Lord of the Night

Zso Sahaal

The underhive bared its necrotic breast to the knives that assaulted it, and poured its blood out onto cold stone streets.

The scouts were abroad, creeping in stealthy corners with eyes peeled and curiosity piqued, regarding each act of terror, each fiery calamity, each bloody attack, with insect fascination. And then one by one, slinking though soot-brick wastes, sliding silent feet along rusted ducts where no Preafect could see or hear, they turned back to their deep, dark terrain to make report to their dark lord.

The pogrom had not yet reached the Shadowkin's lair. Ensconced within their frail homes, casting bright eyes at the vaulted roof of their watery island-cavern, they listened as the lightless territories of the underworld tore themselves apart, bone by brittle bone. The pulses of remote explosions — like the roar of avalanches in the night, echoing from peak to peak — filtered in waves of dislodged dust and shrapnel. The Shadowkin shivered and prayed, and threw stricken glances at their dreadful lord, cloaked upon his throne once more.

Sahaal had not troubled himself to clean his armour. Where once a host of slaves would undress and bathe him — now he was left to fester. He could demand such a service from his tribe, of course, but in truth he did not care for cleanliness in this place. In this anarchy, in the depths of the depression that gripped him, to adopt a feral countenance seemed a fitting response. The tentacles of failure had returned, the bright pincer-teeth of hopelessness. How could he ever know if his ruse with the astropath had succeeded? How would he ever find the Corona now — whether it be through Slake, or Pahvulti, or by chance alone?

How could he ever resume his vengeful crusade?

Such thoughts robbed him of all energy, imbuing his flesh with a brooding indolence. Far easier to sit and burn in self-hatred, to consume his own mind with reproach and guilt, than to stir to activity.

What else, ultimately, could he do?

He was, he knew, terrible to behold. The swirls of decoration on his helm's swept-back crest were speckled now by a frieze of gore. The astropath's fluids coated him head to foot, and where blood had pooled in the gulleys and joints of his armour it clotted to a dirty brown powder, like an iron giant beset by rust.

The scouts came one by one, ferried across the swamp in makeshift barges, flicking away questing tentacles when they crept too close. The rest of the tribe gathered to hear their testimonies from the worlds above, and with every fresh report they murmured and bit their lips. Their concerns were as palpable in their eyes as had they spoken them aloud, and Sahaal regarded them from the shadows of his helm with a shrewd eye.

How far would the Preafects descend their faces asked? How deep would the massacres cut?

Had they not suffered enough beneath their master's frenzied rule?

Guilt upon shame upon failure upon horror. Sahaal couldn't begrudge them their fear.

The scouts spoke of death and blood and horror. Of whole townships ripped to cinder, populations driven before the clubs of riot-mobs, warriors ground beneath tanktracks and booted feet. Of Preafects with electric shields, charging down fleeing townsfolk, breaking heads and snapping bones.

One spoke of a brothel, half collapsed, as its shrieking women were shot down one by one, soot and blood staining naked flesh, whilst they crawled to escape the flames.

One had watched an alliance between rival mobs — a friendship born in shared peril — only for both to fall to the last man and woman, sliced to slivers when vindictors bottled them in and killed and killed until none remained.

One saw a child throw a stone at the Preafect column, and watched the youth's village burn in retribution.

One saw the kutroaches pick the flesh clean from a rioting mob, gassed in their dozens when they turned on the armoured aggressors torching their homes.

One saw blood running as thick as a stream.

And one... one saw the Preafects regroup and confer, and finally — gore-drenched, exhausted, spent — turn back for the hive above.

The Shadowkin shuddered with relief at this last mercy, embracing one another and praising the God-Emperor, and when the final scout had hurried from the circle of firelight before Sahaal's throne he stepped down from his platform and addressed the crowd. The opportunity was too good to ignore.

'You see?' he told them, claws splayed. 'You see now? You see how the hive is corrupted? How the Preafects themselves are hungry for murder and blood? It is the taint, I tell you!' A shiver raced across the crowd, like a breeze rippling through withered trees. They reach out to crush the innocent, and we alone — we, the faithful, the chosen ones — are spared! We alone, in this place that I led you.

You see now? You see?

And oh, they praised him so hard that it all but cut through the bleakness, the loss, the aggression, and for one fraction of one moment Zso Sahaal remembered what it had been to be adored without fear.

And then he asked the scouts if they brought word of the Slake Collective, and that ancient terror came back into their eyes, and the adoration was buried beneath a dozen layers of fear.

None of them brought news.

The crowd dispersed after that, when long moments of silence had passed, when it was clear finally that the lord's displeasure would not over-boil with violence — and there was hidden relief on their faces as they returned to their homes to hunt and cook.

Silence settled in the swamplands.

Sahaal sat and brooded, and beside him Chianni fidgeted in her chair, casting anguished glimpses in his direction, shivering.

His patience for her unspoken anxiety did not last long.

'You are troubled, sister,' he said, grateful — grudgingly — for the distraction. 'And yet we are spared. Explain.'

She struggled to find the right words, crippled by awe at the closeness of his attention. 'The Preafects, my lord... Their... their anger is so mighty. They must hate you a great deal.'

He sensed the curiosity behind her words and sighed, anticipating yet more ugly lies and false devotions in the Emperor's name. The falsehood that had secured the Shadowkin's loyalty had grown to a yoke around his neck, and his gorge rose at the thought of strengthening it further.

'It has ever been thus,' he said, dismissive. 'The unjust have always despised the righteous. Their loathing for me is no greater than my disgust for them.'

That, at least, was truth. He was the righteous one. Was it not their ''glorious'' Emperor that had betrayed his master so cruelly? Was it not they who worshipped a weakling, a coward, a traitor?

It was not enough to sate Chianni's thirst for answers.

'My lord,' she quailed, fingers curling together. 'How can we hope to... to prevail in the face of such anger?'

'With focus,' he said, and realised as he said it that it was advice for his own sake, as much as hers. 'With conviction in the cause.' He twisted to stare down at her, hearing his master's words echoed across the gulf of time. 'Doubt breeds fear, child. And fear is our weapon, not our flaw.'

'But—'

'We strive towards our goals. We strive with every ounce of our flesh, with every bloody tear, every bead of sweat. And though we may fall in the trying, we are undertaking the work of the righteous!'

Fine words. Stirring words. He felt a glimmer of fire return to his belly.

'And... our goals, my lord? The goals we must strive to meet...' she glanced up at him, eyes brimming with hunger. 'W-what are they?'

'I have told you. To find the Slake Collective.'

'Y-yes lord...' Again a glance — first up then away, a sliver of eye contact — and this time Sahaal could see a dangerous recklessness, a desire to comprehend at any cost, that underpinned her fear. 'W-what I meant was... why?'

He considered killing her, briefly.

Should I be angry? his mind mused. Should I suffer this curiosity — this impetuosity — in a creature so frail as this woman?

Should I cut her in two?

His claws began, so slowly that he barely even felt it, to slip from their sheaths. He had not consciously triggered them.

But then... but then...

The priestess's importance could not be understated: to lose her would be to risk losing once more the control of his tribe — and that at this most critical of junctures. For all his might and power he was no diplomat, no empathetic figurehead to safeguard the hopes and fears of a population. His was a diplomacy of terror and carnage, not of words and assurances.

He needed her.

A demonstration, then?

Some painful reprimand, perhaps, to punish her undue curiosity, to teach her — and through her the tribe — that his plans were his alone, that he would not tolerate the prying of peasants.

Chianni noticed the claws and gasped in the silence, perhaps understanding, too late, her mistake.

Yes. Yes, teach her a lesson. Make her bleed. Just a small cut...

It was a voice that came from somewhere deep in his subconscious, and as he focused on it, he saw that it was the same voice that had pushed forth his claws, the same voice that had overwhelmed him as he slew the astropath, the same voice that had brought red haze down across his vision time and time again since his arrival on this blighted world.

Cut her. Cut her, you fool!

Was he mad, then? Was he succumbing to that same random insanity — a thing of brilliance and bitterness — that had consumed his master?

He had long ago forsaken the trust of any other creature... could he now no longer trust his own mind?

He snarled in the silence of his helmet and drowned the voice in his mind, and retracted his claws with a silky rasp, feeling foolish. The priestess swam before his eyes, pale with incomprehension, and it was with a sensation like relief, like a clear water scouring the filth of his psyche, that he broke the silence, focused upon her question, and spoke.

'Why?... Because through them I may find something that was stolen from me. My inheritance.'

'I-inheritance? Something that will help you? Something that will help us?'

He smiled, although of course she could not see it.

'Yes. Something that will aid me.'

'A... forgive me, my lord... a weapon?'

He settled back upon the throne and wet his lips, and was no longer irked by her questions. It felt good to speak of such things, finally. It felt good to leave the vacuum of solitude — however momentary, however falsely. — and remember the glories of his past. What harm could it do? What harm in telling the truth to this eager creature — or at least those parts that would strengthen her loyalty?

What harm in leaving the shadows, for an instant?

'What do you know,' he asked, 'of the primarchs? Of the Emperor's own sons?'

Her bulging eyes were all the answer he needed. He waved away her astonishment and went on.

'There were twenty. Twenty warrior infants, twenty child-gods. Perhaps they were whelped, like human sons. Perhaps he made them, as an artist fashions a masterpiece. Perhaps he simply willed them to life — who knows? What is known is that they were scattered, cast out into the stars like seeds on tilled earth. And in their absence from their father they grew to manhood — each in reflection of the world that had claimed them, each shaped by the people who took them in. The kindness and cruelty of strangers.'

He paused, and in his mind he saw a snow-white baby, rushing through tortured skies, black eyes squinting against clouds and wind, before being swallowed — consumed whole — by the dark.

There was one who fell further, and deeper, than the rest. He came to a world without daylight, where cruelty abounded above compassion, where the only honour was a precarious thing shared amongst thieves and murderers. This child, this feral thing, was raised by no man. No human kindness ever taught him mercy, no mother ever shushed his sleeping terrors. And alone of all the scattered primarchs, all those lost babes, no one taught him wrong from right. Justice from injustice.

'Oh, the beliefs of the other primarchs varied, of course. What is "wrong", or "right", after all? Points of view. As each child grew their sense of righteousness solidified, their concept of what to punish and what to encourage took form, guided by the morality of their tutors or brothers-at-arms. Ultimately the conclusion they drew, whatever their circumstance, was the same: that "right" was whatever they said was right. That "wrong" was whatever they decided to punish.

'Just children, priestess, but already gods to be loved and feared.'

Chianni stirred, throwing off her obvious awe to grasp at the loose end left flailing.

'And the feral child? What of him?'

Sahaal smiled again, warmth flourishing in his chest. Ah, my master...

'He had no tutors. No one would take him in, so he grew wild and independent. No one would feed him, so he learned to hunt and feed himself. No one would comfort him when he was taken by the nightmares in his sleep, or by the visions that plagued his waking hours, or by the fits that wracked his body — so he grew strong and wily, and overcame the nightmares, and deciphered the visions, and repressed the fits.

'No one would teach him what justice was, and so — like no child had ever done before, and no child has ever done since — he taught himself. He saw callousness and cruelty, and recognised them. He saw strength being abused, productivity and peace being surrendered to terror and violence. And do you know what he learned, child?'

'N-no, my lord.'

'He learned that justice is strength. He learned that if he wished to overcome the predators that haunted the darkness, he need only become the strongest predator of them all. He learned that if he wished to punish a murderer, it required only that he be a more accomplished killer. He learned that if he wished to bring peace and equality to his world — and oh, he wanted that so much — he must hunt down those filth that stood in its way and use their weapons against them.

'And he learned that there is only one weapon. Stronger than any gun. Sharper than any blade.' Sahaal leaned close to the priestess, her ashen face reflected with bulbous distortion in the crimson windows of his eyes. 'That weapon is fear, child.'

She swallowed, eyes not leaving him for an instant.

Sahaal went on, quieter than before, voice no more than a whisper. The thugs and the thieves, the rapists and the murderers: they gripped that world tight in their hands because every man and woman was afraid of them. And so the feral warrior became the one thing that would stop them:

'Something that even they would learn to fear. He became the Night Haunter.

'He taught them justice through terror. He led that world into peace and efficiency, where before only violence and anarchy had reigned, and he did so unaided, alone in the dark, for the good of them all.

'His name was Konrad Curze, and he was my master.'

He leaned away from the priestess and watched her closely, gauging her response. She struggled, of course — who would not? — but again the curiosity at her core overcame the awe, an addict demanding more before even the drug-rush has faded.

'Your master...' she breathed. 'What happened to him?'

'His father found him. The Emperor came to him and embraced him, and they went into the stars to lead the mightiest crusade that ever was.'

'S-so he lives? He lives still?'

A bleak tableau erupted behind Sahaal's eyes: a scene he had revisited in his dreams a million times over, each one cutting him deeper than the last.

A pale face, awaiting the killer. Black eyes — bottomless, pouring with angst — staring from the shadows of the writhing room. Its fleshwalls and limb carpets shift underfoot... and the hitch draws near.

Sahaal had been there. He had seen it, hiding in the shadows like some child at play, honouring his vow with tears upon his cheeks. He would not intervene. He would not stop her. He would watch and nothing more: and it hurt him like a cold fire in his guts that could never be doused.

She steps close, horrified at her surroundings, entranced by the target's naked form.

He has been expecting her. He has foreseen this moment.

She sweeps towards him and is surprised. She has been expecting guards. She has anticipated violence. Instead the Haunter smiles and beckons her close, and he speaks.

Oh, by the dark, his voice...

Such words of venom and vengeance he spoke, such heartbroken sentiments.

He smiles throughout, and even as his voice breaks and the tears puncture their inertia and gather in streams along his pallid cheeks, he is welcoming. He is warm. He is calm.

'Death is nothing compared to vindication,' he finishes, sitting forwards on his mighty throne, 'Now do your job and be done with it!'

And her hand rises, and the thing in her grip flickers bile-green, and...

And...

Sahaal stared down at the priestess, blinking through a film of water, and gathered himself.

'No,' he said. 'He is dead. He was betrayed by one who should have loved him.'

The effect of this upon Chianni could hardly have been more devastating. She rocked back in her chair and scrabbled at her face, tears and spittle oozing between fingers, breath catching in her throat.

Sahaal was unsurprised. To him, a veteran of the Horus Heresy, the idea that the gods and angels of the Imperium might be capable of betrayal was nothing new. But to the peasants amongst whom he walked — people like this woman — he was less a living being than a myth made solid. Little wonder their minds rebelled against his words. And little wonder the priestess's nausea: it is not often one is told their gods are just as capable of misery, flaw and evil as any other being.

'Restrain yourself,' he said, tiring of her fit. 'You questioned me regarding my master's legacy, not the reason for his death.'

She recovered her dignity by degrees, straightening into her seat and smoothing her tangled hair. 'Aapologies, lord,' she choked, wiping her face. 'I... I had no idea...'

'He is dead,' Sahaal repeated, eager to return to the story, flushed with a gratification at speaking it aloud that he hadn't expected. It was as if the millennia of his dormancy had allowed the pain to fester in his soul, to expand like some poisoned gas, swelling his ribs with pressure he could no longer contain. Merely speaking of it, merely venting his memories, felt like opening a valve in his mind, expelling the venom in a great invisible cloud. 'He is dead and that is an end to it. He had foreseen it, and for that was grateful, for he could prepare himself. He named an heir, he bequeathed his mightiest treasure, and that heir was — is — me.'

'T-then this treasure is-?'

'Is the item I seek on this world.' He clenched his jaw, remembering. 'It was stolen from me before I could even claim it.'

The Haunter's head, so placid in its aspect, tumbles to the floor and rolls. There is no blood.

The killer stands thus poised, grisly mission complete, and perhaps she pauses to savour the moment. Perhaps she reflects upon the ease with which it was done.

Or perhaps she has more still to do.

She bends to the body and plucks at its dead limbs. A ring, she steals, and a silver blade worn in a flesh scabbard at its shoulder. And then she turns, hunched low on the writhing floor, seeking something.

And then she straightens, and in her hand she holds it. Dislodged from his person at the moment of death, she finds it and she takes it.

