‘Who is this?’ Sinope was asking.
‘He came in from out of the storm,’ Tros replied, speaking loudly so they all could hear him. Nearby, people had been drawn by the sound of raised voices and they stood at slatted windows or in doorways, watching. ‘This is Hyssos. The Void Baron sent him.’
The dark man bowed deeply. ‘You must be the Lady Astrid Sinope.’ His voice was resonant and firm. ‘My lord will be pleased to hear you are still alive. When we heard about Dagonet we feared the worst.’
‘Eurotas… sent you?’ Sinope seemed surprised.
‘For the Warrant,’ said Hyssos. He opened his hand and there was a thickset ring made of gold and emerald in his palm – a signet. ‘He gave me this so you would know I carry his authority.’
Tros took the ring and passed it to Sinope, who pressed it to a similar gold band on her own finger. Soalm saw a blink of light as the sensing devices built into the signets briefly communed. ‘This is valid,’ said the noble, as if she could not quite believe it.
Iota moved away, and she stumbled a step. Soalm glanced after her. The waif gasped and made a retching noise. The Venenum felt an odd, greasy tingle in the air, like static, only somehow colder.
Hyssos extended his hands. ‘If you please? I have a transport standing by, and time is of the essence.’
‘What sort of transport?’ said Tros. ‘We have children here. You could take them–’
‘Tros,’ Sinope warned. ‘We can’t–’
‘Of course,’ Hyssos said smoothly. ‘But quickly. The Warrant is more important than any of us.’
Something was wrong. ‘And you are here now?’ Soalm asked the question even as it formed in her thoughts. ‘Why did you not come a day ago, or a week? Your timing is very opportune, sir.’
Hyssos smiled, but it did not reach his eyes. ‘Who can fathom the God-Emperor’s ways? I am here now because He wishes it.’ His gaze cooled. ‘And who are you?’ Hyssos’s expression turned stony as he looked past Soalm to where Iota was standing, her whole body quivering. ‘Who are you?’ he repeated, and this time it was a demand.
Iota turned and she let out a shriek that was so raw and monstrous it turned Soalm’s blood to ice. The Culexus girl’s face was streaked with liquid where lines of crimson fell from the corners of her eyes. Weeping blood, she brought up the needler-weapon fixed to her forearm, aiming at Hyssos; with her other hand she reached up and tore away the necklet device that regulated her psionic aura.
Against the close, gritty heat of the predawn, a wave of polar cold erupted from out of nowhere, with the psyker at its epicentre. Everyone felt the impact of it, everyone staggered off their balance – everyone but Hyssos.
‘You pariah whore,’ The man’s expression twisted in odious fury. ‘We’ll do this the hard way, then.’
Soalm saw his face open up like a mechanism made of meat and blood, as ice formed on the sand at her feet. Inside him there were only his glaring black eyes and a forest of fangs about a lamprey mouth.
Rage flared like a supernova and Spear let it fill him. Anger and frustration boiled over; nothing about this bloody mission had gone to plan. It seemed as if at every stage he was being tested, or worse, mocked by the uncaring universe around him as it threw obstacle after obstacle into his path.
First the interruption of the purge and his inability to rid himself of the last vestiges of Sabrat’s sickening morality; then the discovery of the fake Warrant of Trade, and the ridiculous little secret of Eurotas’s shameful idolatry; and now, after an interminable voyage to find it, more of these pious fools clogging the way to his prize. He knew it was there, he could sense the presence of the true Warrant hidden inside that nondescript armoured box, but still they tried to stop him from taking it.
Spear had wanted to do this cleanly. Get in, take what he needed, leave again with a minimum of bloodshed and time wasted. It seemed the fates had other ideas, and the whining, pleading daemonskin was bored. The kills on the shuttle had been cursory things. It wanted to play.
In any event, his hand had been forced, and if he were honest with himself, he was not so troubled by this turn of events. Spear had been so set on the recovery of the Warrant and what it contained that he had hardly been aware of the gloomy presence at the edges of his thoughts until he turned his full attention towards it. Who could have known that something as rare and as disgusting as a psychic pariah would be found here on Dagonet? Was it there as some manner of defence for the book? It didn’t matter; he would kill it.
Unseen by the mortals around them, for a brief second the psyker bitch’s aura of icy negation had clipped the raw, mad flux of the daemonskin and the ephemeral bond that connected it – and Spear, as its merge-mate – to the psionic turmoil of the warp.
He knew then that this encounter was no chance event. The girl was an engineered thing, something vat-grown and modified to be a hole in space-time, a telepathic void given human form. A pariah. An assassin.
The girl’s null-aura washed over him and the daemonskin did not like the touch of it. It rippled and needled him inside, making its host share in the cold agony of the pariah’s mental caress. It refused to hold the pattern of Hyssos, reacting, shivering, clamouring for release. Spear’s near-flawless assumption of the Eurotas operative fractured and broke, and finally, as the rage grew high, he decided to allow it to happen.
The skin-matter masquerading as human flesh puckered and shifted into red-raw, bulbous fists of muscle and quivering, mucus-slicked meat. The uniform tunic across his shoulders and back split as it was pulled past the tolerances of the cloth. Lines of curved spines erupted from his shoulders, while bone blades slick as scimitars emerged from along his forearms. Talons burst through the soles of his boots, digging into drifts of sand, and wet jaws yawned.
He heard the screaming and the wails of those all around him, the sounds of guns and knives being drawn. Oh, he knew that music very well.
Spear let the patina of the Hyssos identity disintegrate and matched the will of the daemonskin’s living weapons to his own; the warpflesh loved him for that.
The first kill he made here was a soldier, a man with a stubber gun that Spear’s extruded bone blades cut in two across the stomach, severing his spine in a welter of blood and stinking stomach matter.
His vision fogged red; somewhere the pariah was crying out in strident chorus with the other women, but he didn’t care. He would get to her in a moment.
The sun rose off to his right, and Kell was aware of it casting a cool glow over the plaza. He changed the visual field of the scope to a lower magnification and watched the line of shadows retreat across the marble flagstones.
The morning light had a peculiarly crystalline quality to it, an effect brought on by particles in the air buoyed across the wastelands on the leading edges of a distant sandstorm. Ambient moisture levels began to drop and the Exitus rifle’s internals automatically compensated, warming the firing chamber by fractions of degrees to ensure the single loaded bullet in the breech remained at an optimal pre-fire state.
The sounds of the crowd reached him, even high up in his vantage point. The noise was low and steady, and it reminded him of the calm seas on Thaxted as they lapped at the shores of black mud and dark rock. He grimaced behind his spy mask and pushed the thought to the back of his mind; now was not the time to be distracted by trivia from his past.
Delicately, so the action would not upset the positioning of the weapon by so much as a millimetre, he thumbed the action selector switch from the safe position to the armed setting. Indicator runes running vertically down the scope’s display informed him that the weapon was now ready to commit to a kill. All that Kell required now was his target.