He looked away, towards Kell. “Do you think the Callidus will live?”
“His kind don’t perish easy,” said the Vindicare dryly. “They’re too conceited to die in so tawdry a manner.”
Tariel shook his head. “Koyne is not a ‘he’. It’s not male or female.” He frowned. “Not anymore, anyway.”
“The ship will heal… it. And once our poisoner joins us, we will have our Execution Force assembled…” Kell trailed off.
Tariel imagined he was thinking the same thing as the sniper; and what then? The question as to what target they were being gathered to terminate would soon be answered – and the Vanus was troubled by what that answer might be.
It can only be—
The thought was cut off as the man in the kimono returned with another person at his heels. Tariel determined a female’s gait; she was a slender young woman of similar age to himself.
“By the order of the Director Primus of our clade and the Master of Assassins,” said the man, “you are granted the skills of secluse Soalm, first-rank toxin artist.”
The woman looked up and she gave a hard-edged, defiant look at the Vindicare. Kell’s face shifted into an expression of pure shock and he let out a gasp. “Jenniker.”
The Venenum drew herself up. “I accept this duty,” she said, with finality.
“No,” Kell snarled, the shock shifting to anger. “You do not!” He glared at the man in the kimono. “She does not!”
The man cocked his head. “The selection was made by Siress Venenum herself. There is no error, and it is not your place to make a challenge.”
Tariel watched in confused fascination as the cool, acerbic mien Kell had habitually displayed crumbled into hard fury. “I am the mission commander!” he barked. “Bring me another of your secluses, now.”
“Are my skills in question?” sniffed the woman. “I defy you to find better.”
“I don’t want her,” Kell growled, refusing to look at Soalm. “That’s the end of it.”
“I am afraid it is not,” said the man calmly. “As I stated, you do not have the authority to challenge the assignment made by the Siress. Soalm is the selectee. There is no other alternative.” He pointed back towards the doorway. “You may now leave.” Without another comment, the man exited the room.
“Soalm?” Kell hissed the woman’s surname with undisguised anger. “That is what I should call you now, is it?”
It was slowly dawning on Tariel that the two assassins clearly shared some unpleasant history together. He looked inward, thinking back over what he had managed to learn about Eristede Kell since the start of their mission, looking for some clue. Had these two been comrades or lovers, he wondered? Their ages were close enough that they could have both been raised in the same schola before the clades drew them for individual selection and training…
“I accepted the name to honour my mentor,” said the woman, her voice taking on a brittle tone. “I started a new life when I joined my clade. It seemed the right thing to do.”
Tariel nodded to himself. Many of the orphan children selected for training by the Officio Assassinorum entered the clades without a true identity to call their own, and often they took the names of their sponsors and teachers.
“But you dishonoured your family instead!” Kell grated.
And then, for a brief moment, the woman’s mask of defiance slipped to reveal the regret and sadness behind it; suddenly Tariel saw the resemblance.
“No, Eristede,” she said softly, “you did that when you chose to kill innocents in the name of revenge. But our mother and father are dead, and no amount of bloodshed will ever undo that.” She walked by Kell, and past a stunned Tariel, stepping out into the perfumed jungle.
“She’s your sister,” Tariel blurted it out, unable to stay silent, the data rising up from his memory stack in a rush. “Eristede and Jenniker Kell, son and daughter of Viceroy Argus Kell of the Thaxted Duchy, orphaned after the murder of their parents in a local dispute—”
The Vindicare advanced on him with a livid glare in his eyes, forcing Tariel back against a cage filled with scorpions. “Speak of this to the others and I will choke the life from you, understand?”
Tariel nodded sharply, his hands coming up to protect himself. “But… The mission…”
“She’ll do what I tell her to,” said Kell, the anger starting to cool.
“Are you sure?”
“She’ll follow orders. Just as I will.” He stepped back, and Tariel glimpsed a hollowness, an uncertainty in the other man’s eyes that mirrored what he had seen in the Vindicare’s sister.
