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  Sabrat nodded, crouching to open a hatch in the roof. “Agreed. Work your way down the floors and meet me on the basement level. If you find him, put a shot into the air.” Before Hyssos could say anything in reply, the reeve dropped through the hatch and into the dark.

  Hyssos took a deep breath and moved forward, finding another accessway at the far end of the warehouse. Pausing to don a pair of amplifier glasses, he went inside.

  THERE WAS LITTLE light inside the winestock, but the glasses dealt with that for him. The pools of shadow were rendered into a landscape of whites, greys, greens and blacks. Reaching the decking of the uppermost tier, Hyssos saw the shapes of massive storage tanks rising up around him, the curves of towering wooden slats forming the walls of the great Jeroboams. The smoky, potent smell of the wine was everywhere, the air thick and warm with it.

  He walked carefully, his boots crunching on hard lumps of crystallised sugar caught in the gaps between the planks of the floor, the wood giving with quiet, moaning creaks. The auspex, a small device fashioned in the design of an ornate book, was open on a belt tether, the sensing mechanism working with a slow pulse of light. The unchanged cadence indicated no signs of human life within its scan radius. Hyssos wondered why Sabrat wasn’t registering; but then this building was dense with metals and the scanner’s range was limited.

  The operative’s thoughts kept returning to the data-slate that Perrig had left behind. From the positioning of it among the psyker’s ashes, he supposed that it might have been in her hand when she met her end. She had seen Erno Sigg through the foci objects gathered from the Blasko Wine Lodge and tracked him here through the etherium – but the other word, the third line of letters on the slate… What meaning did they have? What had she been trying to say? How had she died in such a manner?

  Finally, he could not let the question lie and he used his free hand to pull the smashed slate from his pocket.

  Another error in judgement, said a voice in the back of his thoughts. The data-slate was evidence, and yet he had taken it from a crime scene. Pushing back the glasses to his forehead, Hyssos studied the broken screen in the dimness. The scribble of letters there were barely readable, but he knew Perrig’s steady, looping handwriting of old. If he could just find a way to see it afresh, to look with new eyes, perhaps he could intuit what she had been trying to write—

  Spear.

  It hit him like a splash of cold water. A sudden snap of comprehension. Yes, he was sure of it. The spin of the consonants and the loop of the vowels… Yes.

  But what did it mean?

  The next step he took made a wet ripping noise and something along the line of his boot dragged at him, as if a thick layer of glue carpeted the floor.

  Hyssos sniffed the air, wondering if one of the mammoth wine casks had leaked; but then the stale, metallic smell rose up to smother the cloying sweetness all around. He dropped the slate back into his pocket and gingerly slid the goggles down over his eyes once more.

  And there, rendered in cold, sea-green shades, was a frieze made of meat and bones. Across the curve of a wooden storage tank, beneath a wide stanchion and in shadow where the light of Iesta’s days would never have fallen, the display of an eviscerated corpse was visible to him.

  The body was open, the skin cut so that the innards, the skeleton and the muscle were free for removal. The fleshy rags that remained of the victim were nailed up in the parody of a human shape; organs and bones had been taken and arranged in patterns, some of them reassembled together in horrible new fusions. Pubs, for example, fanned like daggers sticking into the wet meat of a pale liver. A pelvic bone dressed with intestines. The spongy mass of a lung wrapped in coils of stripped nerve. All about him, the blood was a matted, dried pool, a sticky patina that had mixed with wine spillages and doubtless seeped down through the floor of this level and the next. Thousands of gallons of carefully matured liquor was tainted, polluted by what had been done here.

  At the edges of the ocean of vitae where the fluid ran away, eight-point stars dotted the bland wooden panels. Amid it all, Hyssos’ eyes caught a shape that focussed his attention instantly; a face. He gingerly stepped closer, his gorge rising as his boots sucked at the flooring. Narrowing his eyes, the operative drew up the auspex, turning its sensoria on the blood slick.

  It was Erno Sigg’s face, cut from the front of his skull, lying like a discarded paper mask.

