Nemesis

ELEVEN Hidden / Sacrifice / Cages

The caverns were deep inside the canyons of a rocky and forbidding landscape that the Dagoneti called the Bladecut. From the ground, the real meaning of the name wasn’t clear, but up high, when glimpsed through the lenses of one of the aerial drones the rebels had captured, it was obvious. The Bladecut was a massive ravine that moved easterly across the stone wilderness beyond the capital, the shape of it like a giant axe wound in the surface of the landscape. There were no roads, nothing but animal trails and half-hidden hunting routes that meandered into sharp gullies which concealed the mouths of the cave network. Thousands of years ago, this had been the site of the first Dagonet colony, where the new arrivals from Terra had huddled in the gloom while their planetforming technologies, now lost to history, had worked to make the world’s harsh environment more habitable for them. The rebels had retaken the old halls of stone, secure in the knowledge that deep inside nothing would be able to dislodge them short of bombing the hills into powder.

Jenniker Soalm walked through the meandering tunnels, her face concealed in the depths of her hood, passing chambers laser-cut from the rock, ragged chainmail curtains hanging over their entrances, others closed off behind heavy impact-welded hatches. Inside the caves everything was in a permanent twilight, with the only constant the watery glow of biolume pods glued to the stone ceiling at random intervals. Capra’s people – some of them warriors, many more civilians and even children – passed her as she walked on.

Soalm glimpsed snatches of the everyday life of the resistance through gaps in the curtains or past open doors. She saw Beye and a few others surrounding a chart table piled high with paper maps; across the way, a makeshift armoury full of captured PDF weaponry; a skinny cook who looked up at her, in the middle of stirring a huge iron drum of thick soup; refugees clustered around a brazier, and nearby a pair of children playing, apparently ignorant of the grim circumstances. The latter was no surprise to her; the rebels did not have much choice about where their people could go to ground.

Further on, she saw a side-chamber that had been converted into a drab approximation of an infirmary, right beside a workroom where figures in shadow were bent over a jury-rigged device trailing wires and connectors. Soalm detected the familiar odour of chemical explosives as she moved on.

A hatch was creaking shut as she approached, and she turned to see. As it closed, one of Capra’s men gave her a blank look from within; over his shoulder she saw a bloodied trooper in clan colours tied to a chair, a moment before he disappeared out of sight. She paused, and heard footsteps behind her.

Soalm turned and saw a pair of refugee children approach, eyes wide with fear and daring. They were both grimy, both in shapeless fatigues too big for them; she couldn’t tell if they were boys or girls.

‘Hey,’ said the taller of the two. ‘The Emperor sent you, right?’

She gave a nod. ‘In a way.’

There was awe in their expressions. ‘Is he like he is in the picts? A giant?’

Soalm managed a smile. ‘Bigger than that, even.’

The other child was about to add something, but an adult turned the corner ahead and gave them both a stern look. ‘You know you’re not supposed to play down here. Get back to your lessons!’

They broke into a run and vanished back the way they had come. Soalm turned to study the man.

‘Are you looking for something?’ he asked warily.

‘I’m just walking,’ she admitted. ‘I needed a moment… to think.’

He pointed past her, blocking her path. ‘You should probably go back.’ The man seemed hesitant, as if he wasn’t sure he had the authority to tell her what to do.

The Execution Force fit strangely among the freedom fighter group. In the weeks that had passed since they liberated the prison camp in the city, Soalm and the others had gained a kind of guarded acceptance, but little more. Under Kell’s orders, each of them had turned their particular skill-sets towards aiding the rebel cause. Tariel’s technical expertise was in constant demand, and Koyne showed a natural aptitude for teaching combat tactics to men and women who had, until recently, been farmers, teachers and shopkeepers. Meanwhile, Iota and the Garantine would go missing for days at a time, and the only evidence of their activities would be intercepted reports from the communication network, stories of destroyed outposts or whole patrols eviscerated by ghostly assailants. As for her brother, he kept his distance from her, working with Capra, Beye and Grohl on battle plans.

Soalm did her part too, but as the days drew on it disturbed her more and more. They were helping the rebels score victories, not just here but through other resistance cells all across the planet; but it was based on a lie. If not for the arrival of the assassins on Dagonet, the war would have been over. Instead they were bolstering it, infusing fresh violence into a conflict that should have already petered out.

The Venenum was precise in what she did; surgical and clean. Collateral damage was a term she refused to allow into her lexicon, and yet here they were, their presence more damaging to the locals than the guns of the nobles.

The man pointed again. ‘Back that way,’ he repeated. Dispelling her moment of reverie, Soalm realised that he was trying to hide something.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I think not.’ Before he could react, she pushed past him and followed the turn of the narrowing corridor as it dropped into a shallow slope. The man reached for her robes to stop her, and she tapped a dot of liquid onto the back of his hand from one of her wrist dispensers. The effect was immediate; he went pale and fell to the ground, the muscles in his legs giving out.

The corridor opened up into another cavern, this one wide and low. In the middle of the dimly-lit space there was a thermal grate throwing out a warm orange glow; surrounding it were rings of chairs, some scattered cushions and salvaged rugs. A knot of people were there, crowded around an older woman who held an open book in her hand. Soalm had the impression of interrupting a performance in mid-flow.

The older woman saw the assassin and fear crossed her expression. Her audience were a mix of all kinds of people from the camp. Two of them, both fighters, sprang to their feet and came forwards with threats in their eyes.

Soalm raised her hands to defend herself, but the old woman called out. ‘No! Stop! We’ll have no violence!’

‘Milady–’ began one of the others, but she waved him to silence, and with visible effort, she drew herself up. Soalm saw the echoes of a lifetime of grace and fortitude there in the old woman’s face.

She pushed through the ring of people and faced her interloper. ‘I am… I was Lady Astrid Sinope. I am not afraid of you.’

Soalm cocked her head. ‘That’s not true.’

Sinope’s aristocratic demeanour faltered. ‘No… No, I suppose it is not.’ She recovered slightly. ‘Ever since Beye told us you were on Dagonet, I knew that this moment would come. I knew one of you would find us.’

‘One of us?’

‘The Emperor’s warriors,’ she went on. ‘Capra said you were the instruments of his will. So come, then. Do what you must.’

‘I don’t understand…’ Soalm began, but the old woman kept talking.

‘I ask only that you show mercy to my friends here.’ Sinope held up the heavy book in her hands. ‘I brought this to Dagonet. I brought it here, to the resistance, when I fled the treachery of my former noble clan. If anyone must suffer because of that, it should be me alone.’ Her eyes glittered with unspent tears. ‘If I must beg you, I will. Please do not hurt them because of me.’

No one spoke as Soalm stepped past the two warriors and took the book from the old woman’s trembling hands. She read aloud the words on the page. ‘The Emperor protects.’

‘We only seek solace in His name,’ said Sinope, her voice falling to a whisper. ‘I know that it is forbidden to speak openly of Him and His divine ways, but we do so only among ourselves, we do not proselytise or seek out converts!’ She clasped her hands. ‘We are so few. We take in only those who come to us of their own free will. We have hurt no one with our beliefs!’

Soalm ran her fingers over the pages of dense, solemn text. ‘You are all followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus. You believe the Emperor is a living god. The only god.’

Sinope nodded. ‘And I will die with that belief, if that is what is required. But promise me I will be the only one. Please!’

She understood, finally. ‘I have not come to purge you,’ Soalm told them. ‘I… We did not even know you were here.’ There was a strange, giddy sense of events shifting around her.

‘But you were sent from Terra…’ said one of the men.

‘Not for this,’ said the Venenum, turning to meet Lady Sinope’s gaze, raising her arm as she did so and drawing back her cuff. ‘And until this moment, I was not certain why.’ Soalm showed them a small golden chain clasped around her wrist, a charm dangling from it in the shape of the Imperial aquila. ‘But now… Now I have an inkling.’

‘She’s one of us,’ said the man. ‘She believes.’

Sinope’s expression became one of joy. ‘Oh, child,’ she said. ‘He sent you. He sent you to us.’

Soalm returned the book to her and nodded.

Kell looked up as the men boiled into the central chamber in a rush of energy and jubilation, weaving through the scattered clumps of hardware and containers, the groups of people who stopped and smiled to see them returning. They still had the smell of cordite, woodsmoke and exertion on them. He scanned the group with a practised eye and saw they had all come back, and only with a few minor injuries. The squad leader, an ex-pilot named Jedda, came over to where Capra was standing at a vox console and enveloped him in a bear hug.

‘It’s done?’ said Capra.

‘Oh, it’s more than done!’ Jedda laughed, the rush of battle still there in his voice. His men shared the moment and laughed with him. ‘Tariel’s information was dead on! We blew out the supports for the bridge and the whole cargo train went down. Hundreds of clanner troops, a dozen fan-jeeps and armoured GEVs, all of it scrap at the bottom of the Redstone river!’

‘They’ll feel that,’ snorted one of the others. ‘The nobles will be tasting blood tonight!’

Capra turned and gave Kell a nod. ‘Thank your man for me. In fact, thank them all. A month ago I would never have thought I’d be saying this, but we actually have them on the defensive. The data and guidance you’ve provided us has enabled the resistance to make coordinated strikes all over the planet. The nobles are reeling.’

‘The mistake they made was their arrogance,’ said Koyne, wandering up to the group. The men parted to let the Callidus come closer; they were all unnerved by the bland, unfinished cast to the assassin’s neutral features. ‘They believed they had won, and lowered their guard. They didn’t expect you to hit back in synchrony. You’ve put them off balance.’

‘We’ll help you keep up the pressure,’ Kell told the resistance leader. ‘All we’ve done so far is show you how to find the cracks in their armour. You need to keep widening them until they break.’

Jedda nodded to himself. ‘We didn’t lose a single man tonight. We keep this up, the commoners who haven’t committed will side with us.’ He grinned at Kell. ‘At this rate, your fleet might get here and find it has nothing to do!’

‘We can only hope,’ said Koyne, drawing a look from the Vindicare.

‘Capra!’ Beye crossed the chamber at a jog, ‘Grohl’s back!’

Kell saw the grim-faced freedom fighter following her, unfurling his overhood and cloak. He had a scuffed carryall over one shoulder.

‘From the capital?’ said Jedda. ‘We made a lot of noise tonight, Terrik! Did they hear it back there in the towers?’ His triumphant mood rolled against the other man’s stony countenance and rebounded without effect.

‘They heard all right,’ said Grohl. He dropped the carryall on a crate being used as a makeshift table and threw off his robes with an irritable shake. ‘The Governor made a broadcast over all the communications channels. A declaration, he called it.’

The group fell silent. Kell saw the moment radiate out across the cavern to every person within earshot.

‘Let’s see it, then,’ said Capra.

Grohl opened the case and produced a memory spool, the commercial kind that any core world civilian home of moderate means possessed. ‘One of our contacts recorded this off the public watch-wire. It’s repeating in a loop at the top of each hour.’ Jedda went to take it from him, but Grohl didn’t give it up. ‘Perhaps you should look at this somewhere more… private.’

Capra considered that for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No. If it’s on the wire, then everyone else knows about it. Our people should too.’

Jedda took the spool and inserted it into a hololithic reader. With a buzzing hum, the device projected the ghostly image of a man in heavy dress uniform, a braided cap upon his head. He was standing before a lectern, and Kell noticed that it bore the sigil of an open, slitted eye; the symbol of the Sons of Horus.

‘Governor Nicran,’ said Jedda with a sneer. ‘I wonder where he recorded this? Cowering in the basement of his mansion?’

‘Quiet!’ hissed Grohl. ‘Listen.’

Kell watched the hololith carefully as the Governor began with empty pleasantries and vapid words of praise for his puppet masters in the noble clans. He read the politician’s expressions, for a moment imagining he was seeing that face down the sights of his Exitus longrifle. Nicran had all the look about him of a desperate man. Then he turned to the important part of the announcement.

‘Citizens of Dagonet,’ he said, ‘I have been gravely disturbed to learn of the deaths of many of our brave PDF troopers in the ongoing and ruthless attacks perpetrated by the resistance. Attacks that have also claimed the lives of many innocent civilians…’

‘Bollocks they have,’ snarled Jedda. ‘Clanner blood only!’

‘I applaud the vigilance of our troopers and recognise their bravery,’ Nicran continued. ‘But I also listen when their commanders tell me that the enemy hiding among us is a clear and present danger we have yet to overcome. And so, rather than prolong this terrible fighting and waste more precious Dagoneti lives, I have petitioned for assistance.’

‘What does that mean?’ muttered one of Jedda’s men. Kell kept his expression unchanged, aware that Koyne was watching him closely.

Across the chamber, a hush had fallen as everyone hung on Nicran’s words. ‘Centuries ago, when Dagonet was beneath the shadow of corrupt priest-kings, we faced a similar crisis. And then, as now, a warrior came to aid us. A master of war who freed us from fear and terror.’ The Governor blinked and licked his lips; Kell felt an odd tingle of anticipation in his trigger finger. ‘Citizens, I have this day received word from the fleet of the Sons of Horus. They are coming to Dagonet to deliver us, and the great hero Horus Lupercal will be with them. Have no fear. The retribution of the Astartes will be swift and terrible, but in its wake the freedom we crave, freedom of liberty, freedom from the stifling rule of a distant and uncaring Emperor, will be ours.’

Grohl tapped a key on the projector and the image died. ‘And there it is.’

It was as if something had sucked all the air from the chamber; Nicran’s statement had shocked the rebels into silence.

Jedda spoke first. ‘Astartes…’ he whispered, all trace of his earlier elation gone. ‘Coming here?’ He looked to Capra. ‘We… We can’t fight Space Marines. Clan troopers are one thing, but the Warmaster’s elite…’

‘They are like nothing we have ever seen,’ Grohl said darkly. ‘Genetically enhanced superhumans. Living weapons. Angels of death. A handful of them can crush armies–’

‘So what should we do, then?’ snapped Beye angrily. ‘Surrender at once? Shoot ourselves and save them the trouble?’

‘They’ll destroy us all,’ Grohl insisted. ‘The only hope we have is to disband our forces and lose ourselves in the general populace, that or flee off-world before their warships arrive.’ He glared at Kell. ‘Because our salvation won’t be here before Horus, will it?’

‘He’s right, Capra,’ said Jedda, his tone bleak. ‘Against men, we’ve got a fighting chance. But we can’t beat war gods–’

‘They’re not gods,’ Kell snarled, quieting him. ‘They are not invulnerable. They bleed red like any one of us. They can die.’ He met Grohl’s look. ‘Even Horus.’

Capra gave a slow nod. ‘Kell’s right. The Astartes are formidable, but they can be beaten.’ He gave the Vindicare a level stare. ‘Tell me they can be beaten.’

‘I killed a Space Marine,’ said Kell. Koyne’s bland expression flickered as something like surprise crossed the other assassin’s face. Kell ignored it and went on. ‘And I’m still here.’

‘Capra…’ Grohl started to speak again, but the rebel leader waved him into silence.

‘I need to think on this,’ he told them. ‘Beye, come with me.’ Capra walked away with the woman, and Kell watched him go. Grohl gave the Vindicare a harsh look and left him with Jedda and the other warriors following.

Kell picked up the memory spool and weighed it in his hand.

‘Did you really terminate an Astartes?’ said Koyne.

‘You know the rules,’ Kell replied, without looking away. ‘A clade’s targets are its own concern.’

The Callidus sniffed. ‘It doesn’t matter. Even if you did, it’s just one truth among a handful of pretty lies. That one, Grohl? He’s the smartest of all this lot. The Sons of Horus will destroy them, and turn this world into a funeral pyre along the way. I’ve seen how the Astartes fight.’

Kell rounded on the shade and stepped closer. ‘The Warmaster is coming here. That’s all that matters.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ said Koyne. ‘And by the time Capra and the other ones who have decided to trust you realise that’s all we want, it will be too late.’ The other assassin leaned in. ‘But let me ask you this, Kell. Do you feel any remorse about what we’re doing? Do you feel any pity for these people?’

The Vindicare looked away. ‘The Imperium appreciates their sacrifice.’

The quarters aboard the Iubar belonging to operative Hyssos were as predictably dull as Spear had expected them to be. There were only a few flashes of individuality here and there – a cabinet with a few bottles of good amasec, a shelf of paper-plas books on a wide variety of subjects, and some rather indifferent pencil sketches that the man had apparently drawn himself. Spear’s lip curled at the dead man’s pretension; perhaps he thought he was some kind of warrior-poet, standing sentinel over the people of the Eurotas clan by day, touching a sensitive artistic soul by night.

The truth was nowhere near as dignified, however. Delving through the morass of jumbled memories he had stolen from Hyssos’s dead brain, Spear found more than enough incidents where the security operative had been called upon to use his detective skills to smooth over situations with native law enforcement on worlds along the Taebian trade axis. The Consortium’s crews and officers broke laws on other worlds and it was Hyssos who was forced to find locals to take the blame or the right men to bribe. He cleaned up messes left by the Void Baron and his family, and on some level the man had hated himself for it.

Spear had extruded a number of eyes and allowed them to wander the room, sweeping for surveillance devices. Finding nothing, he reconsumed them and then rested, letting his outer aspect relax. The fleshy matter coating his body lost a little definition; to an outside observer, it would have looked like an image slipping out of focus through a lens. He sensed a faint call from the daemonskin. It wanted fresh blood – but then it always wanted fresh blood. Spear let some of the remains of Hyssos he had kept in his secondary stomach ooze out to be absorbed by the living sheath, and it quieted.

He sat at the desk across from the sleeping alcove. Laid out over the surface were a half-dozen data-slates, each of them displaying layers of information about the Iubar. There were deck plans and security protocols, conduit diagrams, patrol servitor routings, even a copy of the Void Baron’s daily itinerary. Spear’s long, spidery fingers danced over them, plucking slates from the pile for a moment, putting them back, selecting others. A strategy was forming, and the more he gave it his consideration, the more he realised that it would need to be implemented sooner rather than later.

The rogue trader’s flagship had dropped out of the churn of the warp near a neutron star in the Cascade Line, to take sightings and rest the drives before setting off to the rendezvous at Arrowhead. They would be here no more than a day, and once the Iubar was back in the immaterium, the energy flux from the vessel’s Geller field generators would interfere with Spear’s plans to break into Eurotas’s personal reliquary. The flux had the unfortunate side effect of causing distress to the daemonskin, rendering some of its more useful traits ineffectual. It would have to be done soon, then–

NO

Spear flinched and his whole body rippled with a sudden jolt of pain. The echoing screech lanced through him like a laser.

NO NO NO NO NO NO

‘Shut up!’ he spat, pushing away from the desk, shaking his head. ‘Shut up!’

The voice within tried to cry out again, but he smothered it with a sharp exhale of air and a tensing of his will. For a moment, Spear felt it inside himself, deep down in the black depths of his spirit – the flickering ember of light. A tiny piece of Yosef Sabrat’s soul, trapped and furious.

The killer dropped to the floor of the room and bowed his head, closed his eyes. He drew inwards, let his thoughts fall into himself. It was akin to sinking into an ocean of dark, heavy oil – but instead of resisting it, Spear allowed himself to be filled by the blackness, relishing the sensation of drowning.

He plunged into the void of his own shattered psyche, searching for the foreign, the human, the thought-colours of a dead man. It was difficult; the faint echoes of every life he had destroyed and then imitated all still lingered here somewhere. But they had all been purged through the ritual rites, and what remained was just a shallow imprint, like the shadows burnt on walls by the flash of a nuclear fireball. Something of Yosef Sabrat was still here, though. Something tenacious that obstinately refused to allow Spear to expunge it, clinging on.

And there it was, a glow in the gloom. Spear’s animus leapt at it, fangs out, ready to rip it to shreds. The killer found it cloaked in a memory, a moment – a terrible burning pain. He laughed as he realised he was experiencing the instant when he had pierced Sabrat’s heart with a bone-blade, but this time from his victim’s point of view.

The pain was blinding – and familiar. Spear hesitated; yes, he knew this feeling, this exact feeling. Sabrat’s memory echoed one of his own, a memory from the killer’s past.

Too late, Spear understood that the fragment had fled his grasp, cleverly cloaking itself in the similarity; and too late, he was dragged into his own past. Back to an experience that had made him into the monster he was.

Back to the cage. The pain and the cage…

Voices outside. The armoured warriors moving and speaking. War-angels and gun-lords, black souls and beasts.

Voices.

‘Is this it?’ A commander-master, clear from tone and manner. Obeyed, yes.

‘Aye, my lord,’ says the wounded one. ‘A pariah, according to the logs left by the Silent Sisterhood. But I have not seen the like. And they didn’t know what it was, either. It was bound for destruction, most likely.’

The master-to-be-his-master comes closer. He sees a face filled with wonderment and hatred.

‘I smell the witch-stink on it. It did not die with the rest of the crew and cargo?’

‘The Emperor’s Black Ships are resilient vessels. Some were bound to live beyond our bombardment.’

A pause, during which he takes some sharp breaths, trying to listen to the voices.

‘Tell me what it did.’

A sigh, weary and fearful. ‘I was attacked. It took a finger from me. With its teeth.’

Mocking laughter. ‘And you let it live?’

‘I would have destroyed it, lord, but then it… Then it killed the Codicier. Brother Sadran.’

Laughter stopped now. Anger colouring. ‘How?’

‘Sadran lost an ear to it. Eaten, swallowed whole. Then the witch stood there and waited to be killed. Sadran…’ The wounded one is finding it hard to explain. ‘Sadran turned his fury on the thing and it reflected it back.’

‘Reflected…’ The master-voice, different again. Interested.

‘Fires, lord. Sadran was consumed by his own fires.’ The shapes move around in the shadows beyond the cage bars.

‘I’ve never encountered a pariah capable of that…’ The master comes close, and he has his first real look at it. ‘You’re something special, aren’t you?’

‘It may be a fluke birth,’ says the injured one. ‘Or perhaps some throwback from the experimentations of the Adeptus Telepathica.’

A smile grows wide in the gloom. ‘It may also be an opportunity.’

He presses up towards the bars, allowing himself to reach the ethereal edges of his senses towards the commander-master.

‘We should kill it,’ says the other voice.

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

He touches a mind, and for the first time in his life finds something that is darker than himself. A stygian soul, steeped in blackness, initiated into realms beyond his ability to know.

‘My Lord Erebus–’ the injured one tries to argue, but the master silences him with a look.

‘These are your orders, brother-captain,’ says the dark-hearted one. ‘Remove all trace that we were ever here, and ensure that this vessel becomes lost to the void. I will gather what we came for… and bring our new friend here into the bargain.’ The one called Erebus smiles again. ‘I think we will have use for him.’

As the other warrior departs, the master leans in. ‘Do you have a name?’ he asks.

It has been a long time since he has spoken, and it takes a moment to form the word; but finally he manages. ‘Spear.’

Erebus nods. ‘Your first lesson, then. I am your master.’ Then the warrior is a blur, and there is a blade in his hand, and then the blade is in Spear’s chest and the pain is blinding, burning.

‘I am your master,’ Erebus says once again. ‘And from now on, you will kill only who I tell you to kill.’

Spear reels back. He nods, giving his fealty. The pain fills him, fills the cage.

The pain and the cage…

The moment snapped like brittle glass and Spear jerked upright, his foot kicking out and knocking over a chair. He scrambled to his feet, catching sight of his face in a mirror. Hyssos’s aspect was pasty, like unfired clay. He grimaced and tried to concentrate; but the encounter with the memory fragment and the flash of his past had cut to his core. He was breathing hard, the daemonskin on his hands rippling crimson.

‘Operative?’ Someone was knocking on his cabin door. ‘I heard a cry. Are you all right in there?’

‘I’m fine!’ he shouted back. ‘It… I fell from my bed. It’s nothing.’

‘You’re sure?’ He recognised the voice now; it was one of the duty officers on this deck.

‘Go away!’ he snapped.

‘Aye, sir,’ said the officer, after a moment, and he heard footsteps recede.

Spear walked to the mirror and glared at Hyssos’s face as it resurfaced. ‘You can’t stop me,’ he told the reflection. ‘None of you can. None of you.’

In recognition of their help, the rebels had given all the members of the Execution Force quarters in one of the smaller chambers off the main corridor. The rooms were no bigger than holding cells, but they were dry and they had privacy, which was more than could be said for many of the communal sleeping areas.

Soalm didn’t knock and wait outside her brother’s compartment; instead she slammed the corroded metal door open and stormed into the room.

He looked up from the makeshift table before him, where the disassembled components of his longrifle lay like an exploded technical diagram. Lines of bullets were arranged in rows like tiny sentries on a parade ground. He stopped himself from drawing his Exitus pistol and returned to the work of cleaning his firearm. ‘Where are your manners, Jenniker?’ he said.

She closed the door and folded her arms. ‘We’re doing this, then?’ she said. ‘We’re actually going to sacrifice all these people just to complete the mission?’

‘What was your first clue?’ he asked. ‘Was it when I told you that was our plan, on board the Ultio? Or when Valdor made it exactly, precisely clear what our objective was?’

‘You’re manipulating Capra and his people,’ she insisted.

‘This is what we do,’ said her brother. ‘Don’t pretend you’ve never done the same thing to get close to a mark. Lied and cheated?’

‘I’ve never put innocents in harm’s way. The whole motive for the Officio Assassinorum is to move sightless and unseen, leave no trace but the corpse of our target… But you’re cutting a road of blood for us to follow!’

‘This isn’t the Great Crusade any more, dear sister.’ He put down his tools and studied her. ‘Are you so naïve that you don’t see that? We’re not thinning the ranks of a few degenerate bohemian fops in the halls of some hive-world, or terminating a troublesome xenos commander. We’re on the front lines of a civil war. The rules of engagement are very different now.’

Soalm was quiet for a moment. It had been many years since she had seen Eristede, and it made her sad to see how he had changed. She could only see the worst of him behind those dark eyes. ‘It’s not just the resistance fighters whose lives we are threatening. By keeping this conflict alive we will doom countless innocent people, perhaps even threaten the future of this entire planet and the sector beyond.’

‘Are you asking me if the death of Horus Lupercal is worth that price? That’s a question you should put to Valdor or the Master of Assassins. I am only doing what I was ordered to. Our duty is all that matters.’

She felt a surge of emotion in her chest and crushed it before it could become a snarl or a sob. ‘How can you be so cold-blooded, Eristede? We are supposed to protect the people of the Imperium, not offer them up as fodder for the cannons!’ Soalm shook her head. ‘I don’t know who you are…’

With a flash of anger, her brother bolted to his feet. ‘You don’t know me? I’m not the one who rejected her own name! I didn’t turn my back on justice!’

‘Is that what you tell yourself?’ She looked away. ‘We both had a choice all those years ago, Eristede. Escape, or revenge. But you chose revenge, and you condemned us to a life where we are nothing but killers.’

The memory came back to her in a giddy rush. They were both just children then, the scions of their family. The last surviving members of the Kell dynasty, their holdings destroyed and their parents exterminated during an internecine struggle among the aristocrats of the Thaxted Duchy. Orphaned and alone, they had been drawn into the halls of the Imperial schola and there both secretly selected by agents of the Officio Assassinorum.

Brother and sister had shown promise – Eristede was an excellent marksman for one so young, and Jenniker’s genius for botany and chemistry was clear. They knew that soon the clade directors would make their decisions, and that they would be split up, perhaps never to see one another again. In the halls of the schola they had made their plans to flee together, to eschew the assassin’s path and find a new life.

But then Clade Vindicare offered something that Eristede Kell wanted more than his freedom; the chance to avenge his mother and father. All they asked for in return was his loyalty – and consumed by hate, he gave it willingly. Jenniker had been left behind with nowhere to go but to the open arms of the Venenum.

Months later, she had learned that innocents had been killed in the hit on the man who murdered their parents, and that had been the day when she swore she would no longer go by the name of Kell again.

‘I’d hoped you might have changed since I last saw you,’ she said. ‘And you have. But not for the better.’

Her brother seemed as if he was on the verge of an outburst; but then he drew it back in and looked away. ‘You’re right,’ he told her. ‘You don’t know me. Now get out.’

‘As you command,’ Soalm said stiffly.

TWELVE A Single Drop / Messenger / Wilderness of Mirrors

The men guarding the chamber housing the Void Baron’s private reliquary had allowed their concentration to falter. Spear listened to them speak as he stood in the shadows beyond their line of sight, a few metres up along the vaulted corridor. News had filtered down through the crew hierarchy aboard the Iubar, fractions of the reports from the communicatory that warned of sightings of Adeptus Astartes on the move. No one seemed to know if they were warriors still loyal to the Emperor of Mankind, or if they were those now following the banner of the Warmaster; some even dared to suggest that all the mighty Legions of the Astartes had turned their faces from their creator, embarking on a jihad to take for themselves what they had captured for Terra during the Great Crusade.

Spear understood only small elements of the unfolding war going on across the galaxy; and in truth, it mattered little to him. The killer’s keyhole view of intergalactic conflict was enough. He cared little about sides or doctrines. All Spear needed was the kill. It was enough that his master Erebus had given him murders to commit; perhaps even the greatest murder in human history.

But before that could happen, he had steps to take. Preparations to be made.

Spear allowed the daemonskin to regain a small amount of control over itself, and the surface of his surrogate flesh shivered. Removing the shipsuit overall he had been wearing, he stepped naked into the deep shadows. Hair-like tendrils emerged from his epidermis, sampling the air and the ambient light all around. In moments Spear’s body became wet with sticky processor fluids, changing colour until it was night-dark. His features retreated behind a mask of scabbing crusts, and then he leapt soundlessly to the high ceiling. Secreted oils allowed him to adhere there, and the killer snaked slowly along his inverted pathway, passing over the heads of the guards as they fretted and spoke in low tones about threats they could not understand.

At the entrance to the reliquary there was an intelligent door possessed of a variety of sensory and thought-mechanical systems designed to open only to Merriksun Eurotas, or a member of his immediate family. It was little impediment to Spear. He slapped the daemonskin lightly as it whined in his mind, dragging on him a little as it sensed the guards and expressed a desire to drink their blood. Chastened, it obediently extruded a new, thickly-lipped mouth at his palm. Spear held the mouth over the biometric breath sensor, as the same time sending new hair-tendrils into the thin gaps around the edges of the door. They wormed their way into the locks and teased them open one by one.

It had been easy to sample the Void Baron’s breath; simply by standing close to him, Spear’s daemonskin sheath had plucked the microscopic particulate matter and DNA traces of his exhalations from the air, and stored them in a bladder. Now the second mouth puffed them out over the sensor.

There was the whisper of well-lubricated cogs and the door opened. Spear slipped inside.

Dagonet’s sun was passing low over the top of the ridgeline, and soon night would fall. Jenniker Soalm stood out on the flat expanse of stone that served as a lookout post, and looked out at the ochre rocks without really seeing them. She knew that the mission clock was winding down towards zero, and at best the Execution Force had only hours until they entered the final phase of the operation.

She could see that the others sensed it too. The Garantine had at last returned from whatever lethality he had been spreading on the clanner forces, menacing all who saw him. Tariel, Koyne and the Culexus waif were all making ready – and her brother…

Soalm knew exactly what her brother was doing.

‘Hello?’ The voice made her turn. With slow, careful steps, Lady Sinope emerged from the cave mouth behind her and approached. ‘I was told I might find you here.’

‘Milady.’ Jenniker bowed slightly.

Sinope smiled. ‘You don’t need to do that, child. I’m a noblewoman only in name now. The others let me keep the title as a gesture of respect, but the truth is the clans of this world have wiped away any honour we ever had.’

‘Others must have rejected the call to join Horus’s banner.’

The old woman nodded. ‘Oh, a few. All dead now, I think. That, or terrified into compliance.’ She sighed. ‘Perhaps He will forgive them.’

Soalm looked away. ‘I do not believe He is the forgiving kind. After all, the Emperor denies all word of his divinity.’

Sinope nodded again. ‘Indeed. But then, only the sincerely divine can do such a thing and be true in it. Those who think themselves gods are always madmen or fools. To be raised to such heights, one must be carried there on the shoulders of faith. One must guide and yet be guided.’

‘I would like some guidance myself,’ admitted the assassin. ‘I don’t know where to turn.’

‘No?’ The noblewoman found a wind-smoothed rock and sat down on it. ‘If it is not too impertinent a question, may I ask you how you found your way to the light of the Lectitio Divinitatus?’

Soalm sighed. ‘After our… after my parents were killed in a conflict between rival families, I found myself isolated and alone in the care of the Imperium. I had no one to watch over me.’

‘Only the God-Emperor.’

She nodded. ‘So I came to realise. He was the single constant in my life. The only one who did not judge me… Or leave me. I had heard stories of the Imperial Cult… It was not long before I found like-minded people.’

Sinope’s head bobbed. ‘Yes, that is often the way. Like comes to like, all across the galaxy. Here on Dagonet there are those who do not yet believe as we do – Capra and most of his people, for example – but still we share the same goals. And in the end, there are still many, many of us, child. Under different names, in different ways, everywhere you find human beings. As He led us to greatness and dispelled the fog of all the false gods and mistaken religiosity, the God-Emperor forged the path to the one truth. His truth.’

‘And yet we must hide that truth.’

The old woman sighed. ‘Aye, for the moment. Faith can be so strong at times, and yet so weak in the same moment. It is a delicate flower that must be nurtured and protected, in preparation for the day when it can truly bloom.’ She placed a hand on Jenniker’s arm. ‘And that day is coming.’

‘Not soon enough.’

Sinope’s hand fell away and she was quiet for a moment. ‘What do you want to tell me, child?’

Soalm turned to look at her, eyes narrowing. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ve been doing this since before you were born,’ said the woman. ‘Believe me, I know when someone is holding something back. You’re afraid of something, and it isn’t just this revolution we find ourselves in.’

‘Yes.’ The words came of their own accord. ‘I am afraid. I am afraid that just by coming to your world we will destroy all of this.’ She gestured around.

A brief smile crossed Sinope’s lips. ‘Oh, my dear. Don’t you realise? You have brought hope to Dagonet. That is a precious, precious thing. More fragile than faith, even.’

‘No. I did nothing. I am only… a messenger.’ Soalm wanted to tell her the truth, in that moment. To explain the full scope of the Execution Force’s plans, to reveal the real reasons behind their assistance to Capra’s freedom fighters, to cry out her darkest, deepest fear – that in her collusion with it all, she was no better than her bitter, callous brother.

But the words would not come. All she heard in her thoughts was Eristede’s challenge, the cold calculation he had laid before her; were the lives of these people worth more than the death of the Warmaster, the living embodiment of the greatest threat to the human Imperium?

Sinope came and sat with her, and slowly the old woman’s expression turned darker. ‘Let me tell you what I am afraid of,’ she said. ‘And you will understand why the struggle is so important. There are sinister forces at large in the universe, child.’

‘The Warmaster…’

‘Horus Lupercal is only an agent of that unchecked anarchy, my dear. There are manifestations coming into being on every world that falls into the shadows cast by the Warmaster’s ambition. Out in the blackness between the stars, cold hate grows.’

Soalm found the woman’s quiet, intense voice compelling, and listened in silence, captured by her words.

Sinope went on. ‘You and I, mankind itself and even the God-Emperor… All are being tested by a chorus of ruinous powers. If our Lord is truly divine, then we must know that He will have his opposite, something beyond our understanding of evil… What terrifies me is the dream of what will come if we let that hate overwhelm our glorious Imperium. There will be disorder and destruction. Fire–’

‘And chaos,’ said Jenniker.