THE IUBAR HAD decks filled with cogitator engines that hummed and whirred like patient cats, gangs of progitors moving back and forth between them with crystalline memory tubes and spools of optic coil. According to Hyssos, the devices were used to gather financial condition data from the various worlds along the Eurotas trade routes, running prognostic models to predict what goods a given planet might require months, years, even decades into the future.
“What are we to do with these things?” asked Daig. He’d never been comfortable with the thought of machines that could do a man’s job better.
Hyssos nodded at one of the engines. “I’ve been granted use of this module. Various information sources from Iesta Veracrux’s watch-wire are being collated and sifted by it.”
“You can do that from up here?” Yosef felt an odd stab of concern he couldn’t place.
The operative nodded. “The uptake of data is very slow due to the incompatibility of the systems, but we have some level of parity. Enough to check the capital’s traffic patterns, compare information on the suspect with the movements of his known associates, and so on.”
“We have jagers on the ground doing that,” Daig insisted. “Human eyes and ears are always the best source of facts.”
Hyssos nodded. “I quite agree. But these machines can help us to narrow our fields of inquiry. They can do in hours what would take your office and your jagers weeks to accomplish.” Daig didn’t respond, but Yosef could see he was unconvinced. “We’ll tighten the noose,” continued the operative. “Sigg won’t slip the net a second time, mark my words.”
Yosef shot him a look, searching the comment for any accusation – and he found none. Still, he was troubled, and he had to voice it. “Assuming Sigg is our killer.” He remembered the man’s face in the cooper’s shack, the certainty he had felt when he read Erno Sigg’s fear and desperation. He looked like a victim.
Hyssos was watching him. “Do you have something to add, Reeve Sabrat?”
“No.” He looked away and found Daig, his cohort’s expression unreadable. It wasn’t just Sigg he was having his doubts about; Yosef thought back to what the other man had said in the ruined lodge, and the recent changes in his manner. Daig was keeping something from him, but he could not think of a way to draw it out. “No,” he repeated. “Not now.”
WHAT THE OTHERS called the “staging area” was really little more than a converted storage bay, and Iota saw little reason why the name of it made so much difference. The Ultio was a strange vessel; she was still trying to know it, and it wasn’t letting her. The ship was one thing pretending to be another, an assemblage of rare technologies and secrets that had been stitched into a single body; given a mission, thrown out into the darkness. It was like her in that way, she mused. They could almost have been kin.
The mind inside the ship spoke to her when she spoke to it, answering some of her questions but not others. Eventually, Iota became bored with the circular conversations and tried to find another way to amuse herself. As a test of her stealth skills, she took to exploring the smallest of the crawlspaces aboard the Ultio or spying on the medicae compartment where the Callidus was recovering inside a therapy pod. When she wasn’t doing this or meditating, Iota spent the time hunting down spiders in shadowed corners of the hull, catching and collecting them in a jar she had appropriated from the ship’s mess. So far, her hopes of encoura
ging the arachnids to form their own rudimentary society had failed.
She spotted another of the insects in the lee of a console and deftly snared it; then, with a cruelty born of her boredom, she severed its legs one by one, to see if it could still walk without them.
Kell entered the chamber; he was the last to arrive. The infocyte Tariel had been working at the hololith projector and he seemed uncharacteristically muted. The Vanus’ mood had been like this ever since he and the Vindicare had returned from Terra with the last of the recruits, the woman who called herself Soalm. The new arrival didn’t speak much either. She seemed rather delicate for an assassin; that was something that many thought of Iota when they first laid eyes on her, but the chill of her preternatural aura was usually enough to destroy that illusion within a heartbeat. The Garantine’s bulk took up a corner of the room, like an angry canine daring any one of them to crowd into his space. He was playing with a sliver of sharpened metal – the remains of a tool, she believed – dancing the makeshift blade across his thick fingers with a striking degree of dexterity. He was bored too, but annoyed with it; then again, Iota had come to understand that every mood of the Eversor was some shade of anger, to a greater or lesser extent. Koyne sat in a wire-frame chair, the Callidus’ smoothed-flat features like an unfinished carving in soapstone. She watched the shade for a few moments, and Koyne offered Iota a brief smile. The Callidus’ skin darkened, taking on a tone close to the tawny shade of Iota’s own flesh; but then the moment was broken by Kell as he rapped his gloved hand on the support beams of the low ceiling.
