The Vindicare slung the rifle over his shoulder and felt a tremor in his hands. He looked down at the gloved fingers; they seemed foreign to him, as if they belonged to someone else. They were so steeped in blood; so many lay dead at their touch. The single, tiny pressure of his finger on a trigger plate, such a small amount of expended force – and yet magnified into such great destructive power.
He willed himself to stay away from that secret place in his heart, the stygian well of remorse and wrath that had claimed him on the day he killed the murderer of his parents. He willed it, and failed. Instead, Kell succumbed.
It had been his first field kill.
The man, in transit via aeronef through the valleys of Thaxted Dosas, the dirigible floating beneath the hilltops, skimming the sides of the low peaks. Eristede Kell had made his hide eight days before, in the long grasses. The long grasses like those he and Jenniker played in as children, their games of fetch-find and hunt-the-grue. He waited under the suns and the moons, the former his father’s glory, the latter his mother’s smile.
And when the ’nef came around the hill, he fired the shot and did not make the kill. Not at first. The cabin window was refracted, disrupting his aim. He should have known, adjusted the sights. A lesson learned.
Instead of cold and steely determination, he unchained his anger. Kell unloaded the full magazine of ammunition into the cabin, killing everything that lived within it. He executed all who saw that moment of error, target and collaterals all. Men and women and children.
And he had his revenge.
Once more, he was in that place. Life taken to balance life taken from him, from his family – and once more, there was no sweetness in the act. Nothing but bitter, bitter ash and the rage that would not abate.
With an angry flourish, he grabbed the cable rig on his belt and used the fast-fall to drop quickly from his hide to the waterlogged floor below. The cloak billowing out behind him like the wings of the prey birds overhead, he strode towards the body of the Spear-thing, one hand snaking down to the clasp on the holster at his hip. He did not spare Koyne’s brutalised corpse more than a second glance; despite every tiny challenge to Kell’s authority, in the end the Callidus had obeyed and died in the line of duty. As with Iota, Tariel and the others, he would ensure their clades learned of their sacrifices. There would be new teardrops etched upon the face of the Weeping Queen in the Oubliette of the Fallen.
The monstrous killer lay cruciform, floating on the surface of the floodwater. Rust-coloured billows of blood surrounded the body, a halo of red among the dull shades of the rubble and wreckage.
Kell gave the corpse a clinical glare, barely able to stop himself from drawing a knife and stabbing the crimson flesh in mad anger. The skull, already malformed and inhuman in its proportions, had been burst from within by the lethal concussion of the Shatter bullet. Cracked skin and bone were visible in lines webbing the face; it looked like a grotesque terracotta mask, broken and then inexpertly mended.
Putting the longrifle aside, he drew the Exitus pistol, sliding his hand over the skull sigil on the breech and cocking the heavy handgun. He would leave no trace of this creature.
Kell’s boot disturbed the blood-laced floods and the misted water parted. Motion drew his eye to it; the rusty stain was no longer growing, but shrinking.
The wounds across the body of the killer were drinking it in.
He spun, finger on the trigger.
Spear’s leg made an unnatural cracking sound and bent at the wrong angle, hitting Kell in the chest with the force of a hammer blow. The Vindicare stumbled as the red-skinned creature dragged itself out of the water and threw itself at him. Spear no longer moved with the same unnatural stealth and grace he had seen down the sights of the longrifle, but it made up for what it lacked in speed and aggression. Spear battered at him, knocking the pistol from Kell’s grip, breaking bones with every impact of his jagged fists.
The skin of the killer moved in ways that made the Vindicare’s gut tighten with disgust; it was almost as if Spear’s flesh were somehow dragging about the bones and organs within, animating them with wild, freakish energy. Brain matter and thick fluids dribbled from the impact wound in the killer’s eye, and it coughed globules of necrotic tissues from its yawning mouth and ragged nostrils. The marksman took another hit as he tried to block a blow, and Kell’s shoulder dislocated from its socket, making him bellow in agony.
Stumbling, he fell against the crimson-stained spire where Koyne lay impaled. Spear advanced, with each footfall his body bloating and thickening as it drew in more and more of the blood-laced fluids sloshing about their feet.
There was a face in the bubbling skin of its torso. Then another, and another, biting and chewing at the thin membrane that suffocated them, trying to break free. Spear twitched and halted. It turned its clawed fingers on itself, slashing at the protrusions in its flesh, making scratches that oozed thin liquid.
The faces cried out silently to Kell. Stop him, they screamed.
The daemonskin had saved Spear’s life, if this could be considered life. It was so ingrained in the matter of his being that even the obliteration of his cerebellum was not enough to end him. The proxy-flesh of his warp-parasite contained the force of the bullet detonation – or as much as it was capable of, forcing the broken pieces of Spear back together into some semblance of their undamaged form.
But the daemonskin was a primitive creature, unsophisticated. It missed out petty things like control and intellect, holding tight to instinct and animal fury. The killer was self-aware enough to know that he had been murdered and returned from it, but his mind was damaged beyond repair and what barriers of self-control it had once had were in tatters.
Without them, his cages of captured memory broke open.
The formless force of a fragmented persona-imprint came crashing into Spear’s wounded psyche with the impact of a falling comet, and he was spun and twisted beneath the force of it.
Suddenly, the killer’s thoughts were flooded by an overload of sensation, a bombardment of pieces of emotion, shards of self.
–Ivak and the other boys with a ball and the hoops–
–the smell of matured estufagemi wine was everywhere. The warm, comforting scent seemed cloying and overly strong–
–Renia says yes to his earnest offer of a marriage contract, and he basks in her smile–
–shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pasty-white and streaked with fluid–
–I hate you!–
–the shot that kills the Blue Towers Rapist comes from his gun, finally–
–I’ve heard rumours. Stories from people who know people on other worlds, in other systems–
–No–
–a flicker of guilt–
–I’ve been absent a lot recently–
This was all that there was of Yosef Sabrat’s psyche, an incomplete jigsaw puzzle of a self, driven by the single trait that marbled all the man had been, and all that Spear had destroyed.
He had been waiting. Patient, clever Yosef. Buried deep in the dungeons of Spear’s dark soul, struggling not to fade away. Waiting for a moment like this, for the chance to strike at his murderer.