James Swallow: Nemesis

asked as the warships passed them by had now been answered: for the lesson of it.

Tobeld did not dwell on this, as he moved around the lee of the temporary

pergolas set up beneath the wings of the tethered Stormbirds, hearing the mutter of

conversation among the warriors around him amid the snap of guyropes and windpulled

fabric. Messages were already coming in from the ships in orbit. The other

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worlds, the orbital platforms, the system defence fleet, all were surrendering. Twelve

planets teeming with people, giving up their freedom without a single word of

defiance. Lesson learned.

The taking of the Gyges system had been a swift and almost cursory thing.

Doubtless, in decades to come, it would be less than a postscript in the annals of the

war. No casualties of note had been taken by the warfleet, none that mattered to the

architect of the conflict that this small venture was but a fragment of. Gyges was

merely a stone in the path, a path that began in the Isstvan system and wound its way

across the galaxy towards Terra. Gyges was a passing footstep, beneath which the

blood of millions left no mark. By conventional battle logic, there was no reason for

any of the invaders to even step on to the surface; yet still they had come, in this

small party, for reasons that could only be guessed at.

Tobeld stifled a cough with his hand, pushing the thick robe of his hood to his

face to muffle the sound. It came away wet and he tasted copper in his mouth. The

radiation had killed him the moment he stepped out from the shuttle, him and the

other serfs brought down from the flagship in order to serve the invaders. The serfs

would all be dead before sunset. He knew he would share that fate, but it was a price

worth paying. In the dimness of his dormitory capsule back on the warship, Tobeld

had used a quarter of the elements of his weapons kit to fabricate a strong dosage of

counter-radiation drugs; the rest he had turned to the building of the compound that

nestled inside the finger-long glass vial strapped to the inside of his wrist. He had

done his best to dispose of the remnants of the kit, but he was afraid some trace might

still be discovered; and the counter-rads were working poorly. He had little time.

He passed behind the engine bells of a drop-ship and through the black haze he

spied the largest of the tents, a low pavilion made of non-reflective cloth. For a

second, the wind snapped at the entrance flap and showed him a glimpse of things

inside. He saw what might have been firelight jumping and moving off slabs of

polished ceramite armour, and wet shapes like animated falls of blood. Then the

breeze passed on and the sight was lost to him. Still, the confusion of impressions

made him shiver.

Tobeld hesitated. He would need to cross open ground to get from the Stormbird

to the pavilion, and he could not afford to be challenged. He was entering the

terminal stage of his mission now, after so long. There could be no mistakes. No one

had come this close before. He could not risk failure.

Tobeld took a shaky, tainted breath. He had sacrificed a solar year of his life to

this mission, breaking out from under a cover he had spent half a decade building as

a minor Nobilite clan cook-functionary. He had willingly discarded that carefullycrafted

disguise to embrace a new one, such was the gravity of his new mission; and

through cautious steps, with doses of poisons both subtle and coarse to smooth his

path, Tobeld had made his way into service aboard the battle cruiser Vengeful Spirit,

the flagship of Horus Lupercal.

Two years had passed since the betrayal at Isstvan, the bloody backstabbing that

opened the way to Horus’ insurrection against the Imperium and his father, the

Emperor of Mankind. In that time, his steady progression across the galaxy had

gathered momentum. As this day showed, every system that passed beneath the keel

of Horus’ warships either swore fealty to him, or else they burned. Worlds and

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worlds, united in the aftermath of the Great Crusade, were now torn between loyalty

to a distant Earth and an absent Emperor, or to a victorious Horus and his army of

warlords. The glimpses Tobeld got from his lower-decks vantage point showed an

armada of turncoat-kindred consolidating power degree by punishing degree. Horus

closed his steel grip on sector after sector. One did not need to be a tactician to know

that the Warmaster was marshalling his energies for the advance that had to come—

an eventual thrust towards Terra herself, and to the gates of the Imperial Palace.

Horus could not be allowed to take that step.

At first it had seemed an unassailable objective. The Warmaster himself, a

primarch, a demigod warrior, and Tobeld just a man. A killer of superlative skill and

subtlety, indeed, but still a man. To strike directly at Horus aboard the Spirit would

have been madness, an impossibility. Tobeld toiled aboard the flagship for almost

five months before he even laid eyes upon the Warmaster—and the being he saw that

day was one of such magnitude that it set him reeling, the question hard in his

thoughts. How do I kill this one?

Conventional poisons were worthless ranged against the physiology of an

Astartes; they could ingest the harshest of venoms as Tobeld might sip wine. But

Tobeld was here precisely because poison was his weapon of choice. It could be

swift; it could be patient, escaping detection, lying dormant. He was one of Clade

Venenum’s finest tox-artisans; in his apprenticeship he had manufactured killing

philtres from the most base of components, he had terminated dozens of targets and

left no trace. And he slowly came to believe that he was capable of this, if fate would

only grace him with a single opportunity.

The weapon lay in the vial. Tobeld had created a binary agent, a mixture of

molecular accelerant gels suspending a live sample of gene-altered Baalite thirstwater—

a virulent fluidic life form that could consume all moisture within living

tissues in a matter of seconds. When Horus had announced he would be leading a

landing party to the surface of Gyges Prime, Tobeld heard the tolling of fate in the

words. His chance. His single chance.

There was rumour and supposition aboard the Vengeful Spirit, down on the lower

decks where the human serfs and servitors toiled. Men spoke of strange things afoot

on the levels where the Astartes walked, of changes, of apparitions and peculiarities

in parts of the vessel. Tobeld heard whispers of the so-called lodges where these

changes took place. He listened to stories of rites made on the surfaces of conquered

worlds, things that sickened him as much with their nauseating similarity to crude

idolatry as with their hints of inhumanity and horror. The men who spoke of these

things often vanished soon after, leaving nothing but fear in their wakes.

He concentrated on the weapon, listening for the wind to drop. Horus was there,

no more than a dozen steps away, inside the pavilion with his inner circle—

Maloghurst, Abaddon and the rest of them—engaging in whatever ritual had brought

them to this place. Close now, closer than ever before. Tobeld prepared himself,

forcing away the pain in his throat, his joints. Entering the command tent, he would

introduce the weapon to the jug of wine at Horus’ side, fill the cups of the Warmaster