Nemesis

—the smell of matured estufagemi wine was everywhere. The warm, comforting

scent seemed cloying and overly strong—

—Renia says yes to his earnest offer of a marriage contract, and he basks in her

smile-shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pasty-white

and streaked with fluid—

I hate you!—

—the shot that kills the Blue Towers Rapist comes from his gun, finally—

—I’ve heard rumours. Stories from people who know people on other worlds, in

other systems—

No—

238

—a flicker of guilt—

—I’ve been absent a lot recently—

This was all that there was of Yosef Sabrat’s psyche, an incomplete jigsaw puzzle

of a self, driven by the single trait that marbled all the man had been, and all that

Spear had destroyed.

He had been waiting. Patient, clever Yosef. Buried deep in the dungeons of

Spear’s dark soul, struggling not to fade away. Waiting for a moment like this, for the

chance to strike at his murderer.

The phantom-taint of the dead lawman, wanted justice. It wanted revenge for

every victim in the killer’s bloody annals.

Every soul of those that Spear had slaughtered and looted, every ghost he had

pillaged to assume them, to corrupt them into his disguises, each had tasted like a

special kind of fear. A fear of loss of self, worse than death.

Now that fear was in him, as Spear clawed at the ragged edge of his own mind,

dangling over the brink of a psychic abyss.

And when he spoke, he heard Yosef Sabrat’s voice.

“Stop him!”

The face was not the thing of fangs and horns and dark voids anymore. It

belonged to a man, just a man in pain and sorrow, peering out at him as if through the

bars of the deepest prison in all creation.

Kell’s breath was struck from him by the grief in those all-too-human eyes. He

had seen it enough times, witnessed at a distance in the moment when death claimed

a life. The sudden, final understanding in the eyes of a target. The pain and the truth.

He raced forward, ignoring the spirals of hot agony from the broken, grinding

edges of his ribcage, stabbing slim throwing knives from his wrist-guard into the

torso of the Spear-thing.

It cried out and he pushed past it, falling, slipping on the wet-slick tiles beneath

his feet. Kell rolled, clutching for the fallen pistol, fingers grasping the grip—

The killer was coming for him, festoons of claws and talons exploding from

every surface on its lurching body, the human face disappearing as it was swallowed

by the fangs and spines. It thundered across the debris, crashing through the water.

Kell’s gun came up and he fired. The weapon bucked with a scream of torn air

and the heavy-calibre Ignis bullet crossed the short distance between gunman and

target.

The round slammed into the meat of Spear’s shoulder and erupted in a blare of

brilliant white fire; the hollow tip of the bullet was filled with a pressurised mixture

of phosphoron-thermic compound. On impact, it ignited with a fierce million-degree

heat that would burn even in the absence of oxygen.

Spear was shrieking, his body shuddering as if it were trying to rip itself apart.

Kell took aim again and fired a second shot, then a third, a fourth. At this range he

could not miss. The rounds blew Spear back, the combustion of hot air boiling the

water pooled around him into steam. The white flames gathered across the killer’s

body, eating into the surface of his inhuman flesh.

239

Kell did not stop. He emptied the Exitus pistol into the target, firing until the slide

locked back. He watched his enemy transform from a howling torch into a seething,

roiling mass of burned matter. Spear wavered, the screams from its sagging, molten

jaws climbing the octaves; and then there was a concussion of unnatural sound that

resonated from the creature. Kell saw the ghost of something blood-coloured and

ephemeral ripping itself from the killer’s dying meat, and heard a monstrous, furious

howl. It faded even as he tried to perceive it, and then the smoking remains fell. A

sudden wash of sulphur stink wafted over him and he gagged, coughing up blood and

thin bile. The ghost-image had fled.

Nursing his pain, Kell watched as Spear’s blackened, crumbling skeleton hissed

and crackled like fat on a griddle.

To his surprise, he saw something floating on the surface of the murky

floodwaters; tiny dots of bright colour, like flecks of gold leaf. They issued out from

the corpse of the killer, liberated by Spear’s death. When he reached for them they