Nemesis

by James Swallow

  Sire Eversor spoke. “I will commit every active agent in my clade. All of them, all at once. If I must spend the lives of every last Eversor to kill Horus, then so be it.”

  For the first time since the group had assembled, the silent figure in the hooded robes made a sound; a soft grunt of disagreement.

  “Our visitor has something to add,” said Sire Vanus.

  The Master of Assassins inclined his head towards the shadows. “Is that so?”

  The hooded man moved slightly, enough that he became better defined by the glow-light, but not so much that his face could be discerned inside the depths of the robe. “None of you are soldiers,” he rumbled, his deep tones carrying across the room. “You are so used to working alone, as your occupation demands, that you forget a rule of all conflict. Force doubled is force squared.”

  “Did I not just say such a thing?”, snapped Sire Eversor.

  The hooded man ignored the interruption. “I have heard you all speak. I have seen your mission plans. They were not flawed. They were simply not enough.” He nodded to himself. “No single assassin, no matter how well-trained, no matter which clade they come from, could ever hope to terminate the Archtraitor alone. But a collective of your killers…” He nodded again. “That might be enough.”

  “A strike team…” mused Sire Vindicare.

  “An Execution Force,” corrected the Master. “An elite unit hand-picked for the task.”

  Sire Vanus frowned behind his mask. “Such a suggestion… There is no precedent for something like this. The Emperor will not approve of it.”

  “Oh?” said Callidus. “What makes you so certain?”

  The master of Clade Vanus leaned forward, the perturbations of his image-mask growing more agitated. “The veils of secrecy preserve all that we are,” he insisted. “For decades we have worked in the shadows of the Imperium, at the margins of the Emperor’s knowledge, and for good reason. We serve him in deeds that he must never know of, in order to maintain his noble purity, and to do so there are conventions we have always followed.” He shot a look at the hooded man. “A code of ethics. Rules of conflict.”

  “Agreed,” ventured Siress Venenum. “The deployment of an assassin is a delicate matter and never one taken lightly. We have in the past fielded two or three on a single mission when the circumstances were most extreme, but then always from the same clade, and always after much deliberation.”

  Vanus was nodding. “Six at once, from every prime clade? You cannot expect the Emperor to sanction such a thing. It is simply… not done.”

  The Master of Assassins was silent for a long moment; then he steepled his fingers in front of him, pressing the apex of them to the lips of his silver face. “What I expect is that each clade’s Director Primus will obey my orders without question. These ‘rules’ of which you speak, Vanus… Tell me, does Horus Lupercal adhere to them as strongly as you do?” He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone brooked no disagreement. “Do you believe that the Archtraitor will baulk at a tactic because it offends the manners of those at court? Because it is not done?”

  “He bombed his sworn brethren, his own men even, into obliteration,” said Sire Vindicare. “I doubt anything is beyond him.”

  The Master nodded. “And if we are to kill this foe, we cannot limit ourselves to the moral abstracts that have guided us in the past. We must dare to exceed them.” He paused. “This will be done.”

  “My lord—” began Vanus, reaching out a hand.

  “It is so ordered,” said the man in the silver mask, with finality. “This discussion is at an end.”

  WHEN THE OTHERS had taken their leave through the doorways of the Shrouds, and after the psyber eagles nesting hidden in the apex of the ceiling had circled the room to ensure there were no new listening devices in place, the Master of Assassins allowed himself a moment to give a deep sigh. And then, with care, he reached up and removed the silver mask, the dermal pads releasing their contact from the flesh of his face. He shook his head, allowing a grey cascade of hair to emerge and pool upon his shoulders, over the pattern of the nondescript robes he wore. “I think I need a drink,” he muttered. His voice sounded nothing like the one that had issued from the lips of the mask; but then that was to be expected. The Master of Assassins was a ghost among ghosts, known only to the leaders of the clades as one of the High Lords of Terra; but as to which of the Emperor’s council he was, that was left for them to suspect. There were five living beings who knew the true identity of the Officio’s leader, and two of them were in this room.

