Nemesis

Spear ran his hand up and down the arm of the grox-leather chair where he sat, guiding fingers moulded in fleshy echo of Hyssos’s body over the lustrous, tanned hide. The sensation was pleasing; it made him realise he had spent too long in quietus, denied the simple pleasures of awareness, allowing his consciousness to go dormant while the mind-ghost of Yosef Sabrat ran his flesh. Puppet and the puppeted, master and performer, their roles intermingled. He was tired of it.

At least now he had only to look the part, rather than literally become it. He glanced up and saw a reflection in the glass cabinet behind the desk of High-Reeve Kata Telemach; the ebon face of Hyssos staring back at him.

Telemach swivelled in her deep, wing-backed chair from the watch-wire console on her desk and replaced the bulky handset. Standing nearby like an overweight sentinel, the doughy figure of Reeve Warden Berts Laimner was uncharacteristically still. Spear imagined he was still trying to process all the possible outcomes of the revelation that Yosef Sabrat was the serial killer in their midst, looking for the results where he would come off best. He felt a particular kind of hate for the man, but when he concentrated on the shape of it, Spear could not be certain if it had originated in him, or in Yosef Sabrat. More than once, the reeve’s own temper had brushed against the killer’s, and in those moments threatened to awaken the dormant murderer.

He sucked in a breath and dismissed the thoughts as trivial, refocussing on Telemach, who sat glaring at the vinepaper documents before her.

‘How could something like this happen in my precinct, under my governance?’ she demanded. Typical of the woman, Spear thought. Her first consideration was not How could this tragedy have happened? or A good man like Sabrat a killer? Impossible! No, for all the death and bloodshed and fear that had swept across her city, her first impulse was to worry about how it would make her look. Telemach glared at Laimner. ‘Well?’

‘He… We never suspected for a moment that the killer could be a peace officer.’

The High-Reeve was about to spit out something else, but Spear intervened. In Hyssos’s voice he said ‘In fairness, how could your men have known, milady? Sabrat was a decorated member of the Sentine with over a decade of service under his belt. He knew your procedures and protocols intimately. He knew all the loopholes and blind spots.’

Laimner nodded. ‘Aye, yes. I have teams from the documentary office going over everything in his caseload, back years and years. They’ve already found incidences of file tampering, evidence manipulation…’

All of which Spear had been planting, little by little over the last few weeks. Very soon they would discover more killings that he had laid at the late reeve’s feet, from the deaths of minor citizens to shopkeepers and even a junior jager from this very precinct; every one of them Spear had murdered and impersonated for brief periods of time, working his way up to this identity. Step by step.

‘It was only a matter of time before he was caught,’ Spear-as-Hyssos went on, and he tapped the evidence bag on the desk that contained the harvesting knife. ‘I’ve encountered these kinds of criminals several times. They all become careless after a while, convinced of their own superiority.’

Telemach grabbed one of the more gory picts of the murder scene at the airdocks, waving it at him, and Spear resisted the urge to lick his lips. ‘But what about… all this?’ She jabbed at the beautiful perfection of the eightfold sigils drawn in the blood of the dead. ‘What does it mean?’

He sensed the edge of fear in her words, and relished it. Yes, she understood the common, squalid manners of death, when humans ended one another over trivialities like money and power, anger and lust; but she could not conceive of the idea that one might take life in the name of something greater… to appease something. Spear wanted to tell her. He wanted to tell her that her insect’s-eye view of the cosmos was pathetically naïve, blind to the realities that he had been made privy to at the Delphos on Davin and later, at his master’s hand.

He made Hyssos’s face grow grave and concerned. ‘Sabrat wasn’t alone in all this. His cohort, Segan… They were a partnership.’

‘That fits the facts,’ said Laimner. ‘But I’m not sure why Yosef killed him.’

‘A disagreement?’ offered Spear. ‘All I know is, the two of them conspired to get me alone with them at Whyteleaf. Then I was forced to watch as Sabrat ended Segan’s life, before he tried to do the same to me. I almost…’ At this point, he gave a staged shudder. ‘He almost killed me too,’ he whispered.

‘And the… symbols?’ Telemach asked.

‘These were ritualistic murders.’ He paused for the drama of it. ‘What do you know of this group called the Theoge?’