Had the choice been his, the killer would have preferred to wait until the Iubar and its attendant ships had reached the Sol system before attempting this penetration; but Spear’s windows of opportunity were limited, and growing smaller with each passing hour. It was simply the most expedient option to do this now. Once they were within the boundaries of the Segmentum Solar, security around the Eurotas flotilla would increase tenfold and Operative Hyssos would have much to occupy his time and attention.

And then there was the other possibility to consider; that his target, once marked and stored, might be sufficiently powerful that Spear’s ability could be released against it from across an interplanetary distance. He hoped that would not prove to be so – Spear relished the moment of great joy when he looked a kill in the eye and saw the understanding of the end upon it. To be denied that in his crowning moment… It would be simply unjust.

The killer kept to the lines of tiles that glowed phosphor-green through the gelatinous lenses the daemonskin had grown over his eyes; normal human vision would have noticed nothing to differentiate the tiles on the floor of the reliquary, and so a luckless entrant would wander into one of the zones of contra-gravity stitched into the chamber – there to float trapped until the guards came with guns and ready trigger-fingers.

He ignored the works of art and objects of incredible value that arrayed the long gallery, each given pride of place in an alcove of its own. The remains of every Eurotas Void Baron since the first were held here, their ashes in urns as tall as a child, the containers made from spun diamond, tantalum, the shells of a Xexet quintal and other materials, each rarer and more expensive than the last. Portraits of lords and ladies from the clan’s history dominated every surface, and all of them stared out sightlessly at Spear as he threaded his way past, avoiding the perception spheres of beam sensors and magnetic anomaly detectors. The daemonskin’s fronds waved gently as he moved, continually tasting the ambient atmosphere and temperature to keep the intruder cooled in synchrony. The thermal monitors studding every square centimetre of the reliquary walls looked for the glow of body heat, but saw nothing. All the patient, clever machines continued to believe the chamber was still empty.

At the far end of the gallery, inside a glass stasis cage on a plinth made of white marble and platinum, was the Warrant of Trade.

Spear slowed as he approached it, licking his lips behind the bindings of his scab mask. The motion made the oily skin peel back over his cheeks, revealing teeth, a grin.

The book was made of real paper, fabricated from one of the last natural forests on Venus. The ink had been refined from burst-sac fluids harvested from Jovian skimmer rays. Artisans from Merica had assembled the tome, bound it in rich grox-hide. Inlaid on the cover, flecks of gemstones from all the colonised worlds of the Sol system shimmered in the light of the gallery’s electrocandles. This book was the physical manifestation of the Eurotas clan’s right to travel the stars. More than their fleets of vessels, their armies of staff and crew, more than the fiscal might they wielded over countless worlds and industrial holdings across the Taebian Stars – more than any of those things, the Warrant was what gave Merriksun Eurotas and his kindred the Emperor’s permission to trade, to voyage, to expand the Imperium’s influence through sheer economic power.

The killer almost laughed at that. As if any being could parcel out sections of the universe to his followers like plots of land or portions of food. What hubris. What monumental arrogance to assume that they had that entitlement. Such power could not be given; it could only be taken, through bloodshed, pain and the ruthless application of will.

The glass case had a complex mechanism of suspensors and gravity splines within it, and with the passage of a hand over a ruby sensor pad on the frame, the pages of the book inside could be turned without ever touching them. Spear flicked at the sensor and the Warrant creaked open, leaf after leaf of dense text flickering past.

It fluttered to a halt on an ornately illuminated page lined in gilt, purple ink and silver leaf. Words in High Gothic surrounded a sumptuously detailed picture repeating the image depicted in the jade frieze in the audience chamber – the Emperor granting the first Eurotas his boon. But Spear’s hungry gaze ignored the workmanship, turning instead towards a wet, liquid patch of dark crimson captured upon the featureless white vellum of the Warrant’s final page.

A single drop of blood.

He laid his hand on the edge of the case and let the daemonskin around his fingertips deliquesce, oozing into the weld holding the construction together. The heavy duty armourglass creaked and split down the seam, the malleable flesh pressing on it, shifting it out of true. All at once, a pane gave off a snap of sound, and the killer muffled it with his oily palms. The glass fell out of the frame and into his hand. He greedily reached inside, with trembling fingers.

Spear would rip the page from the ancient book, tear it out of the stasis field that had preserved it for hundreds of years. He would hold the paper to his lips and consume the blood, take it like the kiss of a lover. He would–

His hand reached for the pages of the Warrant of Trade and passed straight through it, as if the book were made of smoke. Inside the glass case, the tome seemed to flicker and grow indistinct, for one blinding moment becoming nothing but a perfect ghost image projected from a cluster of hololithic emitters concealed inside the frame of the cage.

The case was empty; and for a moment so was Spear, his chest hollowed out by the sudden, horrible realisation that his prize was not here.

But then he was filled anew with murderous rage, and it took every last fraction of his self-control to stop the killer from screaming out his fury and destroying everything around him.

After Lady Sinope had left her alone once more, Soalm remained where she was on the ridge and waited for the darkness to engulf her. The night sky, a sight that so often gave her a moment of peace as she contemplated it, now seemed only to veil the threats the old woman had spoken of. She shivered involuntarily and felt a cold, familiar pressure at the edge of her senses.

‘Iota.’ She turned and found the Culexus standing near the cave entrance, watching her. The dusky-skinned girl’s eyes glittered. ‘Spying on me?’

‘Yes,’ came the reply. ‘You should not remain outside for too long. There are ships in orbit and satellite systems under the control of the clan forces. They will be sweeping this zone with their long-range imagers.’

‘How long have you been watching?’

‘I do not believe He is the forgiving kind,’ she repeated, fingering the nullifier torc around her neck.

Soalm frowned. ‘You have no right to intrude on a private conversation!’

If that was meant to inspire guilt in Iota, she gave no such reaction. The pariah seemed unable to grasp the niceties of such concepts as privacy, tact or social graces. ‘What did the woman Sinope mean, when she spoke about “forces at large”?’ Iota shook her head. ‘She did not refer to threats of a military nature.’

‘It’s complicated,’ said Soalm. ‘To be honest, I’m not quite sure myself.’

‘But you value her words. And the words in the book.’

Soalm’s blood ran cold. ‘What book?’

‘The one in the chamber on the lower levels. Where the others gather with Sinope to talk about the Emperor as a god. You have been there.’

‘You followed me?’ Soalm took a warning step forwards.

‘Yes. Later I returned when no one was there. I read some of the book.’ Iota looked away, still toying with the torc. ‘I found it confusing.’

Soalm studied the Culexus, her mind racing. If Iota revealed the presence of the hidden chapel inside the rebel base, there was no way to predict what would happen. Many of Capra’s resistance fighters followed the staunchly anti-theist Imperial edict that labelled all churches as illegal; and she could not imagine what Eristede might do if he learned she had involvement with the Lectitio Divinitatus.

‘Kell will not be pleased,’ said the other woman, as if she could read her thoughts.

‘You won’t speak of it,’ Soalm insisted. ‘You will not tell him!’

Iota cocked her head. ‘He is blood kindred to you. The animus speculum reads the colour of your auras. I saw the parity between them the first time I watched you through the eyes of my helm. And yet you keep that a secret too.’

Soalm tried and failed to keep the shock from her face. ‘And what other secrets do you know, pariah?’

She returned a level stare. ‘I know that you are now considering how you might ensure my silence by killing me. If you make the attempt, there is a chance you may succeed. But you are conflicted by the thought of such an action. It is something your… brother… would not hesitate to do in your place.’

‘I am not Eristede,’ she insisted.

‘No, you are not.’ Iota’s face softened. ‘What is it like?’

‘What?’

‘Having kindred. Siblings. I have no concept or experience of it. I was matured in an enclosed environment. A research facility. Your experience… fascinates me. What is it like?’ she repeated

Strangely, Soalm felt a momentary pang of sadness for the Culexus. ‘Difficult,’ she replied, at length. ‘Iota, listen to me. Please, say nothing to the others about the chapel.’

‘If I do not, will you try to kill me?’

‘Will you force me?’

The Culexus shook her head. ‘No.’

Where? Where was the Warrant?

The question thundered through Spear’s mind and it would not let him go. He could not find rest, could not find a moment’s peace until the document had been located. Everything about his master’s careful, intricate plan hinged on the procurement of that one item. Without it, the assassination of the Emperor of Mankind was impossible. Spear was useless, a gun unloaded, a sword blade blunted. His existence had no meaning without the kill. Every single death he had performed, all of them, from the strangling of his birthparents to the ashing of the Word Bearer who came to slit his throat, the fools on Iesta Veracrux, the psy-witch, the investigators and the man whose face he now wore – all of them were only steps on a road towards his ultimate goal.

And now, Merriksun Eurotas had denied him that. The bloody rage Spear felt towards the Void Baron was so all-consuming that the killer feared merely laying eyes on the man would shatter his cover and send him into a berserker frenzy.

Spear had all but the most trivial of Hyssos’s memories absorbed within him, and the operative had never known that the Warrant of Trade on display in the reliquary was a fake. There were fewer than a dozen men and women in the entire Eurotas Consortium who outranked the operative in matters of security… Spear wondered if one of them might know the true location of the tome. But how to be sure? He could kill his way through them and never be certain if they had that precious knowledge until he sucked it from their dying minds; but he could not risk such reckless behaviour.

Eurotas himself would know. But murdering the Void Baron here and now, disposing of a body, passing through another assumption so soon after having torn Hyssos’s identity from his corpse… This was a course fraught with danger, far too risky to succeed.

No. He needed to find another way, and quickly.

‘Hyssos?’ The nobleman’s voice was pitched high and sharp. ‘What are you doing here?’

Spear looked up as Eurotas crossed the anteroom of the rogue trader’s personal quarters where he stood waiting. ‘My lord,’ he began, moderating his churning thoughts. ‘Forgive my intrusion, but I must speak with you.’

Eurotas glanced over his shoulder as he tied a velvet belt around the day robes he was wearing. Through a half-open door, it was possible to glimpse a sleeping chamber beyond. A naked woman was lying in a doze back there on a snarl of bed sheets. ‘I am engaged,’ the baron said, with a grimace. He seemed distracted. ‘Come to the audience chamber after we enter the warp, and–’

‘No sir,’ Spear put a little steel into Hyssos’s voice. ‘This won’t wait until we set off for Arrowhead. If I am correct, we may need to return to Iesta Veracrux.’

That got his attention. Eurotas’s eyes narrowed, but not enough to hide the flicker of fear in them. ‘Why would that be so?’

‘I have been retracing my steps, going over my notes and recollections from the Iestan murders.’ He fixed the baron with a level gaze and began to pay out the fiction he had created over the last few hours; a fiction he hoped would force the nobleman to give up the information he so desperately needed. ‘The two men… Yosef Sabrat and Daig Segan, the ones who did those terrible deeds. There was something they said that did not seem right to me, at the end when I thought I would be killed by them.’

‘Go on.’ Eurotas went to a servitor and had it pour him a glass of water.

‘Sir, they spoke about a warrant.’ The baron stiffened slightly at the word. Spear smiled inwardly and went on. ‘At the time I thought they meant warrants of arrest… But the thought occurs that they may have been talking about something else.’ He nodded towards a painting on the wall, an impressionistic work showing the current Void Baron reading from the Warrant of Trade as if it were some scholarly volume of esoteric knowledge.

‘Why would they be interested in the Warrant?’ Eurotas demanded.

‘I do not know. But these were no ordinary murderers, sir. We still cannot be certain by what exact means they terminated poor Perrig… And the things they did at the sites of their kills in the name of their Theoge cult–’

‘They were not part of the Theoge!’ snapped the baron, the retort coming out of nowhere. He shook his head and paced away a few steps. ‘I always knew…’ said the nobleman, after a moment of silence. ‘I always knew that Erno Sigg was innocent. That’s why I sent you, Hyssos. Because I trusted you to find the truth.’

Spear bowed, allowing his stolen face to grow saddened. ‘I hope I did not disappoint you. And you were correct, my lord. Sigg was a dupe.’

‘Those murdering swine were not part of the Theoge,’ Eurotas repeated, turning to advance on him once more. His face had lost some of its earlier colour and his gaze was turned inwards.

‘High-Reeve Telemach seemed to think otherwise,’ Spear pressed. ‘If I may ask, why do you disagree with her?’ The killer saw something ephemeral pass over the other man’s face; the shadow of a hidden truth. The understanding was coming up from Hyssos’s captured persona, from the operative’s instinctive grasp of fragile human nature, his ability to perceive the falsehood in the words of a liar. Spear let it rise; Eurotas was going to incriminate himself, if he could only be encouraged to do so. The Void Baron had known more than he had revealed about this situation all along, and only now was it coming to light.

‘I… I will tell you what I… believe,’ said the nobleman, moving to the door to close it. ‘Those madmen on Iesta Veracrux were not just spree killers tormenting and bloodletting to satisfy their own insanity. I am certain now that they were agents of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal, may he rot. They were part of a plot that casts a shadow over the Taebian Sector, perhaps over the whole galaxy!’ He shuddered. ‘We have all heard the rumours about the… things that happen on the worlds that have fallen.’ Then his tone grew more intense. ‘Discrediting the Theoge and blackening the name of our clan is just one part of this conspiracy of evil.’

Spear said nothing, dissembling the man’s words in his thoughts. It was clear now why Eurotas had been so quick to call the matter closed and depart from Iesta Veracrux as fast as decorum would allow. The involvement of Erno Sigg in the murders had been bad enough, but Eurotas had to be sure that sooner or later the clan’s name would become connected to the incident in another, more damning way. He was afraid…

On a swift and sudden impulse, Spear rocked off his feet from where he stood at attention and snatched at the Void Baron’s robes, pulling the man off-balance.

‘What in Terra’s name do you think you are doing?’ Eurotas cried out, affronted at the abrupt assault.

But in the next second his flash of anger died in his throat when Spear pulled up the voluminous sleeve of his robe to reveal a golden chain tight around his wrist, and on it the shape of an aquila sigil. This time he couldn’t resist letting a small smile creep out over Hyssos’s lips. ‘You’re one of them.’

Eurotas shrugged him off and backed away, a guilty cast coming to his eyes. ‘What are you talking about? Get out. You’re dismissed.’

‘I think not, sir.’ Spear gave him a hard look. ‘I think an explanation is in order.’

For a moment, the man teetered on the verge of shouting him down, calling in his personal guard from the corridor outside; but Hyssos’s unerring sense for the hidden told Spear that Eurotas would not. The dead man’s instincts were correct. The nobleman’s shoulders slumped and he planted himself in an ornamental chair, staring into the middle distance.

Spear waited for the confession that he knew would come next; men like the Void Baron lacked the will or the strength to really inhabit a lie. In the end, they welcomed the chance to unburden themselves.

‘I am not…’ He paused, trying to find the right words. ‘The people who call themselves the Theoge came after, do you see? It was we who came first. We carried the message from Terra, in safe keeping aboard our ships, across the entire sector. Every son and daughter of the Eurotas family has been a participant in the Lectitio Divinitatus, since the day of the boon. We carry the Emperor’s divinity with us.’ He said the words with rote precision, without any real energy or impetus behind them.

Spear recalled what Daig Segan had said just before he had torn him open. ‘The Emperor protects…’

Eurotas nodded solemnly; but it was abundantly clear that the light of true belief, the blind faith that Segan had shown in his dying moments, was in no way reflected in the Void Baron. If the nobleman was a believer in the cult of the God-Emperor, then it was only as one who paid lip service to it, because it was expected of him. Spear’s lip curled, his disgust for the man growing by the moment; he did not even have the courage of his convictions.

‘It is our hidden duty,’ Eurotas went on. ‘We spread the word of His divinity in quiet and secrecy. Our clan has been allied to groups like the Theoge on dozens of worlds, for centuries.’ He looked away. ‘But I never truly… That is, I did not…’

Spear watched and waited, saying nothing. As he expected, Eurotas was compelled to fill the silence.

‘Horus is destroying everything. Every thread of power and influence we have, broken one at a time. And now he strikes not only at our holdings, but at the network my forefathers built to carry the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus.’

‘A network of clandestine authority the Eurotas have used to control the Taebian Sector for hundreds of years.’ Spear shook Hyssos’s head. The human’s arrogance was towering; he actually believed that a being as great as the Warmaster would lower himself to such parlour games as disrupting the ambitions of a single petty, venal rogue trader. The reality was, the slow collapse of the Eurotas clan’s fortunes was just a side effect of Horus’s advance across the Ultima Segmentum.

Still; it would serve Spear’s interests to allow the man to think he was the focus of some interstellar conspiracy, when in fact he and all his blighted clan were little more than a means to an end.

‘Ever since the conclusion of the Great Crusade, it has become harder and harder to hold on to things…’ Eurotas sighed. ‘Our fortunes are on the wane, my friend. I have tried to hide it, but it grows worse every day. I thought perhaps, when we return to Terra, I could petition the Sigillite for an audience, and then–’

‘Where is the Warrant of Trade?’ Spear was growing tired of the Void Baron, and he struck out with the question.

Eurotas reacted as if he had been slapped. ‘It… In the reliquary, of course.’ The lie was a poor one at best.

‘I am your senior security operative, sir,’ Spear retorted. ‘Please credit me with some intelligence. Where is the real Warrant?’

‘How did you know?’ He shot to his feet, knocking the water glass to the floor where it shattered. A service mechanical skittered in across the carpet to clean up the breakage, but Eurotas paid it no heed. ‘Only three people…’ He paused, composing himself. ‘When… did you find out?’

Spear studied him. ‘That is of no consequence.’ After the abortive infiltration of the reliquary, the killer had been careful to ensure that no trace of his entry remained. ‘What matters is that you tell me where the real Warrant is now. If you are correct about these agents in the employ of the Warmaster, then we must be certain it is secure.’

‘They were looking for it…’ whispered Eurotas, shocked by the thought.

When the baron looked up at him with cold fear in his eyes, Spear knew that he had the man in his grasp. ‘My sworn duty is to serve the Eurotas clan and their endeavours. That includes your… network. But I cannot do that if the Warrant becomes lost.’

‘That must never happen.’ The Void Baron swallowed hard. ‘It is… not with the fleet. You have to understand, I had little choice. There were certain arrears that could not be paid, favours that were required in order to keep the clan operating–’

‘Where?’ Spear cracked Hyssos’s gruff voice like a whip.

Eurotas looked away, abashed. ‘The Warrant of Trade was touched by the hand of the God-Emperor of Mankind, and so in the eyes of those who embrace the word of the Lectitio Divinitatus, it is a holy object. In exchange for the nullification of a number of very large debts, I agreed to allow an assemblage of nobles involved with the Theoge to take possession of the Warrant for… for an extended period of pilgrimage.’

‘What nobles?’ Spear demanded. ‘Where?’

‘They have not answered my communications. I fear they may be dead or in hiding. When Horus’s forces find them, they will be wiped out, and the Warrant will be destroyed…’ His lip trembled. ‘If it has not already been.’ Eurotas looked up. ‘The Warrant is on the planet Dagonet.’

Finally. The answer. For a long moment, Spear considered breaking out of Hyssos’s restrictive body and reverting back to his kill-form, just to show Eurotas what sort of fool he was the instant before he ripped him to shreds; but instead he let the rage ebb and gave a sullen nod. ‘I will need a ship, then. The fastest cutter available.’

‘You cannot go to Dagonet!’ Eurotas insisted. ‘The government there has already declared for the Warmaster! There is word that the Sons of Horus are on their way to the planet at this very moment… It’s suicide! I won’t allow it.’

Spear twisted his proxy flesh into a sorrowful smile, and gave a shallow bow. ‘I swear to you I will recover the Warrant, my lord. As of this moment, my life has no other purpose.’

At length, the nobleman nodded. ‘Very well. And may the Emperor protect you.’

‘We can but hope,’ he replied.

THIRTEEN Faith or Duty / Bonded / The Warrant

The summons came from the Vindicare, and so Iota joined Kell and the rest of the Execution Force in one of several storage rooms down in the web of caves, away from the more heavily-populated sections of the hideaway. The room smelled of promethium; drums of the liquid fuel were stacked to the ceiling in corners, and the air circulation system worked in fits and starts.

Kell had been careful to time the gathering to coincide with the regular overflights of clan patrol craft; every time it happened, the rebels would fall silent, go dark, and wait for the flyers to make their loop over the Bladecut before heading back to the city. It meant that Capra, Beye, Grohl and the others were all occupied, allowing the assassins to gather unnoticed, at least for a little while.

The Vindicare surveyed the room, looking at them all in turn. Iota noted that he looked to Soalm last of all, and seemed to linger on her. She wondered if his sibling understood the meaning behind that fractional moment. Iota regarded her understanding of human social interaction as an ongoing experiment, but her limited knowledge also afforded her a clarity that others lacked; for all the distance between the brother and sister, it seemed obvious to the Culexus that Kell cared for Soalm more than the woman knew – or wanted to know.

‘We’re entering the final phase,’ Kell said, without preamble. ‘Beye’s contacts in the city have sent word of sightings at the perimeter of the Dagonet system. Warp disturbances. The prelude to the opening of a gateway.’

‘How long until we know for sure?’ asked Koyne. The Callidus looked like a child’s doll the size of a man, all sketched, incomplete features and pale skin.

‘We can’t stay put and wait for confirmation,’ Tariel said, without looking up from his cogitator gauntlet’s keyboard. ‘By the time the warships enter orbit it will be too late.’

The Garantine made a rumbling noise in the back of his throat that appeared to be an affirmation.

‘We commit now,’ said Kell. ‘The Lance has been concealed, yes?’ He looked at Tariel, who nodded.

‘Aye,’ said the infocyte. ‘Grohl supplied transport from the star-port. I supervised the assembly of the component parts myself. It’s ready.’

‘But there’s no way to test it, is there?’ Koyne leaned forwards. ‘If this doesn’t work…’

‘It will work,’ Kell insisted. ‘Everything we’ve done has been leading up to this moment. We’re not going to start second-guessing ourselves now.’

‘I was only making an observation,’ said the shade. ‘As I will be the closest to the target, I think it’s fair to say I have the most invested in a trouble-free termination.’

‘Don’t fret,’ said the Eversor. ‘You won’t get too dirty.’

‘We have fall-back options in place.’ Kell ignored the comment and nodded towards Iota and Soalm. ‘But for now, we concentrate on the primary schema.’ He paused and threw Tariel a look.

The Vanus operative consulted a timer window among the panes of hololiths hanging before him, and then glanced up. ‘The clanner patrols should be heading back to the capital at any moment.’

‘And we’ll follow them.’ Kell reached for his spy mask where it hung from his gear belt. ‘You all have your own preparations to make. I suggest you complete them in short order and then head out. Each of us will go back into the capital individually via different routes, and rendezvous at the star-port. I’ll be waiting for you aboard the Ultio after sunset.’

The only member of the group who did not move after Kell’s dismissal was Soalm. She looked at the Vindicare, her lips thinning. ‘Has Capra been informed?’

‘Don’t be a fool!’ snorted the Eversor, before the other man could even speak. ‘We may have killed one of the turncoats in this little play-gang of rebels, but there are likely others, watching and waiting for something juicy to report before they betray this place.’ The Garantine opened his clawed hands. ‘These people are amateurs. They can’t be trusted.’

Soalm was still looking at Kell. ‘What are they supposed to do after it is done?’

Iota saw colour rise in the Vindicare’s cheeks, but he kept his temper in check. ‘Capra is resourceful. He’ll know what to do.’

‘If he has any sense,’ muttered Koyne, ‘he’ll run.’

Soalm turned away and was the first from the chamber.

Jenniker reached the compartment Beye had assigned to her and went in. What little equipment she had was there, cunningly disguised as a lady traveller’s attaché. It seemed strangely out of place among such drab accommodation, on the Imperial Army-surplus bedroll beside a drawstring bag of ration packs. She paused, studying it.

Inside the case, concealed inside clever modules and secret sections, there were vials of powder, flat bottles of colourless fluid, thin strips of metallised chemical compounds, injectors and capsules and dermal tabs. The manner and means to end an entire city’s worth of human lives, if need be.

For a while she thought about how simple it would be to introduce a philtre of time-release metasarin into the water system of the rebel hideout. Tailored with the right mix, she could make it painless for them. They would just fall asleep, never to wake. They would be spared the brutal deaths that were fated to them all – the payment that would be exacted no matter if the Execution Force succeeded or failed. She thought about Lady Sinope, of trusting Beye and the ever-suspicious Grohl.

Some might have said it would be a mercy. The Warmaster was not a magnanimous conqueror.

Soalm shook her head violently to dispel the thought, and hated herself in that instant. ‘I am not Eristede,’ she whispered to the air.

A sharp knock at the rusted metal door startled her. ‘Hello?’ said a voice. She recognised it as one of the men she had seen in the makeshift chapel. ‘Are you in there?’

She slid the door open. ‘What is it?’

The man’s face was flushed with worry. ‘They’re coming,’ he husked. She didn’t need to ask who they were. If Beye’s contacts in the city had spoken to Capra, then it was logical to assume that others in the rebel encampment knew of what was on the horizon as well.

‘I know.’

He pressed something into her palm. ‘Sinope gave me this for you.’ It was a tarnished voc-locket, a type of portable recording device that lovers or family members gave to one another as a memento. The device contained a tiny, short-duration memory spool and hologram generator. ‘I’ll be outside.’ He pulled the door shut and Soalm was alone in the room again.

She turned the locket over in her hands and found the activation stud. Holding her breath, she squeezed it.

A grainy hololith of Lady Sinope’s face, no larger than Jenniker’s palm, flickered into life. ‘Dear child,’ she began, an urgency in her words that Soalm had not heard before, ‘forgive me for not asking this of you in person, but circumstances have forced me to leave the caves. The man who gave you this is a trusted friend, and he will bring you to me.’ The noblewoman paused and she seemed to age a decade in the space of a single breath. ‘We need your help. At first I thought I might be mistaken, but with each passing day it has become clearer and clearer to me that you are here for a reason. He sent you, Jenniker. You said yourself that you are only “a messenger”… And now I understand what message you must carry.’ The image flickered as Sinope glanced over her shoulder, distracted by something beyond the range of the locket’s tiny sensor-camera. She looked back, and her eyes were intense. ‘I have not been truthful with you. The place you saw, our chapel… There’s more than just that. We have a… I suppose you could call it a sanctuary. It is out in the wastes, far from prying eyes. I will be there by the time you receive this. I want you to come here, child. We need you. He needs you. Whatever mission may have brought you to Dagonet, what I ask of you now goes beyond it.’ She felt the woman’s gaze boring into her. ‘Don’t forsake us, Jenniker. I know you believe with all your heart, and even though it pains me to do so, I must ask you to choose your faith over your duty.’ Sinope looked away. ‘If you refuse… The rains of blood will fall all the way to Holy Terra.’

The hologram faded and Soalm found her hands were shaking. She could not look away from the locket, grasping it in her fingers as if it would magically spirit her away from this place.

Lady Sinope’s words, her simple words, had cut into her heart. Her emotions twisted tight in her chest. She was a sworn agent of the Officio Assassinorum, a secluse of the Clade Venenum ranked at Epsilon-dan, and she had her orders. But she was also Jenniker Soalm – Jenniker Kell – a daughter of the Imperium of Man and loyal servant of the divine God-Emperor of Humanity.

Which path would serve Him best? Which path would serve His subjects best?

Try as she might, she could not shake off the power behind Sinope’s message. The quiet potency of the noblewoman had bled into the room, engulfing her. Soalm knew that what she was being asked to do was right – far more so than a blood-soaked mission of murder that would only lead to death on a far greater scale.

The church of the Lectitio Divinitatus on Dagonet needed her. When she had needed help after mother and father – and then Eristede – had been lost to her, it was the word of the God-Emperor that had given her strength. Now that debt was to be answered.

In the end she realised there was no question of what to do next.

The door opened with a clatter, and the rebel soldier started, turning to see the pale assassin woman standing on the threshold. She had an elaborately-etched wooden case over her shoulder on a strap, and was in the process of attaching a holstered bact-gun to her belt. She looked up, her hood already up about her head. ‘Sinope said you would take me to her.’

He nodded gratefully. ‘Yes, of course. This way. Follow me.’ The rebel took a couple of steps and then halted, frowning. ‘The others… Your comrades?’

‘They don’t need to know,’ said Soalm, and gestured for him to carry on. The two of them disappeared around a curve in the corridor, heading up towards the surface.

From the shadows, Iota watched them go.

Spear loathed the warp.

When he travelled through the screaming halls of the immaterium, he did his best to ensure that he did so in stasis, his body medicated into hibernation – or failing that, if he were forced to remain awake by virtue of having assumed the identity of another, then he prepared himself with long hours of mental rituals.

Both were in order to calm the daemonskin. In the realms of normal space, on a planet or elsewhere, the molecule-thin layer of living tissue bonded to his birth flesh was under his control. Oh, there were times when it became troublesome, when it tried to defy him in small ways, but in the end Spear was the master of it. And as long as it was fed, as long as he sated it with killings and blood, it obeyed.

But in the depths of warp space, things were different. Here, with only metres of steel and the gauzy energy web of a Geller field between him and the thunder and madness of the ethereal, the daemonskin became troublesome. Spear wondered if it was because it sensed the proximity of its kindred out there, in the form of the predatory, almost-sentient life that swarmed unseen in the wake of the starships that passed.

Eurotas had granted him the use of a ship called the Yelene, a fast cutter from the Consortium’s courier fleet designed to carry low-mass, high-value cargoes on swift system-to-system runs. The Yelene’s crew were among the best officers and men the clan had to offer, but Spear barely registered them. He gave the captain only two orders; the first was to make space for Dagonet at maximum speed; the second was not to disturb him during the journey unless the ship was coming apart around them.

The crew all knew who Hyssos was. Among some levels of the Eurotas clan’s hierarchy, he was seen as the Void Baron’s attack dog, and that reputation served Spear well now, glowering through another man’s face at everyone he saw, before locking himself into the opulent passenger cabin provided for his use. The cabin was detailed in rich, red velvet that made the murderer feel like he was drowning in blood. That comforted him, but only for a while.

Once the Yelene was in the thick of the warp, the daemonskin awoke and cried in his mind like a wounded, whining animal. It wanted to be free, and for a long moment, so did Spear.

He pushed the thought away as if he were drawing back a curtain, but it snagged on something. Spear felt a pull deep in his psyche, clinging to the tails of the disloyal emotion.

Sabrat.

NO NO NO NO

Furious, Spear launched himself at a bookcase along one of the walls and slammed his head into it, beating his malleable face bloody. The impact and the pain forced the remnant of the dead reeve’s persona away again, but the daemonskin was still fretting and writhing, pushing at his tunic, issuing tendrils from every square centimetre of bare flesh.

It would not obey him. The moment of slippage, the instant when the corpse-mind shard had risen to the fore, had allowed the daemonskin to gain a tiny foothold of self-control.

‘That won’t do,’ he hissed aloud, and strode over to the well-stocked drinks cabinet. Spear found a bottle of rare Umbran brandy and smashed it open at the neck. He doused the bare skin of his arms with the rich, peaty liquid and the tendrils flinched. Then, he tore open the lid of a humidor on a nearby desk and took the ever-taper from within. At the touch of his thumb, it lit and he jabbed it into the skin. A coating of bluish flame engulfed his hands and he bunched his fists, letting the pain seep into him.

The fire and the pain.

Outside the ship there is nothing but fire. Inside, only pain.

Where he stands, he is shackled to the deck by an iron chain thicker than a man’s forearm, heavy double links reaching to a manacle around his right leg. It is so tightly fastened that he would need to sever the limb at the knee to gain his freedom.

His attention is not on this, however. One wall of the chamber in which the master’s warriors placed him is not there. Instead, there is only fire. Burning madness. He is aware that a thin membrane of energy separates that inferno from him. How this is possible he cannot know; such science-sorcery is beyond him.

He knows only that he is looking into the warp itself, and by turns the warp looks back into him.

He howls and pulls at the chain. The runes and glyphs drawn all over his naked body are itching and inflamed, cold-hot and torturing him. The warp is pulling at the monstrous, unknowable words etched into him. He howls again, and this time the master answers.

‘Be afraid,’ Erebus tells him. ‘The fear will smooth the bonding. It will give it something to sink its teeth into.’

He can’t tell where the voice is coming from. Like so many times before, ever since the opening of the cage, Erebus seems to be inside his thoughts whenever he wishes to be. Sometimes the master comes in there and leaves things – knowledge, ability, thirsts – and sometimes he takes things instead. Memories, perhaps. It’s not easy to be certain.

He has questions; but they die in his throat when he sees the thing coming from the deeps of the warp. It moves like mercury, shimmering and poisonous. It sees him.

Erebus anticipates his words. ‘A minor phylum of warp creature,’ explains the master. ‘A predator. Dangerous but less than intelligent. Cunning, in a fashion.’

It is coming. The gauzy veil of energy trembles. Soon it will pucker and open, just for the tiniest of moments. Enough to let it in.

‘It can be domesticated,’ says the Word Bearer. ‘If one has the will to control it. Do you have the will, Spear?’

‘Yes, master–’

He does not finish his words. The predator-daemon finds the gap and streams through it, into the opened bay of the starship. It smothers him, skirling and shrieking its joy at finding a rich, easy kill.

This is the moment when Erebus allows himself a noise of amusement; this is the moment when the daemon, in its limited way, realises that everywhere it has touched Spear’s flesh, across every rune and sigil, it cannot release. It cannot consume.

And he collapses to the deck, writhing in agony as it tries to break free, fails, struggles, and finally merges.

As the hatch closes off the compartment from the red hell outside, Spear hears the master’s voice receding.

‘It will take you days of agony to dominate it, and failure will mean you both die. The magicks etched into you cannot be broken. You are bonded now. It is your skin. You will master it, as I have mastered you.’

The words echo and fade, and then there is only his screaming, and the daemon’s screaming.

And the fire and the pain.

A thin and cold drizzle had come in with the veil of night, and all across the star-port, the rain hissed off the cracked, battle-damaged runways and landing pads in a constant rush of sound. Water streamed off the folded wingtips of the Ultio’s forward module, down through the broken roof of the hangar, spattering against the patch of dry ferrocrete beneath the vessel where it crouched low to the ground. It resembled an avian predator, ready to throw itself into the sky; but for now the ship’s systems were running in dark mode, with nothing to betray its operable state to the infrequent patrols that passed by.

The star-port had remained largely abandoned since the start of the insurrection. It was still a long way down the clanner government’s long list of important infrastructure repairs. Rebel strikes against power stations and communications towers made sure of that, although Capra had been careful that lines of supply were kept open so that the native populace would not starve. He was winning hearts and minds, for all the good that would do him in the long run.

Kell stood at the foot of the Ultio’s landing ramp and peered into the rain through the eye band of his spy mask, letting the built-in sensors do their work, considering the freedom fighters once more. How would they react when they found the members of Kell’s team gone? Would they think they had been betrayed? Perhaps so. After all, they had been, in a way. And when the mission reached its endpoint, Capra would know full well who had been behind it.

‘Any sign?’ Tariel’s voice filtered down from above him. ‘The pilot-brain reports that the passive sensors registered a blip a short time ago, but since then, nothing.’

