Descending an enclosed stairwell, he caught sight of the western platforms. Monorails there were filling with prisoners, each one closing its doors and moving off seemingly of its own will, carrying the inmates to freedom. The first few to go had ploughed through the barricades across the lines; now there was nothing to stop a mass exodus. Rufin didn’t care, though; he would let them go, as long as he could keep the guns.
Reaching the lowest levels, he found the men at the first guard post were gone. In their place there were piles of clothing and lumps of soggy ash, illuminated by the flickering overhead strip lights. The air here felt cold and oppressive, and Rufin broke into a run again, propelled from the place by a cold pressure that was like a shadow falling over his soul.
He turned the corner and ran towards the armoury post. Six men were there, and all of them were pale and afraid. They saw him coming and beckoned frantically, as if he were being chased by something only they could see.
‘What happened back there?’ he snapped, turning his ire on the first man he saw. ‘Talk, rot you!’
‘Screaming,’ came the reply. ‘Oh, sir, a screaming like you ain’t never heard. From Hades itself, sir.’
Rufin’s fear bubbled over into anger and he backhanded the man. ‘Make sense, you fool! It’s the terrorists!’
At that moment, the floor below them exploded upwards, the iron grid-plates spinning away as a hulking figure burst out of the conduits beneath. Rufin saw a grinning, fanged skull made of tarnished silver and then a massive handgun. A single shot from the weapon struck one of the guards with such force it blew him back into another man, the velocity carrying them both into the curved wall where they became a bloody ruin.
Rufin stumbled away as the dark shape blurred, releasing an inhuman snarl. Gunfire sang from the weapons of the guards, but it seemed to make no difference. There were wet, tearing noises, concussive blasts of bolt-fire, the dense sounds of meat under pressure, breaking and bursting. Something whistled through the air and hit Rufin in the chest.
He went to his knees and slumped against the wall, blinking. Like a blood-painted dagger, a broken human femur, freshly ripped from a still-cooling corpse, protruded from his chest. Rufin vomited black, sticky spittle and felt himself start to die.
The skull-faced figure came to him, trembling with adrenaline, and spat through the grille of the mask. ‘Oh dear,’ it rumbled. ‘I think I broke him.’
Rufin heard a tutting sound and a second figure, this one more human than the clawed killer, hove into view. ‘This is the base commander. We needed him to open the ammunition store.’
‘So?’ said the skull-face. ‘Can’t you do your trick?’
‘It’s not a parlour game for your amusement, Eversor.’ He heard a sigh and then a sound like old leather being twisted.
Through blurry eyes Rufin saw his own reflection; or was it? It seemed to be talking to him. ‘Say your name,’ said the mirror-face.
‘You know… who I am,’ he managed. ‘We’re Goeda Rufin.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ Now it sounded like him too.
The mirror-face drifted away, towards the locking alcove near the heavy iron hatch that secured the ammo stores. It was impregnable, Rufin remembered. The built-in security cogitator needed to recognise both his features and his vocal imprint before it would open.
His face and voice…
‘Goeda Rufin,’ said the mirror, and with a crunch of gears the armoury hatch began to swing open.
Rufin tried to understand how that could be happening, but the answer was still lost to him when his heart finally stopped.
The rendezvous was a spur-line outside a storage depot in the foothills, several kilometres beyond the capital. Under Tariel’s guiding hand, the simple drive-brains of the monorails had obeyed his command and cut fast routes through the network that confused the PDF spy drones sent to follow them. Now they were all here, emptying their human cargoes as the sun set over the hillside.
Kell watched the rag-tag resistance fighters gather the freed people into groups, some of them welcomed back into the fold as lost brothers in arms, others formed into parties that would split off in separate directions and go to ground, in hopes of riding out the conflict. He saw Beye and Grohl moving among them. The woman gave him a nod of thanks, but all the man returned was a steady, measuring look.
Kell understood his position. Even after they had done what he had charged them to do, and obliterated a major stockpile of turncoat weapons into the bargain, Grohl could still not find the will to trust them.
Because he is right not to, said a voice in his thoughts; a voice that spoke with his sister’s words. The rebels believed Kell and the others were some kind of advance unit, a scouting party of special operatives sent as the vanguard of an Imperial plan to retake Dagonet in the Emperor’s name. Like so many things about the assassins, this too was a lie.
A man in a hood emerged from the midst of the rebels and said something to Beye; but it was Grohl’s reaction that gave away his identity, the sudden jerk of the severe man’s head, the tensing of his body.
Kell drew himself up as the man came closer, drawing back the hood. He was bald and muscular, with a swarthy cast to his skin, and he had sharp eyes. The Vindicare saw the tips of complex tattoos peeking up from his collar. Kell offered his hand. ‘Capra.’
‘Kell.’ The freedom fighter took it and they shook, palm to wrist. ‘I understand I have the Emperor to thank for this.’ He nodded at the trains. ‘And for you.’
‘The Imperium never turns its face from its citizens,’ he replied. ‘We’re here to help you win your war.’
A shadow passed over Capra’s face. ‘You may be too late. My people are tired, few, scattered.’ He spoke in low tones that would not carry. ‘It would be more a service to help us find safe passage elsewhere, let some of us come back with the reprisal force as tactical advisors.’
Kell did not break eye contact with the rebel leader. ‘We did this in a day. Imagine what we can do together, in the days ahead.’
Capra’s gaze shifted to where the rest of the Execution Force stood, waiting silently. ‘Beye was right. You are an impressive group. Perhaps… Perhaps with you at our sides, there is a chance.’
‘More than a chance,’ insisted Kell. ‘A certainty.’
Finally, the man’s expression changed, the weariness, the doubt melting away. In its place, there was a new strength. New purpose. He wanted so badly for them to be their salvation, Kell could almost taste it. Capra nodded. ‘The fate of Dagonet rests with us, my friend. We will not forsake it.’
‘No,’ he said, as Capra walked away, gathering his men to him as he began to rally them with firebrand oratory.
But the rebels would not know the truth, not until it was too late; that the fate of Dagonet was only a means to a single end.
To place the Archtraitor Horus between Eristede Kell’s crosshairs.
PART TWO
ATTRITION
ELEVEN
Hidden / Sacrifice / Cages
The caverns were deep inside the canyons of a rocky and forbidding landscape that the Dagoneti called the Bladecut. From the ground, the real meaning of the name wasn’t clear, but up high, when glimpsed through the lenses of one of the aerial drones the rebels had captured, it was obvious. The Bladecut was a massive ravine that moved easterly across the stone wilderness beyond the capital, the shape of it like a giant axe wound in the surface of the landscape. There were no roads, nothing but animal trails and half-hidden hunting routes that meandered into sharp gullies which concealed the mouths of the cave network. Thousands of years ago, this had been the site of the first Dagonet colony, where the new arrivals from Terra had huddled in the gloom while their planetforming technologies, now lost to history, had worked to make the world’s harsh environment more habitable for them. The rebels had retaken the old halls of stone, secure in the knowledge that deep inside nothing would be able to dislodge them short of bombing the hills into powder.