Nemesis

by James Swallow

  “What is to be done?” Efried asked. He would obey any command his primarch had cause to utter, without question or hesitation.

  But Dorn did not answer him directly. “There can only be one target worth such subterfuge, such a gathering of forces. The Officio Assassinorum mean to kill my errant brother Horus.”

  Efried considered this. “Would that not serve our cause?”

  “It might appear so to those with a narrow view,” replied the primarch. “But I have seen what the assassin’s bullet wreaks in its wake. And I tell you this, brother-captain. We will defeat Horus… but if his death comes in a manner such as the Assassinorum intend, the consequences will be terrible, and beyond our capacity to control. If Horus falls to an assassin’s hand there will be a gaping vacuum at the core of the turncoat fleet, and we cannot predict who will fill it or what terrible revenges they will take. As long as my brother lives, as long as he rides at the head of the traitor Legions, we can predict what he will do. We can match Horus, defeat him on even ground. We know him.” Dorn let out a sigh. “I know him.” He shook his head. “The death of the Warmaster will not stop the war.”

  Efried listened and nodded. “We could intervene. Confront Valdor and the clade masters.”

  “Based on what, captain?” Dorn shook his head again. “I have only hearsay and suspicion. If I were as reckless as Russ or the Khan, that might be enough… But we are Imperial Fists and we observe the letter of Imperial law. There must be proof positive.”

  “Your orders, then, sir?”

  “Have the serfs maintain their observations,” Dorn looked up into the darkening sky. “For the moment, we watch and we wait.”

  EIGHT

  Cinder and Ash

  Toys

  Unmasked

  THE ROOM IN the compound they had given over for Perrig’s use was of a reasonable size and dimension, and the last of four that had been offered. The other three she had immediately rejected because of their inherent luminal negativity or proximal locations to undisciplined thought-groupings. The second had been a place where a woman had died, some one hundred and seven years earlier, having taken her own life as the result of an unplanned pregnancy. The adjutant, Gorospe, had looked at Perrig with shock and no little amount of dismay at that revelation; it seemed that no one among the staff of the Eurotas Consortium had had any idea the building on Iesta had such a sordid history.

  But this room was quiet, the buzzing in her senses was abating and Perrig was as close to her equilibrium as she could be in a place so filled with droning, self-absorbed minds. Running through her alignment exercises, Perrig gently edited them out of her thoughtscape, eliminating the disruption through the application of a gentle psionic null-song, like a counter-wave masking an atonal sound.

  She absently touched the collar around her neck as she did this. It was just metal, just a thing, secured only with a bolt that she herself could undo with a single twist. It had meaning, though, for those who looked upon it, for those who might read the words from the Nikaea Diktat acid-etched into the black iron. It was a slave’s mark, after a fashion, but one she wore only for the benefit of the comfort of others. It was not a nullifier, it could not hold her back; it was there so those who feared her ability could have her at their side and still sleep soundly, convinced by the lie that it would protect them from her unearthliness. The texture of the cool metal gave her focus, and she let herself draw inward.

  The last thing she looked at before she closed her eyes was the chronometer on a nearby desk; Hyssos and the local lawmen had returned from the Iubar several hours ago, but she hadn’t seen any of them since the audience with the Void Baron. She wondered what Hyssos would be doing, but she resisted the urge to extend a tendril of thought out to search for him. Her telepathic abilities were poor and it was only her familiarity with his mind that allowed her to sense him with any degree of certainty. In truth, Perrig’s desire to be close to Hyssos only ever brought her melancholy. She had once looked into his thoughts as he slept, once when he had let down his guard, and there she saw that he had no inkling of the strange devotion the psyker had for her guardian; no understanding of this peculiar attachment that could not be thought of as love, but neither as anything else. It was better that way, she decided. Perrig did not wish to think of what might happen if he knew. She would be taken away from him, most likely. Perhaps even returned to the Black Ships from where Baron Eurotas had first claimed her.

  Perrig suffocated the thoughts and returned to her business at hand, eyes tightly shut, her calm forced back into place like a key jammed into a lock.

