terracotta urn, he studied the Executor pistol and worked his fingers around the grip. The desire to use it on some target, any target, was almost too much to hold in. The anticipation tingled in his lobo-chips, and he felt the chemoglands in his neck grow cool as they produced a calmative to regulate the hammering pace of his heartbeat.

‘Eversor.’ The sniper’s voice issued out from the earpiece of his skull-mask. ‘There’s a group of irregulars to the south, under the broken chronograph near the monorail entrance. They’re dug in with a heavy gun.’ The Garantine took a look around the urn and saw the shattered clock face. He grunted an affirmative and Kell went on. ‘They’re holding off a unit of Defence Force troopers. Not many of the PDFs left. Hold and observe.’

That last sentence actually drew a laugh from the Eversor. ‘Oh, no.’ He jumped to his feet, the hissing of stimjectors sounding in his ears, and rolling fire flooded through him. The Garantine’s eyes widened behind his mask and his body resonated like a struck chord. Kell was saying something over the vox, but it seemed like the chattering of an insect.

The Garantine leapt into the air from the balcony overlooking the ticketing plaza and fell two storeys to land on the top of the smashed clock, where it hung from spars extending from the ceiling. The weight of his arrival dislodged the whole construction and he dropped with it, riding it to the tiled floor below to land behind the makeshift gun emplacement. The clock exploded into fragments as it struck the ground, ejecting cogwheels and bits of the fascia in all directions, the shock of it staggering the men behind the autocannon.

Kell had called them irregulars; that meant they were not soldiers, at least in an official sense. His drug-sharpened perception took in all details of them at once. They were garbed in pieces of armour, some of it PDF or Arbites issue, and the weapons they carried were an equally random assortment. At the sight of the towering, skull-masked monster that had fallen from the skies above them, the men on the autocannon hauled the weapon around on its tripod, swinging it to bear on the Garantine.

He roared and threw himself at them, his shout lost in the scream of the Executor. Bolt shells broke the bodies of the men in wet, red bursts, and he fell into their line, raking others with the spines of his neuro-gauntlet. The barbs of the glove bit into flesh and sent those it touched reeling to a twitching, frenzied death. Those on the autocannon he killed by punching, putting his fist through their ribcages. As an afterthought, he kicked the tripod gun away, and it rolled to the tiled floor.

Shivering with the rush, he laughed again. Through his adrenaline haze, he saw the men in the PDF uniforms warily peer out of cover, and then finally advance towards him with laser carbines ready.

He gave a theatrical bow and addressed them. ‘A rescue,’ he snapped. ‘Consider it a gift from the ruler of Terra.’

‘Idiot.’ Kell’s words pierced the veil of his racing thoughts. ‘Look at their chest plates!’

He did so; all of the PDF soldiers wore the etched-out aquila that signified their rejection of the Emperor’s dominion. They started firing, and the Garantine laughed once more, diving into the beam salvo with the Executor at his lead.

Spear’s meal was methodical. All the eating of the human foodstuffs while it had been in quietus had been enough to fuel the camouflage aspect’s biology, but the layers of the killer’s true self were starting to starve. Sipping at the meat of the dockworker and the clerk had served to hold off the hunger pangs, but they had not been enough for true satisfaction; and the destruction of the telepath had taken a lot of energy from him.

Still; feeding now, and a full meal with it. Bones ground between razor teeth, organs still hot and wet bitten into like ripe fruits, and blood by the bucket for the drinking. Thirst slaked, for a while. Yes. It would do.

Deep in the canyons of his mind, Spear could hear the echo of the camouflage’s ghost-mind as it wept and screamed, forced to watch these deeds from the cage where it was held. It could not understand that it was only noise now, no longer a being with life and power to influence the outside world. For as long as Spear remained in control, it would always be so.

Yosef Sabrat was only the last in a long line of coatings painted over Spear’s malleable aspect, like a dye poured on silk. The killer’s flesh, infused with the living skin of a warp-predator, was more daemon than man and it obeyed no laws of the conventional universe. It was a shape with no shape, but not like those human fools who used chemical philtres to manipulate their skin and bone and think themselves clever. What Spear was went beyond the nature of disguise, beyond transformation. There was a word for it that the ancient banned theologies used to talk of their deities taking on human form; they called it assumption.

When he was sated, he gathered what remained of Hyssos and cautiously filled a barrel with the leavings. The operative’s clothing and gear he had stripped with care, placing it to one side for later use. The corpse-meat would be hurled from the roof of the winestock, where it would fall to the floor of the narrow crags far below, and into the rapids that would wash the leftovers out to sea; but first he had the final steps to perform.

From one of the giant tanks given over to the maturation of the wines, Spear dragged out a fleshy egg and used his teeth to open it. Foul gases discharged from within and a naked man dropped out on to the wooden flooring. The sac had grown from a seed Spear planted in the lung of a homeless drunkard shortly after arriving on Iesta Veracrux. Conjured by the sorcery of his masters, the seed consumed the vagrant to make the egg, giving birth to a stasis caul where Spear had been able to store Yosef Sabrat’s body for the past two months.

As the sac dissolved into vapour, he dressed Sabrat in the clothes he had worn while the aspect had been at the fore. The caul had done its work. The dead reeve looked as if he had been freshly killed; no human means of detection would say otherwise. The stab wound through the man’s heart began to bleed again, and Spear artfully arranged the body, finding the harvesting knife in a flesh pocket and applying it to the wound.

He paused to ensure that the puncture on the roof of Sabrat’s mouth was not visible. The iron-hard proboscis that penetrated there had licked at the matter of the lawman’s brain and siphoned off the chains of chemicals that were his memories, his persona. Then, Spear’s daemonskin had patterned itself on those markers, shifting and becoming. The change was so strong, so deep, that when Spear surrendered control to it, the camouflage aspect was not merely a mask that the murderer wore; it was a living, breathing identity. A persona so perfect that it believed itself to be real, resilient enough that even a cursory psionic scan would not see the lie of it.

Still, it had made sense to murder the psyker woman as soon as possible, if not only to protect the truth but also to force the hand of the investigators. Now the next phase was complete, and the Yosef Sabrat identity had played its role flawlessly. Soon Spear would begin the purgation of the disguise, and finally be rid of the man’s irritatingly moral thought processes, his disgustingly soft compassion, the sickening attachment to his colleagues, brood-child and bed partner. From this point on, Spear would only wear a face, and never again give himself over to another man’s self. He was almost giddy with anticipation. Just a few more steps, and he would be within striking distance of his target.

The murderer knelt next to Hyssos’s head, severed at the neck by a slicing cut, and gathered it up. With a guttural choke, Spear spat the proboscis from the soft palate of his mouth and into the skull through its right eye. Seeking, penetrating, it dug deep and found the regions of the dead man’s brain where his self was growing cold.

Spear drank him in.

Koyne put away the monocular and hid it inside a pocket of the officer’s tunic the infocyte had recovered from one of the airfield’s dead. It fit snugly, but the adjustment of the fluid-filled morphing bladders layered underneath the Callidus’s skin allowed the assassin to alter body mass and dimension to accommodate it a little better.

‘How do you propose we get inside?’ said Iota. The Culexus was almost invisible in the shadows by the broken window, with only the steel-grey curve of her grinning helmet visible in the moonlight. Her voice had a peculiar, metallic timbre to it when she spoke from inside the psyker-hood, as if it were coming to Koyne’s ears from a very great distance.

‘Through the front door.’ The Callidus watched the men walking back and forth in front of the communicatory, considering the cautious motions in their steps, analysing the cues of their body language not just for infiltration’s sake, but to parse their states of mind. Data-slates, recovered from what remained of the corpses of the turncoat patrol murdered by the Garantine, had provided the Execution Force with a lead on this facility. It was the nearest thing to a garrison for kilometres around, and at this stage Kell wasn’t ready to send the group out from the relative safety of the Ultio and down the long highway to the capital city, several kilometres to the south. The metropolis itself, the largest of all on Dagonet, could be seen clearly against the darkening sky. Some of the taller towers were still smoking, some had half-collapsed and fallen like drunkards suspended on each other’s shoulders; but no snakes of tracer lashed at the skies, there were no mushroom clouds or flights of assault craft buzzing overhead. It seemed calm, or at least as calm as a city on a world at war with itself had any right to be.