  A machine-slave ambled over and offered up a gold-etched glass of brandy-laced black tea. “Will you join me, my friend?” he asked.

  “If it pleases the Sigillite, I will abstain,” said the hooded man.

  “As you wish.” For a brief moment, the man who stood at the Emperor’s right hand, the man who wore the rank of Regent of Terra, studied his careworn face in the curvature of the glass. Malcador was himself once more, the cloak of the Master of Assassins gone and faded, the identity shuttered away until the next time it was needed.

  He took a deep draught of the tea, and savoured it. He sighed. The effects of the counter-psionics in the room were not enough to cause him any serious ill-effect, but their presence was like the humming of an invisible insect, irritating the edges of his witch-sight. As he sometimes did in these moments, Malcador allowed himself to wonder which of the clade leaders had an idea of who he might really be. The Sigillite knew that if he put his will to it, he could uncover the true faces of every one of the Directors Primus. But he had never pursued this matter; there had never been the need. The fragile state of grace in which the leaders of the Officio Assassinorum existed had served to keep them all honest; no single Sire or Siress could ever know if their colleagues, their subordinates, even their lovers were not behind the masks they saw about the table. The group had been born in darkness and secrecy, and now it could only live there as long as the rules of its existence were adhered to.

  Rules that Malcador had just broken.

  His companion finally gave himself up to the light and stepped into full visibility, walking around the table with slow, steady steps. The hooded man was large, towering over the Sigillite where he sat in his chair. As big as a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes, out of the darkness the man who had observed the meeting was a threat made flesh, and he moved with a grace that caused his rust-coloured robes to flow like water. A hand, tawny of skin and scarred, reached up and pulled back the voluminous hood over a shorn skull and queue of dark hair, to reveal a face that was grim and narrow of eye. At his throat, gold-flecked brands in the shapes of lightning bolts were just visible past the open collar.

  “Speak your mind, Captain-General,” said Malcador, reading his aura. “I can see the disquiet coming off you like smoke from a fire pit.”

  Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian of the Legio Custodes, spared him a glance that other men would have withered under. “I have said all I need to say,” Valdor replied. “For better or for worse.” The warrior’s hand dropped to the table top and he absently traced a finger over the wood. He looked around; Malcador had no doubts that the Custodian Guardsman had spent his time in this chamber working out where the room might actually be located.

  The Sigillite drowned the beginnings of a waxen smile in another sip of the bittersweet tea. “I confess, I had not expected you to do anything other than observe,” he began. “But instead you broke open the pattern of the usual parry and riposte that typically comprises these meetings.”

  Valdor paused, looking away from him. “Why did you ask me here, my lord?”

  “To watch,” Malcador replied. “I wanted to ask your counsel after the fact—”

  The Custodian turned, cutting him off. “Don’t lie to me. You didn’t ask me to join you in this place just for my silence.” Valdor studied him. “You knew exactly what I would say.”

  Malcador let the smile out, at last. “I… had an inkling.”

 
; Valdor’s lips thinned. “I hope you are pleased with the outcome, then.”

  The Sigillite sensed the warrior was about to leave, and he spoke again quickly to waylay him. “I am surprised in some measure, it must be said. After all, you are the expression of Imperial strength and nobility. You are the personal guard of the Lord of Earth, as pure a warrior-kindred as many might aspire to become. And in that, I would have thought you of all men would consider the tactics of the Assassinorum to be…” He paused, feeling for the right word. “Underhanded. Dishonourable, even?”

  Valdor’s face shifted, but not towards annoyance as Malcador had expected. Instead he smiled without humour. “If that was a feint to test me, Sigillite, it was a poor one. I expected better of you.”

  “It’s been a long day,” Malcador offered.

  “The Legio Custodes have done many things your assassins would think beyond us. The sires and siresses are not the only ones who have marque to operate under… special conditions.”

