Nemesis

Spear’s arms went up to bat away the prey birds and he stamped one of the

rodents to death with a clawed foot. The other rats clawed their way up the killer’s

obscene, fleshy torso; another of them was devoured as a mouth opened in Spear’s

stomach and bit it in half. The last was crashed in a balled fist.

The psyber eagles lasted a little longer, spinning about the killer’s horned head,

fluttering and slashing with claws and titanium-reinforced beaks. They scored several

bloody scratches, but could not escape the fronds of sinewy matter that issued out of

Spear’s hands to entrap and strangle them.

Curiosity gave way to anger as the killer dashed the corpses of the birds to the

ground; but for his part, Tariel had used the distraction well.

Dragging it from an inner pocket, the infocyte threw a stubby cylinder at Spear

and hurled himself away in the opposite direction, falling clumsily over a collapsed

table. Lightning fast, the freakish murderer snatched up the object; a grenade. When

they had paused to rearm at the Ultio, Tariel had returned to the case of munitions he

had presented to Iota during their voyage to Dagonet.

Spear sniffed at the thing and recoiled with a sputtering gasp. It was thick with

the stench of dying stars. He hurled it away in disgust; but not quickly enough.

The device exploded with a flat bang of concussion and suddenly the courtyard

was filled with a shimmering silver mist of metal snow.

The killer stumbled to his knees and began to scream.

His psyche was being flensed; the layers of his conscious mind were peeling away

under an impossibly sharp blade, bleeding out raw-red thought. The agony was a

twin to the pain the master had inflicted on Spear all those times he had dared to

disobey, to question, to fail.

It was the particles in the air; they were hurting him in ways that the killer

thought impossible, frequencies of psionic radiation blasting from every single

damned speck of the glittering powder, bathing him in razors. Spear’s mouthparts

gaped open and the sound he released from his chest was a gurgling cry of pain. His

nerves were alight with phantom fires unseen to the naked eye. In the invisible

realms of the immaterium, the Shockwave was sawing at the myriad of threads

connecting the killer to his etheric shadow. The daemonskin was battering itself

bloody, tearing at his subsumed true-flesh as it tried to rip away and flee into the

void.

Spear collapsed, shuddering, and mercifully the effect began to lessen; but

slowly, far too slowly. He saw the human, the pasty wastrel that had come stumbling

into his kill zone. The gangly figure peered out from behind his cover.

Spear wanted to eat him raw. The killer was filled with the need to strike back at

the one who had hurt him. He wanted to tear and tear and tear until there was nothing

left of this fool but rags of meat—

no

The word came like the tolling of a distant bell, drifting across the churning

surface of Spear’s pain-laced thoughts. Quiet at first, then with each moment, louder

and closer, more insistent than before.

no no No No NO NO NO

231

“Get out!” Spear screamed the words as loud as he could, the amalgam of his

once-human flesh thrashing turbulently against the embedded sheath of the

daemonskin symbiont that cloaked him. Skin and skin flexed, tearing and shredding.

Black fluids bubbled from new, self-inflicted wounds, staining the broken stonework.

He swung his head down and battered it against the rubble, hearing bone snap wetly.

Real, physical agony was like a tonic after the impossible, enveloping pain from the

cloud-weapon. It shook the grip of the ghost-voices before they could form.

NO NO NO

“NNNNNnnnnoooo!” Spear bellowed, so wracked with his suffering he could do

nothing but ride it out to the bitter end.

The pale-skinned man was coming closer. He had what could have been a

weapon.

Tariel opened his hand and the emitter cone for the pulse generator grew out of the

gauntlet’s palm, tiny blue sparks clustering around the nib of the device. He was

shaking, and the infocyte grabbed his wrist with his other hand to hold it steady,

trying to aim at the writhing, horrible mass that lay on the stones, screaming and

bleeding.

The psy-disruptor grenades had only been an experiment. He hadn’t really

expected them to work; at best, Tariel thought he might be able to flee under the

cover of the discharge, that it might blind Horus’ monstrous assassin long enough for

him to escape.

Instead, the thing was howling like a soul being dragged into the abyss. It tore at

itself in anguish, ripping out divots of its own flesh. Tariel hesitated, grotesquely

fascinated by it; he could not look away from the twitching spectacle.

Faces grew out of the creature’s torso and abdomen. The quivering red skin

bowed outwards and became the distinct shape of a male aspect, repeated over and

over. It was silently mouthing something to him, but the words were corrupted and

blurred. The expression was clear, however. The faces were begging him, imploring

him.