Lord of the Night

Zso Sahaal

His mind drifted, detached.

He had not slept in four days, and whilst it was true that the artifices of his enhanced brain and body could maintain alertness almost indefinitely, already the nagging seeds of exhaustion twitched at the back of his mind, threatening his efficacy. In this strange place he had conducted himself with unparalleled caution, never once allowing his vigilance to slip.

This, finally, in the lair of his newfound servants, had changed. Riding a wave of his own authority, surrounded by those who would no more allow him harm than kill themselves, Sahaal at last — mercifully — took the opportunity to rest.

They were named the Shadowkin, and they worshipped him. The fools.

He slipped into the arms of half-sleep with an eagerness he had not expected, and drowned in meditation.

He had been uncertain, at first. Confronted by a horde of black-shrouded peasants, creeping from the shadows in the wake of Herniatown's purgation, he had nearly slaughtered them without thought, coasting on the fury of what Nikhae had told him.

The Corona was gone!

His prize was lost to him, and as he stumbled directionless from the killing fields of Herniatown, these Shadowkin had mistaken him for a warrior of the Emperor.

They had seen pictoslates, perhaps, or illuminations in ancient scriptures. The Emperor had created the Space Marines: that much they knew. He had fashioned their primarchs, modelled their Legions, dispatched them to crusade in his name. They knew little of the intricacies of Imperial history, but they could not question the benevolence of such angelic warriors. A Space Marine was beyond imperfection.

They had never heard of the Horus Heresy. Sahaal wasn't surprised. The churning propaganda machines of the Imperium could hardly countenance the popular exposure of its own flawed past.

In the haze of his trance, Sahaal mused upon revealing the truth to his new acolytes, then discounted the possibility... To learn that half the Emperor's angels had turned to the dark fires of Chaos: to these under-hive scum such realities would seem ludicrous. Impossible. Cruel.

Sahaal was no more part of the Emperor's vast congregation than were the xenos that infested the galaxy, and it sickened him that the wide-eyed men and women of the Shadowkin should mistake him so easily. It was true that the seductions of Chaos also held little sway over him — he considered such metaphysical corruption a sign of weakness, of lack of focus — but his contempt for the Emperor matched that of any Chaotic anti-zealot nonetheless, and the Shadowkin's mistaken identity was difficult to swallow.

They saw his power armour, his narrow-eyed helm, his wedge-like shoulderguards, his jewelled bolter. They saw the intricate heraldry of his Legion, and whilst they could not hope to recognise it, they understood that such icons had ever been the remit of the Adeptus Astartes. They had watched him single handedly wipe out a nest of their most iniquitous enemies, and any doubts as to his righteousness were immediately expunged.

They saw him, and they saw a Space Marine, and so they saw a reflection of their god. He had almost killed them for it. And yet their devotion had warmed him — as mindless as that of a machine — and slowly, with growing momentum, his thoughts turned to another, shrewder path.

Herniatown had burned behind him, Nikhae's words — 'I-it's gone... It's sold!' — had scorched his mind, and the Shadowkin had fallen to his feet and praised him. Their worship had filled him with pleasure — pleasure borne upon a lie, but pleasure nonetheless — and slowly, hating himself, resisting the bile in his throat, he had said the one thing that could assure their loyalty. 'Ave Imperator.'

They had brought him to their lair, they had worshipped him, they had given him food and sanctuary, and so he slept.

Adrift upon the trance, he remembered Nikhae's screaming face as slice by slice he was skinned alive. 'Where is the package?'

'I told you, Zagrifs blood! It's gone!'

'Gone where?'

'Sold! W-warpspoor and piss! Y-you sh... shit! Sold!'

'Sold to whom? Speak, or I'll take your eyes.'

'No! N-not th—'

'Sold to whom?'

'Slake! The Collective! I swear it, Throne-as-my-witness! Slake!'

'What is this... "Slake"?'

'I don't... n-nuh...'

'Your eyes, Nikhae. Do you need both?'

'S-sweet Terra, a-a middleman! A go-between for upcity merchants! Slake!'

'Where is he, Nikhae? Where did you find him?'

'I didn't, h—'

'Where is he!'

'I don't know! H-he found us! H-he knew the ship would fall from the sky! He told us to be ready! He commissioned us, warp dammit!'

'He knew?'

'Yes!'

'He ordered the package by name?'

'Yes!'

'That is not possible.'

'I don't know how, but he kn—'

'You're lying to me.'

He was still screaming when there was no skin left for Sahaal to cut away.

Before he planted the fuelcell that destroyed the Glacier Rats' lair, Sahaal vented his rage upon the meaty husk that had once been Nikhae, expelling his fury on muscle and sinew and bone. It had made quite a mess.

The Corona was gone. He had a new target.

And like a dream, in that moment, when he staggered exhausted from Herniatown already planning this new hunt, the solution had delivered itself like a gift from the Four Gods.

The Shadowkin. An army of slaves, bound to him in devotion for the very thing he hated the most.

They would help him find Slake — whoever, whatever, he was.

The trance had lasted some four hours, he judged, when his slumbering senses awoke him. Someone was approaching.

The Shadowkin lair clung to the trunk of one of the great stacks that comprised the Steel Forest, jutting from its girth like a fungus, and Sahaal had found its fortification impressive. As the frightened mob had conducted him aboard their iron-pulleyed elevators he had observed their regimented movements, their well maintained weapons, their silent obedience. Their discipline was impressive, their focus commendable and their arsenal — in the midst of such squalor — fearsome indeed.

They were a tribe of zealots, he had quickly learned, puritans that had rejected the wickedness of the hive centuries before, sinking down to the depths of the underhive where they could pursue their veneration unhindered. They saw in their Emperor a divine judge, in whose name iniquity was purged and impurity burned away. Through long decades their worship had intertwined itself with a morbid indulgence: deifying their lord in his aspect as Death — the ultimate leveller — and revelling in the melancholic symbols of mortality.

Bone worshippers. Scalp hunters.

Corpse-bearers.

Further, finding themselves surrounded by filth and hedonism, hemmed in by false worshippers and iniquitous licence, they had elected themselves to a divine mission, reasoning that they alone must execute the Emperor's law.

They were pious vigilantes, these quiet warriors, and in them Sahaal saw echoes of his master's youth, stalking the streets of Nostramo Quintus, judging and striking from the shadows.

They reminded him of himself, and were it not for their misplaced reverence he might whole-heartedly have accepted their hospitality, told them the truth, secured their obedience for all the right reasons...

But no... No, they were the Emperor's sons and daughters first, and creatures of the night second. He could seek sanctuary amongst them but could never fully lower his guard. His dark beliefs would be anathema to these pious fools, and the irony of the situation was not lost on him: such similar disciplines, such reflected methods, such matching values, but such opposite causes.

So it was that when their priestess scrambled towards Sahaal's mediation platform on her hands and knees, her heart hammering like a drum in his ears, he was awake before she had even opened her mouth.

'Why do you disturb me?' he said, and he smiled inside his helm at the shiver that rattled through her.

'F-forgive me, my lord, I did not intend to discomfort you...'

He dismissed her cowering with a flick of his wrist, tilting his head to regard her closely. 'By what name are you known, child?'

This request seemed to confuse her. Whatever news she'd rushed to divulge, a personal introduction had not been amongst it. 'Chianni, my lord.'

'You are the leader of this band?'

'N... I... I was the second, my lord. B-beneath Con-demnitor Kalriian.'

'And where is he?'

Her eyes, if possible, bulged wider still.

'Y-you... you killed him, my lord...'

Sahaal recalled that first simpering figure, approaching from the shadows outside Herniatown, cut down in mid-exultation. He smoothly extended his duplicity: 'He was remiss in his devotions. It was a mercy to cut him down.'

If she doubted the excuse she gave no sign of it. 'A-as you wish it, my lord.'

He pointed a long claw at her heart, enjoying her squirms. 'You shall be the new condemnitor.'

She dipped her head in shivering gratitude, sweat glistening in the dark. 'You honour me, lord, but I—'

'You may leave me. I would continue my meditation.'

For a second she seemed torn, as if her body would love nothing more than to comply, but her brows dipped and she remained where she was, struggling to speak. Sahaal watched her with interest.

'It is... please, lord. The scouts sent up flares. There are intruders abroad. Judge-men from the city.' She cast her eyes upwards towards the distant struts of the hive-bottom. 'Vindictors from above. We... we seek your counsel.'

'What do they want?' Sahaal's voice contrived to indicate that such tedious announcements were beneath his interest.

'I do not know, lord. T-they share our cause — in the main — though their laws are lax in the Emperor's eyes. Is it not said tha—'

'Spare me the lesson. Are they your enemies?'

She swallowed hard and shook her head, eyes bright in the gloom. 'They have never sought our ruin, lord. They would not enter our territory without cause.'

'I see.'

'T-there is something else...'

'Yes?'

'They... they travel with a mutant. A... a giant. The scouts have seen it. It is... unchained!'

She spoke this last word as if it wounded her to say it, and Sahaal marvelled at the depth of hatred in her voice. Here, even in the filth of the underhive, the Imperium's contempt for all that was 'impure' had found ample representation.

'A mutant?'

'Yes my lord. An abomination in the eyes of the Emperor! I... I have prayed for guidance but—'

'That is unnecessary. I am the Emperor's voice here.'

For a moment she looked as though she might cut her own throat. Sahaal found himself gratified by her discomfort.

'My apologies, lord. I did not mean offence...'

'These "vindictors". They are in the employ of the Imperium?'

'Y-yes my lord.'

'And they have no reason to come here?'

'No, my lord.'

The truth sagged into Sahaal's mind.

They are hunting me. They have my trail.

Something akin to nervousness passed through him, then, but seemed mixed perversely with a measure of excitement. After so long, after such care and secrecy, it was almost a pleasure to face enemies openly.

And in a moment of inspiration, slicing into his consciousness like a blade from the heavens, the solution came to him.

'They are corrupt,' he said, standing. Chianni staggered backwards, dwarfed.

'M-my lord?'

'Listen carefully. You will struggle to believe me.'

'I... I will believe what you tell me, my lo—'

'I was sent here at the Emperor's own command, condemnitor. Do you believe that?'

She sunk to her knees as if struck, mouth agape.

'Ave Imperator! ' she shrieked, overcome.

'Stand, child. We haven't much time.'

She glanced upward with the look of a drunkard.

'I was sent here because this world has fallen from the light of Terra. It is consumed by corruption. From tip to base, only impurity remains.'

'But... but this is...' She gasped for air, like a fish removed from water, and for a brief instant Sahaal found himself pitying her. Her entire universe must be crumbling around her.

'Equixus has fallen to Chaos, child, and there are few of the Emperor's faithful that remain.'

She vomited, clutching at her belly, moaning in horror.

'No...' she whispered, drool sagging from her lips. 'It's not true... it's not true... it's not true...'

'Stand!' Sahaal gripped her collar and yanked her upright like a heap of rags, leaving her tottering in a fugue of terror and misery.

'I don't understand, my lord! T-there was no war! No invasion!'

'You underestimate the ruinous powers. There was no invasion, only infection. The taint spreads like disease. The governor is corrupted. His house and barons are lost to the dark. And piece by piece the purity of this hive is sundered.'

'But... but...'

'I was sent to assess the extent of the corruption,' he said, lies pouring so easily from his mouth. 'I was sent to discover if any of the Emperor's faithful remained.'

'We do, lord! We do!' she almost sang the words, arms raised above her head, delirious with shock.

'You do,' Sahaal nodded, 'and I have found you. And now... now these false servants of the Emperor, these "vindictors", who make a mockery of all that was pure, have descended to crush us all. We must stop them. Do you understand, condemnitor? The Emperor Himself has spoken! We must stop them!'

The intruders' vehicles were familiar, at least. Coiling their way through the Steel Forest, they made light work of the debrisflows around the ducts' bases: Chimera-class chasses, albeit lacking the artillery mounts and dozer-scoops of their forebears. He had once orchestrated the advances of legions of their kind, savaging the enemy with his Raptor packs whilst the guns of the Chimerae battered their flanks. It seemed somehow ludicrous that he should now find himself opposing such familiar machines, accompanied only by a mob of zealots devoted to his enemy's worship.

This time his master's voice echoed almost whimsically through his memories, and he fought a brief surge of affront in its implied disapproval.

How the mighty are fallen, it said, over and over, like a mantra in his soul.

The intruders rounded the final corner in their approach to the Shadowkin lair and Sahaal returned his mind to the present: there was an ambush to oversee.

Forewarned, the Shadowkin attack was as devastating as any Sahaal had seen. Dressed for war, cloaked in tattered rags of black and red, with bones stitched to collars and stolen knuckles swinging on cords from sleeves, they were a grim sight: wraiths that slunk in the dark, skeletal trophies adorning their brows.

Sahaal waited until the first two vehicles had passed below before giving the signal to attack, a single swipe of his clawed fist, reflections flickering like a galaxy in the half-light.

The first hint of danger, a roiling pulse of electric sound and the shadow-stitching flare of a discharge, came far too late for the vindictors.

That first carefully gauged blast from the Shadowkin's solitary lascannon, positioned at the edge of a high balcony, punched through the trailing vehicle's tracks like a fiery blade, gobbets of molten metal sputtering from the wound. The pilot's attempt to brake was as doomed as the vehicle itself: its track peeled, thrashing at the hull as it sluiced away, whipping back on itself at the last instant to slice the vindictor riding shotgun into two ragged halves.

First blood. Time seemed to stop.

Then the Shadowkin howled, like wolves after a kill.

The tank slipped from its line, wobbled across unstable debris, hit a bank of shapeless scrap and flipped onto its back, trailing oil and dust. The screams from within filtered quickly through its mangled shanks.