The prize.

The Corona Nox.

In the shadows, Sahaal gapes. His master had not foreseen this.

And then she is gone, as quick as a cobra. And it is then, only then, with grief overcome by sudden anger, with teeth rasping together and hot tears turning to ice on his cheeks, that Sahaal quits his vantage and races in pursuit.

'S-stolen?'

'Yes. By my master's killer. I should have known his enemies would try to take it...'

'H-he is here? That is who you pursue? This Slake — he is the one who killed your master?'

'No. No, this happened... many years ago. She is dead now.'

'S-she?'

'The killer. The assassin.'

Chianni had the look of one who was drowning in a sea of surprises, and still had not even sighted the shore.

'Then... my lord, why here?'

Sahaal hesitated. In truth the details of the subsequent calamities were still unfocused in his mind, a gamut of colour and light that no amount of mental dissection could unravel. He knew how it began — in fire and blood aboard the assassin's vessel, grappling with claw and fist against the bitch herself, wrestling the Corona from her grasping fingers then fleeing to the Umbrea Insidior...

He knew how it ended, crashing through the mists of Equixus, awaking in the vessel's ruptured guts, his prize stolen.

And between? A hundred centuries. Light. Colour. Capering figures of svelte form and slanted eye, with fluted helms and bright jewels, slipping between reality and warp, gathering around him.

The attack.

The flight.

The trap.

The prison.

Eldar.

'It has reached this world along... intricate pathways,' he said, clearing his mind of the jumbled impressions. 'It came to the Glacier Rats, and then to Slake. And from there...' he sighed, a blister of depression breaking apart, overwhelming even the freedom that had come from speaking with such candour, '...from there I do not know where it has gone.'

Chianni stared at him with wide eyes, and all around the silence of the underhive poured into the vacuum his story had left.

Hours passed, and Sahaal slept, disengaging the cycadian rhythms of his psyche, relaxing the catalapsean node at the centre of his spine that could oscillate so casually between the domes of his brain.

True sleep. And with it, true dreams.

He saw the ice-light of voidfire, capering and self-consuming as the Umbrea Insidior closed with the assassin's transport. He saw melta charges flare in the gloom, and Dreaddaw assault craft punch into soft, yielding iron.

He saw the boarding action, and the slaughter. He saw his raptors make a charnel house of the bitch's craft. He saw her eyes, wide and fearful, as he sliced her hand from her wrist — a bright filigree of blood and oil shivering from the rent — and with it reclaimed the Corona Nox. He saw himself lift a claw for the killing blow: bittersweet vengeance for his master's death.

And then...

Screams upon the vox. His sergeant's voice, fat with anger: 'Warpspit! Eldar, Talonmaster! Xenogen scum!'

They came like a bloody sword from the sky, breaking from dismal walls in light and warpfire, skimming realities like a pebble across water. Limbs wavering breathless guns coughing discs and coils. Like spiders, hatching on webs of Empyrean.

Aliens.

He saw the witch-lord. The dancing devil, with antlered helm and silver staff, blue-gold armour and feathered gown, a warlock-warrior, frozen in his pathway, sword alive with wyrdfire.

He saw himself breaking free from the maelstrom, leaving the assassin to cower, every shred of his being bent upon the Corona. They wanted it. They had come to claim it, in his moment of triumph.

They would not have it.

He saw himself, alone, returning to the Umbrea Insidior. He saw himself shutting out the cries of his brothers. He saw himself aboard his own vessel, fastening his prize in its casket, sealing it against alien hands.

He saw himself tasting, for an instant, triumph.

And then the warp opened its mouth, prised wide by alien hands, and a bubble of nothing intumesced around his ship. She shuddered, a protesting behemoth, a terrible beast floundering into sticky tar to sink centimetre by centimetre, shrieking as she drowned.

They pushed her deep into a timeless bubble, those xenogen spellsingers, and locked her from the warp: a water-filled belljar, sealed with hot wax, cast adrift in an ocean.

They could not enter. He could not leave.

He saw himself rage and roar for a full month. He saw his vassals lock themselves away from his wrath. He saw himself succumb to insanity.

And then finally he saw himself tasting bitter acceptance, piece by piece, until he resigned himself from reality, lost all hope of escape, and entered the trance.

He awoke in the Shadowkin encampment with the flavour of resignation and loss clouding his mind, and found a commotion in progress.

He found Chianni at the water's edge, staring out across the unquiet swamplands, shouting orders and imprecations at the flotilla of boatmen that approached.

She almost choked when he appeared silently behind her, and in the shallows two of the pugs overturned as their pilots glimpsed the apparition on the shore.

'What,' Sahaal hissed, ignoring the fearful splutters from the unctuous waters, 'is the meaning of this?'

They had gathered in their thousands. In makeshift shelters, beneath canvas bivouacs or else simply stretched upon the hard ground, with oily torches sputtering on rusted spars, wagons and litters clustered in protective circles, gang colours fluttering — half-heartedly — side by side, all sense of territory abandoned: the rustmud swamp teemed.

Even as he watched, Sahaal could see the human stream thickening. He had chosen his acolytes' realm with care, placing their encampment at the heart of a patchwork morass of bore-holes and smog vents, but now the winding path that led down from above, snaking from the north, appeared impossibly choked: a flow of humanity like sewage, blocking the pipe that carried it. They stepped from shattered girder to fungal plateau, homing on the great drowned drilling rig like pilgrims to a holy place.

Sahaal cast a brief glance to the south, working his jaw. There — set back from the swamp amidst a tangle of igneous formations and massive fungi — he knew there existed a second route from above: a tunnel so tight and twisting that it could accept only a single body at a time. It was his exit, his bolt-hole, his means of a rapid escape if this unfathomable territory was attacked, and he was pleased to see that its secrecy remained intact. He turned back to the refugees, gratified.

They came with heads bowed and wounds unhealed. They came with the dying carried on palettes behind them, with their faces clouded and their eyes filled with tears. Where once gangs had spat upon the face of their enemies, and died in the name of their totem, now they walked side by side, mutually ignored, hostilities redundant in the face of this harsher, more immediate exodus.

They sought out a new totem, now — a new figurehead — and in the pit of his heart an ugly suspicion as to what it was rolled over Sahaal like a breaking storm.

'Who are they?' he asked Chianni, keeping alive the hopes that he might be wrong.

'J-just... just people, my lord. From the underhive. The Preafects have destroyed half the settlements... They've got nowhere e—'

'What do they want?'

Chianni bit her lip, perceptive enough to know the answer would not please her master.

'They have heard of you,' she said, voice quiet. 'They think... they think you're a myth, but... But they know the Shadowkin escaped unharmed. They know us as... Holy zealots, my lord. They've feared us for decades — as long as the tribe has been here — but... but now we have strength, and they are weakened. They're angry. They don't know what they did to warrant the Preafects' violence. They're dying. They're pitiful. And suddenly they have seen the error of their ways.'

'I did not ask you who they are, priestess. I asked what do they want?'

He knew the answer already, of course.

Chianni's lip trembled as she spoke.

'Sanctuary, lord. They come seeking sanctuary.'

Mita Ashyn

She could not avoid her master's attempts at contact for long. She left the precinct when the chirruping of advancing servitors — snatching at her attention with hivelink comms clutched in piston knuckles — grew tedious, and her excuses became untenable. She knew she was being childish, but the swarm of uncertainties clouding her mind, coupled with the ghosts of exhaustion gripping her, precluded even the most lacklustre of attempts to represent herself intelligibly. For all that, she could tell sleep was not yet an option, so she took to wandering the bustling streets of Cuspseal like an eidolon, a lost spirit seeking absolution.

Preachers leaned from pulpits, holding loosebound books in claw-like grasps, eyes alive with fire and piety. Around them crowds accreted, and as she passed by Mita tasted the cocktail of their thoughts: the bright ember of the zealot, the tepid mundanity of his flock (I believe their minds cried — but always the shackles of doubt, of shame, of sin, weighed their spirits down), and always amongst the crowds she found incongruous minds: the strict focus of undercover Preafects, the darting intentions of pickpockets and outlaws, the fearful disgust of whores, grudgingly seeking custom. She walked on quickly, troubled to find so little purity, so little virtue, amongst this ocean of thought.

At one intersection a knot of boys had gathered around a militia post, recruiting sergeants barking false promises of glory and adventure. The youths shouted and whisded as she passed, even the crudity of their catcalls unable to break through the cage of her worries.

The question that assailed her was as unanswerable as the universe was vast, and amongst its myriad strands of uncertainty she found herself gathering it together, kneading into one shape, one indigestible issue:

Why?

She paced across a hanging bridge and paused to stare at the heads of executed criminals fixed upon each of its stanchions, their eyes and tongues greedily devoured by jewelled beetles and albino bats. The flocks chattered as she passed, stabbing at her psychic senses with needles of ultrasonic sound, and she moved on with only the most cursory glance towards downtown Cuspseal — the hulking cube of the precinct dominating her view, towering above the mighty underhive chasm into the shadows below.

Why does the inquisitor not act?

Why does he restrain me with one hand and wave me forth with the other?

Why does he request my presence then drug me, then lie that he did not?

Why does his mood shift like a tide, ebbing and rising against all stimulus?

Why does he sit day after day, ensconced within the governor's palace?

His actions had hardly been heroic, and that in the face of his noble reputation. And whether he trusted her or not, she would have assumed the mere possibility of a Chaos Marine lurking in the dark would spur him to action. And yet he smiled and sneered, and dismissed the issue, and told her it was being dealt with.

Dealt with! By a single acolyte? A single cowled dissimulus, whatever that was. What if his plans fail?

What if his plans... oh, Emperor, forgive me my doubt... what if his plans cannot be trusted? What if he cannot be trusted?

She lurked in the shadows beneath a tanning factory chewing her lip, and watched as servitor-machines — simian monstrosities with arms like grablifters and thick chords of servomuscle tightening across copper pectorals — hefted tall piles of grox carcasses from uphive chutes into the rambling building. The stench of smoke and tar and burning meat made her retch, and she moved on again. Is there nowhere to think in this damned hive? Was that the problem, perhaps? Had she forgone the process of exhaustive consideration that the tutoria had encouraged? Had she been slack, dumbly clouded by mistrust that had no basis, listening too hard to instincts that had no place in a position of obedience? Where has this paranoia come from? She looped back towards the precinct, more troubled than ever, and when a mugger slipped from the moist darkness of an icemelt-drenched alleyway, blade glittering in his hand, she faced him with an almost indecent joy: relieved to shut out the worries for an instant, relaxed by the simple promise of violence.

The man approached with a sneer, knife weaving mesmeric patterns, holding her attention. It would have been a crude feign even had she not been a psyker, and when his partner, hidden behind her, took her obvious distraction as his cue to attack, she spun a carefully gauged kick into his face, his own momentum snapping the bones of his cheek and ripping an ugly tear across his lip.

The psychic feedback of his surprise and pain was deliciously gratifying.

The first attacker waded in with his knife, all hope of surprise lost, and she ducked beneath his first clumsy swipe to plant a balled fist in his stomach, knocking him down with the breath gone from his lungs.

She rolled aside to avoid any desperate slashing and jumped to her feet before he could groggily arise, imagining Kaustus's tusked face in the place of the mugger's, and half turned with an elegant elbow, dropping him back for a second time, thick ruby fluid gushing from his broken eyeball.

She returned to the first attacker, the broken-lipped nobody, a fraction too late, just as he launched a throwing knife at her head, gurgling on the bloody soup sliding into his mouth. Acting without thought she screwed up her mind and released an impetuous, undirected pulse of psychic energy, deflecting the spinning blade with a clash of blue sparks.

The muggers weren't as stupid as they looked. Seeing what manner of victim they'd chosen, yelping the word ''witch!'' with youthful terror, they fled into the shadows on a chorus of shrieks and moans. Mita huffed behind them, irritated at the brevity of the workout. She hadn't even broken a sweat.

Instinct.

Instinct had saved her. Then, as now...

She realised with a start that it made little difference. The realisation overcame her like some prophetic epiphany, and reduced all her confusions and anxieties to a simple certainty.

Whether she thought it through or listened to her heart, whether she applied the humourless frugality of logic or the unfounded passion of instinct to her troubles, the result would remain the same:

She did not trust her master as far as she could spit him.

When finally his message reached her, upon her return to the precinct, it was a short, prerecorded affair. He stared from a viewspex thick with distortion and white noise, and pointed a gloved finger down the length of the camera optic.

'Stay where you are, interrogator,' he said. 'Allow no other attacks upon the underhive. You understand me? No more failures.

'Remain in Cuspseal. I am sending a mutual friend to collect you.'

The image died with a clipped whine, and Mita sat back from the viewspex with a yawn.

She could no longer bring herself to care.

She slept poorly that night.

Orodai and his Preafects had returned from their subterranean predations with grisly armour and savage smiles, satisfied for now that the iron heel of the Preafectus Vindictaire had crashed whatever flames of rebellion still fluttered at the underhive's heart. She tried to quiz the commander personally — had he seen the Night Lord? Had they killed the traitor? — but the man's exhausted irritation at her continuing presence had earned her few answers, and only by skimming his mind had she tasted the seed of doubt that lingered there.

They had seen nothing of the shadowed monster. Oh, Orodai told himself that it was irrelevant, that he barely believed it was real anyway, that the aim of the assault had been to prevent any further incursions into his territory and to repay the horror of the starport massacre. He even began to believe his own reassurances, but when he ordered Mita out of his office it was with the look of a man who knew he was fooling himself, that his actions had achieved nothing unless perhaps to exacerbate the situation, and that the excesses of the day's violence had all been for nought.

She left him only when he vowed there would be no more attacks, and commandeered a small Preafect dormitory for her and Cog's exclusive use. She snapped at the giant's moronic prattling with more venom than it warranted, and fell into a shallow interrupted slumber to the sound of his suppressed sniffles.

She dreamed of embers — or eyes — burning in the darkness around the edges of her vision. She saw a great shark with blades for fins, cruise through inky water before turning away, rejecting her taste. And then the water was the void, and the spectral currents were eddies in the warp, and a shoal, a school, a pod — a swarm — punctured the nothingness, not of fish nor squid but eagles, silver and blue and black, swooping and gambling in the updrafts of nothingness.

A voice said: 'Seek me, my brothers...'

And out in the dark, where no light could fall, something heard the call. Something paid attention, and listened with a keen ear, then turned and cried into the deeper depths, where some other remote listener waited.

Again and again the cry was repeated, circulated, echoed from ear to mouth to ear, across time and void and warp, until it reached the eagles themselves. One by one they dipped their wings, flexed their steely claws, and raced towards the light.

Towards an island of pearly white. A planet. An icy world, with its face turned from the sun.

Equixus.

She awoke in the small hours of the early morning with the same old uncertainty: how much of a part had the gift played in her nocturnal fantasies? How much was dream, and how much prediction?

She did not sleep again after that.

The following day found her huddled over the steering pillar of an impeller bike, a great plume of ash towering behind her like the tail of a dusty rooster. She had cast off indolence, washed clean her indecision, and decided to act.

As she saw it, the distinction between observation and interference ran deep. She had been expressly forbidden from indulging in the latter. Kaustus's message had said nothing of the former.

In every city, and especially in every hive, Mita knew that there was a certain niche. Sometimes it was naturally filled. Often it was a position to be squabbled over, traded between those who felt inclined to occupy it. Inevitably there would come to each of these conflicts a natural resolution, a winner. Such characters were cunning. They were ruthless. They were scrupulous. They were clever.

She had made her enquiries discreetly, at the start. She had considered Cuspseal from the perspective of a social jigsaw, and had taken pains to direct her interest towards those pieces of a higher calibre – the guildhouse quartermasters, the merchant tsars of the docking quarters, the madams of Whoretown and the recruitment sergeants of the small Fleet Ultima offices adjacent to the precinct. She had thought such characters far more likely to be familiar with the goal of her enquiries than lesser souls.

She needn't have bothered to focus her attention so closely. In the minds of everyone she encountered, be they peon or bourgeoisie or authority, the existence of an information broker, a spymaster, a watcher, was as firm as cold rock. That none of them dared speak his name, or to be overseen in the act of betraying his identity, merely confirmed to Mita his monopoly.