  The psyker knelt on the hard wooden floor of the room. Arranged in a semi-circle around her were a careful line of objects she had picked from the debris of the old wine lodge. Some stones, a brass button from a greatcoat, sticky grease-paper wrapping from a meat-stick vendor and a red leaflet dense with script in the local dialect of Imperial Gothic. Perrig touched them all in order, moving back and forth, lingering on some, returning to others. She used the items to build a jigsaw puzzle image of the suspect, but there were gaping holes in the simulacra. Places where she could not sense the full dimension of who Erno Sigg was.

  The button had fear on it. It had been lost as he fled the fire and the howl of the coleopters.

  The stones. These he had picked up and turned in his hands, used them in an idle game of throws, tossing them across the shack and back again, boredom and nervous energy marbling their otherwise inert auras.

  The grease-paper was laden with hunger, panic. The image here was quite distinct; he had stolen the food from the vendor while the man’s back was turned. He had been convinced he would be caught and arrested.

  The leaflet was love. Love or something like it, at least in the manner that Perrig could understand. Dedication, then, if one were to be more correct, with almost a texture of righteousness about it.

  She dithered over the piece of paper, looking through her closed lids at the emotional spectra it generated. Sigg was complex and the psyker had trouble holding the pieces she had of him in her mind. He was conflicted; buried somewhere deep there was the distant echo of great violence in him, but it was overshadowed by two towering opposite forces. On one hand, a grand sense of hope, even redemption, as if he believed he would be saved; and on the other, an equally powerful dread of something hunting him, of his own victimhood.

  Perrig’s psychometry was not an exact science, but in her time as an investigator she had developed a keen sense of her own instincts; it was this sense that told her Erno Sigg did not kill for his pleasures. As that thought crystallised inside her mind, Perrig felt the first fuzzy inklings of a direction coming to her. She allowed her hand to pick up the stylus at her side and moved it to the waiting data-slate on the floor. It twitched as the auto-writing began in spidery, uneven text.

  Her other hand, though, had not left the leaflet. Her fingers toyed with the edges of it, playing with the careworn paper, seeking out the places where it had been delicately folded and unfolded, time and time again. She wondered what it meant to Sigg that he cared so much for it, and sensed the ghost of the anguish he would feel at its loss.

  That would be how she would find him. The sorrow, fluttering from him like a pennant in the wind. The scribbling stylus moved of its own accord, back and forth across the slate.

  Confidence rose in her. She would find Erno Sigg. She would. And Hyssos would be pleased with her—

  Her heart jumped in her chest and she gasped. The stylus, gripped beyond its tolerances, snapped in two and the broken ends dug into her palm. Perrig was suddenly trembling, and she knew why. At the back of her mind there had been a thought she had not wanted to confront, something she took care to avoid as one might favour an ugly, painful bruise upon the skin.

  But now she was drawn to it, touching the discoloured edges of the psychic contusion, flinching at the tiny ticks of pain it gave off.

  She had sensed it after their arrival on Iesta Veracrux. At first, Perrig i
magined it was only an artefact of the transition of her mind, from the controlled peace of her domicile aboard the Iubar to the riotous newness of the planet’s busy city.

  Correction; she had wanted to believe it was that.

  The trembling grew as she dared to focus on it. A dark shadow at the edges of her perception, close at hand. Closer than Erno Sigg. Much, much closer, more so than Hyssos or any of the Iestan investigators suspected.

  Perrig felt a sudden wetness at her nostrils, on her cheek. She smelled copper. Blinking, she opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was the leaflet. It was red, deep crimson, the words printed on it lost against the shade of the paper. Panting in a breath, Perrig looked up from where she knelt and saw that the room, and everything in it, was red and red and red.

  She let the broken stylus fall and wiped at her face. Thick fluid came away from the corners of her eyes. Blood, not tears.

