‘What group?’ said Daig.
‘The file notes it was part of an informal organisation called the Theoge.’
Yosef swore under his breath and snatched the paper from the woman’s hand. ‘Give me that. We’ll take this from here.’
‘Remember our arrangement!’ she insisted, her cheeks colouring; but the reeve was already stalking away towards the coleopter.
The Warlord Jun Yae Jun bolted upright from the ornate couch where he lay, his robe falling open, scattering the attendants from his sides. He spluttered and snarled, tearing at the web of golden mechadendrites that were wrapped about his head, winding into his ear canals, nostrils and mouth. ‘Get these things off me!’ he bellowed, flailing around, knocking over a hookah and table piled with wine goblets and ampoules.
With an agonised wrench he finally freed himself and glared around, looking for his guardian. Jun could hear the sounds of violence and panic in the halls beyond the room. Something had gone very wrong, and a tide of terror was welling up inside him. He turned it into fury as he found the guardian on his hands and knees, staring into a pool of vomit.
Jun gave him a violent kick. ‘What are you doing down there? Get up! Get up and protect me, you worthless wretch!’
The guardian stood, as shaky as a drunkard. ‘There is darkness,’ he muttered. ‘Black curtains falling.’ The man choked and coughed up bile.
Jun kicked him again. ‘You were supposed to protect me! Why did you fail me?’ His face was crimson with anger. In defiance of Imperial law, without grant or sanction from the Adeptus Terra, the warlord had secured himself a guardian who not only had combatant skills, but was also possessed of a measure of psychic ability. For months, his pet killer had been his most closely-guarded confidence, but now it seemed that his secret was out. ‘There’s a Culexus here! Do you know what that means?’
The guardian nodded. ‘I know.’
When he had first heard the name of the assassin clade spoken, when the story of what the word meant had been told to him, the warlord did not believe it. He understood psykers, the humans gifted – some said cursed – by the touch of the warp. A psyker’s essence burned bright in the realm of the immaterium, forever connecting the world of flesh with the world of the ethereal; but if psykers reflected the far extreme of a spectrum, and ordinary men and women the brief candles of life in the middle ground, then what could represent the opposite end of that balance? The darkness?
They were called pariahs. Chance births, less than one in a billion, children born, so it was said, without a soul. Where a psyker burned sun-bright, they were a black hole. They were antithesis, made manifest. Ice to the fire, darkness to the light.
And as with so many things, the Imperium of Man had found a use for such aberrations. The Clade Culexus harvested pariahs wherever they were found, and rumour suggested that they might even grow them wholesale from synthesis tanks in some secret fleshworks in the wilds of Terra. Jun Yae Jun had never believed in them until this moment, dismissed the very idea as a fiction created to instil fear in the kings and regents who ruled under the aegis of the Emperor. He knew fear now, though, and truth with it.
Jun stumbled towards the doorway, and hands pulled at his robes. ‘Warlord, please,’ said the attendant. The spindly man was speaking rapidly. ‘Stop! The game has not been completed. There is the letting of fluids to be gathered, the sacrament!’
The warlord turned and glared at the attendant. Like all the others who ran this sordid diversion for the masters of the Red Lanes, he was draped in strips of silk and painted with bright inks. He had numerous daubs across his skin, repeating the shape of a disc, a rod and opposed crescents. The design was meaningless to Jun. He tried to shove the man away, but he would not let go.
‘You must not leave!’ snarled the attendant. ‘Not yet!’ He gripped the warlord’s arm and held on tightly.
Jun spat and produced a push-dagger from a pocket. ‘Get off me!’ he roared, and stabbed the man in the throat with three quick moves. Leaving him to die, the warlord forced his way out into the corridor. The guardian stayed with him, his face pale and sweaty. He was mumbling to himself with every step. ‘Vox!’ shouted Jun. ‘Give me your vox!’
The guardian obeyed. A line of blood was seeping from his right eye, like red tears.
Barging his way through the change-brothel’s other clients, slashing a path with the push-dagger, the warlord barked a command string into the mouthpiece of the communicator. ‘Air Guard,’ he shouted. ‘Deploy mobiles for zone strike, now now now!’
‘Location?’ asked the worried voice of the coordinator, back at the Yae clan compound.
‘The Red Lanes!’ he replied. ‘Wipe it off the map!’
‘Lord, are you not in that area?’
‘Do it now!’ It was the only way to be certain of killing the Culexus. He had no other option open to him.
In the ruined apartment, Kell held his breath and listened. Over the disarray in the street below them, his spy mask’s audial sensors had detected the sound of gravity-resist motors. ‘Vanus,’ he said. ‘Do you hear that?’
‘Gunships,’ said Tariel, studying his hololiths. ‘Cyclone-class. I read an attack formation.’
Kell’s face twisted in a grimace, and he ejected the magazine from his weapon, quickly reloading it with a different kind of ammunition.
Crossing the courtyard, the warlord looked up into the rainy night as the first salvo of rockets slammed into the buildings surrounding the square. A massive fist of orange fire and black smoke engulfed the tallest of the shanty-towers, and curls of flame spun away, lighting new infernos wherever they landed.
His guardian was behind him, blinded by a roaring headache, barely able to stagger in a straight line, and with a monumental effort, the psyker bodyguard hauled himself to the groundcar parked near the gates. Dead bodies lay in a circle around the vehicle, shocked to death by the vehicle’s autonomic security system. Recognising him, the car’s driver-servitor opened the gull wing doors to allow the guardian and the warlord inside. Another strike hit home nearby, blasting tiles off the brothel’s roof, sending them down to shatter harmlessly against the vehicle’s armoured skin.
‘Get me out of here,’ demanded Jun. ‘Stop for nothing.’
The guardian, half in and half out of the door, coughed suddenly and blood spluttered from his mouth. He turned, the pain in his skull burning like cold fire, as a figure in glistening black fell the distance from the roof to the courtyard floor. A ring of invisible force radiated out from it, causing a halo of rain to vaporise into mist.
‘Kill her!’ shouted the warlord, his voice high and filled with terror. ‘Kill her!’
The psyker took a foot in the spine and Jun shoved him out of the safety of the car, onto his knees. The gull wing door slammed shut and sealed tight.
The Culexus assassin stepped forwards as the guardian got up again, catching sight of the rain rolling down the contours of her skull-helm, dripping from the orbit of the single ruby eye as if she were weeping. The guardian reached inside himself and went deep, past the blazing pain, past the horrific wave of nothingness that threatened to drown him. He found a breath of fire and released it.
The pyrokinetic pulse chugged into existence, streaming from his twitching fingertips. The blast hit the Culexus dead on, and she backed away, shaking her distended steel head; but the tiny flare of hope the guardian experienced died a second later as the fire ebbed, almost as if it had been pulled into the ribbing of the assassin’s sinister garb.