Contents

Cover

Nemesis – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

One

Object lesson
Tactics of deceit
The star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horus could not be allowed to take that step.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Put an end to this,’ said Erebus.

Korda hesitated. ‘Lord?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What do you mean?’ said Korda.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Horus.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘All right. Show me.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The wife report it, did she?’

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

‘This from the foreman?’

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

‘Was Norte drunk when he was killed?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t know,’ whispered the reeve.

Two

The shrouds
Masked
A common blade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A strike team…’ mused Sire Vindicare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rules that Malcador had just broken.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Just so,’ offered Yosef.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If it exists or not, Yosef added silently.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes.’

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

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

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

‘Why?’

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

‘To the Arbites?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘No…’ managed the youth. ‘Am not…’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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First published in Great Britain in 2010.
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