When Koyne had asked the Vindicare what he had learned on his scouting mission, the Eversor had just grinned and the sniper replied with a terse dismissal. ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

Koyne did not doubt that. The Callidus had learned through many hundreds of field operations, a lot of them in active zones of conflict, that what generals in their places of comfort and control called ‘ground truth’ was often anything but true. For the soldier as much as the assassin, the only equation of truth that always worked was the simple vector between a weapon and a target. But now they were here, Koyne and the pariah girl Iota, the Culexus’s skin-crawling null ability brought along to protect the shade from any possible psionic interception.

‘Tariel was correct in his evaluation,’ said Iota, as a rotorplane chattered past overhead. ‘There is an astropath inside that building.’

‘Is it aware of you?’

She shook her head, the distended skull-helm moving back and forth. ‘No. I think it may be under the influence of chemical restraints.’

‘Good.’ Koyne stood up. ‘We don’t want the alarm to be raised before we are done here.’ Concentrating on a thought-shape and impressing that on flesh, the Callidus altered the dimension of its vocal chords, mimicking the tonality of an officer caught on one of the intercepted vox broadcasts. ‘We will proceed.’

The shapeshifter was as good as its word.

Keeping to the shadows and the low rooftops along the star-port’s blockhouses, Iota followed the Callidus and watched Koyne become a simulacrum of a turncoat PDF commander, advancing through the outer guard post of the communicatory without raising even a moment of concern. At one point, Iota lost sight of the Callidus, and when a man in Dagoneti colours approached her hiding place, she made ready the combi-needler about the wrist of her killing hand in order to silently end him.

‘Iota,’ called an entirely different voice. ‘Show yourself.’

She stepped into the light. ‘I like your tricks,’ said Iota.

Koyne smiled with someone else’s face and opened a door. ‘This way. I relieved the guards at the elevator in here so we won’t have much time. They’re holding the astropath on one of the sublevels.’

‘Why did you change it?’ Iota asked as they moved through the ill-lit corridors. ‘The face?’

‘I bore easily,’ replied Koyne, halting at a lift shaft. ‘Here we are.’

As the Callidus reached for the switch, the doors opened, flooding the corridor with light; inside the elevator two troopers saw the dark shape of the Culexus and went for their guns.

Spear swallowed Hyssos’s one undamaged eye before depositing the dead man’s reamed head among the rest of him; and then with a swift spin of his body, he pitched the remains into the canyon and watched them fall away.

Returning to the tank room, he skirted the beauty of the blood-art he had made from Erno Sigg’s corpse. He had used poor Erno as his stalking horse, tormenting him, pushing him to the edge of sanity before destroying him. The man had served his purpose perfectly. Spear moved on, checking once more that the body of Yosef Sabrat had been arranged just so. The evidence he had fabricated over the past few weeks was also scattered around, arranged so that when it was discovered, it would lead the investigators of the Sentine towards one undeniable conclusion – the killer of Jaared Norte, Cirsun Latigue, Perrig and Sigg and the rest of them was none other than their fellow lawman.

He made a mock-solemn expression with the new face he wore, trying the look on for size; but he had no mirror to see how it seemed on his new guise. Spear pawed at a face that now resembled that of the Eurotas operative. It felt odd and incomplete. The churn of new memories and personality sucked in from Hyssos was curdling where it mixed with those of Sabrat, making him thought-sick. It seemed it would be necessary to purge the stolid reeve’s self sooner rather than later.

With a deep sigh, Spear dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged. He drew on the disciplines that had been beaten into him by his master and focussed his will, seeing it like a line of poison fire laced with ink-black ice.

Reaching into the deeps of his thoughts, Spear found the cage and tore it open, clawing inside to gather up the mind-scraps that were all that remained of Yosef Sabrat. He grinned as fear resonated up from the shuddering persona as some understanding of its final end became clear. Then he began the purge, ripping and tearing, destroying everything that had been the man, vomiting up every nauseating, cloying skein of emotion, little by little sluicing Sabrat’s cloying self away.

Spear gave this deed such focus that it was only when he heard the voice he realised he was no longer alone.

Koyne’s hand flicked up and the toxin-filled stiletto hidden in a wrist sheath flew out in a shallow arc, piercing the stomach of the man on the left. The liquid inside was a consumptive agent that feasted on organic matter, even down to natural fibres and cured leather. He fell to the floor and began to dissolve.

The other man was briefly wreathed in white light that glowed down the hallway as Iota pressed a hand into his chest and shoved him back into the elevator. Koyne watched with detachment as the Culexus’s dark power enveloped the man and destroyed him. His silent scream resonated and he became a mass of material like burned paper. In moments, a curl of damp smoke was all that marked the man’s passing; the other hapless soldier was now a puddle of fluids leaking away through the gridded decking of the elevator floor.

Content that the toxin had run its course and consumed itself into the bargain, the Callidus kicked at the collection of inert tooth fillings, metal buttons and plastic buckles that had gathered and brushed them away with the passage of a boot. Koyne took a moment to break the biolume bubble illuminating the interior of the elevator, and then pressed the control to send it downwards.

They travelled in dark and silence for a few moments, and for Koyne the Culexus seemed to melt away and disappear, even though she was standing at her shoulder.

‘His name was Mortan Gautami,’ Iota said suddenly. ‘He never told anyone of it, but his mother had been able to see the future in dreams. He had a measure of postcognitive ability, but he indulged in narcotics, preventing him from accessing his potential.’ The skull head turned slightly. ‘I used that untapped energy to destroy him.’

‘I’ll bet you know the names of everyone you’ve terminated,’ said Koyne, with a flicker of cruelty.

‘Don’t you?’ said the Culexus.

The Callidus didn’t bother to grace that with an answer. The elevator arrived at the sublevel, and the guards standing outside fell to quick killing blows.

There was a spherical containment chamber in the middle of a room made of ferrocrete, festoons of cables issuing from every point on its surface. A heavy iron iris hatch lay facing them like a closed eye, a short gantry reaching it from the sublevel proper. Koyne stepped up and worked the lever to open it; there was a thin, high-pitched sound coming from inside, and at first the Callidus thought it was a pressure leak; then the iron leaves retracted and it became clear it was reedy, shrill screaming.

Koyne peered into the depths and saw the corpse-grey astropath. It was pressed up against the back of the sphere’s inner wall, glaring sightlessly towards Iota. ‘Hole-mind,’ it babbled, between howls. ‘Black-shroud. Poison-thought.’

The Callidus rapped a stolen pistol against the threshold of the hatch. ‘Hey!’ Koyne snarled in the officer’s voice. ‘Stop whining. I’ll make this simple. Give up the information I need, or I’ll lock her in there with you.’

The astropath made the sign of the aquila, as if it were some kind of ancient rite of warding that would fend off evil. The shrieking died away, and crack-throated, the psychic spoke. ‘Just keep it at a distance.’

Iota took her cue and wandered away, moving back towards the elevator shaft but still within earshot. ‘Better?’

That earned Koyne a weak nod. ‘I will tell you what you want to know.’

The assassin learned quickly that the astropath was one of only a handful of its kind still alive in the Dagonet system. In the headlong melee of revolution, in the process of isolating itself from the galaxy and the Imperium, the planet had begun to rid itself of all lines of connection back to Terra – but some of the newly empowered nobles had thought otherwise and made sure that at least a few telepaths capable of interstellar sending were kept alive. This was one of them, cut off from all means of speaking to its kindred, locked up and isolated. It was starved of communication, and once it began to talk in its papery monotone, the astropath seemed unable to stop.

The psychic spoke of the state of the civil war. As the brief given by Captain-General Valdor had said, Dagonet was a keystone world in the politico-economic structure of the Taebian Sector, and if it fell fully under the shadow of the Warmaster, then it would mark the beginning of a domino effect, as planet after planet along the same trade axis followed suit. Every loyalist foothold in this sector of space would be in jeopardy. In the first moments of the insurrection, desperate signals had been sent to the Adeptus Astartes and the Imperial Navy; but these had gone unanswered.

