Nemesis

“Nothing you have murdered has any weight. But what I destroy will tip the balance

of a galaxy.”

“You’ll be stopped!” Koyne shouted the words with sudden, vicious energy,

boiling up from a place of naked hatred.

“You will never know.” Spear gave a flick of his hand and shot a fan of bone

shards at the assassin. Instead of dodging, Koyne rocked forwards, into the path of

the darts, and parried them away with a web of mnemonic steel. Blades flashing, the

Callidus pushed into the attack, aiming for the single vulnerable point in the killer’s

stance.

Spear had left just such an opening to entice the shade, and seized the moment

with vicious delight. New blades of fang-like matter burst from the surface of his

churning skin and caught Koyne’s twinned strike, blocking the blow even as it fell.

Koyne’s changing face darkened with fright and then agony. Spear crossed his

sword-arms like a falling guillotine and both of the Callidus’ slender, delicate hands

were severed at the wrists.

Fountains of blood jetted across Spear’s torso as Koyne fell backwards with the

force of the pain-shock, and the killer caught his victim before the assassin could

tumble into the sloshing, grimy waters. “We’re alike,” he told the Callidus. “Beneath

the skin. Both the same.”

235

Koyne was a moment from death, and so Spear reached up and drove needlesharp

nails into the trembling skin of the assassin’s face; then with a single, horrific

tearing, he ripped the flesh away to show the red meat underneath. Koyne’s body

bucked with the sheer violence of the act, and Spear gave it a brutal shove.

The Callidus spun away and landed on a fallen spire of masonry, a pinnacle of

marble bursting through the stealthsuit fabric. Pinned there, the body bled out and

twitched, denied a quick death.

“You see?” Spear asked the question to the rag of skin in his hand. “The same, in

our ways.”

The killer tipped back his head and ate his prize morsel. Now this matter was

done with, now the Emperor’s ineffectual foot soldiers had been disposed of, Spear

could return to the matter of the signalling. He looked around, searching for a wide,

flat space where he might begin again on the drawing of the runes.

no

“Be silent,” he hissed.

The daemonskin muttered. Something was touching its surface. A breath of faint

energy, a pinprick of ultraviolet light. Spear turned, senses altering to follow—

The bullet entered the killer’s head through the hollow black pit of his right eye,

the impact transferring such kinetic force it blew Spear off his feet and into a

spinning tumble, down into the debris and floodwater. The shot fractured into

thousands of tiny, lethal shards that expanded to ricochet around inside the walls of

his skull, shredding the meat of his brain into ribbons.

The faceless had given up life in order to draw him into the atrium, into a space

under a sniper’s gun.

In those fractions of seconds as the blackness engulfed him, there was

understanding. There had been another. In his arrogance, he had failed to account for

a third attacker; or perhaps it been Sabrat’s final victory, clouding his mind at the

crucial moment.

The killer was killed.

Kell lowered the longrifle and allowed the cameoline cloak to fall open. The echo of

the gunshot, hardly louder than a woman’s gasp, still echoed around the rafters of the

atrium. Carrion birds roosting nearby flashed into the air on black wings, circling and

snarling at each other in their raucous voices.

The Vindicare slung the rifle over his shoulder and felt a tremor in his hands. He

looked down at the gloved fingers; they seemed foreign to him, as if they belonged to

someone else. They were so steeped in blood; so many lay dead at their touch. The

single, tiny pressure of his finger on a trigger plate, such a small amount of expended

force—and yet magnified into such great destructive power.

He willed himself to stay away from that secret place in his heart, the stygian well

of remorse and wrath that had claimed him on the day he killed the murderer of his

parents. He willed it, and failed. Instead, Kell succumbed.

It had been his first field kill.

236

The man, in transit via aeronef through the valleys of Thaxted Dosas, the

dirigible floating beneath the hilltops, skimming the sides of the low peaks. Eristede

Kell had made his hide eight days before, in the long grasses. The long grasses like

those he and Jenniker played in as children, their games of fetch-find and hunt-thegrue.

He waited under the suns and the moons, the former his father’s glory, the latter

his mother’s smile.

And when the ’nef came around the hill, he fired the shot and did not make the

kill. Not at first. The cabin window was refracted, disrupting his aim. He should have

known, adjusted the sights. A lesson learned.

Instead of cold and steely determination, he unchained his anger. Kell unloaded

the full magazine of ammunition into the cabin, killing everything that lived within it.