Kell didn’t look up at him. ‘Status?’

Tariel gave a sigh. ‘The Garantine has sharpened his knives so much he could slice the raindrops in two. I am monitoring the public and military vox-nets, and I have prepared and loaded all my data phages and blackouts. Koyne is in the process of mimicking the form of the troop commander we captured. I take it the Culexus and the Venenum have still yet to arrive?’

‘Your powers of perception are as sharp as ever.’

‘How long can we afford to wait?’ he replied. ‘We’re very close to the deployment time as it is.’

‘They’ll be here,’ Kell said, just as something shimmered in the downpour beyond the open hangar doors.

‘I am,’ said Iota, emerging from the grey rain. Her voice had a strange, echoing timbre inside her skull-helmet. She removed the weapon helm as she stepped into cover, and shook loose the thin threads of her braided hair. ‘I was delayed.’

‘By what?’ Tariel demanded. ‘There’s nobody out there.’

‘Nobody out there now,’ Iota gently corrected.

‘Where’s the Venenum?’ said Kell, his jaw stiffening.

Iota glanced at him. ‘Your sister isn’t coming.’

Kell’s eyes flashed with shock and annoyance. ‘How–?’

Tariel held up his hands in a gesture of self-protection. ‘Don’t look at me. I said nothing!’

The Vindicare grimaced. ‘Never mind. That’s not important. Explain yourself. What do you mean, she’s not coming?’

‘Jenniker has taken on a mission of greater personal importance than this one,’ the Culexus told him.

‘I gave her an order!’ he barked, his ire rising by the second.

‘Yes, you did. And she disobeyed it.’

Kell grabbed the other assassin by the collar and glared at her. He felt the black shadow of the pariah’s soul-shrivelling aura rise off her in a wave, but he was too furious to care. ‘You saw her go, didn’t you? You saw her go and you did nothing to stop it!’

A flicker of emotion crossed Iota’s face, but it was difficult to know what it was. Her dark eyes became solid orbs of void. ‘You will not touch me.’

Kell’s skin tingled and his hand went ice-cold, as if it had been plunged into freezing water. Reflexively he let the Culexus go and his fingers contracted in pain. ‘What were you thinking, girl?’ he demanded.

‘You don’t own her,’ Iota said, in a low voice. ‘You gave up your part in her life.’

The comment came out of nowhere, and Kell was actually startled by it. ‘I… This is about the mission,’ he went on, recovering swiftly. ‘Not about her.’

‘You tell yourself that and you pretend to believe it.’ Iota straightened up and stepped around him.

He turned; at the top of the ramp Tariel had been joined by the Garantine, the Eversor rocking back and forth, his massive hands clenching and unclenching with barely-restrained energy. A middle-aged man in PDF-issue rain slicker stood nearby, toying with a poison knife. The expression of the face that Koyne had borrowed was wrong, ill-fitting in some way that Kell could not express.

‘How much longer?’ snarled the Eversor. ‘I want to kill an Astartes. I want to see how it feels.’ His jittery fingers played with the straps of his skull-mask, and the pupils of his bloodshot eyes were black pinpricks.

Kell made a decision and stepped after the Culexus. ‘Iota. Do you know where she went?’

‘I have an inkling,’ came the reply.

‘Find Soalm. Bring her back.’

‘Now?’ said Tariel, his face falling. ‘Now, of all times?’

‘Do it!’ Kell insisted. ‘If she has been compromised, then our entire mission is blown.’

‘That’s not the reason why,’ said Iota. ‘But we can tell her it is, if you wish.’

The Vindicare pointed back out into the rains, which had begun to grow worse. ‘Just go.’ He looked away. There was something in his chest, something there he had thought long since vanished. An emptiness. A regret. He smothered it before it could take hold, turning it to anger. Damn her for bringing these feelings back to the surface! She was part of a past he had left behind, and he wanted it to remain that way. And yet…

Iota gave him a nod and her helmet rose to cover her face. Without looking back, she broke into a run and was quickly swallowed up by the deluge.

The Garantine came stomping down the ramp, seething. ‘What are you doing, sniper?’ He spat the words at him. ‘That gutless poisoner flees the field and you make things worse by sending the witch away as well? Are you mad?’

‘Is the notorious Garantine actually admitting he needs the help of women?’ said Koyne, in the troop commander’s voice. ‘Wonders never cease.’

The Eversor rage-killer loomed over the Vindicare. ‘You’re not fit to lead this unit, you never were. You’re weak! And now your lack of leadership is compromising us all!’

‘You understand nothing,’ Kell snarled back.

A steel-taloned finger pressed on his chest. ‘You know what’s wrong with your clade, Kell? You’re afraid to get the blood on you. You’re scared of the stink of it, you want things all neat and clean, dealt with at arm’s length.’ The Garantine jerked a thumb at Koyne. ‘Even that sexless freak is better than you!’

‘Charming,’ muttered the Callidus.

The Eversor went on, hissing out each word in pops of spittle through bared teeth. ‘Valdor must have been making sport when he put you in charge of this mission! Do you think we’re all blind to the way you look at that Venenum bitch?’

In an instant, Kell’s Exitus pistol was in his hands and then the muzzle of it was buried in the exposed flesh of the Garantine’s throat, pressing into the stressed muscles and taut veins.

‘Kell!’ Tariel called out a warning. ‘Don’t!’

The Eversor laughed. ‘Go on, sniper. Do it. Up close and personal, for the first time in your life.’ His clawed hands came up and he rammed the gun into the thick flesh beneath his jaw. ‘Prove you have some backbone! Do it!’

For a second Kell’s finger tightened on the trigger; but to murder an Eversor rage-killer at point-blank range would be suicidal. The gene-modifications deep inside the Garantine’s flesh contained within them a critical failsafe system that would, should the assassin’s heart ever stop, create a combustive bio-meltdown powerful enough to destroy everything close at hand.

Instead, Kell put all his effort into a vicious shove that propelled the Garantine away. ‘If I didn’t need you,’ he growled, ‘I’d blow a hole in your spine and leave you crippled and bleeding out.’

The Eversor sniggered. ‘You just made my argument for me.’

‘This is pointless,’ snapped Koyne, striding down the ramp. ‘No mission plan ever works as it should. Every one of us knows that. We can complete the assignment without the women. The primary target is still within our reach.’

‘The Callidus is correct,’ added Tariel, working his cogitator. ‘I’m reconfiguring the protocols now. There are overlapping attack vectors. We can still operate with two losses.’

‘As long as no one else walks off,’ said the Garantine. ‘As long as nothing else changes.’

Kell’s face twisted in a grimace. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he said, turning away. ‘Secure the Ultio and move out to your kill-points.’

The man’s name was Tros, and he didn’t talk much. He led Soalm out of the caverns through a vaulted hall of rock that had once held fuel rods for Dagonet’s long-dead atmosphere converters, and to a waiting GEV skimmer.

Once they were on their way out into the wilds, the noise of the hovercraft’s engines made conversation problematic at best. The assassin decided to sit back behind the rebel and let him drive.

The skimmer was fast. They wound through the canyons of the Bladecut at breakneck speed, and then suddenly the wall of rock dropped away around them, falling into the ochre desert. As storm clouds rolled in above them from the west, they went deeper and deeper into the wilderness. From time to time, Soalm saw what might have been the remains of abandoned settlements; they dated back to the early colonist decades, back to when this desert had been fertile arable land. That had been in Dagonet’s green phase, before the human-altered atmosphere had changed again, shifting the good climate northwards. The population had moved with it, leaving only the shells of their former homes lying like broken, scattered tombstones.

Finally the GEV’s engine note downshifted and they began to slow. Tros pointed to something in the near distance, and Soalm glimpsed the shapes of tents flapping in the winds, low pergolas and yurts arranged around the stubs of another forsaken township. As the skimmer closed in and settled to the sand in a cloud of falling dust, what caught her eye first was the mural of an Imperial aquila along one long pale wall. It looked old, weather-beaten; but at the same time it shone in the fading daylight as if it had been polished to a fine sheen by decades of swirling sand.

There had only been a handful of people in the makeshift chapel hidden in the rebel base, and Soalm had been slightly disappointed to see how few followers of the God-Emperor were counted among the freedom fighters. But she realised now that small group had only been a fraction of the real number.

The followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus were here.

She stepped from the skimmer and walked slowly into the collection of improvised habitats and reclaimed half-buildings. Even at first glance, Soalm could see that there were hundreds of people. Adults and children, young and old, men and women from all walks of life across Dagonet’s society. Most of them wore makeshift sandcloaks or hoods to keep the ochre dust from their mouths and noses. She saw some who carried weapons, but they did so without the twitchy nervousness of Capra’s rebels; one man with a lasgun eyed her as she passed him, and Soalm saw he was wearing the remnants of a PDF uniform, tattered and ripped in the places where the insignia had been stripped off – all except the aquila, which he wore proudly.

These people, the refugees, were in the process of gathering themselves together for the coming night, tying down ropes and securing sheets. Out here, the winds moved swiftly over the open desert and the particles of dark dust would get into everything. The first curls of the breeze pulled at the hems of her robes as she walked on.

Tros matched her pace and pointed to a strangely proportioned building with a slanted wall and a forest of skeletal antennae protruding from where its roof should have been. ‘Over there.’

‘These are Lady Sinope’s followers?’ she asked.

The man gave a snort of amusement. ‘Don’t say that to her face. She’d think it disrespectful.’ Tros shook his head. ‘We don’t follow her. We follow Him. Milady just helps us on the path.’

‘You knew her before the insurrection?’

‘I knew of her,’ he corrected. ‘My da met her once, when she was a younger woman. Heard her speak to a secret meet at Dusker Point. Never thought I’d have the chance myself, though… Milady has done much for us over the years.’

‘Your family have always been a part of the Imperial Cult, then?’

Tros nodded. ‘But that’s not a name we use here. We call ourselves the Theoge.’

They approached the building and at once Soalm realised that it was no such thing. The construction was actually a small ship, a good measure of its keel buried in the cracked, ruddy earth. Beyond it she saw the rusted frames of dock wharfs, extending into the air. Once this place had been a wide river canal.

There were tents arranged along the side of the old vessel, each lit from within by lamplight. ‘The people here are all from Dagonet?’

‘And other worlds on the axis,’ said the man. ‘Some of them were here on pilgrimages in secret. Got trapped when the clanner nobles tipped everything up.’

‘Pilgrimage?’ she repeated. ‘For what reason?’

Tros just nodded again. ‘You’ll see.’ He opened a heavy steel hatch for her and she went inside.

The old ship had once been a freighter, perhaps a civic transport belonging to some branch of the colonial Administratum; now all that stood was the gutted shell, the sandblasted hull and the corroded metal frames of the decks. Inside, the skeleton of the vessel had been repurposed with new walls made of dry stone or steel from the hulls of cargo containers. The door closed with a solid thump behind Soalm and took the brunt of the wind with it. Only a tendril of chill air reached through to paw at the small drifts of sand in the entryway.

‘Child.’ Sinope approached, and she had tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, child, you came. Throne bless you.’

‘I… owed it,’ said the Venenum. ‘I had to.’

Sinope smiled briefly. ‘I never doubted you would. And I know I have asked a lot from you to do this. I have put you at risk.’

‘I was on a mission I did not believe in,’ she replied. ‘You asked me to take up another, for something I do believe in. It was no choice at all.’

The noblewoman took her hand. ‘Your comrades will not see it the same way. They may disown you.’

‘Likely,’ Soalm replied. ‘But I lost what I thought of as my family a long time ago. Since then, the only kinship I have had has been with others who know the God-Emperor as we do.’

‘We are your family now,’ said Sinope. ‘All of us.’

Soalm nodded at the rightness of the old woman’s words, and she felt lifted. ‘Yes, you are.’ But then the moment of brightness faded as her thoughts returned to the content of the voclocket message. She retrieved the device and pressed it back into Sinope’s thin, wrinkled hands. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Come.’ She was beckoned deeper into the shadowed wreck. ‘Things will become clearer.’

The beached ship, like the camp beyond it, was filled with people, and Soalm saw the same expression in all of them; a peculiar mingling of fear and hope. With slow alarm, she began to understand that it was directed towards her.

‘Tros said you have refugees from all over Dagonet here. And from other worlds as well.’

Sinope nodded as she walked. ‘I hope… I pray that there are other gatherings hiding in the wilds. It would be so sad to admit that we are all that is left.’

‘But there must be hundreds of people here alone.’

Another nod. ‘Four hundred sixteen, at last count. Mostly Dagoneti, but a handful of visitors from other worlds in the Taebian Stars.’ She sighed. ‘They came so far and sacrificed so much… And now they will never return home.’

‘Help is coming.’ Soalm had said the lie so many times over the past few weeks that it had become automatic.

The noblewoman stopped and gave her a look that cut right through the falsehood. ‘We both know that is not true. The God-Emperor is embattled and His continued existence is far more important than any one of us.’ She gestured around. ‘If we must perish so that He may save the galaxy, that is a price we will gladly pay. We will meet again at His right hand.’

Sinope’s quiet zeal washed over her. Soalm took a second to find her voice again. ‘How long has the… the Theoge been here?’

‘Before I was born, generations before,’ said the old woman, continuing on. ‘Before the age of the Great Crusade, even. It is said that when the God-Emperor walked the turbulent Earth, even then there were those who secretly worshipped Him. When He came to the stars, that belief came with Him. And then there was the Lectitio Divinitatus, the book that gave form to those beliefs. The holy word.’

‘Is it true that it was written by one of the God-Emperor’s own sons?’

‘I do not know, child. All we can be sure of is that it is the Imperial truth.’ She smiled again. ‘I grew up with that knowledge. For a long time, we and others like us lived isolated lives, ignored at best, decried at worst. We who believed were thought to be deluded fools.’

Soalm looked around. ‘These people don’t look like fools to me.’

‘Indeed. Our numbers have started to swell, and not just here. Groups of believers all across the galaxy are coming together. Our faith knows no boundaries, from the lowliest hiver child to men who walk the palaces of Terra itself.’ She paused, thinking. ‘The darkness sown by the Warmaster has brought many to our fold. In the wake of his insurrection there have been horrors and miracles alike. This is our time of testing, of that I have no doubt. Our creed is in the ascendant, dear child. The day will come when all the stars bend their knee to Holy Terra and the God-Emperor’s glory.’

‘But not yet,’ she said, an edge of bitterness in her voice. ‘Not today.’

Sinope touched her arm. ‘Have faith. We are part of something larger than ourselves. As long as our belief survives, then we do also.’

‘The people from the other worlds,’ Soalm pressed. ‘Tros said they were here on a pilgrimage. I don’t understand that.’

Sinope did not reply. They followed a patched metal staircase into the lower levels of the old ship, treading with care to avoid broken spars and fallen stanchions. Down here the stink of rust and dry earth was heavy and cloying. After a few metres, they came to a thickly walled compartment, armoured with layers of steel and ceramite. Four men, each armed with heavy-calibre weapons, were crowded around the only hatchway that led inside. They had hard eyes and the solid, dense builds of humans from heavy-gravity worlds. The assassin knew immediately that they were, to a man, career soldiers of long and lethal experience.

Each of them gave a respectful bow as Sinope came into the light cast from the lumes overhead, doffing their caps to the old woman. Soalm watched her go to each in turn and talk with them as if they were old friends. She seemed tiny and fragile next to the soldiers, and yet it was clear that they hung on her every word and gesture, like a troupe of devoted sons. Her smiles became theirs.

Sinope gestured to her. ‘Gentlemen, this is Jenniker.’

‘She’s the one?’ said the tallest of the four, a heavy stubber at rest in his hands.

Sinope nodded. ‘You have all served the Theoge so selflessly,’ she told them. ‘and your duty is almost done. Jenniker will take this great burden from you.’

The tall man gave a regretful nod and then snapped his fingers at another of the four. The second soldier worked the thick wheel in the centre of the hatch, and with a squeal of rusted metal, he opened the door to the cargo compartment.

Sinope advanced inside and Soalm followed warily behind her. It was gloomy and warm, and there was a peculiar stillness in the air that prickled her bare skin. The hatch closed with a crunch.

‘Dagonet is going to fall,’ said the noblewoman, soft and sorrowful. ‘Death is close at hand. The God-Emperor’s love will preserve our souls but the ending of our flesh has already been written. He cannot save us.’

Soalm wanted to say something, to give out a denial, but nothing would come.

‘He knows this. That is why, in His infinite wisdom, the Master of Mankind had you brought to us in His stead, Jenniker Soalm.’

‘No,’ she managed, her heart racing. ‘I am here in service to a lie! To perish for a meaningless cause! I have not even been spared the grace to have a truth to die for!’

Sinope came to her and embraced the assassin. ‘Oh, dear child. You are mistaken. He sent you to us because you are the only one who can do what we cannot. The God-Emperor turned your destiny to cross my path. You are here to protect something most precious.’

‘What do you mean?’

The noblewoman stepped away and moved to a small metal chest. She worked a control pad on the surface – a combination of bio-sensor bloodlocks and security layers – and Soalm stepped closer to get a better look. She knew the design; the chest was of advanced Martian manufacture, a highly secure transport capsule fitted with its own internal support fields, capable of long-term survival in a vacuum, even atmospheric re-entry. It was very much out of place here.

The chest opened in a gust of gas, and inside Soalm saw the shimmer of a stasis envelope. Within the ephemeral sphere of slowed time was a book of the most ornate, fantastic design, and it seemed to radiate the very power of history from its open pages.

‘See,’ said Sinope, bowing deeply to the tome. ‘Look, child, and see the touch of His hand.’

Soalm’s gaze misted as tears pricked her eyes. Before her, gold and silver and purple illuminated a stark page of vellum. On it, the portrait of the angelic might of the God-Emperor standing over a kneeling man in the finery of a rogue trader. In the trader’s hands this book; and falling from his Master’s palm, the shimmering droplet of crimson vitae that rested on the recto page. The scarlet liquid glittered like a flawless ruby, frozen in that distant past, as bright and as new as it had been the second it fell.

‘Emperor’s blood…’ she whispered.

Jenniker Soalm sank to her knees in unrestrained awe, bowing her head to the Warrant of Trade of the Clan Eurotas.

FOURTEEN Arrival / Let Me See You / Kill Shot

The dawn was close as the Dove-class shuttle dropped from the cold, black sky on its extended aerofoils. The craft made an elongated S-turn and came in from over the wastelands to make a running touchdown on the only runway that was still intact. The landing wheels kicked up spurts of rock dust and sparks as the Yelene’s auxiliary slowed to a shuddering halt, the wings angling to catch the air and bleed off its momentum.

The shuttle was the only source of illumination out among the shadows of Dagonet’s star-port, the running lights casting a pool of white across the cracked, ash-smeared ferrocrete. The surroundings had a slick sheen to them; the rains had only ceased a few hours ago.

No one came out from the dark, lightless buildings to examine the new arrivals; if anyone was still in there, then they were staying silent, hoping that the world would ignore them.

In the cockpit, the pilot and co-pilot exchanged glances. Following the operative’s orders, they had made no attempt to contact Dagonet port control on their way down, but both men had expected to be challenged by the local PDF at least once for entering their airspace unannounced.

There had been nothing. When the Yelene slipped into orbit, no voices had been raised to them. The skies over Dagonet were choked with debris and the remnants of recent conflict. It had tested the skills of the cutter’s bridge crew to keep the vessel from colliding with some of the larger fragments, the husks of gutted space stations or the hulls of dead system cruisers still burning with plasma fires. What craft they had spotted that were intact, the operative ordered them to give a wide berth.

Yelene came as close as she dared to Dagonet and then released the shuttle. On the way down the flight crew saw the devastation. Places where the map-logs said there should have been cities were smoke-wreathed craters glowing with the aftershock of nuclear detonations; other settlements had simply been abandoned. Even here, just over the ridge from the capital itself, the planet was silent, as if it were holding its breath.

‘You saw the destruction,’ said the pilot, watching his colleague skim across the vox channels. ‘All that dust and ash in the atmosphere could attenuate signal traffic. Either that or they’ve shut down all broadcast communications planetwide.’

The other man nodded absently. ‘Wired comm is more secure. They could be using telegraphics instead.’

Before the pilot could answer, the hatch behind them opened and the man called Hyssos filled the doorway. ‘Douse the lights,’ he ordered. ‘Don’t draw more attention than we need to.’

‘Aye, sir.’ The co-pilot did as he was told, and the illumination outside died.

The pilot studied the operative. He had heard the stories about Hyssos. They had said he was a hard man, hard but fair, not a martinet like some commanders the pilot had served with. He found it difficult to square that description with his passenger, though. All through the voyage from the Eurotas flotilla to the planet, Hyssos had been withdrawn and frosty, terse and unforgiving when he did take the time to bother speaking to someone. ‘How do you wish to proceed, operative?’

‘Drop the cargo lift,’ came the reply.

Again, the co-pilot did this with a nod. The elevator-hatch in the belly of the shuttle extended down to the runway; cradled on it was a swift jetbike, fuelled and ready to fly.

‘A question,’ said Hyssos, as he turned this way and that, studying the interior of the shuttle cockpit. ‘This craft has a cogitator core aboard. Is it capable of taking us to orbit on its own?’

‘Aye,’ said the pilot, uncertain of where the question was leading. ‘It’s not recommended, but it can be done in an emergency.’

‘What sort of emergency?’

‘Well,’ began the co-pilot, looking up, ‘if the crew are incapacitated, or–’

‘Dead?’

Hyssos’s hands shot out, the fingers coming together to form points, each one piercing the soft flesh of the men’s necks. Neither had the chance to scream; instead they made awkward gasping gurgles as their throats were penetrated.

Blood ran in thick streams from their wounds, and Hyssos grimaced, turning their heads away so the fluid would not mark his tunic. Both men died watching their own vitae spurt across the control panels and the inside of the canopy windows.

Spear stood for a while with his hands inside the meat of the men’s throats, feeling the tingle of the tiny mouths formed at the ends of his fingertips by the daemonskin, as they lapped at the rich bounty of blood. The proxy flesh absorbed the liquid, the rest of it dribbling out across the grating of the deck plates beneath the crew chairs.

Then, convinced that the daemonskin was in quietus once more, Spear moved to a fresher cubicle to clean himself off before venturing down to the open cargo bay. He decided not to bother with a breather mask or goggles, and eased himself into the jetbike’s saddle. The small flyer was a thickset, heavy block of machined steel, spiked with winglets and stabilators that jutted out at every angle. It responded to his weight by triggering the drive turbine, running it up to idle.

Spear leaned forward, glancing down at a cowled display pane that showed a map of the local zone. A string of waypoint indicators led from the star-port out into the wastelands, following the line of what was once a shipping canal but now a dry bed of dusty earth. The secret destination the Void Baron had given him blinked blue at the end of the line; an old waystation dock abandoned after the last round of climate shifts. The Warrant was there, held in trust.

The murderer laughed at the pulse of anticipation in his limbs, and grasped the throttle bar, sending the turbine howling.

He had to give credit to the infocyte; the location that Tariel had selected for the hide was a good one, high up inside an empty water tower on the roof of a tenement block a kilometre and a half from the plaza. It was for this very reason that Kell rejected it and sought out another. Not because he did not trust the Vanus, but because two men knowing where he would fire from was a geometrically larger risk than one man knowing. If Tariel was captured and interrogated, he could not reveal what he had not been told.

And then there was the matter of professional pride. The water tower was too obvious a locale to make the hide. It was too… easy; and if Kell thought so, then any officer of the PDF down in the plaza might think the same, make a judgement and have counter-snipers put in place.

The dawn was coming up as the Vindicare found his spot. Another tenement block, but this one was removed half the distance again from the marble mall outside the Governor’s halls. From what Kell could determine, it seemed as if the building had been struck two-thirds of the way up by a plummeting aerofighter. The upper floors of the narrow tower were blackened from the fires that had broken out in the wake of the impact, and on the way up, Kell had to navigate past blockades of fallen masonry mixed with wing sections and ragged chunks of fuselage. He came across the tail of the aircraft embedded in an elevator shaft, like the feathers of a thrown dart buried in a target.

Where it had impacted, a chunk of walls and floors was missing, as if something had taken a bite out of the building. Kell skirted the yawning gap that opened out to a drop of some fifty or more storeys and continued his climb. The fire-damaged levels stank of seared plastic and burned flesh, but the thick, sticky ash that coated every surface was dull and non-reflective – an ideal backdrop to deaden Kell’s sensor profile still further. He found the best spot in a room that had once been a communal laundry, and arranged his cameoline cloak between the heat-distorted frames of two chairs. Combined with the deadening qualities of his synskin stealthsuit, the marksman would be virtually invisible.

He tapped a pad on the palm of his glove with his thumb. An encrypted burst transmitter in his gear vest sent a signal lasting less than a picosecond. After a moment, he got a similar message in return that highlighted the first of a series of icons on his visor. Tariel was reporting in, standing by at his kill-point somewhere out in the towers of the western business district. This was followed by a ready-sign from Koyne, and then another from the Garantine.

The two remaining icons stayed dark. Without Iota, they had to do without telepathic cover; if the Sons of Horus decided to deploy a psyker, they would have no warning of it… but then the Warmaster’s Legion had never relied on such things before and the Assassinorum had no intelligence they would do so today. It was a risk Kell was willing to take.

And Soalm… Jenniker. The purpose of a Venenum poisoner was as part of the original exit strategy for the Execution Force. The detonation of several short-duration hypertoxin charges would sow confusion among the human populace of the city and clog the highways with panicking civilians, restricting the movements of the Astartes. But now they would do without that – and Kell felt conflicted about it. He was almost pleased she was not here to be a part of this, that she would not be at risk if something went wrong.

The echo of that thought rang hard in his chest, and the press of the sudden emotion surprised him. He remembered the look in her eyes when she had entered the room in the Venenum manse – the coldness and the loathing. It was identical to the expression she had worn all those years ago, on the day he had told her he was accepting the mission to find mother and father’s killer. Only then, there had also been pity there as well. Perhaps she had lost the capacity to know compassion, over time.

He had hoped, foolishly, he now realised, that she might have come to understand why he had made his choice. The killing of their parents had been an aching, burning brand in his thoughts; the need for raw vengeance, although at the time he had no words to describe it. A deed that could not be undone, and one that could not go unanswered.

And when the kill was finished, after all the deaths it took to reach it… Mother and father were still dead, but he had avenged them, and the cost had only been the love of the last person who cared about him. Kell always believed that if he had the chance to change that moment, to make the choice again, he would have done nothing differently. But after looking his sister in the eye, he found that certainty crumbling.

It had been easy to be angry with her at first, to deny her and hate her back for turning her face from him, eschewing her family’s name. But as time passed, the anger cooled and became something else. Only now was he beginning to understand it had crystallised into regret.

A slight breeze pulled at him and Kell frowned at his own thoughts, dismissing them as best he could. He returned to the mission, made his hide, gathering his gear and assembling what he would need for the duration in easy reach. Backtracking, he rigged the stairwells and corridors leading to the laundry room with pairs of trip-mines to cover his rear aspect, before placing his pistol where he could get to it at a moment’s notice.

Then, and only then, did he unlimber the Exitus longrifle. One of the Directors Tertius at the clade had told him of the Nihon, a nation of fierce warriors on ancient Terra, who it was said could not return their swords to their scabbards after drawing them unless the weapons first tasted blood. Something of that ideal appealed to Kell; it would not be right to cloak such a magnificent weapon as this without first taking a life with it.

He settled into a prone position, running through meditation routines to relax himself and prepare his body, but he found it difficult. Matters beyond the mission – or truthfully, matters enmeshed with it – preyed on him. He frowned and went to work on the rifle, dialling in the imager scope, flicking through the sighting modes. Kell had zeroed the weapon during their time with Capra’s rebels, and now it was like an extension of himself, the actions rote and smooth.

Microscopic sensor pits on the muzzle of the rifle fed information directly to his spy mask, offering tolerance changes and detailing windage measurements. He flicked down the bipod, settling the weapon. Kell let his training find the range for him, compensating for bullet drop over distance, coriolis effect, attenuation for the moisture of the late rains still in the air, these and a dozen other variables. With care, he activated a link between his burst transmitter and the Lance. A new icon appeared a second later; the Lance was ready.

He leaned into the scope. The display became clearer, and solidified. His aiming line crossed from the habitat tower, over the stub of a nearby monument, through the corridor of a blast-gutted adminstratum office, down and down to the open square the locals called Liberation Plaza. It was there that Horus Lupercal had killed the crooked priest-king that had ruled Dagonet’s darkest years, early in the Great Crusade. There, he had expended only one shot and struck such fear into the tyrant’s men that they laid down their guns and surrendered at the sight of him.

A figure swam into view, blurred slightly by the motion of air across the kilometres of distance between them. A middle-aged man in the uniform of a PDF troop commander. As he looked in Kell’s direction, his mouth moved and automatically a lip-reading subroutine built into the scope’s integral auspex translated the words into text.

He’s coming, Kell, read the display. Very soon now.

The Vindicare gave the slightest of nods and used Koyne’s torso to estimate his final range settings. Then the disguised Callidus moved out of view and Kell found himself looking at an empty patch of milk-white marble.

The sandstorm hid her better than any camouflage. Iota moved through it, enjoying the push and pull of the wind on her body, the hiss and rattle of the particles as they scoured her metal skull-helm, plucking at the splines of the animus speculum.

The Culexus watched the world through the sapphire eye of the psionic weapon, feeling the pulse and throb of it on the periphery of her thoughts like a coldness in her brain. Humans moved through the arc of fire and she tracked them. Each of them would register her attention without really knowing it; they would shiver involuntarily and draw their sandcloaks tighter, quickening their step to reach warmth and light and safety a little faster. They sensed her without sensing her, the ominous, ever-present shadow of null she cast falling on them. Children, when she turned her hard, glittering gaze in their direction, would begin to cry and not know the reason. When she passed close to tents full of sleeping figures, she could hear them mutter and moan under their breath; she passed over their dreams like a windborne storm cloud, darkening the skies of their subconscious for a moment before sliding beyond the horizon.

Iota’s pariah soul – or lack thereof – made people turn away from her, made them avert their eyes from the shadowed corners where she moved. It was a boon for her stealth, and with it she entered the sanctuary encampment without raising an alarm. She scrambled up a disused crane gantry, across the empty cab and along the rusted jib. Old cables whined in atonal chorus as the winds plucked at them.

From here she had a fine view of the beached ship at the centre of the settlement. What pathways there were radiated out from here, and she had already spotted the parked skimmer peeking out from beneath a tethered tarpaulin; the last time she had seen that vehicle, it had been in Capra’s hideaway. She settled in and waited.

Eventually, a hatch opened, spilling yellow light into the dusty air, and Iota shifted down along the length of the crane jib, watching.

A quartet of armed men exited, two carrying a small metal chest between them. Following on behind was the Venenum and the old noblewoman who had spoken in such strange ways about the Emperor. Auspex sensors in Iota’s helmet isolated their conversation so she could listen.

Soalm was reaching a hand out to brush it over the surface of the chest, and although she wore her hood up, Iota believed she could see a glitter of high emotion in her eyes. ‘We have a small ship,’ she was saying. ‘I can get the Warrant aboard… But after that–’ She turned her head and a gust of wind snatched the end of the sentence away.

The old woman, Sinope, was nodding. ‘The Emperor protects. You must find Baron Eurotas, return it to him.’ She sighed. ‘Admittedly, he is not the most devoted of us, but he has the means and method to escape the Taebian Sector. Others will come in time to take stewardship of the relic.’

‘I will protect it until that day.’ Soalm looked at the chest again, and Iota wondered what they were discussing; the contents of the coffer had some value that belied the scuffed, weather-beaten appearance of the container. Soalm’s words were almost reverent.

Sinope touched the other woman’s hand. ‘And your comrades?’

‘Their mission is no longer mine.’

Iota frowned at that behind her helm’s grinning silver skull. The Culexus would be the first to admit that her grasp of the mores of human behaviour was somewhat stunted, but she knew the sound of disloyalty when she heard it. With a flex of her legs, she leapt off the rusting crane, the jib creaking loudly as she described a back-flip that put her down right in front of the four soldiers. They were bringing up their guns but Iota already had her needler levelled at Sinope’s head; she guessed correctly that the old woman was the highest value target in the group.

Soalm called out to the others to hold their fire, and stepped forward. ‘You followed me.’

‘Again,’ said Iota, with a nod. ‘You are on the verge of irreversibly compromising our mission on Dagonet. That cannot be allowed.’ From the corner of her eye, the Culexus saw Sinope go pale as she dared to give the protiphage her full attention.

‘Go back to Eristede,’ said the poisoner. ‘Tell him I am gone. Or dead. It doesn’t matter to me.’

Iota cocked her head. ‘He is your brother.’ She ignored the widening of Soalm’s eyes. ‘It matters to him.’

‘I’m taking the Ultio,’ insisted the other woman. ‘You can stay here and take part in this organised suicide if you wish, but I have a greater calling.’ Her eyes flicked towards the chest and back again.

‘Horus comes,’ said Iota, drawing gasps from some of the soldiers. ‘And we are needed. The chance to strike against the Warmaster may never come again. What can you carry in some iron box that has more value than that?’

‘I don’t expect you to understand,’ Soalm replied. ‘You are a pariah; you were born without a soul. You have no faith to give.’

‘No soul…’ Sinope echoed the words, coming closer. ‘Is that possible?’

‘In this chest is a piece of the Emperor’s divinity, made manifest,’ Soalm went on, her eyes shining with zeal. ‘I am going to protect it with my life from the ruinous powers intent on its destruction! I believe this with my heart and spirit, Iota! I swear it in the name of the living God-Emperor of Mankind!’

‘Your beliefs are meaningless,’ Iota retorted, becoming irked by the woman’s irrationality. ‘Only what is real matters. Your words and relics are ephemeral.’

‘You think so?’ Sinope stepped fearlessly towards the Culexus, reaching out a hand. ‘Have you never encountered something greater than yourself? Never wondered about the meaning of your existence?’ She dared to touch the metal face of the skull. ‘Look me in the eye and tell me that. I ask, child. Let me see you.’

Somewhere in the distance, Iota thought she heard a ripple of jet noise, but she ignored it. Instead, uncertain where the impulse came from, she reached up a hand and thumbed the release that let the skull-helmet fold open and retreat back over her shoulders. Her face naked to the winds and sand, she turned her gaze on the old woman and held it. ‘Here I am.’ She felt a question stir in her. ‘Is Soalm right? Can you tell? Am I soulless?’

Sinope’s hand went to her lips. ‘I… I don’t know. But in His wisdom, I have faith that the God-Emperor will know the answer.’

Iota’s eyes narrowed. ‘No amount of faith will stop you from dying.’

The ship came out of the void shrouded in silence and menace.

Rising over the far side of Dagonet’s largest moon like a dragon taking wing, the Astartes battleship came on, prow first, knifing through the vacuum towards the combat-cluttered skies. Wreckage and corpses desiccated by the punishing kiss of space rebounded off the sheer sides of its bow as serried ranks of weapons batteries turned in their sockets to bear on the turning world beneath them. Hatches opened, great irises of thick space-hardened brass and steel yawning to give readiness to launch bays where Stormbird drop-ships and Raven interceptors nestled in their deployment cradles. Bow doors hiding the mouths of missile tubes retreated.

