Nemesis

by James Swallow

  The killer and the assassin fell into a blade fight, fat yellow sparks flying as the molecule-thin edges of Koyne’s rapiers cut into the organic swords and broke off brittle, sharp fragments with every hit. Spear’s blades flawed without blunting, as the Callidus learned at cost, the wet lines of them cutting deeply into the stealthsuit. Where blood was drawn, it was slow to clot. The tooth-matter exuded some kind of oily venom that kept the wounds from scabbing over.

  Spear changed the balance of the combat, powerful muscles bunching beneath his red flesh, forcing Koyne back and back towards the fractured walls of the courtyard.

  The animated contours of the Callidus’ face altered as each blow landed or was deflected. A whirlwind of parries flew from Koyne’s arms, but Spear was gaining ground, pushing the assassin deeper into a defensive stance with each passing moment. Koyne’s inconstant aspect showed a carousel of old faces and new faces, all of them in fury and frustration.

  Spear laughed, threads of drool stringing from the split between the halves of his shovel-faced jaw, and in that second Koyne managed a downward slash of both blades. Spear barely parried the move – it was overly aggressive and unexpected, and the tips of the memory swords carved a cross over the killer’s scalp that penetrated to the blackened bone. Wire-thin worms poured from the wound, exposing a milky eye beneath the injury that wept ichor. Spear’s laugh turned to a howl of agony.

  There was something fundamentally wrong with this creature. The assassin was not touched by witch-mark like Iota and her Culexus kindred, but still Koyne could sense on a marrow-deep level that Spear was not meant to exist in this world. The creature, whatever amorphous amalgamation of warp-spawn and human it was, flaunted reason by the mere fact of its existence. It was a splinter in the skin of the universe.

  Koyne did the trick with the koans once again, marshalling the density of bone and lining of musculature for a leap into the air that defied human potential. The Callidus jumped upwards and pivoted in mid-flight, falling out of Spear’s line of sight over a buckled wall.

  The killer came rushing over the hillock of rubble and followed his foe into the atrium proper. The wide, high chamber ran almost the entire length of the terminal, the litter of the dead and the wreckage of the port building lying ankle deep and swimming in stagnant falls of rainwater.

  Koyne was rising back into a fighting stance, slower than the Callidus would have liked, but the stress of muscle reformation on the run took its toll. All the no-mind focussing mantras in the pages of the clade’s Liber Subditus were worth nothing against a blade in the hand of an enemy like this one.

  When Spear spoke, Koyne knew that the moment was near. The fury in the killer’s hissing, sibilant voice was the sound of a serpent uncoiling, hood fanning open before the bite. “I murder and murder, and there is no end to you,” he spat. “You are not challenges to me, you are only steps on the road. Markers for my path.”

  “What monstrosity gave birth to you?” Koyne asked the question, thinking aloud, the changing face shifting anew. “You’re just a collision of freakish chance, an animal. A weapon.”

  “Like you?” Spear’s mucus-slicked blades flicked back and forth, gleaming dully. “Like the wretch back there and the dark-skinned one I killed with my mind? But what have you done of worth, faceless?” He threw an inelegant, bored attack at Koyne that the Callidus avoided, splashing back through a puddle into the shadows. “Nothing you have murdered has any weight. But what I destroy will tip the balance of a galaxy.”

  “You’ll be stopped!” Koyne shouted the words with sudden, vicious energy, boiling up from a place of naked hatred.

  “You will never know.” Spear gave a flick of his hand and shot a fan of bone shards at the assassin. Instead of dodging, Koyne rocked forwards, into the path of the darts, and parried them away with a web of mnemonic steel. Blades flashing, the Callidus pushed into the attack, aiming for the single vulnerable point in the killer’s stance.

  Spear had left just such an opening to entice the shade, and seized the moment with vicious delight. New blades of fang-like matter burst from the surface of his churning skin and caught Koyne’s twinned strike, blocking the blow even as it fell.

  Koyne’s changing face darkened with fright and then agony. Spear crossed his sword-arms like a falling guillotine and both of the Callidus’ slender, delicate hands were severed at the wrists.

  Fountains of blood jetted across Spear’s torso as Koyne fell backwards with the force of the pain-shock, and the killer caught his victim before the assassin could tumble into the sloshing, grimy waters. “We’re alike,” he told the Callidus. “Beneath the skin. Both the same.”

  Koyne was a moment from death, and so Spear reached up and drove needle-sharp nails into the trembling skin of the assassin’s face; then with a single, horrific tearing, he ripped the flesh away to show the red meat underneath. Koyne’s body bucked with the sheer violence of the act, and Spear gave it a brutal shove.

  The Callidus spun away and landed on a fallen spire of masonry, a pinnacle of marble bursting through the stealthsuit fabric. Pinned there, the body bled out and twitched, denied a quick death.

  “You see?” Spear asked the question to the rag of skin in his hand. “The same, in our ways.”