And then the lasguns opened fire, the volley of grenades from above rattled down on the stricken convoy, the Shadowkin rappelled from their balconies with a chilling shriek, and the battle of the Steel Forest began.

To their credit, the intruders were swift to react. The remaining vehicles about-turned, tracks shifting in awkward patterns, to circle their stricken fellow. Their passengers tumbled out in short order, using their vehicles as cover and firing thunderous shotguns into the shapeless shadows, shouting terse orders. To Sahaal, watching from above, they seemed like miniature parodies of Space Marines — their glossy carapaces shaped in obvious reflection of the Astartes' power armour, helms open below the nose, solid gauntlets clutching at stocks and mauls. He sneered in contempt and launched himself from his platform's edge, following the whooping Shadowkin towards the ground, jump pack slowing his descent.

A killing ground had quickly formed between the remaining tanks and the gangers slunk forwards with weapons blazing, pinning the vindictors in their places. Already a gaggle of armoured bodies thrashed and moaned in the circle, blood staining the spongy ground, and the remaining lawmen struggled to find return targets. The Shadowkin were more than adept at stealing about the perimeter of the ring like sharks, snapping off shots then melting away. Even the auto-cannons on the Salamanders' spines seemed useless, hammering their ammunition into the wastes in near disarray, their bright flares dazzling the vindictors further still, rendering the darkness all the more impenetrable.

A frag grenade, dropped almost casually from the gantries above, split apart an exposed Preafect, showering his comrades with whirligig shrapnel and gore. His shriek lasted a fraction of a second, aborted on a froth of viscera and clutching limbs. His comrades hollered and regrouped, more and more of their armoured fellows tumbling from the safety of the Salamanders to confront the threat, and in reply more of the death-masked Shadowkin slipped along black ropes to surround them, lasguns shifting shadows and colours across the distant walls.

Sahaal set himself down at the periphery of the ring and drew his bolter. Rushing into the face of a shotgun salvo would be a folly, but there were... other ways. Whooping his hawk-like shriek, kicking himself into the air, he crossed the deadzone in a single bound, glaring down on the besieged vindictors with trigger depressed. Through gunsmoke and airborne ash bolter shells kicked sticky craters in muscle and sinew, encased bodies jerked as shells detonated and helmeted faces craned up to observe this new threat, gliding on darkness overhead.

Somewhere, lost to the rushing of his blood, Sahaal heard a cheer blossom in the gloom. The Shadowkin were saluting their master.

He savoured their awe, and each discharge of his bolter was an offering to his master, each scarlet-splattered scream a guilty intonation to the Chaos Gods that he neither worshipped nor denied. The sight of his victims' wide eyes and pale faces, gaping up as they realised what they faced all too late, warmed him to his core, and he shrilled as their bodies dissolved in fire and smoke and blood.

'Ave dominus nox!'

His arc complete, he set down on the opposite boundary and spun in his place, eager for a second pass. His feet had all but left the ground when the las-cannon fired its second pulse and the world went white.

A dagger of light punctured the ablative guts of the overturned Salamander, a wound that lanced thick armour and stabbed deep into its fuel reserves. The vehicle seemed to judder and draw a breath, swelling, before detonating in a storm of shattered light.

The metal carcass lifted high on a spout of flame, breaking apart and littering the air, razor fragments blizzarding outwards. At its apex it slouched onto its back like a dying whale, flames running off its scars like water, then crashed — ruined — to the earth.

The Shadowkin roared their approval, weapons brandished high, and the vindictors crawled and bled in the wreckage. Only the hammering of the remaining autocannons swelled the silence, and for every lead gobbet that found a target in the dark — flipping some nameless zealot to his knees with a jet of crimson — a hundred chattered uselessly against the mangled surfaces of the debris flows. Such was the madness of the scene that Sahaal went unnoticed as he clawed his way vertically along a rusted duct, a monstrous lizard adhering to a wall.

He gauged his release with precision, snapping free his claws and tumbling with a cry to land, as elegant as a cat, on the cab of the nearest tank. The pilot's wordless shriek filtered from within, and it was only when Sahaal lunged at the autocannon pintle — severing its plinth and blasting its gunner's head from his shoulders — that the shrill exclamation found words: a rush of curses and prayers. Sahaal leaned inside with a hiss, snipping at the pilot's thrashing arms, spraying the interior with arterial muck.

The shrieks increased in pitch and volume.

Sahaal leapt clear, snagging at an oily overhang and swivelling to watch the vehicle caper out of control, skidding on its axis and ploughing through the diminishing knot of vindictors. Gore-splattered, it rushed into the darkness and quit the battle, dust and waste lifting from its tracks, vanishing to topple to its doom in some forgotten corner. The dismembered pilot's screams dwindled with it into the shadows.

With their cover thus diminished the vindictors were easy prey. The remaining Salamander had tasked itself with knocking out the las-crew that had so decimated its shattered fellow, and its futile tracer sweeps of the balconies above had taken it away from the action on the ground, leaving the Preafects vulnerable.

Sahaal saw the trap an instant too late.

'Stay back!' Sahaal roared to the Shadowkin from his vantage. 'Stay in the shadows! Spare no one! Spare nothing!'

The warning was too late. Flushed by the excitement of victory, led by Condemnitor Chianni, the shrouded warriors rushed forth through the ring of corpse-dotted wreckage to smash against the vindictors.

In the face of a direct assault the Preafects released one final devastating volley before lowering their shotguns, raising instead the power mauls holstered at their sides. There was something of the parade ground in their synchronous movements: thumbing activation runes together, striking combat stances in a perfect circle of glossy armour and fizzling maces. The Shadowkin rebounded from their flanks like bloody waves against a cliff, and every failed swipe of a notched blade or jab with a tarblacked dagger was followed by the precise, deadly swing of an energised club. Sparks burst in bubbles of light, flesh charred and skulls popped. Here a black-robed man staggered clear with a scream, his eyeballs gone, there a young woman limped to escape, the bones of her leg jabbing at ugly angles from her flesh. With no space to put their numbers — or their stealth — to their advantage, the Shadowkin were being massacred. Sahaal found himself swooping to join the frenzy when the lascannon crew fired their third — and final — blast.

This time, perhaps recognising that the remaining Salamander had found its range and was already tilting its autocannon towards them, they eschewed the obvious target presented by the vehicle and tilted their scripture-pocked weapon towards the vindictor ranks, resolving to inflict as much damage as possible before the end.

Had their actions not been undertaken in his name, Sahaal would have derided their sacrifice. A true warrior, he had learned, values his own life at least as much as he values the loss of his enemy's. There was little room in his heart for martyrdom — beyond that, of course, of his dead master.

His betrayed master, who had died for his principles — and so forged a bitter vengeance in his own blood.

His master, whose memory he served.

His master, whose mantle he had inherited...

...and then lost.

At the centre of the killing ground, where the lascannon's discharge slid like an arrow into the earth, the vindictors fell apart at their joints: swallowed in a torus of iridescence that incised bone and sinew like a blade through water. They found themselves blasted up and out on the cusp of a Shockwave, meaty slabs parting along torn seams, shredded alive. This was no great pyrotechnic spectacle, no flaming tumult, no smokeless fireball: merely a sooty chrysanthemum of uncontainable energy, blindingly bright, that dismantled its targets like dried leaves before a storm.

As if in reply, the autocannon found its target. The lascannon crew died in fire and lead, tumbling to the earth like rag-dolls, dead of their wounds long before they struck the ground.

A stunned silence settled.

Through the shifting smoke and lapping fires, beyond the charred bodies and shattered armour-plates, now only the single vehicle remained of the convoy The Shadowkin stared at it with weapons brandished, skeletal trophies on proud display, as if daring it to advance.

And then their warrior-angel, their black/blue lord, their benighted messiah, dropped like a stone from above, plunging bright claws into its ablative sides and rising up its flanks: a hawk taking a dove.

This close, beyond the smoke and dust, Sahaal could finally see what manner of beast manned the autocannon.

It was a giant.

It raised its arms as he slunk near and clenched iron fists, face contorting with a challenge-roar. Sahaal extended his claws and laughed, gratified at the prospect of a worthy opponent. He would enjoy killing this mutant, he decided, this ape-faced freak, and in so doing would secure the loyalty of his xenophobic little slaves forever. He imagined himself surging forwards, claws snickering, blood raining around him.

And then a head appeared at the hatch into the tank's interior: an unarmoured female, as lowly an opponent as he could imagine. She was beneath his attention — unworthy — and he returned his focus to the hulk, claws flexing.

'I know what you are,' the woman said, startling him. Her eyes were wide and her skin bleached with fear, but her voice sounded strong and certain, resonating somewhere deep, transcending his ears. 'Go back to the shadows,' she hissed, lips curling. 'Go back to the warp, Night Lord!'

And then a great dagger punctured his mind: an inelegant swipe of immaterial force that took him by surprise and detonated a bomb within his skull, and he slipped from the Salamander's back onto the floor.

Darkness swallowed him up like an old friend — like the mother whose face he could no longer recall — and it was only on the very edge of his consciousness that he could hear the sound of heavy tracks clawing at soft earth and an engine, dwindling away into the distance.

The witch and her pet giant were gone, and as unconsciousness clouded around him he recalled her words with a start.

Go back to the warp, Night Lord!

She knew what he was.

She had recognised his heraldry.

She had spoken his Legion's name.

In that instant, on the cusp of waking reality, galvanised by his own discovery, he reached a decision: secrecy was futile. He would summon his brethren. No matter what had happened to them, no matter what glories and solemnities ten thousand years had inflicted upon them, he would summon them to his side, and he would greet them with the Corona in his possession, so that they would know, without doubt — Zso Sahaal, Captain of the Night Lords Legion, chosen heir of the Primarch Konrad Curze, had returned from his slumber to claim his throne.

Ave Dominus Nox!

Mita Ashyn

He — the great, the holier-than-thou, the Scourge of Namiito Ophidius, Deliverer of the Claviculus Ultimatum, lord high-and-fragging-mighty Inquisitor Ipoqr Kaustus — was waiting.

Mita half expected a red carpet.

That he had deigned to leave the crystal towers of Steepletown and the comfortable decadence of the governor's palace, that he (and his retinue, of course) had swarmed to the unfashionable depths of Cuspseal, was an indication, she reflected, of just how much trouble she was in.

He received her in Commander Orodai's quarters, and where before she had faced him with the retinue circling behind, now they stood arranged around her, glaring as she entered.

It was a little like stepping onto a stage.

She noted without much surprise that Sergeant Varitens was standing to the left of Orodai's desk. Of the nineteen vindictors and two staff-drivers who had failed to return from the Steel Forest, she found it particularly galling that he hadn't been amongst them. Doubtiess he'd filled Orodai's head with tales of his own heroism and her — Mita's — mistakes, leading his men into a massacre. She could imagine the bureaucratic paper trail that followed: from here all the way up to the inquisitor himself—

Who, she had very little doubt, had lost his temper.

Mita had been back in Cuspseal for ten hours — much of which had been dedicated to a futile attempt to sleep — and with exhaustion clinging to every fibre she was in no mood for yet another dressing down.

'Get it over with,' she said, not waiting to be addressed.

Several of the retinue exchanged glances. She'd be damned if she'd treat them to another dewy-eyed performance of apology and supplication.

'I beg your pardon?' said Kaustus, fingers steepled. His features were once again concealed within his mask, its gloss accentuated by his exquisite gown of red webbing, and Mita met her own reflected gaze and held it, chin jutting proudly.

'The execution, inquisitor,' she said, refusing to be cowed. 'I've failed you twice. I went against your orders. I'm responsible for the deaths of twenty-one of the Emperor's loyal Preafects and I haven't any wish to be kept waiting for summary exe—'

'Sergeant Varitens tells me that you have identified the killer.'

The defiant bite-back she'd been preparing died in her mouth.

'W... what?'

Kaustus leaned forwards. 'He speaks of an armoured warrior, interrogator. He suggests there is a... how did he put it?... A living blasphemy at large.'

Something a little like triumph planted tenuous roots in her belly.

'I-is that so, my lord?'

'It is. What do you say to that, interrogator?'

She glanced at Varitens, seeking confirmation of his collusion. The man's eyes seemed fixated on the floor, wide with child-like fascination. Like a sword of Damocles, descending to puncture her scant shred of victory, a long cord of spittle parted company with his lip and spattered to the floor. Mita's heart sunk.

'As you can see,' Kaustus added, interrupting her before she could answer, 'the good sergeant required some... calming. He was almost ranting, the poor beast.'

'He's been dragged?'

Kaustus's eyes glimmered within the narrow slats of his mask.

'Not quite. We thought it best to cleanse his mind — and that of the surviving driver — using a more...' he waved a thoughtful hand, '...permanent method.'

Lobotomisation. With such impunity could an inquisitor wipe away a man's thoughts and memories.

'Is that to be my fate, my lord?' she scowled, prideful rebellion sputtering in her belly. 'And Cog's? Our minds stripped away because you refuse to believe the truth?'

For an instant, there was silence.

Then Kaustus moved faster than her eye could follow, and with barely a hiss registering in her ears she found herself spinning in her place, the floor rising to meet her, cheek stinging. When the lights cleared from her eyes she found the inquisitor stood over her and she realised with a thrill that he'd struck her.

So much for the cool, collected Inquisitor Kaustus.

'Your insolence stops here, interrogator,' he said, breathing hard. 'And should I wish it I can command far worse fates than mere lobotomy. This is your last warning.'

'B-but why h—'

'Why have I erased the testimonies of the sergeant and the driver? Use your brain, child! If what they say — if what you say — is correct, then the taint is abroad.'

'So you believe me n—'

'I will not tolerate panic and rumour-mongering, is that clear? This is damage limitation, interrogator. Be grateful I consider you capable of keeping secrets.' He returned to his seat, eyes lowered, adding quietly, 'and yes. Yes, I believe you.'