Koyne took this in and said nothing. Both the ships of the admiralty and the Legions of the Emperor’s loyalist Astartes had battles of their own to fight, far from the Taebian Stars. They would not intervene. For all the fire and destruction the collapse of Dagonet and its sister worlds might cause, there were larger conflicts being addressed at this very moment; no crusade of heroes was coming to ride to the rescue. Then the astropath began to lay out the lines of the civil war as it had spread up until this point, and the Callidus thought back to something said aboard the Ultio on their way to Dagonet.

The civil war was a rout, and it was those who stood in the Emperor’s name who were dying. Across the planet, the forces that carried Horus’s banner were only days away from breaking the back of any resistance.

Dagonet was already lost.

Reeve Daig Segan. Through Sabrat’s memories, Spear recalled that the man was as dogged as he was dour, and for all his apparently slow aspect, he was troublingly perceptive.

‘Yosef?’ said the reeve, moving through the gloom with a torch in one hand and a gun in the other. ‘What is that stench? Yosef, Hyssos… Are you in here?’

Segan had followed them to Whyteleaf, despite the orders Sabrat had given, the persona unaware of Spear’s subtle guidance bubbling beneath the surface. In his thoughts, the murderer heard the dim resonance of Sabrat’s essence crying out to be heard. Impossibly, the persona was trying to defy him. It was fighting its own erasure.

Spear’s body, cloaked in Hyssos’s proxy flesh, trembled. The purge was a complicated, delicate task that required all of his concentration. He could not afford to deal with any interruption, not now, not when he was at so critical a juncture…

‘Hello?’ Segan was coming closer. At any moment, he would come across Spear’s carefully constructed crime scene. But it was too soon. Too soon!

Very clearly, Spear heard Sabrat laughing at him. With sudden annoyance, he punched himself in the head and the pain of the blow made the ghost of the voice fall silent. His cheek and the orbit of his right eye sagged as they tried to retain the shape of Hyssos’s imprint.

Spear got up and went to meet Segan as he approached. The other reeve’s torch caught him and he heard the man gasp in shock.

‘Hyssos? Where’s Yosef?’ Segan peered at him. ‘What’s wrong with your face?’

‘Nothing,’ said the operative’s voice. ‘Everything is fine.’

The reeve seemed doubtful. ‘Can you smell that? Like blood and shit and all kinds of–’ Segan’s torchlight illuminated part of the operative’s coat, still wet with vitae. ‘Are you hurt?’

Spear was close to him now. ‘I had a job for you,’ he said. ‘A part to play. Why did you come here when I told you to stay in the city?’

‘Yosef told me to stay, not you,’ Segan retorted, becoming wary. ‘I don’t follow your orders, even if everyone else jumps each time your damn baron coughs.’

‘But you should have stayed,’ Spear insisted. ‘Now I’ll have to rewrite the scenario.’

‘What are you on about?’ said the reeve.

‘Come and see.’ Spear lashed out and grabbed him by the collar. Caught off-guard, Segan stumbled and that was all the murderer needed to destroy his balance and throw him down the length of the room.

Segan slammed into the floor, his gun skittering away into the shadows, sliding to a halt at the edge of the blood pool; he reacted with a sharp yelp. ‘Throne!’ He saw Sabrat’s body and Spear felt a moment of victory as something perished inside the other man. A little bit of his will shrivelled to see his friend so violated. ‘Yosef…?’

‘He did it all,’ said Spear. ‘How terrible.’

Segan shot a venomous glare in his direction. ‘Liar! Never! Yosef Sabrat is a good man, he would never… never…’

Spear frowned. ‘Yes. I knew you wouldn’t accept it. That was your role. There had to be one person in the Sentine who would fight this explanation, or else it would seem false. But now you’ve ruined that. I’ll have to compensate.’

At last, understanding dawned on the other man’s face. ‘You. You did this.’

‘I did it all,’ Spear chuckled. He let his face shift and transform, his eyes become black and dark. ‘I did it all,’ he repeated.

The blood drained from Segan’s face as Spear came closer, letting the change happen slowly. With trembling fingers, the reeve pulled something shiny and gold from inside his cuff and clung to it, as if it were the key to a door that would spirit him away from the horror all around him. The dour little man was pinned to the spot, transfixed with fright.

‘The Emperor protects,’ Segan said aloud. ‘The Emperor protects.’

Spear opened his spiked jaws. ‘He really doesn’t,’ said the murderer.

The distant hum-and-crack of mortar shells could be heard on the Ultio’s flight deck, through the opened vents in the canopy that let in wet, grimy air.

Koyne’s encrypted report, burst-transmitted via tight-beam vox, had reached them just after sunset and confirmed Tariel’s worst fears. The mission was over before it had even begun. He said as much to Kell and the others, earning himself a feral snarl from the Garantine.

‘Weakling,’ growled the Eversor. ‘You’re gutless. Afraid to get your robes dirty in the field!’ The hulking killer leaned towards him, looming. He had his mask off, and his scarred, broken face was if anything more ugly than the metal skull. ‘Mission circumstances always change. But we adapt and burn through!’

‘Burn through,’ repeated the Vanus. ‘Perhaps you misunderstood the meaning of Koyne’s report? Did the larger words confuse you?’

The Garantine rose to his feet, eyes narrowing. ‘Say that again, piss-streak. I dare you.’

‘This war is over!’ Tariel almost shouted it. ‘Dagonet is as good as conquered! Horus has won this world, don’t you see?’

‘Horus has not even set foot on Dagonet,’ countered Soalm.

He rounded on her. ‘Exactly! The Warmaster is not even here, and yet still he is here!’

‘Make him speak sense,’ the Eversor said to Kell, ‘or I’ll cut out his tongue.’

‘It’s not Horus,’ Kell explained. ‘It’s what he represents.’

Tariel nodded sharply. ‘The turncoat nobility on this planet don’t need to see Horus. His influence hangs over Dagonet like an eclipse blotting out the sun. They’re fighting in his name in fear of him, and that is enough. And when they win, the Warmaster’s work will be done for him. This same thing is happening all across the galaxy, on every world too far from the Emperor and the rule of Terra.’ He trembled a little with the sudden frustration he felt deep inside him. ‘When Dagonet falls, Horus will turn his face from this place and move on, his advance one step closer to the gates of the Imperial Palace…’

‘Horus will not come to Dagonet,’ said Soalm, catching on. ‘He will have no need to.’

The infocyte nodded again. ‘And everything we’ve prepared for, the whole purpose of this mission, will be worthless.’

‘We’ll lose our chance to kill him,’ said Kell.

‘Aye,’ snapped Tariel, and he shot the Garantine a glare. ‘Do you see now?’

The Eversor’s expression shifted; and after a moment, he nodded. ‘Then, we must make sure he does come to Dagonet.’

Soalm folded her arms. ‘How do you propose to do that? Once this planet’s Governor makes his allegiance known to the insurrectionists, perhaps the Warmaster may send some delegate to plant the flag, but no more than a starship admiral or some such. He won’t waste a single Space Marine’s time on matters of dispensation.’

The Garantine grunted with callous humour. ‘You all think I’m the slow one here, don’t you? But you miss the obvious answer, woman. If Horus won’t come to a fight that has ended, then we make sure the fight does not end.’

‘Deliberately prolong the civil war.’ Kell said the words without weight.

‘We draw him to us,’ said the Eversor, warming to his theme, showing teeth. ‘We make the taking of Dagonet such a thorn in his side that he has no choice but to come here and deal with it himself.’

Tariel considered the idea; it was blunt and crude, but it had merit. And it could work. ‘Dagonet has a personal resonance with the Warmaster. It was the site of one of his very first victories. That, and its strategic value… It could be enough. It would be a dishonour for him to let this planet slip from his control.’ Hearing footsteps across the deck, he glanced up to see Iota step on to the flight deck; behind her was a man he did not recognise in a PDF uniform.

‘Relax, Vanus,’ said the man, in a cynical tone that could only be Koyne’s. ‘I take it you found my report to be compelling reading. So; what have we missed?’

