Nemesis

“You pariah whore,” The man’s expression twisted in odious fury. “We’ll do this

the hard way, then.”

Soalm saw his face open up like a mechanism made of meat and blood, as ice

formed on the sand at her feet. Inside him there were only his glaring black eyes and

a forest of fangs about a lamprey mouth.

Rage flared like a supernova and Spear let it fill him. Anger and frustration boiled

over; nothing about this bloody mission had gone to plan. It seemed as if at every

stage he was being tested, or worse, mocked by the uncaring universe around him as

it threw obstacle after obstacle into his path.

First the interruption of the purge and his inability to rid himself of the last

vestiges of Sabraf’s sickening morality; then the discovery of the fake Warrant of

Trade, and the ridiculous little secret of Eurotas’ shameful idolatry; and now, after an

interminable voyage to find it, more of these pious fools clogging the way to his

prize. He knew it was there, he could sense the presence of the true Warrant hidden

inside that nondescript armoured box, but still they tried to stop him from taking it.

Spear had wanted to do this cleanly. Get in, take what he needed, leave again

with a minimum of bloodshed and time wasted. It seemed the fates had other ideas,

and the whining, pleading daemonskin was bored. The kills on the shuttle had been

cursory things. It wanted to play.

In any event, his hand had been forced, and if he were honest with himself, he

was not so troubled by this turn of events. Spear had been so set on the recovery of

the Warrant and what it contained that he had hardly been aware of the gloomy

presence at the edges of his thoughts until he turned his full attention towards it. Who

could have known that something as rare and as disgusting as a psychic pariah would

be found here on Dagonet? Was it there as some manner of defence for the book? It

didn’t matter; he would kill it.

Unseen by the mortals around them, for a brief second the psyker bitch’s aura of

icy negation had clipped the raw, mad flux of the daemonskin and the ephemeral

bond that connected it—and Spear, as its merge-mate—to the psionic turmoil of the

warp.

He knew then that this encounter was no chance event. The girl was an

engineered thing, something vat-grown and modified to be a hole in space-time, a

telepathic void given human form. A pariah. An assassin.

The girl’s null-aura washed over him and the daemonskin did not like the touch

of it. It rippled and needled him inside, making its host share in the cold agony of the

pariah’s mental caress. It refused to hold the pattern of Hyssos, reacting, shivering,

clamouring for release. Spear’s near-flawless assumption of the Eurotas operative

fractured and broke, and finally, as the rage grew high, he decided to allow it to

happen.

191

The skin-matter masquerading as human flesh puckered and shifted into red-raw,

bulbous fists of muscle and quivering, mucus-slicked meat. The uniform tunic across

his shoulders and back split as it was pulled past the tolerances of the cloth. Lines of

curved spines erupted from his shoulders, while bone blades slick as scimitars

emerged from along his forearms. Talons burst through the soles of his boots,

digging into drifts of sand, and wet jaws yawned.

He heard the screaming and the wails of those all around him, the sounds of guns

and knives being drawn. Oh, he knew that music very well.

Spear let the patina of the Hyssos identity disintegrate and matched the will of the

daemonskin’s living weapons to his own; the warpflesh loved him for that.

The first kill he made here was a soldier, a man with a stubber gun that Spear’s

extruded bone blades cut in two across the stomach, severing his spine in a welter of

blood and stinking stomach matter.

His vision fogged red; somewhere the pariah was crying out in strident chorus

with the other women, but he didn’t care. He would get to her in a moment.

* * *

The sun rose off to his right, and Kell was aware of it casting a cool glow over the

plaza. He changed the visual field of the scope to a lower magnification and watched

the line of shadows retreat across the marble flagstones.

The morning light had a peculiarly crystalline quality to it, an effect brought on

by particles in the air buoyed across the wastelands on the leading edges of a distant

sandstorm. Ambient moisture levels began to drop and the Exitus rifle’s internals

automatically compensated, warming the firing chamber by fractions of degrees to

ensure the single loaded bullet in the breech remained at an optimal pre-fire state.

The sounds of the crowd reached him, even high up in his vantage point. The

noise was low and steady, and it reminded him of the calm seas on Thaxted as they

lapped at the shores of black mud and dark rock. He grimaced behind his spy mask

and pushed the thought to the back of his mind; now was not the time to be distracted

by trivia from his past.

Delicately, so the action would not upset the positioning of the weapon by so