  “Your charter is quite specific on the Legio’s zone of responsibility.” Malcador felt a frown forming. This conversation was not going where he had expected it to.

  “If you wish,” Valdor said, with deceptive lightness. “My duty is to preserve the life of the Emperor of Mankind above all else. That is accomplished through many different endeavours. The termination of the traitor-son Horus Lupercal and the clear and present danger he represents, no matter how it is brought to pass, serves my duty.”

  “So, you really believe that a task force of killers could do this?”

  Valdor gave a slight shrug of his huge shoulders. “I believe they have a chance, if the pointless tensions between the clades can be arrested.”

  Malcador smiled. “You see, Captain-General? I did not lie. I wanted your insight. You have given it to me.”

  “I haven’t finished,” said the warrior. “Vanus was right. This mission will not please the Emperor when he learns of it, and he will learn of it when I tell him every word that was spoken in this room today.”

  The Sigillite’s smile vanished. “That would be an error, Custodian. A grave misjudgement on your part.”

  “You cannot have such hubris as to believe that you know better than he?” Valdor said, his tone hardening.

  “Of course not!” Malcador snapped in return, his temper flaring. “But you know as well as I do that in order to protect the sanctity of Terra and our liege-lord, some things must be kept in the dark. The Imperium is at a delicate point, and we both know it. All the effort we have spent on the Great Crusade, and the Emperor’s works, all of that has been placed in most dire jeopardy by Horus’ insurrection. The conflicts being fought at this very moment are not just on the battlefields of distant worlds and in the void of space! They are in hearts and minds, and other realms less tangible. But now, here is the opportunity to fight in the shadows, unseen and unremarked. To have this bloody deed done without setting the galaxy ablaze in its wake! A swift ending. The head of the snake severed with a single blow.” He took a long breath. “But many may see it as ignoble. Use it against us. And for a father to sanction the execution of his son… Perhaps it may be beyond the pale. And that is why some things cannot be spoken of outside this chamber.”

  Valdor folded his muscular arms over his chest and stared down at Malcador. “That statement has all the colour of an order,” he said. “But who gives it, I wonder? The Master of Assassins, or the Regent of Terra?”

  The Sigillite’s eyes glittered in the gloom. “Decide for yourself,” he said.

  BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S enlightenment, the Sentine’s precinct house had been a place of idolatry and ancestor worship. Once, the bodies of the rich and those judged worthy had been buried in crypts beneath the main hall, and great garish statuary and other extravagant gewgaws had filled every corner of the building, with cloisters and naves leading here and there to chapels for every deity the First Establishment had brought with them from Old Earth. Now the crypts were cells and memory stacks, armouries and storage lockers. The chapels had different tenants now, icons called security and vigilance, and all the artworks and idols were crushed and gone, a few saved in museums as indicators of a less sophisticated past. All this had taken place a long time before Yosef Sabrat had been born, however. There were barely a handful of living citizens on Iesta Veracrux who could recall any vestiges of a past with religion in it.

  The cathedral’s second life as a place of justice served the building well. It was just as impressive a home for the Sentine as it had been for the long-departed priests. Sabrat crossed the long axis of the main hall, past the open waiting quad where citizens queued and argued with the luckless jagers on desk duty, and through the checkpoint where an impassive, watchful gun-servitor licked his face with a fan of green laser light before letting him by. He threw a cursory nod to a group of other reeves from the West Catchment, all of them gathered around a nynemen board with tapers of scrip, waving off an invite to join them in a game; instead he took the spiral stairs up to the second level. The upper floors were almost a building inside a building, a multi-storey blockhouse that had been constructed inside the hangar-like confines of the main hall, and retrofitted into the structure. The room was in the same state of shabby, half-controlled clutter as it ever was, with bales of rough vinepaper and starkly shot picts arranged in loose piles that represented some sort of untidy order, if only one knew how to interpret it. In the centre of the room, a pillar studded with brass communication sockets sprouted thick rubber-sheathed cables that snaked to headsets or to hololiths. One of them ended in a listening rig around the head of Yosef’s cohort, who sat bent over in a chair, listening with his eyes closed, fingers absently toying with a gold aquila on a chain about his wrist.