What few vessels there were close to the planet did not dare to share the same orbit, and fled as fast as their motors would allow them. As they retreated, they transmitted fawning, obeisant messages that were almost begging in tone, insisting on their loyalties and imploring the invader ship’s commander to spare their lives. Only one vessel did not show the proper level of grovelling fear – a fast cutter in a rogue trader’s livery, whose crew broke for open space in a frenzy of panic. As a man might stretch a limb to ready it before a day of exercise, the battleship discharged a desultory barrage of beam fire from one of its secondary batteries, obliterating the cutter. This was done almost as an afterthought.

The massive craft passed in front of the sun, throwing a partial occlusion of black shadow across the landscape far below. It sank into a geostationary orbit, stately and intimidating, hanging in place over the capital city as the dawn turned all eyes below to the sky.

Every weapon in the battleship’s arsenal was prepared and oriented down at the surface – torpedo arrays filled with warshots that could atomise whole continents in a single strike, energy cannons capable of boiling off oceans, kinetic killers that could behead mountains through the brute force of their impact. This was only the power of the ship itself; then there was the minor fleet of auxiliary craft aboard it, wings of fighters and bombers that could come screaming down into Dagonet’s atmosphere on plumes of white fire. Swift death bringers that could raze cities, burn nations.

And finally, there was the army. Massed brigades of genetically-enhanced warrior kindred, hundreds of Adeptus Astartes clad in ceramite power armour, loaded down with boltguns and chainswords, power blades and flamers, man-portable missile launchers and autocannons. Hosts of these warlords gathered on the mustering decks, ready to embark at their drop-ship stations if called upon, while others – a smaller number, but no less dangerous for it – assembled behind their liege lord high commander in the battleship’s teleportarium.

The vessel had brought a military force of such deadly intent and utter lethality that the planet and its people had never known the like, in all their recorded history. And it was only the first. Other ships were following close behind.

This was the visitation granted to Dagonet by the Sons of Horus, the tip of a sword blade forged from shock and awe.

Far below, across the white marble of Liberation Plaza, a respectful hush fell over the throng of people who had gathered since the previous day’s dusk, daring at last to venture out into the streets. The silence radiated outward in a wave, crossing beyond the edges of the vast city square, into the highways filled with halted groundcars and standing figures. It bled out through the displays on patched streetscreens at every intersection, relayed by camera ballutes drifting over the Governor’s hall; it fell from the crackling mutter of vox-speakers connected to the national watch-wire.

The quiet came down hard as the planet looked to the sky and awaited the arrival of their redeemer, the owner of their new allegiance. Their war-god.

Soalm’s hands were trembling, but she wasn’t sure what emotion was driving her. The righteous passion erupting from laying eyes on the Warrant rolled and churned around her as if she were being buffeted by more than just the gritty winds – but there was something else there. Iota’s hard words about Eristede had come from out of nowhere, and they pulled her thoughts in directions she did not wish them to go. She shook her head; now of all times was not the moment to lose her way. The ties that had once existed between Jenniker and her brother had been severed long ago, and dwelling on that would serve no purpose. Her hands slipped towards the concealed pockets in the surplice beneath her travelling robe, feeling for the toxin cordes concealed there. She wondered if the Culexus would fight her if she refused to carry out the Assassinorum’s orders. Soalm knew the God-Emperor would forgive her; but her brother never would.

The tension of the moment was broken as two figures approached out of the haze of the sandstorm, from the direction of the dry canal bed. She recognised Tros, his steady, rolling gait. At his side was a dark-skinned man whose threads of grey hair were pulled out behind him by the wind, where they danced like errant serpents. The new arrival had no dust mask or eye-shield, and he gave no sign that the scouring sands troubled him.

Sinope stepped towards him, and from the corner of her eye Soalm saw the noblewoman’s men tense. They were unsure where to aim their guns.

Iota made an odd noise in the back of her throat and her hand went to her face. Soalm thought she saw a flash of pain there.

‘Who is this?’ Sinope was asking.

‘He came in from out of the storm,’ Tros replied, speaking loudly so they all could hear him. Nearby, people had been drawn by the sound of raised voices and they stood at slatted windows or in doorways, watching. ‘This is Hyssos. The Void Baron sent him.’

The dark man bowed deeply. ‘You must be the Lady Astrid Sinope.’ His voice was resonant and firm. ‘My lord will be pleased to hear you are still alive. When we heard about Dagonet we feared the worst.’

‘Eurotas… sent you?’ Sinope seemed surprised.

‘For the Warrant,’ said Hyssos. He opened his hand and there was a thickset ring made of gold and emerald in his palm – a signet. ‘He gave me this so you would know I carry his authority.’

Tros took the ring and passed it to Sinope, who pressed it to a similar gold band on her own finger. Soalm saw a blink of light as the sensing devices built into the signets briefly communed. ‘This is valid,’ said the noble, as if she could not quite believe it.

Iota moved away, and she stumbled a step. Soalm glanced after her. The waif gasped and made a retching noise. The Venenum felt an odd, greasy tingle in the air, like static, only somehow colder.

Hyssos extended his hands. ‘If you please? I have a transport standing by, and time is of the essence.’

‘What sort of transport?’ said Tros. ‘We have children here. You could take them–’

‘Tros,’ Sinope warned. ‘We can’t–’

‘Of course,’ Hyssos said smoothly. ‘But quickly. The Warrant is more important than any of us.’

Something was wrong. ‘And you are here now?’ Soalm asked the question even as it formed in her thoughts. ‘Why did you not come a day ago, or a week? Your timing is very opportune, sir.’

Hyssos smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. ‘Who can fathom the God-Emperor’s ways? I am here now because He wishes it.’ His gaze cooled. ‘And who are you?’ Hyssos’s expression turned stony as he looked past Soalm to where Iota was standing, her whole body quivering. ‘Who are you?’ he repeated, and this time it was a demand.

Iota turned and she let out a shriek that was so raw and monstrous it turned Soalm’s blood to ice. The Culexus girl’s face was streaked with liquid where lines of crimson fell from the corners of her eyes. Weeping blood, she brought up the needler-weapon fixed to her forearm, aiming at Hyssos; with her other hand she reached up and tore away the necklet device that regulated her psionic aura.

Against the close, gritty heat of the predawn, a wave of polar cold erupted from out of nowhere, with the psyker at its epicentre. Everyone felt the impact of it, everyone staggered off their balance – everyone but Hyssos.

‘You pariah whore,’ The man’s expression twisted in odious fury. ‘We’ll do this the hard way, then.’

Soalm saw his face open up like a mechanism made of meat and blood, as ice formed on the sand at her feet. Inside him there were only his glaring black eyes and a forest of fangs about a lamprey mouth.

Rage flared like a supernova and Spear let it fill him. Anger and frustration boiled over; nothing about this bloody mission had gone to plan. It seemed as if at every stage he was being tested, or worse, mocked by the uncaring universe around him as it threw obstacle after obstacle into his path.

First the interruption of the purge and his inability to rid himself of the last vestiges of Sabrat’s sickening morality; then the discovery of the fake Warrant of Trade, and the ridiculous little secret of Eurotas’s shameful idolatry; and now, after an interminable voyage to find it, more of these pious fools clogging the way to his prize. He knew it was there, he could sense the presence of the true Warrant hidden inside that nondescript armoured box, but still they tried to stop him from taking it.

Spear had wanted to do this cleanly. Get in, take what he needed, leave again with a minimum of bloodshed and time wasted. It seemed the fates had other ideas, and the whining, pleading daemonskin was bored. The kills on the shuttle had been cursory things. It wanted to play.

In any event, his hand had been forced, and if he were honest with himself, he was not so troubled by this turn of events. Spear had been so set on the recovery of the Warrant and what it contained that he had hardly been aware of the gloomy presence at the edges of his thoughts until he turned his full attention towards it. Who could have known that something as rare and as disgusting as a psychic pariah would be found here on Dagonet? Was it there as some manner of defence for the book? It didn’t matter; he would kill it.

Unseen by the mortals around them, for a brief second the psyker bitch’s aura of icy negation had clipped the raw, mad flux of the daemonskin and the ephemeral bond that connected it – and Spear, as its merge-mate – to the psionic turmoil of the warp.

He knew then that this encounter was no chance event. The girl was an engineered thing, something vat-grown and modified to be a hole in space-time, a telepathic void given human form. A pariah. An assassin.

The girl’s null-aura washed over him and the daemonskin did not like the touch of it. It rippled and needled him inside, making its host share in the cold agony of the pariah’s mental caress. It refused to hold the pattern of Hyssos, reacting, shivering, clamouring for release. Spear’s near-flawless assumption of the Eurotas operative fractured and broke, and finally, as the rage grew high, he decided to allow it to happen.

The skin-matter masquerading as human flesh puckered and shifted into red-raw, bulbous fists of muscle and quivering, mucus-slicked meat. The uniform tunic across his shoulders and back split as it was pulled past the tolerances of the cloth. Lines of curved spines erupted from his shoulders, while bone blades slick as scimitars emerged from along his forearms. Talons burst through the soles of his boots, digging into drifts of sand, and wet jaws yawned.

He heard the screaming and the wails of those all around him, the sounds of guns and knives being drawn. Oh, he knew that music very well.

Spear let the patina of the Hyssos identity disintegrate and matched the will of the daemonskin’s living weapons to his own; the warpflesh loved him for that.

The first kill he made here was a soldier, a man with a stubber gun that Spear’s extruded bone blades cut in two across the stomach, severing his spine in a welter of blood and stinking stomach matter.

His vision fogged red; somewhere the pariah was crying out in strident chorus with the other women, but he didn’t care. He would get to her in a moment.

The sun rose off to his right, and Kell was aware of it casting a cool glow over the plaza. He changed the visual field of the scope to a lower magnification and watched the line of shadows retreat across the marble flagstones.

The morning light had a peculiarly crystalline quality to it, an effect brought on by particles in the air buoyed across the wastelands on the leading edges of a distant sandstorm. Ambient moisture levels began to drop and the Exitus rifle’s internals automatically compensated, warming the firing chamber by fractions of degrees to ensure the single loaded bullet in the breech remained at an optimal pre-fire state.

The sounds of the crowd reached him, even high up in his vantage point. The noise was low and steady, and it reminded him of the calm seas on Thaxted as they lapped at the shores of black mud and dark rock. He grimaced behind his spy mask and pushed the thought to the back of his mind; now was not the time to be distracted by trivia from his past.

Delicately, so the action would not upset the positioning of the weapon by so much as a millimetre, he thumbed the action selector switch from the safe position to the armed setting. Indicator runes running vertically down the scope’s display informed him that the weapon was now ready to commit to a kill. All that Kell required now was his target.

He resisted the urge to look up into the sky. His quarry would be here soon enough.

A kilometre to the west, Tariel licked dry lips and tapped his hand over the curved keypad on his forearm, acutely aware of how sweaty his palms were. His breathing was ragged, and he had to work to calm himself to the point where he was no longer twitching with unspent adrenaline.

He took a long, slow breath, tasting dust and ozone. In the corridors of the office tower, drifts of paper spilled from files discarded in panic lay everywhere, among lines and lines of abandoned cubicle workspaces left empty after the first shots of rebellion had been fired. No one had come up here since the nobles had forced the Governor to renounce the rule of Terra; the men and women who had toiled in this place had either gone to ground, embraced the new order or been executed. At first, the dead, empty halls had seemed to echo with the sound of them, but eventually Tariel had accepted that the tower was just as much an empty vessel as so many other Imperial installations on Dagonet. Gutted and forsaken in the rush to eschew the Emperor and embrace his errant son.

The Vanus crouched by the side of the Lance, and laid a finger on the side of its cylindrical cowling. The device was almost as long as the footprint of the tower, and it had been difficult to reassemble it in secret. But eventually the components from Ultio’s cargo bay had done as their designers in the Mechanicum promised. Now it was ready, and through the cowling Tariel could feel the subtle vibration of the power core cycling through its ready sequence. Content that the device was in good health, Tariel dropped into a low crouch and made his way to the far windows, which looked down into the valley of the capital and Liberation Plaza. The infocyte was careful to be certain that he would not be seen by patrol drones or ground-based PDF spotters.

He took a moment to check the tolerances and positioning of the hyperdense sentainium-armourglass mirrors for the tenth time in as many minutes. It was difficult for him to leave the mechanism alone; now that he had set a nest of alarm beams and sonic screamers on the lower levels to deal with any interlopers, he had little to do but watch the Lance and make sure it performed as it should. In an emergency, he could take direct control of it, but he hoped it would not come to that. It was a responsibility he wasn’t sure he wanted to shoulder.

Each time he checked the mirrors, he became convinced that in the action of checking them he had put them out of true, and so he would check them again, step away, retreat… and then the cycle of doubt would start once more. Tariel tightened his hands into fists and chewed on his lower lip; his behaviour was verging on obsessive-compulsive.

Forcing himself, he turned his back on the Lance’s tip and retreated into the dusty gloom of the building, finding the place he had chosen for himself as his shelter for when the moment came. He sat and brought up his cogitator gauntlet, glaring into the hololithic display. It told Tariel that the device was ready to perform its function. All was well.

A minute later he was back at the mirrors, cursing himself as he ran through the checks once again.

Koyne strode across the edge of the marble square, as near as was safe to the lines of metal crowd barriers. The shade scanned the faces of the Dagoneti on the other side of them, the adults and the children, the youthful and the old, all seeing past and through the figure in the PDF uniform as they fixed their eyes on the same place; the centre of Liberation Plaza, where the mosaic of an opened eye spread out rays of colour to every point of the compass. The design was in echo of the personal sigil of the Warmaster, and the Callidus wondered if it was meant to signify that he was always watching.

Such notions were dangerously close to idolatry, beyond the level of veneration that a primarch of the Adeptus Astartes should expect. One only had to count the statues and artworks of the Warmaster that appeared throughout the city; the Emperor had more of them, that much was certain, but not many more. And now all the towering sculptures of the Master of Mankind were torn down. Koyne had heard from one of the other PDF officers that squads of clanner troops trained in demolitions had been scouring the city during the night, with orders to make sure nothing celebrating the Emperor’s name still stood unscathed. The assassin grimaced; there was something almost… heretical about such behaviour.

Even here, off towards the edges of the plaza, there was a pile of grey rubble that had once been a statue of Koyne’s liege lord, shoved unceremoniously aside by a sapper crew’s dozer-track. Koyne had gone to look at it; at the top of the wreckage, part of the statue’s face was still intact, staring sightlessly at the sky. What would it see today?

The Callidus turned away, passing a measuring gaze over the nervous lines of PDF soldiers and the robed nobles standing back on the gleaming, sunlit steps of the great hall. Governor Nicran was there among them, waiting with every other Dagoneti for the storm that was about to break. Between them and the barriers, the faint glitter of a force wall was visible with the naked eye, the pane of energy rising high in a cordon around the point of arrival. Nicran’s orders had been to place field generators all around the entrance to the hall, in case resistance fighters tried to take his life or that of one of the turncoat nobles.

Koyne sneered at that. The thought that those fools believed themselves to be high value targets was preposterous. On the scale of the galactic insurrection, they ranked as minor irritants, at best. Posturing fools and narrow-sighted idiots who willingly gave a foothold to dangerous rebels. Moving on, the Callidus found the location that Tariel had chosen – in the lee of a tall ornamental column – and prepared. From here, the view across the plaza was unobstructed. When the kill happened, Koyne would confirm it firsthand.

Suddenly, there was a blast of fanfare from the trumpets of a military band, and Governor Nicran was stepping forward. When he spoke, a vox-bead at his throat amplified his voice.

‘Glory to the Liberator!’ he cried. ‘Glory to the Warmaster! Glory to Horus!’

The assembled crowd raised their voices in a thundering echo.

The Garantine ripped off the hatch on the roof of the security minaret as the shouting began, the sound masking the squeal of breaking hinges. He dropped into the open gallery, where uniformed officers pored over sensor screens and glared out through smoked windows overlooking the plaza. Their auspexes ranged all over the city, networking with aerial patrol mechanicals, ground troops, law enforcement units, even traffic monitors. They were looking for threats, trying to pinpoint bombers or snipers or anyone that might upset the Governor’s plans for this day. If anyone so much as fired a shot within the city limits, they would know about it.

They did not expect to find an assassin so close at hand. Firstly the Garantine let loose with his Executor combi-pistol, taking care to use only the needler; bolt fire would raise the alarm too soon. Still, it was enough. Two-thirds of them were dead or dying before the first man’s gun cleared its holster. They simply could not compete with the amplified, drug-enhanced reflexes of the rage-killer. All of them were moving in slow-motion compared to him, not a one could hope to match him. The Eversor killed with break-neck punches and brutal, bullet-fast stabbing. He wrenched throats into wreckage, stove in ribs and crushed spines; and for the one PDF officer who actually dared to shoot a round in his direction, he left his gift to the last. That man, he murdered by putting the fingers of his neuro-gauntlet through his eyes and breaking his skull.

With a rough chuckle, the Garantine let his kill drop and licked his lips. The room was silent, but outside the crowd cried for the Sons of Horus.

And then they came.

A knot of coruscating blue-white energy emerged from the air and grew in an instant to a glowing sphere of lightning. Tortured air molecules screamed as the teleporter effect briefly twisted the laws of physics to breaking point; in the next second, the blaze of light and noise evaporated and in its place there were five angels of death.

Adeptus Astartes. Most of the people in the plaza had never seen one before, only knowing them from the statues they had seen and the picts in history books and museums. The real thing was, if anything, far more impressive than the legends had ever said.

The cries of adulation were silenced with a shocked gasp from a thousand throats; when Horus had come to liberate Dagonet all those years ago, he had come with his Luna Wolves, the XVI Legiones Astartes. They had stood resplendent in their flawless moon-white armour, trimmed with ebony, and it was this image that was embedded in the collective mind of the Dagoneti people.

But the Astartes standing here, now, were clad in menacing steel-grey from helmet to boot, armour trimmed in bright shining silver. They were gigantic shadows, menacing all who looked upon them. Their heavy armour, the planes of the pauldrons and chest plates, the fierce visages of the red-eyed helms, all of it was as awesome as it was terrifying. And there, clear as the sun in the sky, on their shoulders was the symbol of the great open eye – the mark of Horus Lupercal.

The tallest of the warriors, his battle gear decked with more finery than the others, stepped forward. He was covered with honour-chains and combat laurels, and about his shoulders he wore a metal dolman made from metals mined in the depths of Cthon; the Mantle of the Warmaster, forged by Horus’s captains as a symbol of his might and unbreakable will.

He drew a gold-chased bolt pistol, raising it up high above his head; and then he fired a single shot into the air, the round crashing like thunder. The same sound that rang about Dagonet on the day they were liberated. Before the empty shell casing could strike the marble at his feet, the crowd were shouting their fealty.

Glory to Horus.

The towering warrior holstered his gun and unsealed his helmet, drawing it up so the world might see his face.

There could be no hesitation. No margin for error. Such a chance would never come again.

Kell’s crosshairs rested on the centre of the scowling grille of the Astartes helmet. The shimmering interference of distance seemed to melt away; now there was only the weapon and the target. He was a part of the weapon, the trigger. The final piece of the mechanism.

Time slowed. Through the scope, Kell saw armoured hands clasp the sides of the helmet, flexing to lift it up from the neck ring. In a moment more, flesh would be exposed, a neck bared. A clear target.

And if he did this, what then? What ripples would spread from the assassination of Horus Lupercal? How would the future shift in this moment? What lives would be saved? What lives would be lost? Kell could almost hear the sound of the gears of history turning about him.

He fired.

The hammer falls. The single shot in the chamber is a .75 calibre bullet manufactured on the Shenlong forge world to the exacting tolerances of the Clade Vindicare. The percussion cap is impacted, the propellant inside combusts. Exhaust gases funnel into the pressure centre of a boat-tail round, projecting it down the nitrogen-cooled barrel at supersonic velocities. The sound of the discharge is swallowed by suppression systems that reduce the aural footprint of the weapon to a hollow cough.

As the round leaves the barrel, the Exitus longrifle sends a signal to the Lance; the two weapons are in perfect synchrony. The Lance marshals its energy to expend it for the first and only time. It will burn itself out after one shot.

The round crosses the distance in seconds, dropping in exactly the expected arc towards the figure in the plaza. Windage is nominal, and does not alter its course. Then, with a flash, the bullet strikes the force wall. Any conventional ballistic round would disintegrate at this moment; but the Exitus has fired a Shield-Breaker.

Energised fragments imbued with anti-spinward quantum particles fracture the force wall’s structure, and collapse it; but the barrier is on a cycling circuit and will reactivate in less than two-tenths of a second.

It is not enough. The energy of the Lance follows the Shield-Breaker in as the force wall falls; the Lance is a single-use X-ray laser, slaved to Kell’s rifle, to shoot where he shoots. The stream of radiation converges on the exact same point, with nothing to stop it. The shot strikes the target in the throat, reducing flesh to atoms, superheating fluids into steam, boiling skin, vaporising bone.

The only sound is the fall of the headless corpse as it crashes to the ground, blood jetting across the white marble and the Warmaster’s shining mantle.

FIFTEEN Rapture / Aftershock / Retribution

There was something exhilarating about taking kills in this fashion.

The many murders that lay at Spear’s feet were usually silent, intimate affairs. Just the killer and the victim, together in a dance that connected them both in a way far more real, far more honest than any other relationship. No one was really naked until the moment of their death.

But this; Spear had never killed more than three people at once because the need had never arisen. Now he was giddy with the blood-rush, wondering why he had never done this before. The joy of the frenzy was all-consuming and it was glorious.

Throwing off all pretence at stealth and subterfuge was liberating in its own way. He was being truthful, baring himself for everyone to see; and they ran screaming when they witnessed it.

Through the low howl of the sandstorm, the refugees were crying out and scattering. He sprinted after them, hooting with laughter.

He had never been so open. Even as a child, he had hidden himself away, afraid of what he was. And then when the women in gold and silver came for him aboard their Black Ship, he concealed himself still deeper. Even the men with eyes of metal and glass who had cut upon him, plumbing the depths of his anomalous, deviant mind, even they had not seen this face of him.

Spear was a whirling torrent of claws and talons, teeth and horns, the daemonskin blurring as it shifted and reformed itself to end the life of each victim in a new and brutal way. Gasping mouths opened up all over him where vitae spattered his bare flesh, drinking it in.

The last of the soldiers was shooting at him, and he felt bursts of burning pain as thick, high-calibre shots impacted his back and legs. The daemonskin screeched as it shunted away the majority of the impact force, preventing the rounds from ever penetrating Spear’s actual flesh. He spun on his heel, pivoting like a dancer, flipping over though the air. The other soldiers were lying in pools of their own fluids, the sand drinking in their last where heads had been torn open, hearts crushed. Spear skipped over the soldier’s comrades and ignored the burn of a shot that caressed his face. He came close and angled on one leg, bringing his other foot up in a speeding black arc. Talons flicked out and the impact point was the man’s nasal cavity. Bone splintered with a wet crunch, jagged fragments entering his brain like daggers.

How many dead was that? In the race and chase of it, the murderer had lost count.

Then he saw the witch hiding her face behind a steel skull and he didn’t care about that any more. The thin, wiry female shot a fan of needles at him and he dodged most of them, a handful biting into the daemonflesh before the skin puckered and vomited them back out into the dust. This was just a delaying tactic, though. He felt the tremor moving through the warp, the alien monster sheathing his body shivering and reacting in disgust at the proximity of her.

Ill light gathered around the assassin’s aura, sucked into the void within her through the fabric of her stealthsuit. The wind seemed to die off around the waif, as if she were generating a globe of nothingness that sound itself could not enter. The construct of lenses and spines emerging from the side of the grinning steel skull-helm crackled with power, and the perturbed air bowed like water ripples.

A black stream of negative energy cascaded from the weapon and seared Spear as he threw up his hands to block it. The impact was immense, and he screamed with a pain unlike any he had ever felt before. The daemonskin was actually burning in places, weeping yellowish rivulets of pus where it blistered.

All his amusement perished in that second; this was no game. The psyker girl was more deadly than he had given her credit for. More than just a pariah, she was… She was in a small way like him. But where Spear’s abilities were inherent to the twisted, warp-changed structure of his soul, the girl was only a pale copy, a half-measure. She needed the augmentation of the helmet-weapon just to come close to his perfection.

Spear felt affronted by the idea that something could approach the power of his murdergift through mechanical means. He would kill the girl for her pretence.

The daemonskin wanted him to fall back, to retreat and take vital moments to heal; he ignored the moaning of it and did the opposite. Spear launched himself at the psyker, even as he fell into the nimbus of soul-shrivelling cold all about her. He immediately felt his own power being dragged out of him, the pain so bright and shining it was as if she were tearing the arteries from his flesh.

For a brief moment, Spear realised he was experiencing some degree of what it was like for a psyker to die at his hand; this must have been what Perrig had felt as she transformed into ashes.

He lashed out before the undertow could pull him in. Claws like razors split the air in a shimmering arc and sliced across the armoured fabric and the flesh of the waif girl’s throat. It was not enough to immediately kill her, but it was enough to open a vein.

She clapped a hand to the wound to staunch it, but not quick enough to stop an arc of liquid red jetting into the air. Spear opened his mouth and caught it in the face, laughing again as she stumbled away, choking.

Inside Iota’s helmet, blood was pooling around her mouth and neck, issuing in streams from her ears, her nostrils. Her vision was swimming in crimson as tiny capillaries burst open inside her eyes, and she wept red.

The animus speculum worked to recharge itself for a second blast of power. Iota had made a mistake and fired the first discharge too soon, without letting it build to maximum lethality. Her error had been to underestimate the potentiality of this… thing.

She had no frame of reference for what she was facing. At first thought she had imagined he was another assassin, sent against her in some power play to undo the works of the Execution Force. She could not see the logic in such a thing, but then the clades had often pursued strange vendettas against one another to assuage trivial slights and insults; these things happened as long as there was no evidence of them and more importantly, no ill-effects to the greater mission of the Officio Assassinorum.

But this killer was something beyond her experience. That much was certain. At the very least, the glancing hit from the animus’s beam should have crippled him. Iota turned the readings of her aura-sensor across him and what she saw there was shocking.

Impossibly, his psionic signature was changing, transforming. The sinuous nimbus of ghost colours spilled from the peculiar flesh-matter shrouding his body, and with a sudden leap of understanding, Iota realised she was seeing into a hazy mirror of the warp itself; this being was not one life but two, and between them gossamer threads of telepathic energy sewed them both into the inchoate power of the immaterium. Suddenly, she understood how he had been able to resist the animus blast. The energy, so lethal in the real world, was no more than a drop of water in a vast ocean within the realms of warp space. This killer was connected to the ethereal in a way that she could never be, bleeding out the impact of the blast into the warp where it could dissipate harmlessly.

The shifting aura darkened and became ink black. This Iota had seen before; it was the shape of her own psychic imprint. He was mirroring her, and even as she watched it happen, Iota felt the gravitational drag on her own power as it was drawn inexorably towards the shifting, changing murderer.

He was like her, and unlike as well. Where the clever mechanisms of the animus speculum sucked in psionic potentiality and returned it as lethal discharge, this man… this freakish aberration… he could do the same alone.

It was the blood that let him do it. Her blood, ingested, subsumed, absorbed.

Iota screamed; for the first time in her life, she really, truly screamed, knowing the blackest depths of terror. The fires in her mind churned, and she released them. He laughed as they rolled off him and reverberated back across space-time.

Iota’s mouth filled with ash, and her cries were silenced.

The moment seemed to stretch on into infinity; there was no noise across Liberation Plaza, not even the sound of an indrawn breath. It was as if a sudden vacuum had drawn all energy and emotion from the space. It was the sheer unwillingness to believe what had just occurred that made all of Dagonet pause.

In the next second, the brittle instant shattered like glass and the crowds were in turmoil, the twin floodheads of sorrow and fury breaking open at once. Chaos exploded as the people at the front of the crowd barriers surged forwards and collapsed the metal panels, moving in a slow wave towards the ragged line of shocked clanner soldiers. Some of the troops had their guns drawn; others let themselves be swallowed up by the oncoming swell, deadened by the trauma of what they had witnessed.

On an impulse the Callidus could not quantify, Koyne leapt from the base of the pillar and ran behind the line of crackling force-wall emitters. No one blocked the way. The shock was palpable here, thick in the air like smoke.

The hulking Astartes were in a combat wheel around the corpse of their commander, weapons panning right and left, looking for a target. Their discipline was admirable, Koyne thought. Lesser beings, ordinary men, would have given in to the anger they had to be feeling without pause – but the Callidus did not doubt that would soon come.

One of them shoved another of his number out of the way, tearing off his helmet with a twist of his hand. For a fraction of a second Koyne saw real emotion in the warrior’s flinty aspect, pain and anguish so deep that it could only come from a brother, a kinsman. The Astartes had a scarred face, and this close to him, the assassin could see he bore the rank insignia of a brother-sergeant of the 13th Company.

That seemed wrong; according to intelligence on the Sons of Horus, their primarch always travelled with an honour guard of officers, a group known as the Mournival.

‘Dead,’ said one of the other Astartes, his voice tense and distant. ‘Killed by cowards…’

Koyne came as close as the Callidus dared, standing near a pair of worried-looking PDF majors who couldn’t decide if they should go to the side of Nicran and the other nobles, or wait for the Astartes to give them orders.

The sergeant bent down over the corpse and did something Koyne could not see. When he stood up once more, he was holding a gauntlet in his hand; but not a gauntlet, no. It was a master-crafted augmetic, a machine replacement for a forearm lost in battle. He had removed it from the corpse, claiming it as a relic.

But Horus does not–

‘My captain,’ rumbled the sergeant, hefting his boltgun with a sorrowful nod. ‘My captain…’

Koyne’s heart turned to a cold stone in his chest, and movement caught his eye as Governor Nicran pushed away from the rest of the nobles and started down the stairs towards the Astartes. The noise of the crowd was getting louder, and the Callidus had to strain to hear as the sergeant spoke into the vox pickup in the neck ring of his breast plate.

‘This is Korda,’ he snarled, his ire building. ‘Location is not, repeat not secure. We have been fired upon. Brother-Captain Sedirae… has been killed.’

Sedirae. The Callidus knew the name, the commander of the 13th Company. But that was impossible. The warrior Kell had shot wore the mantle, the unique robe belonging to the primarch himself…

‘Horus?’ Nicran was calling, tears running down his face as he came closer. ‘Oh, for the Stars, no! Not the Warmaster, please!’

‘Orders?’ said Korda, ignoring the babbling nobleman. Koyne could not hear the reply transmitted to the sergeant’s ear-bead, but the shift in set of the Space Marine’s jaw told the tale of exactly what had been said. With a jolt of fear, the Callidus turned and broke away, sprinting down the steps towards the crowds.

Koyne heard the peal of Nicran’s voice over the rush of the mob and turned in mid-run. The Governor was shaking his hands, wracked with sobs in front of the impassive, grey-armoured Astartes. His words were lost, but he was doubtless begging or pleading to Korda, vainly making justifications.

With a small movement, the warrior raised the barrel of his bolter and shot the Governor at point-blank range, blasting his body apart. As one, Korda’s men followed his example, turning their guns towards the nobles and executing them.

Over the bass chatter of bolt-fire, the Astartes roared out an order, and it cut through the bedlam like a knife.

‘Burn this city!’ he shouted.

Soalm stumbled through the butchery clutching the bact-gun and dragging the chest behind her. Sinope was with her, trying to support the other end of the container as best she could. The noblewoman’s men were all gone.

The dust-filled air was heavy with the sound of weapons-fire and pain, and there seemed nowhere they could turn that took them away from it.

Soalm stumbled against a shack just as a wave of ephemeral terror radiated out and caught her in its wake. The air turned thick and greasy with the spoor of psionic discharge – and then she heard Iota’s echoing screams, amplified through the vocoder of the Culexus’s helmet.

‘Holy Terra…’ whispered the old woman,

It could only have been Iota’s death-cry; no other voice could carry such dreadful emotion in it.

Soalm turned towards the sound and saw the ending of her happen. Particles of sickly energy were liberated from Iota’s twitching body in a rush of light and noise, and then her stealthsuit collapsed, the silver-steel helmet falling away. Clogged puffs of grey cinders spilled from the black uniform as it crumpled into a heap, the body that had filled it disintegrated in a heartbeat. The skull-faced helmet rolled to a halt, spilling more dark ash into the churning winds.

‘Jenniker!’ Sinope cried out her name as a shape blurred towards them. The Venenum felt a massive impact against her and she was thrown aside, losing her grip on the chest. She managed to fire two quick bursts from the bact-gun as she tumbled, rewarded with the pop and hiss of acids striking flesh.

Iota’s killer loomed out of the buzzing sands, back-lit by the harsh light of the sunrise. She was reaching for a toxin corde as he punched her savagely, disarming her with the force of the blow. The bact-gun tumbled away and was lost. Soalm felt a jagged slash of pain in her chest as her ribs snapped. Falling to the ground, she tried to retch, and found herself in a damp patch of earth, mud formed from sand and spilled arterial blood. A clawed foot swept in and struck her where she had fallen, and another bone snapped. Soalm looked up, hearing laughter.

The writhing shadow loomed, bending towards her; then a length of iron pipe came from nowhere and slammed into the killer’s spine, drawing an explosive hiss of fury. Soalm moved, agony racing through her, trying desperately to retreat.

Sinope, her face lit with righteous fury, drew back her improvised weapon and hit him again, the old woman putting every moment of force she could muster into the blow. ‘For the God-Emperor!’ she bellowed.

The killer did not allow her a third strike, however. He arrested the fall of the iron pipe and held it in place, his other hand snapping out to grasp Sinope’s thin, bird-like neck and pull her off her feet. With a vicious shove, he twisted his grip on the pipe and used it to run the noblewoman through; then he discarded her and strode away.

He came upon the chest where it had fallen, and Soalm gave a weak cry as the murderer’s inky, liquid flesh streamed into the locking mechanism and broke it open from within. The ancient book fell into the sand, and Soalm saw the stasis shell around it sputter out and die.

‘No,’ she croaked. ‘You cannot… You cannot take it…’

The killer crouched and picked up the Warrant, flipping through the aged pages with careless speed, the paper fracturing and tearing. ‘No?’ he said, without turning to her. ‘Who is going to stop me?’

He reached the last page and released a booming, hateful laugh. Soalm felt a lash of sympathetic pain as he ripped the leaf from the binding of the priceless Eurotas relic and cupped the yellowed vellum in his hand. For a moment, she thought she saw the shimmer of liquid on the page, catching the rays of the sunlight.

Then, as if it were some delicacy he was sampling at a banquet, the killer tipped back his head and opened his mouth, his forked jaws opening like an obscene blossom. A dozen more tiny fanged maws opened across his cheeks and neck as he tipped up the paper and swallowed the blood of the God-Emperor.

He began to scream and howl, and the riot of malformation in his flesh became a storm of writhing fronds, tenticular forms, gnashing mouths. His body lost control over itself, the red-black skin warping and distending into shapes that were nauseating and vile.

Weeping in her agony and her failure, Soalm dragged herself away towards Tros’s skimmer, desperate to flee before the killer’s rapture came to its end.

