Lord of the Night

Zso Sahaal

The Macharius Gate was a place of unlikely amalgamations: where the trappings of the rich punctured the realm of the poor, a jewelled knife sinking through tumorous flesh.

Pressed against the inner shell of the hive at its southernmost point, rising and falling no further than a single tier, it was, to the city's aristocracy, a means of escape. Oh, there were starports elsewhere in the hive, and other doors leading to the frozen exterior pocked its rim like airholes, but such outlets were the remit of peasants and workers — inelegant drawbridges and sphincter-portals leading to loading bays and vehicle silos. They were rarely used: who, after all, would choose to venture into the frozen wastes?

But the Macharius Gate — that was a more civilised affair. Slipping into its cambered ceiling, descending in the shadow of the colossal snowgate doors, a tangle of stairwells and plungeshafts tumbled from above, thick with ancient elevators and gearlifters. A single broad illuminator, affixed to the ceiling by a steel cord, smeared its unkind luminosity across all below, flickering with whatever tenuous energy fed it. Here the aristocrats could slip down from their distant pinnacles, unburdened by the unpleasant need to mingle with lesser populations as their descent progressed.

To each noble house its own shaft, and to each the opportunity to travel secretly to this seedy place, as desire dictated. Here the opulence of Steepletown collided with the filth of the first tier: tapestry-hung reception booths mouldering, elegant brass instrumentation pilfered and sold on down the years, leaving now a hotchpotch of exquisite craftsmanship and improvised squalor. Staffed only by a squad of militia auxiliaries — fat part-timers recruited from the local habs who lolled uncomfortably, unshaven faces incongruous with the bright uniforms they'd been given to wear — the gateroom could hardly be considered impregnable. Perhaps, bored and pampered in their spires, the nobles who frequented this peculiar place enjoyed the fact of its relative unsafety? Perhaps they thought it exhilarating?

More likely, they knew that no attacker was stupid enough to try gaining access to the upper hive without the call-codes to which each elevator responded, the sheaf of access papers required to placate the militia elite who patrolled Steepletown, and a sizeable army to rely-upon when things went sour.

The Equixus aristocrats had little to worry about.

The nobles descended here to hunt, primarily. To snort and guffaw amongst themselves, to engender upon their privileged, empty little lives a measure of excitement. They slipped out through the massive snowgates to the vehicle bay beyond, crooning their inflated machismo. They wore heated mouldsuits to shield them from the weather, drove vast juggerkraft loaded with fine wines and sweetmeats, carried decorous weapons of such high calibre that the rare yokkrothi bears they tracked (or, rather, their servitors tracked) would literally vaporise in the unlikely event of a direct hit, and still they somehow managed to slap one another across the back and pronounce themselves brave, manly citizens. Sahaal took one look at it and felt himself angered. This bloated pretend-bravery, this decadent waste of space: it was everything he had come to despise about the Imperium. Vast. Gaudy. Overconfident. Spiritually empty. See how the mighty are fallen... He would change all of that.

The Slake collective had been true to its word. On bundles of parchment its members had scrawled maps to reach this place: descriptions of its interior, directions upon which elevator to approach, what runecodes to enter into its ancient control panel. It would summon their customers' representatives, they assured him. It would lead him to the ones who had purchased his stolen prize.

He'd left them alive, for now: chained to a jagged wall down in the guts of the rustmud caverns. They would receive their swift deaths, as promised, when — if — their assurances were borne out.

The militiamen guarding the gateroom did not pose too great a struggle. Sahaal killed all six without a single shot fired, and waved his ragtag troops past their shattered bodies with a jerk of his bloody claws. As ever, it felt dangerously good to kill again.

He had brought with him a colourful menagerie of warriors — at least one from each subjugated ganghouse, a selection whose eclecticism he owed entirely to Chianni. Still recovering from her wounds, she'd been unable to join his expedition herself, but her advice had been more than pertinent.

Avoid infighting. Avoid favouritism. Take warriors from each tribe. Show them equal respect, and equal contempt. Make them partisan to your struggles, and to one another. Temper their resentment with inclusion and glory.

And it had worked. Such was their awe for the beast that roved ahead of them, such was their terror of the sleek devil that drew them on through shadow and shade, that their mutual loathing was forgotten. Former enemies became allies in fear and devotion: they were gangers no longer. They were Children of the Night.

She was quite the devious diplomat, his condemnitor.

He'd also brought with him the cognis mercator. Pahvulti: the cringing little bastard. Sahaal had conspicuously refused to trust the grinning creature, despite his successful delivery of the Slake collective, and to leave him alone amongst the Shadowkin was not something he cared to countenance. The man knew too much.

That the armless figure — stumbling with a 'het-het-het' and an endless barrage of useless chatter — had enraged Sahaal was a given. That he had gloated and sneered where he should have bowed and offered obeisance had not helped his case. That Sahaal had vowed again and again that he would repay the cackling worm's insolence with death should have sealed his fate...

And yet...

And yet his information had proved flawless. He had helped plan the ongoing attacks upon the hive: its fingers and its heart, in accordance with the Night Haunter's lessons. Pahvulti's knowledge of the city was unmatched, and when ordering his warriors to strike at power stations, orbital armaments, PDF armouries and geotherm ducts, Sahaal had found Pahvulti's input frequently useful. He was a resource that should not be squandered too quickly.

But, more so, the man's hunger for power — as crude as it was — allowed Sahaal at least a measure of dominance over him. The gift of rulership, if and when his brother Night Lords arrived, would be Sahaal's to confer. Pahvulti was no longer in control of their union. Now it was Sahaal who had something the broker wanted, and that was a situation he was keen to enjoy.

And... Yes... yes, he must admit it to himself...

Keeping the bastard alive gave Sahaal something to look forward to.

Within the gateroom, when his mob had entered and swept the place for security and surveillance devices, Sahaal found himself quietly disappointed. The elevator door to which the instructions directed him was an inferior thing: plain and unadorned where others sported intricate frescoes and colourful records of their owner's exploits. Naturally such pomposity revolted Sahaal, but in some strange way he felt that anything connected to the Corona Nox — even the warpshit who had stolen it — should represent a level of... superiority compared to all around it. Amongst a society of princes, he felt as though he'd been mugged by a beggar. It angered him, without him fully being able to explain way.

These days, the anger needed little excuse to arise. The voices rustled and hissed in his mind, tentacles of Chaotic warpstuff playing across his soul, plucking and needling it to ever greater peaks of savagery. For the hundredth time he drew a breath and calmed himself, seeking in vain the focus that his master had always preached.

He entered Slake's code with a steady hand — gratified at the apparent efficiency of the unfussy console — and stepped back to wait.