His name was irrelevant. His whereabouts were not. She plucked it — ultimately — from the mind of a bounty hunter, drunk and leering, in a saloon on the outskirts of Cuspseal. He seemed to Mita to be a prime source of answers: such mercenary scum as he could be guaranteed to have had dealings with the broker, or at least his associates, at one time or another. She'd plunged her astral tentacles into his unresisting consciousness without thought for his safety, relishing the shouts of dismay from his fellow drinkers. Revulsion and disassociation were reactions to her mutation to which she had grown all too familiar, the ability to terrify was something she had had little chance to enjoy. Until now.

To skim a mind for the vaguest impressions of its inner workings was one thing, to hunt for specific detail was another, far more damaging thing entirely.

She shattered his mind and left his brain haemorrhaging — blood pouring from eyes and nose. Her own objectives outweighed everything now.

(Is this how Kaustus feels? she wondered This impunity? This endless authority?)

And so she found herself riding hard, impeller wheels grinding against litterflows and ash dunes, as she made her way towards the broker's home — deep in the teeming habzones of the eastern mezzanines.

Cog rode ahead, his primal instincts and hardwired reactions far superior to her own. When he swerved to avoid some hidden crevice, or jinked his impeller to one side just as other traffic passed — a cavalcade of bikes and trams, scuttling beetlemounts and garish servitor vehicles, dead torsos welded to chasses like fleshy steering columns — she followed suit immediately. Allowing him to lead was a pragmatic deference: on the off-chance that anyone was foolish enough to attempt an ambush, it would be he who absorbed the brant of the attack.

Practicality, even through affection. The stuff of the Inquisition.

They entered the Warren through a looping series of bridgebacks and checkpoints, where queues of impatient civilians gathered to pass. She kept her identity to herself at such times, slotting the cruciform ''I'' pendant of her office into the tiny fleshholster on her shoulder, enduring the sleazy searches of militiamen with uncharacteristic patience. It would not do to broadcast her presence ahead, and if the broker was as adept as his reputation suggested he would know they were coming long before they arrived.

The Warren was a honeycomb of stagnant architecture: hexagonal block after hexagonal block, interlocking in drab material harmonies, facets pressed together for support like stifled teeth in a cogged machine. Here the workers lived, the billion no ones. The antscum. Factory fodder, condemned to lifetimes of drudgery, but thankful to their Emperor for the same. Here the uncomplaining masses awoke, worked, and slept: every day, every year, every century. Termites in a concrete mound, as unique as grains of sand upon an endless island beach.

Cog and Mita swept into a culvert at the base of a particular hab, the memory of its pitted surface and its devotional graffiti no less vivid for being stolen from the bounty hunter's brain. Only on closer inspection was the sham inherent to the construction made plain, and then only through a careful appraisal of tiny details. No clothing dangled on flexing poles from tiny slit-windows. No shadows moved behind blinds and drapes, as they did in surrounding habs. No preachers ranted in fiery oration from the stepped buttresses along each corner, replaced on this edifice by tail human figures: servitors with long shanks and countless eyes, which stood in silent voyeurism of all within their gaze.

It was a statement, of course.

You are being watched.

They left their impeller bikes at the central entrance, and Mita could feel without extending her psychic self the cold intellect regarding them. Through numberless electric eyes, through a myriad of cameras — both hidden and overt — its perpetual interest bored into her from somewhere within.

This, then, was the information broker. And to her senses, which relied upon the whimsy of emotion as a retina relies upon light, his astral presence was a thing of jagged edges and ugly ambitions.

She stepped inside scant seconds behind Cog. It saved her life.

He had used combat servitors, of course. Clever.

Devoid of emotion, lacking even a basic self awareness which might have betrayed them to her senses, they were as invisible to her astral gaze as any other machine. They dropped from recesses above the door and sprung from concealed pits in the rockcrete of the lobby with only the whine of smooth hydraulics to betray their movement. Four of them: sleek models with gangly parts and chequerboards of surgical scars, ramshackle homunculi with a dangerous, graceful aesthetic. Two racked ungainly weapons from plastic holsters, deformed remnants of human flesh held together by circuit wiring. Autoguns — multibarreled and undecorated — loomed in each cybermetallic paw.

The two others started forwards, bird-jointed legs endowing them with a predatory, hopping gait, like reptiles hybridised with zombie corpses. Each sported a shimmering forceblade in the place of a left wrist — flesh and absorption coils interknitted like brambles — and a three-digit powerfist to the right.

Two to shoot the hell out of any trespasser, and two to get in close and finish them off. Cute.

The autoguns opened fire with a roar and Mita ducked on impulse, acknowledging even as she did so that it was a futile gesture: not a single part of the lead firestorm could find its way to her. Bullets impacted on Cog's broad chest like stones striking the flanks of a tank — punching ragged holes in his robe and plucking messy eruptions of blood and flesh into the air — but appearing only to enrage him further. He stretched wide his tri-jointed arms and roared like a beast, great fists clenching in rage, bullets whining as they ricocheted from steel knuckles. A gobbet of his flesh painted itself across Mita's brow, snapping her awake from the urge to freeze up that had seized her. She dropped to her knees and grabbed for the holster at her waist.

She was an interrogator of the Ordo Xenos, warp-dammit. She wouldn't be bested by a hivetown infomerchant and his metal cronies. She'd come prepared for this.

Her boltpistol was loaded and armed before conscious thought even impelled her to seek targets, and she squirreled her way forwards to peer between Cog's legs with the weapon supported in both hands. Through the oscillations of his robe — now tattered and dripping gore — she caught a brief glimpse of the nearest gundrone, wide eyes rolling in metal sockets with whatever vestiges of machismo its human biology retained. She took her time drawing a bead, recalling her training, shutting out every other element of the world, dissolving peripheral threats on a wave of focus, then fired.

The servitor jerked backwards once, then spun at an impact upon its shoulder, then arched backwards with a sudden snap as a third shell caught it in the centre of its forehead. The warheads detonated one by one — dancing their victim like a ghastly marionette — until its head burst apart on a cloud of shrapnel and brain flesh.

Towering over her, Cog's living shield was quickly losing its efficacy. His roar grew weaker with every instant, replaced all too often by anguished moans, and the fabric of his robe drizzled moist gore around his feet like a saturated sponge. Doing her best to stay behind him — and to shut out her shame at accepting his unspoken sacrifice — Mita became aware of a blurring shape to her left. The first of the combat servitors closed with an electric rattle, its face a featureless mass of stretched skin, pulled taut around a single fish-eye lens. Its attack was as brutal as it was efficient — a horizontal hack with the crackling blade instants before a vertical swipe with the powerfist — a combination impossible to dodge. She backed away with a wordless howl, aware already that she was as good as dead.

Cog saved her yet again, clawing with an exhausted grunt at the servitor's head and throwing it, knife chopping uselessly at his tree-like arm, across the room, bowling over the remaining gundrone in the process. Mita followed his lead without hesitation, pumping a glut of bolter shells into the knotted machines as they struggled to disentangle, watching with enormous satisfaction as they blew apart with smoke and sparks dancing around them.

The intervention was one effort too great for Cog's wrecked body: mangled to the point of dissolution, eyes thick with a film of blood and tears, his massive legs gave way and he slumped to the ground with a hiss, hands reaching out.

'Didn't... didn't saved Mita,' he burbled, child-like. 'Suh-sorry...'

'Oh, Cog...' she whispered.

And then it was just her, and in a slow motion dream that had no business invading her reality, the second combat servitor hopped gaily from the plumes of smoke and ripped her boltpistol away, crumpling it in its powerfist.

It placed its blade to her neck and chirruped.

'Shit,' she announced.

'I wouldn't go that far, dear,' said a voice, startling her. 'I thought you did rather well, considering. Het-het-het.'

The curious tone seemed to come from the servitor itself — or at least from the enamel speaker-mouth hooked above its ragged ear — but its unctuous tones stood incongruous against the machine's vapid mind. Someone speaking from afar, then, using this murderous machine as a mouth.

'You must be the information broker,' she said, feeling ridiculous.

'Het-het-het,' the voice sounded positively delirious, its weird laughter grating at her ears. 'Very good, yes, very good! And you must be the inquisitor's witch, yes? Yes? Heard so very much about you, het-het-het. Blinded one of my agents earlier, even, poor little lamb.'

'The muggers? That was you?'

'Het-het-het. It pays to find out as much as possible about strangers in my city.'

'"Find out"? They tried to murder me!'

'Yes. Het-het-het. So I found out you can't be killed by cretins. You see? Thus my metal friends, here.'

The servitor thumped itself on the chest with a hollow clang. Like a puppet, dancing to its master's strings. At its feet, Cog shifted his weight and groaned, watching events through rheumy eyes. Not dead, then. Yet.

'Who are you?' Mita said, the forceblade's charge prickling at the skin of her throat.

'That, my dear, is something you aren't in any position to discover.' The servitor cast an eye — independent of its twin — down to the bleeding giant on the floor. 'Not now that your pet ogryn can't quite find his feet — het-het-het.'

Cog stiffened.

A warning bell rang in Mita's mind.

'What... What did you call him?' she said, bracing herself.

'Didn't you hear me? An ogr—'

Something blurred before her eyes.

The sounds of metal and flesh being ripped apart went on for a long time, even after Cog stamped on the servitor's voicebox and silenced its curses.

'He doesn't like being called that,' Mita muttered, needlessly. She went to find the broker.

Zso Sahaal

They came seeking sanctuary. The underhive recoiled from its wounds, slinking in the dark like a crippled fox, and where before its people had held the Shadowkin in contempt — fearing their vigilante strikes, deriding their zealotry — now their perceptions were changed. Now they saw strength, fortification, protection.

There was not a single family untouched by the Preafect's pogrom, and without a spoken word, without vocal alliance or official consent, they gathered themselves in meagre packs, as best they could, and they trod the winding path into the depths, to where the snaking road descended no further, and there, on the shores of the rustmud swamps, they stopped.

In the heart of Sahaal's domain.

They came seeking sanctuary, and amongst the hordes of their number they brought with them their former masters, their warriors and outlaws and leaders. Their heroes and their villains.

At the start of the second day following the vindictor attack, when die stream had become a trickle, and then finally cleared, Sahaal stared out from his throne across the sea of seething refugees, tasted their stink upon the air, felt their fear and dispossession and dejection, and smiled his secret smile.

He would use them.

'What deception is this?'

'Curse you, Shadowbitch! I'll not stand for—'

'Back off! One more! One more push-!'

Snarls of aggression jittered throughout the Shadowkin encampment, a ring of torches and weapon-gloss glints tightening around twelve strange — and furious — figures. They had come in good faith. Dejected at their flight for sanctuary, ashamed, even, of the exodus from their own territories, they were proud nobles nonetheless. And now, as they stepped from cobbled barges onto the russet-brown island of their former enemies, to find themselves encircled by Shadowkin gunsmen, they reacted with all the outrage of displeased royalty. 'Slit your vile little throats, by the frogspirits—'

'Suggest you lower your weapons, Shadowscum—' And so on.

Condemnitor Chianni directed their corralling with the confidence of one born to lead, and as he watched the unfolding spectacle from the secret places of the island-drill's mouldering carcass, Sahaal reflected gratefully upon her transformation. She had come to him as a stammering under-condemnitor, a witness to her leader's casual slaying by a monstrosity from her nightmares. And now? Now she was a representative of divinity, no less. He had ordered her to gather their current guests in the Emperor's name and she had obliged him without complaint. In the unfamiliar waters of politics and diplomacy, she was his most valuable tool. 'Priestess! You get these guns out of my sight or—'

'Angry! Killing soon! Hiveshit Shadowkin blooding!' The Shadowkin warriors ignored the threats with patience borne of confidence, driving their charges on up the flanks of the rusted heap, towards the dark culvert at its heart where the vast throne of bone and rag — accruing new grisly pennants and morbid trophies with every day — stood empty. Its owner watched the visitors from other, secret vantages, and relished the fear their indignation concealed.

Since their arrival in the Shadowkin territories the swarm of refugees had maintained a fearful distance from the shade-slicked island with its black-ragged denizens and rumours of living horrors. Like mice clamouring at the entrance to a tiger's lair — grateful for its presence but too terrified to approach — they left their protectors well alone, and went about the re-establishment of their feudal structures in new, miniaturised empires, shanty towns and canvas camps pushed against the shores of the swamp. Shadowkin spies watched it all, and through them Sahaal had observed and calculated, and followed their petty dominions with interest.

It was, he supposed, a natural process. In the world above this dismal wasteland, before the Preafects came and changed everything, every aspect of underhive life was governed by the ganghouses. Underworld atristocracies, each as assiduous of its heritage and racial purity as the Steepletown nobles themselves. Their number were impossible to determine and their internecine squabbles, schisms and betrayals impossible to chronicle, but what was certain was this: of them all, seven houses had risen to dominate the rest: seven great clan-tribes of warriors and outlaws. And all — bar one — had swallowed pride and territory in the face of the vindictor raids and fled into the silent deeps of the Shadowkin lair. And thus they now stood, trivial empires scattered along the shores of Sahaal's domain.

First were the Quetzai — a brood of nimble warriors whose gaudy suits of colour and feather slipped amongst the refugees of the northern shore: tall totems moving above the raggedy shelters, each bearing a living kutroach with its limbs and fangs removed.

Second, to the east, the towering brutes of the Atla Clan: warriors ritually scarred from head to toe, poisoned quills worn at the tip of each finger, like the paws of great bears. Their guttural commands — demands for food and drink from the dispossessed peoples over whom they had claimed stewardship — resounded across the waters with irritating frequency.

Beyond them, isolated from the refugee swarm where other houses mingled (and terrorised) at will, the quiet albinos of the Pallor Steppes fashioned sturdy teepees and burnt strange herbs, soporific fumes mixing with those of the swamp. Their hunched forms — so frail, in appearance — belied a fierce martial tradition, and Sahaal found himself reminded of the white-skinned people of Nostramo Quintus, his master's ancient home.

To the south the exiled underhivers found themselves beneath the custodianship of the House Magrittha: genderless warriors with long limbs and high-boned faces, tall rifles clutched in elegant hands, uncertain physiques tattooed and naked, displaying their sacred androgyny for all to see.

In the shallows of the southern shores, where the weakest of the refugees had been pushed by the ungentle Brownian motions of the encampment, the shamanic savages of the Frog Princes had established their oleaginous quarters. Convinced that the bloated amphibians of their former territory were reincarnations of Imperial saints — through whom the Emperor could be contacted — their priests dressed in moist skins, eyes bulging with lugubrious scrutiny, demanding tithes from the hivers beneath their rule not of credits nor food, but unpleasant organic curios: hair from the head of a child, an old man's spittle, ingredients for their rituals of worship.

And finally, to the west, the haughty guards of the Sztak Chai Warlord moved amongst the throng, demanding respect and taxation in equal amounts. Their plain robes disguised bodies honed to teak hardness by decades of martial ''meditation'', and their dawn exercises had captured Sahaal's attention — and his appreciation — from across the waters.

The seventh noble house, un-represented in all of the rustmud caverns, was the Glacier Rat scum: piratical vermin wiped from the face of the hive in the blink of an eye.

Before the exodus these families, these wolf-pack brotherhoods, had ruled the underhive with a clench of iron and blood: and woe betide the settlement that neglected its taxes, or disrespected its territorial overlords.

And now this.

They found themselves reduced to fragmentary slices of shoreline, divisions of power that encircled the drill island like a moat of shifting lava — creeping and insidious, but ultimately slow and unthreatening. They had lost the respect of the underhive. They had existed for centuries as protection merchants: extorting ''their'' peasants for the right to stewardship, and when at last their protection was required, when the armoured fist of the Preafects smashed against the underhive's unprotected belly — they had failed. They had fallen from grace. They had come to Sahaal's tribe with begging bowls outstretched and now — the insolence, the gall! — they were resuming their old ways: formulating petty hierarchies amongst the dispossessed camps, demanding fealty and wealth from those with neither to offer.