  The killer tipped back his head and ate his prize morsel. Now this matter was done with, now the Emperor’s ineffectual foot soldiers had been disposed of, Spear could return to the matter of the signalling. He looked around, searching for a wide, flat space where he might begin again on the drawing of the runes.

  no

  “Be silent,” he hissed.

  The daemonskin muttered. Something was touching its surface. A breath of faint energy, a pinprick of ultraviolet light. Spear turned, senses altering to follow—

  The bullet entered the killer’s head through the hollow black pit of his right eye, the impact transferring such kinetic force it blew Spear off his feet and into a spinning tumble, down into the debris and floodwater. The shot fractured into thousands of tiny, lethal shards that expanded to ricochet around inside the walls of his skull, shredding the meat of his brain into ribbons.

  The faceless had given up life in order to draw him into the atrium, into a space under a sniper’s gun.

  In those fractions of seconds as the blackness engulfed him, there was understanding. There had been another. In his arrogance, he had failed to account for a third attacker; or perhaps it been Sabrat’s final victory, clouding his mind at the crucial moment.

  The killer was killed.

  KELL LOWERED THE longrifle and allowed the cameoline cloak to fall open. The echo of the gunshot, hardly louder than a woman’s gasp, still echoed around the rafters of the atrium. Carrion birds roosting nearby flashed into the air on black wings, circling and snarling at each other in their raucous voices.

  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 wa
s 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.

  The phantom-taint of the dead lawman, wanted justice. It wanted revenge for every victim in the killer’s bloody annals.

  Every soul of those that Spear had slaughtered and looted, every ghost he had pillaged to assume them, to corrupt them into his disguises, each had tasted like a special kind of fear. A fear of loss of self, worse than death.

  Now that fear was in him, as Spear clawed at the ragged edge of his own mind, dangling over the brink of a psychic abyss.

  And when he spoke, he heard Yosef Sabrat’s voice.

  “STOP HIM!”

  The face was not the thing of fangs and horns and dark voids anymore. It belonged to a man, just a man in pain and sorrow, peering out at him as if through the bars of the deepest prison in all creation.

  Kell’s breath was struck from him by the grief in those all-too-human eyes. He had seen it enough times, witnessed at a distance in the moment when death claimed a life. The sudden, final understanding in the eyes of a target. The pain and the truth.

  He raced forward, ignoring the spirals of hot agony from the broken, grinding edges of his ribcage, stabbing slim throwing knives from his wrist-guard into the torso of the Spear-thing.

  It cried out and he pushed past it, falling, slipping on the wet-slick tiles beneath his feet. Kell rolled, clutching for the fallen pistol, fingers grasping the grip—

  The killer was coming for him, festoons of claws and talons exploding from every surface on its lurching body, the human face disappearing as it was swallowed by the fangs and spines. It thundered across the debris, crashing through the water.

  Kell’s gun came up and he fired. The weapon bucked with a scream of torn air and the heavy-calibre Ignis bullet crossed the short distance between gunman and target.

  The round slammed into the meat of Spear’s shoulder and erupted in a blare of brilliant white fire; the hollow tip of the bullet was filled with a pressurised mixture of phosphoron-thermic compound. On impact, it ignited with a fierce million-degree heat that wo
uld burn even in the absence of oxygen.

  Spear was shrieking, his body shuddering as if it were trying to rip itself apart. Kell took aim again and fired a second shot, then a third, a fourth. At this range he could not miss. The rounds blew Spear back, the combustion of hot air boiling the water pooled around him into steam. The white flames gathered across the killer’s body, eating into the surface of his inhuman flesh.

  Kell did not stop. He emptied the Exitus pistol into the target, firing until the slide locked back. He watched his enemy transform from a howling torch into a seething, roiling mass of burned matter. Spear wavered, the screams from its sagging, molten jaws climbing the octaves; and then there was a concussion of unnatural sound that resonated from the creature. Kell saw the ghost of something blood-coloured and ephemeral ripping itself from the killer’s dying meat, and heard a monstrous, furious howl. It faded even as he tried to perceive it, and then the smoking remains fell. A sudden wash of sulphur stink wafted over him and he gagged, coughing up blood and thin bile. The ghost-image had fled.

  Nursing his pain, Kell watched as Spear’s blackened, crumbling skeleton hissed and crackled like fat on a griddle.

  To his surprise, he saw something floating on the surface of the murky floodwaters; tiny dots of bright colour, like flecks of gold leaf. They issued out from the corpse of the killer, liberated by Spear’s death. When he reached for them they disintegrated, flickering in the wan light and then gone.

  “Not for revenge,” he said aloud, “For the Emperor.”

  THE VINDICARE SAT there for a long time, listening to the drumming of the rains and the distant crashes of destruction across the distance to the capital. The explosions and the tremors were coming closer together now, married to the gouts of harsh light falling from the sky above. The city and everything in it was collapsing under the rage of the Sons of Horus; soon they would turn their weapons to the port, to the wastelands, to every place on Dagonet where life still sheltered from their thunder.