Behind him the ranks of warriors shifted in their places. A brute of the Atla Clan scratched at his quilled scalp with a moronic grunt, and behind him a pair of androgynous gunners of House Magrittha exchanged glances through heavy lashes.

The warband was edgy. Sahaal wondered vaguely whether it was the result of the situation, or their proximity to him.

He hoped it was the latter.

'My lord?' asked one, an impressive female of the Sztak Chai whose chain-glaive was as tall as Sahaal himself. 'Has it worked?'

He ignored the interruption and glowered at the console. A small brass dial shifted slowly, inching from one side to the other.

153, it read. The label at the head of the dial was marked, simply: TIER.

It took a little over one minute to reach 152.

The Macharius Gate was, of course, on Tier 1.

'This may take a while.' Sahaal sighed.

The warriors silently took up positions at the gate-room's entrance, perhaps detecting the impatience in their lord's vox-distorted voice, thankful for the opportunity to stay out of his way. Pahvulti slumped into a corner, crossing his knees and chattering quietly to himself.

With the hunger for violence gnawing at his mind, Sahaal anticipated the wait for his quarry's arrival as if preparing to be tortured. In some quiet sliver of his soul he recognised that this burgeoning fury was a far from useful state of mind, but it lingered nonetheless: as if a fire had been stoked inside him which no amount of dousing could extinguish.

Resolving instead to contain the blaze — to let it burn slow and steady, without fiery impulse or crackling explosion — he knelt at the elevator's dull entrance and emptied his mind, pushing himself deep into a trance.

He was so close. He could feel it...

He could afford to wait a while longer.

His past called him back, and he slipped into a dream with a sigh.

On Tsagualsa, from the shifting flesh of the Screaming Gallery, the Night Haunter called forth his captains and rose to address them...

The Heresy was ended. The other Traitors had fled. Chaos owned them, now.

Not so the Night Lords. Unseducable, their hate. Incorruptible, their focus. In their hearts Chaos could find little fuel to ignite its insidious fires.

Their hearts burned already, with hate and injury, with the need for vengeance.

Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, gathered his captains as a father gathers his sons, and he filled them with pride and joy in the Bitter Crusade they would undertake in his name. They chanted his name and praised his wisdom, and he accepted their devotion with a melancholy smile.

And then he told them that he was soon to die, and everything crumbled to dust.

Sahaal was there. He saw it all.

And as the captains raged and boiled, as outrage bred denial, he watched his lord with a sad eye and knew it was true.

The Night Haunter would die — not because he would be powerless to overcome his attacker, not because he would be slain like some common foe—

—but because in death he would find vindication, of sorts. And, perhaps, peace.

The Night Haunter silenced his captains with a word, and told them that he would select an heir. He told them that he would take from among them a son to lead in his stead.

Sahaal had felt, at that instant, the first stirrings of an unquenchable ambition. He gazed from face to face of his brother captains, and wondered if they shared his hunger. If they wanted what he wanted.

Not power.

Not blood.

Revenge.

Most avoided his stare. Most remained flushed with sadness and rage at the news of their master's death. Most crumbled from his regard — from his concerns — like salt before a torrent of blood.

Only one met Sahaal's eye. Only one gloated with flushed cheeks and teeth brandished, pale lips ringed with tribal scars, bright eyes unrepentant for the aspirations worn within them: a brazen lust for the offered position that he did nothing to conceal.

Krieg Acerbus. The giant. The Headtaker. The Axemaster.

The Brute.

Konrad Curze closed black-glazed eyes and opened his mouth, and the name on his lips was Zso Sahaal.

Something rumbled at the edge of Sahaal's perceptions, dredging his mind from its reminiscence and pulling him back into the light. He quit the trance as if casting off a cloak, his master's voice echoing in his ears, and was troubled to discover the meditation had done little to cure his nascent rage. The vision of Acer-bus, in particular, had merely stoked the fires higher.

There had been little love lost between Battle-brothers Zso and Krieg.

The elevator was on the verge of arrival. The dial on the console read TIER: 3, and Sahaal calculated quickly that something in the region of two and a half hours had elapsed since his meditation — and the carriage's descent — had begun. As the capsule neared the end of its journey — its diagonal progress hampered by the changing gradient of the hive's walls — the shaft into which it was delivered began to ramble, protesting at the vertical stresses placed upon it.

One by one Sahaal's accompanying warriors slipped from their places at the gateroom entrance, sensing the arrival of their target. They gathered at the elevator's doors, racking weapons with a professional disinterest that did nothing to hide their curiosity, training loaded muzzles upon the unadorned surface of the heavy portal.

'Stay to the side,' Sahaal commanded, unsheathing his claws with a rasp. 'And kill nothing. I want prisoners.'

The warriors edged aside, clearing the space before the elevator. If the sight that greeted whoever was within was a posse of scowling oudaws and deephive gangers with more guns than sense, Sahaal was confident their first act upon opening the doors would be to immediately close them again.

He turned to face Pahvulti — still seated in the corner, watching with eyes and optics narrowed — and crooked a finger to beckon him over. His uncertain expression filled Sahaal's heart with infantile joy.

He knows I don't need him any more, he thought. He knows he's expendable.

'You stand in front of the doors,' he said, looming over the broker. 'You greet them. You draw them out. You draw them out so we can take them. Understand?'

Pahvulti nodded, mute. There was little else he could do.

Sahaal slipped into the darkness beside the elevator doors where his warriors lurked, and slowed his breathing, fighting the anxiety.

So close... so close.

Out of his view, around the corner of the shaft's terminus, the doors opened. Sahaal watched Pahvulti's face assiduously, trying to ascertain what manner of person — or people — was within by gauging his responses. It did him little good: Pahvulti's face was a mass of twitches and arcane mechanical movements, none of them obviously connected to his emotions.

A cautious voice ebbed from within the elevator.

'You aren't Slake...' it said. 'Who are you? Where did you get the codes?'

Something cold and metal racked out of sight. Sahaal could hear the heartbeat of his warriors accelerating. Whoever was within the elevator had a weapon.

'Friend of Slake's,' Pahvulti said, nodding and scraping. 'Het-het-het, yes, yes... Friend.'

'You've got no arms.'

'Yes, het-het-het. No arms, no guns. No need to be alarmed.'

'What do want, raggedy man? Answer me!'

'Slake, yes? Sent me to discuss more... acquisitions.'

'Don't be ridiculous. We've got what we wanted. The three-headed freak has nothing else to offer us. You hear me?'

Footsteps clattered against the floor. Whoever occupied the lift — still beyond Sahaal's vision — was marching forwards to confront Pahvulti up close.

Several things happened at once.

At the edge of Sahaal's sight, creeping past the corner of the elevator, he caught his first glimpse of the man he had come to seize. It was an official of some sort: colourfully robed, holding a small pistol in his manicured grip. A majordomo, Sahaal guessed: a personal servant of whichever noble house owned the elevator. A slave of whichever bastard had purchased the Corona Nox.

