How many dead was that? In the race and chase of it, the murderer had lost count.
Then he saw the witch hiding her face behind a steel skull and he didn’t care about that any more. The thin, wiry female shot a fan of needles at him and he dodged most of them, a handful biting into the daemonflesh before the skin puckered and vomited them back out into the dust. This was just a delaying tactic, though. He felt the tremor moving through the warp, the alien monster sheathing his body shivering and reacting in disgust at the proximity of her.
Ill light gathered around the assassin’s aura, sucked into the void within her through the fabric of her stealthsuit. The wind seemed to die off around the waif, as if she were generating a globe of nothingness that sound itself could not enter. The construct of lenses and spines emerging from the side of the grinning steel skull-helm crackled with power, and the perturbed air bowed like water ripples.
A black stream of negative energy cascaded from the weapon and seared Spear as he threw up his hands to block it. The impact was immense, and he screamed with a pain unlike any he had ever felt before. The daemonskin was actually burning in places, weeping yellowish rivulets of pus where it blistered.
All his amusement perished in that second; this was no game. The psyker girl was more deadly than he had given her credit for. More than just a pariah, she was… She was in a small way like him. But where Spear’s abilities were inherent to the twisted, warp-changed structure of his soul, the girl was only a pale copy, a half-measure. She needed the augmentation of the helmet-weapon just to come close to his perfection.
Spear felt affronted by the idea that something could approach the power of his murdergift through mechanical means. He would kill the girl for her pretence.
The daemonskin wanted him to fall back, to retreat and take vital moments to heal; he ignored the moaning of it and did the opposite. Spear launched himself at the psyker, even as he fell into the nimbus of soul-shrivelling cold all about her. He immediately felt his own power being dragged out of him, the pain so bright and shining it was as if she were tearing the arteries from his flesh.
For a brief moment, Spear realised he was experiencing some degree of what it was like for a psyker to die at his hand; this must have been what Perrig had felt as she transformed into ashes.
He lashed out before the undertow could pull him in. Claws like razors split the air in a shimmering arc and sliced across the armoured fabric and the flesh of the waif girl’s throat. It was not enough to immediately kill her, but it was enough to open a vein.
She clapped a hand to the wound to staunch it, but not quick enough to stop an arc of liquid red jetting into the air. Spear opened his mouth and caught it in the face, laughing again as she stumbled away, choking.
Inside Iota’s helmet, blood was pooling around her mouth and neck, issuing in streams from her ears, her nostrils. Her vision was swimming in crimson as tiny capillaries burst open inside her eyes, and she wept red.
The animus speculum worked to recharge itself for a second blast of power. Iota had made a mistake and fired the first discharge too soon, without letting it build to maximum lethality. Her error had been to underestimate the potentiality of this… thing.
She had no frame of reference for what she was facing. At first thought she had imagined he was another assassin, sent against her in some power play to undo the works of the Execution Force. She could not see the logic in such a thing, but then the clades had often pursued strange vendettas against one another to assuage trivial slights and insults; these things happened as long as there was no evidence of them and more importantly, no ill-effects to the greater mission of the Officio Assassinorum.
But this killer was something beyond her experience. That much was certain. At the very least, the glancing hit from the animus’s beam should have crippled him. Iota turned the readings of her aura-sensor across him and what she saw there was shocking.
Impossibly, his psionic signature was changing, transforming. The sinuous nimbus of ghost colours spilled from the peculiar flesh-matter shrouding his body, and with a sudden leap of understanding, Iota realised she was seeing into a hazy mirror of the warp itself; this being was not one life but two, and between them gossamer threads of telepathic energy sewed them both into the inchoate power of the immaterium. Suddenly, she understood how he had been able to resist the animus blast. The energy, so lethal in the real world, was no more than a drop of water in a vast ocean within the realms of warp space. This killer was connected to the ethereal in a way that she could never be, bleeding out the impact of the blast into the warp where it could dissipate harmlessly.
The shifting aura darkened and became ink black. This Iota had seen before; it was the shape of her own psychic imprint. He was mirroring her, and even as she watched it happen, Iota felt the gravitational drag on her own power as it was drawn inexorably towards the shifting, changing murderer.
He was like her, and unlike as well. Where the clever mechanisms of the animus speculum sucked in psionic potentiality and returned it as lethal discharge, this man… this freakish aberration… he could do the same alone.
It was the blood that let him do it. Her blood, ingested, subsumed, absorbed.
Iota screamed; for the first time in her life, she really, truly screamed, knowing the blackest depths of terror. The fires in her mind churned, and she released them. He laughed as they rolled off him and reverberated back across space-time.
Iota’s mouth filled with ash, and her cries were silenced.
The moment seemed to stretch on into infinity; there was no noise across Liberation Plaza, not even the sound of an indrawn breath. It was as if a sudden vacuum had drawn all energy and emotion from the space. It was the sheer unwillingness to believe what had just occurred that made all of Dagonet pause.
In the next second, the brittle instant shattered like glass and the crowds were in turmoil, the twin floodheads of sorrow and fury breaking open at once. Chaos exploded as the people at the front of the crowd barriers surged forwards and collapsed the metal panels, moving in a slow wave towards the ragged line of shocked clanner soldiers. Some of the troops had their guns drawn; others let themselves be swallowed up by the oncoming swell, deadened by the trauma of what they had witnessed.
On an impulse the Callidus could not quantify, Koyne leapt from the base of the pillar and ran behind the line of crackling force-wall emitters. No one blocked the way. The shock was palpable here, thick in the air like smoke.
The hulking Astartes were in a combat wheel around the corpse of their commander, weapons panning right and left, looking for a target. Their discipline was admirable, Koyne thought. Lesser beings, ordinary men, would have given in to the anger they had to be feeling without pause – but the Callidus did not doubt that would soon come.
One of them shoved another of his number out of the way, tearing off his helmet with a twist of his hand. For a fraction of a second Koyne saw real emotion in the warrior’s flinty aspect, pain and anguish so deep that it could only come from a brother, a kinsman. The Astartes had a scarred face, and this close to him, the assassin could see he bore the rank insignia of a brother-sergeant of the 13th Company.
That seemed wrong; according to intelligence on the Sons of Horus, their primarch always travelled with an honour guard of officers, a group known as the Mournival.
‘Dead,’ said one of the other Astartes, his voice tense and distant. ‘Killed by cowards…’