‘You exfiltrated without any complications?’ said Kell.

Iota nodded. ‘What is the local time?’

‘Fourteen forty-nine.’ Tariel answered automatically, his chronoimplant already synched to the Dagonet clock standard.

‘There’s six of us,’ the Garantine went on. ‘Each has destroyed rulers and broken kingdoms all on their own. How hard could it be to add some fuel to this little blaze?’

‘And what about the Dagoneti?’ Soalm demanded. ‘They’ll be caught in the crossfire.’

The other assassin looked away, unconcerned. ‘Collateral damage.’

‘What is the local time?’ Iota said again.

‘Fourteen fifty. Why do you keep asking–?’ Tariel’s reply was cut off by a flash of light in the distance, followed seconds later by the report of an explosion.

‘What in Hades was that?’ said Kell. ‘The… communicatory?’

‘A power generator overload. I made it look like the commoner freedom fighters did it,’ said Koyne. ‘We couldn’t afford to leave any traces. Or survivors.’

The Garantine’s grin grew even wider. ‘See? We’ve already started.’

TEN Matters of Trust / Breakout / False Flag

‘Don’t run,’ snarled Grohl. ‘They see you running and they’ll know.’

Beye shot him a narrow-eyed look from beneath her forage cap. ‘This isn’t running. Believe me, you’d know if it was running. This is a purposeful walk.’

He snorted and clamped a hand around her arm, forcibly slowing her down. ‘Well, dial it back to a meander. Look casual.’ Grohl glanced around at the marketplace stalls as they passed through them. ‘Look like you want to buy something.’

At their side, Pasri made a face. ‘Buy what, exactly?’ asked the ex-soldier, her scarred nose wrinkling.

She had a point. Most of the stalls were bare, abandoned by owners who were either too afraid to leave their homes, or lacking for produce to offer after the nobles had instituted martial law and imposed checkpoints on all the out-of-city highways. Beye couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder. In the distance, what had once been a precinct tower for the capital’s regiment of Adeptus Arbites was now wreathed in thin smoke. The crossed-out Imperial aquila on its southerly face was visible through the haze, and the harsh croaks of police sirens wafted towards them on the wind.

‘Don’t stare,’ Grohl snapped.

‘You want us to blend in,’ she replied. ‘Everyone else is staring.’ Not that there were many people around. The few daring to venture out onto the streets of Dagonet’s capital kept off the rubble-strewn roads or minded their own business. No one assembled in groups of more than four, fearful of the edicts that threatened arrest and detention for anyone suspected of ‘gathering for reasons of sedition’.

Beye almost laughed at the thought of that. Sedition was the act of treason against an existing order, and if anything, she, Grohl, Pasri and the handful of others were the absolute antithesis of that. They were the ones championing the cause of rightful authority, of the Emperor’s rule. It was the noble clans and the weakling Governor who were the rebels here, rejecting Terra and siding with…

Her eyes flicked up as they passed into a crossroads. There on the island in the centre of the highway, a statue of the Warmaster stood untouched by the street fighting. He towered over her, standing tall with one hand reaching out in a gesture of aid, the other holding a massive bolter pistol upwards to the sky. Beye noticed with a grimace that votive candles and small trinkets had been left at the foot of the plinth by those eager to show their devotion to the new regime.

Grohl paused at the intersection, rubbing at his thin beard, his eyes flicking this way and that. Finally, he made a choice. ‘Over here.’

Beye and Pasri followed him across the monorail lines towards an alleyway between two shuttered storefronts. She managed not to flinch as a patrol rotorplane shrieked past over the rooftops, klaxons hooting.

‘It’s not looking for us,’ Pasri said automatically; but in the next moment, Beye heard a change in the aircraft’s engine note as it circled, looking for a place to put down.

‘Are you sure about that?’

Grohl swore. This entire operation had been a cascade of errors from start to finish. Firstly, the man who was meant to drive the GEV truck did not arrive at the rendezvous, forcing them to improvise with rods and ropes to hold down the steering yoke and throttle – because of course, Grohl would never have considered sacrificing himself for the cause on a target so ordinary. Then, at the approach, they found the barricades placed by the clanner troops had been moved, making their straight shot at the precinct doors impossible. And finally, as the payload of crudely-cooked chemical explosives had at last detonated in a wet blast of noise and light, Beye saw that the damage it inflicted on the building was superficial at best.

She had at least hoped they could escape the security dragnet. But if they were captured, their failure would be total and complete. Beye knew that the patrol flyers carried nine-man teams with cyber-mastiffs and spy drones. The first icy surges of panic bubbled up in her chest as she imagined the interior of a dank interrogation cell. She would never see Capra again.

Grohl broke into a run and she followed him with Pasri at her heels, listening for the metallic barks of the enhanced dogs. He slipped through a gap between two waste skips and down towards a side road. Ahead of him, a woman in a sun-hood and sarong stepped out from a doorway and looked up at them. Beye was struck by the paleness of her face; Dagonet’s bright sunshine tanned everyone on the planet’s temperate zone, which meant she was either a shut-in noblewoman or an off-worlder; and neither were likely to be seen in this part of the inner city.

‘Pardon,’ she began, and her accent immediately confirmed her non-Dagoneti status. ‘If I could trouble you?’

Grohl almost missed a step, but then he pressed on, pushing past the stranger. ‘Get out of my way,’ he growled.

Beye came after him. She heard the yelps of the mastiffs in the distance and saw Pasri looking back the way they had come, her expression unreadable.

‘As you wish,’ the woman said, spreading her hands. Beye saw the glint of metal nozzles at her wrists just as she pursed her pale lips and blew out a long breath. A vaporous mist jetted from the nozzles and engulfed them all.

The ground beneath Beye’s feet suddenly became the consistency of rubber and she stumbled, dimly aware of Grohl doing the same. Pasri let out a weak cry and fell.

As Beye collapsed in a heap, her limbs refusing to do as she told them, she saw the pale woman smile and lick beads of the spray off her fingertips. ‘It’s done,’ she heard her say, the words drawing out into a liquid, humming echo.

Beye’s senses went dark.

The acrid chemical stink of smelling salts jolted her back to wakefulness and Beye coughed violently. Blinking, she raised her head and peered at the room she found herself in, expecting the pale green walls of an Arbites cell; instead, she saw the gloomy interior of some kind of storehouse, shafts of daylight reaching down through holes in a sheet-plas roof.

She was tied to a chair, hands secured behind her back, ankles tethered to the support legs. Grohl was in a similar state to her right, and past him, Pasri looked back at her with an expression of tight fear. Grohl met her gaze, his face a mask of rigid, forced calm. ‘Say nothing,’ he told her. ‘Whatever happens, say nothing.’

‘Right on schedule,’ said a new voice. ‘As you said.’

‘Of course.’ That was the pale woman. ‘I can time the actions of my toxins to the second, if need be.’

Beye focussed and saw the woman in the sarong talking with an odd-looking youth wearing what looked like some form of combat gear. He was working a device mounted on his forearm, a gauntlet that grew a flickering holoscreen. Both of them glanced at their prisoners – for that was what they were, Beye realised belatedly – and then past their heads.

She heard motion behind her and Beye sensed someone standing at her back. ‘Who’s there?’ she said, before she could stop herself.

A third figure moved around the captives and came into view. He was tall, clad in a black oversuit with armour patches and gear packs. A heavy pistol of a design Beye had never seen before hung at his hip. He had a hawkish face that might have been handsome if not for the hardness lurking in his gaze. ‘Names,’ he said.

Grohl made a derogatory sound deep in his throat. The youth with the wrist-device sniffed and spoke again. ‘Liya Beye. Terrik Grohl. Olo Pasri.’

‘The nobles have files on all of you,’ said the hawkish man. ‘We took these copies of their database on the resistance when we destroyed the Kappa Six Communicatory.’

‘You did that?’ said Pasri.

‘Shut up,’ Grohl snarled. ‘Don’t talk!’

