Seventh Retribution

by Ben Counter

  ‘I cannot ask you to burden yourself with that knowledge,’ said Syncella. ‘Fight as you have done. Or leave Opis to us. It makes little difference. Do not fight us, and your duty here is done.’

  ‘If there is an enemy of the Imperium here, if it is as serious as you claim, then my duty is to kill it.’

  ‘Do not follow us, Imperial Fist. I will not allow myself to be brought to battle again as here. And there must be no more blood shed between allies. Agreed?’

  ‘What is your target?’ repeated Lysander.

  ‘I will not tell you,’ said Syncella. ‘And mine is one mind from which your Librarian Deiphobus will be tearing no secrets. Serve on, Captain Lysander, as we shall.’

  Syncella turned her back on Lysander and walked away, towards the narrow stone bridge that led to the crash site.

  On the bridge were two more figures. One was Scout-Sergeant Orfos. The other was an Assassin going by his synskin suit, and a follower of the Vindicare Temple going by the sniper rifle he carried, an elaborate weapon with a large suppressor and a scope with a multiple lens selector. Lysander could tell its high craftsmanship even from the other side of the bridge.

  Orfos was running. The Assassin was pursuing him, with his pistol sidearm in his hand, ready to shoot.

  Syncella seemed prepared for the Assassin, but not for Orfos.

  ‘It’s the translator,’ said Orfos. ‘The Assassinorum’s target. It’s vel Sephronaas’s translator. He was shooting at her but Geryius and I got in the way.’

  ‘Skult?’ demanded Syncella of the Assassin.

  ‘Say the word, mistress,’ replied the Vindicare.

  ‘It is too late now,’ said Syncella.

  ‘The translator?’ said Lysander. Lysander had an image in his mind of perhaps the least threatening opponent he could imagine. The skinny, miserable woman who crouched at the Lord Speaker’s side and translated the language of the Aristeia into the Low Gothic used by its commoners. She had barely made any impression on his memory at all.

  ‘She could twist the Lord Speaker’s words into anything,’ continued Orfos. ‘She was controlling the Aristeia through him. That’s who was being moved through the refugee camp. Not vel Sephronaas. His translator. She’s the target. She’s the reason we’re here.’ Orfos took another few steps forwards and stopped, having walked into the area of the psychic anomaly generated by Syncella.

  ‘Syncella?’ demanded Lysander. ‘Is this so?’

  Syncella looked at him. There was no expression on her face now. Her previous interactions had been feigned, the nuances of facial movement and vocal inflection the result of sleep-taught routines. Now there was no need to keep up a pretence. She clamped the collar back shut around her neck, and the unnatural, hateful waves stopped breaking against Lysander’s mind. ‘It is so,’ she said.

  ‘Is her name Legienstrasse?’

  ‘It matters not what its name is.’

  ‘It does,’ said Lysander. ‘Because if you are hunting Legienstrasse, there is something we know that you do not.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Syncella.

  ‘The champions of Chaos on this world are afraid of her. We have looked inside their minds. They obey her. She has taken control of the same weapons you deployed to bring about this war. That means when you face her, you face them. You need not just one bullet, Syncella. You need enough to kill a whole planet’s worth of moral threats. You do not have them. We have.’

  ‘Then you will fight alongside us, Captain Lysander?’ said Syncella.

  ‘Not as an ally. As an enemy of your enemy. Not for honour. For victory. For survival. But you must tell us everything, Lady Syncella. As unaccustomed as you are to it, there must be no more secrets.’

  Lady Syncella held up a hand. ‘Or?’

  ‘Or the Imperial Fists continue to fight. We will not give up on Opis. We will not allow its people to be condemned by the servants of Chaos. And we will not forget who brought those servants here.’

  ‘Then it is settled,’ said Syncella. ‘Though all parties no doubt dislike it. The Imperial Fists and the Officio Assassinorum will fight together to acquire and kill the target Legienstrasse.’

  ‘Then what must we do first?’ asked Lysander.

  ‘First,’ said Syncella, ‘we must tell you what Legienstrasse is.’

  Many stories described the birth of the Officio Assassinorum. All of them were lies.