Sahaal could not stand for that. There was one authority in this rusting hinterland, and one authority alone. He would not be challenged, whether they knew of his existence or not.

And so to each noble family, through scouts that he sent to each camp, he offered an invitation — a communion with the condemnitor of the Shadowkin — and true to form, blustering, face-keeping, puffed with misplaced pride, each was accepted. The head of every house, and his or her finest warrior, summoned to meet with those whose sanctuary they had claimed. That was the deal. That was the bait.

They arrived like visiting princes, of course, and now... now they snarled like caged beasts at every ungentle prod of a lasgun muzzle in their ribs, every hand-heel push towards the centre of the island.

How the mighty are fallen...

The Night Haunter's words, ringing in Sahaal's mind.

'—demand to know the meaning of this, warp's piss!'

'—be repercussions! The Sztak Chai does not tolerate—'

'—kill! Cut slice-and-dice — kill all!'

And then there was a new voice, neither raised nor strained, which cut through the objections like a razor and left jaws gaping.

'Be silent,' it said, from above their heads. 'Be silent and bow to your new lord.'

He dropped from the stain of darkness that covered the cavern's ceiling without a noise, a long-shanked vision of black and blue, devil-red eyes glaring from a pall of shadow, striking the brown earth and straightening, black cloak of feather and rag settling across him like a funeral shroud. To their minds, alive with such terror that they had never before known, he was not real. He could not be real. This gangle-limbed beast — this filth-slicked spider — that had broached the walls of nightmare and found form in corporeal flesh. Towering over them, a half-seen ghoul, veiled by darkness and design, his respirator steamed unctuous coils of vapour like a daemon's breath, and as he tilted his head through light-dappled chinks of shadow he flexed his claws from their sheaths, slicing the awe-frozen moment in half.

The visitors came to their senses all at once. Some screamed.

Some tried to run. Some fell to their knees.

They had heard the rumours, perhaps. They had heard that the madmen of the Shadowkin — those zealous fools who had shut themselves away from the rest of the underhive, eschewing contact and wealth, concerned only with their morbid deathcult, dedicated to the Emperor's purity — had a new master. They had shrugged and spat, untroubled by the machinations of that which did not concern them.

They had heard tales, even, of something new in the underhive, some dark presence that prowled in the night and killed without compunction. They had heard of mutilations and bloody atrocities, of bodies disjointed and violated, of eyes put out and fingers stolen.

They had heard rumours of terrors and abominations, and dismissed them as idle tales to scare the children.

They were regretting their flippancy now.

'The leaders will approach,' Sahaal said, voice a mere hiss.

None seemed prepared to obey, each ''noble'' hiding behind his or her accompanying warrior, faces drawn, mouths agape, refusing still to believe what their eyes were telling them.

Sahaal hissed and gestured at Chianni, a half-flick of his claws that he knew she would translate accordingly. On cue the condemintor waved forwards the Shadowkin warriors, overseeing their rough advance: pulling apart nobles and protectors like clinging lovers, threatening and clubbing when resistance was offered, pushing forwards the gang leaders to stumble, alone and unprotected, in a gaggle at Sahaal's feet.

Six little pigs, quivering in their fat.

'You came to this place,' Sahaal said, gaze sweeping across them, arm gesturing out across the smog of the swamps, 'in terror. You fled before your enemies like vermin, and you ran here. Into my arms. To me!'

He took a step forwards, light smearing itself a fraction further across his armour.

'You came to me for sanctuary — uninvited, unwanted — but have I turned you away? No. I have tolerated your presence. I have let you slip among the shores of my domain like snakes in tall grass... and how have you repaid my kindness?'

Another step, claws flashing across flickering torchlight, eyes burning. The nobles cringed in their places.

'Have you visited me, to bow? Have you offered fealty, to the Emperor's own warrior? Have you yielded to me? No. No, you have said nothing. You have waited until you were called!'

Another step, and this time the group's cohesion splintered: the frail head of the Pallor House fell onto his knees with a moan, the feathered priestess of the Quetzai fumbled for a weapon at her belt — long since taken by her captors — and the Frog Priest turned his bloated body and tried to flee, eyes spinning, only to-be thrust forwards again by the Shadowkin circle.

Sahaal did not pause at the interruption.

'The hive has fallen from the Emperor's light and turned against the Underworld, and like children running for their mother you have expected from the Shadowkin protection, sanctuary, comfort... And at what price? None! You have offered me nothing!'

His voice echoed across the silent wastes, strong and shrill and terrible.

'I shall tolerate the disrespect no longer. If you are to stay, if you are to plague my territory like wolves, then it shall be at my pleasure.'

He leaned down, helmed countenance shedding shadows like oil, eyes burning with ruby fires. 'You are the guests of Holy Warriors,' he hissed, breath steaming, 'and if you are to remain so it is fair that you should share their burden.'

He straightened abruptly, cloaks rippling, and extended his hands towards the group, each fan of razor-light claws snickering away to its secret sheath, leaving only gloved fists.

'Which of you will accept my rule?' he asked. 'Which of you will taste divinity, and join my crusade? Which of you will surrender his house to the Emperor's mercy?'

One by one the nobles swallowed their terror, licked dry lips and forced down the shivering in their limbs, and stepped forwards to kiss the hands of the beast.

'Good,' he said, when they had finished. He glanced up towards the waiting Shadowkin, and the six champions of the ganghouses restrained amongst them, watching events with earnest eyes. They had witnessed their own masters signing away their autonomy, and their expression told Sahaal everything he needed to know: They would have done exactly the same. As he returned his gaze to his newest slaves he stole a glance towards Chianni, noting without surprise her expression of unconcealed disdain. She had spent all her life despising the underhive's other gangs, punishing their iniquity when the Emperor's will allowed, protecting her tribe from their predations when it did not. It was a mark of her utter obedience to Sahaal that, as he claimed their strength as his own, she did not raise her voice in protest.

He had a pleasing surprise for her, yet.

'Do you know,' he said, glowering at the nobles, 'of lions?'

They stared, bewildered.

'Great predators of ancient Terra,' he explained, 'pack beasts — loyal to their clan, and obedient. Always obedient to their strongest member.' He paused, enjoying the drama of the moment despite himself. 'And when a new leader arose, a blooded-daw ready to assume command, his first action was always the same.

'He could not tolerate disloyalty. He could not risk challenge to his authority. He could not spare any rem-r.ant of the old regime, the old order.

'Do you know what he did, little nobles?'

Their eyes were wide. Their lips trembled. Perhaps some knew what was coming.

'He killed all the cubs.'

Sahaal beheaded the six nobles with two strokes of his claws.

The champions of the gang houses, who had witnessed the transferral of power and could no more deny it to their brothers and sisters than they could rail against it, were returned to their petty empires with a single message, to spread amongst the dispossessed masses of the underhive. You belong to the Shadowkin now. Prepare for war.

'C-CONDEMNITOR?'

'Why do you disturb our lord's sacred slumber?'

Voices flourished on the cusp of Sahaal's hearing, pricking at his sleeping mind like an itch, drawing him up from the depths of his dreams to an intangible, half-awake plateau.

'S-something's happened, condemnitor!' a man quailed, directing his stammerings, Sahaal assumed, to Chianni — seated as ever beside him. 'We... we thought that... that h-he... w-would wish to know.'

They can't even speak my name...

'Explain,' Chianni grunted, sounding unimpressed.

'It's the prisoner. From the starport...'

'The warp-seer?'

'Y-yes.'

Sahaal was fully awake in a second. He rose to his feet and jabbed a finger towards the cowering man, prostrated before the throne.

'What is it? What's happened to the prisoner?'

'S-sweet Emperor!'

'Tell me!'

'We... we think he's dying, lord!'

Bound in chains at his wrists and legs, the second astropath — a prisoner in a squalid Shadowkin hut since his capture — drooled a thick paste of spittle and bile from his mouth, tongue snagging against his teeth, running red with his own blood. At irregular intervals his body stiffened as if electrified, each narrow-corded muscle standing out from his emaciated frame, withered face crumpled in wordless agony.

He had soiled himself, and coupled with the strands of drying blood and vomit that pooled around him, streaking his pigeon chest, his cell stank like a madhouse, an impression his shrieks did little to dispel.

Like his dead comrade before him he wore across his brow a twisted strip of lead, and it was to this that Sahaal's attention immediately flew. It glowed red hot, faint clouds of steam boiling above it, scorching the man's flesh like a cattle brand.

'My lord!' Chianni cried out from his side, horrified by what, to her, must seem some cruel form of witchcraft.

If only she knew...

'Get out,' Sahaal ordered, waving her and the cowering messenger away, ignoring the flash-flicker of disappointment that crossed her features. 'Now.'

He closed the door — such as it was — behind them, listening carefully at its corrugated frame, enhanced senses outstretched, to ensure neither were eavesdropping.

And then he turned back to the writhing astropath, rolling and moaning, shattering his own teeth at the strength of his gnashing, and bent down close to watch.

And yes, there it was... at the edge of his perception, a grating presence... whispering... promising, teasing, cursing...

The warp swarms, gathering around, scratching with immaterial claws, fighting to break through the lead shield.

'Someone,' Sahaal said, wiping a tender finger across the man's sweaty brow, 'is trying to say hello.'

Working with an abruptness that drew a strangled gasp from the psyker, he hooked a talon beneath the metal coronet and snipped it away, exposing the man's singed forehead. Opening the way.

He did not need psychic senses to know what happened next. It was like an indescribable sound — some ultrasonic pitch that went unheard, but felt nonetheless — dwindling away to nothing. It was like a pressure being released, like a faucet opening in the sky to pour away all the psychic waste, all the vile shit that clamoured beyond perception. And the waste pipe, the reservoir into which it all flushed clear, was the psyker's head.

He jerked upright, like a meat puppet, body moving in strange unbalanced steps that were not its own. Blood poured from his mouth. The warp beasts tore at his soul, a frenzied feast beyond the veil of reality.

Sahaal backed away, heart racing. Had it worked? Had someone heard his call? Had the predators of the empyrean stretched out their shapeless tongues at the arisal of a beacon? A message, trying to get through?

The psyker's head twisted around, muscles manipulated by a mind that was not his own, until he faced Sahaal, empty eye sockets glaring into him.

And then he spoke — falteringly at first, like a marionette guided by an inexpert hand — but with growing confidence, and clear intention.

'W-we..., we... we are c-coming... fun... for you...'

Sahaal dropped to his knees, overcome.

'B-brothers?'

'We are coming for you, Talonmaster. Prepare the way. Ave dominus nox.'

'A-ave!'

The psyker's head exploded like a bursting bubble, scattering fragments of skull and shredded brain across his cell, and in some distant dimension his soul sobbed as the swarms fought for their feast.

Sahaal removed his helm and, unashamed, wept with joy.

The next day Shadowkin scouts moved amongst the refugee camps with a message, gathering crowds at every junction, filling the air with shouts and protests.

In every part of the shanty town the message was the same.

Go now into the hive, they read, parchment sheets held in trembling hands. Rise now in the corrupted world above us, and gather for your new masters your tithe.

The Emperor's Angel is among us, friends, and he taxes not our wealth, nor our food, nor our blood. He demands payment in justice.

Every able man, every able woman. Each shall present to the Emperor's Angel the head of a sinner, or else themselves he branded so — and culled accordingly.

Those below the age of fifteen years are exempted. They shall be overseen by the Shadowkin in their parents' absence.

You have two days.

There was outrage, at first. Outrage and horror and disbelief. But the story of the nobles' executions had circulated, the uncertain presence of some terrible Holy Thing lurking upon the island had gathered weight with each retelling, and beyond the outrage and the horror, above all else, there was terror.

The Shadowkin were strong where all other tribes had been crippled. The reprisals for failure were no idle threat. The refugees could not flee. They could not hide. They could not desert their children.

It did not take long for small groups — faces set, teeth clenched, fists curled around blunt-edged machetes and crude blades — to set off on the long, tortuous trek into the hive itself. Equixus faced a bloody night.

Mita Ashyn

When she was finished with the cognis mercator — the information broker she'd risked so much to find — Mita returned to Cuspseal feeling uncomfortably pleased with herself. She hadn't broken the rules her master had imposed, hadn't prosecuted her own attack against the nightmare lurking in the underhive, hadn't sanctioned such an attack from any other source, and certainly hadn't interfered with the inquisitor's own plans. Whatever they were.

All she had secured was an element of... insurance. Kaustus need never know.

At the secondary tiercluster, alongside the Arbites precinct, she paused to lead Cog into a hospice of the Order Panacear. The giant had fared well despite his wounds, stalwart physiology seemingly impervious to the pain his injuries looked likely to cause.

Or perhaps, Mita reflected cruelly, he was simply too stupid to know when he should have been dead.

Either way, she found herself quietly affected by his plight. His defence of her safety had been selfless, his loyalty utterly beyond reproach, and in some emotive corner of her mind she found herself sharing his pain, empathic senses indulging her shame with masochistic relish.

It could not be ignored, of course, that Cog's loyalty to her was a far purer, more successful thing than her loyalty to her master. Had Cog ever questioned her orders? Had he ever doubted her, or mistrusted her, or sought to disobey? Of course not.

And look where it got him...

He was a mess. Great ragged holes bled freely all across him, the vast musculature beneath revealed in all its grisly glory. One of his cheeks was ripped — a vacant chasm that exposed gums and molars to the very back of his mouth, leaving a tortured flap of flesh trailing from his jawline. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen, his knuckles grazed of almost all their skin, and his long arms punctured with more holes than a cratered asteroid. Even the sisters of the Order, fluttering from bed to bed in cassocks and starched wimples, with a quiet prayer and a dispensoria of arcane drugs for every occasion, did not seem overly optimistic at his chances of recovery.

After, that is, Mita had bullied them into accepting ''the abomination'' as a patient. The authority of the Inquisition remained unsullied in some quarters at least.

She left her loyal giant in their care for a scant hour, returning to the precinct to change her clothes and steal a short moment's soothing meditation, before returning to oversee his care. She walked between the Preafect fortress and the hospice with an irrepressible spring in her stride, satisfied that whatever the movements of the thing prowling the shadows below her feet, whatever clandestine actions it undertook, she would be fully aware of it.

And then she stepped into Cog's cramped healing cell and recalled, with a jolt, Kaustus's words.

'I am sending a mutual friend to collect you'.

There was someone waiting for her.

He was the sort of man, Mita had decided during the tedious minutes that followed, whose petty affection for authority had come to dominate every part of his persona, to the extent that any story, any piece of unshared information, was delivered with trembling relish. I know something you don't, his gimlet eyes said, and I'll take my damned time in telling you.

'It was on the seventh tier that we found them,' he expounded, waving an arm for emphasis. A small fleck of froth had gathered in the corner of his mouth as he talked — an unpleasant detail that Mita found herself unable to ignore. 'Wretched creatures. Totally disorganised, of course — their kind always are. So pitifully earnest.'

He locked his lips around the tip of the hookah he wore in a strap against his chest, dislodging the bead of spittle, and drew bubbles through the bulb at its base.

...buglbuglbuglbugl...

'Mmm.'

He breathed out cherry-scented smoke, lips curled in a feline smile, a set of onyx-black false teeth twinkling like a starry void within. Mita repressed the temptation to apply a fist to their gloomy surface.

'We killed them all, of course,' he droned, 'bar the leader. We thought you might appreciate an interrogation. Heh. When you're ready.'

He was a priest — or at least that's what he called himself. His obvious self-adoration was hardly in keeping with the selflessness that came with devotion, and were it not for the winged aquila burned above his right eye he would look no different to any other member of Kaustus's retinue. She wondered why the inquisitor had chosen him as his errand boy.

'Tauists,' he blurted, red smog spilling from his nostrils like some ghastly dragon. 'Got hold of a tau propaganda vidslug — we're looking into how. Heretical hogwash. "Greater good" this, "mutual benefit", that. And the idiots believe it — can you image? No place in the Emperor's light for fools like that.'

Mita kneaded her temples, exhausted and headachey. That Kaustus had dispatched this man to fetch her — to rein her in — was obvious, and that he had thus far occupied his time with meandering anecdotes and tales of inconsequence was not helping her mood. She might as well have been talking to the inquisitor himself.