  Propelled by a surge of fright, she came to her feet, her boot catching the data-slate and crushing the glassy screen beneath the heel. The room seemed humid and stifling, every surface damp and meat-slick. Perrig lurched towards the only window and reached for the pull to drag back the curtains so she might open it, get a breath of untainted air.

  The drapes were made of red and shadows, and they parted like petals as she came closer. Something approximating the shape of a human being opened up there, suspended by spindly feet from the ceiling overhead. The heavy velvets thumped to the wooden floor and the figure unfolded, wet and shiny with oils. Its name impressed itself on the soft surfaces of her mind and she was forced to speak it aloud just to expunge the horror of it.

  “Spear…”

  A distended maw of teeth and bone barbs grew from the head of the monstrosity. Stygian flame, visible only to those with the curse of the witch-sight, wreathed the abstract face and the black pits that were its eyes. In an instant, Perrig knew what had made all those kills, what hands had delicately cut into Jaared Norte, Cirsun Latigue and all the others who had perished at its inclination.

  She backed away, her voice lost to her. More than anything, Perrig wanted to cover her eyes and look away, find somewhere to hide her face so that she would not be forced to see the Spear-thing; but there was nowhere for her to turn. Even if she clawed the orbs from her sockets, her witch-sight would still remain, and the aura of this monstrous creature would continue to smother it.

  Horribly, she sensed that the killer wanted her to look upon it, with all the depth of perception her psychic talents allowed. It projected a need for her to witness it, and that desire drew her in like the pull of gravity from a dark sun.

  Spear muttered to itself. When Perrig had touched the minds of other killers in the past, she had always flinched at the awful joy with which they pursued their craft; she did not see that here, however. Spear’s psyche was a pool of black ink, featureless and undisturbed by madness, lust or naked fury. It was almost inert, moving under the guidance of an unshakable certainty. It reminded her for one fleeting instant of Hyssos’ ordered mindset; the killer shared the same dogged, unflinching sense of direction towards its goals… almost as if it were following a string of commands.

  And still it let her in. She knew if she refused it, Spear would tear her open then and there. She tried desperately to break past the miasma of cold that lay around her, projecting as best she could a panicked summons towards her absent guardian; but as she did this, she also let her mind fall into Spear, stalling for time, on some level repulsed and fascinated by the monster’s true nature.

  Spear was not coy; it opened itself to her. What she saw in there sickened her beyond her capacity to express. The killer had been made this way, taken from some human stock now so corrupted that its origin could not be determined, sheathed with a skein of living materials that seemed cut from the screaming depths of the warp itself. Perhaps a fluke of cruel nature, or perhaps a thing created by twisted genius, Spear was soulless, but unlike any stripe of psionic null Perrig had ever encountered.

  It was a Black Pariah; the ultimate expression of negative psychic force. Perrig had believed such things were only conjecture, the mad nightmare creations of wild theorists and sorcerous madmen – yet here it stood, watching her, breathing the same air as she wept blood before it.

  And then Spear reached out with fingers made of knives and took Perrig’s hand. She howled as burning pain lanced through her nerves; the killer severed her right thumb with insolent ease and drew it up and away, toying with its prize. Perrig gripped her injured hand, vitae gushing from the wound.

  Spear took the severed flesh and rolled it into its fanged maw, crunching down the bone and meat as if it were a rare delicacy. Perrig sank back to the blood-spattered floor, her head swimming as she caught the edges of the sudden psionic shift running through the killer.

  The black voids of its eyes glared down at her and they became smoky mirrors. In them she saw her own mind reflected back at her, the power of her own psionic talents bubbling and rippling, copied and enhanced a thousandfold. Spear had tasted her blood, the living gene-code of her being – and now it knew her. It had her imprint.

  She scrambled backwards, feeling the humming chorus of her mind and that of the killer coming into shuddering synchrony, the orbits of their powers moving towards alignment. Perrig cried out and begged it to stop, but Spear only cocked its head and let the power build.

  It had not killed in this manner for a long time, she realised. The other deaths had been mundane and unremarkable. It wanted to do this just to be sure it was still capable, as a soldier might release a clip of ammunition to test the accuracy of a firearm. Belatedly Perrig understood that she was the only thing for light years around that could have been any kind of threat to it; but now, too late.