Mita tottered to her feet, dizzied. Such an uncharacteristic performance from the inquisitor had prompted a chorus of astonished thought from the retinue, and Mita struggled to shut out the psionic clamour.

'So,' Kaustus intoned, returning to his brooding position with fingers toying at his pendant. 'Tell me. What manner of corruption draws me so successfully from my Holy Work?' The boredom in his voice was as theatrical as it was palpable. 'A cult of the Dark Powers? Some mutant animal, perhaps? Or some tainted aristocrat, seeking thrills and kills in the underhive?' He folded his arms. 'Speak, child — I would know the agent of this... distraction.'

Mita squared her shoulders.

'It is a Traitor Space Marine, my lord.'

Uproar.

The retinue dissolved in a froth of gabbled prayers and startled exchanges — outrage clamouring with denial and anger.

Only Kaustus remained silent, and it was only Mita — who regarded his reaction scrupulously — that noted the tightening of his knuckles and the stiffening of his spine.

His eyes burned into her, betraying nothing.

'Impossible!' It was Commander Orodai who first summoned the ire required to speak out, rising to his feet and stabbing an infuriated finger at the floor. The venom in his voice astonished even Mita.

'I won't listen to this!' the commander stormed, arms waving. 'No warpshit daemon ever set foot inside my city, and I won't have some slip of a witch suggesting otherw—'

'It's no daemon!' Mita interrupted, gorge rising. 'It's a Space Marine, you fool! One of our own, fallen from the light. It's more cunning than any daemon!'

'This is intolerable...' Orodai turned to Kaustus with his cheeks burning. 'Are we to listen to these heresies all day?' he snarled. 'Silence your brat before I do it myself!'

He drew his pistol.

Mita's heart skipped.

In the mist of her senses the psychic nebula of Orodai's mind turned black and red, an ugly bruise of murderous intent. She staggered away, a warding hand raised. Her eyes tracked the commander's fist with morbid absorption, every centimetre of the gun's slow ascension like a countdown to thick, endless night.

'Have a care, Orodai.'

The voice seemed to come from far away, and it took Mita's revolving senses an eternity to stabilise, to draw her eyes away from the rising gun, and to note the tip of a sword, paused centimetres short of pricking at Orodai's skin.

'It is unwise to issue orders to an inquisitor,' said Kaustus tiredly, 'or to threaten his flock.'

Mita hadn't even seen him draw the blade.

'I... I...' Orodai seemed torn between outrage and self-preservation, anger and terror jockeying on the surface of his thoughts. Mita allowed herself a tiny smirk, enjoying his dilemma.

'One cannot trust the testimony of a mutant,' the commander said carefully, tone levelled to be as reasonable as possible. The sword did not waver. 'She's probably in league with whatever "taint" she's uncovered, by the Throne!'

'A grave allegation,' Kaustus said. The blade stayed where it was.

Orodai eyed the inquisitor along the sword's edge, lip curling, and abruptly he seemed to sag, shoulders drooping. 'She'd bring down the wrath of the Inquisition on my world...' he said softly, his voice almost plaintive.

'Aaah...' Kaustus lowered the sword with a chuckle, sliding it into its sheath. 'Suddenly it all becomes clear.' His voice was thick with amusement. 'Your objection has more to do with your fear of me than of whatever bogeyman my interrogator has exposed.'

Orodai rallied with the look of man determined to preserve as much dignity as he could, though there was precious little to salvage.

'Your organisation's reputation precedes it,' he snapped, fingers questing for blemishes at his throat. 'I've heard the stories. Worlds virus-bombed on the strength of a single rumour. Whole populations wiped out for fear of one heretic.' His jaw tightened. 'I won't trust the fate of my city to the word of... of...' he glanced across at Mita, searching for some sufficiently derogatory term, settling finally for a derisive: 'that!'

'Nor,' said Kaustus, enjoying every moment, 'would I'

And right on cue the retinue chuckled its vicious amusement. Orodai re-holstered his gun, mollified by the shared ridicule of the psyker, the mutant, the wretched interrogator.

Mita bowed her head and thought: In shared cruelty lies acceptance — her own lesson, recalled time and time again.

The Emperor loves me. The Emperor loves me. The Emperor loves me.

Bitter comfort.

She acknowledge with a start that she despised them all, every last one.

'So you don't believe me,' she said, doing her best to ignore the laughter.

Kaustus seated himself again and waved an untroubled hand.

'Spare me your damaged pride,' he said. 'I've already told you I believe you. Something is loose in the underhive and it must be brought to heel. There's no question of that.' He fixed her with a pointed look. 'Whatever that "something" might be.'

'My lord! I recognised the traitor's heraldry!' Her voice came almost as a whimper. 'A fanged skull, leather-winged and homed, rampant against a field of lightning.'

Kaustus's casual posture did not change.

'The mark of the Night Lords!' she shouted, furious at his tranquillity. 'I would not mistake it! I've studied the Insignium Tratoris! I was zealous in memorising such th—'

'Your schooling is of no consequence, interrogator. If reading ancient texts is the full measure of your wisdom then I suspect your tenure with my retinue shall be very short.'

Another guffaw from the mob, another burning moment of shame and hatred.

'My lord...' her voice was quiet, almost plaintive. 'You must believe me.'

'Child.' Kaustus preened at the sleeves of his robe, voice sceptical, 'if a heretic Marine is indeed at large, perhaps you could account for how it is that you — a mere interrogator — were able to escape him?'

Mita opened her mouth.

And closed it again.

In truth, she had barely been able to believe it herself. She had lashed out at the monster with an impetuous psychic strike, a panicky assault without measure or hope of success. It was as if the Night Lord had been utterly unprepared, not just lacking in psychic defence but unaware that such a thing even existed. His mind had been like that of a child, as if the very last thing he had expected to face was a psyker.

Not the type of vulnerability one identified with the Traitor Legions.

'I... I don't know my lord,' she muttered, beaten, 'but I'm certain of the identifica—'

Kaustus silenced her with a sigh.

'That is beyond the point, interrogator,' he growled, looking away with a dismissive wave. 'We thank you for your report nonetheless. It shall be dealt with.'

She opened her mouth to remonstrate, to make him see sense, to scream and shout and vent her frustration until her throat bled, but Kaustus cut her short with a raised palm and a glare.

'It shall be dealt with,' he repeated. 'But not by you.' He turned to face the retinue, crooking a finger to beckon forth a solitary member. 'Dissimulus!'

A man, whose name Mita did not know, stepped from the throng and turned to face him, dipping his head. Mita instinctively dipped inside his mind, tasting the surface of his thoughts. Visually he seemed unremarkable, what few features his robe betrayed were average — his age was indeterminate, his hair cut to a medium length, physically neither tall nor short. Little wonder, Mita reflected, that she'd paid so little attention to him: amongst the menagerie of personalities comprising the retinue he was positively mundane.

In the boiling ocean of his mind, however, he was unique.

Never before had Mita encountered such an indistinct anima. In a typical personality the fronds and tentacles of outward thought clustered at their roots around a solid core of ego, that diamond-hard seed of identity that informed all else, as a bitter stone informs the growth of a peach. Not so here. In the tormented mindscape of this plain man no such centre existed, no nucleus of 'this-is-me' presented itself, and the one uniformity she could identify was a lust, a desire, a craving: though for what she could not say.

She withdrew with less information than she'd held before, and regarded the uninteresting figure with a new sense of caution. What manner of human was unaware even of its own personality, its own gender, its own name?

'Approach, child...' Kaustus said, and the man stepped forwards until he all but touched his master. Kaustus leaned down towards him, and for one surreal instant Mita wondered if the inquisitor planned to kiss him, irrespective of his mask. At the last instant he diverted his face towards the figure's ear and there, looming over like some ancient ogre, he whispered his secret plans.

If the rest of his acolytes felt any jealousy at this preferential treatment, or frustration at being so excluded, even their thoughts failed to betray them. Mita alone struggled with her annoyance, consumed by something that bore all the ugly hallmarks of envy.

She was the interrogator. She was the inquisitor's second. She had found the enemy, and this was her reward — to be ridiculed and excluded? This was the glory she'd pursued?

And then the nameless man broke away from Kaustus's clinch and was gone, walking from Orodai's office without a backward glance. The inquisitor glanced at his remaining disciples and barked a surly ''dismissed'', and Mita imagined that he paused as his eyes passed hers and something dark, some shadow of malice, shifted minutely in the lagoons of his irises.

She left Cuspseal alongside the rest of the retinue, returning to Steepletown with resentment clouding her mind, and with every breath she cursed her master's name for not believing her, for not taking her seriously, for not seeming troubled. There was a Chaos Marine loose in the hive, by the Emperor's tears, and he seemed no more bothered than had he found a fly in his drinking grail.

Mita watched him, and brooded and seethed, and did nothing.

The next morning, installed once more in the drab envelope of her meditation cell, she awoke to the knocking of a servitor-herald, pompously dressed in ermine and satin. She received its monotone message half awake, unashamed of her nakedness before a creature so devoid of emotion, and slammed the door just a little too loudly as it left.

Kaustus had once more requested her presence.

She prepared to join him with all the usual surges of apprehension and frustration that his beckons always entailed, and spent several flustered minutes considering what to wear. It was as if the turmoil of the previous days had never occurred and she was reduced once more to panicking over how best to secure his respect. She hated herself for such meaningless exactitude as fussily choosing her costume, but was enslaved to it nonetheless.

Cog slept on the floor beside her simple palette, and she stepped over him to rummage in her luggage without even attempting stealth. Having noted her dismal mood, he'd come to her cell the night before with child-like words of comfort, and she'd allowed him to sleep on the floor beside her palette with guilty gratitude — there was someone in the galaxy, at least, who liked her. She knew from past experience that nothing short of a blow to the head would wake him from his contented slumber, so she left him to it and got on with the business of dressing. She began by shrugging on a scarlet robe with white and gold filigree at its seams: nothing too ostentatious, but fittingly colourful for the hive's upper tiers. In these decorous corridors and it was the gaudiest and most patterned who went unnoticed, and the drab who attracted the most attention.

Today, attention was something she could do without.

To her great relief the retinue was absent when she reached Kaustus's chambers. He stood amongst a gaggle of macabre servitor-attendants and skull-drones, meticulously fastening his power armour and layering his magnificent robes. Up until the moment that a hovering arcocherub — a baby's corpse riddled with preservative machinery and cogitation engines — settled his mask over his tusked features, he appeared utterly bored by the whole procedure.

Ignored in the doorway, Mita found herself reflecting upon how differently he wore his armour to the fiend that stalked her nightmares, that blue'black monstrosity from the underhive. As an alumnus of the Inquisitorial scholastia she knew more than most about the elaborate biological changes that the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes — the Emperor's Space Marines — underwent. Such things were shrouded in mysticism, and the mere knowledge that each Marine started life as a lowly human marked her as the recipient of privileged secrets. Nonetheless, the specifics of such alterations were beyond her, and she had imagined that, like Kaustus, such warriors wore their armour as she wore a cloak: the fastenings more complex, perhaps, the fabric more arcane, but ''clothing'' nonetheless.

And yet the Night Lord had moved like his armour was his skin, unencumbered, his movement recalling liquid in its smooth, roiling reactions.

Compared to that shadowed figure Kaustus's motions abruptly seemed cumbersome, and Mita marvelled to find herself so unimpressed by him where previously she had thought him awesome.

'My lord,' she said, announcing herself. The flock of servitors dispersed quietly, their task complete, and Mita noticed with chagrin that her master too had chosen a scarlet and white ensemble, albeit far grander than her own.

'Interrogator. Good.'

'You sent for me, my lord?'

'I did. I've decided it's safer to keep you where I can see you. I think we shall spend the day together.'

He sounded almost cheery. Mita feigned a smile.

Governor Zagrif surprised Mita by being neither old, corpulent, sinister or pompous. She'd met a small but illustrative number of Imperial commanders on other worlds, and in her experience the post bred one of either melancholia or megalomania. To a psyker, such things were as palpable as girth, height or clothing, and she failed to detect either in Imperial Commander Cinnavar Zagrif.

He was skinny and short, dressed entirely in white. As she and Kaustus approached his straight-backed throne, flanked by bronze combat servitors like toy soldiers, he regarded her with a watery-eyed expression of pleasure. Dwarfed beneath the vast heraldry of a familial tapestry — crossed sword and sceptre upon a dappled ice-field, crested by a crescent moon and a ring of stars — he seemed the very opposite of authoritative. Mita's expectations were utterly confounded: amongst them all the one thing she had failed to anticipate was a softly spoken man of her own age, with an astral presence that was profoundly dull. When his subconscious flickered a brief tendril of lechery towards her it came almost as a relief.

Almost.

'Kaustus!' he exclaimed, rising with an outstretched hand. 'What news from the deepest darkest depths?' He giggled at his own alliteration, like a child reciting a nursery rhyme.

To Mita's astonishment Kaustus returned the handshake.

'Nothing troublesome, Cinnavar.'

Mita almost choked. The governor didn't notice.

'Good, good.' He glanced towards her. 'And who is this? A consort, perhaps?' He nudged Kaustus mischievously. 'I thought better of you!'

Mita held her breath, waiting for the inquisitor to chop the man in two for his insolence. When he merely chuckled and waved the insinuation aside, she was left wondering if it was she, or he, who had gone insane.

'I'm afraid not, Cinnavar. This is my interrogator.'

Mita bowed formally, doing her best to ignore the smog of promiscuity ebbing from the governor's mind. It was one thing to suspect someone of undressing you with their eyes but quite another to share the experience.

'And to what do we owe this pleasure?' The governor rubbed his hands, eyes flitting to meet the inquisitor's. 'Is she here to help us with the lock?'

