Nemesis

estufagemi here, holding barrels of it for years so it can mature undisturbed.”

“How many staff?”

Sabrat shook his head distractedly. “It… It’s all automated.” The flyer’s skids

bumped as the craft landed. “Quickly!” said the reeve, bolting up from his seat. “If

the coleopter dwells, Sigg will know we’re on to him.”

Hyssos followed him down the drop ramp, into a cloud of upswept dust and

leaves caught in the wake of the aircraft. He saw Sabrat give the pilot a clipped wave

and the coleopter rattled back into the sky, leaving them ducking the sudden wind.

As the noise died away, Hyssos frowned. “Was that wise? We could use another

pair of eyes.”

The reeve was already walking on, across the top of the shallow warehouse where

they had been deposited. “Sigg ran the last time.” He shook his head. “Do you want

that to happen again?” Sabrat said it almost as if it had been the operative’s fault.

“Of course not,” Hyssos said quietly, and drew his gun and a portable auspex

from the pockets inside his tunic. “We should split up, then. Search for him.”

Sabrat nodded, crouching to open a hatch in the roof. “Agreed. Work your way

down the floors and meet me on the basement level. If you find him, put a shot into

the air.” Before Hyssos could say anything in reply, the reeve dropped through the

hatch and into the dark.

Hyssos took a deep breath and moved forward, finding another accessway at the

far end of the warehouse. Pausing to don a pair of amplifier glasses, he went inside.

There was little light inside the winestock, but the glasses dealt with that for him. The

pools of shadow were rendered into a landscape of whites, greys, greens and blacks.

Reaching the decking of the uppermost tier, Hyssos saw the shapes of massive

storage tanks rising up around him, the curves of towering wooden slats forming the

walls of the great Jeroboams. The smoky, potent smell of the wine was everywhere,

the air thick and warm with it.

He walked carefully, his boots crunching on hard lumps of crystallised sugar

caught in the gaps between the planks of the floor, the wood giving with quiet,

moaning creaks. The auspex, a small device fashioned in the design of an ornate

book, was open on a belt tether, the sensing mechanism working with a slow pulse of

light. The unchanged cadence indicated no signs of human life within its scan radius.

Hyssos wondered why Sabrat wasn’t registering; but then this building was dense

with metals and the scanner’s range was limited.

The operative’s thoughts kept returning to the data-slate that Perrig had left

behind. From the positioning of it among the psyker’s ashes, he supposed that it

might have been in her hand when she met her end. She had seen Erno Sigg through

the foci objects gathered from the Blasko Wine Lodge and tracked him here through

the etherium—but the other word, the third line of letters on the slate… What

meaning did they have? What had she been trying to say? How had she died in such a

manner?

Finally, he could not let the question lie and he used his free hand to pull the

smashed slate from his pocket.

115

Another error in judgement, said a voice in the back of his thoughts. The dataslate

was evidence, and yet he had taken it from a crime scene. Pushing back the

glasses to his forehead, Hyssos studied the broken screen in the dimness. The

scribble of letters there were barely readable, but he knew Perrig’s steady, looping

handwriting of old. If he could just find a way to see it afresh, to look with new eyes,

perhaps he could intuit what she had been trying to write—

Spear.

It hit him like a splash of cold water. A sudden snap of comprehension. Yes, he

was sure of it. The spin of the consonants and the loop of the vowels… Yes.

But what did it mean?

The next step he took made a wet ripping noise and something along the line of

his boot dragged at him, as if a thick layer of glue carpeted the floor.

Hyssos sniffed the air, wondering if one of the mammoth wine casks had leaked;

but then the stale, metallic smell rose up to smother the cloying sweetness all around.

He dropped the slate back into his pocket and gingerly slid the goggles down over his

eyes once more.

And there, rendered in cold, sea-green shades, was a frieze made of meat and

bones. Across the curve of a wooden storage tank, beneath a wide stanchion and in

shadow where the light of Iesta’s days would never have fallen, the display of an

eviscerated corpse was visible to him.

The body was open, the skin cut so that the innards, the skeleton and the muscle

were free for removal. The fleshy rags that remained of the victim were nailed up in

the parody of a human shape; organs and bones had been taken and arranged in

patterns, some of them reassembled together in horrible new fusions. Pubs, for

example, fanned like daggers sticking into the wet meat of a pale liver. A pelvic bone

dressed with intestines. The spongy mass of a lung wrapped in coils of stripped