Kell was already on his way out even as the echo of his gunshot died around him. He drew up the cameoline cloak across his shoulders, pulling the Exitus longrifle over one arm. He set the timers on the emplaced explosives to ignite once he was clear. The Vindicare paused to add an extra krak charge to a support pillar in the middle of the laundry room; when it detonated, it would collapse the ceiling above and with luck, obliterate what remained intact of the hab-tower’s gutted upper levels. He had left no trace behind him, but it paid to be thorough.

Kell heard the sounds rising up from the streets as he dropped down to the tier below, moving towards his exit point. Disorder would spread like wildfire in the wake of the assassination; the Execution Force had to get beyond the city perimeter before the pandemonium caught up to them.

He went to the edge of the shattered flooring and looked out. He could see people beneath him, the tiny dots of figures running in the avenues. Kell kicked aside a piece of fallen masonry and recovered his descent gear.

The vox link in his spy mask crackled as the seldom-used general channel was keyed.

Kell froze. Only the members of the team knew the frequency, and all of them knew that the channel was a mechanism of last resort. Even though it was heavily encrypted, it lacked the untraceable facility of the burst transmitters; the fact that one of the team was using it now meant something had gone very, very wrong.

The next sound he heard was the voice of the Callidus. Every word said was being simultaneously transmitted to Tariel and the Garantine. ‘Mission fail,’ said Koyne, panting with the exertion of running. He could hear bolter shots and screaming in the background. ‘Confirming mission fail.’

Kell was shaking his head. That could not be true; the last thing he had seen through the Exitus’s scope was the flash of radiation as the Lance ended the target’s life. Horus Lupercal was dead…

‘Broken Mirror,’ said Koyne. ‘I repeat, Broken Mirror.’

The code phrase hit Kell like a physical blow and he sagged against the crumbling wall. The words had only one meaning – a surrogate, a sacrificial proxy had replaced their target.

A storm of questions rushed through his thoughts; how could Horus have known they would be waiting for them? Had the mission been compromised from the very start? Had they been betrayed?

The warrior Kell had placed between his crosshairs could only have been the Warmaster! Only Horus, the liberator of Dagonet clad in his mantle, would have made his grand gesture of the single shot into the sky… It could not be true! It could not be…

The moment of doubt and uncertainty flared bright, and then faded. Now was not the time to dwell on this turn of events. The first, most important directive was to exfiltrate the strike zone and regroup. To re-evaluate. Kell nodded to himself. He would do that, he decided. He would extract his team from this mess and then determine a new course of action. As long as a single Officio Assassinorum operative was still alive, the mission could still be completed.

And if along the way, a traitor came to light… He shrugged off the thought. First things first. The Vindicare keyed the general channel. ‘Acknowledged,’ he said. ‘Extraction sites are now to be considered compromised. Proceed to city perimeter and await contact.’

Kell secured the longrifle and fixed his descent pack to his back. ‘Go dark,’ he ordered, ending the final command with the tap of a switch that deactivated his vox gear.

An explosion made his head snap up and his spy mask’s optics located the thermal bloom in the corner of his vision, surrounding it with indicator icons. A vehicle had apparently been blown up by an exchange of gunfire. He wondered who would be foolish enough to shoot back at an Astartes just as a roar of engine noise swept over his head. Kell shrank into the cover of a partly-collapsed wall as a heavy, slate-coloured aircraft thundered around the habitat tower on bright rods of thruster flame – a Stormbird in the livery of the Sons of Horus.

For a moment, he feared the Astartes had detected his firing hide; but the Stormbird swept on and down into the city, passing him by unnoticed. Kell looked up into the early morning sky and saw more raptor-shapes falling from the high clouds, trailing streamers of vapour from atmospheric re-entry. Whoever it was that Kell’s kill-shot had executed, the Warmaster’s warriors were coming in force to avenge him.

When he was sure the Stormbird was gone, Kell backed off and then ran at the hole in the wall. He threw himself into the air and felt the rush of the wind as gravity claimed his body. For agonising seconds, the streets below rose up towards him; then there was a sharp jerk across his shoulders as the sensors in the descent pack triggered the release of the parafoil across his back. The iridescent curve of ballistic cloth billowed open and his fall slowed.

Kell dropped into the sounds of terror and violence, searching for an escape.

Every deck of the Vengeful Spirit shook with barely-restrained violence as drop-ship after drop-ship rocketed off the launch decks. They streamed away from the battleship in a long, unbroken chain, lethal carrion birds wheeling and turning in towards the surface of Dagonet, carrying fury with them.

Nearby, system boats in service to the PDF’s space division were either turning to flee from the ships of the Warmaster’s fleet, or else they were already sinking into their home world’s gravity well as flames crawled down the length of them. The Vengeful Spirit’s gunnery crews had been sparing with the use of their megalaser batteries, striking the ships hard enough to cripple them but not enough to obliterate them. Now the PDF cruisers would burn up in the atmosphere, and the fires of their deaths would be seen the whole planet over. It was a most effective way to begin a punishment.

The Vengeful Spirit and the rest of her flotilla encroached slowly on Dagonet’s orbital space, approaching the staging point where Luc Sedirae’s vessel, the Thanato, was waiting for them. Most of the Thanato’s complement of drop-ships had already been deployed, the men of the 13th Company falling onto the capital city in a tide of unfettered rage. The handsome and ruthless master of the 13th was beloved of his warriors; and they would avenge him with nothing less than rivers of blood.

The tall viewing windows of the Lupercal’s Court looked out over the bow of the Vengeful Spirit, the curve of Dagonet and the lone Thanato laid out before it. Maloghurst left the Warmaster where he stood at the windows and crossed the strategium towards the corridor outside. As he walked, he spoke in low tones to the troupe of chapter serfs who followed him everywhere he went. The equerry parsed Horus’s commands to his underlings and they in turn moved away to carry those orders about the fleet.

Beyond the doorway there was a shadow. ‘Equerry,’ it said.

‘First Chaplain,’ Maloghurst replied. His disfigured face turned its perpetual scowl at the Word Bearer, dismissing the rest of the serfs with a flick of his clawed hand. ‘Do you wish to speak with me, Erebus? I had been told you were engaged in your… meditations.’

Erebus did not appear to notice the mocking tone Maloghurst placed on his question. ‘I was disturbed.’

‘By what?’

The Word Bearer’s face split in a thin smile. ‘A voice in the darkness.’ Before Maloghurst could demand a less obtuse answer, Erebus nodded towards the far end of the chamber, where Horus stood observing the motions of his fleet.

The lord of the Legion was magnificent in his full battle gear, his armour striped with shining gold and dark brass, hides of great beasts lying off his shoulder in a half-cloak. His face was hidden in the gloom, highlights made barely visible by the cold glow of the data consoles before him.

‘I would ask a question of the Warmaster,’ said the other Astartes.

Maloghurst did not move. ‘You may ask me.’

‘As you wish.’ Erebus’s lip curled slightly. ‘We are suddenly at battle alert status. It was my understanding we were coming to this world to show the flag in passing, and little more.’

‘You haven’t heard?’ Maloghurst feigned surprise, amused that for a change he knew something the Word Bearer did not. ‘Brother-Captain Sedirae was given the honour of standing as the Warmaster’s proxy on Dagonet. But there was an… incident. A trap, I believe. Sedirae was killed.’

Erebus’s typically insouciant expression shaded dark for a moment. ‘How did this happen?’

‘That will be determined, in due time. For the moment, it is clear that the assurances claiming Dagonet City as a secure location were false. Through either subterfuge or inadequacy on the part of Dagonet’s ruling cadres, a Son of Horus lost his life down there.’ Maloghurst inclined his head towards the Warmaster. ‘Horus has demanded reciprocity.’

‘The nobles will die, then?’

The equerry nodded. ‘To begin with.’

Erebus was silent for a few seconds. ‘Why was Sedirae sent?’

‘Are you questioning the orders of the Warmaster?’

‘I only seek to understand–’ Erebus trailed off as Maloghurst took a step towards the Word Bearer, moving through the doorway and into the corridor.

‘You would do well, Chaplain, to remember that an honoured battle-brother was just murdered in cold blood. A decorated Astartes of great esteem whose loss will be keenly felt, not just by the 13th Company but by the entire Legion.’

Erebus’s eyes narrowed, showing his doubts at the description of Sedirae’s great esteem. While it was true the man was a fine warrior, many considered him an outspoken braggart, the Word Bearer among them. But as ever, the equerry kept his own opinions to himself.

Maloghurst continued. ‘It would be best for the Warmaster to deal with this matter without the involvement of those from outside the Legion.’ He nodded to a servitor in the lee of the doors, and the helot began to slide the towering panels closed. ‘I’m sure you appreciate that.’

There was a moment when the Word Bearer seemed as if he were about to protest; but then he nodded. ‘Of course,’ said Erebus. ‘I bow to your wisdom, equerry. Who knows the Warmaster’s moods better than you?’ He threw a nod and walked away, back into the shadows of the corridor.

They were killing everything that moved.

The Sons of Horus began by firing on the crowds in Liberation Plaza, routing the civilians and turning the mob into a screaming tide of bodies that trampled each other in a desperate attempt to flee back down the roads and away from the great halls.

Koyne fought through the mass, catching sight of some of the killings along the way. Kell’s emergency command echoed through the vox-bead hidden in the Callidus’s ear.

The Astartes walked, slow and steady, across the plaza with their bolters at their hips, firing single shot after single shot into the people. The missile-like bolt shells could not fail to find targets, and for each person they hit and instantly killed, others fell dead or near to it from the shared force of impact. The blasts rippled out through flesh and bone, the crowds were so closely packed together. And although Koyne never saw it, the assassin heard the hiss and crackle of a flamer being used. The smell of burned flesh was familiar.

The panic was as much a weapon as the guns of the Astartes. People running and pushing, drowning in animal fear; they trampled one another blindly as they tried to escape along the radial streets leading from the plaza. Some transformed their fear into violence, brandishing weapons of their own in vain attempts to cut a path through the madness.

Koyne rode the terrified mob as one might have floated on a turbulent sea, not fighting it, letting the frenzied currents of push and pull shove a body here and there. As the roads opened up into wider boulevards, the crush lessened and people broke into an open run; some of them were met by strafing fire from the first of the Stormbirds that swooped in low between the buildings.

The Callidus was carried to the edge of the street and found passage through a storefront damaged in the early days of the insurrection. Hidden for a moment from the screaming throng outside, Koyne dared to consult a small holo-map of the city; any one of the avenues would take the assassin straight out of the metropolis to the city perimeter, but down each street the Astartes were advancing in small groups, coldly pacing their kills into those who ran and those who surrendered alike.

After a moment, Koyne peered over the lip of a shattered window and saw that the leading edge of the crowds had passed by. Stragglers were still running past, heading southwards. Behind them, walking as if it were nothing more than a morning stroll, the Callidus spotted a single Astartes in grey ceramite, moving with a bolter at his shoulder. Sighting down the weapon as he went, he was picking targets at random and ending them.

This was not a military exercise; this was a castigation.

‘This is your fault!’ The voice was full of terror and fury.

Koyne spun and found a man, his clothes freshly torn and a new cut staining his forehead with blood. He stood across the rubble-strewn shop floor, glaring at the Callidus, pointing a shaky finger.

It was the uniform he was indicating. The dun-coloured tunic of the Dagonet Planetary Defence Force, in disarray now, but still a part of the false identity Koyne was operating under.

The man shambled through the glass, kicking it aside without a care for the noise he was making. ‘You brought them here!’ He stabbed a finger at the street. ‘That’s not Horus! I don’t know what those things are! Why did you let them come to kill us?’

Koyne realised that the man had no idea what had happened; perhaps he hadn’t seen the Shield-Breaker and the Lance. All he saw was a monstrous killing machine in armour the colour of storms.

‘Stop talking,’ said Koyne, pulling open the PDF tunic and feeling for a fleshpocket holster. With a gasp, the Callidus tabbed the seam. Koyne’s weapon was in there, but the assassin’s muscles were tight with tension and it was proving difficult to relax and ease the skin-matter open. ‘Just be silent.’

There was movement outside. Someone on a higher floor in the building across the street, probably some bold member of Capra’s rebellion or just a Dagoneti sick of being a victim, tossed a makeshift firebomb that shattered wetly over the warrior’s helmet and right shoulder. The Son of Horus halted and swiped at the flames where they licked over the ceramite, patting them out with the flat of his gauntlet. As Koyne watched, the Astartes was still dotted with little patches of orange flame as he pivoted on his heel and aimed upward.

A heavy thunderclap shot rang out, and the bolter blew a divot of brick from the third floor. A body, trailing threads of blood, came spiralling out with it, killed instantly by the proximity of the impact.

‘They… they want you!’ snarled the man in the shop, oblivious to what was taking place outside. ‘Maybe they should have you!’

‘No,’ Koyne said, fingers at last touching the butt of the pistol nestling inside the false-flesh gut over the Callidus’s stomach. ‘I told you to–’

Stone crunched into powder and suddenly the warrior was there in the doorway of the gutted shop, too big to fit through the wood-lined threshold. The emotionless eyes of the fearsome helmet scanned them both and then the figure advanced, its bolter dropping onto a sling. Koyne stumbled backwards as the Son of Horus tore through the splintering remains of the doorway, drawing his combat blade as he came. The knife was the size of a short sword, and the fractal edge gave off a dull gleam.

Before the Callidus could react the Astartes struck out with the pommel and hit the assassin in the chest. Koyne felt bones snap and spun away, landing hard. In a perverse way, the assassin was pleased; Koyne’s cover was clearly still intact. If the Astartes had known what he was facing, the kill would have come immediately.

The man was pointing and shouting; the Son of Horus, having decided to preserve his ammunition for the moment, advanced on the survivor, the top of his helmet knocking light fittings down from the patterned ceiling. A sweep of the combat blade silenced the man by taking his head from his shoulders; the body gave a peculiar little dance as nerves misfired, and fell in a heap.

Koyne had the gun but the twitching of the muscles and the flesh-pocket would not let it go; pain from the impact injury robbed the Callidus of the usual concentration and control needed at a moment like this.

The Son of Horus changed his grip on the knife, holding it by the blade, ready to throw it; in the next second a crash of bolter fire echoed and impact points appeared in a line of silver blooms across the chest plate and left shoulder pauldron of the Astartes.

Through blurry vision, Koyne saw a man-shape moving faster than anything human should have; and a face, a mask, a fanged skull made of discoloured gunmetal.

Scrambling backwards, the assassin watched as the Garantine sprinted around the Astartes in a tight arc, rolling over fallen counters and leaping from pillar to wall. As he moved, his Executor pistol was snarling, spitting out low-gauge bolt shells that clattered and sparked off the towering warrior’s armour.

The Astartes let the combat blade drop and brought up his bolter; the weapon was of a far larger calibre than the Executor. A single direct hit at the ranges these close quarters forced upon the combatants would mean death for the Eversor; but to kill him, first the Astartes had to hit him.

Koyne moaned in pain as the gun slowly eased out of the stress-tensed flesh pocket, watching as the two combatants tried to end each other. In the confined space of the destroyed store the bray of bolt shells was deafening, and the air filled with the stench of cordite and the heavy, choking dust from atomised flakboard. A support pillar exploded, raining plaster and wood from the broken flooring above. The Callidus could hear the animalistic panting of the Eversor as he moved like lightning back and forth across the Space Marine’s line of sight, goading the Astartes into firing after him. Stimm-glands chugged and injectors hissed as the Garantine’s bloodstream was flooded with bio-chemicals and cocktails of drugs that pushed him beyond the speed of even an Astartes’s enhanced reflexes.

Koyne’s gun, slick with mucus and fluids, finally vomited itself out of the assassin’s stomach and on to the floor. The Callidus clutched at it and released a shot in the direction of the grey-armoured hulk. The neural shredder projected a spreading plume of sickly energetic discharge around the Son of Horus and the warrior staggered with the hit, one hand coming up to clutch at his helmet.

The Garantine roared past, sprinting over Koyne where the Callidus lay propped up against a wall. ‘My kill!’ he was shouting, the words repeating and coming so fast they became a single stream of noise. ‘My killmykillmykillmykill–’

He was a blur of claws and gun, too fast for the eye to process the images. Sparks flew as the Eversor assassin collided bodily with the Astartes and knocked him down, the Garantine firing his Executor into the impact holes in the warrior’s chest at point-blank range, clawing wildly at his helmet with the spiked talon of his neuro-gauntlet. Koyne could hear the Astartes snarling, angrily fighting back, but the Eversor was like mercury, slipping through his clumsy armoured fingers.

Then dark, arterial blood spurted as the armour was cracked and the Garantine dug into the meat he found inside. His bolter dry, the Astartes punched and bludgeoned the Eversor, but if any pain impulses reached the Garantine’s mind, the brew of rage-enhancers and sense-inhibitors swimming through his bloodstream deadened them to nothing.

With a croaking, wet rattle, the Astartes sank back and collapsed. Chattering with coarse laughter, the Garantine swept up the fallen combat blade and pressed all his weight behind it. The weapon sank through sparking power cables and myomer muscles until it pierced flesh and cut bone.

After a minute or so, the Eversor dropped to the floor, still shaking with the aftershock of his chemical frenzy. ‘Ss-so…’ he began, struggling to speak clearly, forcing himself to slow down with each panting gulp of breath. ‘Th-this is how it feels to k-kill one of them…’ He grinned widely behind the fanged mask. ‘I like it.’

The Callidus stood up. ‘We need to move, before more of his brethren arrive.’

‘Aren’t you… aren’t you going to th-thank me for saving your life, s-shape-changer?’

Without warning, the Astartes suddenly lurched forwards, gauntlets snapping open, savage anger fuelling a final surge of killing fury. Koyne’s neural shredder was at hand and the assassin fired a full-power discharge into the skull of the Son of Horus; the blast disintegrated tissue in an instant wave of brain-death.

The warrior lurched and fell again. Koyne gave the Garantine a sideways look. ‘Thank you.’

SIXTEEN Collision / The Choice / Forgiveness

A bombardment had begun, and the people of Dagonet’s capital feared it was the end of the world.

They knew so little of the reality of things, however. High above in orbit, it was only the warship Thanato that fired on the city, and even then it was not with the vessel’s most powerful cannons. The people did not know that a fleet of craft were poised in silence around their sister ship, watchful and waiting. Had all the vessels of the Warmaster’s flotilla unleashed their killpower, then indeed those fears would have come true; the planet’s crust cracked, the continents sliced open. Perhaps those things would happen, soon enough – but for now it was sufficient for the Thanato to hurl inert kinetic kill-rods down through the atmosphere, the sky-splitting shriek of their passage climaxed by a lowing thunder as the warshots obliterated power stations, military compounds and the vast mansion-houses of the noble clans. From the ground it seemed like wanton destruction; from orbit, it was a shrewd and surgical pattern of attack.

Koyne and the Garantine stayed off the main avenues and boulevards, avoiding the roadways where processions of frightened citizens streamed towards the city limits. Hours had passed now since the killing in the plaza, and the people had lost the will to run, numbed by their own terror. Now they stumbled, silently for the most part, some pushing carts piled high with whatever they could loot or carry, others clinging to overloaded ground vehicles. When people did speak, they did so in whispers, as if they were afraid the Adeptus Astartes would hear the sound of a voice at normal pitch from across the city.

Listening from the shadows of an alleyway across from a shuttered monorail halt, the Callidus heard people talking about the Sons of Horus. Some said they had set up a staging point in Liberation Plaza, that there were hordes of Stormbirds parked there disgorging more Astartes with each passing moment. Others mentioned seeing armoured vehicles in the streets, even Battle Titans and monstrous war creatures.

The only truth Koyne could determine from what he gleaned was that the Sons of Horus were intent on fulfilling the orders of Devram Korda to the fullest; Dagonet City would be little more than a smouldering funeral pyre by nightfall.

The assassin looked up to where a massive streetscreen hung at a canted angle from the front of the station building. The display was cracked and fizzing with patchy static; text declaring that the metropolitan rail network was temporarily suspended was still visible, the pixels frozen in place. Koyne eyed the device warily. The public screens all had arrays of vid-picters arranged around them, connected to the municipal monitoring network. The Callidus had a spy’s healthy disdain for being caught on camera.

As if it had sensed the shade’s train of thought, Koyne saw very clearly as one of the picters jerked on its gimbal, stuttering around to face the line of refugees. The assassin retreated back into the shadows, unsure if the monitor had caught sight.

A few metres down the alley, the Garantine was sitting atop a waste container, shivering with the come-down from his reflex-boosters, working with a field kit to close up the various wounds the Son of Horus had inflicted on him during the earlier melee. Koyne grimaced at the chewing sound of a dermal stapler as it knitted flesh back to flesh.

The Garantine looked up; his mask was off, and one of his eyes was torn and damaged, weeping clear fluids. He grinned, showing bloodstained teeth. ‘Be with you in a trice, freak.’

Koyne ignored the insult, shrugging off the ragged remains of the PDF troop commander tunic and replacing it with a brocade jacket stolen from a fallen shop-window dummy. ‘May not have that long.’

The Callidus shrank back against the wall and let the face of the portly PDF officer slip away. It was painful to make a change like this, without proper meditation and time spent, but the circumstances demanded it. Koyne’s aspect flowed to resemble that of a young man, a boyish face under the same unruly mop of thin hair.

‘Do you remember what you used to look like?’ said the Eversor, disgust thick in his tone.

Koyne gave the other assassin a sideways look, making a point of gazing at the topography of scarification and the countless implants both atop and beneath his epidermis. ‘Do you?’

The Garantine chuckled. ‘We’re both so pretty in our own ways.’ He went back to his wounds. ‘Any sign of more Astartes?’

The Callidus made a negative noise. ‘But they’ll be coming. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. They march through a city, putting the torch to everything they pass, daring anyone to stop them.’

‘Let them come,’ he grunted, tying the last field dressing around his thick thigh.

‘There will be more than one next time.’

‘Don’t doubt it.’ The Eversor’s hands were still twitching. ‘The poisoner girl was right. We’re all going to die here.’

That drew a harsh look from the Callidus. ‘I have no intention of ending my life on this backwater world.’

He chuckled. ‘Act like you have a choice.’ The Garantine made a metronome motion with his fingers. ‘Ticky-tocky. Odds are against us. Someone must’ve talked.’

That made the other assassin fall silent. Koyne had not wanted to dwell on the possibility, but the Garantine was right to suspect that their mission had been compromised. It seemed a logical deduction, given what had happened in the plaza.

The sharp cry of an animal drew Koyne’s attention away from such troubling thoughts and the assassin looked up to see a raptor bird flutter past the end of the alleyway, pivoting on a wing to glide in their direction.

There was a flurry of movement and the Eversor had his Executor aimed upward, the sensor mast of his Sentinel gear drawing a bead; the combi-weapon’s needler made a snapping sound and the bird died in mid-turn, falling to the ground like a stone.

Koyne went to the animal’s body; there had been something odd about it, a flicker of sunlight off metal…

‘Hungry, are you?’ The Garantine lurched along behind, limping slightly.

‘Idiot.’ Koyne held up the bird’s corpse; a single needle-dart bisected its bloody torso. The raptor had numerous augmetic implants in its skull and pinions. ‘This is a psyber eagle. It belongs to the infocyte. He’s looking for us.’ Koyne glanced up at the streetscreen once more, and the imagers beneath it.

‘Maybe it was him who talked,’ muttered the Eversor. ‘Maybe you.’

The image on the streetscreen flickered and changed; now it was an aerial view of the street, then shots of the alleyway, then a confused tumble of motion. Koyne suddenly understood the display was showing a replay of the visual feed from the eagle’s auto-senses.

Some of the refugee stragglers saw the same thing and stopped to watch the loop of footage. Koyne tossed the dead bird aside and stepped out into the street. Immediately, all the imagers along the bottom of the streetscreen whirred, moving to capture a look at the Callidus.

For a moment nothing happened; if Koyne was right, if it was Tariel watching through those lenses, the Vanus would be confused. Koyne’s face was different from the last one the infocyte had seen. But then the Garantine shuffled out into the open and all doubt was removed.

The refugees saw the hulking rage-killer and backed away in fear, as if suddenly becoming aware of a wild animal in their midst. In that, Koyne reflected, they were almost correct. The Garantine leered at them, showing his teeth.

A hooter sounded from the monorail halt, and in juddering fits and starts, the heavy metal gate closing off the station from the street began to draw open on automated mechanisms. The screen above flickered again, and this time the text displayed there announced that the rail system was now in operation.

Koyne smiled slightly. ‘I think we have some transport.’ The Callidus took a step, but a clawed hand grabbed the assassin’s arm.

‘Could be a trap,’ hissed the Garantine.

In the distance, another orbital strike screamed into the earth and sent a tremor through the ground beneath their feet. ‘Only one way to find out.’

On the elevated platform above the street level a single train was active. The web of monorail lines had been inert ever since the start of the insurrection against Terra, first shut down by the clanner troops as a way of imposing order by restricting the movement of the commoners through the city, and later forced to stay idle because of the mass breakout at the Terminus. But some lines were still connected to what remained of the capital’s rapidly-dying power grid, and the autonomic control systems that governed the operation of the trains and lines and points were simplistic devices; they were no match for someone with the skills of a Vanus.

Another psyber eagle roosted on the prow of the train and it called out a strident caw as Koyne and the Garantine sprinted on to the platform. The Callidus threw a glance down the wide stairwell; some of the bolder refugees were venturing inside the station after them.

‘Quickly,’ Koyne found an open carriage door and climbed inside. The train was a cargo carrier, partitioned off inside by pens suitable for livestock. The air within was thick with the stink of animal sweat and faeces.

As the Garantine climbed in, the eagle took wing and the train shunted forwards with a grinding clatter, sending sparks flying from the drive wheels gripping the rail. Ozone crackled and the carriages lurched away from the station, picking up momentum.

The train rattled along, a dull impact resonating off the metalwork as it shouldered a piece of fallen masonry off the rails. Koyne drew the neural shredder and moved back through the cargo wagon, kicking open the hatch to the next carriage, and then the two more beyond that. In the rear car the shade found the corpses of groxes, the bovines lying where they had fallen on the gridded metal flooring. They were still tethered to anchoring rings on the walls, doubtless forgotten and left to starve in this reeking metal box after the fighting had begun.

Satisfied they were alone, the Callidus walked back the length of the train to find the Garantine in the stubby engine car, watching the chattering cogitator-driver. Through the broken glass of the engine compartment canopy, the elevated track was visible ahead, dropping away down to the level of one of the main boulevards, paralleling the radial highway’s course.

‘If we’re lucky, we can ride this heap all the way out of the city,’ said Koyne, absently examining the charge glyph on the neural weapon.

The Eversor had his fang-mask back on, and he was growling softly with each breath, peering into the distance like a predator smelling the wind. ‘We’re not lucky,’ he retorted. ‘Do you see?’ The Garantine pointed a metal-taloned finger ahead of the train.

Koyne pulled a pair of compact magnoculars from a belt clip and peered through them. A fuzzy image swam into focus; grey blobs became the distinct shapes of Adeptus Astartes in Maximus-pattern armour, moving to block the path of the monorail. As the Callidus watched, they dragged the husks of burned-out vehicles across the line, assembling a makeshift barricade.

‘I told you this was a trap,’ rumbled the Garantine. ‘The Vanus is delivering us to the Astartes!’

Koyne gave a shake of the head. ‘If that was so, then why aren’t we slowing down?’ If anything, the train’s velocity was increasing, and warning indicators began to blink on the cogitator panel as the carriages exceeded their safety limits.

The wheels screeched as the train raced down the incline from the elevated rails to the ground level crossing, and metal flashed off metal as the Sons of Horus began to open fire on the leading carriage, pacing bolt shells into the hull from the cover of their obstruction.

The Garantine blind-fired a burst of full-auto fire through the broken window and then followed Koyne back through the wagons at a sprint. Shots punched through the walls of the cargo cars, rods of sunlight stabbing through the impact holes into the musty interior. The decking rocked beneath their feet and it was hard to stay upright as the train continued to gather speed.

They made it to the rearmost wagon as the engine car slammed into the barricade and crashed through it. The husks of a groundcar and a flatbed GEV spun away across the boulevard, throwing two Astartes aside with the force of the collision. Metal fractured, red-hot and stressed beyond its limits, and the guide wheels broke away from the axle. Instantly freed from the monorail, the train lurched up and twisted over on to its side. The carriages crashed down to the blacktop and scored a gouge down the length of the street, spitting cascades of asphalt and gravel.

In the rear car, the assassins were thrown into the grox carcasses, the impact absorbed by the foetid meat of the dead animals. Screeching and vomiting clouds of bright orange sparks, the derailed cargo train finally slowed to a shuddering halt.

Koyne lost awareness for what seemed like long, long minutes. Then the Callidus was aware of being dragged upwards and then propelled through a tear in what had once been the wagon’s roof. The shade took several shaky steps out on to the roadway, smelling hot tar and the tang of burned metal. Koyne blinked in the sunlight, feeling for the neural shredder. The weapon was still there, mercifully.

The Garantine lurched past, reloading his Executor. ‘I think we upset them,’ he shouted, pointing past Koyne’s shoulder.

Turning, the assassin saw armoured giants running down the road towards them, firing from the hip. Bolt-rounds cracked into the ground and the shattered train with heavy blares of concussion. Koyne drew the neural weapon and hesitated; the pistol had a finite range and was better suited to a close-in kill. Instead, the Callidus retreated behind part of the cargo wagon. Perhaps a lucky shot might take down one of the Sons of Horus, even hobble two of them… but that was a tactical squad back there, bearing down on the pair of them.

‘We’re not lucky,’ the assassin muttered, considering the possibility that this backwater would indeed be the place that claimed the life of Koyne of the Callidus. A ricochet careened off the roadway and the Garantine staggered back into cover. Koyne smelled the thick, resinous odour of bio-fluids; there was a deep purple-black gouge in the Eversor’s back. ‘You’re wounded.’

‘Am I? Oh.’ The other assassin seemed distracted, clearing a fouled cartridge from the breech of his gun. A metal canister rattled off the wagon and landed near their feet; without hesitation, the Garantine scooped up the krak grenade and threw it back in the direction it had come. Koyne could see that his every movement was an effort, as more thick, chemical-laced blood seeped from the injury.

The Eversor let out a low, ululating gasp as injectors discharged, nullifying his pain. He glared back at Koyne and his pupils were pinpricks. ‘Something’s coming. Hear it?’

Koyne was about to speak, but a sudden roar of jet wash smothered every other noise. From between the towers lining one of the side streets came a blunt-prowed flyer, the boxy fuselage suspended between two sets of wings that ended in vertical thruster pods; it was painted in bright stripes of white and green, the livery of the city’s firefighting brigade. There was a man in a black stealthsuit at an open hatch, a longrifle in his grip. A shot snapped from the gun muzzle and further down the road a car exploded.

Koyne pulled at the Garantine’s arm as the aircraft dropped towards the street. ‘Time to go,’ the Callidus shouted.

The Eversor’s muscles were bunched hard like bales of steel cable, and he was vibrating with wild energy. ‘He said he killed one of them, before.’ The Garantine was glaring at the oncoming Astartes. ‘That’s two now, if he’s to be believed.’

The flyer was spinning about, trying to find a place to settle as the Sons of Horus split their fire between the assassins and the aircraft. ‘Garantine,’ said Koyne. ‘We have to move.’

The rage-killer twitched and a palsy came over him. ‘I don’t like you,’ he said, slurring the words. ‘You realise that?’

‘The feeling is mutual.’ Koyne had to yell to be heard over the noise of the thrusters. The flyer was hovering less than a metre from the roadway. Tariel was at the canopy, beckoning frantically.

‘Good. I don’t want you to confuse my motives.’ And then the Eversor surged into a loping run, his legs blurring as he hurtled out of cover and straight into the lines of the Astartes. Shell casings cascaded out behind him in a stream of brass, falling from the ejection port of his combi-weapon.

The Callidus swore and sprinted in the opposite direction towards the flyer. Kell was in half-cover by the open hatch, the Exitus rifle bucking in his grip as he fired Turbo-Penetrator rounds into the enemy squad. Koyne leapt up and scrambled into the crew compartment of the aircraft.

Tariel was cowering behind a panel, pale and sweaty. He appeared to be puppeting the aircraft’s pilot-servitor through the interface of his cogitator gauntlet. The infocyte looked up. ‘Where’s the Garantine?’ he yelled.

‘He’s made his choice,’ said Koyne, slumping to the deck.

The Eversor ran screaming into the cluster of rebel Astartes, blasting the first he found off his feet with a screeching salvo of rounds from the Executor. He collided with the next and the two of them went down in a crash of ceramite and metal. The Garantine felt the boiling churn of energy racing through his veins, his mech-enhanced heart beating at such incredible speed the sound it made in his ears was one long continuous roar. The stimm-pods in the cavities of his abdomen broke their regulator settings and flooded him with doses of Psychon and Barrage pumped directly into his organs, while atomiser grilles in the frame of his fang-mask puffed raw, undiluted anger-inducers and neuro-triggers into his nostrils.

He rode on a wave of frenzy, of black and mad hate that sent him howling with uncontrollable laughter, each choking snarl rattling like gunshots. He was so fast; so lethal; so satisfied like this.

The Garantine had been awake now for the longest period of his life since before they had found him in the colony, the gnawed bones of his neighbours in his little child’s hand, the tips sharpened to make a kill with. He missed the dreamy no-mind bliss of the stasis cowls. He felt lost without the whispering voices of the hypnogoges. This kind of living, the hour-to-hour, day-by-day existence that the rest of them found so easy… it was a hell of stultifying torpor for the Garantine. He hated the idea of this interminable yesterday and today and tomorrow. He craved the now.

Every second he was awake, he felt as if the pure rage that fuelled him was being siphoned away, making him weak and soft. He needed his sleep. Needed it like air.

But he needed his kills even more. Better than the hardest hit of combat philtre, more potent than the jags of pleasure-analogue that issued from the lobo-chips in his grey matter – the kills were the best high of them all.

He was pounding on the Space Marine’s helmet, smashing in the eye-lenses, beating his clawed hands bloody. The Executor was a club he used to bludgeon and swipe.

Impacts registered on him, blasts of infernal heat throwing him off his victim, driving him hard into the road. Heavy, drug-tainted vitae frothed at his mouth and bubbled through the maw of the fang-mask. He felt no pain. There was only a white ball of warmth in the middle of him, and it was growing. It expanded to fill the Garantine with a rush the like of which he had never felt before. The implants in him stuttered and died, shattered by glancing bolter hits and knife stabs. He had nothing but rags below the right knee.

Every muscle in his body shuddered as the death-sign triggered a dormant artificial gland beneath his sternum. The engorged, orb-shaped organ spent its venom load, bursting as the end came close. The Terminus gland poured a compound into the Garantine that made the blood in his veins boil, turning it to acid. Every drug and chemical mixed uncontrollably, becoming potent, toxic, explosive.

The soft tissues of the Eversor’s eyes cooked in their orbits, and so he was blind to the final flash of exothermic release, as his body was consumed in an inferno of spontaneous combustion.

They hugged the contours of the city streets, moving fast and as low as they dared, but out on the edge of the capital the Sons of Horus had little presence. Instead, the rebel Astartes had allowed their orbital contingent to hammer at the walled estates and parklands belonging to the noble clans. The city was now ringed with a dirty chain of massive impact craters. The blackened bowls of churned earth were fused into glassy puddles in some places, where the force of the kinetic strikes had melted the ground into distended fulgurite plates.

