‘What?’ Yosef felt suddenly giddy, as if he had stood up too quickly.
‘The common people are the ones fighting back. They say there is blood in the streets of the capital. Soldiers fighting soldiers, militia fighting clan guards. Those who could flee filled every ship they could get their hands on.’
He sat quietly, letting this sink in. There was, he had to admit, a certain logic to the chain of events. Yosef had visited Dagonet in his youth and he recalled that Horus Lupercal was second only to the Emperor in being celebrated by the people of the planet; statues in the Warmaster’s honour were everywhere, and the Dagoneti spoke of him as ‘the Liberator’. As the historic record went, in the early years of the Great Crusade to reunite the lost colonies of humanity, Dagonet languished under the heel of a corrupt and venal priest-king who ruled the planet through fear and superstition. Horus, at the head of his Luna Wolves Legion, had come to Dagonet and freed a world – accomplishing the deed with only one round of ammunition expended, the single shot he fired that dispatched the tyrant. The victory was one of the Warmaster’s most celebrated triumphs, and it ensured he would be revered forever as Dagonet’s saviour.
Small wonder then, that the aristocratic clans who now ruled the planet would give their banners to him instead of a distant Emperor who had never set foot on their world. Yosef’s brow creased in a frown. ‘If they follow Horus…’
‘Will Iesta follow suit?’ said Renia, completing his question for him. ‘Terra is a long way from here, Yosef, and our Governor is no stronger-willed than the rulers of Dagonet. And if the rumours are true, the Warmaster may be closer than we know.’ His wife reached out again and took both his hands, and this time he noticed that she was trembling. ‘They say that the Sons of Horus are already on their way to Dagonet, to take control of the entire sector.’
He tried to summon a fraction of his firm, steady voice, the manner he had been trained to display as a reeve when the citizens looked to him in time of danger. ‘That won’t happen. We have nothing to be afraid of.’
Renia’s expression – her love for him for trying to protect her there, but intermingled with stark fear – told him that for all his efforts, he did not succeed.
The chemical snows of the Aktick Zone, thick feathery clumps tainted a sickly yellow from thousands of years of atmospheric contaminants, beat at the canopy of the aircraft. Out beyond the bullet-shaped nose of the transport, there was only a featureless cowl of grey sky and the whirling storm. Eristede Kell gave it a glance and then turned away, stepping back from the raised cockpit deck to the small cabin area behind it.
‘How much longer?’ said Tariel, who sat strapped into a thrust couch, a half-finished logica puzzle in his soft, thin fingers.
‘Not long,’ Kell told him, deliberately giving him a vague answer.
The Vanus’s face pinched in irritation, and he fiddled with the complex knot of the logica without really paying attention to it. ‘The sooner we get there, the happier I will be.’
‘Nervous passenger?’ the sniper asked, with mild amusement.
Tariel heard it in his voice and fired him an acid look. ‘The last aircraft I was in got shot down over the desert. That hasn’t exactly made me well-disposed to the whole experience.’ He discarded the logica – which, to his surprise, Kell realised the Vanus had completed without apparent effort – and pulled up his sleeve to minister to his cogitator gauntlet. ‘I still don’t understand why I am needed here. I should have returned with Valdor.’
‘The Captain-General has duties of his own to attend to,’ said Kell. ‘For now on, we’re on our own.’
‘So it would seem.’ Tariel threw a wary look to the far end of the cabin, where the girl Iota was sitting. Tariel had placed himself as far away from her as it was possible to get and still be inside the aircraft’s crew compartment.
For her part, the Culexus appeared wholly occupied with the pattern of the rivets on the far bulkhead, running her long fingers over the surface of them, back and forth. She seemed lost in the repeated, almost autistic actions.
‘Operational security,’ said Kell. ‘Valdor’s orders were quite clear. We assemble the team he wants, and no one must learn of it.’
Tariel paused, and then leaned closer. ‘You know what she is, don’t you?’
‘A pariah,’ sniffed the Vindicare. ‘Yes, I know what that means.’
But the Vanus was shaking his head. ‘Iota is designated as a protiphage. She’s not human, Kell, not like you or I. The girl is a replicae.’
‘A clone?’ The sniper looked back at the silent Culexus. ‘I would not think it beyond the works of her clade to create such a thing.’ Still, he wondered how the genomasters would have gone about it. Kell knew that the Emperor’s biologians were greatly skilled and possessed of incredible knowledge – but to make a living person, whole and real, from cells in a test tube…
‘Exactly!’ insisted Tariel. ‘A being without a soul. She’s closer to the xenos than to us.’
A smile pulled briefly at Kell’s lips. ‘You’re afraid of her.’
The infocyte looked away. ‘In all honesty, Vindicare, I am afraid of most things. It’s the equilibrium of my life.’
Kell accepted this with a nod. ‘Tell me, have you ever been face to face with one of the Eversor?’
Tariel’s face went ashen, the tone of his cheeks paling to match the polar snows outside the flyer’s viewports. ‘No,’ he husked.
‘When that happens,’ Kell went on, ‘then you’ll truly have something to be afraid of.’
‘That’s where we’re going,’ offered Iota. Both of them had thought the girl to be wrapped up in whatever private reality existed inside her mind, but now she turned away from the bulkhead and spoke as if she had been a part of the conversation all along. ‘To fetch the one they call the Garantine.’
Kell’s eyes narrowed. ‘How do you know that name?’ He had not spoken of the next assassin on Valdor’s list.
‘Vanus are not the only ones who know things.’ She cocked her head to stare at Tariel. ‘I’ve seen them. Eversor.’ Iota’s hand strayed to her skull-helm, where it rested nearby on a vacant passenger couch. ‘Like and like.’ She smiled at the infocyte. ‘They are rage distilled. Pure.’
Tariel glared at the sniper. ‘That’s why we’re out here in this icy wilderness? To get one of them?’ He shuddered. ‘A primed cyclonic warhead would be safer!’
Kell ignored him. ‘You know the Garantine’s name,’ he said to Iota. ‘What else do you know?’
‘Pieces of the puzzle,’ she replied. ‘I’ve seen what he left behind. The tracks of blood and broken meat, the spoor of the vengeance killer.’ She pointed at Tariel. ‘The infocyte is right, you know. More than any one of us, the Garantine is a weapon of terror.’
The matter-of-fact way she said the words made Kell hesitate; ever since Valdor had appeared out there in the deserts with his commands and his authority handed down from the Master of Assassins himself, the Vindicare’s sense of unease had grown greater by the day, and now Iota cut to the heart of it. They were lone killers, all of them in their own ways. This gathering together sat wrongly with him; it was not the way in which things were to be done. And somewhere, deep in the back of his thoughts, Eristede Kell found he was also afraid of what such orders boded.
‘Vindicare!’ He turned as the transport pilot called out his clade’s name. ‘Approach control doesn’t answer. Something is wrong!’