Nemesis

Some might have said it would be a mercy. The Warmaster was not a magnanimous conqueror.

Soalm shook her head violently to dispel the thought, and hated herself in that instant. ‘I am not Eristede,’ she whispered to the air.

A sharp knock at the rusted metal door startled her. ‘Hello?’ said a voice. She recognised it as one of the men she had seen in the makeshift chapel. ‘Are you in there?’

She slid the door open. ‘What is it?’

The man’s face was flushed with worry. ‘They’re coming,’ he husked. She didn’t need to ask who they were. If Beye’s contacts in the city had spoken to Capra, then it was logical to assume that others in the rebel encampment knew of what was on the horizon as well.

‘I know.’

He pressed something into her palm. ‘Sinope gave me this for you.’ It was a tarnished voc-locket, a type of portable recording device that lovers or family members gave to one another as a memento. The device contained a tiny, short-duration memory spool and hologram generator. ‘I’ll be outside.’ He pulled the door shut and Soalm was alone in the room again.

She turned the locket over in her hands and found the activation stud. Holding her breath, she squeezed it.

A grainy hololith of Lady Sinope’s face, no larger than Jenniker’s palm, flickered into life. ‘Dear child,’ she began, an urgency in her words that Soalm had not heard before, ‘forgive me for not asking this of you in person, but circumstances have forced me to leave the caves. The man who gave you this is a trusted friend, and he will bring you to me.’ The noblewoman paused and she seemed to age a decade in the space of a single breath. ‘We need your help. At first I thought I might be mistaken, but with each passing day it has become clearer and clearer to me that you are here for a reason. He sent you, Jenniker. You said yourself that you are only “a messenger”… And now I understand what message you must carry.’ The image flickered as Sinope glanced over her shoulder, distracted by something beyond the range of the locket’s tiny sensor-camera. She looked back, and her eyes were intense. ‘I have not been truthful with you. The place you saw, our chapel… There’s more than just that. We have a… I suppose you could call it a sanctuary. It is out in the wastes, far from prying eyes. I will be there by the time you receive this. I want you to come here, child. We need you. He needs you. Whatever mission may have brought you to Dagonet, what I ask of you now goes beyond it.’ She felt the woman’s gaze boring into her. ‘Don’t forsake us, Jenniker. I know you believe with all your heart, and even though it pains me to do so, I must ask you to choose your faith over your duty.’ Sinope looked away. ‘If you refuse… The rains of blood will fall all the way to Holy Terra.’

The hologram faded and Soalm found her hands were shaking. She could not look away from the locket, grasping it in her fingers as if it would magically spirit her away from this place.

Lady Sinope’s words, her simple words, had cut into her heart. Her emotions twisted tight in her chest. She was a sworn agent of the Officio Assassinorum, a secluse of the Clade Venenum ranked at Epsilon-dan, and she had her orders. But she was also Jenniker Soalm – Jenniker Kell – a daughter of the Imperium of Man and loyal servant of the divine God-Emperor of Humanity.

Which path would serve Him best? Which path would serve His subjects best?

Try as she might, she could not shake off the power behind Sinope’s message. The quiet potency of the noblewoman had bled into the room, engulfing her. Soalm knew that what she was being asked to do was right – far more so than a blood-soaked mission of murder that would only lead to death on a far greater scale.