The Age of Scorpio by Gavin Smith

blood-screen. It was like walking through preternatural spiderwebs. He hid behind the door of the Range Rover as he did not want the local police to see him self-harm. Du Bois drew the tanto from the sheath in the small of his back. The blade opened his flesh. He barely felt it, the folded steel was so sharp.
    Waiting was the worst thing for Hamad. His first out had been blown: the Circle, with their grip on the security services and their command of surveillance technology, had responded too quickly.
    He sat cross-legged in the filthy room in the flophouse. In front of him were the two curved daggers. They were older than any existing civilisation and made from materials that most modern scientists would fail to understand, unless of course they were part of the Circle.
    The simple white blade, Gentle Sleep, was not the problem: it killed easily, almost sorrowfully. The other blade, the blade of skeletal black metal, Nightmare, was another matter. It lusted for the killing, whispered to Hamad, drew out the dying and made it hurt for every victim.
    Hamad had thrown a blood-screen up, and through it Nightmare was aware of everyone within the flophouse and the surrounding buildings, the street, the station. Nightmare wanted all their deaths.
    He had been aware of the sirens from the furthermost elements of the blood-screen long before he had heard them. Nightmare had whispered the joy the sirens heralded. Hamad felt like weeping. When would he finally have killed enough?
    Chief Inspector Benedict Appleby did not have time to deal with the special-forces cowboy walking towards him. The man wore loose-fitting, dark casual clothes, his sandy-blond hair down to his shoulders, surprisingly clean-shaven, blue eyes and designer leather jacket, but it was his cock-of-the-walk attitude that gave it away.
    ‘Tell me, Chief Inspector, was one of the group of men you’ve just murdered fucking your wife?’ du Bois asked.
    ‘What? No!’ Appleby had been so taken aback by the question he had actually answered it.
    ‘Then why have you sent them all to their certain death?’
    ‘I think we can handle—’
    ‘No, you have shown no aptitude for thinking at all. I need to get in there now.’
    ‘We’re in the middle of an op—’
    ‘A very public sodomising – yes, I’m aware of that. Do you know what one of these is?’ The man showed Appleby a warrant card. Appleby’s eyes widened.
    ‘Yes. I mean, that is, I’ve never seen one before but—’
    ‘This means I can do as I please. Order your men not to interfere with me in any way, understand?’
    ‘Look, you can’t speak to me like that! I will need to check this.’
    Du Bois sighed: the whole point of the warrant card was to avoid situations like this. He pulled out his phone and hit speed dial.
    Hamad had wanted to run. He really had. Nightmare had not. Nightmare wanted to stay. He heard the door battered open. Hamad thought about the police officers thundering up the stairs. Their families, their lives, the sum of their experiences up to this moment. Were they loved? Did they have children? Nightmare howled in his head. He was not done killing, it seemed. Not that it mattered any more.
    He felt the screen snagged, attacked, changed.
    The godsware implants were two slits on his forehead. He opened his eyes. All of them. The Marduk implant showed him the ways through. They made a lie of matter. He fell back through the floor.
    Hamad emerged through the ceiling above the stairway halfway through a graceful somersault and landed among the armed police officers on the cramped stairway. He pushed gun barrels away from him, the slightest touch of hand and foot sending the officers tumbling down the stairs. He seemed to flow among them, moving to where they thought him least likely to be. Toying with probability.
    Hamad crouched low, his leg kicking out behind him. Gentle Sleep cut through a heavy boot like it did not exist. A nearly sentient poison coursed into the