The rains drummed on the canopy and the flames hissed; then he became aware of a presence at his side. Koyne stood there, holding his longrifle. ‘Vindicare,’ said the shade. ‘What are your orders?’
Kell opened his fingers and saw a gold aquila there, stained with dots of red.
‘In the Emperor’s name,’ he said, rising to his feet and taking the weapon, ‘follow me.’
SEVENTEEN
Confrontation / Duel / Termination
Kell looked up as Koyne emerged from the hangar where the Ultio was hidden and his expression stiffened. The boyish face, the pretence at the shape of a human aspect, these were all gone now. Instead, the Callidus had stripped down to what existed in the core of the shade’s persona. An androgynous figure in the matt black overall of a stealthsuit similar to that worn by Kell and Tariel, but with a hood that clung to every contour of the other assassin’s face. The only expression, if it could be said to be such a thing, was from the emerald ovals that were the eyes of the mask. Cold focus glittered there, and little else. Kell was reminded of an artist’s wooden manikin, something without emotion or animation from within.
Koyne’s head cocked. ‘There’s still time to reconsider this.’ The voice, like the figure, was neutral and colourless. Without someone else’s face to speak from, the Callidus seemed to lose all effect.
He ignored the statement, rechecking the fresh clips of ammunition he had taken from the ship for the paired Exitus longrifle and pistol. ‘Remember the plan,’ said the Vindicare. ‘We’ve all seen what it can do. There’s just the three of us now.’
‘You saw it,’ Tariel said, in a small voice. ‘We all saw it. On the memory coil, and out there… It’s not human.’
Koyne gave a reluctant nod. ‘And not xenos. Not alien in that way.’
‘It’s a target, that’s all that matters,’ Kell retorted.
The Callidus scowled. ‘When you have been where I have been and seen what I have seen, you come to understand that there are living things out there that go beyond such easy categorisation. Things that defy reason… even sanity. Have you ever peered into the warp, Vindicare? What lives there–’
‘This is not the warp!’ grated Kell. ‘This is the real world! And what lives here, we can end with a bullet!’
‘But what if we can’t kill the fiend?’ said Tariel, a long ballistic coat pulled tight over him. Congregating under the shadows near his boots, Kell saw rodent-like forms sheltering from the rain.
‘I wounded it,’ said the Vindicare. ‘So we will kill it.’
Tariel gave a slow nod. Overhead, a crackling roar crossed the sky as something burning crimson-purple passed above them, obscured by the low, dirty clouds. Seconds later, impact tremors made the runway quiver all around them, and the winds brought the long, drawn-out rumble of buildings collapsing. The city was entering its death-throes, and when it was finally smothered, Kell doubted the fury of the Sons of Horus would be sated.
Tariel looked up. ‘Vox communications will be sporadic, if they even work at all,’ he said. ‘The radioactives and ionisation in the atmosphere are blanketing the whole area.’
Kell nodded as he walked away. ‘If one of us finds the target, we’ll all know quickly enough.’
The pain across his back was a forest of needles.
Spear ran on, skirting around the rings of broken ferrocrete that had been sections of the control tower, now fallen in a line across the landing pads and maintenance pits. He could feel the daemonskin working against the myriad fragments of metal that were embedded in him, deposited there by the explosion of the shuttle. One by one, the pieces of shrapnel were being expunged from his torso, the living flesh puckering to spit them out in puffs of black blood.
The burn from the blast was torture, and with every footfall jags of sharp agony raced up Spear’s changed limbs and tightened around his chest. When the fuel bowser had detonated, the concussion had caught him first and thrown him clear. The shuttle took the brunt of the explosion, and it was lost to him now. He would need to find another way off Dagonet. Another way to signal the master.
He slowed, clambering over a pile of rubble sloughed from the front of the terminal building, dragging himself up on spars of twisted rebar over drifts of shattered blue glass.
At the apex he dared to pause and throw a glance back through the filthy downpour. The shuttle wreckage was still burning, bright orange flames shimmering where the wet runway reflected them like a dark mirror. Spear’s segmented jaws parted in a low growl. He had allowed himself to become distracted; he was so enraptured by his own success at taking the Warrant he had not stopped to consider the meaning of the witch-girl’s company with the cultists of the Theoge.
Her appearance there had not been happenstance. At first he thought she was merely some defender, a palace guard put in place as a last line of defence by Eurotas’s fanatic cohorts; now it was becoming clearer. He was facing assassins, killers of his own stripe with their own weapons of murder.
He considered what their presence meant, and then discarded the concern. If his purpose on Dagonet had been known, if the forces of the arrogant Emperor had really, truly understood the threat Spear posed to their precious liege lord, this world would have been melted into radioactive glass the moment he set foot on it.
Spear chuckled. Perhaps they expected him to feel fear at his pursuit, but he did not. If anything, he became more certain of his own victory. The only thing that could have faced him on his own terms was the witch-girl, and he had boiled her in the crucible of her own powers. He had little fear of gun or blade after that.
The killer dropped through the yawning space of a tall broken window and landed in a cat-fall on the tiled floor of the terminal. Dust and death hung in the air. Sweeping his gaze around, he saw the remnants of a massive display screen where it had been blown from its mounts by the concussion of an impact several miles away. Across the debris-strewn floor there were a handful of corpses, ragged and gory where carrion-fowl had come to prey on them. The jackal birds glared at Spear from the gloomy corners of the chamber, sitting in their roosts and sniffing at the air. They smelled his blood and they were afraid of its stench.
The daemonskin rippled over him and Spear let out a gasp. It could sense the others coming, it could feel the proximity of bloodletting, of new murder.
He sprinted away into the shadows to prepare; he would not deny the needs of his flesh.
Tariel expected to feel a crippling terror when the others vanished into the shadows of the building, but he did not. He was never really alone, not if he were to be honest with himself. The infocyte found the makings of a good hide in a blown-out administratum room on the mezzanine level of the main terminal, a processing chamber where new arrivals to Dagonet would have been brought for interview by planetary officials before being given formal entry. The eyerats scrambled around him, sniffing at the corners and patrolling the places where there were holes in the walls or missing doorways; his two remaining psyber eagles were watching the main spaces of the atrium and occasionally snapping at the native carrion scavengers when they became too curious.
In a corner formed by two fallen walls, Tariel dropped into a lotus settle and used the cogitator gauntlet to bring up a schematic of the building. It was among the millions of coils worth of files he had copied from the stacks of the Dagonet governmental librariums over the past few weeks, the data siphoned into his personal mnemonic stores. It was habitual of him to do such a thing; if he saw information untended, he took it for himself. It wasn’t theft, for nothing was stolen; but on some level Tariel regarded data left unsecured – or at least data that had not been secured well – as fundamentally belonging to him. If it was there, he had to have it. And it always had its uses, as this moment proved.