Sahaal leaped from his concealment with a shriek to freeze the fires of hell: a banshee-wail that stunned the wizened figure as if electrified. Panicking, the fool's finger tightened on the trigger of his pistol, and at the heart of the thunder-peal that followed Pahvulti's head burst like a bubble, metallic waste and brain-flesh detonating outwards. Sahaal eclipsed the death from his mind and reached out talons to snatch the majordomo up, to lift him on plumes of air away from this ugly little chamber—

The light spilling in from the doorway — the entrance his warriors had left unattended in their rush to confront the elevator — was blotted out, and the thud of marching feet filled the world.

The Preafects had arrived. A lot of Preafects.

They were led by the witch.

The first shotgun salvo decimated Sahaal's warriors lurking to the left of the elevator. Flesh left bone like jelly, pulverised beyond recognition. Thick slabs of paste scrawled themselves across rusted walls: powdered bone and strangled cries lost to the air. Hands clutched at nothing and were shredded, faces dissolved beneath an expanding cloud of lead shot, screams died in lacerated throats and warding arms, held across faces in primal protection, detonated like ripe fruit.

The echoes of the blast circled the gateroom like a captive bat.

In the course of a single second the Night Lord had lost half of his troops. The feathered headdress of a Quetzai clansman, still affixed to the ruptured clumps of scalp and hair of its former owner, slapped across his shoulder with a moist report. He ignored it and surged onwards, stretching out for the majordomo. Nothing else mattered.

The vindictors poured into the room like a tide of black-coated crabs, perfectly in step, ranks punctuated by the red stripes of an occasional heavy-weapons dervishi, or the unhelmeted snarl of a shouting sergeant. And the noise... the noise shook the room to its foundations and left dust curling from its distant ceiling. Armour clashing together, feet pounding the terracrete in robotic unison, voices raised in a sonorous chant:

'Lex Imperator... Lex Imperator... Lex Imperator...'

It was like an army. Even from the midst of his memories, dredged from the days of the Great Crusade, when glittering hosts without number swept across alien plains, Sahaal could not recall seeing its like. Perfectly precise movements. Every man dressed alike. Black. Shining. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, spilling into the room like oil from a drum.

A perverse part of his soul was gratified. All this, just for me...

Somewhere behind it all, through the tight spaces of the gateroom entrance — immovably blocked by the onrushing troops — a trio of Salamander tanks lurked. Command stations, Sahaal guessed, leading from the rear. Cowards.

He tried in vain to find the witch again, he had seen her enter at the forefront, dressed in rags, but had lost her amidst the swarm. She, at least, had dared to face him. He would enjoy ripping her to shreds.

Somewhere beyond his focused vision he registered a retort like the splintering of a thousand trees. Shotguns being racked, gloved arms pumping fresh shells into place.

The second salvo, en route, all conducted with machine efficiency. There was no cunning trap here, no subtle advance and flanking manoeuvre. Sahaal and his warriors were outnumbered twenty times over: bottled in a dead end, engulfed by a wall of black gloss carapace that seeped forwards like tar.

There was no hope of victory. No hope of defeating them. No hope of escape.

Not on the ground, at any rate.

And then he was upon the shrieking majordomo, wrapping gracile limbs around the man's midriff, locking claws together like the teeth of two gears. He spun as he went, turning his back towards the vindictors, shielding his prize from their pernicious attentions and kicking off, jump pack flaring behind him, delivering him into the air.

For an instant he considered leaping for the open elevator, riding its slow carriage up to the domain of whatever pompous noble had stolen his treasure. But before he could even twist towards it, dipping his rising body to bank left—

BOOM.

The second salvo. Right on time.

The blast swept the world from beneath him like a tidal wave of lead. His launch skewed, his legs flared with pain and jinked out to one side, spinning him backwards even as his feet left the ground. The ancient armour held its cohesion — its spirit moaning in the static of his vox — but where his greaves met his thighguards the metal storm peppered his joints and found his flesh. He shut out the pain, clearing his mind, and put his faith in the larriman coagulators haunting his blood. Unconcerned by the wounds he concentrated on restoring his trajectory — twisting with a furious roar — before his disastrous launch could deliver him into a wall or, worse, the floor: a greasy smear of flesh and armour. The jump pack protested at his ungentle contortions, the spirit that fused it to his true armour hissing deep in his psyche like a part of his own body. Its spiralling ascent smoothed, lifting him now at a shallow angle, fizzling and spitting as it went. It wasn't enough. The great snowgates, locked tight, loomed massively before him.

Mustering an effort that sent adrenaline bursting in his brain, cursing the weight of his captive, he rolled onto his front and banked hard, streaking across the heads of the astonished Preafects, silencing the majordomo's shrieks with a deft backhand across the man's face. With balance regained and agility restored, he whooped aloud and resought the elevator. It was too late: the black ranks had closed across it like a lead shield, and he dipped down in fury to rake a single claw across the Preafects' heads, shattering helmets and cleaving skulls like a ploughshare through their midst.

More blasts followed in his wake — no longer disciplined salvoes but panicky, opportunistic shots — thumping at the air like flak charges. But Sahaal was too fast: streaking across vindictor helmets like a ground-hugging missile, every careless discharge had little effect other than to scatter lead shot amongst the shooter's comrades.

In the blink of an eye the implacable advance collapsed. There was something in their midst, now: something that moved faster than they could see, something that shrieked like a child and lashed out with bright claws, cutting and hewing. Something that could dance between raindrops.

Somewhere behind Sahaal the pounding of a hell-gun joined the acoustic maelstrom, reverberating like a drum between the breathless gasps of lasguns. His remaining warriors, he guessed, cornered in their tiny alcove, fighting for their lives.

Let them die. Let them take as many of the faceless fools as they can. Let them sell their lives for me.

The prospect was strangely invigorating.

He ripped a dervishi's head from its body with a casual sideswipe, bringing up his legs to claw at another man's face as he did so. A fist caught the edge of his helm and he laughed at the futility of the attacker's blow, lost in a vicious world of madness and blood. He turned and crouched, igniting the jump pack with a spoken command, chuckling at the screams of agony from behind him as its blue-fire backwash incinerated a knot of scrambling vindictors, pushing him high into the air.

This! This is life! To kill and rejoice!

Immortal! Superhuman! Scion of the Haunter!

Feel their fear! Taste their terror!

It was... intoxicating.

And then something vast and black, like a great fist reaching out to seize him, slipped up into the air and bulged. He moved on instinct, swooping with the avian grace that was the gift of the Raptor, and dodged the unfurling veil with scant centimetres to spare.

Net-cannons.

