James Swallow - Nemesis

stiff attention, his gaze directed anywhere but at the scene of the crime.

The stone floor was awash in dark arterial blood, and there were fleshy shapes

scattered randomly in the shallow little sea of rippling crimson. Ropes of what had to

be intestine, shiny lumps of organ meat that caught the light, and other things pastywhite

and streaked with fluid. An array of butcher slab remnants, discarded not in

haste but with disinterest.

The reeve felt disgust and confusion in equal measure, but he reined them in and

let his sharp eye take the lead. He looked for patterns and impressions. It had been

done with care and precision, this. No crime of passion, no murder of opportunity.

Cool, calm and without fear of discovery. Yosef peered into the shadows, the first

questions forming in his mind.

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How had this been done and kept silent enough that no one had heard it? With so

much blood shed, had the killer been tainted, left a trace? And where…? Where

was…?

Yosef stopped short and blinked. The pool of blood was in gentle motion, small

swells crossing it back and forth. He heard tiny hollow splashes here and there. “The

remains…” he began, glancing back at Skelta. “There’s not enough for a corpse.

Where’s Norte’s body?”

The jager had one hand to his mouth, and with the other he gingerly pointed

upwards. Yosef raised his eyes to the roof and there he found the rest of Jaared Norte.

The drivesman’s body had been opened in a manner that the reeve had only seen

in use by morticians—or rather, in a manner that was an extreme variation on the cuts

used for a post-mortem examination. Iron impact rods, the kind of heavy bolts used

by building labourers to secure construction work to sheer cliff sides, had been used

to nail Norte to the ceiling of the shed. One through each ankle, another through the

meat of the forearms, the limbs splayed out in an X-shaped stance. Then, slices

across the torso at oblique angles had enabled the killer to peel back the epidermis of

the torso, the neck and face. These cuts created pennants of skin that each came to a

point; one to the right and to the left, another down across the groin and the last torn

up over the bloody grinning mess of the skull to rise over the dead man’s head. Four

more impact rods secured the tips of these wet rags of meat in place. From the

opened confines of the man’s body, loops of dislodged muscle and broken spars of

bone pointed down towards the blood pool, weeping fluid.

“Have you ever seen anything like that?” managed Skelta, his voice thick with

revulsion. “It’s horrific.”

Yosef’s first thought was of a sculpture, of an artwork. Against the dark metal

plates of the shed’s roof, the drivesman had been made into a star with eight points.

“I don’t know,” whispered the reeve.

19

TWO

The Shrouds

Masked

A Common Blade

The Imperial Palace was more city than stronghold, vast and ornate in the majesty of

its sprawling scope, towers, pinnacles and great monoliths of stone and gold that

swept from horizon to jagged horizon. Landscapes that in millennia past had been a

patchwork of nation-states and sovereignties were now buried beneath the grand

unity of the Empire of Humanity, and its greatest monument. The dominions of the

palace encompassed whole settlements and satellite townships, from the confines of

the Petitioner’s City to the ranges of the Elysium Domes, across the largest star-port

in the Sol system and down to the awesome spectacle of the Eternity Gate. Millions

toiled within its outer walls in service to the Imperium, many living their lives

without ever leaving the silver arcology ziggurats where they were born, served, and

died.

This was the shining, beating heart of all human endeavour, the throne and the

birthplace of a species that stood astride the galaxy, its splendour and dignity vast

enough that no one voice could ever hope to encompass them with mere words. Terra

and her greatness were the jewel in the Imperial crown, bright and endless.

And yet; within a metropolis that masqueraded as a continent, there were a

myriad of ghost rooms and secret places. There were corners where the light did not

fall—some of them created for just that purpose.

There was a chamber known as the Shrouds. Inside the confines of the Inner

Palace, if one could have gazed upon the schematics of those bold artisans who laid

the first stones of the gargantuan city-state, no trace of the room or its entrances

would have been apparent. To all intents and purposes, this place did not exist, and

even those who had need to know of its reality could not have pinpointed it on a map.

If one could not find the Shrouds, then one was not meant to.

There were many ways to the chamber, and those who met there might know of

one or two—hidden passageways concealed in the tromp I’oeil artworks of the Arc

Galleries; a shaft behind the captured waterfall at the Annapurna Gate; the blind

corridor near the Great Orrery; the Solomon Folly and the ghost switch in the

sapphire elevator at the Western Vantage; these and others, some unused for

centuries. Those summoned to the Shrouds would emerge into a labyrinth of evershifting

corridors that defied all attempts to map them, guided by a mech-intellect

that would navigate them to the room and never twice by the same route. All that

could be certain was that the chamber was atop a tower, one of thousands ranged in

sentry rows across the inner bulwarks of the Palace, and even that was a supposition,

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based on the weak patina of daylight allowed to penetrate the sailcloth-thick blinds

that forever curtained the great oval windows about the room. Some suspected that

the light might be a deception, a falsehood filtered through trick glass or even totally

simulated. Perhaps the chamber was deep underground, or perhaps there were more

than one of them, a suite of dozens of identical rooms so exacting in similarity that to

tell them apart would be impossible.

And once within, there was no place on Earth more secure, save for the

Emperor’s Throne Room itself. None could listen in upon words spoken in a place

that did not exist, that could not be found. The walls of the chamber, dark mahogany

panels adorned with minimalist artworks and a few lume-globes, concealed layers of

instrumentality that rendered the room and everything in it completely dead to the

eyes and ears of any possible surveillance. There were counter-measures that fogged

radiation detection frequencies, devices that swallowed sound and heat and light,

working alongside slivers of living neural matter broadcasting the telepathic

equivalent of white noise across all psychic spectra. There was even a rumour that

the chamber was cloaked by a field of disruption that actually dislocated local spacetime

by several fractions of a second, allowing the room to exist a heartbeat into the

future and out of reach of the rest of the universe.

In the Shrouds there was a table, a long octagon of polished rosewood, and upon

it a simple hololithic projector casting a cool glow over the assembled men and

women gathered there. In deep, comfortable seats, six of them clustered around one

end of the table, while a seventh sat alone at the head. The eighth did not sit, but