On any other target, it might have worked. But this was an amalgam of uncontrolled human mutation, merged with a predatory form from a dimension made of madness. What it had that could be called mentality was a lattice of instinct and obedience suspended somewhere beyond the reach of anything in the physical plane.
Spear shrugged off the flickers of energy, folds of skin and fronds of flesh-matter crisping and peeling away from its head like a tattered layer of ablative armour. The grinning, fang-lined mouth underneath was wet with fluids and pus. The killer’s cutting blades swept in and the barrel of the neural shredder was severed cleanly.
The gun screamed and spat watery orange fluids in jerking sputters, twitching so hard that it jolted itself from Koyne’s grasp and tumbled away, falling into the shadows beneath collapsed sheets of flakboard. The Callidus shrank back, grasping for the twin to the memory sword already at point and ready.
The killer and the assassin fell into a blade fight, fat yellow sparks flying as the molecule-thin edges of Koyne’s rapiers cut into the organic swords and broke off brittle, sharp fragments with every hit. Spear’s blades flawed without blunting, as the Callidus learned at cost, the wet lines of them cutting deeply into the stealthsuit. Where blood was drawn, it was slow to clot. The tooth-matter exuded some kind of oily venom that kept the wounds from scabbing over.
Spear changed the balance of the combat, powerful muscles bunching beneath his red flesh, forcing Koyne back and back towards the fractured walls of the courtyard.
The animated contours of the Callidus’s face altered as each blow landed or was deflected. A whirlwind of parries flew from Koyne’s arms, but Spear was gaining ground, pushing the assassin deeper into a defensive stance with each passing moment. Koyne’s inconstant aspect showed a carousel of old faces and new faces, all of them in fury and frustration.
Spear laughed, threads of drool stringing from the split between the halves of his shovel-faced jaw, and in that second Koyne managed a downward slash of both blades. Spear barely parried the move – it was overly aggressive and unexpected, and the tips of the memory swords carved a cross over the killer’s scalp that penetrated to the blackened bone. Wire-thin worms poured from the wound, exposing a milky eye beneath the injury that wept ichor. Spear’s laugh turned to a howl of agony.
There was something fundamentally wrong with this creature. The assassin was not touched by witch-mark like Iota and her Culexus kindred, but still Koyne could sense on a marrow-deep level that Spear was not meant to exist in this world. The creature, whatever amorphous amalgamation of warp-spawn and human it was, flaunted reason by the mere fact of its existence. It was a splinter in the skin of the universe.
Koyne did the trick with the koans once again, marshalling the density of bone and lining of musculature for a leap into the air that defied human potential. The Callidus jumped upwards and pivoted in mid-flight, falling out of Spear’s line of sight over a buckled wall.
The killer came rushing over the hillock of rubble and followed his foe into the atrium proper. The wide, high chamber ran almost the entire length of the terminal, the litter of the dead and the wreckage of the port building lying ankle deep and swimming in stagnant falls of rainwater.
Koyne was rising back into a fighting stance, slower than the Callidus would have liked, but the stress of muscle reformation on the run took its toll. All the no-mind focussing mantras in the pages of the clade’s Liber Subditus were worth nothing against a blade in the hand of an enemy like this one.
When Spear spoke, Koyne knew that the moment was near. The fury in the killer’s hissing, sibilant voice was the sound of a serpent uncoiling, hood fanning open before the bite. ‘I murder and murder, and there is no end to you,’ he spat. ‘You are not challenges to me, you are only steps on the road. Markers for my path.’
‘What monstrosity gave birth to you?’ Koyne asked the question, thinking aloud, the changing face shifting anew. ‘You’re just a collision of freakish chance, an animal. A weapon.’
‘Like you?’ Spear’s mucus-slicked blades flicked back and forth, gleaming dully. ‘Like the wretch back there and the dark-skinned one I killed with my mind? But what have you done of worth, faceless?’ He threw an inelegant, bored attack at Koyne that the Callidus avoided, splashing back through a puddle into the shadows. ‘Nothing you have murdered has any weight. But what I destroy will tip the balance of a galaxy.’
‘You’ll be stopped!’ Koyne shouted the words with sudden, vicious energy, boiling up from a place of naked hatred.
‘You will never know.’ Spear gave a flick of his hand and shot a fan of bone shards at the assassin. Instead of dodging, Koyne rocked forwards, into the path of the darts, and parried them away with a web of mnemonic steel. Blades flashing, the Callidus pushed into the attack, aiming for the single vulnerable point in the killer’s stance.
Spear had left just such an opening to entice the shade, and seized the moment with vicious delight. New blades of fang-like matter burst from the surface of his churning skin and caught Koyne’s twinned strike, blocking the blow even as it fell.
Koyne’s changing face darkened with fright and then agony. Spear crossed his sword-arms like a falling guillotine and both of the Callidus’s slender, delicate hands were severed at the wrists.
Fountains of blood jetted across Spear’s torso as Koyne fell backwards with the force of the pain-shock, and the killer caught his victim before the assassin could tumble into the sloshing, grimy waters. ‘We’re alike,’ he told the Callidus. ‘Beneath the skin. Both the same.’
Koyne was a moment from death, and so Spear reached up and drove needle-sharp nails into the trembling skin of the assassin’s face; then with a single, horrific tearing, he ripped the flesh away to show the red meat underneath. Koyne’s body bucked with the sheer violence of the act, and Spear gave it a brutal shove.
The Callidus spun away and landed on a fallen spire of masonry, a pinnacle of marble bursting through the stealthsuit fabric. Pinned there, the body bled out and twitched, denied a quick death.
‘You see?’ Spear asked the question to the rag of skin in his hand. ‘The same, in our ways.’
The killer tipped back his head and ate his prize morsel. Now this matter was done with, now the Emperor’s ineffectual foot soldiers had been disposed of, Spear could return to the matter of the signalling. He looked around, searching for a wide, flat space where he might begin again on the drawing of the runes.
no
‘Be silent,’ he hissed.
The daemonskin muttered. Something was touching its surface. A breath of faint energy, a pinprick of ultraviolet light. Spear turned, senses altering to follow–
The bullet entered the killer’s head through the hollow black pit of his right eye, the impact transferring such kinetic force it blew Spear off his feet and into a spinning tumble, down into the debris and floodwater. The shot fractured into thousands of tiny, lethal shards that expanded to ricochet around inside the walls of his skull, shredding the meat of his brain into ribbons.
The faceless had given up life in order to draw him into the atrium, into a space under a sniper’s gun.
In those fractions of seconds as the blackness engulfed him, there was understanding. There had been another. In his arrogance, he had failed to account for a third attacker; or perhaps it been Sabrat’s final victory, clouding his mind at the crucial moment.
The killer was killed.
Kell lowered the longrifle and allowed the cameoline cloak to fall open. The echo of the gunshot, hardly louder than a woman’s gasp, still echoed around the rafters of the atrium. Carrion birds roosting nearby flashed into the air on black wings, circling and snarling at each other in their raucous voices.