Beye kept silent. Like the rest of them, she’d been wondering just what had happened at Kappa Six ever since the newsfeeds had announced the ‘cowardly, treacherous attack by terrorist militants’ a few days earlier. In the end, Capra had suggested that it was either the work of an independent cell they weren’t aware of, or just some accident the nobles had decided to blame on them.

‘We’re nothing to do with those resistance radicals,’ insisted Pasri. ‘We’re just citizens.’

The youth sneered. ‘Please don’t insult my intelligence.’

‘Things are going badly for you, aren’t they?’ said the man, ignoring the interruption. ‘They’re getting close to finding your hideaway. Close to finding Capra and all his cell leaders.’

Beye tried not to react when he said the name, and failed. He turned to her. ‘How many of your people have surrendered in the past few weeks? Fifty? A hundred? How many have taken the offer of amnesty for themselves and their families?’

‘It’s a lie,’ Beye blurted out, ignoring Grohl’s hiss of annoyance. ‘Those who give up are executed.’

‘Of course they are,’ said the man. He nodded towards the youth. ‘We even have picts of the firing squads.’ He paused. ‘Your entire resistance network–’

‘Such as it is,’ said the youth, with an arch sniff.

‘Your network is on the verge of collapse,’ continued the other man. ‘Capra and his trusted core of freedom fighters are the only things holding it together. And the nobles know that all they really need to do is wait.’ He walked down the line of them. ‘Just wait, until you run out of supplies, of ammunition. Of hope. You’re all exhausted, pushed beyond your limits. Hungry and tired. None of you want to say it, but you all know it’s true. You’ve already lost, you just can’t admit it.’

That was enough for Grohl to break his own rules. ‘Go screw yourself, clanner bastard!’

The man raised an eyebrow. ‘We’re not… clanners, is it? We are not in the employ of the nobles.’ He leaned down and pulled something from the neck of his armour; an identity disc on a chain. ‘We serve a different master.’

Beye immediately recognised the shape of an Imperial sigil-tag, a bio-active recognition device gene-keyed to its wearer. An etching of the two-headed aquila glittered there on its surface. It could not be forged, duplicated or removed from the person of its user without becoming useless. Anyone wearing such a tag was a soldier in service to the Emperor of Mankind.

‘Who are you?’ Pasri was wary.

The man indicated himself. ‘Kell. These are Tariel and… Soalm. We are agents of the Imperium and the authority of Terra.’

‘Why tell us your names?’ hissed Grohl. ‘Unless you’re going to kill us?’

‘Consider it a gesture of trust,’ said the pale woman. ‘We already know who you are. And in all honesty, knowing what to call us hardly makes you a threat.’

Beye leaned forward. ‘Why are you here?’

Kell nodded to Tariel, and the youth produced a mollyknife. He moved to where Pasri was sitting and cut her loose, then proceeded to do the same with Grohl.

‘We have been sent by the Emperor’s command to aid the planet Dagonet and its people in this time of crisis.’ Beye was certain that she saw a loaded look pass between Soalm and Kell before the man spoke again. ‘We are here to help you oppose the insurrection of Horus Lupercal and anyone who takes his side.’

Grohl rubbed at his wrists. ‘So, of course you would like us to take you to the secret retreat of the resistance. Introduce you personally to Capra. Open ourselves up so you can murder us all in one fell swoop?’ He turned his head and spat. ‘We’re not fools or traitors.’

Tariel cut Beye loose and offered a hand to help her to her feet, but she refused. Instead, he gave her a data-slate. ‘You know how to read these, correct? Your file says that you served the Administratum as a datum clerk in the office of colonial affairs, prior to the insurrection.’

‘That’s right,’ she said.

Tariel indicated a text file in the slate’s memory. ‘I think you’ll want to look at this document. And please check the security tags so you are sure it has not been tampered with.’

Kell walked closer to Grohl. ‘I believe you when you say you’re not a traitor, Terrik Grohl. But you have been fooled.’

‘What in Stars’ name are you talking about?’ snarled the other man.

‘Because there is a traitor in this room,’ Kell went on; and then faster than Beye’s eye could follow, the Imperial agent’s hand flicked up from his belt with the blocky, lethal-looking pistol in its grip, and he shot Pasri dead through the heart at point-blank range.

Beye let out a cry of shock as Grohl started forward.

Tariel tapped the slate. ‘Read the file,’ he repeated.

‘And then search your good friend Olo,’ added Soalm.

Grohl did that as Beye read on. By the time she had finished, the colour had drained from her cheeks, and Grohl had discovered the wireless listening device concealed on the other woman. The files, as Tariel said, unaltered from their original form, were reports from the clanners about an informant in the resistance. Capra had suspected they had a leak for some time, but he hadn’t been able to discover who. According to the last entry, Olo Pasri had agreed to give up the location of the main freedom fighter safe zone, but was stalling for a larger finder’s fee and the guarantee of passage off-world.

All of this she told to Grohl, who listened with a stony, rigid expression. After a long moment, he spoke. ‘I don’t trust you,’ he said to Kell. ‘Even this, you could have faked it. Did it all just to get close to us.’

‘Grohl–’ Beye began, but Kell held up a hand, silencing her.

‘No, he’s right. Given time and effort, we could have engineered something like this. And if I were in your place, I would share your suspicions.’ He paused again, thinking. ‘So, then. We need to earn your trust.’

‘A demonstration,’ suggested Soalm.

Kell nodded. ‘Give us a target.’

Spear ran his hand up and down the arm of the grox-leather chair where he sat, guiding fingers moulded in fleshy echo of Hyssos’s body over the lustrous, tanned hide. The sensation was pleasing; it made him realise he had spent too long in quietus, denied the simple pleasures of awareness, allowing his consciousness to go dormant while the mind-ghost of Yosef Sabrat ran his flesh. Puppet and the puppeted, master and performer, their roles intermingled. He was tired of it.

At least now he had only to look the part, rather than literally become it. He glanced up and saw a reflection in the glass cabinet behind the desk of High-Reeve Kata Telemach; the ebon face of Hyssos staring back at him.

Telemach swivelled in her deep, wing-backed chair from the watch-wire console on her desk and replaced the bulky handset. Standing nearby like an overweight sentinel, the doughy figure of Reeve Warden Berts Laimner was uncharacteristically still. Spear imagined he was still trying to process all the possible outcomes of the revelation that Yosef Sabrat was the serial killer in their midst, looking for the results where he would come off best. He felt a particular kind of hate for the man, but when he concentrated on the shape of it, Spear could not be certain if it had originated in him, or in Yosef Sabrat. More than once, the reeve’s own temper had brushed against the killer’s, and in those moments threatened to awaken the dormant murderer.

He sucked in a breath and dismissed the thoughts as trivial, refocussing on Telemach, who sat glaring at the vinepaper documents before her.

‘How could something like this happen in my precinct, under my governance?’ she demanded. Typical of the woman, Spear thought. Her first consideration was not How could this tragedy have happened? or A good man like Sabrat a killer? Impossible! No, for all the death and bloodshed and fear that had swept across her city, her first impulse was to worry about how it would make her look. Telemach glared at Laimner. ‘Well?’

‘He… We never suspected for a moment that the killer could be a peace officer.’

The High-Reeve was about to spit out something else, but Spear intervened. In Hyssos’s voice he said ‘In fairness, how could your men have known, milady? Sabrat was a decorated member of the Sentine with over a decade of service under his belt. He knew your procedures and protocols intimately. He knew all the loopholes and blind spots.’

Laimner nodded. ‘Aye, yes. I have teams from the documentary office going over everything in his caseload, back years and years. They’ve already found incidences of file tampering, evidence manipulation…’

All of which Spear had been planting, little by little over the last few weeks. Very soon they would discover more killings that he had laid at the late reeve’s feet, from the deaths of minor citizens to shopkeepers and even a junior jager from this very precinct; every one of them Spear had murdered and impersonated for brief periods of time, working his way up to this identity. Step by step.

‘It was only a matter of time before he was caught,’ Spear-as-Hyssos went on, and he tapped the evidence bag on the desk that contained the harvesting knife. ‘I’ve encountered these kinds of criminals several times. They all become careless after a while, convinced of their own superiority.’