For an instant — a single horrific moment — Mita felt Kaustus's emotion. Where before he had presented a solid ball of impenetrable thought, impossible for her to examine or invade, abruptly his defences fell, and what boiled beneath was rage.

But it was only an instant, as sudden as it was intense, and his mind — whatever had caused it to flex so venomously — was once more locked away beneath layers of self control.

'No,' he said.

And was that a blush of guilt swelling on the governor's psyche? Had he said something he shouldn't have? Mita grit her teeth at the uncertainties, the secrets. Something was going on here, something she knew nothing about. What was ''the lock''?

'Fine,' the governor said, struggling to seem dismissive. 'Good, good.'

'I thought the interrogator might appreciate a view of your collection,' Kaustus said, voice tight. 'That is all.'

The governor nodded with the look of a man who has narrowly escaped an unpleasant fate, and gestured towards a set of painted doors to one side. 'B-by all means. Please. By all means.'

Mita found herself regarded by governor and inquisitor alike.

'My lord?' she said.

'Through there,' Kaustus grunted, nodding at the doors.

She pushed them open with a strange sense of foreboding, feeling like some performing animal, and found herself on a narrow bridge, enclosed on all sides by thick plasplex. Even through the ice and settled snow that patterned the tunnel's outer surfaces she could see that the causeway stretched between the hive's central peak — in which the throne room skulked — and a lesser tower, rising parallel from the shadowed depths. She crossed the abyss with a lurch of nausea, horrified at the vertiginous chasm below her feet, and it was only Kaustus's quiet footsteps at her heel that kept her from crying out, or clinging to the handrail for her life.

The tunnel ended in a second set of doors and, with an impatient nod from her master, she pushed her way through.

And stopped.

In all of the palace — a maze of jewelled stairways and iMricately frescoed chapels, cloistered archways hung with tapestries of spun gold and elaborate congresia sporting sculptures of alabaster and onyx — it was difficult to imagine encountering anything that might shatter the atmosphere of perpetual, unyielding opulence. Nonetheless, Mita stepped through the painted doorway and felt her knees weaken.

'The governor has a fondness for curios,' Kaustus muttered, in explanation.

It was like a gallery. A bazaar. A treasure trove. And it was vast.

There were windows marking the entire periphery. Tiny reinforced portals, perhaps, but windows nonetheless: a subtle symbol of wealth which implied this one chamber, this circular cavern with its sky-blue dome and pearlescent columns, stretched the entire diameter of its tower.

And within it?

She'd never seen such measures. At close intervals, raised on silver plinths and bordered by bright illuminators, the governor's collection of antiquities and valuables could have easily held her spellbound for weeks. Books, archeotech, pictslates, sculptures, pickled beasts, jewels, antiques... At every angle there stood some priceless rarity, some article of unthinkable value, and Mita's blood raced to see them all. She tottered forwards as if drunk, and extended a hand towards a nearby exhibit — a great emerald containing at its heart the shadowy form of a tiny lizard.

'No touching.' Kaustus chided behind her, like a parent slapping his child's wrists. A gloved finger gestured vaguely upwards, drawing her eye towards the ceiling. Set in a wide ring around the plinth, like spotlights with narrow apertures, a bevy of lasguns glared down upon her, crude servos tracking every movement. At their centre, like some grotesque trophy displayed at the heart of a spider's web, a disembodied human head fixed its baleful eyes — long since replaced by compound optics — upon the tip of her outstretched hand.

'Security servitors.' Kaustus shrugged, voice bored. Mita noted without surprise — and only a small shiver of revulsion — that similar effigies, rotting flesh hanging from slack bones, gazed down upon each and every item in Zagrif s collection.

She pulled back her hand slowly, uncomfortably aware of the machine intelligence above. At some arbitrary point its attention seemed to dwindle, as if no longer judging her a threat, and the lasguns returned to a neutral spread with a soft hiss.

'Effective,' she said, controlling her voice.

'Indeed.'

She turned towards the remainder of the room, her eyes drawn towards an accumulation of spotlights on one side, and a dais higher than any other. She took a step towards it, curious, and stopped.

Something uncoiled in her brain like a great spider, scuttling between uncertainties, and she knew.

'He's here...' she whispered, fists clenching, head jerking from left to right, seeking that hunched shape, that midnight form, those burning red eyes.

'What did you say?' Kaustus said, his voice so close to her ear that she jumped.

'H-he's here! The Night Lord! I feel him! He's in here!'

And then something sharp tugged against the fabric of her arm, and before she could glimpse down to see what had punctured her skin the lights of the gallery dimmed in her eyes, the sky-blue dome clouded over, and her consciousness spiralled away.

Zso Sahaal

Zso Sahaal sat upon a throne of fur and bone, armoured fingers steepled before him, and brooded on past and future.

Tomorrow he would strike. A guildhall, perhaps or some other Administratum stronghold some communicatory centre where the Imperial fools would keep their mutant slaves.

It had been the witch that had given him the idea. Mutants and slaves... Yes.

That was tomorrow. The future. The first step upon a road to redemption.

As for the past, as for that swirl of violence and chaos that had brought him here, to this smog-thick place, as for the madness that left him seated in darkness upon a throne of bone, as for yesterday...

They had carried him.

Following the battle of the Steel Forest the tribe had lifted him from the debris where the witch had struck him down, placed him carefully on a litter, and borne him up to their secret platforms amongst the canopies of the heat vents.

In retrospect the treatment was as galling as it was comforting. True, he found himself amongst a community that would go to any length to keep him from harm... but to be so manhandled — and by devotees of the withered Emperor, no less! Sahaal had awoken with a suppressed shiver of disgust at the thought.

But then, his memories were thick with ugliness already.

The witch, the witch... She had struck him to the floor with a single flex of her powers, like a bomb between his eyes, and he shivered that such a slight being should hold such power over him. The witch. The bitch. He had not expected to face psykers.

Steeling himself — disgruntled by the need to sink so low — he breathed a reluctant prayer to the Dark Gods. The ruinous powers had always been allies to his cause — enemies of his enemies, but never his friends — and even now, when he needed their patronage, he shivered at the prospect of openly courting their involvement. If the deities of the warp resented his reluctance they gave no sign of it, within instants a dark stirring played at the edge of his senses.

He would not be unprepared for the witch a second time.

Had the Imperium truly fallen so far from its much-vaunted light during his absence? Had the Carrion God truly allowed such deviants to enter his service ungoverned? Sahaal could hardly despise the impurity of mutation — the gods to whom he had just appealed thrived on such things, after all — but it was a needle of hypocrisy that fed his hatred nonetheless. The mutant stood for everything the Imperium reviled — impurity, uncertainty, vulnerability, corruptibility — and yet here they were, put to work, devils made useful. Just another sign of the Emperor's weakness. Another symptom of his unsuitability for deification.

How long before these psykers too were made scapegoats, blamed for actions that were both sanctioned and encouraged, just as Sahaal's master had been?

Oh, my master...

Konrad Curze. The Night Haunter. The Shadowed Martyr. Antecedent of the Corona Nox. Sahaal breathed his mentor's names with choked reverence and, as ever, found himself calmed and angered in equal parts.

'We shall repay their insult yet,' he whispered, voice lost to the darkness of his helm.

He returned his thoughts to the witch, flexing his fingers introspectively. She had tasted his thoughts. She could find him again — of that he had no doubt. She had known what he was.

And he, equally, had seen her true self.

She had worn it emblazoned on her collar, a thing so inconspicuous he had barely noticed it at the time, and only in the fog of enforced sleep had the symbol come to the fore of his mind: an embroidered ''I'', bisected three times by bars of black and silver, with a tiny skull fashioned at the crux of the central bar.

The Inquisition. Hunting him. He had no time for such distractions.

A day had since passed, and the Shadowkin lair within the Steel Forest had been deserted at his command. Centuries of tradition, long decades of territorial security, had perished in the instant it had taken him to shrug and announce: 'We move.' The witch had escaped, and that meant the Inquisition would return. They must leave at once, he knew, and seek refuge in a place better suited to repel attack.

And the Shadowkin, his dismal little allies, had not complained once. Overtly.

And yes, his motives were pure, yes, the move was necessary, yes, the gang would be purged if they did not leave. But still he could hear the mutters in the shadows, he could taste the resentment of his flock, he could feel their worship wane. Condemnitor Chianni had not survived the battle, and with her leadership lost his grip upon his miniature empire had grown tenuous indeed.

He took them into the deep, leaving behind only a gaggle of scouts to watch over their former domain. He led them into those boundless wastelands he had explored in his first days within the hive, into the foetid swamp zones where the heat of the planet warmed the air and sulphur bubbled across the pools. In these smog-thick caverns he prowled before them, eschewing the snaking caravans that trekked at his heel and the throng that sang devotional songs to raise their spirits... And also muttered, always muttered, when they thought he could not hear.

There was no place deeper than this.

He brought them to where the hulk of a drilling behemoth pitched like a rusted island from the sludge of an oily ocean, lost to the shadows. He guessed that at one time it had dug these basins and caves, these rustmud caverns, a swarm of humanity building and settling in its wake. And here it had faltered — perhaps blunted by its labours or else merely forgotten, with none caring to settle so deep — and rotted in its own fuel, drowned in the snow that its exertions had melted, with only its massive loins rearing from its caldera like a tombstone.

Here Sahaal had hidden his cache of weapons and ammunition, and here he brought his children, his black-draped tribe, on their exodus from the Steel Forest.

The Shadowkin crossed the thick waters and tried to ignore the silvery fronds that moved in the deep, and settled upon the island without comment. Their lord had won a great victory, he had driven the heretic interlopers from their cherished lands — why then must they leave those lands behind? Why must they come to this blighted place?

And in low voices, in muffled hisses that they didn't dare imagine he could hear, they asked: How was he struck down so easily by the witch? Was he not supposedly mighty? Could he not have crushed her with ease?

Sahaal issued two tasks to his tribe, before even they hunted and fed their children. The first was that they dispatch scouts into the shadows, to listen to rumour and collect gossip, and to bring to him the man named Slake. He commanded this without explanation, and those warriors thus selected scattered into the night without question.

His second command was that they build him a throne.

For all that he considered his command above dissent, Sahaal was no fool, and as his tribe worked with bone and rag to fashion a fitting seat for their lord, their prayers seemed muted, their prostrations halfhearted, and their anxious glances of fear betrayed the simmering glut of resentment. Sahaal took it all in and stored it away, but could not bring himself to be troubled. The Night Lords commanded obedience, not affection, and whether these scum liked him or not was irrelevant. They would do what he told them, and that was enough.

They built the throne from the crippled spars of the great digger, sealed in improvised forges, and covered the seat in furs of black and brown. The arms and back they topped with stolen bones and teeth, a skull upon each hand pommel and freshly-taken heads — those of slain vindictors they had brought with them — mounted on spines above die whole. Sahaal found their grim iconography gratifying: they, like his ancient Legion, understood the power of morbidity and the fear that went along with it. That they devoted their gruesome trophies to the glory of the Emperor was the one sour note in an otherwise pleasing practice.

He ascended his throne with no small measure of pride, and as the Shadowkin dispersed to tend to their own needs he lost himself in the memories of glories that had long since passed, never once pausing to consider the dissatisfaction of his people.

On Tsagualsa, the carrion world, the Legion had raised a palace for its lord.

He had gathered his captains together, and they came with a fleet of bladed prows and bitter warriors, skulls displayed at belt and shoulder, scriptures crossed through with bloody ink.

Horus was dead. The heresy that had looked ready to rip the bloated Imperium apart had ground to a halt. The Legions that had turned from the Emperor and sided instead with Chaos, that boiling fount of madness and disorder, were scattered, licking their wounds, bemoaning their losses, running for their lives.

Not so the Night Lords!

Alone amongst them all, the Night Haunter's contempt for his father had outdated, and outlasted, the rebellion. The Emperor's favoured son Horus had corrupted the other dark Legions, pouring poison upon their primarchs with insidious whispers and sweet promises, but not so to the Night Haunter. Not to Konrad Curze. He had seen his father for what he was long before. He had chosen Chaos as a tool — as an ally — but was not seduced by it. And when Horus was cut down, when the other Traitor Legions were shattered, when distant Terra was liberated and the Emperor triumphant, had the Night Lords fled? Had they yelped in fear and skulked into the gloom to fight amongst themselves, as had the others?

No. No, not they.

Their primarch unleashed them, he fed them the fear they yearned, and on Tsagualsa he called them to his side, and showed them his palace.

It was built of bodies: still living, fused at broken joint and sliced skin, knotted around coiling vertebrae and dissected sinews.

In the screaming gallery, where a carpet of moaning faces rose in broad steps — writhing spines and clutching fingers shivering along every edge — the Dark Lord received his captains with a bow.

He was naked, but for a cloak of black feathers, and had never been more magnificent. Sahaal and his brothers dropped to their knees and hailed him: their father, their master, their lord, their Dominus Nox.

He regarded each in turn, and to each he nodded once, a feral jolt of recognition, like a wolf regarding its pack. All of them were there: Quissax Kergai, Master of the Armoury, whose scouring of the Launeus forgeworld had crippled the loyalists of the Trigonym sector. Vyridium Silvadi, Lord of the Fleet, who had routed the flotilla of Admiral Ko'uch and bombarded the Ravenguard for five days before they could retreat, unsupported, like the cowards they were. Even Koor Mass, encased now in the sleek shell of a dreadnought, its every surface decorated with flayed skin, had deigned to attend his master's audience.

There was one other who Sahaal noted amongst the menagerie, and he avoided that one's gaze, finding his countenance distasteful. Krieg Acerbus, youngest of the Haunter's captains, incalculably vast and swollen with pendants and gory souvenirs of his works, leant on the shaft of his great poweraxe and smiled with insolemn pleasure at his master's attention.

Sahaal ignored the giant's smirking features and concentrated instead upon his lord, resplendent upon a throne of obsidian and silver.