  The chime of the auspex drew his gaze from the horror. Hyssos had been trained by the Consortium’s technologians on the reading of its outputs, and he saw datums unfurl on its small screen. The blood, it told him, was days old; perhaps even as much as a week. This atrocity had been done to Erno Sigg well before Perrig’s execution, of that there was no doubt. The auspex could not lie.

  Swallowing his revulsion, Hyssos let the scanning device drop on its tether and raised his gun upwards, finger tightening on the trigger. His hand was trembling, and he could not seem to steady it.

  But then the footsteps reached him. From across the other side of the lake of dried blood, a shadow detached from the darkness and came closer. Hyssos recognised the purposeful gait of the Iestan reeve; but he moved without hesitation, straight across the middle of it, boots sucking at the glutinous, oily mess.

  “Sabrat,” called the operative, his voice thick with repugnance, “What are you doing, man? Look around, can’t you see it?”

  “I see it,” came the reply. The words were paper-dry.

  The amplifier glasses seemed like a blindfold around his head and Hyssos tore them off. “For Terra’s sake, Yosef, step back! You’ll contaminate the site!”

  “Yosef isn’t here,” said the voice, as it became fluid and wet, transforming. “Yosef went away.”

  The reeve came out of the dimness and he was different. There were only black pits glaring back at Hyssos from a shifting face that moved like oil on water.

  “My name is Spear,” said the horror. The face was eyeless, and no longer human.

  NINE

  Dagonet

  Assumption

  Falling

  THE ORBITS ABOVE Dagonet were clogged with the wreckage of ships that had tried too hard to make it off the surface, vessels that were built as pleasure yachts or shuttlecraft, suborbitals and single-stage cargo barges for the runs to the near moons. Many of them had fallen foul of the system frigates blockading the escape vectors, torn apart under hails of las-fire; but more had simply failed. Ships that were overloaded or ill-prepared for the rigours of leaving near-orbit space had burned out their drives or lost atmosphere. The sky was filled with iron coffins that were gradually spiralling back to the turning world below them. At night, those on the planet could see them coming home in streaks of fire, and they served as a reminder of what would happen to anyone who disagreed with the Governor’s new order.

  The Ultio navigated in on puffs of thruster gas, having left the warp in the shadow of the Dagonet system’s thick asteroid belt. Cloaked in stealth technologies so advanced they were almost impenetrable, it easily avoided the ponderous turncoat cruisers and their nervous crews, finding safe harbour inside the empty shell of an abandoned orbital solar station. Securing the drive section in a place where it – along with Ultio’s astropath and Navigator – would be relatively safe, the forward module detached and reconfigured itself to resemble a common courier or guncutter. The pilot’s brain drew information from scans of the traitorous ships to alter the electropigments of the hull, and by the time the assassin craft touched down at the capital’s star-port, it wore the same blue and green as the local forces, even down to the crudely crossed-out Imperial aquila displayed by the defectors.

  Kell had Koyne stand by the vox rig, ready to talk back to the control tower. The Callidus had already listened in on comm traffic snared from the airwaves by Tariel’s complex scanning gear, and could perform a passable imitation of a Dagoneti accent – but challenge never came.

  The tower was gone, blown into broken fragments, and all across the spr
awling landing fields and smoke-wreathed hangars, small fires were burning and wrecked ships that had died on take-off lay atop crumpled departure terminals and support buildings. Gunfire and the thump of grenade detonations echoed to them across the open runways.

  Kell advanced down the ramp and used the sights on his new longrifle to sweep the perimeter.

  “Fighting was recent,” said the Garantine, following him down. The hulking rage killer took a deep draught of air. “Still smell the blood and cordite.”

  “They’ve moved on,” said the sniper, sweeping his gaze over corpses of soldiers and civilians who lay where they had fallen. It was difficult to be sure who had been shooting at who; Dagonet was in the middle of a civil war, and the lines of loyalist and turncoat were not yet clear to the new arrivals. A blink of laser fire from inside one of the massive terminals caught his eye and he turned to it as the crack of broken air reached them a moment later. “But not too far. They’re fighting through the buildings. Lucky for us the place is still contested. Leaves us with less explaining to do.”