Telemach grabbed one of the more gory picts of the murder scene at the airdocks, waving it at him, and Spear resisted the urge to lick his lips. ‘But what about… all this?’ She jabbed at the beautiful perfection of the eightfold sigils drawn in the blood of the dead. ‘What does it mean?’

He sensed the edge of fear in her words, and relished it. Yes, she understood the common, squalid manners of death, when humans ended one another over trivialities like money and power, anger and lust; but she could not conceive of the idea that one might take life in the name of something greater… to appease something. Spear wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her that her insect’s-eye view of the cosmos was pathetically naïve, blind to the realities that he had been made privy to at the Delphos on Davin and later, at his master’s hand.

He made Hyssos’s face grow grave and concerned. ‘Sabrat wasn’t alone in all this. His cohort, Segan… They were a partnership.’

‘That fits the facts,’ said Laimner. ‘But I’m not sure why Yosef killed him.’

‘A disagreement?’ offered Spear. ‘All I know is, the two of them conspired to get me alone with them at Whyteleaf. Then I was forced to watch as Sabrat ended Segan’s life, before he tried to do the same to me. I almost…’ At this point, he gave a staged shudder. ‘He almost killed me too,’ he whispered.

‘And the… symbols?’ Telemach asked.

‘These were ritualistic murders.’ He paused for the drama of it. ‘What do you know of this group called the Theoge?’

He had barely said the word before the High-Reeve’s face split in a sour sneer. ‘Those throwback religionists? This is their doing?’ She shot a look at Laimner. ‘I said they were part of this. Didn’t I say so? I knew it!’

Spear nodded. ‘They are some sort of fundamentalist cult, if I understand correctly. It seems that Daig Segan was the go-between for the Theoge, and in turn the murders committed by Sabrat with his help were likely motivated by some twisted set of beliefs.’

‘Human sacrifices?’ said Laimner. ‘On a civilised world like this? This is the thirty-first millennium, not primitive prehistory!’

Telemach answered immediately. ‘Religion is like a cancer. It can erupt without warning.’ For a moment, Spear wondered what great hurt in the woman’s past had occurred because of someone else’s belief; something scarring, no doubt, to make her hate any thought of such things with that undiluted venom.

‘I would advise you move against this group as soon as possible,’ he went on, getting to his feet. ‘Your media services have already learned of some elements of this case. I imagine those involved with the Theoge will quickly become targets for vigilantism.’

Laimner nodded. ‘Sabrat’s wife and child have already been attacked. I sent Skelta to the house… He said they were hounded and stoned.’

‘Find out if they were involved,’ Telemach insisted. ‘And by nightfall I want every single Theoge suspect on the books hauled in for questioning.’

Spear drew himself up, smoothing down the front of Hyssos’s tunic in a reflexive gesture copied from the operative’s own muscle-memory. ‘I see you have everything in hand. You have my report. I will take my leave of you now this matter is concluded.’

Laimner shook his head. ‘But, wait. There are proceedings… Testimony to be made, a tribunal. You will need to remain on Iesta to give statements.’

‘The Void Baron does not wish me to stay.’ All it took was a look from Hyssos’s eyes to the High-Reeve, and she buckled immediately.

‘Of course, operative,’ she said, the thought of defying Eurotas or one of his agents never occurring to her. ‘If any questions arise, a communiqué can be sent via the Consortium. We caught the killer. That’s all that is important.’

He nodded and made for the door. Behind him, he heard Laimner speak again. ‘The people will feel safer,’ he said. It seemed less like a statement of fact, and more like something the man was trying to convince himself of.

A brief smile crossed Spear’s changed face. The fear that he had unleashed on the streets of Iesta Veracrux would not be so easily dispelled.

Goeda Rufin was enjoying the difference in things.

Before, back when the Governor was still kowtowing to Terra and the nobles did nothing but grumble, Rufin had been destined to remain a low ranked non-commissioned officer in the Dagonet PDF. His life consisted largely of shirking his responsibilities – such as they were – and putting his workload on the junior ratings unlucky enough to be under his supervision at the vehicle pool. Since the day he had enrolled after a justicar gave him the choice between borstal or service, Rufin had never looked back to civilian life, but in all that time he hadn’t been able to shake the longing for a day when he could wear a coveted officer’s braid. It didn’t occur to him that his general level of ignorance outstripped any small measure of ability he had; Rufin was simply unable to grasp the idea that he had never risen in rank because he was a poor soldier. He was a makeweight in the city garrison, and everyone seemed to know it but him. To hear Rufin talk, it would seem like there was a huge conspiracy among the senior officers to keep him down, while other men were promoted up the ladder – men that he considered less deserving, despite copious evidence to the contrary. But Rufin wasn’t one to let facts get in the way of his opinions.

He was snide and demeaning to the back of every man who wore the braid. He amused himself by scribbling anonymous obscenities about them on the walls of the barracks washroom, dragging his heels over every order they gave him, this and a dozen other petty revenges.

It was because of that Goeda Rufin was in the office of his commander when the liberation took place. That’s what they were calling it now, ‘The Liberation’, the bloody day of upheaval that left Dagonet declared free of Imperial rule and true to the banner of the Warmaster Horus.

Rufin had been there, waiting, forgotten. He had been there for a disciplinary review – someone had heard him bad-mouthing his superiors one time too many – and if it had just been any other day, he would likely have ended up dismissed from the PDF for his troubles.

But then the shooting started, and he saw soldiers fighting soldiers in the courtyard. Warriors from the palace garrison, their uniforms marred by crossed-out aquila sigils, cutting down all the men he never liked. He was hiding in his commander’s office when the officer came running in, barking orders at him. At his heels were a pair of the palace men, and seeing them, Rufin at last caught up to what was going on. When his commander bellowed at him to come to his aid, Rufin took up the ornamental dagger the man used as a letter opener and stabbed him with it. Later, the leader of the invading troops shook his hand and offered him a marker with which to scratch out his own Imperial emblems.

He got his officer braid because of that, and all the men who surrendered with him took it too, that or the buzz of a las-round to the back of the head. After the dust settled the new regime needed officers to fill the ranks they had culled. Rufin was happy to accept; Emperor or Warmaster, he didn’t give a damn whose name he had to salute. He had no respect for any of them.

Rufin left the motor pool behind. His new command was the ‘emergency circumstances security camp’ established on the site of the capital terminus monorail station. Ever since the nobles had shut down the networks, the passenger trains had lain idle; but now they had a new duty, serving as prison accommodations for the hundreds of civilians and idiot rebels who had dared to defy the new order.

Rufin lorded it over them, walking back and forth across the high gantries above the choked platforms, making sure each inmate knew he held the power of life and death with random beatings and executions. When he wasn’t exercising his dull brutality and boredom on them, Rufin was prowling the ammo stores on the lower levels, in what used to be the maintenance wells for the engines. He liked being down there, among the smells of cordite and gunmetal. It made him feel like a real soldier to be surrounded by all that firepower.

Entering the observation cupola above what was once the station’s central plaza, he caught the watch officer sipping a mug of black tea and gave him a glowering stare. ‘Status?’ he barked.

The officer looked at his chronograph. ‘Check-in at the top of the hour, sir. That’s another quarter-turn away.’ He had barely finished speaking when the intercom grille over their heads crackled into life.

‘Early?’ said Rufin.

‘Control!’ said a panicked voice over the vox. ‘I think… I think there might be a problem.’

‘Post two, say again?’ began the watch officer, but Rufin snatched the handset from him and snarled into it.

‘This is the base commander! Explain yourself!’

‘Recruit Zejja just… Well, he just fell off the south wall. And Tormol isn’t responding to his wireless.’ Then, very distinctly, the open vox channel caught a sound like a quick, low hum, followed a heartbeat later by a wet chug and then the echo of a body falling.

Rufin thrust the handset back at the watch officer, uncertain what to do next. ‘Shall I try to raise the other guard posts now, sir?’ said the other man, stifling a cough.

‘Yes,’ He nodded. That sounded like the right sort of thing. ‘Do that.’

Then, without warning, the old control board left intact from the station’s prior function flickered into life. Lines of colour denoting tracks, blocks of illumination signifying individual carriages, all began to click and chatter as they activated.