Her patience for her master's obliqueness was rapidly reaching its end.

...buglbuglbuglbugl...

And to make matters worse, it was becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a more irritating sound than the hookah's incessant watery mussitation.

'Why,' she asked, diplomatic to the end, 'are you telling me all this?'

He scowled at her over the ridge of Cog's chest — rising and falling with the shallow sleep into which he had slipped — as if affronted by her ignorance. His mind told a different story, an unsubtle blend of smug superiority and false piety. He was enjoying himself, talking down to his supposed superior like a parent patronises a child.

'Because,' he sniffed, 'last time I checked you were an interrogator of the Ordo Xenos, and — hah — an affiliate of the team that conducted the raid. I thought you'd appreciate the successes of your comrades.'

'Oh, spare me,' she snapped, patience expiring. 'We're on the Eastern Fringes, you fool. The chances are there are Tauist cells on every warpdamned tier. You didn't come all the way from Steepletown to boast about shooting up a bunch of bored idealists.' She crossed her arms and slumped, inwardly annoyed at the ease with which her temper had broken.

The priest's thought patterns changed with frightening speed. Cold, boundless distaste flooded her senses. Briefly, she wished Cog was still awake.

'That sounds an awful lot like rebel sympathy,' he hissed, every word a barb. 'You should have a care, interrogator...'

'I seem to be managing fine so far'

'That is a matter of some... debate, amongst our lord's disciples.'

'I'll bet it is, she snarled internally. Last time I saw the obtuse bastards I killed one of them. She kept the sentiment to herself, this time. An uncomfortable silence settled, broken only by the incessant thought-destroying buglbuglbugl, and as she drummed her fingers against the edge of Cog's sleeping pallet a sliver of enquiry arose in her mind. She knew she should repress it, should control her insolence in the presence of this ghastly little man — who would, of course, relay this encounter word-for-word to the inquisitor — but her curiosity was engorged and, as ever in its implacable face, her objections were bulldozed as if insubstantial.

'Tell me, father,' she said, raising an ironic eyebrow. 'During this... heroic... attack...'

He met her gaze undaunted, her sarcasm wasted. 'What of it?'

'What part did the inquisitor play?'

The priest narrowed his eyes. 'Why do you ask?'

'Indulge me.'

The man worked his jaw, fingers tapping at the pipe's stem. 'He led from afar.'

'He wasn't there?'

'His duties with the governor absented him. He planned the raid beforehand and judged that it didn't require his personal attention. What is your point?'

'And his absence didn't trouble you?'

He glared, mind fizzing with disgust. 'Why should it?'

But deep down, beneath layers of obedience and dogma, through thick walls of blinkered devotion and preconception, Mita could taste it: like a ghost of a flavour, playing across the man's mind.

Uncertainty.

She had touched a nerve.

Kaustus brought us to this world to uncover xenophile cells, to purge the heretics who had placed the word of the alien above the light of the Emperor. That's why we're here, warpdammit.

And finally he has the opportunity to perform his sacred duty, to maintain the mantle of heroism he's been so keen to foster — and he sends his thugs in his stead?

It makes no sense.

What are you doing up there, Kaustus? Sneaking about with Zagrif, as thick as thieves, prowling through treasure-galleries and ancient archives?

What are you up to, you bastard?

'No reason,' she said. 'No reason at all.'

The priest grunted, unconvinced, and Mita smirked, that tiny particle of uncertainty in his mind feeding her distrust, her conviction that all was not well.

'You don't like me very much, do you?' she smiled, confidence renewed, deliberately provocative.

The priest raised his eyebrows. 'I'm hardly alone in that respect'

'Is that a fact?'

'Oh yes.' Another smile, ghostlit by crimson smog — black teeth making her squirm. 'The inquisitor... struggled, when seeking a messenger willing to find you.'

'But you overcame your personal dislike in the name of the Emperor? Poor, burning little martyr.'

'Such hostility, interrogator. It does not become you'

Her jaw tightened, fists clenching. 'Let me show you what becomes me,' she snarled, half standing.

The man seemed infuriatingly unperturbed by the threat, drawing puffy clouds of rosy smoke from his pipe, its buglbuglbuglbugl grinding further against her nerves. When finally he spoke he glared from beneath heavy-lidded eyes, making no attempt to disguise his contempt.

'The inquisitor is displeased,' he said, sausage-fingers caressing the pipe's mouthpiece. 'Furious, you might say.'

Mita's mouth was opening before she could stop herself. 'Now there's a surprise.'

The man made a show of shaking his head, eyes rolling in their lidded orbits. Red vapours coiled around the edge of his cassock.

'He had hoped your... resentment... your sarcasm... might be tempered by your time away from the retinue.' The spittle gathered again beside his mouth, like froth on a toxic shore. 'It seems not.'

She threw a pointed glare at the door. 'Is that it?' she demanded, impatient. 'Is that the message? Don't let me keep you.'

'Oh, there's more. Much more' ...buglbuglbuglbugl...

'Could you stop that?'

'Stop...?'

'The smoking, It's annoying.'

He leered.

'The inquisitor has requested that I put to you a question. A very simple question.'

'Yes?'

'He requests your counsel. He asks... "What would you do?"'

Mita frowned. The ground had been swept from beneath her.

'What?'

'You heard me. The situation, as it stands. Rumours of xenophilia in the hive, a bogeyman stalking the underworld. In our lord's place, interrogator, what would you do?'

'Is this a test?'

'You know very well that it is.'

Her mind raced.

Passivity or aggression. Submission or challenge.

Every time she had tried to toe the inquisitor's line, every time she had kept her head down, played by his rules, obeyed him without question, she had found herself marginalised, disrespected, held in contempt for some imagined weakness. And every time the fires of rebellion had coiled in her stomach, every time she'd dared to challenge Kaustus's lead directly, to stand up to his bullish ways, she'd engendered a curious sort of respect from him. Was that the way?

Do I swallow my pride and lie — 'I would have done exactly as he has done'? Or do I remain true to my heart? True to my instincts?

There was no contest.

'I would divert all my attention towards the threat in the underhive,' she said, flatly. 'I would prioritise the possibility of a Chaotic incursion far above the existence of xenophile cells. I would commission every force at my disposal — the Preafects, the retinue, the warpdamned militia, if need be — to find and utterly crush the monster in the shadows.' She nodded, as if reassuring herself. 'That is what I would do, priest, in the inquisitor's place.' The man pursed his lips, the hookah forgotten. 'I see,' he said, presently. 'That is... a shame'

'A shame? I don't unders—'

Abrupt anger blossomed across the priest's mind, shocking her questing senses, his face clouding like a thunderstruck sky.

'How many times?' he barked, black teeth flashing like oil. 'Understanding is not a requirement! The inquisitor demands obedience — that is all! No questions. No warp's-piss assumptions. And no initiative!

'But you asked what I would do! How can I answer without initiative?'

'Ha.' He settled into his chair, a cruel grin curling his face. 'Indeed, yes. Perhaps you are not entirely stupid.'

'I... What? How dare y—'

'I asked you a question, interrogator. There is only one correct answer'

'What answer, damn you?'

The priest steepled his fingers. 'That you are not in the inquisitor's place, and not privy to the information at his disposal, and therefore unable to judge. The only correct answer, interrogator, is that it is an unanswerable question.'

'That's ridiculous! Riddles and warpshit tricks!'

'What is ridiculous,' he hissed, coldness filling his gaze, 'is for a chit of a witch to think she knows everything. There are forces beyond your sight, girl! There are details which only the inquisitor may know. The retinue understands that. Do we assume that we may overrule his judgement without knowing all the facts? Are we so colossally arrogant? No! No, that is a position occupied by you alone.'

She blustered, trying to muster an indignant reply — but his words had cut, and he knew it.

He's right. Emperor's blood, he's right!

The priest leaned forwards, acrid breath washing across her, as if to rub astringent into an already gaping wound. 'The inquisitor hopes you would have learned, during your time alone. There is always more than meets the eye.'

As if to demonstrate he lifted the hookah pipe in one withered hand, thumb caressing the beads of silver filigree at its root.

A blade snapped from its tip like a launching missile, a concealed stiletto spine lurching to a halt and juddering, lancing the air.

'What are you d—' Mita stammered, reactions made sluggish by the priest's accusing words, warning bells chiming slowly — too slow! — in her mind. But even as the threat flourished across her senses a glut of self assurance steeled her muscles. He was just an old man, armed only with a blade.

A voice deep in her subconscious snarled in the shadows. Rip him to shreds!

And then lethargically — like a viewspex display crippled by faulty lightcells, rendering its sanctified image in glacial slow motion — the priest reached out not for her, but for Cog.

'Oh, God-Emperor, no...'

The blade punched into the meat of the giant's throat with a wet thump.

Bracing himself, black teeth bared, the priest sliced outwards, cutting through jugular and windpipe, opening a fleshy crevice in Cog's neck. To Mita's horror he awoke for an instant, and the burst of innocent bewilderment, the flash of contact with her own eyes — questioning, pleading, trusting — would haunt her for as long as she lived.

Time returned to normal with the hot spray of released blood against her face, a geyser of scalding magma, patterning walls and ceiling. She cried out, senses tumbling, thrashing to escape from the sticky eruption.

'Your loyalty should be to your inquisitor alone,' the priest hissed into the dying warrior's ear, harsh voice thick with triumph, eyes flicking up to glower at Mita through the crimson drizzle. 'Not this creature.'

Cog died with a gurgle.

Something snapped behind Mita's eyes.

'No!' she screamed, psychic claws boiling outwards, all self-control gone, slash-stabbing into the ether to shred the priest's thoughts like paper. Red venom covered her vision, rage slipped between her defences like sand pouring through fingers, and she reached out for his brain like a hungry wolf, relishing the terror on his face.

And then corded muscles closed around her shoulders, a gauntleted hand swatted at the back of her head, and the retinue of Inquisitor Ipoqr Kaustus ripped through the connecting wall of the next cell in a riot of dust and fabric, hollering prayers and warcries, shouting for her blood.

She should have known better.

Of course the inquisitor would send backup.

Of course he wouldn't leave it to a withered priest.

She'd failed his test. She should have known that wouldn't be the end of it.

As power swords flickered in the dust and guidance optics shimmered from hooded binox headsets, Mita realised it was probably the last oversight she would ever make.

A gun-metal blade burned itself across her vision, its wielder shouting wordlessly as his stroke descended. Somewhere nearby the sisters of the Order Panacear were screaming, the hooded figures of the retinue pushing past them, ignoring their protests, boiling from the shattered wall hollering curses and orders: all of them impressions of a chaotic environment that swirled into Mita's overloaded senses.

She ducked beneath the swordstroke and spun inside the acolyte's guard, elbowing him in the guts then driving the heel of her hand into his nose as he stumbled, feeling it crackle and puncture his brain somewhere within. A razor-stab of premonition — a frozen image of scorching contrails streaking towards her, like toothy-mouthed maggots — caught behind her eyes, and without conscious thought she seized the tumbling corpse beneath its shoulders and pulled it upright.

Bolter fire exploded across her senses, true to the premonition: throbbing at the air and dazzling her with its phosphor bright muzzleflash. The corpse shuddered beneath her grip, clotted lumps of fat and bloodpaste tumbling forwards like a waterfall, shedding its weight — and its shielding — with every moment. The force of each percussive blow forced her backwards, legs straining, crumpling into a ball. She was being caged. Overborne. Destroyed.

And whilst the gunservitor pinned her down, kept her sprawled against her grisly cover, she could guarantee that the rest of the Inquistor's loyal warriors had split, sneaking along adjacent corridors, surrounding her like wolves around a lamb.

Get up.

That dangerous voice again, whispering its incautious counsel into her heart.

Get up, fool! You're better than this!

The servitor paused to reload — whispering columns of metal sliding a fresh clip into place, smooth actuators ejecting its predecessor on a tide of gunsmoke. Mita seized the opportunity to assess her surroundings, gaze flashing left and right as her head crept above the mangled body's charred shoulder.

Don't die here, Mita. Don't die on the floor.

You're better than this!

Everywhere was smoke, a thick blanket of bittersweet stench that itched at her eyes and clouded her nostrils. The servitor stood foresquare in the doorway, hunched back rising from heavy unjointed legs, head a sunken battery of optics and twitching sensoria that dangled, like a vulture's beak, between and below the line of its shoulders. Beyond it the veiled shapes of the retinue capered in the adjacent room, every action underwritten by the dull tone of a cognis logi, assessing tactics and possibilities aloud. Nearer still, cringing in a corner beside the bloodslicked bed with his robe dishevelled and a strangled prayer on his breath, was the priest.

The split-second of eye-contact was all it took Mita to acknowledge he hadn't intended on finding himself trapped in a room with her.

Footsteps echoed through thin walls at her back, other warriors, taking up position, preparing to close the iron claw around her. You're better than this! The voice was right.

The bolterfire resumed, and now with every impact and subsequent detonation the corpse that covered her unravelled more, hammering at her legs, driving the breath from her body, hurting her.

Concentrate.

The priest. Remember the priest!

She closed herself down. She wiped away the world from her senses. She rose up from her body and slid like a harpoon into the priest's head. He tried to resist, for all the good it did him.

Down, down, down... Through layers of character and bubble-slick tiers of memory, past instincts and dreams, sliding between secret desires and repressed rages like a rip-blade, aimed at a heart. She closed astral fingers around that slumbering pearl, that black beacon of uncertainty and disloyally she had felt before. A tiny seed, perhaps, the faintest of rebellious sentiments, but fully formed nonetheless. She pricked at his neuroses, swelled his paranoia with an artist's hand, and suddenly — like breaking an egg — she cracked it open and released it.

In his mind, clenching upon itself, protesting at the invader within its bounds, every certainty the priest had ever felt collapsed beneath him. Every faith, every trust, every loyalty: all of them dissolved, turning inwards, burning at his soul.

He could trust nothing.

He could tolerate no one.

The world was against him.

The instinct, of course, was to flee.

He leapt upright with a startled shriek, hookah clattering free of its straps and shattering at his feet. His charge propelled him out from his corner, robes fluttering, and into the path of the servitor. He crashed into its hulking frame even as he crossed the stream of its firestorm, bolter shells shredded him, picking clean his bones. His frail form was gone within instants, reduced to jelly and bonepowder, but it was enough.

Mita arose behind the wailing man from her moist cover with a shriek, hand closing around the discarded powersword as she moved, gliding to one side and lunging with all her might.

Even as the servitor's field of fire cleared, the unexpected obstacle blasted to wet fragments as quickly as it had arisen, a cautionary algorithm chattered against its engine-brain. It was nowhere near fast enough.

Mita cleaved the massive beast in two with a single stroke, punched through the shocked crowd of non-combatant retainers still lurking beyond the door, and was gone.

As she sprinted through the clamouring wastes of Cuspseal, breath catching in her throat, muscles aching, clothes slick with Cog's blood, a single word swam in her thoughts like a leviathan, rising from some twilight realm, absorbing every iota of her mind.

Outlaw.

She went into the shadow.

Zso Sahaal

Two days seeped by as if captured in amber, struggling against viscous time to claw their way free, to taste liberation for one endless, impossible moment. Sahaal counted each second with truculent impatience, fingers drumming at the arms of his throne, mind adrift with possibilities, plans, frustrations.

Still no word of the Corona.

Two days in the shadow, in the foglight of the rust-mud caverns. Two days of torpid nothing, with only the flickering of firelight to indicate life, like the hive-ghosts themselves, gathered where the nightmares became flesh, swirling about their new king.

Sahaal stared across the water and viewed his domain, and nodded his quiet pleasure. In the north, against the edge of the lapping waters, a tall mound was taking shape, rising up like some swollen stalagmite to challenge the cavern ceiling. The rushing figures at its base had no inkling of his scrutiny, and when — as he had now taken to doing with spiralling frequency — he quit his tattered seat to scuttle across the beams and stanchions of the swamplands, play-stalking the Shadowkin and their refugee guests without their knowledge, still his presence remained secret. He burned with the desire to act, but had no outlet for his energy.