He had not anticipated this. In the air he was immortal — or, at least, felt immortal. These swarming maggots sought to bring him down, to earthbind him: to tangle his claws and crush his life.

The giddying rush of sublime power crumbled beneath humility and anxiety. He'd been swept up in his own magnificence. How could he have been so foolish? How could he have allowed himself such arrogance as to believe he could overcome this... this sea of enemies?

It was the rage, he knew. That ugly voice in his head. That cold wisp of savagery, fooling him, making him reckless and unbalanced.

What had the Night Haunter said? Something... something about a flaw...

'It festers in our blood... It makes us fools, my heir... Do you know what it is?'

Focus, Sahaal! Focus!

Somewhere in the shadows the hellgun stuttered and fell silent, the last of his colourful warriors torn from their concealment by a vengeful plume of lascannon fire.

Cursing himself, vigilant for the next unfolding net to come billowing up towards him, he ululated and spiralled higher, feeling his hopes crumbling around him, claws sinking into malleable iron. Upside down, he scuttled across the jumbled beams and awkward buttresses of the ceiling, the majordomo still clutched to his chest. Shotgun blasts raked his back, ineffectual at this distance, stones cast against a mountainside. But there was little respite here: even now he could imagine the dervishi tilting lascannons towards him, bracing themselves against ferocious recoil.

Quelling the panic in his heart, he raced across the inverted topography of the ceiling like a fleeing spider, darting into every crevice, every lightless nook in his search for safety. Flashlights snapped to life beneath him, dazzling him like the wash of a miniature supernova. Horror coiled into his mind: a whirlwind of loss and shame. He was exposed, he was defeated. To a creature of the dark, such as he, the light was an acid envelope, scouring not only his eyes but his confidence, his dreams, his courage. Deprived of the shadows, stripped bare of his armour of darkness, he felt as frail as any human worm, and he clung there to the ceiling like a roosting bat, waiting to be picked-off.

A failure.

'We shall not rest. We shall not flee. We shall not succumb.'

His master's voice. Dredged from memories, again. Circling in his mind, now as always.

'No relief until the insult is repaid. No satisfaction until the traitor-Emperor is dead. No rest until the galaxy cries aloud with one voice, one shriek, one howl of terror.'

'Ave Dominus Nox!'

Sahaal threw back his head, cursed the doubts that had even dared to enter his mind, and shrieked with the hate that had sustained him for one hundred centuries.

Let him die! Let him be torn to shreds! But let him die with fire in his heart and blood on his claws.

He reached out to the single massive illuminator, dangling like an anchor from a cord at his side, and he sliced apart the steel cable with a contemptuous flick.

The rig tumbled earthwards. He would teach these human scum the meaning of fear.

'Death to the False Emperor!' he roared, drawing his bolter. 'Ave Dominus Nox!'

And he dropped down in the wake of the illuminator, clung to the majordomo with every last shred of his strength, and smiled a feral smile.

Mita Ashyn

The first that Mita knew of any danger, the first that any of the vindictor party knew, was a sound like the planet splitting itself open: rumbling from its guts to its skin.

The illuminator landed amidst the Preafects like an asteroid, splintering the rock floor and engulfing a section of the black-clad ranks in fire and shrapnel. Twenty men died in an instant, and like all those around her Mita surged outwards on the crest of a wave: a tide of broken metal and whirligig sparks. At its heart a sooty fireball rolled and blackened, tumbling upwards into a tall plume of black smoke, plucked-through by rushing figures and shouting voices.

And from the gulf above them, before they could regroup, before their dazzled senses could recover, throaty shots rang out through the shrill whoop of an airborne howl. Mita recognised the roar of a bolter: barking over and over, muzzleflash flickering on high.

Picked out in the haloes of the vindictors' flashlights, burning like phosphor in the sudden storm, the plummeting Night Lord rushed towards them — a thing of midnight skies and lightning bolts, able somehow to exude an impression of shadowed malevolence despite the brightness around it.

Its shriek cut the air keener than any knife.

Bolter shells struck each flashlight dead in its centre: unerring accuracy from a creature moving so fast. Angry eruptions shuffled shadows and shrapnel into the air, warheads blasting each torch to shredded metal, slicing exposed skin all around.

And then there was only darkness.

Total. Complete.

Endless night.

But not silent. The shrieks of the Night Lord became the whole world: a sonic vista of frozen screams and blood-chilling yelps. Others rose to join it — the moans of terrified vindictors, the shouts of confused and panicky men, corralled together with fingers on guns, the pained grunts of those who imagined themselves slashed, ripped and torn by the unseen monster...

It was chaos.

Here a Preafect would cry out: the sharp tug of an impact against shoulder or thigh preceding a hot burst of fluid, a slow swell of creeping pain, and then the piece-by-piece revulsion as the amputated limb failed to respond. Most never even felt the cut.

Here a sergeant's head thumped into the ruck like a moist bomb, parted from its body on the other side of the room, deposited from above by the unseen devil.

Here a gun hand was abruptly missing, here a slice of armour and skin was peeled back and gone in an instant, here a man hollered as his scalp was taken and his eyes filled with his own blood. Here a man tripped on his own guts.

Here a man tried to shout, and found his jaw and tongue ripped away.

Mita felt it all closing around her, a dizzying kaleidoscope.

The Night Lord was everywhere all at once: circling above, swooping to cut and kill with delighted impunity. He dipped down here and there, he sliced and he slashed and he shrieked. Blood splattered like rain, warm drizzle without direction or colour.

In the blackness, every shape was a threat, every voice a scream.

The rational core of Mita's brain understood all too well what was happening. The beast was not indulging in genocide, nor establishing a massacre. The odds were against it, and yet it had refuted the threat, stared it down, and turned it on its head.

It had coaxed forth panic from disciplined minds, and like a dam bursting its banks, like a stampede that could not be contained, those same minds turned in upon themselves, cut away any bonds of comradeship that they felt to those around them, and devolved, in an instant, into self-concerned, self-protecting, self-trusting beasts. They became molecules at the heart of a storm: packed together, chafing to be free, and yet repelling every other particle — be it friend or foe.

Shotguns rang out in the dark. Randomly fired, aimed at nothing but the night. They were killing one another.

There were too many of them, Mita understood with a jolt. Mustered from the precincts of Cuspseal and its surrounding cities alike, the vindictor force had been presented with simple orders: enter the gateroom. Kill anything that moves. Allow nothing to escape.

They had followed the commands with commendable efficiency, but in his haste to destroy the monster haunting his city Orodai had overlooked a simple factor. He had poured his ranks into the narrow chamber like sand filling a grail: piling through the narrow doorway, packing tightly together as they assumed firing positions. It was true that their quarry could never hope to escape this sea of aggressors, but the realisation that was rapidly stealing over each and every Preafect, marooned in a world of lightless fear, pushed forwards from the rear even as they turned and forged back towards the entrance, was that they were as incapable of exit as was their prey.

