Nemesis

cancelled in perpetuity with the clan, following an… incident.”

“Go on.”

The woman glanced at the paper. “Sigg was cashiered after a violent episode on

one of the Consortium’s deep space trading stations.”

“He stabbed someone.” Yosef tossed out the guess and the widening of her eyes

told him he was right. “Killed them?”

Gorospe shook her head. “There was no fatality. But a… a weapon was used.”

“Where is he now?”

“We have no record of that.”

Daig’s lip curled. “So you decided to throw him out, just dump a violent offender

on our planet without so much as a warning to the local law enforcement? I think I

could find a judiciary who would classify that irresponsible endangerment.”

“You misunderstand. Sigg was released after a period of detention commensurate

with the severity of his misbehaviour.” Gorospe looked at the paper again.

“According to notations made by our security staff, he was genuinely remorseful. He

voluntarily went into the custody of a charitable rehabilitation group here on Iesta

Veracrux. That’s why he asked to be released on this planet.”

“What group?” said Daig.

“The file notes it was part of an informal organisation called the Theoge.”

Yosef swore under his breath and snatched the paper from the woman’s hand.

“Give me that. We’ll take this from here.”

“Remember our arrangement!” she insisted, her cheeks colouring; but the reeve

was already stalking away towards the coleopter.

The Warlord Jun Yae Jun bolted upright from the ornate couch where he lay, his robe

falling open, scattering the attendants from his sides. He spluttered and snarled,

tearing at the web of golden mechadendrites that were wrapped about his head,

winding into his ear canals, nostrils and mouth. “Get these things off me!” he

bellowed, flailing around, knocking over a hookah and table piled with wine goblets

and ampoules.

With an agonised wrench he finally freed himself and glared around, looking for

his guardian. Jun could hear the sounds of violence and panic in the halls beyond the

room. Something had gone very wrong, and a tide of terror was welling up inside

him. He turned it into fury as he found the guardian on his hands and knees, staring

into a pool of vomit.

Jun gave him a violent kick. “What are you doing down there? Get up! Get up

and protect me, you worthless wretch!”

58

The guardian stood, as shaky as a drunkard. “There is darkness,” he muttered.

“Black curtains falling.” The man choked and coughed up bile.

Jun kicked him again. “You were supposed to protect me! Why did you fail me?”

His face was crimson with anger. In defiance of Imperial law, without grant or

sanction from the Adeptus Terra, the warlord had secured himself a guardian who not

only had combatant skills, but was also possessed of a measure of psychic ability. For

months, his pet killer had been his most closely-guarded confidence, but now it

seemed that his secret was out. “There’s a Culexus here! Do you know what that

means?”

The guardian nodded. “I know.”

When he had first heard the name of the assassin clade spoken, when the story of

what the word meant had been told to him, the warlord did not believe it. He

understood psykers, the humans gifted—some said cursed— by the touch of the warp.

A psyker’s essence burned bright in the realm of the immaterium, forever connecting

the world of flesh with the world of the ethereal; but if psykers reflected the far

extreme of a spectrum, and ordinary men and women the brief candles of life in the

middle ground, then what could represent the opposite end of that balance? The

darkness?

They were called pariahs. Chance births, less than one in a billion, children born,

so it was said, without a soul. Where a psyker burned sun-bright, they were a black

hole. They were antithesis, made manifest. Ice to the fire, darkness to the light.

And as with so many things, the Imperium of Man had found a use for such

aberrations. The Clade Culexus harvested pariahs wherever they were found, and

rumour suggested that they might even grow them wholesale from synthesis tanks in

some secret fleshworks in the wilds of Terra. Jun Yae Jun had never believed in them

until this moment, dismissed the very idea as a fiction created to instill fear in the

kings and regents who ruled under the aegis of the Emperor. He knew fear now,

though, and truth with it.

Jun stumbled towards the doorway, and hands pulled at his robes. “Warlord,

please,” said the attendant. The spindly man was speaking rapidly. “Stop! The game

has not been completed. There is the letting of fluids to be gathered, the sacrament!”

The warlord turned and glared at the attendant. Like all the others who ran this

sordid diversion for the masters of the Red Lanes, he was draped in strips of silk and

painted with bright inks. He had numerous daubs across his skin, repeating the shape

of a disc, a rod and opposed crescents. The design was meaningless to Jun. He tried