“We’re all here,” said the Vindicare. His gaze swept the room, dwelling briefly on all of them; all of them except Soalm, she noted. “The mission begins now.”
“Where are we going?” asked Koyne, in a voice like Iota’s.
Kell nodded to Tariel. “It’s time to find out.”
The infocyte activated a code-key sequence on the projector unit and a haze of holographic pixels shimmered into false solidity in the middle of the chamber. They formed into the shape of a tall, muscular man in nondescript robes. He had a scarred face and a queue of close-cut hair over an otherwise bare skull, and if the image was an accurate representation, then he was easily bigger than the Garantine. The hologram crackled and wavered, and Iota recognised the tell-tale patterns of high-level encoding threading through it. This was a real-time transmission, which meant it could only be coming from another ship in orbit, or from Terra itself.
Kell nodded to the man. “Captain-General Valdor. We are ready to be briefed, at the Master’s discretion.”
Valdor returned the gesture. “The Master of Assassins has charged me with that task. Given the… unique nature of this operation, it seems only right that there be oversight from an outside party.” The Custodian surveyed all of them with a measuring stare; at his end of the communication, Iota imagined he was standing among a hololithic representation of the room and everyone in it.
“You want us to kill him, don’t you?” the Garantine said without preamble, burying his makeshift knife in the bulkhead beside his head. “Let’s not be precious about it. We all know, even if we haven’t had the will to say it aloud.”
“Your insight does you credit, Eversor,” said Valdor, his tone making it clear his compliment was anything but that. “Your target is the former Warmaster of the Adeptus Astartes, Primarch of the Luna Wolves, the Archtraitor Horus Lupercal.”
“They are the Sons of Horus now,” muttered Tariel, disbelief sharp in his words. “Throne’s sake. It’s true, then…”
The Venenum woman made a negative noise in the back of her throat. “If it pleases my lord Custodes, I must question this.”
“Speak your mind,” said Valdor.
“Every clade has heard the rumours of the missions that have followed this directive and failed it. My clade-cohort Tobeld was the last to be sent on this fool’s errand, and he perished like all the others. I question if this can even be achieved.”
“Cousin Soalm has a compelling point,” offered Koyne. “This is not some wayward warlord of which we are speaking. This is Horus, first among the Emperor’s sons. Many call him the greatest primarch that ever lived.”
“You’re afraid,” snorted the Garantine. “What a surprise.”
“Of course I am afraid of Horus,” replied Koyne, mimicking the Eversor’s gruff manner. “Even an animal would be afraid of the Warmaster.”
“An Execution Force like this one has never been gathered,” Kell broke in, drawing the attention of all of them. “Not since the days of the first masters and the pact they swore in the Emperor’s service on Mount Vengeance. We are the echo of that day, those words, that intention. Horus Lupercal is the only target worthy of us.”
“Pretty words,” said Soalm. “But meaningless without direction.” She turned back to the image of Valdor. “I say again; how do we hope to accomplish this after so many of our Assassinorum kindred have been sacrificed against so invulnerable an objective?”
“Horus has legions of loyal warriors surrounding him,” said Tariel. “Astartes, warships, forces of the Mechanicum and Cybernetica, not to mention the common soldiery who have come to his banner. How do we even get close enough to strike at him?”
“He will come to you.” Valdor gave a cold, thin smile. “Perhaps you wondered at the speed with which this Execution Force has been assembled? It has been done so as to react to new intelligence that will place the traitor directly in your sights.”
“How?” demanded Koyne.
