James Swallow - Nemesis

robes made a sound; a soft grunt of disagreement.

“Our visitor has something to add,” said Sire Vanus.

The Master of Assassins inclined his head towards the shadows. “Is that so?”

The hooded man moved slightly, enough that he became better defined by the

glow-light, but not so much that his face could be discerned inside the depths of the

robe. “None of you are soldiers,” he rumbled, his deep tones carrying across the

room. “You are so used to working alone, as your occupation demands, that you

forget a rule of all conflict. Force doubled is force squared.”

“Did I not just say such a thing?”, snapped Sire Eversor.

The hooded man ignored the interruption. “I have heard you all speak. I have

seen your mission plans. They were not flawed. They were simply not enough.” He

nodded to himself. “No single assassin, no matter how well-trained, no matter which

clade they come from, could ever hope to terminate the Archtraitor alone. But a

collective of your killers…” He nodded again. “That might be enough.”

“A strike team…” mused Sire Vindicare.

“An Execution Force,” corrected the Master. “An elite unit hand-picked for the

task.”

Sire Vanus frowned behind his mask. “Such a suggestion… There is no precedent

for something like this. The Emperor will not approve of it.”

23

“Oh?” said Callidus. “What makes you so certain?”

The master of Clade Vanus leaned forward, the perturbations of his image-mask

growing more agitated. “The veils of secrecy preserve all that we are,” he insisted.

“For decades we have worked in the shadows of the Imperium, at the margins of the

Emperor’s knowledge, and for good reason. We serve him in deeds that he must

never know of, in order to maintain his noble purity, and to do so there are

conventions we have always followed.” He shot a look at the hooded man. “A code

of ethics. Rules of conflict.”

“Agreed,” ventured Siress Venenum. “The deployment of an assassin is a delicate

matter and never one taken lightly. We have in the past fielded two or three on a

single mission when the circumstances were most extreme, but then always from the

same clade, and always after much deliberation.”

Vanus was nodding. “Six at once, from every prime clade? You cannot expect the

Emperor to sanction such a thing. It is simply… not done.”

The Master of Assassins was silent for a long moment; then he steepled his

fingers in front of him, pressing the apex of them to the lips of his silver face. “What

I expect is that each clade’s Director Primus will obey my orders without question.

These ‘rules’ of which you speak, Vanus… Tell me, does Horus Lupercal adhere to

them as strongly as you do?” He didn’t raise his voice, but his tone brooked no

disagreement. “Do you believe that the Archtraitor will baulk at a tactic because it

offends the manners of those at court? Because it is not done?”

“He bombed his sworn brethren, his own men even, into obliteration,” said Sire

Vindicare. “I doubt anything is beyond him.”

The Master nodded. “And if we are to kill this foe, we cannot limit ourselves to

the moral abstracts that have guided us in the past. We must dare to exceed them.”

He paused. “This will be done.”

“My lord—” began Vanus, reaching out a hand.

“It is so ordered,” said the man in the silver mask, with finality. “This discussion

is at an end.”

When the others had taken their leave through the doorways of the Shrouds, and after

the psyber eagles nesting hidden in the apex of the ceiling had circled the room to

ensure there were no new listening devices in place, the Master of Assassins allowed

himself a moment to give a deep sigh. And then, with care, he reached up and

removed the silver mask, the dermal pads releasing their contact from the flesh of his

face. He shook his head, allowing a grey cascade of hair to emerge and pool upon his

shoulders, over the pattern of the nondescript robes he wore. “I think I need a drink,”

he muttered. His voice sounded nothing like the one that had issued from the lips of

the mask; but then that was to be expected. The Master of Assassins was a ghost

among ghosts, known only to the leaders of the clades as one of the High Lords of

Terra; but as to which of the Emperor’s council he was, that was left for them to

suspect. There were five living beings who knew the true identity of the Officio’s

leader, and two of them were in this room.

A machine-slave ambled over and offered up a gold-etched glass of brandy-laced

black tea. “Will you join me, my friend?” he asked.

“If it pleases the Sigillite, I will abstain,” said the hooded man.

24

“As you wish.” For a brief moment, the man who stood at the Emperor’s right

hand, the man who wore the rank of Regent of Terra, studied his careworn face in the

curvature of the glass. Malcador was himself once more, the cloak of the Master of

Assassins gone and faded, the identity shuttered away until the next time it was

needed.

He took a deep draught of the tea, and savoured it. He sighed. The effects of the

counter-psionics in the room were not enough to cause him any serious ill-effect, but

their presence was like the humming of an invisible insect, irritating the edges of his

witch-sight. As he sometimes did in these moments, Malcador allowed himself to

wonder which of the clade leaders had an idea of who he might really be. The

Sigillite knew that if he put his will to it, he could uncover the true faces of every one

of the Directors Primus. But he had never pursued this matter; there had never been

the need. The fragile state of grace in which the leaders of the Officio Assassinorum

existed had served to keep them all honest; no single Sire or Siress could ever know

if their colleagues, their subordinates, even their lovers were not behind the masks

they saw about the table. The group had been born in darkness and secrecy, and now

it could only live there as long as the rules of its existence were adhered to.

Rules that Malcador had just broken.

His companion finally gave himself up to the light and stepped into full visibility,

walking around the table with slow, steady steps. The hooded man was large,

towering over the Sigillite where he sat in his chair. As big as a warrior of the

Adeptus Astartes, out of the darkness the man who had observed the meeting was a

threat made flesh, and he moved with a grace that caused his rust-coloured robes to

flow like water. A hand, tawny of skin and scarred, reached up and pulled back the

voluminous hood over a shorn skull and queue of dark hair, to reveal a face that was

grim and narrow of eye. At his throat, gold-flecked brands in the shapes of lightning

bolts were just visible past the open collar.

“Speak your mind, Captain-General,” said Malcador, reading his aura. “I can see

the disquiet coming off you like smoke from a fire pit.”

Constantin Valdor, Chief Custodian of the Legio Custodes, spared him a glance

that other men would have withered under. “I have said all I need to say,” Valdor

replied. “For better or for worse.” The warrior’s hand dropped to the table top and he