They were stuck inside their own trap, with a maddened devil.

It was not a pleasing revelation.

Their panic all but overcame Mita, then. Wallowing in its emotive backlash, blasting through her empathic senses like a flamer's kiss, guzzled by the completeness of the dark, the crowd's disharmony scorched her mind: left her shivering and afraid. She fell to her knees, pushed aside and trampled by the rushing figures, and all but lost control, bile rising in her throat. And always above it, like the ghost of a flavour, circling at the apex of the cloud of fear and terror that it had generated, the mind of the Night Lord tingled against her senses.

She would not approach it. She would not try to delve inside it, not now that she knew what manner of force protected its astral presence. Not since the creature's warp-guardians had come so close to overwhelming her before...

But even so, even without the benefit of careful scrutiny, even without the need to look close, to push inside and explore, she could sense the shape of that ancient, awful psyche, and oh... oh, God-Emperor... once more... just as it had been before.

It was like looking into a mirror.

The doubt... the power... the suspicion...

She surfaced from her horror at the sound of a firm voice, tentacles of psychic thought discovering an authoritative mind: a sergeant, she guessed, hollering orders from nearby.

'Binox!' he growled. 'Night vision! All men! Put on your Throne-damned binox, Vandire's piss!'

It was like a beacon. Like a tiny shaft of light in an endless wasteland. That one sliver of order punctured the panic-spell the Night Lord had cast, and all around it the shouting Preafects paused in their directionless flight and took stock, drew breath, fumbled for their goggles.

Mita made a mental node to find out the sergeant's name. If ever she escaped from this killing-room alive she'd be sure to commend the man to Orodai.

She fumbled around her until she found an armoured body, sticky with blood. Whether cut down by the Night Lord or blown apart by friendly fire, it didn't matter: the Preafect was dead. She scrabbled at its belt until her questing fingers found a binox strap, and pulled the blocky device over her eyes.

The world opened up in lurid shades of green and grey.

'Regroup, damn you!' the sergeant roared, and she swivelled to face him as if snatching for a lifeline, a solitary mote of warmth in a place of endless winter. He was nothing, she supposed — just one man amongst hundreds — but already she could see a circle of calmness spreading around him, vindictors pulling on night vision goggles, gazing around to see what damage they had done.

'Arm your weapons!' he cried, swept up on the flames of his own leadership. 'Shoot the Throne-damned shit! Shoot to ki—'

His head left his body.

Mita felt herself groan: a primal shock of horror and understanding, anticipating already what this would mean.

A pulse of blood jack-knifed over the tumbling corpse, a blur of something crossed overhead, blades outstretched. Something blue and black and bronze, which knew all too well who to target.

It screamed. It screamed just like a baby.

The panic returned harder than ever. Somewhere outside, in the faint light burning through the gate-room entrance, Orodai was shouting instructions from the back of his Salamander. It could do no good, now. Not from out there. Not so far from the boiling heart of this awful, inky place. The one voice of reason was gone, cut down with contemptuous ease by the unseen thing.

So easy to imagine horrors in the dark...

So easy to forget they faced a single foe. A single mortal foe...

And that, of course, was how the Night Lord worked. He dissolved his enemies in terror. He let them forget that he could bleed and die. He let them fill the darkness with their own demons, and when he shrieked on high it was like the voice of death itself, riding out to claim them for its own.

They had bottled a devil in a dead end. They had sprung their trap and thought themselves clever: and then the devil had showed them how wrong they were. It had made the dead end its own territory, it had dragged them into its own world — a world of darkness where it, and it alone, ruled — and now it would kill them one by one, at its leisure. Mita could no more pacify the frightened Preafects — lost to all reason — than she could push back the sea. They were all going to die.

She saw it, perfectly clear, in black and white.

The Night Lord would kill every last one.

And the only way to spare them all, to spare herself...

Think, Mita, think!

...was to give it what it wanted.

Her goggled eyes fell upon the colossal snowgates, twin blocks of tempered steel and iron — ten metres high — rising with the shallow camber of the room.

What does it want?

Escape.

The press of bodies was too great. She'd struggled as valiantly as she could, keeping her head low, pushing through jostling Preafects like a rat between the legs of elephants. At every accidental contact there were rebuttals and curses — 'It's the beast! Sweet Emperor, the beast is here!' — which inevitably drew the unkind attention of hacking power mauls, slash-stabbing blades and carelessly discharged shotguns. It was thanks only to the utter completeness of the dark that most attacks were carried wide, and to her precognitive senses that she had thus far been forewarned of any imminent weapons-fire.

But no longer. Abruptly the crush was too great, the herd of panicking men was packed together too tight for her to wriggle through, and each was too busy shouting and cowering to listen to the woman in their midst.

'Binox, you fools!' she'd been shouting, all along. 'Put your damned binox on!'

For all the good it would do, she might as well have addressed her advice to the Emperor himself. Useless!

Did... did I just think that?

Again, she wondered at the Night Lord's ability to sow discord. A death here, a death there, utter darkness and a medley of horrific shrieks: these, it would seem, were the ingredients of his domination. These simple things, able to turn hardened veterans of street law into cringing whelps. Able to leave her thoughtlessly questioning her own god... It was, she admitted awkwardly, impressively effective. None of which offered her much assistance in the task of reaching her goal. A shotgun stock blurred out of the soupy green image of her binox and she ducked it with a curse, amazed — besides anything else — that its owner could be so colossally stupid as to think such a flimsy attack could hurt the Night Lord, even if she had been it.

Another push, another repelling jab. This was getting her nowhere. She was so damned close!

A spray of warmth patterned her cheek, blood scattered from on high, and another shriek rang out nearby: the beast striking again, like an eagle dipping its talons below the surface of an unquiet lagoon, plucking out some thrashing silvery thing with a cry. Even with the goggles she couldn't see her foe clearly, only a blur, an indistinct something, trailing carnage as it leapt away, claws glittering.

The psychic glut hanging above the crowd reached agonising saturation behind her eyes: an intensity of confusion and dread that, impossible to block out, all but destroyed her. She felt her knees weaken and for an instant was sure she would fall. Staggering, she wondered how long she'd last beneath the booted feet of the stampeding Preafects.

And then the one remaining course of action arose in her mind. She could not reach the snowgate controls — she could barely stand upright, by the Throne! — and like a drowning soul clinging to a rope she grabbed at the idea and did not let go.

The animus motus. Telekinesis.

Very definitely not her forte.