The Night Haunter paused to gather his thoughts, drawing his feathered cloak around him like a great crow folding its wings — and then he spoke.

He told them of his bitter crusade. He told them of his hate for the traitor-Emperor who had turned upon him without warning or honour, a hate that burned bright and uncfuenched, but as patient as time itself. He told them that they, his children, his dark warriors, his prefects of fear personified, were each worth a dozen of any loyalist Marine, with ''purity'' on their ignorant lips and devotion in their hollow, hypocritical souls.

He told them that they would have their revenge upon the withered god, and they cheered in the shadows of the writhing mausoleum and clashed their gauntlets against their breasts in joy.

And then he drew breath and told them he was going to die, and their joy crumbled like ash.

Sahaal returned to the present in the shifting smog of the rustmud swamplands in a bleak mood, his master's morbid promise ringing through his mind. More than ever the need for action, for some palpable sense of gain, burned through his brain. The bitterness of the Night Haunter was a patient force, but his fury was far sharper and his discipline far younger. What did all this brooding achieve? What must he do? How must he act?

Seated amongst his tattered rags, Zso Sahaal found himself dizzied by a rush of panic and impatience, surging in his guts, calling him to action, to violence, to murder.

It was not a wise time to approach him with a protest.

There were two: young Shadowkin standing close enough to each other to beuay their nervousness. They would not have undertaken their quiet rebellion alone, and so like children clutching for the comfort of their parents, they had come together.

The first was a man in his twenties, shaven-headed and tattooed, whose circlet of shattered ribs and bangles of beaded finger bones marked him out as a fine warrior. Where an older man might have leaned upon a staff this youth clutched at a heavy volume of Imperial scripture like a lifeline, as if no harm could befall him so long as he touched its battered surface.

His companion was a woman of similar age, hair dyed purple and blue, swept back from her skull like a teardrop, whose black cloak dangled with stolen scalps, hands crooked around a tall rifle. A sniper, then — another warrior of the tribe.

Two fools, staggering into the presence of their lord to register their dissent, each silently praying that the other would speak first. Sahaal watched them without movement. He knew how to deal with insubordination.

'My lord?' the woman said after a long pause, unsure whether he was awake. 'M-my lord, may we address you?'

Sahaal let the silence roll, enjoying their squirms.

'Master, we seek an audience...' the man said, prostrating himself beside his fellow.

'Speak,' Sahaal voxed finally, enjoying the thrill of horror that passed across their faces.

Again, the woman found her nerve first.

'M-my lord, we... We are unsure of this place. The hunters have found little to eat and the tribe is hungry. W-we...' she faltered, glancing at the man for support.

'We don't understand why you've brought us here,' he said, the accusation firm in his voice. 'We don't understand what you intend for us. Are we to continue our holy purges, or...'

'Or do you have some new task for us?' the woman's voice too grew more confident with each word. 'We... we would understand your wishes.'

An uncomfortable silence settled. Sahaal decided to probe the depths of this dissatisfaction, impressed by their audacity.

'Have I not given command,' he said, 'that the man named Slake be brought to me?'

'Y-yes my lord, but—'

'Have I not given command that the tribe fortify itself?'

'You have, but—'

'Have I not led you when leadership was needed, and commanded you when command was required?'

'You have, my lord.'

He stood and raised the volume of his voxcaster, towering above them.

'Why then, thrice-damned, do you stand before me to question my orders!'

'We mean no insult, lord!' It was almost a squeal. 'We only seek to understand! The tribe is uncertain!'

In that instant, with the woman's silent glimpse into the shadows, Sahaal grasped the magnitude of his problem. This pair were not operating alone, he saw, not a protesting minority amongst a whole. No, they were representatives — great warriors elected to present the clan's discontent to its leader.

'Preysight,' Sahaal whispered, and again the lenses of his eyes blazed with magnified acuity, penetrating the shadows. And yes... yes, there they were: the elders and the youngsters, the women and children and warriors of the tribe, all of them gathered to listen beyond the circle of light around the throne, all of them hungry for answers.

His rule was not as secure as he had thought.

He needed the tribe.

'What heresy is this?' he roared, brandishing his claws. 'What filth is this!'

The two warriors shivered on the floor and he advanced towards them, step by murderous step.

'What pitiful circumstance has brought me to you! The whole hive is lost to the dark, the population corrupted by the taint, and this is my army? These are my loyal crusaders?' He spread his arms and addressed the dark ceiling of the cavern, theatrical even in his rage. 'A tribe of disloyal fools and simpering traitors! A mob who reject the word of the Emperor's chosen because they do not understand it!'

He shrieked the words until the cavern shuddered and, oh — it hurt to claim such a link to the withered god, but...

But oh, it was delicious to see such terror in their eyes.

'Kneel!' he bellowed, and the young warriors obeyed without thought.

He would kill them, he resolved. He would behead them so the entire gang could watch, and all of them would know the price of disquiet, the consequence of insolence. They would obey him, or face his wrath.

It was an inelegant ultimatum — he knew that as soon as he decided it. He needed the Shadowkin as his allies — the recovery of the Corona depended upon it — and if he must kill nine in every ten to secure the obedience of those that remained, his army would be small indeed.

But there was no other choice, no option but to let fly his rage, to hack off these two heads — and any other that dared question him.

Yes. It was necessary.

And secretly, silently, a dark portion of his mind giggled to itself and said: Yes, yes, make your excuses... Deny that you cherish the slaughter... Peddle your pretend-honour as much as you like.

It will do you no good, Night Lord.

You're a monster. And you know it.

He raised his claws and felt the silence of expectation: a hundred eyes regarding him from the shadows, a hundred gasps burning in his ears. The condemned warriors moaned low in their throats, and—

And a commotion arose across the still waters, faint lights wending their way towards the distant shore.

It was the scouts Sahaal had left in the Steel Forest, and with his vision sharpened he could see they were carrying a survivor.

It was Condemnitor Chianni, and as the rafts slunk out from the rusted island to return her to her tribe, her fevered moans rose in volume to echo through the swamps.

'H-hail!' she yowled, delirious. 'Hail the Emperor's angel!'

It was like a shaft of light, striking Sahaal in his moment of rage. His thin lips curled in a smile and slowly, banishing that secret voice to the rear of his mind, he sheathed his claws.

Obedience could be secured through loyalty as well as terror. Sahaal's master had understood that.

Condemnitor Chianni was loyal to him. They were loyal to her. It was not a complex manipulation.

'Behold the Emperor's mercy!' Sahaal said, inventing wildly. 'He spares those that are wise, and offers redemption to those who are not.' He waved the condemned warriors away, returning to his throne.

'Ave Imperator!' filtered across the waters, Chianni's plaintive cry repeating over and over.

'You should listen to your leader,' Sahaal said to the warriors' retreating backs, repressing a chuckle at his own good fortune. 'She is far wiser than you.'

Her leg had been peppered by shrapnel from the explosion, and her throat crushed by an inelegant swipe of a vindictor's maul. When her bearers reached the foot of his throne she nonetheless insisted upon standing, staggering as best she could to kneel before him.

'My lord,' she croaked, voice forever changed by the bruise across her neck, 'I am gladdened to see you. I feared the worst when I awoke to find the tribe gone.' Her eyes blinked with joyful tears. 'Emperor be praised that they — and you — are safe.'

Sahaal was uncomfortable with such unrestrained warmth, and struggled to find an answer. The condemnitor's return to the Shadowkin had effected an almost miraculous transformation, all their sullenness and suspicion crumbling upon itself, becoming devotion once more. It was as if they had been waiting to have their zeal directed, as if their obeisance was without question but, lacking an interface, had become cold and bitter. None of them had relished facing their demigod master themselves, and only via the mediating presence of their leader could they direct their energies.

By the mere art of worshipping him, Condemnitor Chianni had abruptly become his most vital resource. He breathed a thankful prayer to the spirit of his master for returning her to his side in his moment of need.

'Rest,' he instructed her, accepting her grasping supplications without any outward display of chagrin. 'Restore your strength.'

He raised his voice so that the whole island could hear him, chilling tones like a breath upon the air. 'We must all restore our strength,' he announced, pulling the robes of the throne around him once more. 'Tomorrow... tomorrow we strike a blow for the Emperor's glory!'

And this time there was no muttering, no dark exchanges of glances, no uncertainty in the Shadowkin response.

This time they cheered.

Mita Ashyn

She was dreaming, and that was the one comfort she could take: that no matter how awful, how sickening, how wretched, the things she witnessed were only the product of her own mind, and owed nothing to reality.

There was a procession — that was the first detail that came upon her: a train of walking figures dressed in black cloaks, arising from the nothingness of her sleep like specks of oil, consolidating into figures that moved and sung. Leaning upon gnarled canes, they chanted in mantra-like harmony, stepping in time like a slow-motion army.

Her perspective shifted, widening its net, and a hive-shell starport opened up below her, hangars and towers jostling amongst baroque pylons and sweeping launch-pads, where fat shuttles sulked amongst chanting techpriests, blessed and maintained simultaneously. Here the temperature dipped, subject to the frozen whimsy of the storms that raged beyond the opening in the hive's shell. Here, alone in all the city, a hiver could brave the snow and catch a glimpse — cloud-shrouded and as dark as coal, but a glimpse nonetheless — of the sky.

At the end of a broad concourse, where would-be passengers thronged and shouted and complained, grotesque servitor drones dangled from ceiling joists like flies in webs of steel, needle-arms checking documents, uncaring eyes assessing passengers for concealed weapons, signs of disease, or whatever other arbitrary criteria they chose. Those that passed their capricious test hurried through ferrocrete arches towards the shuttles, whilst those that failed backed away in silent horror, split from their loved ones and destitute, all their funds wasted on the price of a single rejected ticket. Such wretches would invariably wind up dead, or else filter their way into the underhive where all the other dispossessed clamoured for warmth. But there could be no protest here, not beneath the gaze of the vindictors who straddled the entry gates and perched within turrets to either side of the concourse, helmed gazes surveying the sullen crowd for the slightest infraction. The dried blood on the ground was silent testament to the extent of their vigilance.

Amongst the crowds the procession of black cloaks marched like a shadow, and Mita's slumbering mind again wafted past, intrigued, wondering at their relevance. Well accustomed to the psychic insanity of prediction trances, with their excesses of colour and sound, to her this dreary vision could hardly be considered noteworthy. She wondered vaguely what it signified and scolded herself for such unfounded superstition. Beyond the realms of the psychic trance a dream was just that — a dream: no more meaningful than a random scattering of images, drawn together in an approximation of narrative.

But still... There was something not right here, in this fantasy vision...

Something that jarred...

Mita had arrived upon Equixus as part of the Inquisitorial caravan, and was therefore received at the uppermost of the hive's three starports. So great was the polarity between that tranquil maze of incense-shrouded lounges and this brutal compound that every detail shocked her, every petty act of rejection burned into her mind. Such was the reality of hive life — on every tier, a different world — but she had never witnessed the place laid out below her in the flesh. Why then had her slumbering brain chosen to imagine it, to fabricate its minutae as part of a dream?

The procession of cloaked figures joined the rear of the winding queue.

For a moment Mita had wondered whether she had somehow slipped into the Furor Arcanum, studying the strands of future possibility, but no: such visions were fat with fantasy, abstractions that required interpretation rather than humdrum visions such as this.

There was only one other option.

Could it be that her astral self had left its body? Could it be that these visions were neither dream nor fantasy nor future possibility, but presently occurring events? Could it be that she was remotely viewing things as they happened?

Of the four major disciplines practised in the Scholastia Psykana, she had always considered herself primarily a precognitor — observing the whimsy of the warp to determine future events — and had occasionally employed her talents as an empathitor — skimming emotion and thought from the minds of those around her. Even in the field of animus motus — telekinesis, the most physically draining of all — she had some small natural talent... but in mastering the role of proculitor, the remote viewer, she had failed dismally.

It was a discipline that carried its own risks, and was best suited to those without the distraction of other talents: allowing one's astral form to roam free was to expose it to any malevolent force within the warp that paid an interest. Mita had tried it only once, during her first year at the scholastia, and had been informed by the grim-faced adept-tutors that her mind was too ordered, too anxious, too uptight, to engender success. The discipline required the ability to un-focus, to relax — but to maintain a careful veneer of security nonetheless.

Could it be that in her present state — slumbering, surfing on an ebb of dreams and fantasies — her mind had allowed itself to relax enough to break free?

And that it was therefore vulnerable to attack?

With anxiety rising, choosing caution over curiosity, she tried to wake.

And could not.

Panic gripped her then, and as if from a great distance she remembered being in Governor Zagrifs gallery of treasures. She remembered the short stab of pain against her arm and slowly, with the certainty growing, she realised what was happening.

She had been drugged.

She had been knocked out like some misbehaving beast, shredding her defences and her disciplines and now — now, when she needed the ability to awake like never before — she found herself trapped, ineffectual, relaxed to the point that she had been plunged into a discipline that she had never been taught to master.

Her warp-gaze had elected to show her something, and she was powerless to decline.

Even as her astral form flexed in agitation the crowds below her began to shriek. The dreamscape haze turned bloody red and the phalanx of parading figures threw back the folds of their black cloaks to expose weapons held against their chests, and opened fire.

This, then, was what her senses had brought her here to see.

It was a massacre.

The attackers concentrated, where they could, upon the vindictor sentries — pressing superior numbers against them before they could respond. Even in the midst of her alarm Mita watched, helpless, as one by one the armoured Preafects toppled from their perches, lasbolts gashing them open, shotguns tumbling from grasping fists.

The crowd had become a living organism, bolting and flexing with a single voice, and at their heart people fell underfoot and were trampled, screams lost to the collective wail of terror.

