A thing with a strange iridescent carapace flittered in its confinement, catching his eye, and the sheen of the chitin recalled a recent memory. The flesh of the Callidus had looked just the same when they had pulled Koyne out of the vacuum over Jupiter; the shapeshifting assassin had done a peculiar thing, turning into a deformed, almost foetus-like form in order to survive in the killing nothingness of space. Koyne’s skin had undergone a state change from flesh to something like bone, or tooth. Tariel recalled the disturbing sensation of touching it and he recoiled once again.
He looked away, towards Kell. ‘Do you think the Callidus will live?’
‘His kind don’t perish easy,’ said the Vindicare dryly. ‘They’re too conceited to die in so tawdry a manner.’
Tariel shook his head. ‘Koyne is not a “he”. It’s not male or female.’ He frowned. ‘Not any more, anyway.’
‘The ship will heal… it. And once our poisoner joins us, we will have our Execution Force assembled…’ Kell trailed off.
Tariel imagined he was thinking the same thing as the sniper; and what then? The question as to what target they were being gathered to terminate would soon be answered – and the Vanus was troubled by what that answer might be.
It can only be–
The thought was cut off as the man in the kimono returned with another person at his heels. Tariel determined a female’s gait; she was a slender young woman of similar age to himself.
‘By the order of the Director Primus of our clade and the Master of Assassins,’ said the man, ‘you are granted the skills of secluse Soalm, first-rank toxin artist.’
The woman looked up and she gave a hard-edged, defiant look at the Vindicare. Kell’s face shifted into an expression of pure shock and he let out a gasp. ‘Jenniker?’
The Venenum drew herself up. ‘I accept this duty,’ she said, with finality.
‘No,’ Kell snarled, the shock shifting to anger. ‘You do not!’ He glared at the man in the kimono. ‘She does not!’
The man cocked his head. ‘The selection was made by Siress Venenum herself. There is no error, and it is not your place to make a challenge.’
Tariel watched in confused fascination as the cool, acerbic mien Kell had habitually displayed crumbled into hard fury. ‘I am the mission commander!’ he barked. ‘Bring me another of your secluses, now.’
‘Are my skills in question?’ sniffed the woman. ‘I defy you to find better.’
‘I don’t want her,’ Kell growled, refusing to look at Soalm. ‘That’s the end of it.’
‘I am afraid it is not,’ said the man calmly. ‘As I stated, you do not have the authority to challenge the assignment made by the Siress. Soalm is the selectee. There is no other alternative.’ He pointed back towards the doorway. ‘You may now leave.’ Without another comment, the man exited the room.
‘Soalm?’ Kell hissed the woman’s surname with undisguised anger. ‘That is what I should call you now, is it?’
It was slowly dawning on Tariel that the two assassins clearly shared some unpleasant history together. He looked inward, thinking back over what he had managed to learn about Eristede Kell since the start of their mission, looking for some clue. Had these two been comrades or lovers, he wondered? Their ages were close enough that they could have both been raised in the same schola before the clades drew them for individual selection and training…
‘I accepted the name to honour my mentor,’ said the woman, her voice taking on a brittle tone. ‘I started a new life when I joined my clade. It seemed the right thing to do.’
Tariel nodded to himself. Many of the orphan children selected for training by the Officio Assassinorum entered the clades without a true identity to call their own, and often they took the names of their sponsors and teachers.
‘But you dishonoured your family instead!’ Kell grated.
And then, for a brief moment, the woman’s mask of defiance slipped to reveal the regret and sadness behind it; suddenly Tariel saw the resemblance.
‘No, Eristede,’ she said softly, ‘you did that when you chose to kill innocents in the name of revenge. But our mother and father are dead, and no amount of bloodshed will ever undo that.’ She walked by Kell, and past a stunned Tariel, stepping out into the perfumed jungle.
‘She’s your sister,’ Tariel blurted it out, unable to stay silent, the data rising up from his memory stack in a rush. ‘Eristede and Jenniker Kell, son and daughter of Viceroy Argus Kell of the Thaxted Duchy, orphaned after the murder of their parents in a local dispute–’
The Vindicare advanced on him with a livid glare in his eyes, forcing Tariel back against a cage filled with scorpions. ‘Speak of this to the others and I will choke the life from you, understand?’
Tariel nodded sharply, his hands coming up to protect himself. ‘But… The mission…’
‘She’ll do what I tell her to,’ said Kell, the anger starting to cool.
‘Are you sure?’
‘She’ll follow orders. Just as I will.’ He stepped back, and Tariel glimpsed a hollowness, an uncertainty in the other man’s eyes that mirrored what he had seen in the Vindicare’s sister.
The Iubar had decks filled with cogitator engines that hummed and whirred like patient cats, gangs of progitors moving back and forth between them with crystalline memory tubes and spools of optic coil. According to Hyssos, the devices were used to gather financial condition data from the various worlds along the Eurotas trade routes, running prognostic models to predict what goods a given planet might require months, years, even decades into the future.
‘What are we to do with these things?’ asked Daig. He’d never been comfortable with the thought of machines that could do a man’s job better.
Hyssos nodded at one of the engines. ‘I’ve been granted use of this module. Various information sources from Iesta Veracrux’s watch-wire are being collated and sifted by it.’
‘You can do that from up here?’ Yosef felt an odd stab of concern he couldn’t place.
The operative nodded. ‘The uptake of data is very slow due to the incompatibility of the systems, but we have some level of parity. Enough to check the capital’s traffic patterns, compare information on the suspect with the movements of his known associates, and so on.’
‘We have jagers on the ground doing that,’ Daig insisted. ‘Human eyes and ears are always the best source of facts.’
Hyssos nodded. ‘I quite agree. But these machines can help us to narrow our fields of inquiry. They can do in hours what would take your office and your jagers weeks to accomplish.’ Daig didn’t respond, but Yosef could see he was unconvinced. ‘We’ll tighten the noose,’ continued the operative. ‘Sigg won’t slip the net a second time, mark my words.’
Yosef shot him a look, searching the comment for any accusation – and he found none. Still, he was troubled, and he had to voice it. ‘Assuming Sigg is our killer.’ He remembered the man’s face in the cooper’s shack, the certainty he had felt when he read Erno Sigg’s fear and desperation. He looked like a victim.
Hyssos was watching him. ‘Do you have something to add, Reeve Sabrat?’
‘No.’ He looked away and found Daig, his cohort’s expression unreadable. It wasn’t just Sigg he was having his doubts about; Yosef thought back to what the other man had said in the ruined lodge, and the recent changes in his manner. Daig was keeping something from him, but he could not think of a way to draw it out. ‘No,’ he repeated. ‘Not now.’