Like all sanctioned psykers trained by the Scholastia Psykana, her psychic gifts could be shaped and hardened, manifesting themselves as physical forces — albeit clumsily — like opportunistic swings of club and fist. It was a gift borne in the heat of the moment, an impetuous force with which to strikeout like a hammer when danger threatened, or to turn aside a blow before it could fall. Using it as a precision instrument, calculatingly reaching out to change the world, was something at which she had never excelled.

It drained her energy like a bleeding wound.

A good psyker knows his limits, her tutors had smugly informed her. This is yours.

Well, warp take them! There was nothing else for it.

Agitated, shocked at her own sudden disrespect for her revered masters, she drew a deep breath and steadied herself, clenching her fists. She tried to be calm, to reach out from the cold centre of her soul, focusing all her will upon the snowgate lever... but of course that was the wrong tactic. She needed not calm, but rage: sudden and impulsive — and to plan for such a thing was to immediately negate it.

Sweat beads pricked at her forehead.

Off to one side, as if in another world, a stumbling vindictor shoved her from his path, the blow of his elbow barely puncturing the psychic realm she was trying to cross. Her body collapsed to the floor, unpiloted, but she paid it no heed: lashing, striking, ripping out with immaterial fists at the gate lever again and again.

Nothing happened.

And then something cried out in the dark, and on the crest of a premonition she swivelled her head up into the inky abyss and saw it, the Night Lord, dropping its shoulders, lifting its grasping boots like an eagle's claws, and swooping.

It had seen her.

It was coming for her.

Directly.

Eyes blazing.

Filling her world.

Shrieking like a dying child.

She was going to die.

And then there was the energy she deeded, there was the adrenaline and fear and mingled rage, and there was the crackling fist of her psychic self, taking form, locking around the lever like a snapping maw, pulling with all its strength. Pulling so hard she felt her eyes fill with blood. Pulling so hard her ears popped and her heart roared in protest. Pulling so hard she thought her bones would shatter. She thought her veins would explode.

The lever turned.

The doors awoke like slumbering gods, shedding the layer of dust and ice scrawled across their inner surface, grinding open like the gates to some forbidden paradise. An arctic wind cut between them, flurrying snow boiling into the cavern in tumbling waves, and with it came a modicum of light: a ghostly spillage from the outer shell of the hive itself — wan and incomplete, scarcely a true light at all, but enough to determine shapes. Enough to distinguish friend from enemy.

The vindictors paused mid-riot. Maul blows went undelivered. Fingers eased from triggers. Doused in feeble luminosity, able at last to settle their frayed nerves and seek a modicum of calmness, the Preafect chaos ground to a slow, uncomfortable halt.

And above Mita's exhausted body, eyes blazing in the half-light, the Night Lord changed direction with seconds to spare, a bone-jarring jink from the vertical to the horizontal, the robe-tails of the man it had captured fluttering behind it. It whooped once — as if in farewell — and was swallowed by the ice-spume of the gates, splitting the snowy night with claws outstretched.

There were bodies everywhere. Most were dead of shotgun wounds.

And Mita Ashyn, who had spared the lives of those who remained, whose mind had been all but wiped away by the demands of the animus motus, sagged to the floor and felt as if she'd died. She considered whispering a prayer of thanks to the Emperor. It was the sort of thing she'd be expected to do.

But then... the Emperor hadn't saved her. She'd saved herself.

Just like always.

A flash of familiarity circulated through her, and she recalled the reflective shape of the Night Lord's psyche. Such doubt, such solitude. He had nothing but his principles to sustain him, nothing but himself to rely upon. Just like her.

A young Preafect approached, carefully crouching beside each body that littered the floor, checking for injuries, calling out for medics wherever he found life. He reached Mita's huddled form and squatted on his haunches, squinting at the rag-coated bundle that his eyes could scarcely make out.

'You okay? You injured?' he said, voice soft, with youth.

'I c-could use some help standing,' Mita stammered, all her energy spent.

The man backed away abruptly as if stung, recognising her face. Orodai had hardly been recalcitrant when it came to letting his men know whose testimony had lead them on this mission.

The Preafect continued his way along the heap of injured and dead as if she didn't exist, and it was only on the very cusp of her hearing that she heard him spit into the shadows, whispering beneath his breath.

'Witch.'

It was the last straw.

I just saved your life, you contemptible little shit.

Squatting on the floor of the Macharius Gateroom, bleeding from her ears and her nose, watching the crowds thin and the medics come and go, Mita Ashyn had something of a crisis of faith.

She sat for a long time and considered her place within events. In the main, the uncertainties that troubled her — exacerbated, no doubt, by exhaustion — revolved around a single query:

Why?

Why did she do it? Why had she struggled so hard, since those long-forgotten days when the blackships stole her from her family, to serve this bloated Imperium? Why had she toiled on behalf of these ignorant bastards, these bigoted fools who feared her and hated her and called her an abomination? Why had she bled and cried, why had she poured effort and energy into protecting the glory of an empire that... that had no place for her?

Had she been used? Had she been enslaved by those who sought only her destruction — a tame little witch that they could wield like a weapon until she ceased to be needed, and then snuff her out?

Why had she never felt these uncertainties before?

That, at least, was a question she could answer:

Because you've never found a partisan before.

Because you've never tasted such bitterness in another creature's soul, and it makes you question your own.

Because the Night Lord feels exactly the same.

She tried to shut out the whispers, the cruel inklings that spoke with her own voice, that stoked the fires of her paranoia, but they would not be silenced. They spread to overwhelm her, and in a panic she turned to the one glowing fragment of her soul which they could not penetrate: her faith.

In its glow, all her doubts were excised. By its light the whispering voices were silenced.

Had she been used? Had she been cruelly manipulated?

No, of course not. She fought not in the name of these people, but in the name of the Emperor! He did not hate her. Was it not through him that her powers were granted? Was it not through him that the future could be navigated, imparted through his tarot and the furor arcanum like seeds of prophecy?

He did not despise her. He would not use her so.

And yes, his agents were a teeming mass, contradictory and contemptible. Let them hate her, if they must. Let them pursue their own agendas, let them lock their horns together and schism like splintering ice. Let the Inquisition cast her out, let Orodai's black-suited worms despise her, let the whole of the universe rail against her if they must.

The Emperor loved her. She was certain.

Mollified, she rose to her feet. The vindictors had erected several small illuminator-tripods to allow the medics to work, and by their pale light she glanced around the room, sickened by the carnage. She wondered vaguely what to do next. Certainly her usefulness as a combatant had expired — she could barely stand, let alone fight — and at any rate the Night Lord was long gone. There would be no hope of catching it now.

Should she report, then, to Orodai? No doubt he would blame her for this calamity, and the curses of hateful men was something she could happily do without. No, she'd stay clear of Orodai, for now. He had more than enough to be getting along with.