The lines of refugees crossed the craters beneath them, streamers of people moving like ants across the footprint of an uncaring giant. The thick, smoke-soiled air over the destruction veiled the passage of the flyer. Tariel told them they were fortunate that the Adeptus Astartes had not deployed air cover; in this wallowing, keening civilian aircraft they would have been no match for a Raven interceptor.

On Kell’s orders the infocyte directed the flyer out over the wastelands beyond the city walls and into the dusty churn of the deserts. With each passing second they were putting more and more distance between them and the star-port hangar where the Ultio had been concealed.

Nothing followed them; at one point the sensors registered something small and fast – a jetbike perhaps – but it was far off their vector and did not appear to be aware of them.

Finally, Koyne broke the silence. ‘Where in the name of Hades are we going?’

‘To find the others,’ said the Vindicare.

‘The women?’ Koyne was still hiding behind a young man’s face and the expression the Callidus put on it was too old and too callous for such a youthful visage. ‘What makes you think they’re any less dead than the Eversor?’

Kell held up a data-slate. ‘You don’t really think I’d let the Culexus out of my sight without knowing exactly where she was, do you?’

‘A tracking device?’ Koyne immediately glared at Tariel, who shrank back behind the hologram of the flyer’s autopilot control. ‘One of your little toys?’

The infocyte gave a brisk nod. ‘A harmless radiation frequency tag, nothing more. I provided enough for all of us.’

Koyne turned the glare back on Kell. ‘Did you plant one on me as well?’ The boy’s eyes narrowed. ‘Where is it?’

Kell smiled coldly. ‘Those rations aboard the Ultio were tasty, weren’t they?’ Before the Callidus could react, he went on. ‘Don’t be so difficult, Koyne. If I hadn’t factored in a contingency, we never would have found you. You’d still be in the city, marking time until Horus’s warriors cut you down.’

‘You thought of everything,’ said the shade. ‘Except the possibility that our target would know we were coming!’

Tariel began to speak. ‘The target in the plaza–’

‘Was not the Warmaster!’ snarled Koyne. ‘I am an assassin palatine of more kills than I care to mention, and I have survived every sanction and prosecuted each kill because I had no secrets. No one to confide in. No chance for a breach in operational security. And yet here we are, with this grand and foolish scheme to murder a primarch crashing down around us, and for what? Who spoke, Kell?’ The Callidus crossed the flyer’s small cabin and prodded the marksman in the chest. ‘Who is to blame?’

‘I don’t have an answer for you,’ said Kell, in a moment of candour. ‘But if any of us were traitors to the Emperor, we’ve had opportunities aplenty to stop this endeavour before it even left the Sol system.’

‘Then how did Horus foresee the attack?’ asked Koyne. ‘He let one of his own commanders perish in his stead. He must have known! Are we to believe he’s some kind of sorcerer?’

A chime sounded from Kell’s data-slate, and he left the question unanswered. ‘A return. Two kilometres to the west.’

Tariel opened another pane of ghostly hololithic images and nodded. ‘I have it. A static location. The flyer’s auspex is detecting a metallic mass… conflicting thermal reads.’

‘Set us down.’

Below them, dust clouds whirled past, reducing visibility to almost nothing. ‘The sandstorm and the contaminants from the orbital bombing…’ The Vanus looked up and his argument died on his lips as he saw Kell’s rigid expression. He sighed. ‘As you wish.’

Two of Tariel’s eyerats found her, slumped over the yoke of a GEV skimmer half-buried under a storm-blown dune. From what the infocyte could determine, she had been injured before getting into the vehicle, and at some point as she tried to escape into the deep desert, her wounds had overcome her and the skimmer controls had slipped from her grip.

Kell, an expression of stony fury on his face, shoved Tariel out of the way and gathered up Soalm where she lay. Her face was discoloured with bruising, and to the infocyte’s amazement, she still lived.

Koyne drew something from the back seat of the GEV: a sculpted silver helmet in the shape of a skull, crested with lenses and antennae of arcane design. When the Callidus held it up to look it in the eye, black ash fell from the neck and was carried away on the moaning winds. ‘Iota…’

‘Dead,’ Soalm stirred at the mention of the psyker’s name. ‘It killed her.’ Her voice was slight, thick with pain.

‘It?’ echoed Tariel; but Kell was already carrying the Venenum back towards the flyer.

Koyne was the last inside, and the Callidus drew the hatch shut with a slam. The shade brought Iota’s helmet back, and sat it on the deck of the cabin. It fixed them all with its mute, accusatory gaze. Outside, the winds threw rattling curls of sand across the canopy, plucking at the wings of the aircraft.

Across the compartment, Kell tore open a medicae pack and emptied the contents across the metal floor. He worked to load an injector with a pan-spectrum anti-infective.

‘Ask her what happened,’ said Koyne.

‘Shut up,’ Kell snapped. ‘I’m going to save her life, not interrogate her!’

‘If she was drawn away on purpose,’ continued the Callidus. ‘If it was deliberate that Soalm was attacked and Iota killed…’

‘What could have killed her?’ Tariel blurted out. ‘I witnessed what she was capable of in the Red Lanes.’

Koyne scrambled across the cabin towards the sniper. ‘For the Throne’s sake, man, ask her! Whatever she is to you, we have to know!’

Kell hesitated; and then with deliberate care, he replaced the anti-infective agent with a stimulant. ‘You’re right.’

‘That could kill her,’ Tariel warned. ‘She’s very weak.’

‘No,’ Kell replied, placing the nozzle of the injector at her pale neck, ‘she’s not.’ He pressed the stud and the drug load discharged.

Soalm reacted with a hollow gasp, her back arching, eyes opening wide with shock. In the next moment, she fell back against the deck, wheezing. ‘You…’ she managed, her gaze finding Kell where he stood over her.

‘Listen to me,’ said the Vindicare, that curious unquantifiable expression on his face once again. ‘The Garantine is dead. The mission was a failure. Horus sent a proxy in his place. Now his Astartes are punishing the city for what we have done.’

Soalm’s eyes lost focus for a moment as she took this in. ‘A killer…’ she whispered. ‘An assassin… hiding behind the identity of a rogue trader’s agent.’ She looked up. ‘I saw what it did to Iota. The others it just murdered, but her… And then the blood…’ The woman started to weep. ‘Oh, God-Emperor, the blood…’

‘What did she just say?’ Koyne asked. ‘Idolatry is outlawed! Of all the–’

‘Be quiet!’ Tariel snapped. The infocyte leaned forward. ‘Soalm. There is another assassin here? It killed Iota, yes?’

She gave a shaky nod. ‘Tried to end me… Murdered Sinope and the others in the sanctuary. And then the book…’ She sobbed.

Kell extended a hand and laid it on her shoulder as she wept.

‘I can show it,’ said Tariel. Koyne turned to see the Vanus grasping Iota’s helmet in his hands. ‘What happened, I mean. There’s a memory coil built into the mechanism of the animus speculum. A mission recorder.’

‘Do it,’ said Kell, without looking up.

In short order, Tariel used his mechadendrites to prise open panels along the back of the metal skull, and connected cords of bright brass and copper between the hidden ports on the device and the hololith projector built into his cogitator.

Images flickered and jumped. Fractured moments of conversation blurred and sputtered in the air as the infocyte plumbed the depths of the memory unit, cutting though layers of encryption; and then it began.

Soalm looked away; she did not want to witness it a second time.

Tariel watched Iota die through her own eyes.

He saw the man in the Eurotas uniform transform into the thing that called itself ‘Spear’; he saw the perplexing readouts on the aura scans that matched nothing the psyker had encountered before; and he saw the horrific act of the taking of her blood.

‘It tasted her…’ Soalm muttered. ‘Do you see? In the moment before the kill.’

‘Why?’ Koyne was sickened.

‘A genetic lock,’ Tariel said, nodding to himself. ‘Powerful psionic rituals require the use of an organic component as an initiator.’

‘A blood rite?’ Koyne shot him a look. ‘That’s primitive superstition.’

‘It might appear so to a certain point of view.’

Iota died again, the audio replay catching the raw terror in her death-scream, and Tariel looked away, his gorge rising. The peculiar waif-like psyker had not deserved to perish in so monstrous a way as this.

No one spoke for a long time after the playback ended. They sat in silence, the images of the daemonic abomination embedded in their thoughts, the revolting spectacle of the girl’s murder echoing in the howling winds outside.

‘Sorcery,’ said Kell, at length. His voice was cold and hard. ‘The rumours about Horus’s sinister plans are true. He is in league with allies from beyond the pale.’

‘The ruinous powers…’ muttered Soalm.

‘It is not magick,’ Tariel insisted. ‘Call it what it is. Science, but the darkest science. Like Iota herself, a creation of intellects unfettered by morals or boundaries.’

‘What are you saying, that this witchling Spear is like her?’ Koyne’s eyes narrowed. ‘The girl was something bred in a laboratory, deliberately tainted by the touch of the warp.’

‘I know what it… what he is,’ said Tariel, yanking out the cables from the gauntlet and dousing the hologram’s deathly images. ‘I have heard the name of this creature.’

‘Explain,’ demanded Kell.

‘This must never be repeated.’ The infocyte sighed. ‘The Vanus watch all. Our stacks are filled with information on all the clades. It is how we maintain our position.’

Koyne nodded. ‘You blackmail everyone.’

‘Indeed. We know that the Culexus seek to improve upon their psychic abilities through experimentation. They gather subjects from the care of the Silent Sisterhood. Those they do not induct into their ranks, they spirit away for… other reasons.’

‘This Spear was one of ours?’ Koyne was incredulous.

‘It is possible,’ Tariel went on. ‘There was a project… it was declared null by Sire Culexus himself… they called it the Black Pariah. A living weapon capable of turning a target’s psionic force back upon it, without the aid of an animus device. The ultimate counter-psyker.’

‘What became of it?’ said Kell.

‘That data is not available. The starship the Culexus used as their base of operations was to be piloted into a sun. So the orders said. I know this because my mentor was tasked with gathering this intelligence.’

‘And this Spear is the Black Pariah?’ Kell frowned. ‘Not dead, but in service to the Warmaster.’ He shook his head. ‘What have we been thrown into?’

‘But why is it here, on Dagonet?’ insisted Koyne. ‘To destroy Iota? To disrupt our plan against Horus?’

Soalm gave a shuddering breath. ‘Iota was just in the way. Like all the pilgrims and the refugees. Collateral damage. Spear wanted the book. The blood.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Kell took her arm and pulled her around. ‘Jenniker, what do you mean?’

She told them; and as he understood, Tariel went weak and slumped against the side of the hull, shaking his head. His mouth silently formed the words no, no, no, over and over again.

Koyne snorted. ‘The Emperor’s blood? That cannot be! This is madness… Horus’s assassin tears a page from some ancient tome and with that he can strike at the most powerful human being who ever lived? The very idea is ridiculous!’

‘He has what he wants now,’ Soalm went on. ‘Synchrony with the God-Emperor’s gene-marker. Spear is like a primed bomb, ready to detonate.’ She blinked back tears. ‘We have to stop him before he leaves the planet!’

‘You saw what Spear did to Iota,’ Kell looked towards the Callidus. ‘If this thing is a mirror for psychic might, can you imagine what would happen if he got through to Terra? If he came close enough to turn that power on the Emperor?’

‘A cataclysm…’ husked Tariel. ‘The same thing that happened to Iota, but multiplied a million times over. A collision of the most lethal psychic forces conceivable.’ The infocyte swallowed hard. ‘Throne’s sake… He might even… kill him.’

Koyne gave a sarcastic snort. ‘The Emperor of Mankind wounded by something so fantastic, so ephemeral? I can’t believe it is possible. Spear will be swatted away like an insect. This woman’s reason cannot be trusted! Her kind are governed by archaic spiritual fanaticism, not facts!’

‘The God-Emperor alone guides me…’ she insisted.

The Callidus stabbed a finger at the poisoner. ‘You see? She admits it! She’s part of a cult forbidden by the Council of Terra!’ Before anyone else could respond, the shade went on. ‘We have a mission here! A target! Horus may have sent this Captain Sedirae to his death by design, or we may have tipped our hands by moving too soon, but it does not matter! The end result remains the same. Our mission is not yet ended.’

‘He will come down to Dagonet,’ said Tariel. ‘The Warmaster has no choice now. The punishment of this world must be seen to come from his hand.’

‘Exactly,’ insisted Koyne. ‘We have another chance to kill him. The only chance. A moment like this will never come again.’

Soalm painfully pushed herself to her feet. ‘You understand nothing about me, shapechanger, or what I believe!’ she snarled. ‘His divinity is absolute, and you delude yourself by your denial of it. Only He can save humanity from the darkness that gathers around us. We cannot fail Him!’ She lurched and fell against Kell, who caught her before she could stumble to the deck. ‘I cannot fail Him… Not again.’

Tariel spoke up. ‘If Soalm is right, if this is the Black Pariah and he has ingested a measure of Imperial blood… Spear will seek to flee this world and make space to Terra as quickly as possible. And if he has a ship that can get him to the warp, or worse, if Horus’s fleet is waiting for the assassin to come to them, there will be no way to stop him. Spear must be killed before he leaves Dagonet.’

‘Or we can trust in the Emperor and follow our orders,’ Koyne broke in. ‘You think him divine, Soalm? I may not agree, but I do believe he is strong enough to shrug off any attack. I believe that he will see this Spear coming and strike him from the sky.’ The Callidus’s boy-face twisted. ‘But Horus? The Warmaster is a serpent, rising for just one moment from his hiding place. We kill him here on this world and we end the threat he represents forever.’

‘Will it be that simple?’ Soalm snapped back. ‘A city full of people is being put to the sword out there because we killed a single Astartes. Do you think if the Warmaster dies, every rebel will fall to his knees and be crippled by grief? It will be anarchy! Destruction and chaos!’

‘I am mission commander,’ Kell’s voice cut through the air. ‘I have authority here.’ He glared at Soalm. ‘I will not be disobeyed again. The decision is mine alone.’

‘We can’t kill them both,’ said Tariel.

‘Get us airborne,’ said the Vindicare, reaching for his rifle.

There was a ragged group of men on the perimeter wall of the star-port, some of them soldiers, some of them not, all with looted firearms and the aura of hot fear about them. They saw the jetbike hurtling in from across the desert and they fired on it without hesitation. Everything had been trying to kill them since the shock of the dawn broke, and they did not wait to find out if this vehicle was friend or foe. Insanity and terror ruled Dagonet now, as men turned on men in their panic to flee the doomed city.

The stubby aerodyne had a single, medium-wattage lascannon mounted along the line of the fuselage, and Spear aimed it with twists of the jetbike’s steering handles, lashing along the battlement of the wall with lances of yellow fire. Bodies exploded in blasts of superheated blood-steam as shots meant to knock down aircraft eradicated men with each hit. Those who didn’t die in the initial volley were killed as they ran when Spear came around in a tight loop to strafe them off the line of the wall.

Threads of sinew and knots of transformed tissue flared out behind the killer’s head in a fan. Fronds from the daemonskin fluttered, sucking the mist of blood from the air as the bike passed over the wall and skimmed the runway towards the parked shuttle.

The Eurotas ship was untouched, although Spear noted two corpses off by the prow. The autonomic guns in the shuttle’s chin barbette had locked onto the pair of opportunists, who had clearly thought they could claim the craft to escape. The little turret turned to track the jetbike as Spear came in but it did not fire; the sensors saw nothing when they looked at him, only a jumble of conflicting readings the primitive machine-brain could not decipher.

He abandoned the flyer and sprinted towards the shuttle. Spear was electric; his every neuron sang with bubbling power and giddy anticipation. The tiny droplet of blood he had consumed was like the sweetest nectar. It bubbled through his consciousness like potent, heady wine; he had a flash of Yosef Sabrat’s memory, a sense-taste of drinking an elderly vintage with Daig Segan, savouring the perfection of it. This was a far greater experience. He had dared to sip from the cup of a being more powerful than any other, and even that slightest of tastes made him feel like the king of all creation. If this were an echo of it, he thought, what glory the Emperor must feel to simply be.

Spear released a deep, booming laugh to the clouded skies. He was a loaded gun, now. Infinitely lethal. Ready to commit the greatest murder in history.

He just needed to be close…

Under the starboard wing, he glimpsed a small drum-shaped vehicle on fat tyres; it was a mechanised fuel bowser, governed by simple automata. The device was one of many such systems in the star-port, machines that could do the jobs of men by loading, unloading or servicing the ships that passed through the facility; but like so many things on Dagonet, in the disorder that had engulfed the planet no one had thought to stand down the robots, and so they went on at their programmed tasks, ignorant of the fact that buildings had collapsed around them, unaware that their human masters were most likely dead in the rubble.

The automaton had dutifully done its job, and refuelled the shuttle with fresh promethium. Spear hesitated on the cockpit ladder and his ebullient mood wavered.

Overhead, red light and thunder rolled in across the runway from the burning city, and Spear’s fanged mouth twisted in something like a scowl. In truth, he had not expected the Sons of Horus to be so close behind him to Dagonet. He had hoped he might have a day, perhaps two – but the tides of the warp were capricious. He wondered if some intelligence had been at work to bring all these players to the same place at the same time. To what end, though?

Spear shook the thought away. He was so set on leaving this place behind he had not stopped to think that his means of escape might no longer be in place. It was likely that if the Warmaster’s fleet was here, then the cutter Yelene was either in their possession or smashed to fragments.

‘I must get to Terra…’ He said the words aloud, the need burning in him; and then he sensed a distant taint upon his perception. A powerful, sinister presence. Unbidden, Spear looked up again, into the storm.

Yes. The master was up there, looking down on Dagonet, searching for him. The killer could see the dark, piercing gaze of Erebus in the patterns of the clouds. The master was waiting for him. Watching to see what he would do next, like a patient teacher with a prized student.

Spear dropped off the ladder and moved back to the front of the shuttle. It was all falling into place. With the blood taken, he needed only to ride to his target and perform his kill. Erebus was here to help him; the master would give him the ship he needed. It would be his final act as a mentor.

The killer took one of the bodies on the runway and dragged it into the lee of the wing, under cover from the thick gobbets of black rain that were falling. Spear remembered the rituals of communication that Erebus had seared into his memory. It would only take a moment to arrange. He dipped his fingers into a deep wound on the man’s torso and cupped a handful of thickening blood; then, quickly, Spear used it to draw glyphs of statement on the cracked ferrocrete surface. He made the circles and crosses, building the shape of an eightfold star line by line. Once complete, it would be visible to Erebus like a flare on a moonless night. The master would see it and know. He would understand.

The wind changed direction for an instant, blowing the smell of the corpse and the tang of promethium across the sensing pits in Spear’s fanged maw; and, too, it brought him the skirl of humming turbines.

His head snapped up, catching sight of a white-and-green shape dropping down through the mist. Something flashed in the open hatch and Spear jerked away on reflex.

A bullet creased the surface of his daemonflesh face like a razor blade, opening a ragged gouge that spat out a fan of ebon fluid; the tainted blood spattered over the half-drawn glyphs, ruining the pattern. Spear stumbled. A fraction of a second slower and the bullet would have struck him between the fathomless black pits of his eyes.

Tightening the muscles in his arms, Spear put up his palms with a snap of the wrist, and the daemonflesh grew new orifices. Long spars of sharp bone clattered into the air in a puff of pinkish discharge.

‘Watch out!’ Tariel called, stabbing at controls to throw the flyer into a half-roll that showed the belly of the aircraft to their target.

Kell staggered, losing his balance for a second as he clung on to his rifle. Koyne, surprisingly strong for wearing a body that seemed insubstantial, grabbed him and held him up. Nearby, Soalm hung on for dear life, shivering in the cold draught billowing through the open hatch.

Bone shards peppered the hull of the flyer and punched through the metal fuselage. Kell flinched as several impacted his chest and buried themselves in the armour there. Koyne cried out and as the aircraft righted itself, the Callidus fell backwards, a circle of bright crimson blossoming through the material across the shade’s thigh.

Kell swept a hand over his chest, flicking the shards away. As they fell to the deck they denatured, becoming soft and pliant. To the Vindicare’s disgust, the shards began to writhe like blind worms. He stamped them into patches of white pus and brought the Exitus up to his shoulder. ‘Tariel! Bring us around!’

The flyer had come in upwind, their approach masked by the clouds and the thunder from the shelling of the capital. Now they were circling the parked shuttle, the livery of the Eurotas Consortium clear as day across the hull. What Kell saw through his targeting scope was disturbing; he had faced humans of every stripe, mutant creatures, even xenos. Spear was unlike any of them. Even from this distance, it exuded a tainted menace that sickened him to look at.

‘It’s making for the cockpit,’ Tariel called out. ‘Kell!’

The marksman saw the blur of the assassin-creature as it ran; the thing hazed the air around it like waves of heat rising from a searing desert, making it hard to draw a bead. His finger tensed on the trigger. There was a high-velocity Splinter round in the chamber – on impact with an organic target it would fracture into millions of tiny hair-like fragments, each a charged piece of molly-wire. The wires would expand in a sphere and rip through flesh and bone like a tornado of blades.

It would do this, if he hit his target. But Kell had missed with the first shot. Even from a moving platform, through rain, against a partly-occluded target, he should have found the mark.

The Vindicare made a snap decision and worked the slide of the rifle, ejecting the unspent Splinter bullet, in one swift motion thumbing a red-tipped round from a pocket on his arm into the open chamber.

‘What are you waiting for?’ Koyne shouted. ‘Kill it!’

The breech of the Exitus closed on the Ignis bullet and Kell swung the longrifle away from the target. He ignored Koyne’s cries and his scope filled with the shape of the fuel bowser.

The incendiary compound in his next shot hit the main promethium tank and combusted. A fist of orange fire flipped the shuttle over and engulfed it in flames. Shockwaves of damp air struck the flyer and the aircraft was forced down hard, the impact of the landing snapping off the undercarriage.

Kell got up as bits of hull metal clattered out of the sky, bouncing off the runway. For a moment, all he saw was the jumping, twisting shapes of the flames; but then something red and smoking tore itself out of the wreckage and began to run for the star-port terminal building.

The Vindicare snarled and raised the rifle, but the weight of the gun told him the magazine was empty. He swore, slamming a new clip into place, knowing as he did that it would not matter. When he peered back through the scope, Spear had vanished. ‘He’s gone for cover,’ he began, turning. ‘We need to–’

‘Eristede?’ His sister’s voice stopped him dead. She lay on the deck, and her face was waxy and dull. There was blood on her lips, and when she moved her hands he saw a jagged length of bone protruding from her chest.

He let the rifle fall and ran to her, dropping into a crouch. Old emotions, strong and long-buried, erupted inside him. ‘Jenniker, no…’

‘Did you kill it?’

He felt the colour drain from him. ‘Not yet.’

‘You must. But not out of fury, do you understand?’

The cold, familiar rage that had always sustained him welled up in Kell’s thoughts. It was the same burning, icy power that had spurred him on ever since that day in the schola, since the moment the woman in the Vindicare robes had told him they knew the name of the man who had killed his parents. It was his undying fuel, the bottomless wellspring of dark emotion that made him such a superlative killer.

His sister’s fingertips touched his cheek. ‘No,’ she said, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘Please don’t show me that face again. Not the revenge. There is no end to that, Eristede. It goes on and on and on and it will consume you. There will be nothing left.’

Kell felt hollow inside, an empty vessel. ‘There’s nothing now,’ he said. ‘You took it all when you broke away. The last connection I had.’ He looked down at his hands. ‘This is all I have left.’

Jenniker shook her head. ‘You’re wrong. And so was I. I let you go that night. I should have made you stay. We could have lived another life. Instead we doomed ourselves.’

She was fading now, and he could see it. A surge of raw panic washed over him. His sister was going to die and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘He is watching. The God-Emperor waits for me.’

‘I don’t–’

‘Hush.’ She put a finger on his lips, trembling with her agony. ‘One day.’ Jenniker pressed something into his palm and closed his fingers over it. ‘Save His life, Eristede. He will draw me to His right hand, to be with mother and father. I’ll wait for you there. We will wait for you.’

‘Jenniker…’ He tried to find the right words to say to her. To ask her to forgive him. To understand; but her eyes were all the answer he needed. He saw such certainty there, such absence of doubt.

With difficulty she pulled a slim toxin corde from her pocket. ‘Do this, my brother,’ she told him, her pain rising. ‘But not for revenge. For the God-Emperor.’

Before he could stop her, she touched the tip of the needle-like weapon to her palm and pierced the flesh. Kell cried out as her eyes fluttered closed, and she became slack in his hands.

The rains drummed on the canopy and the flames hissed; then he became aware of a presence at his side. Koyne stood there, holding his longrifle. ‘Vindicare,’ said the shade. ‘What are your orders?’

Kell opened his fingers and saw a gold aquila there, stained with dots of red.

‘In the Emperor’s name,’ he said, rising to his feet and taking the weapon, ‘follow me.’

SEVENTEEN Confrontation / Duel / Termination

Kell looked up as Koyne emerged from the hangar where the Ultio was hidden and his expression stiffened. The boyish face, the pretence at the shape of a human aspect, these were all gone now. Instead, the Callidus had stripped down to what existed in the core of the shade’s persona. An androgynous figure in the matt black overall of a stealthsuit similar to that worn by Kell and Tariel, but with a hood that clung to every contour of the other assassin’s face. The only expression, if it could be said to be such a thing, was from the emerald ovals that were the eyes of the mask. Cold focus glittered there, and little else. Kell was reminded of an artist’s wooden manikin, something without emotion or animation from within.

Koyne’s head cocked. ‘There’s still time to reconsider this.’ The voice, like the figure, was neutral and colourless. Without someone else’s face to speak from, the Callidus seemed to lose all effect.

He ignored the statement, rechecking the fresh clips of ammunition he had taken from the ship for the paired Exitus longrifle and pistol. ‘Remember the plan,’ said the Vindicare. ‘We’ve all seen what it can do. There’s just the three of us now.’

‘You saw it,’ Tariel said, in a small voice. ‘We all saw it. On the memory coil, and out there… It’s not human.’

Koyne gave a reluctant nod. ‘And not xenos. Not alien in that way.’

‘It’s a target, that’s all that matters,’ Kell retorted.

The Callidus scowled. ‘When you have been where I have been and seen what I have seen, you come to understand that there are living things out there that go beyond such easy categorisation. Things that defy reason… even sanity. Have you ever peered into the warp, Vindicare? What lives there–’

‘This is not the warp!’ grated Kell. ‘This is the real world! And what lives here, we can end with a bullet!’

‘But what if we can’t kill the fiend?’ said Tariel, a long ballistic coat pulled tight over him. Congregating under the shadows near his boots, Kell saw rodent-like forms sheltering from the rain.

‘I wounded it,’ said the Vindicare. ‘So we will kill it.’

Tariel gave a slow nod. Overhead, a crackling roar crossed the sky as something burning crimson-purple passed above them, obscured by the low, dirty clouds. Seconds later, impact tremors made the runway quiver all around them, and the winds brought the long, drawn-out rumble of buildings collapsing. The city was entering its death-throes, and when it was finally smothered, Kell doubted the fury of the Sons of Horus would be sated.

Tariel looked up. ‘Vox communications will be sporadic, if they even work at all,’ he said. ‘The radioactives and ionisation in the atmosphere are blanketing the whole area.’

Kell nodded as he walked away. ‘If one of us finds the target, we’ll all know quickly enough.’

The pain across his back was a forest of needles.

Spear ran on, skirting around the rings of broken ferrocrete that had been sections of the control tower, now fallen in a line across the landing pads and maintenance pits. He could feel the daemonskin working against the myriad fragments of metal that were embedded in him, deposited there by the explosion of the shuttle. One by one, the pieces of shrapnel were being expunged from his torso, the living flesh puckering to spit them out in puffs of black blood.

The burn from the blast was torture, and with every footfall jags of sharp agony raced up Spear’s changed limbs and tightened around his chest. When the fuel bowser had detonated, the concussion had caught him first and thrown him clear. The shuttle took the brunt of the explosion, and it was lost to him now. He would need to find another way off Dagonet. Another way to signal the master.

He slowed, clambering over a pile of rubble sloughed from the front of the terminal building, dragging himself up on spars of twisted rebar over drifts of shattered blue glass.

At the apex he dared to pause and throw a glance back through the filthy downpour. The shuttle wreckage was still burning, bright orange flames shimmering where the wet runway reflected them like a dark mirror. Spear’s segmented jaws parted in a low growl. He had allowed himself to become distracted; he was so enraptured by his own success at taking the Warrant he had not stopped to consider the meaning of the witch-girl’s company with the cultists of the Theoge.

Her appearance there had not been happenstance. At first he thought she was merely some defender, a palace guard put in place as a last line of defence by Eurotas’s fanatic cohorts; now it was becoming clearer. He was facing assassins, killers of his own stripe with their own weapons of murder.

He considered what their presence meant, and then discarded the concern. If his purpose on Dagonet had been known, if the forces of the arrogant Emperor had really, truly understood the threat Spear posed to their precious liege lord, this world would have been melted into radioactive glass the moment he set foot on it.

Spear chuckled. Perhaps they expected him to feel fear at his pursuit, but he did not. If anything, he became more certain of his own victory. The only thing that could have faced him on his own terms was the witch-girl, and he had boiled her in the crucible of her own powers. He had little fear of gun or blade after that.

The killer dropped through the yawning space of a tall broken window and landed in a cat-fall on the tiled floor of the terminal. Dust and death hung in the air. Sweeping his gaze around, he saw the remnants of a massive display screen where it had been blown from its mounts by the concussion of an impact several miles away. Across the debris-strewn floor there were a handful of corpses, ragged and gory where carrion-fowl had come to prey on them. The jackal birds glared at Spear from the gloomy corners of the chamber, sitting in their roosts and sniffing at the air. They smelled his blood and they were afraid of its stench.

The daemonskin rippled over him and Spear let out a gasp. It could sense the others coming, it could feel the proximity of bloodletting, of new murder.

He sprinted away into the shadows to prepare; he would not deny the needs of his flesh.

Tariel expected to feel a crippling terror when the others vanished into the shadows of the building, but he did not. He was never really alone, not if he were to be honest with himself. The infocyte found the makings of a good hide in a blown-out administratum room on the mezzanine level of the main terminal, a processing chamber where new arrivals to Dagonet would have been brought for interview by planetary officials before being given formal entry. The eyerats scrambled around him, sniffing at the corners and patrolling the places where there were holes in the walls or missing doorways; his two remaining psyber eagles were watching the main spaces of the atrium and occasionally snapping at the native carrion scavengers when they became too curious.

In a corner formed by two fallen walls, Tariel dropped into a lotus settle and used the cogitator gauntlet to bring up a schematic of the building. It was among the millions of coils worth of files he had copied from the stacks of the Dagonet governmental librariums over the past few weeks, the data siphoned into his personal mnemonic stores. It was habitual of him to do such a thing; if he saw information untended, he took it for himself. It wasn’t theft, for nothing was stolen; but on some level Tariel regarded data left unsecured – or at least data that had not been secured well – as fundamentally belonging to him. If it was there, he had to have it. And it always had its uses, as this moment proved.

Working quickly, he allowed the new scans filtering in from the rats and the eagles to update the maps, blocking out the zones where civil war, rebel attack and careless Astartes bombardments had damaged the building. But the data took too many picoseconds to update; the vox interference was strong enough to be causing problems with his data bursts as well. If matters became worse, he might be forced to resort to deploying actual physical connections.

And there was more disappointment to come. The swarm of netflys he had released on entering the building were reporting in sporadically. The infrastructure of the star-port was so badly damaged that all its internal scrying systems and vid-picters were inert. Tariel would be forced to rely on secondary sensing.

He held his breath, listening to the susurrus of the contaminated rainfall on the broken glass skylights overhead, and the spatter of the runoff on the broken stonework; and then, very distinctly, Tariel heard the sound of a piece of rubble falling, disturbed by a misplaced footstep.

Immediately, a datum-feed from one of the eyerats out in the corridor ceased and the other rodents scrambled for cover, their adrenaline reads peaking.

The infocyte was on his feet before he could stop himself. The lost rat had reported its position as only a few hundred metres from where he now stood.

I will make sure that nothing ever gets close enough to kill me. Tariel’s skin went clammy as his words to Kell returned to him, damning the Vanus with his foolish arrogance. He moved as quickly as he dared, abandoning his makeshift hide and ducking out through a rent in the fallen wall. He heard the psyber eagles take wing above as he moved.

Tariel flinched as he passed through a stream of stale-smelling water dripping down from above, dropping from ledge to ledge until he was in the atrium. He glanced around quickly; the chamber was modelled on a courtyard design. There were galleries and balconies, some ornamental, some not. Through the eyes of one of the birds, he saw a spot that had strong walls to the back and three distinct lines of approach and escape. Pulling his coat tighter, he moved towards it in the shadows, quick and swift, as he had been taught.

As he ran he tabbed the start-up sequence for the pulse generator and sent dozens of test signals to his implanted vox bead; only static answered him. Now, for the first time, he felt alone, even as the feeds from the implanted micropicters in the skulls of his animals followed him in his run. The tiny images clustered around his forearm, hovering in the hololithic miasma.

He was almost across the span of the courtyard when Spear fell silently out of the dimness above him and landed in a crouch on top of an overturned stone bench. The face of red flesh, silver fangs and black eyes looked up and found him.

Tariel was so shocked he jumped back a step, every muscle in his body shaking with surprise.

‘What is this?’ muttered the killer. Those blank, sightless eyes cut into him. The voice was almost human, though, and it had a quizzical edge, as if the monstrosity didn’t know what to make of the trembling, thin man in front of him.

And now the fear came, heavy and leaden, threatening to drag Tariel down; and with it there was an understanding that lanced through the infocyte like a bullet. He had fatally exposed himself, not through the deception of a superior enemy, but because he had made a beginner’s mistake. The falling stone, the lost signal – those had been nothing. Happenstance. Coincidence. But the infocyte had still run. He had committed the cardinal sin that no Vanus could ever be absolved of; he had misinterpreted the data.

Why? Because he had allowed himself to think that he could do this. The past days spent in the company of the Vindicare, the Callidus and Culexus, the Eversor and Venenum, they had convinced him that he could operate in the field as well as he had from his clade’s secret sanctums. But all Fon Tariel had done was to delude himself. He was the most intelligent person in the Execution Force, so why had he been so monumentally foolish? Tariel’s mind railed at him. What could have possibly made him think he was ready for a mission like this? How could his mentors and directors have abandoned him to this fate, spent his precious skills so cheaply?

He had revealed himself. Shown his weakness before the battle had begun. Spear made a noise in its throat – a growl, perhaps – and took a step forward.

The eyerats leapt from the rubble all around the red-skinned freak, claws and fangs bared, and from above in a flutter of metal-trimmed wings, the two psyber eagles dived on the killer with talons out. The slave-animals had picked up on the fear signals bleeding down Tariel’s mechadendrites and reacted in kind.

Spear’s arms went up to bat away the prey birds and he stamped one of the rodents to death with a clawed foot. The other rats clawed their way up the killer’s obscene, fleshy torso; another of them was devoured as a mouth opened in Spear’s stomach and bit it in half. The last was crushed in a balled fist.