  And then, they met in the non-space between them. Beyond her ability to stop it, Perrig’s psionic ability unchained itself and thundered against Spear’s waiting, open arms. The killer took it all in, every last morsel, and did so with the ease of breathing.

  In stillness, Spear released its burden and reflected back all that Perrig was, the force of her preternatural power returning, magnified into a silent, furious hurricane.

  The woman became ashes and broke apart.

  THROUGH THE CORUSCATING, unquenchable fires of the immaterium, the Ultio raced on, passing through the corridors of the warp and onwards beyond the borders of the Segmentum Solar. The ship’s sight-blind Navigator took it through the routes that were little known, the barely-charted passages that the upper echelons of the Imperial government kept off the maps given to the common admiralty. These were swift routes but treacherous ones, causeways through the atemporal realm that larger ships would never have been able to take, the soul-light glitter of their massive crews bright enough that they would attract the living storms that wheeled and turned, while Ultio passed by unnoticed. The phantom-ship was barely there; its Geller fields had such finely-tuned opacity and it engines such speed that the lumbering, predatory intelligences that existed inside warp space noted it only by the wake it left behind. As days turned and clocks spun back on Terra, Ultio flew towards Dagonet; by some reckonings, it was already there.

  On board, the Execution Force gathered once more, this time in a compartment off the spinal corridor that ran the length of the starship’s massive drives.

  KELL WATCHED, AS he always did.

  The Garantine was still toying with his makeshift blade. He had continued to craft it into a wicked shiv that was easily the length of a man’s forearm. “What do you want, Vanus?” he asked.

  Tariel gave a nervous smile and indicated a large cargo module that replaced one whole wall of the long, low compartment. “Uh, thank you for coming.” He glanced around at Kell, Iota and the others. “As we are now mission-committed, I have leave to continue with the next stage of my orders.”

  “Explain,” said Koyne.

  The infocyte rubbed his hands together. “I was given a directive by the Master of Assassins himself to present thes
e materials to you only after the group had been completely assembled and only after the Ultio had left the Sol system.” He moved to a keypad on the cargo module and tapped in a string of symbols. “I am to address the matter of your equipment.”

  The Eversor assassin’s head snapped up, his mood instantly changing from insolence to laser-like intensity. “Weapons?” he asked, almost salivating.

  Tariel nodded. “Among other things. This unit contains the hardware for our mission ahead.”

  “Did you know about this?” demanded the Garantine, glaring at Kell. “Here I am playing with scraps and there’s a war-load right here on board with me?”

  Kell shook his head. “I assumed we’d be equipped on site.”

  “Why did someone fail to tell me there was an armoury aboard this tub?” Tariel ducked as the Garantine threw his shiv and it buried itself in a stanchion close by. “Give me a weapon, now! Feels like I’m bloody naked here!”

  “What a delightful image,” murmured Soalm.

  “He needs it,” said Iota, distractedly. “He actually feels a kind of emotional pain when separated from his firearms. Like a parent torn from its child.”

  “I’ll show you torn,” grated the hulking killer, menacing the Vanus. “I’ll do some tearing.”

  “Open!” Tariel fairly shouted the word and the mechanism controlling the lock hissed on oiled hydraulics. The pod split along its length and rolled back, presenting brackets of guns, support equipment and other wargear.

  The Garantine’s face lit up with something approximating joy. “Hello, pretty pretty,” he muttered, drawn to a rack where a heavy pistol, ornate and decorated with metallic wings and sensor probes, lay waiting. He gathered it up and hefted it in one hand. Cold laughter fell from his lips as gene-markers tingled through him, briefly communing with the lobo-chips implanted in his brain, confirming his identity and purpose.

  “The Executor combi-pistol,” said Tariel, blinking rapidly as he drew the information up from a mnemonic pool in his deep cortex. “Dual function ballistic bolt weapon and needle projectile—”