Besides, there was one final strand to this vast, tangled investigation that remained un-plucked. One remaining clue to be pursued.

The package. That was why the Night Lord had come here in the first place. That was why he had entered the hive. That was why he had faced the Glacier Rats, captured Slake, ventured here to this blood-splattered room. All to retrieve the package that had been stolen from him.

So what was it? What item could possibly encourage a beast such as he to wreak such havoc in a hostile place? And who could have stolen it from him?

Mita pursued answers in the only way that she could. She stumbled into the open elevator from which the majordomo had been abducted, kicked aside a dissected limb from the door runnels, and watched the doors close before her.

As the elevator rumbled to life, she wondered whether the Night Lord had learned from his captive the identity of his target. She imagined its blue-black form slinking back to its lair, demanding answers from the cringing majordomo, hissing and spitting. Would it be that simple, she wondered? Would he find his thief quickly?

She guessed not. Commander Orodai was not stupid enough to commit all his resources to a single engagement.

The Night Lord would find little sanctuary in his lair.

Zso Sahaal

And then, like the end of a beautiful dream, everything fell apart.

Sahaal returned to his domain along dark and secret paths, slipping once more into the underhive through the abyssal rent in the earth that had first granted him entry. He'd been concerned, as he raced to cross the snowy expanse outside the Macharius gate, that his unconscious captive might freeze before he could even be interrogated. He needn't have worried: beneath the man's thick cloak he proved to be a porcine specimen, a healthy layer of fat providing adequate insulation from the cold. Just another decadent blob from a decadent world. Sahaal would enjoy getting answers out of this man.

He'd slipped down through the empty underhive like an eidolon, ghosting through settlements that had been decimated days before by the Preafect pogrom.

He sneaked through deserted villages and empty nomad-trains, musing upon their former inhabitants. All had either died or descended to join his army.

His Empire.

The mere thought of it cheered him, exorcising the insult of the gateroom ambush from his mind. His army. His children — ready to rise up at his command and wreak havoc wherever he desired.

Somewhere, in the quiet shadows at the rear of his mind, he reminded himself that they existed only to die. He would throw them into the jaws of their enemies to bring anarchy and madness to this fearful city, and in the crippled wake of their sacrifice his brothers of the Night Lords Legion would arrive to find their path open, their advance uncontested. But these were stifled thoughts, buried at the base of a mind revelling in its dominion. He admitted to himself that the very idea of sacrificing his children troubled him, filling him with an uncertain chagrin that he couldn't explain.

Could it be... could it be that he grew fond of them? Could it be that the mantle of overlord had settled upon his shoulders and grown comfortable? Could it be that he was seduced by the devotion and worship of his tribe?

Or was it simply that he enjoyed the power their worship bequeathed, and loathed the prospect of surrendering it?

Was this how the Night Haunter had felt — protectorate of the peoples of Nostramo Quintus, a dark lord who brought them peace and efficiency through fear? Had he loved the blind, empty worms beneath his command? Had it broken his heart to leave them behind him, when the Emperor came and claimed him as his own son?

Sahaal analysed his thoughts and, yes... yes, he was proud of his children, a paternal regard for their glories that flushed him with warmth and shame in equal measure. Already they had achieved so much more than he could have dreamed. 'Strike you at his hands, and he shall not cut you.'

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

The hands had been wrenched from their wrists: silos of surface-to-air lance arrays that his strongest Shadowkin captains had led ragtag bands to cripple. Pocking the hive like kroothair quills, it would have taken an eternity to destroy them all, but the Shadowkin had done well. Those batteries that remained. would exist in fear: their crews awaiting the arrival of whatever unseen attackers had razed the others. Desertions would be rife.

The heart... the heart had been easy. Unprotected and unwatched, the mighty vents that drew heat from the blazing heart of Equixus, feeding the city with warmth and power, were easy targets. Over the past few days, at Pahvulti's direction, they had been breached deep in the underhive — makeshift bombs strapped to metal diaphragms, thick plumes of magma and shimmering air scorching from every fractured edge. Whole tiers had fallen to darkness and cold. And now crops would wither and die as hydroponics coleria froze. The militias would find themselves quelling riots, distributing blankets, sharing out meagre rations, pacifying crowds. When the sword fell and the skies burned with Night Lords' vessels, they would be simple prey.

The city was far from crippled — Sahaal was too much a realist to believe that — but it was injured and bleeding, and in the face of such wounds the infection of fear was never far behind. When the blow came, when the city faced its darkest moment, how many of its stalwart defenders would stand in the Night Lords' way, with their morale sapped and their stomachs empty?

Not many, Sahaal guessed.

And it was all thanks to his armies. All thanks to the Shadowkin and their refugee comrades, blind little mice, who obeyed his command to assuage the guilt of the blood on their hands. He was their champion. The lord of the oppressed. The master of the dispossessed, who had taken their simmering resentment of the hive above and wielded it like a flaming sword.

He returned to the rustmud caverns by the winding, hidden entrance to the south. He would re-enter his domain quietly, he had resolved, silently, and once there he would torture the slumbering fool gripped beneath his arm to find — finally! — the identity of the one that had stolen the Corona Nox.

He returned to his territory with pride and triumph in his stomach, and he paused at the cusp of the tunnel's exit to survey his domain.

His mouth fell open.

The swamps were burning.

The tanks.

He had wondered to himself, as he soared above the vindictor crowds in the Macharius gateroom, weaving his fearful spell like an artist at work, why his enemies had committed infantry alone to his destruction. A pragmatic commander would have blasted entry into the room and bombarded him to paste with shell and mortar, grinding him to dust beneath the wheels of armoured vehicles.

He should have guessed the true reason. The vindictor commander was no fool. Whilst the hive festered and moaned with terror, whispering of nightmares in the dark, imagining him — blue-shanked and bronze coated, blood-spattered and burning with Chaotic fires — at the heart of every new disturbance that rocked the city, the Preafects' salient leader had understood that the real threat arose not from a single Night Lord, but from the army he had constructed.

Sahaal almost admired the man. He had seen through the terror-glamour, and reacted to it with a cold efficiency that matched Sahaal's own.

The tanks had come to the rustmud caverns whilst he was absent. They had come with cannons and howitzers, and as he stared out across the churning fires, and darting figures that had once been his domain, he knew he was too late. It was over.

A voxcaster voice from each vehicle's spine declared, over and over:

'The Night Lord is dead... You are not our enemies... Disperse to your homes... Resistance shall he crushed... The Night Lord is dead...'

Sahaal's empire was crumbling beneath him.

They had driven a wedge into the refugee encampment, lighting fires across rag rooftops and straw walls as they went. A great phalanx of Salamanders and Chimeras bulldozed all that stood before them, crewmen standing brazenly on each one, glossy armour lit devilishly in the flames of the burning terrain. Despite the destruction the vindictors had been careful to discriminate amongst their enemies: assiduously avoiding the temptation to open fire upon the shrieking, fleeing sections of the crowd.