When finally those few vindictors that remained summoned the presence of mind to return fire their targets proved more elusive than they had anticipated. With their black cloaks removed the aggressors dispersed, just faces amongst the turmoil, snapping off opportunistic rounds before vanishing into the crowd. Inevitably, the enforces chose retaliation above discretion.

Snapping orders across the breadth of the concourse, they turned their shotguns upon the crowd and opened fire indiscriminately. Such was the reality of the Emperor's law: it was better to sacrifice the innocent in pursuit of the guilty than to allow the heretic, the traitor or the abomination to escape.

At that moment, as the roadway grew slick with blood, as the screams of dying women and children saturated Mita's dreaming mind, her psychic senses struck upon a dark suspicion. A taint, almost, an infinitesimal cancer, gnawing at the edge of her perception.

He's here...

She drew back from the spectacle, noting that already a column of vindictors rushed to reinforce their beleaguered fellows, and cast her eye further outwards. This was a dangerous moment. Where before she had raged against the dream now she must immerse herself within it, sinking into its folds, trawling its shadows for her target. As she did so with a shudder the colours around her intensified, the edges of buildings and cables hardened—

And in the warp, a hair's breadth from reality itself, the unctuous wisp of light that was Mita's astral form brightened, like a flare.

At the gate the crowd broke its ranks and swarmed through the checkpoints. Shrieking and fleeing across the concrete beyond, cloaks flapping, the starport descended piece by bloody piece into anarchy. Hundreds had died already, and as Mita shifted her psychic self towards the dark blemish she sought, leaving behind the crackle of gunfire and the shouts of the wounded, she knew that hundreds more would join them.

And she knew, now, that it was all a waste.

The attack was merely a diversion.

She found it — him — nearby, drawn to his spectral shadow like a shark to blood.

He had crawled from the depths of the undercity from a fissure at the hive's base, where industrial smog belched upwards in long curtains, and had scaled the plated walls of the lower tiers claw by claw, rising towards the starport's gaping launchfields not from within, but without. Where normally a squad of vindictors could be found, thermal cloaks flapping in the wind, gazing out in ceaseless vigil for just such an incursion, now the beast's route was clear, now the sentries had rushed off to reinforce elsewhere, now his shadow fell across nothing but empty concrete and silent, unattended shuttles.

The Night Lord's entrance to the starport went utterly unnoticed, by all but Mita.

She swept around him with the dreamscape fracturing at her heel, all her tenuous energies gobbled by his presence. Where before she had felt the taint about him like a faint promise, now it was a wound in reality itself, swarming around him and sucking at her mind. He had opened himself to Chaos, she could see, and in consequence there was some strange quality to him in this esoteric reality, some otherness that here, in this place of uncertain physicality and warp-borne visions, burned around him like a corona. She felt as though she swam a viscous ocean, and to even approach him took every shred of her effort. He existed at the heart of a great darkness, a blemish in the warp, and she struggled to see him through the fog of his soul. Something was happening to his boundary, some trick of what passed for light. Some sense of motion.

Of swarming...

And the voices... Cluttering, whispering, giggling tones, on the cusp of hearing. Were they real?

The Raptor dragged behind him a jaegar squad of humans, coated warriors who wasted little effort in attempting to speed his climb, content to allow their lord to take their weight. One by one they joined him at the edge of the platform, casting off ropes and buckles, unlimbering from cases upon their backs long tubes, hollow and undecorated, like the blowpipes of some jungle race.

The voices reached a keening pitch in Mita's mind and the air — the very fabric of this fantasy place — began to boil around the Chaos Marine's form, as if his mere presence were anathema to reality.

He paused. He glanced around himself as if listening to something that only he could hear, and his companions exchanged nervous glances.

'She is here,' he said.

'M-my lord?'

The witch. She is here. She is watching!

Mita's panic surged. How could he know?

In fear and reflex she tried to kick herself free of the dream, but it was too late, she had immersed herself too deeply, the drug continued to grip her blood, and she could not escape into the waking world.

The Night Lord's companions had taken up combat stances, knives and hatchets brandished.

'Where, my lord?' one hissed, voice little more than a whisper. 'What should we do?'

'Fear not,' the monster said, and its voice betrayed its amusement. 'We each have our guardian spirits. It is not wise to eavesdrop on one such as I. As the bitch will discover.'

And then the distortions that boiled around his outline seemed to pulse, and the fabric of the dreamscape ripped, and there, there, like splinters of shadow hanging in the sky, the chittering somethings of the warp were released.

They clamoured around her. They pressed in, trying to fasten leech-like mouths to her screaming soul, slipping long claws into her mind.

And finally, as the sound of the Night Lord's laughter rushed in to fill her world, as the cost of scrying too deep unfolded its tentacles and teeth around her, the drugs that crippled her body ran their course and she awoke, mercifully, gratefully, with a scream.

She was in her cell, she saw immediately. Whatever had happened to her, whoever had dragged her, she'd been returned to her quarters without so much as a braise. Given that Kaustus was the only one present when unconsciousness had claimed her, it was an uncomfortable possibility that presented itself. Had he done this to her?

But why? Why had he called her to the governor's gallery? Why had he instructed her through those doors? And why, Emperor's oath, why, would her own master incapacitate her just as she sensed the enemy's presence?

She pushed it from her mind. It was an enigma that would have to wait.

She was dressed and sprinting towards her master's suite within instants, and with every footfall she blotted out the horror of what had happened inside the dream. Her tutors at the scholastia would have been revolted by her foolishness, scrying so close and so unguarded to a creature of Chaos — little wonder she'd fallen prey to the predators of the warp! She should no more hunt sharks by painting herself in fresh blood than she should use her warpsight to spy upon agents of the ruinous powers, and as she berated herself Kaustus's unkind words came back to her with razor-like clarity:

'You lack experience. You are unqualified in the ways of Chaos.'

He'd been right. The bastard.

Still, she lived yet. She'd escaped — though barely. And now she had news for the inquisitor that could not wait.

'My lord!' she howled, bursting past the sentries at his doorway, 'I know where he is! I know where the trai—'

And stopped.

Kaustus was not in his chambers.

A semicircle of amused stares greeted her abrupt silence, the retinue taking its leisure en masse. Priests glanced up from mumbled prayers, scholars raised horned brows from ancient manuscripts, warriors paused in games of dice, and on every hooded face a demeaning smile played.

'Looks like someone finally woke up,' said one.

Mita blanched. 'I... What? What do you mean?'

'The inquisitor said you were taking a break.' A chuckle rolled across the room.

Indignity burst like a ripe boil in Mita's mind.

'I was drugged, warpspit and piss! What do you expect?'

'Yeah... He said you'd been suffering from paranoia, too.'

More titters circulated. Mita took a breath and rose above it.

'Where is he?' she demanded. 'I haven't time for this. It's important.'

'He isn't to be disturbed.'

'Tell me! I order you to tell me!'

She knew it was a mistake as soon as she'd said it. The temperature seemed to drop.

'Is that so?' one of them said.

Several figures — blocky shapes with the roiling movements of warriors — slouched to their feet, drawing close with languid menace, lips twisted in scowls.

'I don't think,' one growled, 'that we're in the mood to be taking orders from you.'

'You know I outrank you,' she said, almost keeping the quaver from her voice. The largest of the thugs was all but touching her now, and it was only the psychic pall of amusement from the others that prevented her from staggering away. She refused to give them the satisfaction of another humiliation.

'And you know,' the brute grunted, stabbing a finger against her chest, 'that we could snap you like a twig.'

Prodding her, on reflection, was a mistake.

'I won't tolerate this disrespect any more,' she whispered, as much to herself as to the man, and without warning she raised her knee as hard and fast as she could—

—directly into his crotch.

There was a noise not unlike a damp crunch.

He went down with a gurgle, and that might have been enough to end the matter, perhaps even to gain her a modicum of esteem from the shrieking fool's comrades — had she been finished with him. She was not.

She knelt on his chest and pushed a hand against his forehead, ignoring his cries. She dispensed with subtlety, plunged a dagger of psychic thought into his moronic brain, and needled about until the information she sought rose to the fore. She swam through simple thoughts, hunted down her target, and left with a vindictive kick.

The warrior died with a gasp.

'He's with the governor, then,' Mita said, examining the information she'd extracted. The retinue stared agog mouths hanging open.

'Thanks,' she nodded to the smoking corpse. 'Don't get up.'

Kaustus was waiting for her outside the governor's quarters: successfully taking the indignant wind out of her sails. He'd been forewarned of what she'd done — one of the other retinue members calling ahead, clearly — and hers was not the only foul temper.

'Diota Vasquillius,' he hissed, eyes flashing behind his mask, 'has served me for nine years. I once saw him kill a tyranid carnifex on Saliius-Dictai, loading and firing a lascannon without assistance. I've seen him strangle orks with his bare hands. I've seen him kill genest—'

'My lord,' she interrupted, ignoring his bulging eyes. 'I suspect he never faced a witch in a bad mood.'

Kaustus glared at her for long seconds.

'Correct,' he said, finally, and again she felt that strange sense of respect, as though the line between impressing and insulting her master was fine indeed.

'I have news,' she said, pressing her advantage. 'I... I have slept. I have seen where the Traitor Marine i—'

'Interrogator, we have discussed this. I assured you it was being dealt with.'

'There was an attack, my lord! U-upon the spaceport! I saw it! It may still be under way!'

Kaustus eyed her suspiciously, absorbing her words.

'An attack?' he said, and for the first time Mita felt that finally he was taking her seriously.

'Yes! I watched it all! Hundreds died!'

Kaustus half turned away, fingers kneading together. He spoke beneath his breath, and Mita struggled to hear. 'The spaceport...' he muttered. 'Why the spaceport?'

'I... I don't know, my lord.'

He turned back to her as if surprised by her presence, and again she felt that there were elements to this maze she did not understand, pieces moving across a mighty chessboard of which she could witness only a fraction. The certainty was rapidly settling upon her that she could trust the testimony of nobody but herself.

'What should we do, my lord?' she hissed, astonished at her master's display of indecision. Never before had she seen him so affected by a sliver of news, let alone one from her mouth.

'Do?' he muttered. 'I... W-we should... We...' His voice trailed off, his eyes gazing into nothing.

She stared, astonished and frightened by this new Kaustus.

'My lord?'

And then abruptly he was back, eyes focused, voice hard, and it was as if he had never been away.

'We do nothing,' he growled, turning away, gesturing at the gaudily dressed servitor-doorman to the governor's chambers.

'But—'

'But nothing! How many times must I say it, interrogator? It is being dealt with. I have my own methods.'

The door swung open and Kaustus stepped away.

'But — my lord!' her cry caught him on the threshold, and he turned back to regard her from the corner of his eye. 'What of the vision?' she said. 'What of the attack? I cannot do nothing.'

He cocked his head, sighing, then nodded to himself.

'You will see to it that our mutual friend Commander Orodai keeps his nerve. There will be no action, do you understand? The attack must go unanswered!'

She glared down the length of his pointed finger, brandished like a gun, and swallowed.

She wanted to shriek: But why?

She wanted to grip him by his peacock-lapels and shake him until he gave her the answers she wanted. Needed.

She wanted to understand what in the name of Terra's arse he was playing at.

But more than anything she wanted his approval and his respect, so once more she dipped in a bow, swallowed her objections, and said: 'Yes, my lord. The Emperor prevails.'

'Indeed he does, interrogator. Be about your duties.'

The door began to close. Mita pounced upon her one final chance like a famished tiger.

'My lord?'

This time he did not turn back. 'Yes, interrogator?'

'I... Before, when I was in the gallery, and... and I thought I felt the traitor's presence...?'

'Yes?'

'Was... was I drugged, my lord?'

His pause was a fraction too long.

'Don't be ridiculous,' he said. 'You fainted again. It is a habit you should learn to control.'

He closed the door behind him.

Mita Ashyn was beginning to consider the very real chance that her master was insane.

She returned to Cuspseal with a sense of urgency, vying with confusion for dominance. Accompanied once more by Cog, she tolerated the elevator descent with cracking patience and raced upon her arrival to Orodai's offices, to carry out her master's orders. That she neither understood nor agreed with them was irrelevant. This time, she vowed, passing stammering vindictor clerks and objecting doormen, she would not fail. Orodai's office was empty.

She was too late.

In the wake of the assault upon the starport, unwilling to endure one more attack upon his Preafectus Vindictaire, and eschewing the assistance of the Inquisition whose presence he was quickly growing to resent, Commander Orodai had mustered as many of his lawmen as he could, had mobilised the precinct's entire complement of armoured vehicles, and had personally led a battle-group a thousand strong into the darkness below Cuspseal.

Mita had failed. Again.

War was coming to the underhive.

Zso Sahaal

In the final analysis, it had been easier than stealing fruit from a child.

All had gone as planned, and if the diversionary assault upon the starport gates had left a dozen or more Shadowkin dead. If the place had run thick with the blood of civilians and Preafects alike, if the operation had cost him dear in time and effort and anxiety, then these were sacrifices he was pleased to make.

Offerings, even.

He had the support of the Dark Gods, whether he cherished it or not.

Standing there on the edge of the launchpad, he'd felt the witch's scrying eyes like a whisper at the rear of his mind. And, as if in reply, the certainty that the warp stood at his shoulder, regarding his enemy with boundless hunger, had gripped him. It had flexed, swarmed at the forefront of his soul, and consumed her.

She would not be eavesdropping on him again.

So, he had the patronage of Chaos itself.

Before his aeons of dormancy, Sahaal's regard for the Ruinous Ones had matched that of his Legion: Chaos was as capricious a force as it was almighty, they understood that, and Konrad Curze had spent too long overcoming insanity and terror to lie so easily in the Dark Gods' bed.

But still, but still... It was an... intoxicating sensation, to have guardians so mighty.

