Nemesis

the Sons of Horus would be sated.

Tariel looked up. “Vox communications will be sporadic, if they even work at

all,” he said. “The radioactives and ionisation in the atmosphere are blanketing the

whole area.”

Kell nodded as he walked away. “If one of us finds the target, we’ll all know

quickly enough.”

The pain across his back was a forest of needles.

Spear ran on, skirting around the rings of broken ferrocrete that had been sections

of the control tower, now fallen in a line across the landing pads and maintenance

pits. He could feel the daemonskin working against the myriad fragments of metal

that were embedded in him, deposited there by the explosion of the shuttle. One by

one, the pieces of shrapnel were being expunged from his torso, the living flesh

puckering to spit them out in puffs of black blood.

The burn from the blast was torture, and with every footfall jags of sharp agony

raced up Spear’s changed limbs and tightened around his chest. When the fuel

bowser had detonated, the concussion had caught him first and thrown him clear. The

shuttle took the brunt of the explosion, and it was lost to him now. He would need to

find another way off Dagonet. Another way to signal the master.

He slowed, clambering over a pile of rubble sloughed from the front of the

terminal building, dragging himself up on spars of twisted rebar over drifts of

shattered blue glass.

At the apex he dared to pause and throw a glance back through the filthy

downpour. The shuttle wreckage was still burning, bright orange flames shimmering

where the wet runway reflected them like a dark mirror. Spear’s segmented jaws

parted in a low growl. He had allowed himself to become distracted; he was so

enraptured by his own success at taking the Warrant he had not stopped to consider

the meaning of the witch-girl’s company with the cultists of the Theoge.

Her appearance there had not been happenstance. At first he thought she was

merely some defender, a palace guard put in place as a last line of defence by

Eurotas’ fanatic cohorts; now it was becoming clearer. He was facing assassins,

killers of his own stripe with their own weapons of murder.

He considered what their presence meant, and then discarded the concern. If his

purpose on Dagonet had been known, if the forces of the arrogant Emperor had

really, truly understood the threat Spear posed to their precious liege lord, this world

would have been melted into radioactive glass the moment he set foot on it.

Spear chuckled. Perhaps they expected him to feel fear at his pursuit, but he did

not. If anything, he became more certain of his own victory. The only thing that

could have faced him on his own terms was the witch-girl, and he had boiled her in

the crucible of her own powers. He had little fear of gun or blade after that.

The killer dropped through the yawning space of a tall broken window and

landed in a cat-fall on the tiled floor of the terminal. Dust and death hung in the air.

Sweeping his gaze around, he saw the remnants of a massive display screen where it

had been blown from its mounts by the concussion of an impact several miles away.

Across the debris-strewn floor there were a handful of corpses, ragged and gory

228

where carrion-fowl had come to prey on them. The jackal birds glared at Spear from

the gloomy corners of the chamber, sitting in their roosts and sniffing at the air. They

smelled his blood and they were afraid of its stench.

The daemonskin rippled over him and Spear let out a gasp. It could sense the

others coming, it could feel the proximity of bloodletting, of new murder.

He sprinted away into the shadows to prepare; he would not deny the needs of his

flesh.

Tariel expected to feel a crippling terror when the others vanished into the shadows

of the building, but he did not. He was never really alone, not if he were to be honest

with himself. The infocyte found the makings of a good hide in a blown-out

administratum room on the mezzanine level of the main terminal, a processing

chamber where new arrivals to Dagonet would have been brought for interview by

planetary officials before being given formal entry. The eyerats scrambled around

him, sniffing at the corners and patrolling the places where there were holes in the

walls or missing doorways; his two remaining psyber eagles were watching the main

spaces of the atrium and occasionally snapping at the native carrion scavengers when

they became too curious.

In a corner formed by two fallen walls, Tariel dropped into a lotus settle and used

the cogitator gauntlet to bring up a schematic of the building. It was among the

millions of coils worth of files he had copied from the stacks of the Dagonet

governmental librariums over the past few weeks, the data siphoned into his personal

mnemonic stores. It was habitual of him to do such a thing; if he saw information

untended, he took it for himself. It wasn’t theft, for nothing was stolen; but on some

level Tariel regarded data left unsecured—or at least data that had not been secured