  Some were perpetuated longer than others, and that made them as close to the truth as was possible when discussing the Assassinorum. The truth was buried so deep, recorded in so many writings later obliterated and memories later withered away, that the truth might as well never have existed.

  The days of the Horus Heresy were so dark that their shadows would stain the next ten thousand years. The Emperor and the commander of his armies, the Warmaster Horus, fought a civil war to determine the future of the Imperium and of the human race.

  It was in this war, and in the upheavals that followed it that the Imperium, as it currently existed, was founded. The Adeptus Terra took over the government of the human race in the name of the critically wounded God-Emperor. His church arose to enforce its piety. The Imperial Guard and Navy, and the Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes, were reorganised to defend it. And somewhere in the darkness, the Officio Assassinorum was born.

  Killers were selected by the Emperor. Six murderers without peer, each so skilled at a particular form of death that their skill was akin to worship. When the Heresy ended, with Horus dead and the Emperor crippled, they vowed to pass on their skills to the next generations who would do murder in the Emperor’s name.

  Or, the Emperor’s Church, the newly-founded Adeptus Ministorum, sought to reconcile the savagery of the Emperor’s many deviant cults with the word of the Imperial creed. These cultists offered up their murdered victims as sacrifices to the Emperor. Instead of purging them, the Ministorum brought them into the fold, focusing their bloodlust on the skills needed to hunt down the Emperor’s foes and building six mighty Temples to house and train them. Eventually the six Temples broke from the Adeptus Ministorum, and vanished into the deepest shadows of the Imperium.

  Or, of all the most deadly killers deployed by the Ruinous Powers under Horus’s leadership, a handful were captured during the Heresy and its aftermath instead of being killed. The fledgling government of the Imperium offered to indulge their wildest excesses of bloodshed, in return for teaching their skills to the Imperium’s own killers and founding the six Temples.

  None was true, but none was truly a lie, for the truth itself did not exist any more.

  Ten thousand years passed.

  The Imperial Assassins honed their craft to such an extent that one man or woman could do what might take an army to do by conventional warfare. Even the High Lords of Terra, whose permission was required by Imperial law before an Assassin could be deployed, did not know where the Assassin Temples were located or even if there were physical temples at all. The very finest archeotech was made available for the Temples’ Grand Masters to arm and armour their agents.

  A well-placed bullet or blade ended thousands upon thousands of lives. Governors who sought to secede from the Imperium. The commanders of Traitor Legions or alien armies. The admirals of pirate fleets. Apostate cardinals who preached words abhorrent to the Imperial creed. Heretechs whose innovations and tech-abominations threatened to destabilise the Adeptus Mechanicus. Whole Imperial armies and fleets were spared when a war was ended before it began, with a key enemy general or spiritual leader executed by the agents of the Assassinorum. There was never any shortage of deserving throats to slit, never any lack of certain misery and death to be averted by a bullet through the correct brain.

  ‘The Callidus,’ said Lady Syncella. ‘Who kills through deceit and disguise. She can take on any form, even mimic the pheromones of certain noisome aliens, and thereby get close enough to the target to place a knife through whatever vital organ is the most vulnerable.’

  The back of the Gil
ded Pyre was not as luxurious as the inside of the Damnatio Memoriae to which she was accustomed, but she showed no discomfort strapped in to the grav-restraints. The Imperial Fists had two Thunderhawks on Opis and the second, the Peril Swift, had been recalled from Rekaba to support the transporting of Lysander’s strike force from the Blood Eyrie. The Gilded Pyre was currently for the use of Lysander and Lady Syncella, with Agent Skult taking a seat in the passenger compartment’s corner. He said nothing, and Lysander had still not seen the face under his stealth mask.

  ‘The Second Temple is the Eversor. The berserker. A weapon to be pointed at the enemy and unleashed. Even in death, his body chemistry will cause a biological meltdown destroying whatever has slain it. When the target is known for martial superiority and an insistence on fighting its assailants in person, it is to the Eversor’s way of death we turn.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lysander, ‘of the Eversor.’