He was everywhere and nowhere. Free to roam, cursed to wait.

He did not need the preysight of his helm, nor the nocturnal vision that was his birthright, to know what the growing mound was built from. Two days, he had given them. After that they would be his.

His master would be proud of him.

In moments of indulgence, when he slipped beneath the waters of meditation, he fancied that he could see Konrad Curze's face. In glittering hazes of pallor and shape, he fancied he could visit the Night Haunter, could speak with him as he had once done, could seek comfort and counsel in his master's voice.

It was all an illusion. The primarch was gone forever, his legacy was all that remained.

In life Konrad Curze had been a tortured soul. Plagued by the wildness of his childhood, haunted by visions of his own demise, he struggled with every fibre of his being to earn the respect and admiration of his brothers, and — above all else — to prove himself worthy of his father's affection. In adulthood as in youth he struck from the shadows, he waged war with fear and steel in the Emperor's name, and he raised his own sons, his Night Lords, with a martial pride unmatched in all the galaxy.

There was little glory in his aspect, if truth be known.

Where other primarchs wrestled for heroic deeds and the favour of their God-Emperor, Sahaal's master pursued only results. He would never be as charismatic as Lion El'Johnson, as articulate as Roboute Guilliman, as demagogic as Horus the Favoured... but he could be strong. He could shatter any enemy. He could be pragmatic. He could be terrifying.

In a universe of terror he robbed the Emperor's enemies of their horrific mantle. He overcame savagery by outstripping it. He purged the brutal by outdoing their brutality. He sacrificed what scant charm he had and took up the crown of scapegoat — the foulest of the primarchs, the dirtiest of fighters, the Emperor's own devil — so that none, none, would stand before him.

Rebels surrendered at the mere suggestion of his intervention. Raiders fled with his name upon their lips, swords unbloodied. Those that were feared were made to fear him. Those that were hated were made to hate him.

Obedience through terror.

He had never been human, but like all the primarchs there lurked in some deep corner of his luminous heart a flavour — a bitter taste — of humanity.

Konrad Curze sacrificed it. He wiped tears of insanity from snowy cheeks and cast his warmth to the wolves, and he did it in the Emperor's name. He lost everything.

He became what he had always been destined to, what the galaxy demanded he become, what the Emperor himself sanctioned, moulded, needed: He became a loyal monster.

And when he turned to his father for succour, for affection, for the merest glimmer of gratitude—

—he received only contempt.

Sahaal surfaced from his musings to find that his grip had splintered the arm of his throne to dust, long shards of bone and iron cutting his hand. He'd bitten his tongue without realising it, and his mouth was filled with the metal tang of his own blood.

Contempt.

That was the Night Haunter's legacy. The contempt of a betrayed son for his father.

And the need for revenge.

Oh, how the mighty are fallen.

'I vow it...' he whispered, unheard. 'Master, I vow it to you. We shall be mighty yet.'

'We shall make him pay for what he did.'

The heap grew massive. From humble beginnings — a cluster, a clutch — it swelled upwards: layer upon layer, compacted together, shovelled one upon the next in imitation of the hive itself.

The stench, by the second day's end, when the camps teemed with life once more and Sahaal slipped across the swamps in secret to view the results of their labours, was an almost physical force.

Men and women, old and young, mouths wide, a rheumy film coating dead eyes. Tongues limp. Flies scuttling and tasting slack skin. From a heap to a hillock, and thence to a mountain, blood spattered, bruised, cold.

A multitude of dead heads glared upwards in mute accusation, and Sahaal met their gaze with a tiny smile.

Most had been taken messily. In distant alleys, he guessed, in maze-like habsprawls and secret places — necks severed with untidy force. Machetes and domestic knives, swinging and bludgeoning, notched daggers and antique blades. The damage to some spoke of sawing, of blow after blow, of hacking without precision through gristle and vertebrae. Of struggles in darkened places, of hands clutching and pushing, straining to defend.

'How many failed to return?' Sahaal murmured, flicking a gesture towards his condemnitor. She alone had joined him before the pile — flickering torches aggravating their shadows.

'Not many,' Chianni said, her voice low. 'The ones who refused to partake were soon... harvested, by those who did not.' Sahaal had at first mistaken her hush for revulsion, but no... no, the Shadowkin were adequately familiar with the tokens of mortality. Her quiet was instead a thing of awe and devotion, centred about the monument before her. 'We think perhaps sixty are unaccounted. Whether they've fled or been captured we don't know.'

'We have their children?'

'Of course.'

He turned to face her, unhelmeted eyes glistening. 'Then you know what to do.'

She nodded. Sahaal was impressed: even the notion of infanticide could not perturb her. Not she: the favourite of a Space Marine.

Yes, it had been wise to confide in her.

Sahaal turned back to his prize and cleared his mind, appreciating its majesty anew, a cone of scattered shapes, an altar to terror.

It was a harvest worthy of the Blood God himself: a mountain of gristle and gore, of gap-toothed grins and severed spines, befitting the brass throne of Khorne.

Not that Sahaal would ever offer it as such. No, these stolen skulls would be gifted to no deity, pledged to no metaphysical spirit.

There was, after all, no God of Fear.

'To the memory of the Night Haunter...' he whispered.

It had been a masterful plan, he knew, to dispatch the refugees on such a ghastly errand. At its most base level it had secured their loyalty: they became complicit to his crusade, bloody-handed allies whether they liked it or not. Few had relished the prospect of murder — fewer still had achieved it with precision and clean conscience — but now... now, with their morbid tithe paid and the faces of their victims haunting their nightmares, now their minds were his to mould.

He had tasked them with targeting sinners — the iniquitous, the mercenary, the impure — and they had made their solemn way into the hive, dispersing like a cloud of flies along elevator shafts and unknown duct crawls, to do that very thing. The hivers were fools if they thought the Cuspseal floor-rents were the only way up from the underhive, and the refugees had scattered across the city in defiance of the their so-called ''containment''. From the lowest to the highest tiers, in every shadowed recess and crowded street: a cry, a shout, the wet retort of metal finding flesh, and then only pumping blood and sprinting feet.

Had each and every victim been a sinner? Was every last head the fitting trophy of a slain delinquent who deserved his fate? No.

Of course not — no more so than any being may be considered guilty for the raft of petty evils for which, every day, every human was accountable. Here were the heads of the innocent mixed with the stolen skulls of scum, but he'd wager that each murderer would now convince his or herself, for the sake of their conscience, that their victim had been an abomination worthy of execution. That their brutality had been undertaken in the name of the Emperor. That no matter what violence they had committed, what horror they had seen, it was all excusable as part of their new lord's Holy Campaign.

Sahaal owned them all, now. Truly, the human mind was a wonderful thing.

But more important still, in the act of chaining themselves to his will, this horde of vigilantes, these thousand-strong killers, had injured the hive more than he could ever hope to have achieved alone.

The number of lives taken was irrelevant. Alongside the city's millions this mountain of skulls was a tawdry fraction, and yet... and yet in every level, in every township and city, the fear would be felt. He knew it, as a cognitor knows numbers and a poet knows words.

Let the Civilian Worship Channel deny it. Let the Preafects shake their heads and ring their bells, and claim that all is well. The more it was refuted, the more the rumours would spread. A wave of murders — insidious, motiveless, random. A slinking tide of death.

In a single disparate swoop, more punishing than any spectacle, more invidious than any gaudy massacre that could claim a million lives, fear would blossom on a tsunami of rumour and suspicion. He could well imagine the whispers, the frightened glances, the questions raised in every home.

Who is responsible? What do they want?

What had the victims done to incur such wrath?

The hive would become a restrained place. Doors would lock. Neighbours would cast troubled glances across cramped habways and avoid conversation. Families would huddle in the dark and whisper of ghouls in the night.

Kill a thousand men and they will hate you.

His master's voice, slipping upon runnels of ghostly memory.

Kill a million men and they will queue to face you. But kill a single man and they will see monsters and devils in every shadow. Kill a dozen men and they will scream and wail in the night, and they shall feel not hatred, but fear.

Sahaal nodded, pleased.

He had taken the first step. His brothers were coming for him, and he would be damned for a weakling and a fool if he was unready.

'Summon the captains,' he said to Chianni — and for an instant he fancied that he was back upon Tsagualsa, commanding his raptors, directing the Night Lords with the focus they required.

'Of course, my lord,' Chianni trilled, shattering the illusion. 'In respect of what?'

Sahaal grunted, eyeing the skulls with half a smile.

'In respect of war, condemnitor. What else?'

Another moment's introspection, as he paused for his warriors to gather, another slip back in time: once more to the great halls of the Vastitas Victris and the Night Lords fleet, once more to the side of his master, black-feathered and veiled, leaning upon the Vulture Lectern to address the brothers. Such reminiscing gripped Sahaal more and more often, and at times the vividity of the visions scared him — so convincing was their colour, so remarkable their detail. At times he feared he was going mad.

But always he relished the opportunity to revisit his master's lifetime, and with each occurrence he immersed himself further in the words, treating each as a message intended for him alone. His master's legacy lay with him now. He must be true to the primarch's teachings.

'To kill an enemy, strike you in three places.'

That was how the lecture began, initiates and veterans side by side — Marine and Raptor and Scout and Terminator — each an equal in their lord's eyes, each dwelling upon every word with fevered concentration.

'Strike you at his hands, and he shall not cut you.'

'Strike you at his heart, and his life shall wane.'

'Strike you at his mind, and his courage shall fail, his faith shall leave him, his defeat is assured.'

Sahaal's enemy was the hive. He gave thanks to his master's ghost and, when finally his captains scurried to join him, he sent six squads to remove the city's fingers, one by one.

Surface to air batteries. Orbital defences. Overwhelmed by sudden coordinated attacks, sabotaged beyond the point of rapid reconstruction. Strike you at his hands, and he shall not cut you.

Four groups he sent outwards into the edges of the underhive, where the pulsing hearts of the city stood and rumbled.

Power stations. Geothermal vents. Great melta charges and jury-rigged bombs tightened against churning pumps, depriving the hive of its power and heat. Strike you at his heart, and his life shall wane.

And the mind... The onslaught upon the city's mind, he led himself.

He had expected militiamen, or perhaps PDF regiments, skulking and morose in the xanthic lights at the compound's entrance, passing bacsticks and hipflasks to fend off the cold. As it was, he was not alone in acknowledging the supreme importance of propaganda, and it would not be so easy to gain entry. Clearly he had underestimated the vindictors' commander.

The city's population was jumpy — the murders had seen to that — and with citizens locking themselves away in their habs, mumbling prayers to keep the monsters away from their doors, Sahaal's small war-band had little trouble reaching its destination undiscovered: sneaking through secret streets, forgotten shafts, desolate tramways. At the midtier intersection his scouts had indicated, they pulled themselves from a disused duct and prowled towards the industrial arcade that was their destination, only to find no fewer than six Preafects ringing its heavy gates.

Glutted by the success of their stealth, Sahaal cursed himself for not anticipating that their goal would be better guarded. The Shadowkin melted into the adjacent alleyways, awaiting his command. He sized-up the enemy with a practiced eye.

Two dervishi, heavy carapace armour marked with red stripes, hefted actuator-stabilised lascannons at either edge, with a quartet of shotguns — no less dangerous for their lighter armament — prowling between. In the wake of the attack upon the starport, clearly, the Preafects were taking no chances.

Sahaal grinned despite himself. He had spent too long on his throne, too long brooding and sulking in the gloom, to be dispirited by the odds. It felt good to be active again.

He took them from above, ululating as he dropped into their midst. The first dervishi he had cleaved apart before the squad was even aware of his presence, and before they could gather their instincts and round their weapons he'd stepped through the bloodspray to find a second victim, punching claws through glossy visor and skull alike, twisting through meat and bone. A shotgun pulsed to his left, a panicky blast that barely scratched him, and even as he dislodged the shattered face from his claws he was raising his bolter with his free hand, planting a round in the assailant's face and ducking beneath his thrashing grasp like a ghost, a blue and bronze streak, too fast to follow. By the time the shell detonated in the muffled confines of the dead man's helmet, far behind him, Sahaal had closed with the remaining men. The hiss of a charging lascannon pricked at his senses and he bounded across the shotgunners with a precise burst of his jump pack — snatching at their heads with his talons and dragging them behind him, flinging them with a final shriek — diced by the blades that released them — at the remaining dervishi. The lascannon discharged into their tumbling bodies and vaporised itself — and much of its wielder — in an orb of incandescence, scattering ash and fluid.

Sahaal settled beside the glowing debris and applied his claws to what few scraps of flesh remained, disappointed to find nothing left to kill.

The attack had lasted no more than five seconds.

'We move,' Sahaal announced, beckoning the awestruck Shadowkin from their cover, tearing at the gate with his claws.

The legend above the portal, smouldering now where the lascannon had singed it, mottled with the slurping remnants of the squad that had been intended to protect it from invasion, read:

CIVILIAN WORSHIP BROADCAST STATION

Sahaal smiled as his miniature army slipped within, the echoes of his master's advice warming him.

'...Strike you at his mind, and his courage shall fail, his faith shall leave him, his defeat is assured...'

Once within, the task he had taken upon himself took little time to complete.

It went without saying that the tech-priests made poor targets for his attentions. In his need for technical expertise they might have served him well, but he knew from bitter experience that such devoted — and inhuman — stalwarts were difficult to persuade. With time he could have broken their minds and forced them to do his bidding — there was little doubt of that — but time was the one resource he was without.

Instead he slew them all, gathered together where the priests made their daily broadcasts, and with his Shadowkin holding weapons in clammy palms against their backs, he forced the legion of acolytes, retainers and novitiates to watch. Stripped of their masters, unguarded by the surgical/mechanical paraphernalia that kept the Omnissiah's brood faithful and unafraid, these youths were quick to accede to his demands. And after decades of conducting their masters' orders, of undertaking every tedious duty, every minor maintenance, they were more than adept at complying.

From entry to completion, it took no longer than twenty minutes. The consoles were blessed — clumsily, falteringly — by the captive novices, the servitors chattered with relayed orders and data packages, the bunched cables that led from studio to chapel, to sanctification-nodes and then upwards to all parts of the hive, crackled to life.

Sahaal killed the unwilling partisans who had helped him — quickly and disinterestedly — and rushed to review the security. Twenty minutes was a worthy time: but more than enough for the vindictors to gather.

Perhaps the guards at the doorway, cut down like vermin in his first assault, had missed a scheduled vox report. Perhaps a routine patrol had chanced upon the devastation at the broadcast-station's gates. The truth hardly mattered — only the situation: leaning from a narrow window he could clearly see the armoured figures below, slipping from cover to cover, releasing thick red smoke to cover their advance. From elsewhere in the building Sahaal's Shadowkin traded opportunistic shots with the attackers, bright laserbolts flicking from windows into the smokepall, hellguns rattling without any great effect, spattering the facade with lead.

'Preysight,' he murmured, more interested than concerned. His enhanced gaze stripped away layers of ruby smog, confirming what he'd suspected. The rattle of gunfire was a distraction — and a crude one — for the phalanx of heavily armoured dervishi assembling in the cover of the shattered gates: an assault squad, preparing to enter. Clearly the ministorum had little patience for protracted gunbattles. They wanted their station back. Quickly.

Sahaal shrugged to himself, sight returning to normal. As he dragged himself onto the rocky ledge of the window he wondered vaguely whether the Shadowkin — spread throughout the building by now, straining beneath the weight of weapons and grenades — had secretly suspected they were never intended to escape alive. Certainly it would take a fool to think he could run the bottleneck gauntlet of the main gates as they now were. Had they known? Had they followed his lead (through loyalty or terror) anyway?

He told himself with a sigh that he didn't care one way or another, that such worms were fit only for sacrifice, and as he poised himself against the edge of the ledge he almost managed to convince himself. Another tiny twinge of guilt, of shared pain, pricked at him, and he struggled to shake it off.

There was no escape from this building, he knew, unless one happened to have the gift of flight.

He launched himself into the smoke, unseen by friend or foe, and as he bounded across the abyss towards the safety of the shadow beyond, he hoped that his tribesmen would sell their lives dearly, and commended them to a peaceful grave.