  He shouldered the rifle as Tariel ventured a few wary steps down the ramp. “Vindicare? How are we to proceed?”

  Kell walked back up a way. The rest of the Execution Force were gathered on the lower deck, watching him intently. “We need to gather intelligence. Find out what’s going on here.”

  “Dagonet’s extrasolar communications went dark some time ago,” noted Tariel. “Perhaps if you could secure a prisoner for interrogation…”

  Kell nodded and beckoned to Koyne. “Callidus. You’re in charge until we get back.”

  “We,” said Soalm pointedly.

  He nodded towards the Garantine. “The two of us. We’ll scout the star-port, see what we can find.”

  “Ah, good,” said the Eversor, rubbing his clawed hands together. “Exercise!”

  “Are you sure two will be enough?” Soalm went on.

  Kell ignored her and moved closer to Koyne. “Keep them alive, understand?”

  Koyne made a thoughtful face. “We’re all lone wolves, Vindicare. If the enemy come knocking, my first instinct might be to run and leave them.”

  He didn’t rise to the bait. “Then consider that order a test of your oath over your instincts.”

  SABRAT’S LONGCOAT WHIRLED as the horror coiled, leaping into the air towards Hyssos. The operative heard it snapping like sailcloth in a stiff breeze and recoiled, firing shots that should have struck centre-mass but instead hit nothing but air.

  The thing that called itself Spear landed close to him and he took a heavy blow that threw him off his feet. Hyssos slammed into a tall pile of Balthazar bottles that tumbled away with the impact, rolling this way and that. Pain raced up his spine as he twisted and tried to regain his footing.

  Spear tossed the coat away and then, with care that seemed strange for something so abhorrent in appearance, deftly unbuttoned the white shirt beneath and set it aside. Bare from the waist up, Hyssos could see that the creature’s flesh was writhing and changing, cherry-red like tanned leather. He saw what looked like hands pressing out from inside the cage of the monster’s chest, and the profile of a screaming face. Yosef Sabrat’s face.

  The bare arms distended and grew large, their proportions ballooning. Fingers merged into flat mittens of meat, grew stiff and glassy. Hands became bone blades, pennants of pinkish-black nerve tissue dangling from them.

  Hyssos aimed the gun and fired at the place where a man’s heart would have been, but down came the arms and the shot was deflected away. He smelled a slaughterhouse stink coming off the creature, saw the sizzling pit in the limb from the impact as it filled with ooze and knit itself shut.

  The body of the thing was in chaos. It writhed and throbbed and pulsed in disgusting ways, and the operative was struck by the conviction that something was inside the meat of it, trying to get out.

  As the eyeless face glared into him, the distended jaws opening wide to let droplets of spittle fall free, Hyssos found his voice. “You killed them all.”

  “Yes.” The reply was a gurgling chug of noise.

  “Why?” he demanded, retreating back until he was trapped against the fallen bottles. “What in Terra’s name are you?”

  “There is no Terra,” it bubbled, horrible amusement shading the words. “Only terror.”

  Hyssos saw the shape of the face again, this time pressing from the meat of Spear’s bloated shoulders. He was sure it was crying out to him, imploring him. Run, it mouthed, run run run run—

  He raised the gun, shaking, his blood turning to ice. Hands tightening on the grip, aiming for the head. In his time, Hyssos had seen many things that defied easy explanation – strange forms of alien life, the impossible vistas of warp space, the darkest potentials of the human character – and this creature was first among them. If hell was a place, then this was something that had been torn out of that infernal realm and thrust into the real world.

  Spear raised its sword-arms and rattled their hard surfaces off one another. “One more,” it intoned. “One step closer.”

  “To what?” The question was a gasp. It came at him again, and Hyssos shot it in the face.

  Spear shrugged it off. The first downward slash cut away Hyssos’ right hand across the forearm, the gun falling with it. The second stabbing motion pierced skin, ribcage and lung before emerging from his back in a splatter of dark arterial crimson.

  Hyssos was not quite dead as Spear began to cut him into pieces. His last awareness was of the sound of his own flesh being eaten.