So let the casualties be offerings. Let the Shadowkin dead, with all the civilians and vindictors who had perished alongside, bleed upon the altar of Chaos Undivided. Let the hungry gods have their repast of souls, and let him return to his tasks unhindered. It was a worthy transaction.

Seated upon his throne, slouched with claws steepled and a blanket of shadows covering his unhel-meted face, he ignored the sounds of mourning throughout the encampment and struggled for calm.

He must be patient. The venom that the Shadowkin had smeared upon their darts was a potent substance, and the... prizes would be asleep a while longer.

Patience.

Focus.

The assault had succeeded. The starport had been breached and his ragtag army had allowed him all the time he had required to steal what he had come for. The prizes — captives, of a kind — couldn't be allowed to see him, not yet, and so a team of handpicked warriors had accompanied him, blowpipes brandished, to anaesthetise the fools before they could react.

Carrying them down into the dark — two limp shapes, withered and malnourished, slung upon each shoulder — he had felt in his heart like a warrior king, returning to his tribe with the bounties of conquered realms.

And yes, the Shadowkin had rejoiced in his victory. They'd cheered and feasted on what pitiful foods their dreary territory offered, and praised his name for such a daring raid. But as they consigned their dead to the Emperor's grace there was melancholia in their eyes.

So many had not returned.

And maddeningly, inmriatingly, Sahaal found himself troubled by their disquiet. Oh, they remained worms — less than worms! — but he confessed that as his reliance upon them grew he was encumbered by the distraction of pride.

This was his empire. His tribe. And he could not escape their reflected grief.

He wondered, distantly, whether this was how his master had felt. The mighty primarch of the Night Lords Legion had grown to manhood as a feral creature, a solitary hunter in the shadows of Nostramo Quintus, a vigilante without friend or peer. Only when his reign of terror had swollen to infect the entire city, when the law was his law and the streets were his streets, only then was he given governance of the populace.

Had he, too, resented the responsibility? Had he yearned to rely upon none but himself, to dispense with counsellors and soldiers and assistants? Had it sat heavily upon his heart that even he could not rule a world unaided?

And had he learned, by degrees, to value those at his command?

Had it hurt him when they perished?

Draped in shadow, Zso Sahaal brooded upon his throne at the heart of a web of confusions and distractions, and waited with crumbling patience for the two men that he had stolen to awake from their poisoned sleep.

So it was, with his attention elsewhere, that the burning drive to locate the Corona Nox had relented to a simmering pain in his guts, an unspoken knot of loss that his present concerns had eclipsed.

And so it was that the issue chose that very moment to resurface, interrupting his meditation with shouts, cheers, and song.

The scouts had found Slake.

'He was in Sewersump,' the man said, voice quavering with a soup of pride and nerves. He was young: still a novice, in tribal terms, but sturdily built and confident nonetheless. A find such as this would secure for him unlimited respect, and it was clear even to Sahaal that the youth intended to savour his moment. 'There's a guild there,' he added, 'does nothing but broker sales for kutroach shells.'

The youngster had chosen to address his report — without instruction — to Condemnitor Chianni, seated beside Sahaal with her wounds bandaged and her face austere. Sahaal found the arrangement pleasing: clearly the tribesfolk felt ill at ease directing their words to their angelic demagogue, preferring to use their priestess as an interface. It represented the perfect fusion of devotion and terror, and their fearful glimpses in his direction gratified Sahaal immensely.

'Kutroach?' he hissed, drawing startled glances from the crowd. He supposed that it was easier for them to think of him as some throned idol, so perfect was his stillness. Every time he moved or spoke it was a chilling reminder that their magnificent, terrible lord was as real, and as alive, as they.

Humans, Sahaal was observing, preferred to keep their gods at arms' length.

Thankfully Chianni's reaction was rather less awestruck, and she twisted to face him with hands clasped. He had spun her a vague lie regarding his search for Slake — ''an enemy of the Emperor'', as he'd put it — and her willingness to assist in such a holy quest had been amusing to regard.

'Beasts of the underhive,' she explained. 'Beetle creatures with leather wings and bladed tails. Very dangerous. Their husks are perfect for ornaments and bowls, so the guilds often sell them uphive. The other gangs collect shell bounties whenever they can.'

'But not you?'

She seemed briefly affronted. 'Money is the foodstuff of corruption, my lord...'

'Of course,' he rumbled, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. 'Continue.'

Chianni gestured for the scout to go on.

'W-well... I know the guilds sometimes use middlemen, so I thought it would be worth checking...'

Chianni nodded. 'A wise idea.'

The boy beamed. 'I found him speaking with two others, a-another man and a woman. A guilder came over — handfuls of credits, he had — and called out to him. He called him Slake, I'm certain of it.'

Sahaal's fingers tightened on the skull-pommels of his throne.

'You did well,' Chianni told the boy, perhaps noting her master's eagerness. 'Bring him forwards. Our lord would look upon him.'

The morsel that was pushed into the light, bound at its hands and ankles, shrieking like a stuck pig, was not what Sahaal had imagined.

It was a small man — if not genetically stunted then at least abnormal in his build, features prematurely wizened, scalp clinging to a few last scraps of hair. His simple clothes were stained and dirty and his face was marked with fresh bruises: evidence of the scouting party's rough treatment. Most notable however, were the twin sockets set high on his hydrocephalic forehead, one above each eye: ugly irises that extruded long cable-bundle umbilici, dangling to his shoulders like metallic dreadlocks.

He collapsed to the rusted floor with a wail, took one look at the throned giant looming over, and burst into tears.

'Sweet hive ghosts I didn't do anything don't kill me oh God-Emperor please...'

'Silence him,' Chianni said, a fraction before Sahaal. The young scout dropped to his knees and punched the wailing specimen across the face, splitting his lip and speckling the floor with his blood. His cries died abruptly.

'You are Slake?' Chianni asked, glaring.

'N... no! No! Not on my own!'

The scout punched him again, harder this time. 'Lies!' he roared. 'I heard his name!'

'Breggan,' Chianni said. 'Be still.'

The young scout backed away, breathing hard.

'You are Slake,' Chianni repeated — this time a statement. 'You are a go-between for upcity guilders, correct? Answer me!'

'N-no!' he wailed, tears and snot thick on his face. 'Not on my own! Oh sweet Terra, no! Y-you don't understand! Not on my own!'

Sahaal had heard enough. He was out of his throne and hunched over the man like a great lion, seemingly without movement, and the Shadowkin audience cried out and backed away, astonished at his speed.

The man stared up into the twisted visage of Sahaal's helm, and felt the tears freeze on his cheeks.

'...oh...'

'Four days ago,' Sahaal whispered, so quiet that none but the captive could hear his reed-thin voice, 'you purchased from the Glacier Rat scum Nikhae an item. You knew it was coming. You took it from him and paid him. Yes?'

In the face of such icy terror, the man's stammers were frozen away, leaving only a tight, strangled tone.

'Yes. I mean... I don't know. I have a small piece of the memory but—'

Sahaal pressed a claw against the wattles of his neck.

'Explain.'

'Slake! It's... not a person. Not one of us.' His eyes rolled, mouth quivering. 'It's a collective. A group, you see? The gestalim surgery... we took the implant! Separate us, we're just people. But together, all three joined...' He pawed his bound hands at the cables hanging from his skull, broken nails clattering against their sockets. 'Together we are Slake. Th-three people, one machina. We share memories. We share intellect! Alone we are nothing!'

Sahaal ground his teeth.

'You are servitors?'

'No! No, the servitor is a slave to the machina. Together, we control it.'

There had been servitors, even in Sahaal's time. Empty minded things: human bodies with machines for brains, controlled and governed by the chattering logic engines inside. Such contrivances left no room for personality or self awareness, rendering a servitor little more than a mobile tech-console. Their lives — such as they were — were a sequence of parameter and stimulus.

Could it be that these three nothings, these human fools with more avarice than sense, had found a way to retain their minds — their ambitions — yet to foster the cold intellect of a servitor nonetheless?

'How is this possible?' Sahaal rasped, bladed claw tight against the man's larynx.

'We paid! We chose it! We found... found a man who could do it!'

'And who,' Sahaal hissed, already guessing the answer, 'was that?'

'Pahvulti! His name is Pahvulti!'

The cognis logi. The information broker. The renegade tech-priest.

The bastard.

It was not a name welcome to Sahaal's ears.

He lifted the shrieking captive in one great claw, and carried him out into the shadows away from the tribe, to question him as only he could.

When he was done with the man, who was one piece but not the whole of Slake, Sahaal brought his head before the Shadowkin and held it high, blood snaking in long chords along his arm.

The man had known little, ultimately. Glimmers of memories, snatches of detail that fired recognition in his eyes but could draw nothing new from the fragments of his third of the Slake computer. It was as he said: alone, he was pifitful. A moronic child, a nothing, a nobody.

He could recall meetings. He could glimpse, in agonised flashes, the package that Sahaal sought so desperately.

'Was it open?' Sahaal had raged. 'Was it opened?'

But that detail was beyond him, as were any others, and the Night Lord had been quick to succumb to the fury that was building inside him with every day, the hungry voices whispering for blood in his mind.

Sahaal took the man's head and left the body to the waters of the swamp, where luminous tendrils dragged it down to the depths.

The scouts were redeployed to find the remaining pieces of the collective. The youngster who had captured the man went unthanked, chastised for his incomplete prize.

It was all Sahaal could do not to tear him to shreds.

Thus it was, with his blood boiling in his veins, his heart hammering in his ears, and the name ''Pahvulti'' spinning in a slick of poison and piss through his mind, that two fawning Shadowkin crept forth to tell him that finally the captives he had taken from the starport were awake.

The savage grin on his face left them ashen with terror.

In a shack at the camp's edge — as sturdy and soundproofed a structure as the meagre building materials had allowed — he took delivery of the first hostage. The tribesmen dumped the moaning creature to the floor, faces twisted with disgust. He dismissed them and they left with relief, pausing only to spit at the blind worm on the floor.

Sahaal wondered vaguely how they might react if they knew the truth: that without such astropathic wretches as this their mighty Imperium was a doomed giant, without eyes or ears or mouth.

He stepped towards the figure — shivering and naked in the rustmud — and crooned with an eagerness that he could no longer contain. His rage would not be restrained.

'W-who's there?' the man quailed, withered features crumpling further. His wrists and ankles were bound with sharp cable and his eyes... his eyes had been taken from him long, long ago. The tortured flesh at their edges was puffy with unhealed scars and infection.

'You cannot see me?' Sahaal teased, already knowing the answer.

'I... N-no! My visem dens... sweet Emperor... It's gone!'

Ah yes, Sahaal reflected. The second sight. Such men as this did not need eyes to see.

Usually.

'What have you done to me?' the voice grew loud, indignation at the theft of its greatest sense puncturing its fear. Sahaal allowed himself an indulgent smile.

'It is lead,' he said, bending to run fingers across the thick strip of bent metal, powder-white, coiled across his furrowed forehead like a circlet. Sahaal flicked it playfully. 'It is anathema to your... gifts, yes? You may no more penetrate it than a hawk may escape its hood.'

'Who are you?' The astopath's voice became a whisper, an awestruck quail that wrestled between curiosity and horror. 'How do you know so much about the gift? I... I am not afraid of you!'

Sahaal's smile broadened.

'I know the astropath's weakness, little man,' he said, 'because at one time an army of your brothers was at my disposal, through choice or not. And as for your fear...' He wet his lips, trembling, 'I think we both know you are lying.'

'The Emperor's faith is strong in my soul! I am without sin! Whatever your aims I shall n—'

'Do you know of Chaos?'

The man's mouth opened and closed, all his bluster stolen from him, a paroxysm of revulsion wracking him. 'I... You dare speak its name? Emperor preserve m—'

'You shall know of Chaos. You shall bathe in its fires, my friend. You shall know its voice.'

'Blasphemy! B-blasphemy!' The psyker tried to spit, to summon a gobbet of rebellious spittle on his flexing tongue, but Sahaal was faster. A single talon snickered from its secret sheath, blurred in the air, and was gone. The man spat out his own tongue on the crest of a shriek.

'Now you will be silent,' Sahaal said, backhanding the creature's cheek until its screams were replaced only by the wet gurgles of oozing blood, 'and you will listen closely. And you will struggle, and writhe, and try to escape, and in your mind you shall hurt harder than you have ever felt pain before, but you cannot switch off your ears, my friend. You cannot help but listen. 'And feel, of course. Always feel.' And Zso Sahaal began to cut. To draw slivers of flesh from arms and legs. To glide artist's strokes of tip and blade through unresisting skin and muscle. To sever sinews at knee and shoulder, at groin and ankle. To pluck arrowhead wounds across fatty chest meat, to scrape skin layer by layer from the belly's bulge. To drag deep plough-furrows across yielding buttocks and meaty loins. To cut and cut and cut and cut. And as he cut he spoke. He spoke across every scream and cough, ignoring inarticulate pleas and wordless prayers.

He spoke of the darkness that haunts youth's fears. Of the horrors that only the imagination of a child may devise. He spoke of bogeymen and spider gods, of scissor-fingered hags and the writhing of snakes. He spoke of faces in the sky and wet-edged lips, like the folds of a great belly, pursing to suck the light from the world.

He spoke of adolescent terror. Of self-harm and religious awakening. Of Imperial dogma crashing the soul, of familial rejection or parental perversion. Of young pain.

There was always reference to pain.

And always the cut, cut, cut.

He spoke of the terrors of adulthood. Of knives in the dark and rape in the light. Of butchers and marauders, of aliens and mutants. He spoke of fires creeping nearer, of quicksand clogging the lungs, of nooses drawing tight. He spoke of death and torture and eyes in the night.

And he cut and he cut and he cut.