The psyber eagles lasted a little longer, spinning about the killer’s horned head, fluttering and slashing with claws and titanium-reinforced beaks. They scored several bloody scratches, but could not escape the fronds of sinewy matter that issued out of Spear’s hands to entrap and strangle them.

Curiosity gave way to anger as the killer dashed the corpses of the birds to the ground; but for his part, Tariel had used the distraction well.

Dragging it from an inner pocket, the infocyte threw a stubby cylinder at Spear and hurled himself away in the opposite direction, falling clumsily over a collapsed table. Lightning fast, the freakish murderer snatched up the object; a grenade. When they had paused to rearm at the Ultio, Tariel had returned to the case of munitions he had presented to Iota during their voyage to Dagonet.

Spear sniffed at the thing and recoiled with a sputtering gasp. It was thick with the stench of dying stars. He hurled it away in disgust; but not quickly enough.

The device exploded with a flat bang of concussion and suddenly the courtyard was filled with a shimmering silver mist of metal snow.

The killer stumbled to his knees and began to scream.

His psyche was being flensed; the layers of his conscious mind were peeling away under an impossibly sharp blade, bleeding out raw-red thought. The agony was a twin to the pain the master had inflicted on Spear all those times he had dared to disobey, to question, to fail.

It was the particles in the air; they were hurting him in ways that the killer thought impossible, frequencies of psionic radiation blasting from every single damned speck of the glittering powder, bathing him in razors. Spear’s mouthparts gaped open and the sound he released from his chest was a gurgling cry of pain. His nerves were alight with phantom fires unseen to the naked eye. In the invisible realms of the immaterium, the shockwave was sawing at the myriad of threads connecting the killer to his etheric shadow. The daemonskin was battering itself bloody, tearing at his subsumed true-flesh as it tried to rip away and flee into the void.

Spear collapsed, shuddering, and mercifully the effect began to lessen; but slowly, far too slowly. He saw the human, the pasty wastrel that had come stumbling into his kill zone. The gangly figure peered out from behind his cover.

Spear wanted to eat him raw. The killer was filled with the need to strike back at the one who had hurt him. He wanted to tear and tear and tear until there was nothing left of this fool but rags of meat–

no

The word came like the tolling of a distant bell, drifting across the churning surface of Spear’s pain-laced thoughts. Quiet at first, then with each moment, louder and closer, more insistent than before.

no no No No NO NO NO

‘Get out!’ Spear screamed the words as loud as he could, the amalgam of his once-human flesh thrashing turbulently against the embedded sheath of the daemonskin symbiont that cloaked him. Skin and skin flexed, tearing and shredding. Black fluids bubbled from new, self-inflicted wounds, staining the broken stonework. He swung his head down and battered it against the rubble, hearing bone snap wetly. Real, physical agony was like a tonic after the impossible, enveloping pain from the cloud-weapon. It shook the grip of the ghost-voices before they could form.

NO NO NO

‘NNNNNnnnnoooo!’ Spear bellowed, so wracked with his suffering he could do nothing but ride it out to the bitter end.

The pale-skinned man was coming closer. He had what could have been a weapon.

Tariel opened his hand and the emitter cone for the pulse generator grew out of the gauntlet’s palm, tiny blue sparks clustering around the nib of the device. He was shaking, and the infocyte grabbed his wrist with his other hand to hold it steady, trying to aim at the writhing, horrible mass that lay on the stones, screaming and bleeding.

The psy-disruptor grenades had only been an experiment. He hadn’t really expected them to work; at best, Tariel thought he might be able to flee under the cover of the discharge, that it might blind Horus’s monstrous assassin long enough for him to escape.

Instead, the thing was howling like a soul being dragged into the abyss. It tore at itself in anguish, ripping out divots of its own flesh. Tariel hesitated, grotesquely fascinated by it; he could not look away from the twitching spectacle.

Faces grew out of the creature’s torso and abdomen. The quivering red skin bowed outwards and became the distinct shape of a male aspect, repeated over and over. It was silently mouthing something to him, but the words were corrupted and blurred. The expression was clear, however. The faces were begging him, imploring him.

The fizzing wash of static issuing from his vox broke for a moment and Tariel heard Koyne’s flat, emotionless drone in his ear. ‘Do not engage it, Vanus,’ said the static-riddled voice. ‘We’re coming to you–’

Then the signal was swallowed up again by interference as somewhere off in the distant city, a new slew of warheads were detonated.

The killer’s spasms of pain were calming, and Tariel came as close as he dared. He hesitated, the question spinning in his thoughts, the pulse generator humming and ready. Attack or flee? Flee or attack?

The faces faded, melting back into the crimson-hued flesh, and suddenly those black, abyssal eyes were staring into him, clear as nightfall.

Tariel triggered the blast of focussed electromagnetic force, but it was too late. Spear moved at the speed of hate, diving into him with his hands aimed forwards in a fan of unfolding claws, knocking his arms away. Wicked talons punctured the Vanus’s torso and tore through dermal flex-armour and meat, down into bone and organs; then the hands split apart and ripped Tariel’s ribcage open, emptying him on to the wet stones.

The slaughterhouse stink of Fon Tariel’s bloody demise reached Koyne as the shade bolted from the broken-ended skywalk spanning the main terminal atrium. The Callidus skidded to a halt and spat in annoyance as what was left of the infocyte was shrugged off his killer’s claws and pooled at the feet of the red-fleshed thing.

Koyne saw the shoals of mouths emerging all over the surface of the monstrosity, as they licked and lapped at the steaming remains of the Vanus. A furious surge of censure ran through the assassin’s mind; Tariel had been a poor choice for this mission from the start. If Koyne had been given command of the operation, as would have been the more sensible choice, then the Callidus would have made sure the Vanus never left the Ultio. Tariel’s kind were simply incapable of the instincts needed to operate in the field. There was a reason the Officio Assassinorum kept them at their scrying stations, and now this wasteful death had proven it. This was all the Vindicare’s fault; the entire mission was breaking apart, collapsing all around them.

But it was too late to abort now. The killer, the Spear-creature, was looking up, sensing the Callidus’s presence – and now Koyne’s options had fallen to one.

With a flexion of the wrist, the haft of a memory sword fell into Koyne’s right hand and the Callidus leapt from the suspended walkway; in the left the shade had the neural shredder, and the assassin pulled the trigger, sending an expanding wave of exotic energy cascading towards Spear.

The red-skinned freak skirted the luminal edge of the neural blast and dodged backwards, performing balletic flips that sent Spear spinning through pools of dark shadow and shafts of grey, watery sunlight.

Koyne pivoted to touch down on altered legs, shifting the muscle mass to better absorb the shock of the landing. The koans of the change-teachers learned in the dojos of the clade came easily to mind, and the Callidus used strength of will to forcibly alter the secretions of polymorphine from a series of implanted drug glands. The chemical let bone and flesh flow like tallow, and Koyne was a master at manipulating it from moment to moment. The assassin allowed the compound to thicken muscle bunches and bone density, and then attacked.

Spear grew great cleavers made of tooth-like enamel from orifices along the bottom of his forearms, and these blades whistled as they slashed through the air around Koyne’s head. A downward slash from the memory sword briefly opened a gouge on Spear’s shoulder, but it was knitting shut again almost as soon as it was cut. Another neural blast went wide. Koyne was too close to deploy the pistol properly, and feinted backwards, resisting the temptation to engage the enemy killer in close combat.

Spear opened his mouth and shouted awls of black cartilage into the air. Glancing hits peppered Koyne’s green-eyed hood and the darts denatured, dissolving into tiny crawling spiders that ate into the ballistic cloth with their sharp mandibles. Before they could chew through the emerald lenses to the soft tissues of Koyne’s eyes, the Callidus gave a snort of frustration and tore the hood away, discarding it.

The assassin saw a glimpse of a familiar face-that-was-no-face, reflected in a sheet of fallen glass. It was not as blank a canvas as it should have been; Koyne’s aspect trembled, moving of its own accord. The Callidus’s anger deepened, and so in turn the face became more defined. There was a slight resemblance there that veered towards the scarred visage of the Garantine.

Koyne didn’t like the thought of that, and turned away as Spear attacked again. The tooth-blades were continuing to grow, lengthening and becoming brownish-grey along the edges. Before the killer could close the range, Koyne aimed the neural shredder and depressed the trigger pad. Energy throbbed from the focussing crystal in a widening stream that swept over Spear and knocked him backwards.

The Callidus had claimed many victims with the weapon. It was a singular horror in its own way; not content with the cessation of a life, instead the pistol behaved as an intellivore, disintegrating the connections between the neurons of an organic brain, killing only memory and mind with the brutality of a hurricane sweeping through a forest.

On any other target, it might have worked. But this was an amalgam of uncontrolled human mutation, merged with a predatory form from a dimension made of madness. What it had that could be called mentality was a lattice of instinct and obedience suspended somewhere beyond the reach of anything in the physical plane.

Spear shrugged off the flickers of energy, folds of skin and fronds of flesh-matter crisping and peeling away from its head like a tattered layer of ablative armour. The grinning, fang-lined mouth underneath was wet with fluids and pus. The killer’s cutting blades swept in and the barrel of the neural shredder was severed cleanly.

The gun screamed and spat watery orange fluids in jerking sputters, twitching so hard that it jolted itself from Koyne’s grasp and tumbled away, falling into the shadows beneath collapsed sheets of flakboard. The Callidus shrank back, grasping for the twin to the memory sword already at point and ready.

The killer and the assassin fell into a blade fight, fat yellow sparks flying as the molecule-thin edges of Koyne’s rapiers cut into the organic swords and broke off brittle, sharp fragments with every hit. Spear’s blades flawed without blunting, as the Callidus learned at cost, the wet lines of them cutting deeply into the stealthsuit. Where blood was drawn, it was slow to clot. The tooth-matter exuded some kind of oily venom that kept the wounds from scabbing over.

Spear changed the balance of the combat, powerful muscles bunching beneath his red flesh, forcing Koyne back and back towards the fractured walls of the courtyard.

The animated contours of the Callidus’s face altered as each blow landed or was deflected. A whirlwind of parries flew from Koyne’s arms, but Spear was gaining ground, pushing the assassin deeper into a defensive stance with each passing moment. Koyne’s inconstant aspect showed a carousel of old faces and new faces, all of them in fury and frustration.

Spear laughed, threads of drool stringing from the split between the halves of his shovel-faced jaw, and in that second Koyne managed a downward slash of both blades. Spear barely parried the move – it was overly aggressive and unexpected, and the tips of the memory swords carved a cross over the killer’s scalp that penetrated to the blackened bone. Wire-thin worms poured from the wound, exposing a milky eye beneath the injury that wept ichor. Spear’s laugh turned to a howl of agony.

There was something fundamentally wrong with this creature. The assassin was not touched by witch-mark like Iota and her Culexus kindred, but still Koyne could sense on a marrow-deep level that Spear was not meant to exist in this world. The creature, whatever amorphous amalgamation of warp-spawn and human it was, flaunted reason by the mere fact of its existence. It was a splinter in the skin of the universe.

Koyne did the trick with the koans once again, marshalling the density of bone and lining of musculature for a leap into the air that defied human potential. The Callidus jumped upwards and pivoted in mid-flight, falling out of Spear’s line of sight over a buckled wall.

The killer came rushing over the hillock of rubble and followed his foe into the atrium proper. The wide, high chamber ran almost the entire length of the terminal, the litter of the dead and the wreckage of the port building lying ankle deep and swimming in stagnant falls of rainwater.

Koyne was rising back into a fighting stance, slower than the Callidus would have liked, but the stress of muscle reformation on the run took its toll. All the no-mind focussing mantras in the pages of the clade’s Liber Subditus were worth nothing against a blade in the hand of an enemy like this one.

When Spear spoke, Koyne knew that the moment was near. The fury in the killer’s hissing, sibilant voice was the sound of a serpent uncoiling, hood fanning open before the bite. ‘I murder and murder, and there is no end to you,’ he spat. ‘You are not challenges to me, you are only steps on the road. Markers for my path.’

‘What monstrosity gave birth to you?’ Koyne asked the question, thinking aloud, the changing face shifting anew. ‘You’re just a collision of freakish chance, an animal. A weapon.’

‘Like you?’ Spear’s mucus-slicked blades flicked back and forth, gleaming dully. ‘Like the wretch back there and the dark-skinned one I killed with my mind? But what have you done of worth, faceless?’ He threw an inelegant, bored attack at Koyne that the Callidus avoided, splashing back through a puddle into the shadows. ‘Nothing you have murdered has any weight. But what I destroy will tip the balance of a galaxy.’

‘You’ll be stopped!’ Koyne shouted the words with sudden, vicious energy, boiling up from a place of naked hatred.

‘You will never know.’ Spear gave a flick of his hand and shot a fan of bone shards at the assassin. Instead of dodging, Koyne rocked forwards, into the path of the darts, and parried them away with a web of mnemonic steel. Blades flashing, the Callidus pushed into the attack, aiming for the single vulnerable point in the killer’s stance.

Spear had left just such an opening to entice the shade, and seized the moment with vicious delight. New blades of fang-like matter burst from the surface of his churning skin and caught Koyne’s twinned strike, blocking the blow even as it fell.

Koyne’s changing face darkened with fright and then agony. Spear crossed his sword-arms like a falling guillotine and both of the Callidus’s slender, delicate hands were severed at the wrists.

Fountains of blood jetted across Spear’s torso as Koyne fell backwards with the force of the pain-shock, and the killer caught his victim before the assassin could tumble into the sloshing, grimy waters. ‘We’re alike,’ he told the Callidus. ‘Beneath the skin. Both the same.’

Koyne was a moment from death, and so Spear reached up and drove needle-sharp nails into the trembling skin of the assassin’s face; then with a single, horrific tearing, he ripped the flesh away to show the red meat underneath. Koyne’s body bucked with the sheer violence of the act, and Spear gave it a brutal shove.

The Callidus spun away and landed on a fallen spire of masonry, a pinnacle of marble bursting through the stealthsuit fabric. Pinned there, the body bled out and twitched, denied a quick death.

‘You see?’ Spear asked the question to the rag of skin in his hand. ‘The same, in our ways.’

The killer tipped back his head and ate his prize morsel. Now this matter was done with, now the Emperor’s ineffectual foot soldiers had been disposed of, Spear could return to the matter of the signalling. He looked around, searching for a wide, flat space where he might begin again on the drawing of the runes.

no

‘Be silent,’ he hissed.

The daemonskin muttered. Something was touching its surface. A breath of faint energy, a pinprick of ultraviolet light. Spear turned, senses altering to follow–

The bullet entered the killer’s head through the hollow black pit of his right eye, the impact transferring such kinetic force it blew Spear off his feet and into a spinning tumble, down into the debris and floodwater. The shot fractured into thousands of tiny, lethal shards that expanded to ricochet around inside the walls of his skull, shredding the meat of his brain into ribbons.

The faceless had given up life in order to draw him into the atrium, into a space under a sniper’s gun.

In those fractions of seconds as the blackness engulfed him, there was understanding. There had been another. In his arrogance, he had failed to account for a third attacker; or perhaps it been Sabrat’s final victory, clouding his mind at the crucial moment.

The killer was killed.

Kell lowered the longrifle and allowed the cameoline cloak to fall open. The echo of the gunshot, hardly louder than a woman’s gasp, still echoed around the rafters of the atrium. Carrion birds roosting nearby flashed into the air on black wings, circling and snarling at each other in their raucous voices.

The Vindicare slung the rifle over his shoulder and felt a tremor in his hands. He looked down at the gloved fingers; they seemed foreign to him, as if they belonged to someone else. They were so steeped in blood; so many lay dead at their touch. The single, tiny pressure of his finger on a trigger plate, such a small amount of expended force – and yet magnified into such great destructive power.

He willed himself to stay away from that secret place in his heart, the stygian well of remorse and wrath that had claimed him on the day he killed the murderer of his parents. He willed it, and failed. Instead, Kell succumbed.

It had been his first field kill.

The man, in transit via aeronef through the valleys of Thaxted Dosas, the dirigible floating beneath the hilltops, skimming the sides of the low peaks. Eristede Kell had made his hide eight days before, in the long grasses. The long grasses like those he and Jenniker played in as children, their games of fetch-find and hunt-the-grue. He waited under the suns and the moons, the former his father’s glory, the latter his mother’s smile.

And when the ’nef came around the hill, he fired the shot and did not make the kill. Not at first. The cabin window was refracted, disrupting his aim. He should have known, adjusted the sights. A lesson learned.

Instead of cold and steely determination, he unchained his anger. Kell unloaded the full magazine of ammunition into the cabin, killing everything that lived within it. He executed all who saw that moment of error, target and collaterals all. Men and women and children.

And he had his revenge.

Once more, he was in that place. Life taken to balance life taken from him, from his family – and once more, there was no sweetness in the act. Nothing but bitter, bitter ash and the rage that would not abate.

With an angry flourish, he grabbed the cable rig on his belt and used the fast-fall to drop quickly from his hide to the waterlogged floor below. The cloak billowing out behind him like the wings of the prey birds overhead, he strode towards the body of the Spear-thing, one hand snaking down to the clasp on the holster at his hip. He did not spare Koyne’s brutalised corpse more than a second glance; despite every tiny challenge to Kell’s authority, in the end the Callidus had obeyed and died in the line of duty. As with Iota, Tariel and the others, he would ensure their clades learned of their sacrifices. There would be new teardrops etched upon the face of the Weeping Queen in the Oubliette of the Fallen.

The monstrous killer lay cruciform, floating on the surface of the floodwater. Rust-coloured billows of blood surrounded the body, a halo of red among the dull shades of the rubble and wreckage.

Kell gave the corpse a clinical glare, barely able to stop himself from drawing a knife and stabbing the crimson flesh in mad anger. The skull, already malformed and inhuman in its proportions, had been burst from within by the lethal concussion of the Shatter bullet. Cracked skin and bone were visible in lines webbing the face; it looked like a grotesque terracotta mask, broken and then inexpertly mended.

Putting the longrifle aside, he drew the Exitus pistol, sliding his hand over the skull sigil on the breech and cocking the heavy handgun. He would leave no trace of this creature.

Kell’s boot disturbed the blood-laced floods and the misted water parted. Motion drew his eye to it; the rusty stain was no longer growing, but shrinking.

The wounds across the body of the killer were drinking it in.

He spun, finger on the trigger.

Spear’s leg made an unnatural cracking sound and bent at the wrong angle, hitting Kell in the chest with the force of a hammer blow. The Vindicare stumbled as the red-skinned creature dragged itself out of the water and threw itself at him. Spear no longer moved with the same unnatural stealth and grace he had seen down the sights of the longrifle, but it made up for what it lacked in speed and aggression. Spear battered at him, knocking the pistol from Kell’s grip, breaking bones with every impact of his jagged fists.

The skin of the killer moved in ways that made the Vindicare’s gut tighten with disgust; it was almost as if Spear’s flesh were somehow dragging about the bones and organs within, animating them with wild, freakish energy. Brain matter and thick fluids dribbled from the impact wound in the killer’s eye, and it coughed globules of necrotic tissues from its yawning mouth and ragged nostrils. The marksman took another hit as he tried to block a blow, and Kell’s shoulder dislocated from its socket, making him bellow in agony.

Stumbling, he fell against the crimson-stained spire where Koyne lay impaled. Spear advanced, with each footfall his body bloating and thickening as it drew in more and more of the blood-laced fluids sloshing about their feet.

There was a face in the bubbling skin of its torso. Then another, and another, biting and chewing at the thin membrane that suffocated them, trying to break free. Spear twitched and halted. It turned its clawed fingers on itself, slashing at the protrusions in its flesh, making scratches that oozed thin liquid.

The faces cried out silently to Kell. Stop him, they screamed.

The daemonskin had saved Spear’s life, if this could be considered life. It was so ingrained in the matter of his being that even the obliteration of his cerebellum was not enough to end him. The proxy-flesh of his warp-parasite contained the force of the bullet detonation – or as much as it was capable of, forcing the broken pieces of Spear back together into some semblance of their undamaged form.

But the daemonskin was a primitive creature, unsophisticated. It missed out petty things like control and intellect, holding tight to instinct and animal fury. The killer was self-aware enough to know that he had been murdered and returned from it, but his mind was damaged beyond repair and what barriers of self-control it had once had were in tatters.

Without them, his cages of captured memory broke open.

The formless force of a fragmented persona-imprint came crashing into Spear’s wounded psyche with the impact of a falling comet, and he was spun and twisted beneath the force of it.

Suddenly, the killer’s thoughts were flooded by an overload of sensation, a bombardment of pieces of emotion, shards of self.

–Ivak and the other boys with a ball and the hoops–

–the smell of matured estufagemi wine was everywhere. The warm, comforting scent seemed cloying and overly strong–

–Renia says yes to his earnest offer of a marriage contract, and he basks in her smile–

–shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pasty-white and streaked with fluid–

–I hate you!–

–the shot that kills the Blue Towers Rapist comes from his gun, finally–

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

–No–

–a flicker of guilt–

–I’ve been absent a lot recently–

This was all that there was of Yosef Sabrat’s psyche, an incomplete jigsaw puzzle of a self, driven by the single trait that marbled all the man had been, and all that Spear had destroyed.

He had been waiting. Patient, clever Yosef. Buried deep in the dungeons of Spear’s dark soul, struggling not to fade away. Waiting for a moment like this, for the chance to strike at his murderer.

The phantom-taint of the dead lawman wanted justice. It wanted revenge for every victim in the killer’s bloody annals.

Every soul of those that Spear had slaughtered and looted, every ghost he had pillaged to assume them, to corrupt them into his disguises, each had tasted like a special kind of fear. A fear of loss of self, worse than death.

Now that fear was in him, as Spear clawed at the ragged edge of his own mind, dangling over the brink of a psychic abyss.

And when he spoke, he heard Yosef Sabrat’s voice.

‘Stop him!’

The face was not the thing of fangs and horns and dark voids any more. It belonged to a man, just a man in pain and sorrow, peering out at him as if through the bars of the deepest prison in all creation.

Kell’s breath was struck from him by the grief in those all-too-human eyes. He had seen it enough times, witnessed at a distance in the moment when death claimed a life. The sudden, final understanding in the eyes of a target. The pain and the truth.

He raced forward, ignoring the spirals of hot agony from the broken, grinding edges of his ribcage, stabbing slim throwing knives from his wrist-guard into the torso of the Spear-thing.

It cried out and he pushed past it, falling, slipping on the wet-slick tiles beneath his feet. Kell rolled, clutching for the fallen pistol, fingers grasping the grip.

The killer was coming for him, festoons of claws and talons exploding from every surface on its lurching body, the human face disappearing as it was swallowed by the fangs and spines. It thundered across the debris, crashing through the water.

Kell’s gun came up and he fired. The weapon bucked with a scream of torn air and the heavy-calibre Ignis bullet crossed the short distance between gunman and target.

The round slammed into the meat of Spear’s shoulder and erupted in a blare of brilliant white fire; the hollow tip of the bullet was filled with a pressurised mixture of phosphoron-thermic compound. On impact, it ignited with a fierce million-degree heat that would burn even in the absence of oxygen.

Spear was shrieking, his body shuddering as if it were trying to rip itself apart. Kell took aim again and fired a second shot, then a third, a fourth. At this range he could not miss. The rounds blew Spear back, the combustion of hot air boiling the water pooled around him into steam. The white flames gathered across the killer’s body, eating into the surface of his inhuman flesh.

Kell did not stop. He emptied the Exitus pistol into the target, firing until the slide locked back. He watched his enemy transform from a howling torch into a seething, roiling mass of burned matter. Spear wavered, the screams from its sagging, molten jaws climbing the octaves; and then there was a concussion of unnatural sound that resonated from the creature. Kell saw the ghost of something blood-coloured and ephemeral ripping itself from the killer’s dying meat, and heard a monstrous, furious howl. It faded even as he tried to perceive it, and then the smoking remains fell. A sudden wash of sulphur stink wafted over him and he gagged, coughing up blood and thin bile. The ghost-image had fled.

Nursing his pain, Kell watched as Spear’s blackened, crumbling skeleton hissed and crackled like fat on a griddle.

To his surprise, he saw something floating on the surface of the murky floodwaters; tiny dots of bright colour, like flecks of gold leaf. They issued out from the corpse of the killer, liberated by Spear’s death. When he reached for them they disintegrated, flickering in the wan light and then gone.

‘Not for revenge,’ he said aloud, ‘For the Emperor.’

The Vindicare sat there for a long time, listening to the drumming of the rains and the distant crashes of destruction across the distance to the capital. The explosions and the tremors were coming closer together now, married to the gouts of harsh light falling from the sky above. The city and everything in it was collapsing under the rage of the Sons of Horus; soon they would turn their weapons to the port, to the wastelands, to every place on Dagonet where life still sheltered from their thunder.

The Warmaster’s rebels and traitors would not stop on this world, or the next, or the next. They would cut a burning path across space that would only end at Terra.

That could not come to pass. Kell’s war – his mission – was not over.

Using the Exitus rifle to support his weight, he gathered what he needed and then the Vindicare marksman left the ruins of the terminal behind, beginning a slow walk across the cracked runways under darkening skies.

In the distance, he saw the Ultio’s running lights snap on as the ship sensed his approach.

EIGHTEEN I Am The Weapon / Into The Light / Nemesis

The guncutter climbed the layers of cloud, punching through pockets of turbulent air thrown into the atmosphere by storm cells, the new-born thunderheads spawning in the wake of orbit-fall munitions.

Somewhere behind it, down on Dagonet’s surface, the landscape was being dissected as lance fire swept back and forth. The killing rains of energy and ballistic warheads had broken the boundaries of the capital city limits; now they were escaping to spread across the trembling ground, cutting earth like a keen skinning knife crossing soft flesh.

The burning sky cradled the arrow-prowed ship, which spun and turned as it wove a path through the cascades of plasma. No human pilot could have managed such a feat, but the Ultio’s helmsman was less a man and more the ship itself. He flew the vessel through the tides of boiling air as a bird would ride a thermal, his hands the stabilators across the bow, his legs the blazing nozzles of the thrusters, fuel-blood pumping through his rumbling engine-heart.

Ultio’s lone passenger was strapped into an acceleration couch at the very point of the ship’s cramped bridge, watching waves of heat ripple across the invisible bubble of void shields from behind a ring-framed cockpit canopy.

Kell muttered into the mastoid vox pickup affixed to his jawbone, subvocalising his words into the humming reader in the arm of the couch. As the words spilled out of him, he breathed hard and worked on attending to his injuries. The pilot had reconfigured the gravity field in the cockpit to off-set the g-force effects of their headlong flight, but Kell could still feel the pressure upon him. But he was thankful for small mercies – had he not been so protected, the lift-off acceleration from the port would have crushed him into a blackout, perhaps even punctured a lung with one of his cracked ribs.

It remained an effort to speak, though, but he did it because he knew he was duty bound to give his report. Even now, the Ultio’s clever subordinate machine-brains were uploading and encoding the contents of the memory spool from Iota’s skull-helm, and the pages of overly analytical logs Tariel had kept in his cogitator gauntlet. When they were done, that compiled nugget of dense data would be transmitted via burst-signal to the ship’s drive unit, still hiding in orbit, within the wreckage of a dead space station.

But not without his voice to join them, Kell decided. He was mission commander. At the end, the lay of the choices were his responsibility and he would not shirk that.

Finally, he ran out of words and bowed his head. Tapping the controls of the reader, he pressed the playback switch to ensure his final entry had been embedded.

‘My name is Eristede Kell,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Assassin-at-Marque of the Clade Vindicare, Epsilon-dan. And I have defied my orders.’

Nodding, he silenced himself, discarding the mastoid patch. Kell’s voice seemed strange and distant to him; it was less a report he had made and more of a confession.

Confession. The loaded connotations of that word made him glance down, to where he had secured Jenniker’s golden aquila about the wrist of his glove. He searched himself, trying to find a meaning, a definition for the emotion clouding his thoughts. But there was nothing he could grasp.

Kell pressed another switch and sent the vox recording to join the rest of the data packet. Outside, the glowing sky had darkened through blue to purple to black, taking the rush of air with it. Ultio was beyond the atmosphere now, and still climbing.

Each breath he took felt tainted and metallic. Thick fluids congested at his throat and he swallowed them back with a grimace. The smell in his nostrils was no one’s blood but his own, and while the painkillers he had injected into his neck had gone some way towards keeping him upright, they were wearing thinner by the moment.

An indicator rune on the control console flared green; Ultio had been sent a line-of-sight signal from the drive unit. Out there in the wreckage-strewn orbits, the drive module was awakening, stealthily turning power to its warp engine and sublight drives. In moments, the astropath and Navigator on board would be roused from their sense-dep slumber. The Ultio’s descent module needed only to cross the space to the other section of the ship and dock; then, reunited, the vessel could run for the void and the escape of the immaterium.

Kell leaned forwards to stare out of the canopy. The only flaw in that otherwise simple plan was the gathering of warships between the guncutter and the drive module.

An armada barred his way. Starships the size of a metropolis crested with great knife-shaped bows, blocks of hideously beweaponed metal like the heads of god-hammers, each one detailed in shining steel and gold. Each with the device of an opened, baleful eye about them, glaring ready hate into the dark.

At the centre of the fleet, a behemoth. Kell recognised the lines of a uniquely lethal vessel. A battle-barge of magnificent, gargantuan proportions haloed by clouds of fighter escorts; the Vengeful Spirit, flagship of the Warmaster Horus Lupercal.

‘Pilot,’ he said, his voice husky with the pain, ‘put us on an intercept heading with the command ship. Put all available power to the aura cloak.’

The cyborg helmsman clicked and whirred. ‘Increased aura cloak use will result in loss of void shield potentiality.’

He glared at the visible parts of the pilot’s near-human face, peering from the command podium. ‘If they can’t see us, they can’t hit us.’

‘They will hit us,’ it replied flatly. ‘Intercept vector places Ultio in high-threat quadrant. Multiple enemy weapon arcs.’

‘Just do as I say!’ Kell shouted, and he winced at the jag of pain it caused him. ‘And open a link to the Navigator.’

‘Complying.’ The Vindicare thought he heard a note of grievance in the reply as the guncutter turned, putting its bow on the Vengeful Spirit. The sensors were showing the first curious returns from the picket ships in Horus’s fleet. They were sweeping the area for a trace, uncertain if their scry-sensors had seen something; but the Ultio’s aura cloak was generations ahead of common Naval technology. They would be inside the fleet’s inner perimeter before anyone on the picket vessels could properly interpret what they had seen.

Another rune on the console glowed; a vox channel was open between the forward module and the drive section. Kell spoke quickly, fearful that the transmission would undo all the work of the cloak if left active a second too long. ‘This is Kell. Stand by to receive encoded burst transmission. Release only on Omnis Octal authority.’ He took a shaky breath. ‘New orders supersede all prior commands. Protocol Perditus. Expedite immediate. Repeat, go to Protocol Perditus.’

It seemed like long, long seconds before the Navigator’s whispering, papery voice returned through the speaker grille. ‘This will be difficult,’ it said, ‘but the attempt will be made.’ Kell reached for the panel to cut the channel just as the Navigator spoke again. ‘Good luck, assassin.’

The rune went dark, and Kell’s hand dropped.

Beyond the canopy, laser fire probed the sky around the ship, and ahead the battle-barge grew to blot out the darkness.

Close-range lascannons on the hull of the drive module blew apart the paper-thin sheath of metals hiding the aft section of the ship, and the Ultio’s drive section blasted free of the station wreck in a pulse of detonation. Fusion motors unleashed the tiny suns at their cores and pushed the craft away, climbing the acceleration curve in a glitter of void shields and displaced energy. In moments, the vessel was rising towards one-quarter lightspeed.

Picket ships on the far side of the Warmaster’s fleet, ex-Imperial Navy frigates and destroyers crewed only by human officers, saw it running and opened fire. Most of the ships belonging to the Dagoneti had been obliterated over the past few hours, and the stragglers had either been forced down to the surface or cut in two by their beam lances.

Targeting solutions on the odd craft that had suddenly appeared on their holoscopes behaved unexpectedly, however. Weapon locks drifted off it, unable to find a true. Scans gave conflicting readings; the ship was monstrously over-powered for something of its tonnage; it seemed unmanned, and then it seemed not. And strangest of all, the glimmer of a building warp signature built up around its flanks the further it strayed away from the gravity shadow of the planet, racing for the jump point.

Warships dropped out of formation and powered after it, following the unidentified craft up and out of the plane of the Dagonet system’s ecliptic. They would never catch it.

Alone now on their headless beast of a vessel, the Ultio’s Navigator and astropath communed with one another in a manner most uncommon for their respective kinds; with words.

And what they shared was an understanding of mutual purpose. Protocol Perditus. A coded command string known to them both, to which there was only one response. They were to leave their area of operation on immediate receipt of such an order and follow a pre-set series of warp space translations. They would not stop until they lay under the light of Sol. The mission was over, abandoned.

Weapons fire haloed the space around the ship as it plunged towards the onset of critical momentum, the first vestiges of a warp gate forming in the void ahead.

The blood continued to stream from Erebus’s nostrils as he shoved his way out of the elevator car and through the cluster of helots waiting on the command deck. The fluid matted his beard and he grimaced, drawing a rough hand across his face. The psychic shock was fading, mercifully, but for a brief while it had felt as if it would cut him open.

There, in his chambers aboard the flagship, meditating in the gloom over his spodomancy and mambila divination, he attempted to find an answer. The eightfold paths were confused, and he could not see their endpoints. Almost from the moment they had arrived in the Dagonet system, Erebus had been certain that something was awry.

His careful plans, the works he had conceived under the guidance of the Great Ones, normally so clear to him, were fouled by a shadow he could not source. It perturbed him, and to a degree undeserving of such emotion. This was only a small eddy in the long scheme, after all. This planet, this action, a minor diversion from the pre-ordained works of the great theatre.

And yet Horus Lupercal was doing such a thing more and more. Oh, he followed where Erebus led, that was certain, but he did it less quickly than he had at first. The Warmaster’s head was being turned and he was wilful with it. At times, the Word Bearer allowed himself to wonder; was the master of the rebels listening to other voices than he?

Not to dwell, though. This was to be expected. Horus was a primarch. One could no more hope to shackle one down and command him than a person might saddle an ephemeral animus. The First Chaplain reminded himself of this.

Horus must be allowed to be Horus, he told himself. And when the time is upon him… He will be ready.

Still; the voyage to Dagonet, the fogging of the lines. That did not disperse. If anything, it grew worse. In his meditations Erebus had searched the egosphere of the planet turning below them, but the screaming and the fear drowned out every subtle tell. All he could divine was a trace of the familiar.

The pariah-thing. His Spear. Perhaps no longer on this world, perhaps just the spoor of its passing, but certainly something. For a while he was content to accept this as the truth, but with the passing of the hours Erebus could not leave the matter be. He worried at it, picked at the psy-mark like a fresh scab.

Why had Spear come to Dagonet? What possible reason could there be for the killer to venture off the path Erebus had laid out for him? And, more to the troubling point of it, why had Horus chosen to show the flag here? The Word Bearer believed that coincidence was something that existed only in the minds of men too feeble-brained to see the true spider web of the universe’s cruel truth.

It vexed him that the answer was there below on the planet, if only he could reach out for it.