  “Daig.” Yosef stopped in front of the man and called his name. When he didn’t respond, the reeve snapped his fingers loudly. “Wake up!”

  Reeve Daig Segan opened his eyes and let out a sigh. “This isn’t sleep, Yosef. This is deep thought. Have you ever had one of those?” He took off the headset and looked up at him. Yosef heard the tinny twitter of a synthetic voice from the speakers, reading out the text of an incident report in a clicking monotone.

  Daig was a study in contrasts to his cohort. Where Sabrat was of slightly above average height, narrow-shouldered, clean-shaven and sandy-haired, Segan was stocky and not without jowls, his hair curly and unkempt around a perpetually dejected expression. He managed another heavy sigh, as if the weight of the world were pressing down upon him. “There’s no point in me listening to this a second time,” he went on, tugging the rig’s jack plug from its socket on the pillar with a snap of his wrist. “Skelta’s reports are just as dull with the machine reading them to me as him doing it.”

  Yosef frowned. “What I saw out there wasn’t any stripe of dull.” He glanced down and saw a spread of picts from the storage shed crime scene. Even rendered in light-drenched black and white, the horror of it did not lessen. Mirrors of liquid were in every image, and the sight of them brought sense memory abruptly back into the reeve’s forebrain. He blinked the sensation away.

  Daig saw him do it. “You all right?” he asked, concern furrowing his brow. “Need a moment?”

  “No,” Yosef said firmly. “You said you had something new?”

  Daig’s head bobbed. “Not so new. More like a confirmation of something we already suspected.” He searched for a moment through the papers and data-slates before he found a sheaf of inky printout. “Analysis of the cutting gave up a pattern that matches a type of industrial blade.”

  “Medical?” Yosef recalled his impression of the almost clinical lines of the mutilation; but Daig shook his head.

  “Viticultural, actually.” The other reeve pawed through a box at his feet and produced a plastic case, opening it to reveal a wickedly curved knife with a knurled handle. “I brought one up from evidentiary so we’d have an example to look at.”

  Yosef recognised it instantly, and his hand twitched as he resiste
d the urge to reach for it. A harvestman’s blade, one of the most familiar tools on the planet, made by the millions for Iesta Veracrux’s huge army of agricultural workers. Blades exactly like this one were used in every vineyard, and they were as commonplace as the grapes they were used to cut. Being so widespread, of course, they were also the most common tool of murder on Iesta—but Yosef had never seen such a blade used for so ornate a killing as the one at the airdocks. To use the crude tool for so fine a cutting would have required both great skill and no little time to accomplish it. “What in Terra’s name are we dealing with?” he muttered.

  “It’s a ritual,” said Daig, with a certainty that seemed to come from nowhere. “It can’t be anything else.” He put the blade aside and gestured at the scattered files. As well as the tide of paperwork from the airdock murder, packets of fiche and other picts had arrived from a couple of the sub-precincts in the nearby arroyo territories, automatically flagged by the reports of the incident sent out on the planetwide watch-wire. There had been other deaths, and while the nature of them had not been exactly the same as Jaared Norte’s, elements of similar methodology were expressed in each. Daig had suggested that their killer was “maturing” with each assault, growing more confident in what they wished to convey with their deeds.

  This was not Iesta Veracrux’s first serial murder spree. But it seemed different from all the others that had gone before it, in a manner that Yosef could not yet fully articulate.

  “What I don’t fathom,” began a voice from behind them, “is how in Stars the bugger got the poor fool up on the ceiling.” Yosef and Daig turned to where Reeve Warden Berts Laimner stood, a fan of picts in his meaty paw. Laimner was a big man, dark-skinned and always smiling, even now in a small way at the sight of Norte’s grotesque death; but the warm expression was always a falsehood, masking a character that was self-serving and oily. “What do you think, Sabrat?”