The sounds of gunfire echoed at his back for a long time.

It was as he returned to the safety of the underhive, pushing through cobweb-choked kilometres of inter-wall ducting slipping between steel bulkheads like a ghost within a recess, that it happened. He hopped from a tall plateau of coolant bulbs, macerated by rust and time, onto the scorched remains of a factorial chimney, long since stunted, when the noise arose from the gloom, an unctuous retort that sent shivers of recognition — and rage — up and down his spine.

'Het-het-het...' it went, rising on dry air thermals, scattering flocks of white bats. 'Het-het-het!'

It was Phavulti, the cognis mercator. He sat and leant against a dripping oilvent, exuding every impression of sedate relaxation, and waved gaily as Sahaal inched from the blackness of the tunnel ceiling. Whatever damage Sahaal had done to him before was long gone, replaced without thought for elegance by mechanical contrivances. It had become more difficult still to detect where, if at all, human flesh remained.

'See you, up there, het-het-het. Been waiting for you. Heard about the attack on the CW... Walls have ears, yes. Thought you'd probably come this way. What kept you?'

Sahaal backed into the shadows, teeth grating.

What to do? What to do?

He was, ultimately, a warrior. He understood conflict. He breathed guerrilla war and terrorism. In such simple pursuits there was little complexity, little uncertainty. It was a thing of victory and defeat: he that was strongest, he that was cleverest, he that was most terrible, would win.

He was also a lord. He was used to obedience. He had grown accustomed to swimming an ocean of terror, to being feared and worshipped by those around him. That was as it should be.

But Pahvulti's familiarity, his infuriating laughter, his intractable inability to feel fear: these were things that Sahaal could neither understand nor tackle.

As ever in such instants, instinct took over.

'Scum!' he roared, quitting the shadows like a bolt of darkness, claws rasping from their sheaths mid-flight. He thumped into the robed man like a meteor, shredding cable and sinew, and whooped aloud, gyrating on streamers of superheated air, twisting for another strike.

Pahvulti stood and stared at him — both his arms torn away — and shook his head.

'Dear, dear, dear,' he grinned. 'Deja vu. Het-het-het.'

There was little point in prolonging the attack, after that. Sahaal felt himself deflate: how could one terrorise a fool intent only upon ridicule? He set down in the gloom near to the smiling creature, restraining himself as best he could, and crossed his arms.

It didn't work. Patience was not a virtue that could contend with his rage.

He took an abrupt step forwards, headbutted the information broker with the deathmask-crest of his helm, dropped an armoured knee onto the fool's chest, and pressed his claws against what little flesh remained of the man's neck.

'Look at me, worm,' he hissed. 'Look at me as I kill you.'

'Het-het-het. Why would you want to do that, by Terra's teats?'

'You've insulted my honour. You've played games with forces beyond your comprehension.' He leaned down, so close that the curling vapours of his rebreather wafted around the broker's mechanized face. He would not tolerate this disrespect any longer. The fool had nothing to offer. 'I shall eat your heart, broker, if you have such a thing. Your skull shall adorn my throne.'

'No, no... Not Pahvulti. Not when he's been sent for such a task.'

Sahaal paused. 'What task?'

For the first time the broker's face clouded — losing its contemptible grin. For the first time, Sahaal fancied, the man was taking him seriously. 'I was sent as a spy,' he said, optics chattering in the place of his cheeks, 'by a witch of the Inquisition.'

Warning bells shrieked in Sahaal's mind.

Kill him! Kill him!

'The Inquisition? You admit to it freely? What madness is this?'

'Het-het-het. She thinks to make a fool of me, friend. She thinks to threaten and cajole, to have me tell tales. I have chosen to confound her.'

'Oh?'

'I have chosen to help you instead.'

'Help?' Sahaal forced a bitter laugh. 'How could you help me?'

Still the man gave no indication of being put off, lips twitching apart. 'Knowledge,' he said, simply. 'Nothing is beyond Pahvulti. Nothing escapes him. He sees all...'

Riddles and delays. Kill the worm. Be on your way.

But...

But if he sees all...

Sahaal wet his lips, an uncomfortable thought swimming into focus.

'Such as?'

'Places, people... Names... I know you understand, Marine. I know there's a name you want to hear.'

He's lying. He's crawling to save his life. Kill him!

But...

But what if...

'What name?'

'Slake. Little collective Slake. Hiding from you. Cowering in the dark. Het-het-het!

Sahaal's blood ran white hot.

'You... you know where he is? Tell me!' He pushed a claw through the man's chest, snapping through layers of rubber and steel as it went, an irritable, truculent gesture — venting his spleen. It had little effect.

'Not he. They. Of course I know. I built them. Het-het-het.'

'Tell me! Tell me where they are or I'll rip you to shreds!'

'No, no... Not Pahvulti. Not when he knows so much.'

'What do you think you know, fool?'

'I know what you're doing, yes. I know who you're doing it with. Where your little empire festers, I know. I've seen it. Eyes everywhere. Het-het-het! He blinked, a languid affair, like a crocodile nictitating its eyes. 'I know what you are!

Sahaal rocked back on his haunches. 'And what am I, little worm?'

'Het-het-het. Traitor Marine. Child of the Rebellion. Ally to the Great Betrayer. Night Lord!' He grinned. 'Recognised your markings the instant I saw you.'

Sahaal forced down the surprise in his belly. He had not expected this. 'And?'

'And I've been listening to rumours. Gossip in the dark.'

'What gossip? Confound your tongue!'

'A holy warrior — that's what you're calling yourself, yes? Your little tribe, you've told them — het-het-het — you've told them you're here to deliver them. You've told them you're a lovely little candle, a rose of purity in the darkness of corruption. That your brothers are coming to help you. Yes? I hear such things, such lies... You told them, didn't you? You told them you must prepare for your brothers. Yes? That is what you've said, isn't it?'

'What of it?'

He knows so much!

'We both know it's a lie, Night Lord. We both know they're not coming to save the hive. Het-het-het. Quite the opposite...'

'You threaten to expose my falsehoods? Is that it? Is that your best threat?'

'No threat, Night Lord. Only confirmation of my suspicions.'

'Then what do you want? Why should I spare you? Tell me!'

'Slake. You should spare me for Slake.'

'Tell me where he is.' Sahaal struggled with the words. 'I'll spare you. I'll vow it.'

I'll kill him! I'll cut his face from his skull!

'Het-het-het. No, no... last time... last time I helped you, what was the price?'

'There was no price! I spared your life. That is all!'

'Yes. No price. First one is always free, I told you. This time... this time Pahvulti's expenses are far greater.'

For the first time in his life Sahaal found himself speechless.

'Y... you...' he stammered, oceans of rage and astonishment pummelling against his restraint. 'You don't get to... to make demands of me, worm! You're nothing! I'm the Talonmaster! I'm the chosen of the Haunter! I'll cut you into a thousand p—'

'You will do nothing. Not if you want Slake.'

And that was the crux.

The Corona was everything. The Corona was mightier than his esteem, mightier than his rage, mightier than his pride.

Through Slake, it would be his.

And through Pahvulti, he could find Slake.

Kill him! Rip him to shreds! Slice him apart!

Still angry, those inner voices, but growing fainter: swallowed by the cold sludge of his pragmatism. That Chaotic part of his soul, tainted indelibly by the invitation of the Dark Gods' patronisation, raged and stormed ever one, but slowly, struggling with each word, he blotted out its tumult and swallowed his pride.

'What... What is your price, broker?'

'Power, Night Lord. The witch will go without the reports she expects me to make. I shall give you Slake. Your brothers will come, the city will fall. Who will reign in their wake?'

He smiled, steely teeth sparkling.

'Me. Pahvulti will reign.'

Mita Ashyn

Mita awoke to the sound of screaming. She was on her feet and poised for combat before even her dreams had receded, and she stood in addled bewilderment for long seconds, blinking in the light, before reality distinguished itself from fantasy.

God-Emperor, it's freezing...

The invidious cold of Equixus had been invading the hive in disparate tiers for days: thermal conditioners sputtering and falling silent, power flickering and dying in random quadrants. Such interruptions were, of course, temporary, but as teams of techpriests and armies of acolytes roved from switchboard to grid-centre, chanting and blessing, diverting power from here, there, anywhere, still the tremulous vagaries of heating ducts and silent fans couldn't hold the frost at bay. Mita wondered what the power failures signified and who was responsible. She felt she could take a pretty good guess.

She shivered, not entirely from the cold, and peered around.

The alleyway where she'd slept was unchanged: filthy walls covered with oil and rust. No snarling vindictors loomed over her with power mauls flaring, no hive-mobs threw bottles and swore in the gloom, and no fiery purgatists poked at her raggedy form with barbed rods, hollering imprecations and zealous damnation. For two days she'd lived thus: a streetsleeper, an outlaw — freezing by night, starving by day. She'd exchanged the gaudy threads of her Inquisitorial robes for thick rags, and had cut her hair short and ragged, guided only by the reflection in a sump-puddle. There were more than enough agents of hostility against vagrants, without encouraging recognition at the hands of Kaustus's agents. Given the fierceness of the environment and the apathy of its population, she supposed it was little wonder that she hadn't thus far encountered a single other vagabond. Such unfortunates had two choices: to descend into the bosom of the underhive where their status allowed acceptance — but not affection — or to die.

She guessed it was a tough decision.

For her part, she had no intention of doing either. Homeless she may be, hunted by the Emperor's own Inquisition, but she at least had a purpose. She at least had straws to clutch. She had the information broker...

None of which was especially relevant to the fact that someone, nearby, had screamed. It was hardly an exceptional thing: the Cuspseal environs could hardly be equated with the anarchy of the underhive, but it was still a society far from Utopian. Muggings, murders, rapes, such were the lifeblood of the hive's darker quarters, and given the strange events of recent days — the beheadings that had thrown the streets into such fearful discord — a cry in the night was just another background sonata.

But the scream that had awoken her had not been alone. A chorus of voices had called out together — and continued in their distress. She hurried from her concealment, pulling her cloak tight against the cold, and gauged the sound's location.

That, perhaps, was the one remaining distinction between Mita Ashyn and any other Cuspseal transient: anyone else would have run from the sounds of terror.

She headed directly for them.

It was a gather-hall. Such low-rise huts — frequently domed, often decorated with holy tableaux (inevitably of such poor quality that saint X was indistinguishable from Ecclesiarch Y) and devotional graffiti — were a common sight throughout the hive: bulging chambers squeezed into opportunistic gaps like rubber igloos. In their gloomy little bellies, packed with row upon row of uncomfortable plasteen pews and staffed — in the more uptown districts — by a quivering maintenance servitor, the local populace flocked to digest their daily dose of Citizen Worship broadcasting. Such places were never empty and rarely quiet, disparate factory shifts staggered to allow a fraction of the locality to visit, each in turn. From these communal indoctria arose the sounds of wavering hymns, chanted chatechistic responses, cheers and exclamations at the fiery words of whatever dogmatist was picked out in the crackling haze of the viewspex screen.

And now, it would seem, screams.

Mita hurried inside, prepared for a fight, and stopped dead in her tracks. It was not the audience that snagged at her attention, rocking back as they were in their seats, some covering their eyes, others clutching at one another like infants seeking comfort, but rather the focus of their horrified gazes: the great viewspex screen, hanging on optic cables and bundles of datawire like a great luminous spider, wreathed in the incense of devotional thuribles suspended around it.

Picked out in its flickering light was a cardinal — the cardinal, she guessed, who fronted whichever rousing show was scheduled for this early hour — and he had been crucified.

Set against a dark background, the broadcast optics zoomed upon his meaty frame: stripped naked, beaten across face and chest, cut in a multitude of places by small, razor incisions. He had been lifted bodily upon a weird rig — a thing of draped umbilici and sinister outcrops, multifaceted lenses glaring from its trunk like the boles of a plastic tree — which Mita recognised as a photoseer: a camera servitor similar, no doubt, to that which had filmed this grisly tableau. Held against the tall machine, arms splayed, legs bound together, the priest had been stapled down. Up and down each arm, punched through the fleshy crutch betwixt fibia and tibia, through shoulders and collar-sections, through the fat of his thighs and the tense elastic of his heels, a dozen or more ugly, rusty pins had been driven.

At the foot of the unmoving photoseer, now bright with his blood, other bodies lay heaped: black robed and augmented, long-nailed hands and servo manipuli arms clutching emptily at awkward angles. Tech-priests, Mita guessed — devoted servants of the Emperor in his aspect as the Machine God. Every last one beheaded.

The cardinal was still alive, somehow. The slow suffocation of the spread eagle had given him a deathly grey pallor, and even were it not for the gag pushed hard between his jaws she doubted he would have been able to scream — but still he eyed the lens of the photoseer, throat wobbling to whatever pleas he was trying to vocalise.

Worse yet, sucking at her vision as if alive and hungry, writhing in some hellish geography of the eye, was the single word that had been cut into the Cardinal's chest, scrawled in incision and blood.

'Excommunicate!'

Mita felt her knees weaken. Little wonder the crowd's distress.

The image zoomed towards the hateful word, pinpricks of bloody sweat thrown into sharp detail on the viewscreen, and just as the audience felt sure the horrors were over, a voice began to speak.

It tore at Mita's soul like a hungry wraith. She knew it. She recognised it.

The Night Lord.

'Behold,' it whispered, not so much spoken as insinuated upon the air, like the breath of the wind given form, 'the price of false zeal.'

The audience gasped and gibbered amongst itself, trading prayers.

'A corrupt little cardinal, I found — fat with the wealth of his flock, soiled by gluttony and decadence. It was a mercy to spill his blood.'

Someone in the audience vomited. Nobody looked around, all eyes wide, brimming with tears of terror. The sheer force of their anxiety pushed at Mita's senses, threatening to overwhelm her.

'It was a mercy to hear his screams.'

The image jumped abruptly. Still pushed to its highest magnification, the photoseer swept its gaze to the side: a blur of nonsensical shapes, flitting one across the next. Formless dark and flickering light gave way to panoramas of blue and bronze, of red-tainted confusion and glossy tones, all of it chipped and hardened by harsh shadows. It found its target in a flash of nauseous focus and — with an instant's pause for swirling minds to decipher what they were seeing — the crowd erupted anew.

Devil-red slits, burning from a field of shadow, swept up and backwards in arrowhead slants, tickled by a wreath of misted breath.

Eyes.

'So shall perish all who have fallen from the light,' their owner hissed. 'The Emperor's gaze has fallen upon this world—' (shrieks and fainting amidst the audience) '—and he has found it wanting. Corruption is all he sees. A city of iniquity and injustice, ruled by the weak and the selfish.'

The image began to loosen, pulling away from those eyes, smouldering with malice. Whatever form held them remained indistinct, bathed in shadow, hinted only in flashes of blue and bronze, in hulking dimensions that fooled the eye and mauled the senses.

'You have seen the deaths amongst you. The sinners cut down. I took their heads to clean their corruption. They are the first among many. They will not be the last. Repent, sinners. Fear your Emperor's wrath. Fear his angel of vengeance.'

At its widest angle, the viewspex was a poor interface for the horror of its subject. This shape, this unseen thing, leaned from the lightless void, eyes afire, breath steaming. Spines and chains caught at flickering firelight, half-seen allusion to its size and shape. Neither were obvious: it was a presence first and a solid being second, an ethereal devil, a graceful silhouette. The audience clothed its faceless hulk with whatever nightmare-flesh their minds conjured, and all along they suspected that whatever terrors their imaginations supplied, the reality was sure to be far, far worse.

It hissed at the photoseer, and claws like bolts of lightning snapped into view from nowhere. Shrieks rang out in the cramped gather-hall.

'Judgement is coming,' the beast said. 'Do not resist it.'

And then the broadcast ended, and the fizzing snowstorm of white noise was all that lit the gloomy cavern.

There was a moment of silence.

'He's lying!' Mita cried, heart pounding. 'He's lying! He wants us to fear him! He's no child of the Emperor!'

She might as well have tried to whisper in the face of a hurricane. No one was listening to her.

They were too busy screaming.