And so he was utterly unprepared for what came next. The rising of the black shriek of a sudden psionic implosion. In the chamber, sensing the edges of it, turning his thoughts to the dark places within and allowing the void to speak to him.

A mistake. The death-energy of his assassin-proxy, hurtling up from the planet’s surface, the escaping daemon beast brushing him as it fled back to the safety of the immaterium. It hit him hard, and he was not ready for it.

He felt Spear die, and with him died the weapon-power. The phantom gun at the head of the unknowing Emperor, shattered before it could even be fired.

Erebus’s fury drove him from his chambers, through the corridors of the ship. His plan, this thread of the pathway, had been broken, and for Hades’s sake he would know why. He would go down to Dagonet and sift the ashes of it through his fingers. He would know why.

Composing himself, the Word Bearer entered the Lupercal’s Court without waiting to be granted entry, but even as Maloghurst moved to block his path, the Warmaster turned from the great window and beckoned Erebus closer. He became aware of alert sirens hooting and beyond the armourglass, fashioned in the oval of an open eye, he saw rods of laser fire sweeping the void ahead of the flagship’s prow.

Horus nodded to him, the hellish light of the weapons discharges casting his hard-edged face like blunt stone. He was, as ever, resplendent in his battle gear. In his haste, Erebus had come to the Court still in his dark robes, and for a moment the Word Bearer felt every bit of his inferiority to the Warmaster, as Horus seemed to loom over him.

None of this he showed, however. He bottled it away, his aspect never changing. Erebus was a prince of lies, and well-practised with it. ‘My lord,’ he began. ‘If it pleases the Warmaster, I have a request to make. A matter to address–’

‘On the surface?’ Horus looked away. ‘We’ll visit Dagonet soon enough, my friend. For the work to be done.’

Erebus maintained his outwardly neutral aspect, but within it took an effort to restrain his tension. ‘Of course. But perhaps, if I might have leave to venture down before the rites proper, I could… smooth the path, as it were.’

‘Soon enough,’ Horus repeated, his tone light; but the chaplain knew then that was the end to it.

Maloghurst hobbled closer, bearing a data-slate. He shot the Word Bearer a look as he stepped in front of him. ‘Message from the pickets,’ he said. ‘The other target is too fast. They scored hits but it will make space before they catch it.’

The Warmaster’s lips thinned. ‘Let it go. What of the other, our ghost?’ He gestured at the inferno raging outside.

‘Indeterminate,’ the equerry sniffed. ‘Gun crews on the perimeter ships report phantom signals, multiple echoes. They’re carving up dead sky, and finding nothing.’ Erebus saw his scarred face’s perpetual frown deepening. ‘I’ve drawn back the fighter screen as you ordered, lord.’

Horus nodded. ‘If he dares come so close to me, I want to look him in the eyes.’

The Word Bearer followed the Warmaster’s gaze out through the windows.

The slate in Maloghurst’s gnarled fingers emitted a melodic chime, at odds with the urgency of its new message. ‘Sensors read… something,’ said the equerry. ‘Closing fast. A collision course! But weapons can’t find it…’

‘An aura cloak,’ said Erebus, peering into the stormy dark. ‘But such a device is beyond the Dagoneti.’

‘Yes.’ Horus smiled, unconcerned. ‘Do you see him?’ The Warmaster stepped to the window and pressed his hands to the grey glass.

Out among the maelstrom of energy, as javelins of fire crossed and recrossed one another, scouring the sky for the hidden attacker, for one instant the Chaplain saw something like oil moving over water. Just the suggestion of a raptor-like object lensing the light of the distant stars behind it. ‘There!’ He pointed.

Maloghurst snapped out a command over his vox. ‘Target located. Engage and destroy!’

The gun crews converged their fire. The craft was close, closer than the illusory ghost image had suggested. Unbidden, Erebus backed away a step from the viewing portal.

Horus’s smile grew wider and the Word Bearer heard the words he whispered, a faint rumble in the deepest register. ‘Kill me,’ said the Warmaster, ‘if you dare.’

Ultio burned around him.

The pilot was already dead in the loosest sense, the cyborg’s higher mental functions boiled in the short-circuit surge from a hit on the starboard wing; but his core brain was intact, and through that the ship dodged and spun as the sky itself seemed to turn upon them.

The ship trailed pieces of fuselage in a comet tail of wreckage and burning plasma. The deck trembled and smoke filled the bridge compartment. A vista of red warning runes met Kell’s eyes wherever he looked. Autonomic systems had triggered the last-chance protocols, opening an iris hatch in the floor to a tiny saviour pod mounted beneath the cockpit. Blue light spilling from the hatch beckoned the Vindicare for a moment. He had his Exitus pistol at his hip and he was still alive. He would only need to take a step…

But to where? Even if he survived the next ten seconds, where could he escape to? What reason did he have to live? His mission… The mission was all Eristede Kell had left in his echoing, empty existence.

The command tower of the Vengeful Spirit rose through the forward canopy, acres of old steel and black iron, backlit by volleys of energy and the red threads of lasers. Set atop it was a single unblinking eye of grey and amber glass, lined in shining gold.

And within the eye, a figure. Kell was sure of it, an immense outline, a demigod daring him to come closer. His hand found the manual throttle bar and he pressed it all the way to the redline, as the killing fires found his range.

He looked up once again, and the first sighting-mantra he had ever been taught pressed itself to the front of his thoughts. Four words, a simple koan whose truth had never been more real than it was in this moment.

Kell said it aloud as he fell towards his target.

‘I am the weapon.’

Across the mountainous towers of the Imperial Palace, the sun was rising into the dusky sky, but its light had yet to reach all the wards and precincts of the great fortress-city. Many districts were still dormant, their populace on the verge of waking for the new day; others had been kept from their slumber by matters that did not rest.

In the ornate corridors of power, there was quiet and solemnity, but in the Shrouds, any pretence at decorum had been thrown aside.

Sire Eversor’s fist came down hard on the surface of the rosewood table with an impact that set the cut-glass water goblets atop it rattling. His anger was unchained, his eyes glaring out through his bone mask. ‘Failure!’ he spat, the word laden with venom. ‘I warned you all when this idiotic plan was proposed, I warned you that it would not work!’

‘And now we have burned our only chance to kill the Warmaster,’ muttered Sire Vanus, his synth-altered voice flat and toneless like that of a machine.

The master of Clade Eversor, unable to remain seated in his chair, arose in a rush and rounded the octagonal table. The other Sires and Siresses of the Officio Assassinorum watched him stalk towards the powerful, hooded figure standing off to one side, in the glow of a lume-globe. ‘We never should have listened to you,’ he growled. ‘All you did was cost us more men, Custodian!’

At the head of the table, the Master of Assassins looked up sharply, his silver mask reflecting the light. Behind him there was nothing but darkness, and the man appeared to be cradled in a dark, depthless void.

‘Yes,’ spat Sire Eversor. ‘I know who he is. It could be no other than Constantin Valdor!’

At this, the hooded man let his robes fall open and the Captain-General was fully revealed. ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘I have nothing to fear from you knowing my face.’

‘I suspected so,’ ventured Siress Venenum, her face of green and gold porcelain tilting quizzically. ‘Only the Custodian Guard would be so compelled towards ensuring the deaths of others before their own.’

Valdor shot her a look and smiled coldly. ‘If that is so, then in that way we are alike, milady.’

‘Eversor,’ said the Master, his voice level. ‘Take your seat and show some restraint, if that is at all possible.’ The featureless silver mask reflected a twisted mirror of the snarling bone face.

‘Restraint?’ said Sire Vindicare, his aspect hidden behind a marksman’s spy mask. ‘With all due respect, my lord, I think we can all agree that the Eversor’s anger is fully justified.’

‘Horus sent one of his men to die in his stead,’ Sire Eversor sat once more, his tone bitter. ‘He must have been warned. Or else he has a daemon’s luck.’

‘That, or something else…’ Siress Venenum said darkly.

‘Missions fail,’ interrupted the silk-faced mistress of the Callidus. ‘It has ever been thus. We knew from the start that this was a target like no other.’

Across from her, the watchful steel skull concealing Sire Culexus bent forward. ‘And that is answer enough?’ His whispering tones carried across the room. ‘Six more of our best are missing, presumed dead, and for what? So that we may sit back and be assured that we have learnt some small lesson from the wasting of their lives?’ The skull’s expression did not change, but the shadows gathered around it appeared to lengthen. ‘Operative Iota was important to my clade. She was a rarity, a significant investment of time and energy. Her loss does not go without mark.’

‘There’s always a cost,’ said Valdor.

‘Just not to you,’ Venenum’s retort was acid. ‘Our best agents and our finest weapons squandered, and still Horus Lupercal draws breath.’

‘Perhaps he cannot be killed,’ Sire Eversor snapped.

Before the commander of the Custodians could reply, the Master of Assassins raised his hand to forestall the conversation. ‘Sire Vanus,’ he began, ‘shall we dispense with this hearsay and instead discuss what we know to be true of the fallout from our operation?’

Vanus nodded, his flickering, glassy mask shifting colour and hue. ‘Of course.’ He pushed at a section of the pinkish-red wood and the table silently presented him with a panel of brass buttons. With a few keystrokes, the hololithic projector hidden below came to life, sketching windows of flickering blue light above their heads. Displays showing tactical starmaps, fragments of scout reports and feeds from long-range observatories shimmered into clarity. ‘News from the Taebian Sector is, at best, inconclusive. However, it appears that most, if not all, of the prime worlds along the length of the Taebian Stars trade spine are now beyond the influence of Imperial governance.’ On the map display, globular clusters of planets winked from blue to red in rapid order, consumed by revolt. ‘The entire zone has fallen into anarchy. We have confirmation that the worlds of Thallat, Bowman, Dagonet, Taebia Prime and Iesta Veracrux have all broken their ties with the lawful leadership of Terra and declared loyalty to the Warmaster and his rebels.’

Sire Culexus made a soft hissing sound. ‘They fall as much from their fears as from the gun.’

‘The Warmaster stands over them and demands they kneel,’ said Valdor. ‘Few men would have the courage to refuse.’

‘We can be certain of only two factors,’ the Vanus went on. ‘One; Captain Luc Sedirae of the 13th Company of the Sons of Horus, a senior general in the turncoat forces, has been terminated. Apparently by the action of a sniper.’ He glanced at Sire Vindicare, who said nothing. ‘Two; Horus Lupercal is alive.’

‘Sedirae’s death is an important success,’ said the Master, ‘but it is no substitute for the Warmaster.’

‘My clade has already engaged with the information emerging from the Taebian Sector,’ said Sire Vanus. ‘My infocytes are in the process of performing adjustments in the overt and covert media to best reflect the Imperium’s position in this situation.’

‘Papering over the cracks with quick lies, don’t you mean?’ said Siress Callidus.

The colours of the Vanus’s shimmer-mask blue-shifted. ‘We must salvage what we can, milady. I’m sure–’

‘Sure?’ The silk mask tightened. ‘What are you sure of? We have no specifics, no solutions! We’ve done nothing but tip our hand to the traitors!’

The mood of the room shifted, and once again the anger and frustration simmering unchecked threatened to erupt. The Master of Assassins raised his hand once more, but before he could speak a warning bell sounded through the room.

‘What is that?’ demanded Sire Vindicare. ‘What does it mean?’

‘The Shrouds…’ The Master was coming to his feet. ‘They’ve been compromised…’ His silvered face suddenly turned towards one of the mahogany-panelled walls, as if he could see right through it.

With a bullet-sharp crack, ancient wood and rigid metals gave way, and a hidden door slammed open. Beyond it, in the ever-shifting puzzle of the changing corridors, three figures filled the space. Two wore amber-gold armour chased with white and black accents, their faces set and grim. They were veteran Space Marines of the VII Legiones Astartes in full combat plate; but eclipsing their presence was a warrior of stone cast and cold, steady gaze standing a head higher than both of them.

Rogal Dorn stepped into the Shrouds, his battle gear glittering in the light of the lume-globes. He cast his gaze around the room with an expression that might have been disgust, dwelling on Valdor, then the Master, and finally the deep shadows engulfing the farthest side of the chamber.

It was Siress Venenum who dared to shatter the shocked silence that came in the wake of Dorn’s intrusion. ‘Lord Astartes,’ she began, desperately trying to rein in her fear. ‘This is a sanctum of–’

The Imperial Fist did not even grace her with a look. He advanced towards the rosewood table and folded his arms across his titanic chest. ‘Here you are,’ he said, addressing his comments towards Valdor. ‘I told you our conversation was not ended, Custodian.’

‘You should not be here, Lord Dorn,’ he replied.

‘Neither should you,’ snapped the primarch, his voice like breaking stones. ‘But you brought both of us to it. To this… place of subterfuge.’ He said the last word as if it revolted him.

‘This place is not within your authority, Astartes.’ The voice of the Master of Assassins was altered and shifted, but still the edge of challenge was clear for all to hear.

‘At this moment, it is…’ Dorn turned his cold glare on the mirrored face staring up at him. ‘My Lord Malcador.’

A thrill of surprise threaded across the room, as every one of the Sires and Siresses turned to stare at the Master.

‘I knew it…’ hissed Culexus. ‘I always knew you were the Sigillite!’

‘This is a day of revelations,’ muttered Sire Vanus.

‘I have just begun,’ Dorn rumbled.

With a sigh, Malcador reached up and removed the silver mask, setting it down on the table. He frowned, and an eddy of restrained telepathic annoyance rippled through the air. ‘Well done, my friend. You’ve broken open an enigma.’

‘Not really,’ Dorn replied. ‘I made an educated guess. You confirmed it.’

The Sigillite’s frown became a brief, intent grimace. ‘A victory for the Imperial Fists, then. Still, I have many more secrets.’

The warrior-king turned. ‘But no more here today.’ He glared at the other members of the Officio. ‘Masks off,’ he demanded. ‘All of you! I will not speak with those of such low character who hide their faces. Your voices carry no import unless you have the courage to place your name to them. Show yourselves.’ The threat beneath his words did not need to break the surface.

There was a moment of hush; then movement. Sire Vindicare was first, pulling the spy mask from his face as if he were glad to be rid of it. Then Sire Eversor, who angrily tossed his fang-and-bone disguise on to the table. Siress Callidus slipped the silk from her dainty face, and Vanus and Venenum followed suit. Sire Culexus was last, opening up his gleaming skull mask like an elaborate metal flower.

The assassins looked upon their naked identities for the first time and there was a mixture of potent emotions: anger, recognition, amusement.

‘Better,’ said Dorn.

‘Now you have stripped us of our greatest weapon, Astartes,’ said Siress Callidus, a fall of rust-red hair lying unkempt over a pale face. ‘Are you satisfied?’

The primarch glanced over his shoulder. ‘Brother-Captain Efried?’

One of the Imperial Fists at the door stepped forwards and handed a device to his commander, and in turn Dorn placed it on the table and slid it towards Sire Vanus.

‘It’s a data-slate,’ he said.

‘My warriors intercepted a starship beyond the edge of the Oort Cloud, attempting to vector into the Sol system,’ Dorn told them. ‘It identified itself as a common freighter, the Hallis Faye. A name I imagine some of you might recognise.’

‘The crew…?’ began Sire Eversor.

‘None to speak of,’ offered Captain Efried.

Dorn pointed at the slate. ‘That contains a datum capsule recovered from the vessel’s mnemonic core. Mission logs. Vox recordings and vid-picts.’ He glanced at Malcador and the Custodian. ‘What is spoken of there is troubling.’

The Sigillite nodded towards Sire Vanus. ‘Show us.’

Vanus used a hair-fine connector to plug the slate into the open panel before him, and immediately the images in the ghostly hololith flickered and changed to a new configuration of data-panes.

At the fore was a vox thread, and it began to unspool as a man’s voice, thick with pain, filled the air. ‘My name is Eristede Kell. Assassin-at-Marque of the Clade Vindicare, Epsilon-dan… And I have defied my orders.’

Valdor listened in silence along with the rest of them, first to Kell’s words, and then to fragments of the infocyte Tariel’s interim logs. When Sire Vanus opened the kernel of data containing the vid-records from Iota’s final moments, he watched in mute disgust at the abomination that was the Black Pariah. As this horror unfolded before them, Sire Culexus bent forwards and quietly wept.

They listened to it all; the discovery of military situation on Dagonet and the plan to reignite the dying embers of the planet’s civil war; Jenniker Soalm’s rejection of the mission in favour of her own; the assassination of Sedirae in Horus’s stead and the brutal retribution it engendered; and at last, the existence of and lethal potential within the creature that called itself Spear, and the choice that the Execution Force had been forced to make.

When they had heard as much as was necessary, the Sigillite shouted at Sire Vanus to cease the playback. Valdor surveyed the faces of the clade directors. Each in their own way struggled to process what they had been brought by the Imperial Fists.

Sire Eversor, confusion in his gaze, turned on the Culexus. ‘That freakish monstrosity… you created that? For Terra’s sake, cousin, tell me this is not so!’

‘I gave the orders myself!’ insisted the psyker. ‘It was destroyed!’

‘Apparently not,’ Dorn replied, his jaw tightening.

‘But it is dead now, yes?’ said Sire Vanus. ‘It must be…’

Dorn’s dark eyes flashed with anger. ‘A narrow view. That is all your kind ever possess. Do you not understand what you have done? Your so-called attempts at a surgical assault against Horus have become nothing of the kind!’ His voice rose, like the sound of storm-tossed waves battering a shoreline. ‘Sedirae’s death has cost the lives of an entire planet’s population! The Sons of Horus have taken revenge on a world because of what your assassins did there!’ He shook his head. ‘If the counter-rebellion on Dagonet had been allowed to fade, if their war had not been deliberately and callously exacerbated, Horus would have passed them by. After my brothers and I have broken his betrayal, the Imperium would have retaken control of Dagonet. But now its devastation leads to the collapse of keystone worlds all across that sector! Now the traitors take a strong foothold there, and it will be my battle-brothers and those of my kindred who must bleed to oust them!’ He pointed at them all in turn. ‘This is what you leave behind you. This is what your kind always leave behind.’

Valdor could remain silent no longer and he stepped forward. ‘The suffering on Dagonet is a tragedy, none will deny that,’ he said, ‘and yes, Horus has escaped our retribution once more. But a greater cause has been served, Lord Dorn. Kell and his force chose to preserve your father in exchange for letting your errant brother live. This assassin-creature Spear is dead, and a great threat to the Emperor’s life has been neutralised. I would consider that a victory.’

‘Would you?’ Dorn’s fury was palpable, crackling in the air around him. ‘I’m sure my father is capable of defending himself! And tell me, Captain-General, what kind of victory exists in a war like the one you would have us fight?’ He gestured at the room around them. ‘A war fought from hidden places under cover of falsehood? Innocent lives wasted in the name of dubious tactics? Underhanded, clandestine conflicts, fuelled by secrets and lies?’

For a moment, Valdor half-expected the Imperial Fist to rip up the table between them just so he could strike at the Custodian; but then, like a tidal wave drawing back into the ocean, Dorn’s anger seemed to subside. Valdor knew better, though – the primarch was the master of his own fury, turning it inward, turning it to stony, unbreakable purpose.

‘This war,’ Dorn went on, sparing Malcador a glance, ‘is a fight not just for the material, for worlds and for the hearts of men. We are in battle for ideals. At stake are the very best of the Imperium’s ultimate principles. Values of pride, nobility, honour and fealty. How can a veiled killer understand the meaning of such words?’

Valdor felt Malcador’s eyes on him, and the tension in him seemed to dissipate. At once, he felt a cold sense of conviction rise in his thoughts, and he matched the Imperial Fist’s gaze, answering his challenge. ‘No one in this room has known war as intimately as you have, my lord,’ he began, ‘and so surely it is you who must understand better than any one of us that this war cannot be a clean and gallant one. We fight a battle like no other in human history. We fight for the future! Can you imagine what might have come to pass if Kell and the rest of the Execution Force had not been present on Dagonet? If this creature Spear had been reunited with the rebel forces?’

‘He would have attempted to complete his mission,’ said Sire Culexus. ‘Come to Terra, to enter the sphere of the Emperor’s power and engage his… murdergift.’

‘He would never have got that far!’ insisted Sire Vanus. ‘He would have been found and killed, surely. The Sigillite or the Emperor himself would have sensed such an abomination and crushed it!’

‘Are you certain?’ Valdor pressed. ‘Horus has many allies, some of them closer than we wish to admit. If this Spear could have reached Terra, made his attack… Even a failure to make the kill, a wounding even…’ He trailed off, suddenly appalled by the grim possibility he was describing. ‘Such a psychic attack would have caused incredible destruction.’

Dorn said nothing; for a moment, it seemed as if the primarch was sharing the same terrible nightmare that danced in the Custodian’s thoughts; of his liege lord mortally wounded by a lethal enemy, clinging to fading life while the Imperial Palace was a raging inferno all around him.

Valdor found his voice once more. ‘Your brother will beat us, Lord Dorn. He will win this war unless we match him blow-for-blow. We cannot, we must not be afraid to make the difficult choices, the hardest decisions! Horus Lupercal will not hesitate–’

‘I am not Horus!’ Dorn snarled, the words striking the Custodian like a physical blow. ‘And I will–’

‘Enough.’

The single utterance was a lightning bolt captured in crystal, shattering everything around it, silencing them all with an unstoppable, immeasurable force of will.

Rogal Dorn turned to the sound of that voice as every man, woman and Astartes in the chamber sank to their knees, each of them instinctively knowing who had uttered it. The Sigillite was the last to do so, shooting a final, unreadable look at the primarch of the Imperial Fists before he too took to a show of obeisance.

The question escaped Dorn’s lips. ‘Father?’

The darkness, the great curtain of shadows that had filled the furthest corner of the chamber now became lighter, the walls and floor growing more distinct by the moment as the unnatural gloom faded. He blinked; strange how he had looked directly into that place and seen it, but without really seeing it at all. It had been in plain sight for everyone in the room, even he, and yet none of them had registered the strangeness of it.

Now from the black came light. A figure stood there, effortlessly dominating the space, his patrician features marred by a mixture of turbulent emotions that gave even the mighty Imperial Fist a second’s pause. The Emperor of Mankind wore no armour, no finery or dress uniform, only a simple surplice of grey cloth threaded with subtle lines of purple and gold silk; and yet he was still magnificent to behold.

Perhaps he had been listening to them all along. Yet, it seemed to be a defiance of the laws of nature, that a being so majestic, so lit with power, could stand in a room among men, Astartes and the greatest mortal psyker who ever lived, and be as a ghost.

But then he was the Emperor; and to all questions, that was sufficient answer.

His father came towards him, and Rogal Dorn bowed deeply, at length joining the others at bended knee before the Master of the Imperium.

The Emperor did not speak. Instead, he strode across the Shrouds to the tall windows where the sailcloth drapes hung like frozen cataracts of shadow. With a flick of his great hands, Dorn’s father took a fist of the cloth and snatched it away. The hangings tore free and tumbled to the floor. He walked the perimeter of the room, ripping away every last cover until the chamber was flooded with the bright honey-yellow luminosity of the Himalayan dawn.

Dorn dared to glance up and saw the golden radiance striking his father. It gathered its brightness to him, as if it were an embrace. For an instant, the sunlight was like a sheath of glowing armour about him; then the primarch blinked and the moment passed.

‘No more shadows,’ said the Emperor. His words were gentle, summoning, and all the faces in the room turned to look upon him. He placed a hand on Dorn’s shoulder as he passed him by, and then repeated the gesture with Valdor. ‘No more veils.’

He beckoned them all to stand and as one they obeyed, and yet in his presence each of them felt as if they were still at his feet. His aura towered over them, filling the emotions of the room.

Dorn received a nod, as did Valdor. ‘My noble son. My loyal guardian. I hear both your words and I know that there is right in each of you. We cannot lose sight of what we are and what we aspire to be; but we cannot forget that we face the greatest enemy and the darkest challenge.’ In the depths of his father’s eyes, Dorn saw something no one else could have perceived, so transient and fleeting it barely registered. He saw sorrow, deep and unending, and his heart ached with an empathy only a son could know.

The Emperor reached out a hand and gestured towards the dawn, as it rose to fill the room around them. ‘It is time to bring you into the light. The Officio Assassinorum have been my quiet blade for too long, an open secret none dared to speak of. But no longer. Such a weapon cannot exist forever in the shadows, answerable to no one. It must be seen to be governed. There must be no doubt of the integrity behind every deed, every blow landed, every choice made… or else we count for naught.’ His gaze turned to Dorn and he nodded slowly to his son. ‘Because of this I am certain; in the war to come, every weapon in the arsenal of the Imperium will be called to bear.’

‘In your name, father.’ The primarch returned the nod. ‘In your name.’

Dagonet was all but dead now, her surface a mosaic of burning cities, churned oceans and glassed wastelands. And yet this was a show of restraint from the Sons of Horus; had they wished it, the world could have suffered the fate of many that had defied the Warmaster, cracked open by cyclonic torpedo barrages shot into key tectonic target sites, remade into a sphere of molten earth.

Instead Dagonet was being prepared. It would be of use to the Warmaster and his march to victory.

Erebus stood atop the ridgeline and looked down into the crater that was all that remained of the capital. The far side of the vast bowl of dirty glass and melted rock was lost to him through a mist of poisonous vapour, but he saw enough of it to know the scope of the whole. Transports were coming in from all over the planet, bringing those found still alive to this place. He watched as a Stormbird swooped low over the crater and opened its ventral cargo doors, dropping civilians like discarded trash amid the masses that had already been herded into the broken landscape. The people were arranged in lines that cut back and forth across one another, crosses laid over crosses. Astartes stood at equidistant points around the kilometres of the crater’s edge, their presence alone forbidding any survivor from making an attempt to climb out and flee. Those that had at the beginning were blasted back into the throng, bifurcated by bolt shells. The same fate befell those who dared to move out of the eightfold lines carved in the dust.

The supplicants – for they did not deserve to be known as prisoners – gave off moans and whispers of terror that washed back and forth over the Word Bearer Chaplain like gentle waves. It was tempting to remain where he stood and lose himself in the sweet sense of the dark emotions brimming across the great hollow; but there were other matters to attend to.

He heard bootsteps climbing the wreckage-strewn side of the crater, and moved to face the Astartes approaching him. All about them, thin wisps of steam rose into the air from the heat of the bombardment still escaping from the shattered earth.

‘First Chaplain.’ Devram Korda gave him a wary salute. ‘You wished me to report to you regarding your… operative? We located the remains you were looking for.’

‘Spear?’ He frowned.

Korda nodded, and tossed something towards him. Erebus caught the object; at first glance it seemed to be a blackened, heat-distorted skull, but on closer examination the cleft, scything jawbone and distended shape were clearly the work of forces other than lethal heat and flame. He held it up and looked into the black pits of its eyes. The ghost of energies clung to it, and Erebus had a sudden impression of tiny flecks of gold leaf on the wind, fading into nothingness.

‘The rest of the corpse was retrieved along with that.’ Korda pointed. ‘I found other bodies in the same area, among the ruins of the star-port terminal. Agents of the Emperor, it would appear.’

Erebus was unconcerned about collateral damages. His irritation churned and he brushed Korda’s explanation away with a wave of his hand. ‘Leave it to rot. Failures have no use to me.’ He dropped the skull into the dust.

‘What was it, Word Bearer?’ Korda came closer, his tone becoming more insistent. ‘That thing? Did you unleash something on this backwater world, is that why they killed my commander?’

‘I am not to blame for that,’ Erebus retorted. ‘Look elsewhere for your reasons.’ The words had barely left his lips before the Chaplain felt a stiffening in his chest as a buried question began to rise in him. He pushed it away before it formed and narrowed his eyes at Korda. ‘Spear was a weapon. A gambit played and lost, nothing more.’

‘It stank of witchcraft,’ said the Astartes.

Erebus smiled thinly. ‘Don’t concern yourself with such issues, brother-sergeant. This was but one of many other arrows in my quiver.’

‘I grow weary of your games and your riddles,’ said Korda. He swept his hand around. ‘What purpose does any of this serve?’

The warrior’s question struck a chord in the Word Bearer, but he did not acknowledge it. ‘It is the game, Korda. The greatest game. We take steps, we build our power, gain strength for the journey to Terra. Soon…’ He looked up. ‘The stars will be right.’

‘Forgive him, brother-sergeant,’ said a new voice, an armoured form moving out of the mist below them. ‘My brother Lorgar’s kinsmen enjoy their verbiage more than they should.’

Korda bowed and Erebus did the same as Horus crossed the broken earth, his heavy ceramite boots crunching on the blasted fragments of rock. Beyond him, Erebus saw two of the Warmaster’s Mournival in quiet conversation, both with eyes averted from their master.

‘You are dismissed, brother-sergeant,’ Horus told his warrior. ‘I require the First Chaplain’s attention on a matter.’

Korda gave another salute, this one crisp and heartfelt, his fist clanking off the front of his breastplate. Erebus fancied he saw a scrap of apprehension in the warrior’s eyes; more than just the usual respect for his primarch. A fear, perhaps, of consequences that would come if he was seen to disobey, even in the slightest degree.

As Korda hurried away, Erebus felt the Warmaster’s steady, piercing gaze upon him. ‘What do you wish of me?’ he asked, his tone without weight.

Horus’s hooded gaze dropped to the blackened skull in the dust. ‘You will not use such tactics again in the prosecution of this conflict.’

The Word Bearer’s first impulse was to feign ignorance; but he clamped down on that before he opened his mouth. Suddenly, he was thinking of Luc Sedirae. Outspoken Sedirae, whose challenges to the Warmaster’s orders, while trivial, had grown to become constant after the progression from Isstvan. Some had said he was in line to fill the vacant place in the Mournival, that his contentious manner was of need to one as powerful as Horus. After all, what other reason could there have been for the Warmaster to grant Sedirae the honour of wearing his mantle?

A rare chill ran through him, and Erebus nodded. ‘As you command, my lord.’

Was it possible? The Word Bearer’s thoughts were racing. Perhaps Horus Lupercal had known from the beginning that the Emperor’s secret killers were drawing close to murder him. But for that he would need eyes and ears on Terra… Erebus had no doubt the Warmaster’s allies reached to the heart of his father’s domain, but into the Imperial Palace itself? That was a question he dearly wished to answer.

Horus turned and began to walk back down the ridge. Erebus took a breath and spoke again. ‘May I ask the reasoning behind that order?’

The Warmaster paused, and then glanced over his shoulder. His reply was firm and assured, and brooked no argument. ‘Assassins are a tool of the weak, Erebus. The fearful. They are not a means to end conflicts, only to prolong them.’ He paused, his gaze briefly turning inward. ‘This war will end only when I look my father in the eyes. When he sees the truth I will make clear to him, he will know I am right. He will join me in that understanding.’

Erebus felt a thrill of dark power. ‘And if the Emperor does not?’

Horus’s gaze became cold. ‘Then I – and I alone – will kill him.’

The primarch walked on, throwing a nod to his officers. On his command, the lines of melta-bombs buried beneath the hundreds of thousands of survivors detonated at once, and Erebus listened to the chorus of screams as they perished in a marker of sacrifice and offering.

AFTERWORD

Working on the Horus Heresy series, I am often asked about just how much of this stuff we prepare in advance. Because the broad strokes of Horus Lupercal’s betrayal and the galactic civil war that followed it have already been documented, there’s occasionally a suggestion that – in some fashion – we already have all of this story stored somewhere, codified and arranged, ready to be written out by the authors when the moment is right.

Not so. There exists no great library of all the acts of the Horus Heresy.

And while the end point at the Siege of Terra is certainly known and unchangeable, the markers along the road to get there are not as well defined. Some events, like the Word Bearers attack on the Ultramarines at Calth, or the battle of Signus Prime (which I wrote about in Fear to Tread) are firmly placed in the timeline, while others are more like flags planted in sand.

And then there are the stories that evolved out of the act of writing the Horus Heresy itself – tales that might never have been put to paper if they hadn’t been brought into focus by the presence of other stories around them.

Nemesis is one of those. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a tale of assassins, it’s a creature of shadows, created out of light falling on a totally different story, but still connecting to the greater whole.

Here’s how it came to be: I was at one of the regular writers’ meetings at Games Workshop HQ in Nottingham with Graham McNeill and Dan Abnett, a story conference that was taking place to wrangle the narrative between the two connected books they were working on – A Thousand Sons and Prospero Burns. I didn’t have anything firm on the Heresy writing schedule at that point, and I was largely there to offer an additional voice on proceedings. But I felt a little like I was surplus to requirements, because Dan and Graham had the Wolves and the Sons cooking nicely, and while I did chip in a few ideas, it wasn’t my gig.

But here’s the thing. When you put writers in a room together, writers who are passionate about a storyline, at the top of their game, who are engaged and enthusiastic about their shared fictional world, what you get is a kind of synergy that is pretty damned amazing. Story ideas start to emerge out of nothing, and there’s a crackle of creativity in the air that can be thrilling. I hear musicians talk about the energy they get while jamming, and I know it’s the same thing.

So we were off on a little side-conversation about exactly how the Legio Custodes operated during the Emperor of Mankind’s rule, and an idea for a story coalesced right there in the middle of my train of thought. ‘What about the Officio Assassinorum?’ I said. ‘What were they doing during the havoc of the Heresy?’

We kicked the idea around for a bit, and then things went back to the destruction of Prospero – but I was frantically scribbling down ideas in my notebook, trying to get them all on to paper before they got lost in the ether.

By the time the story meeting ended, I had the outline for a book. As we were packing up to leave, Graham leaned over and asked if I was going to write “that assassin thing”... because if I didn’t, he was going to. I went away and drew up the formal pitch for what would become Nemesis.

I’d been thinking about writing something assassin-y for Black Library for a while. Editor Lindsey Priestley and I had toyed with the idea of a 41st millennium series of four novellas all set in the same city at the same time, detailing the missions of different Assassinorum operatives whose stories would cross over each other – but we just couldn’t make it work at the time.

However, using the assassins during the Heresy, now that had real potential.

And it also dovetailed with something else that hadn’t been explored in the ten or so books written up to that point: what was it like to be an ordinary person during the Horus Heresy? We talked about a hypothetical everyman character (whom we nicknamed ‘Joe Hivecity’) and wondered how his life would be under the threat of Horus’s rebellion and the darker powers massing across the galaxy. I’d later return to this theme in ‘Liar’s Due’, a short story I wrote for the Age of Darkness anthology, but in Nemesis I took the opportunity to tell it in widescreen.

The novel is made up of two threads – one follows the assassins as they assemble their ill-fated mission to terminate the Warmaster, and the second is that street-level story of ordinary folks who find themselves caught up in a war beyond reason.

Nemesis remains one of my favourite projects for Black Library, not only for the fact that it let me do something different and challenging but also because it earned me New York Times bestseller status for the first time in my career! So, six years later, I’m pleased to see it returning to print in this special hardback edition.

In a war (and a series) about primarchs and Space Marines, Nemesis isn’t really about any of them. Like the Horus Heresy itself, if you’ve seen the big picture, you already know how it is going to end.

But this book is a glimpse of the galaxy that the Horus Heresy is being fought over. Its function is to peel back the layers and present the reality behind the battle lines, and to show the origins of the Silent War – the clandestine, undocumented stratum of the conflict that isn’t all about planet-crackers and warfleets big enough to blot out suns, but one-on-one fights in dingy back alleys and the ill-lit corridors of power.

James Swallow

January 2016