“It is the judgement of Lord Malcador and the Council of Terra that Horus’ assassination at this juncture will throw the traitor forces into disarray and break the rebellion before it can advance on to the Segmentum Solar,” said Valdor. “Agents of the Imperium operating covertly in the Taebian Sector report a strong likelihood that Horus is planning to bring his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, to the planet Dagonet in order to show his flag. We believe that the Warmaster’s forces will use Dagonet as a foothold from which to secure the turning of every planet in the Taebian Stars.”
“If you know this to be so, my lord, then why not simply send a reprisal fleet to Dagonet instead?” asked Soalm. “Send battle cruisers and Legions of Astartes, not six assassins.”
“Perhaps even the Emperor himself…” muttered Koyne.
Valdor gave them both a searing glare. “The Emperor’s deeds are for him alone to decide! And the fleets and the loyal Legions have their own battles to fight!”
Iota nodded to herself. “I understand,” she said. “We are to be sent because there is not certainty. The Imperium cannot afford to send warfleets into the darkness on a mere ‘likelihood’.”
“We are only six,” said Kell, “but together we can do what a thousand warships have failed to. One vessel can slip through the warp to Dagonet far easier than a fleet. Six assassins… the best of our clades… can bring death.” He paused. “Remember the words of the oath we all swore, regardless of our clades. There is no enemy beyond the Emperor’s wrath.”
“You will take the Ultio to the Taebian Sector,” Valdor went on. “You will embed on Dagonet and set up multiple lines of attack. When Horus arrives there, you will terminate his command with extreme prejudice.”
“MY LORD.” EFRIED bowed low and waited.
The low mutter of his primarch’s voice was like the distant thunder over the Himalayan range. “Speak, Captain of the Third.”
The Astartes looked up and found Rogal Dorn standing at the high balcony, staring into the setting sun. The golden light spilled over every tower and crenulation of the Imperial Palace, turning the glittering metals and white marble a striking, honeyed amber. The sight was awesome; but it was marred by the huge cube-like masses of retrofitted redoubts and gunnery donjons that stood up like blunt grey fangs in an angry mouth. The palace of before – the rich, glorious construct that defied censure and defeat – was cheek-by-jowl with the palace of now – a brutalist fortress ranged against the most lethal of
foes. A foe that had yet to show his face under Terra’s skies.
Efried knew that his liege lord was troubled by the battlements and fortifications the Emperor had charged him to build over the beauty of the palace; and while the captain could see equal majesty in both palace and fortress alike, he knew that in some fashion, Great Dorn believed he was diminishing this place by making it a site fit only for warfare. The primarch of the Imperial Fists often came to this high balcony, to watch the walls and, as Efried imagined, to wait for the arrival of his turncoat brother.
He cleared his throat. “Sir. I have word from our chapter serfs. The reports of preparations have been confirmed, as have those of the incidents in the Yndenisc Bloc and on Saros Station.”
“Go on.”
“You were correct to order surveillance of the Custodes. Captain-General Valdor was once again witnessed entering closed session at the Shrouds, with an assemblage of the Directors Primus of the Assassinorum clades.”
“When was this?” Dorn did not look at him, continuing to gaze out over the palace.
“This day,” Efried explained. “On the conclusion of the gathering a transmission was sent into close-orbit space, likely to a vessel. The encryption was of great magnitude. My Techmarines regretfully inform me it would be beyond their skills to decode.”
“There is no need to try,” said the primarch, “and indeed, to do so would be a violation of protocols. That is a line the Imperial Fists will not cross. Not yet.”
Efried’s hand strayed to his close-cropped beard. “As you wish, my lord.”
Dorn was silent for a long moment, and Efried began to wonder if this was a dismissal; but then his commander spoke again. “It begins with this, captain. Do you understand? The rot beds in with actions such as these. Wars fought in the shadows instead of the light. Conflicts where there are no rules of conduct. No lines that cannot be crossed.” At last he glanced across at his officer. “No honour.” Behind him, the sun dipped below the horizon, and the shadows across the balcony grew.
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