Nemesis

When Rufin turned back to the watch officer, the man was lolling in his chair, eyes and mouth open, staring blankly at the ceiling. He caught a strange, floral smell emanating from the officer and gingerly extended a hand to prod his waxy, damp face. The watch officer slumped forward, knocking his tea glass over. The flower-stink grew stronger as the liquid pooled on the floor.

Rufin’s hand flew to his mouth. ‘Poison!’ Without looking back, he ran to the cupola door and raced away, footsteps banging off the metal gantries.

5

Spear reached out a hand and rubbed the edge of the ornate tapestry between Hyssos’s thick fingers. The complex depiction on the hanging was of the Emperor, smiting some form of bull-like alien with a gigantic sword made of fire.

He rolled his eyes at the banal pomposity of the thing and stepped away, carelessly brushing fibres of broken thread from his hands. Touching the object was forbidden, but there was nobody here in the audience chamber to see him do it. The killer idly wondered if the residue left by the daemonskin of his flesh-cloak would poison and shrivel the ancient artwork. He hoped it would; the idea of the humans aboard the Iubar running about and panicking as the piece blackened and corroded amused him no end.

He glanced out of the viewing windows as he wandered the length of the chamber. The curve of Iesta Veracrux was slipping away beneath the starship’s keel as it turned for open space, and Spear was not sorry to see it go. He had spent too long on that world, living in the inanities of its civilisation, play-acting at a half-dozen different roles. Since his arrival, Spear had been many faces – among them a vagrant, a storeman, a streetwalker, a jager and a reeve, living the lie of their ridiculous, pointless existences. He had stacked their corpses, and all the others, to make the ladder that led him to where he now stood.

A few more murders. One, perhaps two more assumptions. And then he would be close to the mark. The greatest prey of them all, in fact. A shiver of anticipation rippled through him. Spear was eager, but he reined the emotion in, pushed it down. Now was not the time to be dazzled by the scope of his mission. He had to maintain his focus.

Before, such a slip might have been problematic; he was convinced that such thoughts were how the psyker wench Perrig had been able to gather a vague sense of him down on Iesta. But with her no more than a pile of ashes in a jar in the Iubar’s Chamber of Rest, that threat was gone for the moment. Spear knew from Hyssos’s memories that Baron Eurotas had spent much influence and coin in order to bend the Imperium’s fear-driven rules about the censure of psychics; and given the present condition of the Consortium’s welfare, that would not be repeated. The next time he met a psyker, he would be prepared.

He smirked. That was something unexpected he pulled from the operative’s ebbing thoughts. The Void Baron’s secret, and the explanation for the shabby appearance of his agency’s compound on Iesta; for all the outward glitter and show the merchant clan put on for the galaxy at large, the truth whispered in the corridors of its ships was that the fortunes of Eurotas were waning. Little wonder then that the clan’s master was so desperate to hold on to any skein of power he still had.

It made things clearer; Spear had known that sooner or later, if he murdered enough members of the Eurotas staff and made it look like Sigg was the killer, the baron would send an operative to investigate. He never expected him to come in person.

Matters must be severe…

Spear halted in front of the red jade frieze, and reached out to touch it, tracing a fingertip over the sculpting of the Warrant of Trade. This place was full of glittering prizes, of that there could be no doubt. A thief in Spear’s place could make himself richer than sin – but the killer had his sights set on something worth far more than any of these pretty gewgaws. What he wanted was the key to the greatest kill of his life.

The hubris of the rogue trader irritated Spear. Here, in this room, there were objects that could command great riches, if only they were brought to market. But Eurotas was the sort who would rather bleed himself white and eat rat-meat before he would give up the gaudy trappings of his grandeur.

As if thought of him was a summons, the doors to the audience chamber opened and the Void Baron entered in a distracted, irritable humour. He shrugged off his planetfall jacket and tossed it at one of the squad of servitors and human adjutants trailing behind him. ‘Hyssos,’ he called, beckoning.

Spear imitated the operative’s usual bow and came closer. ‘My lord. I had not expected your shuttle to return to the Iubar until after we broke orbit.’

‘I had you voxed,’ Eurotas replied, shaking his head. ‘Your communicator implant must be malfunctioning.’