With a deep sigh, Spear dropped to the floor and sat cross-legged. He drew on the disciplines that had been beaten into him by his master and focussed his will, seeing it like a line of poison fire laced with ink-black ice.
Reaching into the deeps of his thoughts, Spear found the cage and tore it open, clawing inside to gather up the mind-scraps that were all that remained of Yosef Sabrat. He grinned as fear resonated up from the shuddering persona as some understanding of its final end became clear. Then he began the purge, ripping and tearing, destroying everything that had been the man, vomiting up every nauseating, cloying skein of emotion, little by little sluicing Sabrat’s cloying self away.
Spear gave this deed such focus that it was only when he heard the voice he realised he was no longer alone.
Koyne’s hand flicked up and the toxin-filled stiletto hidden in a wrist sheath flew out in a shallow arc, piercing the stomach of the man on the left. The liquid inside was a consumptive agent that feasted on organic matter, even down to natural fibres and cured leather. He fell to the floor and began to dissolve.
The other man was briefly wreathed in white light that glowed down the hallway as Iota pressed a hand into his chest and shoved him back into the elevator. Koyne watched with detachment as the Culexus’s dark power enveloped the man and destroyed him. His silent scream resonated and he became a mass of material like burned paper. In moments, a curl of damp smoke was all that marked the man’s passing; the other hapless soldier was now a puddle of fluids leaking away through the gridded decking of the elevator floor.
Content that the toxin had run its course and consumed itself into the bargain, the Callidus kicked at the collection of inert tooth fillings, metal buttons and plastic buckles that had gathered and brushed them away with the passage of a boot. Koyne took a moment to break the biolume bubble illuminating the interior of the elevator, and then pressed the control to send it downwards.
They travelled in dark and silence for a few moments, and for Koyne the Culexus seemed to melt away and disappear, even though she was standing at her shoulder.
‘His name was Mortan Gautami,’ Iota said suddenly. ‘He never told anyone of it, but his mother had been able to see the future in dreams. He had a measure of postcognitive ability, but he indulged in narcotics, preventing him from accessing his potential.’ The skull head turned slightly. ‘I used that untapped energy to destroy him.’
‘I’ll bet you know the names of everyone you’ve terminated,’ said Koyne, with a flicker of cruelty.
‘Don’t you?’ said the Culexus.
The Callidus didn’t bother to grace that with an answer. The elevator arrived at the sublevel, and the guards standing outside fell to quick killing blows.
There was a spherical containment chamber in the middle of a room made of ferrocrete, festoons of cables issuing from every point on its surface. A heavy iron iris hatch lay facing them like a closed eye, a short gantry reaching it from the sublevel proper. Koyne stepped up and worked the lever to open it; there was a thin, high-pitched sound coming from inside, and at first the Callidus thought it was a pressure leak; then the iron leaves retracted and it became clear it was reedy, shrill screaming.
Koyne peered into the depths and saw the corpse-grey astropath. It was pressed up against the back of the sphere’s inner wall, glaring sightlessly towards Iota. ‘Hole-mind,’ it babbled, between howls. ‘Black-shroud. Poison-thought.’
The Callidus rapped a stolen pistol against the threshold of the hatch. ‘Hey!’ Koyne snarled in the officer’s voice. ‘Stop whining. I’ll make this simple. Give up the information I need, or I’ll lock her in there with you.’
The astropath made the sign of the aquila, as if it were some kind of ancient rite of warding that would fend off evil. The shrieking died away, and crack-throated, the psychic spoke. ‘Just keep it at a distance.’
Iota took her cue and wandered away, moving back towards the elevator shaft but still within earshot. ‘Better?’
That earned Koyne a weak nod. ‘I will tell you what you want to know.’
The assassin learned quickly that the astropath was one of only a handful of its kind still alive in the Dagonet system. In the headlong melee of revolution, in the process of isolating itself from the galaxy and the Imperium, the planet had begun to rid itself of all lines of connection back to Terra – but some of the newly empowered nobles had thought otherwise and made sure that at least a few telepaths capable of interstellar sending were kept alive. This was one of them, cut off from all means of speaking to its kindred, locked up and isolated. It was starved of communication, and once it began to talk in its papery monotone, the astropath seemed unable to stop.
The psychic spoke of the state of the civil war. As the brief given by Captain-General Valdor had said, Dagonet was a keystone world in the politico-economic structure of the Taebian Sector, and if it fell fully under the shadow of the Warmaster, then it would mark the beginning of a domino effect, as planet after planet along the same trade axis followed suit. Every loyalist foothold in this sector of space would be in jeopardy. In the first moments of the insurrection, desperate signals had been sent to the Adeptus Astartes and the Imperial Navy; but these had gone unanswered.
Koyne took this in and said nothing. Both the ships of the admiralty and the Legions of the Emperor’s loyalist Astartes had battles of their own to fight, far from the Taebian Stars. They would not intervene. For all the fire and destruction the collapse of Dagonet and its sister worlds might cause, there were larger conflicts being addressed at this very moment; no crusade of heroes was coming to ride to the rescue. Then the astropath began to lay out the lines of the civil war as it had spread up until this point, and the Callidus thought back to something said aboard the Ultio on their way to Dagonet.
The civil war was a rout, and it was those who stood in the Emperor’s name who were dying. Across the planet, the forces that carried Horus’s banner were only days away from breaking the back of any resistance.
Dagonet was already lost.
Reeve Daig Segan. Through Sabrat’s memories, Spear recalled that the man was as dogged as he was dour, and for all his apparently slow aspect, he was troublingly perceptive.
‘Yosef?’ said the reeve, moving through the gloom with a torch in one hand and a gun in the other. ‘What is that stench? Yosef, Hyssos… Are you in here?’
Segan had followed them to Whyteleaf, despite the orders Sabrat had given, the persona unaware of Spear’s subtle guidance bubbling beneath the surface. In his thoughts, the murderer heard the dim resonance of Sabrat’s essence crying out to be heard. Impossibly, the persona was trying to defy him. It was fighting its own erasure.
Spear’s body, cloaked in Hyssos’s proxy flesh, trembled. The purge was a complicated, delicate task that required all of his concentration. He could not afford to deal with any interruption, not now, not when he was at so critical a juncture…
‘Hello?’ Segan was coming closer. At any moment, he would come across Spear’s carefully constructed crime scene. But it was too soon. Too soon!
Very clearly, Spear heard Sabrat laughing at him. With sudden annoyance, he punched himself in the head and the pain of the blow made the ghost of the voice fall silent. His cheek and the orbit of his right eye sagged as they tried to retain the shape of Hyssos’s imprint.