  ‘Then yours is great fortune, Lysander. For many the existence of the Eversor is the last thing they ever learn. Third is the Venenum Temple. Masters of poisons. Theirs is the mantra that every enemy has a weakness. Even the alien and the daemon are not immune. Xenos-tailored toxins can be synthesised in such small doses that only Venenum can be trusted with their use, lest the last drops be wasted. Psychic poisons, such as those gathered from the Emperor’s own tears at the foot of the Golden Throne, might lay low the daemon. Again, only the Venenum can be given the task of delivering it. Fourth is the Vindicare.’

  ‘The sniper,’ said Lysander. ‘I witnessed one on the battlefield. Agent Skult is not the first I have encountered.’

  ‘Quite so,’ said Syncella. ‘Masters of death from a distance. A perfect mission is one in which the target is slain without anyone ever knowing from whence the bullet came.’

  ‘Like the assassination of Inquisitor Kekrops?’

  ‘That was, as you suggest, a perfectly executed mission.’

  ‘The killing of Legienstrasse,’ said Lysander, ‘was not?’

  The Vindicare, Agent Skult, spoke for the first time. ‘I had calculated for the effect of one Space Marine’s body impeding my shot,’ he said. ‘I was not prepared for the bullet to pass through two bodies. Yet this is unforgivable. The failure was a sin, and shall be repented of when the target is dead.’

  ‘Fifth is the Culexus Temple,’ continued Syncella, ‘into which I was inducted. A hunter of psykers. Any witch or sorcerer draws his power from the warp, where that power boils and blazes without containment. Every human mind has its echo in the warp. But the mind of a Culexus is a negative presence, a psychic void, like a black hole, and where we walk no psyker’s art can prevail.’

  ‘Your collar renders you almost normal, then?’

  ‘It does. As a Grand Master of the Culexus Temple I sometimes must attend to diplomatic duties among the other Adeptae. It would not be prudent to deploy the Culexus’s weapon on such occasions. The Sixth Temple is the Vanus. His purpose is to erase not just the physical being, but the memory, the existence of the target as a social construct, eliminating all who know the target and erasing all data pertaining to him.’

  ‘And what could the target be,’ said Lysander, ‘that three Assassins are despatched to kill her?’

  ‘What else?’ said Syncella. ‘Another Assassin.’

  The Aristeia had not always been noted for their mercy.

  Opis’s rulers were adept at absorbing their enemies into their own ranks, founding new bloodlines from surrendered kings and welcoming their princes and councillors into their parliaments. In this way, as much as on the battlefield, was Opis conquered. But sometimes, the Aristeia of Khezal had been angered too greatly to show such compassion.

  The city of Krae had resisted the Aristeia for thousands of years. Ancient pacts ensured its independence, and it ruled its own hinterland by the sea with what, on Opis, passed for peace. The Aristeia swapped ambassadors with Krae, which became a city of poets and scholars, or artists and intellectuals. Every member of the Aristeia had hung paintings by one of Krae’s masters on his wall, or had a book written by one of the city’s literary elite in his library.

  But the Aristeia, in silence, was jealous. Krae was beautiful. Krae was rich. Commoners dreamed of living there. The city’s artists were patronised by the planet’s most powerful. For hundreds of years the desire was voiced, first as a whisper, in the counting-houses and salons of Khezal. Bring Krae into the fold. Conquer it, by arms or by politics, and take that cultural wealth for ourselves.

  One hundred years before Inquisitor Kekrops landed on Opis, the Aristeia sent an envoy to the Panopticon of Krae, carrying with him a declaration that Krae belonged to the Aristeia and always had done. A signatory to some ancient pact of independence had been revealed, through careful perusal of the records in the Temple of Muses, to be of an unqualified bloodline. Krae would allow the Aristeia to take over its government and continue as it had done, with only minimal impact on the everyday lives of its people.

  Krae knew the Aristeia were jealous. The city’s greatest minds had gathered once every few decades to discuss what would be done when the moment came. Some had created elaborate plans for war machines and hidden death-traps surrounding the city. Others wanted to mobilise the citizenry, train and arm them so they could be turned into an army at a moment’s notice. But none of these plans played to the strengths of Krae. They were not warriors. Mechanical war machines could only do so much without fighting men. The peasants could not hold out against the Aristeia’s armies for long.