It was the same all across the city. Wherever she went, wandering unseen — as only the vagrant can truly be — the sobbing and screams rang out in the dark. In the frantic colours of the klubzones, in the srnoggy wastes where the factories clamoured with downmarket habs, in every street and every stairway: unbridled horror. Whispers. Rumours.

The Citizen Worship broadcasts were resumed quickly, control of the station clearly regained. The stammering denials and assurances — 'All is well, all is well' — did little to quell the storm. Indeed each authority that attempted placation and denied the corruption of the hive merely fed the dissent, branding themselves as partisans to the iniquity by attempting to conceal its existence. Only a sliver of the teeming masses had been present to see the broadcast, but it hardly mattered. The mouth-to-ear machine worked its cogs to nothingness as the story was told and retold, mutating and growing with each hour.

Chapels groaned with bodies: crying out for forgiveness, demanding mercy from unprepared priests, themselves shaken to the core of their faith by the threat of divine justice. On streets the purgatists found themselves outdone by the sudden zeal of those seeking absolution, wailing and gnashing, striking themselves with thorny canes until every tramway and stairwell was moist with the blood of flagellants.

But most... most of the hive did not resort to such excesses. Most slunk home with faces pale, deserting the factories in their droves, locking doors and bolting shutters, whispering fearful reassurances to sobbing infants and telling spouses over and over, 'I love you, I love you...'

Just in case.

The Emperor's angel was abroad, and in his path all sin would burn, all unrighteousness would bleed itself dry, all mercy would be denied.

And not a single thing that Mita said could convince the city otherwise. The Night Lord had outmanoeuvred her.

Where is your— 'It is being dealt with' —now, Kaustus?

Skulking in the gloom of a frightened city, she realised with her heart sinking that the time had come to deploy the one ace she still held. She found a secluded spot in the dark beneath the struts of a mezzanine stairwell, and sat with her legs crossed, clearing her mind.

This was going to hurt.

When she had visited the information broker, days before, when his servitors had come so close to finishing her and Cog, she had watched it dawn upon him with amusing slowness that all the arrogant bluster in the world would do him little good.

She plucked his secrets from his mind.

She'd found him enmeshed at the heart of a great room/machine, cursing the destruction of his cybernetic warriors. Like a fat spider in its web, the cords of his data-empire snaked from every corner, a morass of sensoria consoles, augaria readouts, clattering logic engines, auspex monitors, fluttering dials and bank upon bank of viewspex screens: meeting in a knot, a tangle, a halo of rubber and metal, at his head. From here he controlled photo-optics, cameras, servitors and communicators hive-wide. From here he intercepted transmissions, he eavesdropped like some digital god, he watched a thousand transactions in a thousand places, and he stored it all away like a bee, hoarding its honey.

He had thought himself implacable. He had tamed a Space Marine, by the hiveghosts, how could a mere woman hope to hold any sway over him?

In his world of computations and logic, of bitter numbers and black/white divisions, of strength and weakness, there was of course one parameter he could never hope to calculate: the realm of the psyker.

And yes, he may have spent his life severing his ties with humanity, rebuilding his body time and time again, augmenting and reshaping his mind like a sculptor working clay — but he could not escape from the raw biology of his brain. It was an emotive organ, and if his media were metal and mathematics, then Mita's were thoughts themselves.

She had slid into his consciousness before his smugness could even take flight, and he had been powerless to stop her. He'd told her everything: who he was, how he had been created, the extents of his empire. He'd told her about his meeting with the Space Marine, about the creature's quest for the Glacier Rats, about the ongoing hunt — spreading rumours across the entire underhive — for the Slake collective: always in pursuit of some unknown package. He had bared his steely soul before the scalpel of her astral self, until she'd had him exactly where she'd wanted him.

She'd threatened him with the one thing that was guaranteed to scare him — informing his former masters at the Adeptus Mechanicus of his existence and whereabouts, reminding him that it wasn't too late to undergo the puritens lobotomy a second time — and he had capitulated like the unctuous little worm he so clearly was.

He would find the Night Lord, she'd insisted. He would report every movement — every orkspoor word — back to her. She arranged times and places, and then she let him go.

He would betray her, of course. It was inevitable — that was just the sort of mind he had. She imagined he would wriggle his way into the Night Lord's debt, seeking protection and power from the beast she had sent him to spy upon. It was of little consequence. She had taken... other precautions.

The tutoria of the Scholastia Psykana called the procedure inculcati. It involved depositing a fragment — a parsus — of one's own astral self, like a souvenir, within the subconscious of another human. Once detached, the psyker could form a brief link with their target — location and distance notwithstanding — and ride, like some insidious piggyback signal, upon their very senses. It was a poor alternative to remote viewing at the best of times, but — given her difficulty with that discipline, and the Night Lord's guardian warpthings — that was no longer an option.

The inculcati was difficult. It was painful. And it allowed only one chance.

When she'd pushed her way inside Pahvulti's mind, revolted at his cold ambition, acknowledging the probability of his betrayal from the start, she had screwed up her courage, braced herself, and cut away a piece of her soul, pushing it down into the efficient columns of his brain. If she could no longer spy on the Night Lord herself, she'd decided, she'd send this fool on her behalf: to stare through his eyes and hear through his ears.

Which, seated beneath the mezzanine, sweat pricking her brow, moaning with effort and agony as if on some secret childbirth, she did.

And his external temperature at 30.4°C: the result, no doubt, of coolants within his armour. His throne is built of rusted iron and bone, decorated in feathers, and stands at 3.1 metres from base to tip.

Pahvulti's clipped thoughts, spiralling around her like a river. She fixed her fingers into the rush and concentrated, overwhelmed by alien impressions and thoughts. To see through Pavhulti's eyes was to be immersed in a sensory ocean, ridged by tsunamis of detail and analysis.

At a depth of 1.5km below ice-level, the rock is warm. He is the lord of the underhive — undisputed — and I am at his left. To his right sits his condemnitor. I recognise her from my surveillance locus as Avisette Chianni. She is one of the Shadowkin.

I have no arms.

I have seen two hundred and six Shadowkin since I came to this place. I have seen many more refugees.

Each carries a weapon. He has built an army.

Far above, seated in the boiling heart of the trance, Mita was staggered. The inculcati link was not strong — remaining sapient in the deluge of another being's thoughts was far harder than she had imagined, and the conflicting inputs of Pahvulti's body with her own had all but severed the connection at its start — but still she was overwhelmed by the broker's secret admiration for the domain the Night Lord had built.

One point two metres above me, to my right, He says:

'Bring them forwards.'

I have given him Slake. All is well.

The scouts — three of them, all men, though one is an albino of the Pallor House — push their prize forwards. No doubt the Night Lord is mixing the resources at his control, forging links between those who serve him voluntarily, and those who have discovered themselves dominated. It is a salient tactic: There is no shortage of loyalty in this place.

The scouts found the collective in the safehouse I revealed. The Slake members seem bewildered at the heart of the Shadowkin camp: there are two remaining, and with a third of their efficiency compromised their situation confuses them. They are rendered children, summoned before an elder. When the male stumbles his companion falters with him: linked to his temple by a cord of copper umbilicus.

The woman was once Sicca Yissen, aspiring heiress to the Yissen Guildhouse. The man, at one time, was Apolus Jaque, illegitimate child of the Rogue Trader Corleoni. And their missing member was Kuloch Sven-Dow, whose putsch of the WestHab trading consortium failed so spectacularly.

I know their names because I created them. They came to me, disgraced by guild and gold, each hungry for a second chance. They needed an edge above their competitors, and so I created the gestalim. I fused their memories together, I gave them the power of the cognitor but preserved their personalities. They have existed for three years, four months and sixteen days. In that time they have become junkies.

Information-narcotics. Middlemen desired and sought-after all over the hive, but indebted only to me.

Until today I have patronised their custom with paternal pride. I have allowed them autonomy (at the price only of their loyalty) and even hidden them, in this time of peril. I have been like a father to them.

And now the Night Lord has demanded them, and I have provided.

Poor, poor little Slake.

Something lands in the mud at their feet, cast down from above and behind me. It is a skull, polished clean, shining sockets above each eye trailing useless cables like antennae.

Kuloch Sven-Dow. Rest in peace, fool.

The Slake collective is reunited in a tangle of scrabbling grasps and piteous groans. Its living members need no prompt, they jack into the dead skull like starving slaves presented with a meal, lolling and mewling in pleasure at the surge of data.

The collective is reunited, and whatever childish anxiety they had suffered is eclipsed in an instant. When the initial rush has passed they face the Night Lord with disinterested eyes and say:

'You are going to kill us, then?'

They speak together, perfectly in harmony. It is an amusing effect.

If their straightforwardness is of consternation to my new master, he does not show it.

'I will,' he says. 'But there are a thousand deaths at my disposal. Some are slower than others. You understand.'

The collective trades glances. I know they are discussing within the confines of their secret union, unheard voices crackling back and forth. They display no outward signs of fear.

'We accept,' they say. 'It will be painless?'

The Night Lord shrugs. 'It will be fast.'

They were a fine creation, the gestalim. I shall be disappointed to see them gone, but we are all of us made slaves in the Night Lord's presence, and to accept his dominion is the clearest, easiest path.

'There was a package,' he hisses, and I fancy that one point three seconds into his pause there comes a quiet sigh, unheard by all but me, and I wonder what thoughts circulate in his mind. 'You commissioned the Glacier Rats to steal it.'

'We did.'

'How did you know it was coming?'

'Our buyer anticipated its arrival. He employed us as middlemen. We would locate and hire agents to retrieve the item. Their fee, as was ours, was generous.'

He hisses behind me. He is eager.

'Where is the package now? Was it opened? Was the seal broken?'

'It was not opened by us. It has been delivered to the customer.'

In the throne, the monster leans forwards. He deploys his most pertinent query like a pict-gambler presenting an ace of cups.

'Who,' he said, unable to disguise the hunger in his voice, 'is the customer?'

In the world above, through pain and sweat, Mita cleared her consciousness and focused, struggling to hold the inculcati connection. This, her senses told her, was a critical moment.

The package...

Something stolen from the Umbrea Insidior.

Something worth a thousand deaths to pursue.

The package was at the crux of it all.

She pushed further into Pahvulti's consciousness, straining to hear.

'We do not know,' the collective says.

There is no hiss from the Night Lord, no explosion of temper and carnage. I wonder, perhaps, if he has come to anticipate disappointment.

'We have only a location,' Slake continues, harmonious voice unwavering. 'A meeting place and a signal code, to summon the customer's agents. They come to collect, and to make payment!'

'And where,' the Night Lord says, voice a whisper, 'is that?'

'The Macharius Gate! The Macharius Gate!'

A cowled scribe — who had made a spirited attempt at tackling her legs — received a heel in his face for his troubles. She sprinted on, past bemused acolytes and oblivious servitors, shouting as she went. 'Orodai! Orodai, you bastard! The Macharius Gate!' The Cuspseal Preafect-precinct was busy, even for the insanity that passed as the norm in these parts. She leapt over a scrum of off-duty Dervishi — too slow to intercept her — and pounded up alabaster stairs to the next level. 'Orodai! Orodai!'

Obstruction to her hurtling progress was certainly growing now. She'd bolted past the fat desk sergeant at the precinct's entrance with a discourteous ripple of psychic energy — not enough to kill, but plenty to leave him sagging and corpulent in his chair. By now alarms would be ringing in higher levels, squads would be closing like black-glossed claws upon her hellish advance, and perhaps someone, some unctuous little aide, was informing Orodai that a madwoman was indulging in a laughable attempt to deliver an unsanctioned message. She just hoped the news pricked his curiosity. Nothing's ever easy.

'Orodai! The Macharius Gate! Damn your eyes, man! Can you hear me? The Macharius Gate!'

A young Preafect went down behind her, an elbow catching him squarely in the face. His partner — an older vindictor with a well-polished punctiliousness about him — decided to forgo the non-lethal approach and raised his shotgun. She blasted him with a messy crackle of astral energy and resisted the urge to grab for his gun as she passed. Being armed was a sure way to get oneself shot.

At the penultimate level, leaving behind her a scattered trail of bewildered aides and psychically-battered Preafects, whichever security-servitor was coordinating the ''emergency'' presented the result of its labours: a ten-strong block of Preafects, fully armoured, which let rip with a salvo of shotgun fire in the tight confines of the stairwell at the very instant she rounded the corner. It was only the premonitionary flicker of imminent obliteration that flashed through her secret senses that compelled her to skid to a halt, leaping back in the direction she'd come, and even that wasn't quite fast enough. A thick wall of leadshot snagged at the edge of her shoulder as she vanished, spinning her in her place and dropping her to the floor, crying out.

Hot blood warmed her arm.

Heavy footsteps clumped down towards the corner and she mustered what little energy she still had to prepare another psychic strike. But then shouted commands and the heavy clanking of armoured bodies rose up the stairwell from below, the first of many vindictors pounced around the corner with gun bared, and she realised with a particularly foul curse that she was utterly outnumbered.

'Macharius Gate...' she mumbled, unable to think of anything else to say, as the first of several dozen shotgun muzzles nudged against her skin. 'Macharius Gate, you bastards...'

'What about the Macharius Gate?' a voice said, from above. She felt a flutter of recognition at the dry tones, and looked up with the first stirrings of hope. The Preafects inched aside to allow a plainly dressed figure past.

'Orodai!' she exclaimed.

'Commander Orodai,' he corrected, expression none-too-impressed to see her. 'What are you doing here, girl?'

'Delivering vital information on behalf of the Inquisition.' He sighed.

'Miss Ashyn, the last I heard was that you had been ejected from that body for gross insubordination. Your former colleagues visited me. They were very keen to impress upon me what to do if you were found.' I'll bet they were, the bastards. One of the Preafects racked his shotgun, pointedly. 'Commander,' she hissed, heart throbbing so hard she could barely hear her own voice. 'You know as well as I do that Kaustus is making a mistake.'

'Have a care, girl. An outlaw is hardly in the position to disparage an inquisitor.'

'For the Emperor's sake, Orodai! The inquisitor's a fool! A warp-damned fop more troubled by the governor's treasures than the danger in this hive!' Orodai glared at her, working his jaw. Which way will you go, you efficient little bastard? Slowly, eyes narrowed, Orodai reached into his belt and lifted his pistol, training it upon Mita's head. Her heart fell.

'Dismissed,' he barked to the Preafects. 'I can handle this whelp.'

The vindictors vanished without complaint. Orodai waited until they had all gone, until the echoes of their clattering strides had faded, before re-holstering the pistol.

Mita frowned. 'I... I don't understand...'

'It does not do to discuss politics in public, girl. Walls have ears.'

'I... I...'

'I'm assuming you've come to me for a reason. I'm no more a fan of the Inquisitorial bastard than you, but then the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Particularly when she's a warp-piss witch who lost a squad of my best men.'

Mita suffered the chide with good grace, refusing to rise.

'I know where you can find him.'

'Who?'

'You know who. The Night Lord. The Chaos Marine. The beast that's made a mess of your pretty littlie city.'

He shook his head. 'Still you insist upon that notio—'

Her mouth fell open. 'How can you doubt it?' she stormed, outraged. 'You must have seen the hijacked broadcast!'

'I did. All I saw was a pair of red eyes.'

'Don't be a fool! Why deny it to yourself? There's a warp-damned Traitor Marine loose in your city, Orodai, and I can tell you where it is! Are you so thick-skulled that you'll refuse to hear it?'

He sighed, and when he spoke his voice was calmer, quieter: thick with exhausted frustration.

'Child, whether the creature is real or not is irrelevant. All we know is that someone — something — has formed an army in the underhive.' He raised an eyebrow at her stunned expression and half-smiled. 'The Inquisition isn't the only body that has its spies, girl. So you see, you really have nothing to offer me. We already know where your... "beast" resides, whatever it is. But to attack it in its own lair would be fo—'

'Not there.'

'What?'

She allowed a smile to curl her lips, the throbbing of her bloody shoulder rescinding to nothing.

'He's leaving his lair,' she said. 'He has an appointment. The Macharius Gate, Orodai. That's where we slay the dragon.'