Soalm was still looking at Kell. ‘What are they supposed to do after it is done?’
Iota saw colour rise in the Vindicare’s cheeks, but he kept his temper in check. ‘Capra is resourceful. He’ll know what to do.’
‘If he has any sense,’ muttered Koyne, ‘he’ll run.’
Soalm turned away and was the first from the chamber.
Jenniker reached the compartment Beye had assigned to her and went in. What little equipment she had was there, cunningly disguised as a lady traveller’s attaché. It seemed strangely out of place among such drab accommodation, on the Imperial Army-surplus bedroll beside a drawstring bag of ration packs. She paused, studying it.
Inside the case, concealed inside clever modules and secret sections, there were vials of powder, flat bottles of colourless fluid, thin strips of metallised chemical compounds, injectors and capsules and dermal tabs. The manner and means to end an entire city’s worth of human lives, if need be.
For a while she thought about how simple it would be to introduce a philtre of time-release metasarin into the water system of the rebel hideout. Tailored with the right mix, she could make it painless for them. They would just fall asleep, never to wake. They would be spared the brutal deaths that were fated to them all – the payment that would be exacted no matter if the Execution Force succeeded or failed. She thought about Lady Sinope, of trusting Beye and the ever-suspicious Grohl.
Some might have said it would be a mercy. The Warmaster was not a magnanimous conqueror.
Soalm shook her head violently to dispel the thought, and hated herself in that instant. ‘I am not Eristede,’ she whispered to the air.
A sharp knock at the rusted metal door startled her. ‘Hello?’ said a voice. She recognised it as one of the men she had seen in the makeshift chapel. ‘Are you in there?’
She slid the door open. ‘What is it?’
The man’s face was flushed with worry. ‘They’re coming,’ he husked. She didn’t need to ask who they were. If Beye’s contacts in the city had spoken to Capra, then it was logical to assume that others in the rebel encampment knew of what was on the horizon as well.
‘I know.’
He pressed something into her palm. ‘Sinope gave me this for you.’ It was a tarnished voc-locket, a type of portable recording device that lovers or family members gave to one another as a memento. The device contained a tiny, short-duration memory spool and hologram generator. ‘I’ll be outside.’ He pulled the door shut and Soalm was alone in the room again.
She turned the locket over in her hands and found the activation stud. Holding her breath, she squeezed it.
A grainy hololith of Lady Sinope’s face, no larger than Jenniker’s palm, flickered into life. ‘Dear child,’ she began, an urgency in her words that Soalm had not heard before, ‘forgive me for not asking this of you in person, but circumstances have forced me to leave the caves. The man who gave you this is a trusted friend, and he will bring you to me.’ The noblewoman paused and she seemed to age a decade in the space of a single breath. ‘We need your help. At first I thought I might be mistaken, but with each passing day it has become clearer and clearer to me that you are here for a reason. He sent you, Jenniker. You said yourself that you are only “a messenger”… And now I understand what message you must carry.’ The image flickered as Sinope glanced over her shoulder, distracted by something beyond the range of the locket’s tiny sensor-camera. She looked back, and her eyes were intense. ‘I have not been truthful with you. The place you saw, our chapel… There’s more than just that. We have a… I suppose you could call it a sanctuary. It is out in the wastes, far from prying eyes. I will be there by the time you receive this. I want you to come here, child. We need you. He needs you. Whatever mission may have brought you to Dagonet, what I ask of you now goes beyond it.’ She felt the woman’s gaze boring into her. ‘Don’t forsake us, Jenniker. I know you believe with all your heart, and even though it pains me to do so, I must ask you to choose your faith over your duty.’ Sinope looked away. ‘If you refuse… The rains of blood will fall all the way to Holy Terra.’
The hologram faded and Soalm found her hands were shaking. She could not look away from the locket, grasping it in her fingers as if it would magically spirit her away from this place.
Lady Sinope’s words, her simple words, had cut into her heart. Her emotions twisted tight in her chest. She was a sworn agent of the Officio Assassinorum, a secluse of the Clade Venenum ranked at Epsilon-dan, and she had her orders. But she was also Jenniker Soalm – Jenniker Kell – a daughter of the Imperium of Man and loyal servant of the divine God-Emperor of Humanity.
Which path would serve Him best? Which path would serve His subjects best?
Try as she might, she could not shake off the power behind Sinope’s message. The quiet potency of the noblewoman had bled into the room, engulfing her. Soalm knew that what she was being asked to do was right – far more so than a blood-soaked mission of murder that would only lead to death on a far greater scale.
The church of the Lectitio Divinitatus on Dagonet needed her. When she had needed help after mother and father – and then Eristede – had been lost to her, it was the word of the God-Emperor that had given her strength. Now that debt was to be answered.
In the end she realised there was no question of what to do next.
The door opened with a clatter, and the rebel soldier started, turning to see the pale assassin woman standing on the threshold. She had an elaborately-etched wooden case over her shoulder on a strap, and was in the process of attaching a holstered bact-gun to her belt. She looked up, her hood already up about her head. ‘Sinope said you would take me to her.’
He nodded gratefully. ‘Yes, of course. This way. Follow me.’ The rebel took a couple of steps and then halted, frowning. ‘The others… Your comrades?’
‘They don’t need to know,’ said Soalm, and gestured for him to carry on. The two of them disappeared around a curve in the corridor, heading up towards the surface.
From the shadows, Iota watched them go.
Spear loathed the warp.
When he travelled through the screaming halls of the immaterium, he did his best to ensure that he did so in stasis, his body medicated into hibernation – or failing that, if he were forced to remain awake by virtue of having assumed the identity of another, then he prepared himself with long hours of mental rituals.
Both were in order to calm the daemonskin. In the realms of normal space, on a planet or elsewhere, the molecule-thin layer of living tissue bonded to his birth flesh was under his control. Oh, there were times when it became troublesome, when it tried to defy him in small ways, but in the end Spear was the master of it. And as long as it was fed, as long as he sated it with killings and blood, it obeyed.
But in the depths of warp space, things were different. Here, with only metres of steel and the gauzy energy web of a Geller field between him and the thunder and madness of the ethereal, the daemonskin became troublesome. Spear wondered if it was because it sensed the proximity of its kindred out there, in the form of the predatory, almost-sentient life that swarmed unseen in the wake of the starships that passed.