  SHOTS AND CRIES of pain sounded distantly as they drew closer to the engagement. The crackling drone of an emplaced autocannon sounded every few moments from down in the open plaza.

  They had found plenty of dead along the way, and to begin with the Eversor paused at the sight of each clash, looking around to see if any of the combatants had perished carrying weapons of any particular note. But he found nothing he wanted to salvage, all of it basic Nire-pattern stubbers and the occasional lasgun. The Garantine didn’t like lasers; too fragile, too lightweight, too prone to malfunction when worked hard. He liked the heavy certainty of a ballistic gun, the comforting shock of recoil when it fired, the deep bass note of the shells crashing from the muzzle or the whickering sizzle of needle rounds. The bulky combi-weapon in his mailed fist was a perfect fit; it was his intention rendered in gunmetal.

  Crouching in the lee of a tall, broken terracotta urn, he studied the Executor pistol and worked his fingers around the grip. The desire to use it on some target, any target, was almost too much to hold in. The anticipation tingled in his lobo-chips, and he felt the chemoglands in his neck grow cool as they produced a calmative to regulate the hammering pace of his heartbeat.

  “Eversor.” The sniper’s voice issued out from the earpiece of his skull-mask. “There’s a group of irregulars to the south, under the broken chronograph near the monorail entrance. They’re dug in with a heavy gun.” The Garantine took a look around the urn and saw the shattered clock face. He grunted an affirmative and Kell went on. “They’re holding off a unit of Defence Force troopers. Not many of the PDFs left. Hold and observe.”

  That last sentence actually drew a laugh from the Eversor. “Oh, no.” He jumped to his feet, the hissing of stimjectors sounding in his ears, and rolling fire flooded through him. The Garantine’s eyes widened behind his mask and his body resonated like a struck chord. Kell was saying something over the vox, but it seemed like the chattering of an insect.

  The Garantine leapt into the air from the balcony overlooking the ticketing plaza and fell two storeys to land on the top of the smashed clock, where it hung from spars extending from the ceiling. The weight of his arrival dislodged the whole construction and he dropped with it, riding it to the tiled floor below to land behind the makeshift gun emplacement. The clock exploded into fragments as it struck the ground, ejecting cogwheels and bits of the fascia in all directions, the shock of it staggering the men behind the autocannon.


  Kell had called them irregulars; that meant they were not soldiers, at least in an official sense. His drug-sharpened perception took in all details of them at once. They were garbed in pieces of armour, some of it PDF or Arbites issue, and the weapons they carried were an equally random assortment. At the sight of the towering, skull-masked monster that had fallen from the skies above them, the men on the autocannon hauled the weapon around on its tripod, swinging it to bear on the Garantine.

  He roared and threw himself at them, his shout lost in the scream of the Executor. Bolt shells broke the bodies of the men in wet, red bursts, and he fell into their line, raking others with the spines of his neuro-gauntlet. The barbs of the glove bit into flesh and sent those it touched reeling to a twitching, frenzied death. Those on the autocannon he killed by punching, putting his fist through their ribcages. As an afterthought, he kicked the tripod gun away, and it rolled to the tiled floor.

  Shivering with the rush, he laughed again. Through his adrenaline haze, he saw the men in the PDF uniforms warily peer out of cover, and then finally advance towards him with laser carbines ready.

  He gave a theatrical bow and addressed them. “A rescue,” he snapped. “Consider it a gift from the ruler of Terra.”

  “Idiot.” Kell’s words pierced the veil of his racing thoughts. “Look at their chest plates!”

  He did so; all of the PDF soldiers wore the etched-out aquila that signified their rejection of the Emperor’s dominion. They started firing, and the Garantine laughed once more, diving into the beam salvo with the Executor at his lead.

  SPEAR’S MEAL WAS methodical. All the eating of the human foodstuffs while it had been in quietus had been enough to fuel the camouflage aspect’s biology, but the layers of the killer’s true self were starting to starve. Sipping at the meat of the dockworker and the clerk had served to hold off the hunger pangs, but they had not been enough for true satisfaction; and the destruction of the telepath had taken a lot of energy from him.