  So they attacked with ideas.

  The envoy was sent back with a reply that Krae did not recognise the legitimacy of the Aristeia’s authority. Writings flooded out of Krae describing the many philosophical reasons why the Aristeia could not legitimately rule the planet. Works on the nature of power, of the right and wrongs of government, of the possibility for a planet’s common citizens to rule themselves, emerged to catch the imagination of academics and commoners worldwide.

  The Aristeia were furious. It would have been one thing for Krae’s soldiers to face the Aristeia on the battlefield. Dead commoners were of little concern, and the Aristeia’s sons always needed new wars in which to earn their commendations and glorify their bloodlines. But this was an assault on the very fabric of the Aristeia, on the concept of power itself.

  Krae could not be brought into the fold. Its people could not be trusted to embrace the Aristeia as their betters and their rulers. Its elite would plot just as they had done, to find a new path of independence. Krae had to die.

  Khezal threw everything it had at Krae. It was no longer interested in bringing the city’s military to battle, and forcing the city to surrender. The city itself was the target.

  The intellectuals of the universities and galleries were herded out into the street and their brains dashed out against the cobbles. The people were forced at bayonet point from their homes. Works of art were defaced and the libraries burned.

  When it was done, Krae was empty save for the bodies. The Aristeia forbade anyone to settle there again. The city was left for the forest to swallow, and over the decades the trees broke through its streets and broke apart the foundations of its opera houses and museums. It had stood like this, abandoned and decaying, for a century, when Operation Starfall began two hundred kilometres to the west of the abandoned city.

  Karnikhal Six-Finger wrenched his blade from the body of another Imperial Guardsman.

  The dirt under his feet was sodden with blood. Blood dripped from the leaves of the trees around him, like a red rain.

  It was the blood of his own soldiers, who in their madness had hammered sections of jagged black metal armour to their bodies. It was the blood of his enemies, Guardsmen in desert camouflage ill-suited to their sudden deployment in the coniferous forests towards the eastern edge of the Starfall Line. Karnikhal did not care whose blood it was, for his god did not care, either.

  ‘Bathe deep!’ he yelled. ‘It will wash away your weakness! Drink d
eep! It is strength!’

  His soldiers ran through the trees. He saw two or three cut down by las-fire. The enemy, shocked by the force of his charge, were scattered but still fighting, trying to organise themselves into firing lines.

  An Imperial officer, wearing a long black greatcoat with a peaked cap, stood in front of him. Karnikhal’s height was so great that he looked down on the man as the officer yelled out the words of a prayer and ran straight at him.

  The officer had a power sword, a fine weapon with an elaborate basket hilt and a blade that was a sliver of silver light. Karnikhal sidestepped the first thrust and sliced his chainsword through the back of the officer’s leg. The chainteeth, already clotted with a dozen enemies’ worth of gore, carved through the man’s leg at mid-thigh. The officer sprawled into the wet dirt and Karnikhal picked him up by the neck. The power sword had dropped from the officer’s hands, the blade hissing where it touched the mud.

  Karnikhal looked into the officer’s face. Already the blood had drained from it. It was whitening as he watched.

  A memory surfaced from the bubbling red ocean of Karnikhal’s mind. Half-recalled, fragmented by the centuries. A face like this. But not exactly – it was the face of another Space Marine, as Karnikhal himself had once been.

  ‘Side with us!’ the face cried. Karnikhal could not put a name to it, for he had obliterated that information from his memory. ‘With us! Angron is mad and Horus desires power. My brother, do not…’

  Karnikhal’s hand was around the Space Marine’s throat in his memory, just as it was around the Imperial officer’s now. And both hands now closed, crunching through bone and cartilage. Both faces contorted in death, both pairs of eyes rolled up and went dull.

  Karnikhal threw the memory out of his mind, at the same time slamming the officer’s body against a tree trunk.

  It was good. There was blood. The smouldering armour he wore smoked where blood had sprayed across it, filling the forest with the stench of burning men. His head pounded with signals from his cranial implants, which dispensed the painkillers that dulled the agony of the molten armour with every life he took.