He spoke of the warp, and when his victim's larynx burst from the rawness of its screams he spoke of the Ruinous Ones, of the watchers in the void, of the Empyrean swarms. He spoke of prowling madness, of insanity unleashed upon a million worlds, of the Emperor's wounds and the Traitor's joy. He spoke of the Haunter's palace. Of the blood of angels. Of the tentacles in the warp. Of the steel teeth bared in the echoes of eternity.

Of horror and nightmare and terror and venom.

He vented himself. He raged against the astropath's flesh. He diced and cut and ripped. He disjointed and jellified. He lost himself to a haze of red and he spoke of the primal scream, the banshee howl that echoed in the earliest caves of mankind, the feral simplicity of Fear.

And the dam broke open, and the walls of the astropath's resistance crumbled, and the chittering in the warp filled his ears and scratched petulant claws against the man's mind, and as the tumult reached its unbearable climax Sahaal reached through the paste of blood and shit and tears and wrenched away the lead circlet upon the man's brow.

For an instant, the astropath's second sight was returned to him.

He saw a bloodslick daemon with black eyes and claws of lightning steel, that leaned close to his shattered senses and hissed: 'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'

And then the astropath was beheaded with a single stroke of the monster's claws.

The swarms of the warp, baited close by such psychic terror as they had never before tasted — an intoxicating fillip that pulsed like a beacon across the ethereum — rushed in to frenzy-feast upon the released soul.

And the warp rippled like a disturbed millpond, and in its clash of hues and flavours it was Sahaal's face, Sahaal's voice, Sahaal's mind, that was borne upon the cusp of the astropath's deathshriek.

Borne outwards, towards eternity.

Mita Ashyn

She was in Orodai's empty office, wrestling with indecision, when it hit.

It broke across her defences like a tsunami upon a beach, surging above and through her, overwhelming every part of her mind, leaving her drowning and gasping for air.

It was a bloody-red dagger, hooked beneath her ribs and rising, rising rising.

It was a branding iron, smouldering with red heat, that scorched her not with a word or symbol, but a vision, an image, an event.

It was a psychic maelstrom that boiled the very air, undirected and all powerful, sent blasting into the void like the cusp of Shockwave, a telepathic exterminatus warhead that swelled like a fattening womb, invisible and intangible but terrible nonetheless. Lost at its centre was a scream — a hidden voice of pain and fear (oh, God-Emperor, such fear!) — that howled its horrors to the warp even as it was consumed: squabbled over by hungry beasts, divided and shredded before its echoes had even died.

It shivered along her spine, it froze her blood and sent her knees buckling, hands grasping for support, and this despite the unhappy truth: that the deathshriek was but a fraction of the surge: a motive force to propel it outwards, a pilot light upon which far greater, and more dazzling, visions had been hung.

Mita fell to the floor with a gasp and Cog, who had not even been aware of the psychic Shockwave, let alone assaulted by its ferocity, was left mumbling his moronic concerns and trying, clumsily, to restrain her flailing limbs.

She bit her lip and bled, and frothed at the corner of her mouth, and in the punctured atria of her psychic mind she suffocated beneath an avalanche of sights and sounds.

'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'

The voice was a foghorn, aching her ears (though it had no true sound), announcing in a blaze of light and a chorus of dark alarms the identity of her enemy. Beyond the mind's eye, in the haze of telepathy, senses became occluded and intangible: sounds became visible, images bore taste and scent, the cold touch of flesh rode a piggyback upon a musical discord. A synaesthetic whirlwind. An arco-mental maze. She stumbled through its corridors and clung to a shred of chattering lightning, holding it fast.

Zso Sahaal. A name.

And his image — an incandescent pictogram, brighter and more terrible than any auspex, sharper than the greatest sensoria — was scratched upon the raw flesh of her flayed brain and scarred it forever: like an electoo within her eyelids, impossible to escape, even in sleep.

It was him. The Night Lord. Her enemy.

She recognised him, despite the confusion and the whirligig tumult of conflicting senses. His face was rendered in music and the soft scents of ash and incense, his midnight blue body a medley of bitter flavours, and his claws... his claws were the touch of an artist's brush upon canvas, the gende caress of a lover's fingers. All this he was, beyond mere vision, but she recognised him nonetheless. The sallow eyes, with pupils so swollen they were black from edge to edge, the furrowed brow, the hollow cheeks, the pallid pate of a hairless skull. All of it encased in ceramite and steel, flexing plates hung with chains and barbs, marked all over with Legion sigils and dark scriptures.

Zso Sahaal. Night Lord.

'Seek me, my brothers,' the voice purred, and Mita found herself dimly aware of the message swarming past her senses, expanding beyond and through her, climbing ever outwards in a growing sphere. It swept through the hive of Equixus like a wall of steam, and then onwards and outwards, clambering into the void, across the gulf of space. Seeking those who cared to listen.

In the hive, the message went all but unnoticed. Like Cog beside her, most hivers remained as oblivious to the unseen maelstrom around them as if they were blind and straining to see. Some shivered, or blinked in a momentary discomfort they didn't understand, and perhaps even paused to wonder at the meaning of it all — before setting their shoulders and berating themselves for such foolishness, and forging on with their small, empty lives.

In their cots, in starports and Administratum offices, guilder nexus-points and tech-monasteries, astropaths cried out and gibbered in their sleep. Identified in their youth as psykers of mediocre talent, such withered man-morsels formed a communications network, serving and sustaining the Imperium that hated them. Where tightbeamed transmissions would take an age to cross the stellar gulf, an astropath could hurl his or her voice into the warp, relaying messages and instructions upon their masters' behalf. All had undergone the Soul Binding ritual — fortifying their defences, melting their eyes, melding their very spirits with that of the Emperor himself — and as such had little to fear from the predations of warp beings. Their susceptibility to such unfocused visions as now plagued Mita was all but negligible, and so in their cloistered cells their reactions were muffled, the preserve of nightmares and troubled thoughts. Their patient minders, who had grown well used to such disturbed slumbering, calmly administered soothing drugs to their unstable charges. Alone in all the city, Mita convulsed and screamed, utterly exposed.

Even through her fear and pain she burned with outrage at nature of this psychic storm. Her enemy's cunning — and cruelty — was beyond words, and she was as staggered by her revulsion as by the agony of the storm itself.

The Night Lord had known he could not control an astropath. He could not force a psyker to dispatch a message on his behalf, nor could he be certain — if he found a willing dispatcher — that the message had been sent at all. Alone and hunted within an unfamiliar city, he could not place his trust in such uncertain, intangible things.

And so he'd found the one way he could be sure his message would be dispatched. The one way that it would blast outwards in all directions, irrespective of the crude directions of a straining astropath.

The bastard. The cruel, warp-damned bastard!

He'd delivered his message in the psyker's moment of death, in the blink of a psychic atrocity, at the heart of a deathscream formed in the moments of a soul's consumption.

The bastard, he fed the psyker to the warp, and made sure his face and his words were the last things the poor wretch ever knew, like echoes on the cusp of a dying Shockwave.

How far could such a message travel? How deep into the warp would such a horrific end propel the psyker's scream?

And who might be listening, out amongst the stars, for just such a thing?

'I am Zso Sahaal. Talonmaster of the...' Over and over again.

Convulsing on the floor of Orodai's office, Mita clamped down hard with all her willpower and shielded herself from the pain, great mental defences rising in her mind like stormshields. And then, undistracted by the horror, she shifted her perceptions of the pulsing signal and coiled outwards from its grasp, turning to regard it in a new and disciplined perspective. Released from the pain, recovered from the shock and awe of its first bite, she sorted her cluttered senses together and was rewarded with order.

The warp was a pool of oil, now — at least, that was how her mind had chosen to rationalise it. The astropath's death had struck it hard, concentric ripples bulging outwards from its centre. Drawing close, Mita saw clearly the process the Night Lord had tapped into, and found herself morbidly impressed by its cunning: with secret fractal symmetry — each tiny component a replica of the whole — every concentric ripple bore along its bow-wave the shadow, the echo, of the event that had caused it. And through it, as it faded with each diminishing ring, Mita found herself able to explore, to taste the ghost of the Night Lord's mind where before she was unable even to approach him. It was as if she had been presented with a pictoslate of her enemy: a transcendent snapshot that had dazzled her at first but that now, now that its brightness had faded, now that she was accustomed to its flare, she could use to study his aspect. And oh, what rage he held in his soul! There was loss, beneath it all. A wisp of colour haunting the midnight whole, like a deep sea kraken swimming an ocean of rage.

He has lost something. Something he loves. Something he cares for with holy pride. He has lost it, and it angers him. And he is alone. With a precision that she struggled to maintain, she peeled back the layers of this echo-enemy — a perfect but fading replica of the Night Lord's mind — and found a forest of emotion, buried deep beneath layers of time and denial, that shocked her. Ambition. Uncertainty. Frustration. Loneliness. Suspicion. Paranoia. Power.

She drew back from it with an inward gasp, surfacing from the trance and into Cog's burly arms, wrapped around her in a desperate embrace: the one thing his simple mind had presented as a solution to his mistress's distress.

And as she prized herself away and thanked him, and caught her bearings, and wiped the blood from her lip, her mind lingered on what it had found, and pulsed with a shock that she could barely contain.

Staring at the Night Lord's mind — even through the haze of shadow and echo — had been like staring at a mental map of herself.

Outside Orodai's office, pandemonium reigned. Obeying Mita's instruction with empty devotion, Cog carried her through the narrow door and into the antechamber beyond, where the commander's servitor aides sat lifeless at their desks, bereft of orders. Their human counterparts — acolytes and scribes in the employ of the Vindictare, whose taskmasters had deserted them in their march to war — clustered at the chamber's apex, where a rusting civilian worship viewspex glimmered with a broken image, a breathless voice barking terse reports from horn-like speakers. Periodically the crowd cheered, fists punching at the air, and Mita drew close to their swarm with a sinking heart. She could well imagine what they were watching.

'...and onwards into the gulley known as Spit Run, where resistance was overcome with mighty deeds and...'

Propaganda. Damn Orodai for his wounded pride — he'd led the Preafects on a crusade and he'd taken the Hivecasters with him.

Damn, damn, damn.

The acolytes snapped to a guilty attention when they saw her, decorum returning where excitement had ruled. She ignored them and steered Cog towards the screen, his bulk pushing cowls and autoscholars aside like a ship's keel.

'...and just receiving word from the second wing — they're east of here in the Chalkmire territories — that a rebel stronghold at Brokepoint Town has fallen to the Emperor's warriors with a total loss of life...'

The presenter, who stood at a safe distance from the growing maelstrom of tracer fire and sooty explosions behind him, was clean and elaborately dressed, his unassuming features betraying not a single hint of mechanised augmentation. Mita was hardly surprised: she'd seen broadcasts on other Civilian Worship systems on other populous worlds — joyous reports of the Emperor's victories, lectures in religious dogma, uplifting sermons, vilification of captured criminals and heretics — and in every case the chosen representative of the state embodied pure, unthreatening humanity. Mita had little doubt that beyond the gaze of the servoskull trained upon him, the small man sported a plethora of control articulators, autofocus diaphragms and self-viewing vambrances to broadcast his own image into his retina, but such paraphernalia could hardly be considered photogenic.

'...seem to have routed insurrectionists with — praise his glory — no reported casualties! Truly an example to us all...' The little man waved an arm grandly at the scene behind him — some unnamed underhive township being bombed to dust by a circle of Preafect tanks. Through the unclear flickers of pixelated flames, if she concentrated hard, Mita could make out the small silhouettes of staggering figures, writhing and dying. Children and women, burned alive.

She wondered, distantly, how many millions of eyes were fixed upon communal hivecasters throughout Equixus. Most worlds practised compulsory viewing: at least an hour of every day spent by each citizen in passive absorption of CW doctrine, and from what Mita had seen of this hive its customs were no less rigorous than elsewhere. She prayed to the Emperor with what small part of her mind remained untarnished by doubt and exhaustion that Inquisitor Kaustus was not amongst this broadcast's audience.

Not that it would stop him from hearing about it, one way or another.

'...a surge of rebels, but in praise to Him-on-the-Throne-of-Earth — Ave Imperator! — heroes of the Preafectus Vindictaire have broken through the barricades to dispatch the filthy heretics...'

Mita clenched her teeth. Not heretics. Just people. The worthless and the dispossessed, the ones who fell through the cracks. The ones being slaughtered in the name of revenge.

She could imagine the scene all too clearly. The winding column of Preafect Salamanders, grinding across drifts of waste and rust. Perhaps their intentions were pure, at the start, perhaps they really did intend to seek out those responsible for the attack on the star-port, to hunt down the villain behind it all. But the underhive was a warren of suspicion and paranoia, and it would not have taken long for the first shots to ring out, for the first angry outlaws to panic at the sight of such a force and lash out.

The Preafects had no idea who was responsible for the massacre at the starport. They had no clue as to the motive or the goal. In the main theirs was a simple role, and at its crux was an elegant assertion: Resistance implies guilt.

Orodai had led his warriors into the shadows to hunt and kill a monster. Instead they found themselves conducting genocide — a glorious, wanton, bloody pogrom upon those who had slipped from the light.

Blood ran thick through the streets of the underhive, and though its inhabitants begged the Emperor for mercy, wept his name as they died, screamed in prayer as their families burned — still the slaughter continued, and it was conducted in the name of the same god to which its victims cried out for help.

As she left the room, feeling sick, a servitor twitched at her side and fixed its dead eyes on her face, a telescopic array of circuitry and shattered bone creaking forwards from its shoulder, pushing a miniature hivelink headset towards her.

'A call,' it announced, lugubrious mouth hanging slack around a voicebox embedded upon its long-dead tongue. 'The inquisitor requests y—'

'I'm not here,' Mita said, hurrying past. 'He's missed me.'

She left the chambers with bile in her throat, and tried to ignore the sounds of cheering from the viewspex gather-halls she passed as she went.