Nemesis

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.

10

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.

11

‘Stop him!’

The face was not the thing of fangs and horns and dark voids any more. 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.