Rufin shot a worried look out of the windows of the cupola and heard the mutter of dozens of electric motors coming alive. The sound echoed around the vaulted glass spaces of the station concourse and platforms. Below, the prisoners were scrambling to their feet, energised by the sound. Rufin drew his pistol on impulse and kneaded the grip. ‘What’s going on?’ he demanded.

The watch officer looked at the consoles before him in surprise. ‘That… That’s not possible,’ he insisted, coughing again. ‘All remote operations of station systems were locked down, the hard lines were severed…’ He swallowed hard, beads of sweat appearing on his high forehead. ‘I think someone is trying to move the trains.’

Below, the ornate copper departure boards for all the platforms began whirring in a rattling chorus of noise, each one flashing up destination after destination. With a sharp report, they all stopped at once, all of them showing the same thing; End Of The Line.

The prisoners saw the words and let out a ragged cheer. Rufin shouted abuse back at them, and caught sight of one of his men running up the platform with a heavy autogun in his grip. The trooper was perhaps twenty metres from the jeering prisoners when his chest exploded in a silent, red blossom, and he fell.

Finally, the correct words registered in his mind. ‘We’re under attack!’

When Rufin turned back to the watch officer, the man was lolling in his chair, eyes and mouth open, staring blankly at the ceiling. He caught a strange, floral smell emanating from the officer and gingerly extended a hand to prod his waxy, damp face. The watch officer slumped forward, knocking his tea glass over. The flower-stink grew stronger as the liquid pooled on the floor.

Rufin’s hand flew to his mouth. ‘Poison!’ Without looking back, he ran to the cupola door and raced away, footsteps banging off the metal gantries.

Spear reached out a hand and rubbed the edge of the ornate tapestry between Hyssos’s thick fingers. The complex depiction on the hanging was of the Emperor, smiting some form of bull-like alien with a gigantic sword made of fire.

He rolled his eyes at the banal pomposity of the thing and stepped away, carelessly brushing fibres of broken thread from his hands. Touching the object was forbidden, but there was nobody here in the audience chamber to see him do it. The killer idly wondered if the residue left by the daemonskin of his flesh-cloak would poison and shrivel the ancient artwork. He hoped it would; the idea of the humans aboard the Iubar running about and panicking as the piece blackened and corroded amused him no end.

He glanced out of the viewing windows as he wandered the length of the chamber. The curve of Iesta Veracrux was slipping away beneath the starship’s keel as it turned for open space, and Spear was not sorry to see it go. He had spent too long on that world, living in the inanities of its civilisation, play-acting at a half-dozen different roles. Since his arrival, Spear had been many faces – among them a vagrant, a storeman, a streetwalker, a jager and a reeve, living the lie of their ridiculous, pointless existences. He had stacked their corpses, and all the others, to make the ladder that led him to where he now stood.

A few more murders. One, perhaps two more assumptions. And then he would be close to the mark. The greatest prey of them all, in fact. A shiver of anticipation rippled through him. Spear was eager, but he reined the emotion in, pushed it down. Now was not the time to be dazzled by the scope of his mission. He had to maintain his focus.

Before, such a slip might have been problematic; he was convinced that such thoughts were how the psyker wench Perrig had been able to gather a vague sense of him down on Iesta. But with her no more than a pile of ashes in a jar in the Iubar’s Chamber of Rest, that threat was gone for the moment. Spear knew from Hyssos’s memories that Baron Eurotas had spent much influence and coin in order to bend the Imperium’s fear-driven rules about the censure of psychics; and given the present condition of the Consortium’s welfare, that would not be repeated. The next time he met a psyker, he would be prepared.

He smirked. That was something unexpected he pulled from the operative’s ebbing thoughts. The Void Baron’s secret, and the explanation for the shabby appearance of his agency’s compound on Iesta; for all the outward glitter and show the merchant clan put on for the galaxy at large, the truth whispered in the corridors of its ships was that the fortunes of Eurotas were waning. Little wonder then that the clan’s master was so desperate to hold on to any skein of power he still had.

It made things clearer; Spear had known that sooner or later, if he murdered enough members of the Eurotas staff and made it look like Sigg was the killer, the baron would send an operative to investigate. He never expected him to come in person.

Matters must be severe…

Spear halted in front of the red jade frieze, and reached out to touch it, tracing a fingertip over the sculpting of the Warrant of Trade. This place was full of glittering prizes, of that there could be no doubt. A thief in Spear’s place could make himself richer than sin – but the killer had his sights set on something worth far more than any of these pretty gewgaws. What he wanted was the key to the greatest kill of his life.

The hubris of the rogue trader irritated Spear. Here, in this room, there were objects that could command great riches, if only they were brought to market. But Eurotas was the sort who would rather bleed himself white and eat rat-meat before he would give up the gaudy trappings of his grandeur.

As if thought of him was a summons, the doors to the audience chamber opened and the Void Baron entered in a distracted, irritable humour. He shrugged off his planetfall jacket and tossed it at one of the squad of servitors and human adjutants trailing behind him. ‘Hyssos,’ he called, beckoning.

Spear imitated the operative’s usual bow and came closer. ‘My lord. I had not expected your shuttle to return to the Iubar until after we broke orbit.’

‘I had you voxed,’ Eurotas replied, shaking his head. ‘Your communicator implant must be malfunctioning.’

He touched his neck. ‘Oh. Of course. I’ll have it seen to.’

The baron went for a crystalline cabinet and gestured at it; a mechanism inside poured a heavy measure of wine into a glass goblet, which he snatched up and drank deeply. He gulped it down without savouring it. ‘We are done with our visit to this world,’ Eurotas told him, his manner veering towards a brooding sullenness. ‘And it has taken our dear Perrig along the way.’ He shook his head again and fixed Spear with an accusing glare. ‘Do you know what she cost me? A moon, Hyssos. I had to cede an entire bloody moon to the Adeptus Terra just to own her.’ He walked on, across the mosaic floor. The cabinet raised itself up on brass wheels and rolled obediently after him.

Spear searched for the right thing to say. ‘She had a good life with us. We all valued her contribution to the clan.’

The baron turned his glare on the vanishing planet. ‘The Governor would not stop talking,’ he said. ‘They wanted our fleet to remain in orbit for another week, something about “helping to stimulate the local economy”…’ He snorted with derision. ‘But I have little stomach for the festivals they had planned. I walked out on them. More important things to do. Imperial service and all that.’

Spear nodded thoughtfully, deciding to feed the man’s mood. ‘The best choice, my lord. With the situation as it is in this sector, it makes sense for the clan to keep the flotilla moving. To be in motion is to be safe.’

‘Safe from him.’ Eurotas took another drink. ‘But the bastard Warmaster is killing us by inches even so!’ His voice went up. ‘Every planet he binds to him costs us a weight in Throne Gelt that we cannot recover!’ For a moment, it seemed as if the baron was about to give voice to something that might have been considered treasonable; but then he caught himself, like a man afraid he would be overheard, and his expression changed. ‘We will head for the edge of this system and then make space to the rendezvous point at the Arrowhead Nebula.’

Spear knew already what their next port of call would be, but he asked anyway. ‘What will our intentions be there, lord?’

‘We will lay to wait to assemble the clan’s full fleet, and while we are there meet a ship from Sotha. Aboard are a party of remembrancers under the Emperor’s aegis. I will personally take them home to Terra, as the Council has requested.’

‘The security of the remembrancers is of great concern,’ said Spear. ‘I will make all arrangements to ensure their safety from the moment they board the Iubar to the moment we bring them to the Imperial Palace.’

Eurotas looked away. ‘I know you’ll do what is required.’

Spear had to fight down the urge to grin. The path was open, and now all that he needed to do was follow it all the way to the end. To the very gates of the Emperor’s fortress–

NO

The voice crackled in his ears like breaking glass, and Spear jerked, startled.

NO NO NO

The baron did not appear to have heard it; the killer felt a peculiar twitch in his hands and he glanced down at them. For one terrible moment, the skin there bubbled and went red, before shifting back to the dark shades of Hyssos’s flesh. He hid them behind his back.

