‘Where is Ekharth?’ said Verreault. ‘Shouldn’t he be here by now?’
Lansung pulled a pocket chronograph out. ‘He is late. I advised him to take a circuitous route. He will have become lost. I’ve never seen him without a dozen servants. The man’s hopeless.’
‘Vangorich may have got to him already.’
‘He’ll be here,’ said Lansung.
They had nothing more to say. The raucous noise of Terra’s traffic and industry rumbled in through the unglazed loopholes. The smell of their own fear settled in the room. The Autumn Tower had seen fierce fighting. Many heroes had been made there. Verreault offered a private apology to their ghosts for his own cowardice.
The door creaked. Lansung half leapt from his chair, his hand on the hilt of his sword. Verreault drew his bolt pistol.
‘Ekharth?’
The door squealed wide. A breathless Ekharth, smeared in rust and dust, came through it.
‘Why are you dressed like that?’ said Lansung, eyes widening at the Master of the Administratum’s dirty finery. ‘What if you were followed?’
Ekharth laughed through his panting at their disguises. ‘Do you think playing dress up would help us?’
‘Did you come alone?’ said Verreault. He kept his bolt pistol in his hand.
‘I did, I did. I got a little lost,’ said Ekharth. ‘One is not used to arranging one’s own affairs.’
‘Sit! We lack for time,’ said Lansung.
‘I have guessed why you wish to see me.’ Ekharth sat, equidistant from the other two so they formed the points of a triangle.
‘Vangorich,’ said Verreault. His voice strangled on the name.
‘His appointment is dangerous, I agree,’ said Ekharth.
‘He forces our hand,’ said Lansung. ‘Vangorich seeks to govern in all but name. He has threatened us to win our support. Our entourages were infiltrated. Assassins disguised as our closest bodyguards have been at our sides for the Emperor alone knows how long. Months.’
‘Years, even, Lansung. We should not underestimate him,’ said Verreault.
‘We should not!’ said Ekharth. He panicked. ‘Has he done the same to me? Are my family all right? I… I must go.’
‘Calm down, Tobris. Stay seated.’
‘He will have similar plants in all the High Lords’ households.’
‘Even Wienand’s, even the Navigator’s,’ said Ekharth. His eyes boggled. Sweat beaded his face.
‘Definitely. His men are everywhere,’ said Verreault.
‘You are sure?’
‘We have seen it. Their faces melted and changed in front of us,’ said Lansung. ‘Polymorphine.’
‘I saw it too,’ said Verreault. ‘He has used the threat of them to garner our support.’
‘I had wondered why you voted with him recently,’ said Ekharth. ‘What are you proposing?’
‘Like any enemy, he must destroyed,’ said Lansung.
‘Killed,’ said Verreault.
‘Assassinate the Assassin? Are you sure?’ said Ekharth.
‘We have no other choice,’ said Lansung. ‘Our adepta have their own killers. Vangorich has no monopoly on death.’
Ekharth’s face changed in an instant, from panic to laughter. He opened his mouth wide and laughed so loudly the chamber rang with the sound of it.
‘He’s gone insane,’ said Verreault. ‘I knew we shou—’
An overpowered laspistol went off, the displacement crack muffled by a megathule modulator. Verreault fell face forwards onto the table. As he died, his fingers tightened, sending a bolt shooting past Ekharth’s head. It buried itself in the wall and exploded, scattering a spray of hot iron. Ekharth did not flinch at the impact. Lansung shrank in on himself, hands upraised.
Ekharth stood, laspistol trained upon Lansung in a rock steady grip, though a fragment of shrapnel hissed in the skin over his eye.
‘You are not Ekharth,’ said Lansung.
‘My, my. The people mutter about your idiocy. I had thought them wrong, it is the way of the ruled to rail against rulers. It appears they were not. Obviously, I am not Ekharth. Stand up.’ The man who was not Ekharth jerked his gun. ‘Move. Take my place here.’
‘And if I do not?’
‘I’ll shoot you and then drag you here. If you want to survive this, I advise you to comply. Move, Lord High Admiral.’
‘This is treason! Vangorich cannot hope to get away with this.’ Lansung stood up, his hands over his head.
‘I believe he can, though what I think doesn’t matter. I am a tool. He is the artist. Now sit.’
The Assassin waved Lansung into the chair. Still covering the Lord High Admiral, he walked around the table, took up Verreault’s bolt pistol in his left hand and crouched down to the level of the table. When he pointed the bolt pistol at Lansung, it was situated exactly where it would have been had Verreault been alive and still holding it.
‘What are you doing?’ said Lansung, his face blanching.
‘From your own lips you condemn yourselves. There is no escape from this. You are to die a traitor, Lord High Admiral.’
Lansung rose from the chair. ‘You said I would survive!’
‘I implied you would. Goodbye.’ The Assassin fired. Lansung’s protests went unsaid. The bolt-round hit him in the heart, obliterating the organ and with it, the life of Lord High Admiral Lansung.
The Assassin sprayed the guns with a geneticide that wiped all trace of his use of them away. He waited for the chemical agent to become inert, then placed the guns into the hands of the two dead High Lords. Then he peeled off the thin layers of flesh-coloured synskin that covered his arms to the elbow, placed them in a loophole and set them alight with a melta beam, burning them twice so that only fine ash remained. He blew this away to join the rest of the particulate matter clogging Terra’s skies. They’d find no fyceline discharge on him now, if they dared to look.
He ruffled his hair, hyperventilated to redden his face, then keyed his vox-button. Ekharth’s servants waited for him at the foot of the tower.
‘Help! Help!’ he said in Ekharth’s voice. ‘High Lords Lansung and Verreault have murdered each other!’
Chapter Ten
Krule’s judgement
Beast Krule observed the street from a stanchion of a monorail, crushed into the space between bracket and trackbed that allowed the rail to flex on its pneumatic suspension, although a carefully placed block of adamantium prevented it from doing so for the time being. Apart from a slightly bumpy ride for the commuters riding between the Archive Menorum and their tribal hab-towers, there was no indication Krule was there, down in the underhive of the Antipodean Minoris region. He was shielded from the street by the architecture of the transit line and from augurs by the electricity sputtering from the monorail’s fraying cables.
It was extremely uncomfortable, but comfort had never been a consideration in an Assassin’s career. Lurking had been his lot in life. Even while monitoring traffic in Tashkent Hive, he had been watching unobserved. If there was a time in his life when he hadn’t hidden, he didn’t remember it. The Venenum Temple had been dark. When he hadn’t been training to fight or to poison, he had been training to hide. That was his role, to hide and strike in close and depart, and he was good at it.
The land here had been mountainous before it had been covered over. Rather than level the peaks, the architects of the hive had simply boxed them in, creating this small underworld. The metal sky of the higher levels pressed down hard on the mountain stumps. An angle of stone and filthy metal defined the boundary of the underhive. Ancient structures from the dawn of mankind’s history slumped against the giant supporting columns of the hive above. Rotting rockcrete slums closed in his perceptions to this one dirty street, washed by effluent rain and frequented by nobody he would like to meet. He had been waiting a very long time, and Krule was getting nervy.
Ordinarily, Krule asked no questions about a particular play, beyond those that would help him refine the mission. This time there was a question that niggled him as he waited in that noisome space.