NO

Then the echo made the origin of the sound clear. Spear let his gaze turn inwards and he felt it in there, moving like mercury.

Sabrat. Until this moment, Spear had believed the purgation that the idiot reeve’s cohort interrupted had gone to plan, but now his certainty crumbled. There was still some fraction of the stolid fool’s self hiding in the shadowed depths of the killer’s mind, some part of the false self he had worn that had not been expunged. He pushed in and was sickened by the sense of it, the loathsome, nauseating morality of the dead man staining his mind. It was bubbling up like bile, pushing to the top of his thoughts. A scream of recrimination.

‘Hyssos?’ Eurotas was staring at him. ‘Are you all right, man?’

‘I…’

NO NO NO NO NO

‘No.’ Spear coughed out the word, his eyes watering, and then with effort took control of himself once more. ‘No, lord,’ he went on. ‘I… A moment of fatigue, that’s all.’ With a physical effort, the killer silenced the cries and took a shuddering breath.

‘Ah.’ The baron approached and gave him a kindly pat on the shoulder. ‘You were closest to the psyker. There’s no shame in being affected by her loss.’

‘Thank you,’ said Spear, playing into the moment. ‘It has been difficult. Perhaps, with your permission, I might take some respite?’

Eurotas gave him a fatherly nod. ‘Do so. I want you rested when we reach the rendezvous.’

‘Aye, lord,’ Spear bowed again and walked away. Unseen by anyone else, he buried the nails of his hand in his palm, cutting the waxy flesh there; but no blood emerged from the ragged meat.

Rufin found another intercom panel on the station’s mezzanine level and used it to send out an all-posts alert; but if anything he became even more afraid when the only men that reported back were the ones at the armoury. He told them to hold the line and started on his way to them. If he could get there before any of the terrorist attackers did, he could open the secure locks and drag out all the big, lethal weapons that he had been so far denied the chance to use. There were autocannons down there, grenade launchers and flamers… He’d give these loyalist bastards a roasting for daring to cross him, oh yes…

Descending an enclosed stairwell, he caught sight of the western platforms. Monorails there were filling with prisoners, each one closing its doors and moving off seemingly of its own will, carrying the inmates to freedom. The first few to go had ploughed through the barricades across the lines; now there was nothing to stop a mass exodus. Rufin didn’t care, though; he would let them go, as long as he could keep the guns.

Reaching the lowest levels, he found the men at the first guard post were gone. In their place there were piles of clothing and lumps of soggy ash, illuminated by the flickering overhead strip lights. The air here felt cold and oppressive, and Rufin broke into a run again, propelled from the place by a cold pressure that was like a shadow falling over his soul.

He turned the corner and ran towards the armoury post. Six men were there, and all of them were pale and afraid. They saw him coming and beckoned frantically, as if he were being chased by something only they could see.

‘What happened back there?’ he snapped, turning his ire on the first man he saw. ‘Talk, rot you!’

‘Screaming,’ came the reply. ‘Oh, sir, a screaming like you ain’t never heard. From Hades itself, sir.’

Rufin’s fear bubbled over into anger and he backhanded the man. ‘Make sense, you fool! It’s the terrorists!’

At that moment, the floor below them exploded upwards, the iron grid-plates spinning away as a hulking figure burst out of the conduits beneath. Rufin saw a grinning, fanged skull made of tarnished silver and then a massive handgun. A single shot from the weapon struck one of the guards with such force it blew him back into another man, the velocity carrying them both into the curved wall where they became a bloody ruin.

Rufin stumbled away as the dark shape blurred, releasing an inhuman snarl. Gunfire sang from the weapons of the guards, but it seemed to make no difference. There were wet, tearing noises, concussive blasts of bolt-fire, the dense sounds of meat under pressure, breaking and bursting. Something whistled through the air and hit Rufin in the chest.

He went to his knees and slumped against the wall, blinking. Like a blood-painted dagger, a broken human femur, freshly ripped from a still-cooling corpse, protruded from his chest. Rufin vomited black, sticky spittle and felt himself start to die.

The skull-faced figure came to him, trembling with adrenaline, and spat through the grille of the mask. ‘Oh dear,’ it rumbled. ‘I think I broke him.’

Rufin heard a tutting sound and a second figure, this one more human than the clawed killer, hove into view. ‘This is the base commander. We needed him to open the ammunition store.’

‘So?’ said the skull-face. ‘Can’t you do your trick?’

‘It’s not a parlour game for your amusement, Eversor.’ He heard a sigh and then a sound like old leather being twisted.

Through blurry eyes Rufin saw his own reflection; or was it? It seemed to be talking to him. ‘Say your name,’ said the mirror-face.

‘You know… who I am,’ he managed. ‘We’re Goeda Rufin.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ Now it sounded like him too.

The mirror-face drifted away, towards the locking alcove near the heavy iron hatch that secured the ammo stores. It was impregnable, Rufin remembered. The built-in security cogitator needed to recognise both his features and his vocal imprint before it would open.

His face and voice…

‘Goeda Rufin,’ said the mirror, and with a crunch of gears the armoury hatch began to swing open.

Rufin tried to understand how that could be happening, but the answer was still lost to him when his heart finally stopped.

The rendezvous was a spur-line outside a storage depot in the foothills, several kilometres beyond the capital. Under Tariel’s guiding hand, the simple drive-brains of the monorails had obeyed his command and cut fast routes through the network that confused the PDF spy drones sent to follow them. Now they were all here, emptying their human cargoes as the sun set over the hillside.

Kell watched the rag-tag resistance fighters gather the freed people into groups, some of them welcomed back into the fold as lost brothers in arms, others formed into parties that would split off in separate directions and go to ground, in hopes of riding out the conflict. He saw Beye and Grohl moving among them. The woman gave him a nod of thanks, but all the man returned was a steady, measuring look.

Kell understood his position. Even after they had done what he had charged them to do, and obliterated a major stockpile of turncoat weapons into the bargain, Grohl could still not find the will to trust them.

Because he is right not to, said a voice in his thoughts; a voice that spoke with his sister’s words. The rebels believed Kell and the others were some kind of advance unit, a scouting party of special operatives sent as the vanguard of an Imperial plan to retake Dagonet in the Emperor’s name. Like so many things about the assassins, this too was a lie.

A man in a hood emerged from the midst of the rebels and said something to Beye; but it was Grohl’s reaction that gave away his identity, the sudden jerk of the severe man’s head, the tensing of his body.

Kell drew himself up as the man came closer, drawing back the hood. He was bald and muscular, with a swarthy cast to his skin, and he had sharp eyes. The Vindicare saw the tips of complex tattoos peeking up from his collar. Kell offered his hand. ‘Capra.’

‘Kell.’ The freedom fighter took it and they shook, palm to wrist. ‘I understand I have the Emperor to thank for this.’ He nodded at the trains. ‘And for you.’

‘The Imperium never turns its face from its citizens,’ he replied. ‘We’re here to help you win your war.’

A shadow passed over Capra’s face. ‘You may be too late. My people are tired, few, scattered.’ He spoke in low tones that would not carry. ‘It would be more a service to help us find safe passage elsewhere, let some of us come back with the reprisal force as tactical advisors.’

Kell did not break eye contact with the rebel leader. ‘We did this in a day. Imagine what we can do together, in the days ahead.’

Capra’s gaze shifted to where the rest of the Execution Force stood, waiting silently. ‘Beye was right. You are an impressive group. Perhaps… Perhaps with you at our sides, there is a chance.’

‘More than a chance,’ insisted Kell. ‘A certainty.’

Finally, the man’s expression changed, the weariness, the doubt melting away. In its place, there was a new strength. New purpose. He wanted so badly for them to be their salvation, Kell could almost taste it. Capra nodded. ‘The fate of Dagonet rests with us, my friend. We will not forsake it.’

‘No,’ he said, as Capra walked away, gathering his men to him as he began to rally them with firebrand oratory.

But the rebels would not know the truth, not until it was too late; that the fate of Dagonet was only a means to a single end.

To place the Archtraitor Horus between Eristede Kell’s crosshairs.