'The Night Lord is dead... We are here to liberate you from your slavery... The Night Lord is dead...'

It was a masterful piece of duplicity. Arranged against the combined strength of the Shadowkin and the refugees, the Preafects knew that they had little hope of victory. But with words alone they could divide their enemies: appealing to the refugees' self-preservation, shattering the bonds of terror that Sahaal had spent so long cultivating.

They fled in their hundreds, past the ravaging tanks and up, up by the long northern road, back into their empty dwellings in the undercity above. Like insects casting off their cocoons they threw off the shackles of alliance that Sahaal had forced upon them, they washed clean their hands of the murders each had committed, they ran into the dark with a prayer of forgiveness and a backward glance, and then they were gone.

The Shadowkin themselves received no such mercy. They had courted the daemon as their own master. No excuses of slavery could stain their lips.

The tanks gathered at the banks of the burning swamp, and one by one their mighty cannons angled, like knights tilting lances, towards the rusted island-drill. The tribesmen knew what was coming, perhaps, and swarmed from their dwellings with empty warcries and holy condemnations, lined across the beaches with guns blasting ineffectually at the distant tanks, calling down damnation and the Emperor's wrath upon their unclean enemies.

Ironic, Sahaal mused, that a tribe so devout could be so defiled. It was not the Preafects who had betrayed their Emperor, after all...

Should he act? Should he attempt to intervene? Would it do any good?

The cannons opened fire, great pounding slabs of sound that echoed about the caverns like the laughter of giants. And like geysers of metal and smoke, like a field of angry mushrooms of bloody-red fire that snarled and blackened as they capered upwards, the island was swallowed whole.

The Shadowkin died like vermin, and as his kingdom was toppled before his eyes Sahaal found himself sinking to his knees, overcome, wracked by such powerful emotions that he couldn't define where horror became grief, where loss became madness, and where insanity became rage.

He stood abruptly, body rising in a single movement, discarding the captive majordomo at his feet, forgotten.

Rage. Yes... He could focus on rage.

He knew where he was with rage.

His claws sprung from their sheaths with a relish he could barely contain, and he threw back his head and screamed: a primal shriek that burned away every thought, that stripped clean his body and his mind of everything but pure, unpolluted, uncontainable fury.

He would kill them all for what they had done to his people. He would rip apart the tanks with his bare hands, he would rise on thermals of death and glory, and show these pitiful humans what it was to cross the Talonmaster! He would—

Would—

It was too much. His brain was not meant for this. His mind had not been shaped to deal with a slumber of a hundred centuries, to withstand the barrage of loss and uncertainty that he had encountered, to feel compassion for the creatures beneath his dominion.

Kill! the voices shrieked. Burn the world! Kill them all!

He was a thing of war. He was a weapon of terror, to be aimed and released. He had never intended to be so lost from his brothers, to grow so isolated from the path of the Night Haunter. He had never been intended to be so subject to human emotion.

He was weak.

He was going insane. And he knew it.

Hidden at the mouth of the secret tunnel, bathed in the shadows of shifting firelight, Zso Sahaal's mind convulsed with the alien sensations — confusion, loss, uncertainty, loneliness — that it could never hope to withstand. His empire had been taken from him, his grip upon sanity had crumbled with it, and he spiralled away into a great darkness without end.

He fell to floor like some contemptible, shellshocked little human — a total breakdown without escape — and unconsciousness devoured him whole.

On Tsagualsa, the Night Haunter spoke his name, and selected him above all others as his heir. How had he felt, in that frozen moment? How had his selection ignited his mind?

He felt... unsurprised. He felt as though he had always expected it.

He was the Talonmaster. He was his master's truest son. It was natural.

The brute Acerbus left without comment.

On Tsagualsa the Night Haunter dismissed his remaining captains, and to his throne he led Zso Sahaal.

Yours, one day. One day soon!

And he had told Sahaal how it would happen, how he had seen it: burned upon his dreams like a cruel pantomime, played out over and over every night. An assassin of the Callidus shrine would come for him, slinking in the dark, creeping across the writhing galleries of the living palace with her heart hammering in her ears, her fists clenched tight.

There would be no opposition. No attempts to stand in her way. She must be allowed through to enact the final grisly scene.

The Night Haunter, baleful eyes shining, lipless mouth trembling, turned to Sahaal then and made him vow it. Arms interlocked, eyes meeting in shadowed pools.

There would be no intervention. The assassin would fulfil her role. She would play out her part in the endless comedy. Sahaal vowed it, and hated himself. And the Night Haunter, Konrad Curze, his master, made him vow to watch it all. To stare from the shadows to see it happen. He made him vow it on the sacred hatred of the Legion, on the insult that must he repaid, and Sahaal could no more break his oath than he could kill his lord himself. He would watch his master die. And when the she-bitch was gone — her bloody task complete — he would step from his vantage and lift from his master's corpse the Corona Nox. He would take it for himself. He would show it as his symbol of office, and he would lead the Night Lords ever onwards. He vowed it.

He would lead them as his master had done, with boundless hate and endless patience. He would unite them in crusade upon the Traitor Emperor, and all would be well.

And his master turned to him and asked him if he knew, if he understood, what it was that made the Night Lords weak. What was the flaw that crippled their hearts?

Sahaal did not know, so Konrad Curze sat and smiled, and told him.

It had something to do with power. It had something to do with rage. It had something to do with the fear that the Legion grasped, the terror they used as a weapon to destroy their foes.

Fear must be a means to an end, he said. It must be used as an instrument in pursuit of a goal, whether it be obedience or peace or genocide. Just as the Night Haunter had been used as his father's ugly tool, so too must the Legion use fear.

But to sow terror without cause, to horrify without goal — that way lay corruption. The fear ceased to be a means to an end and became an end in itself: seeking dominance over others, seeking to terrify them into submission for the simple fact of their obeisance. Seeking carnage and fear with spite and pleasure.

That way lay megalomania.

That way lay the seduction of power, and it was the flaw in the blood of every Night Lord. It was the flaw he had spent his life struggling to defeat, bearing in its womb madness and venom, begetting the fits that had plagued his waking hours, taunting him with visions of his own end.

That way lay Chaos.

'It festers in our blood... It makes us fools, my heir...'

The Night Haunter would not allow his Legion to succumb so easily to the whispers of the Dark Gods. Chaos had served him well as an ally — as a deadly fire to be hurled at his enemies — but he would not countenance its digestion of his Legion.

Their leader must be strong. Not in arm or in courage — that was the remit of those like Krieg Acerbus — fine warriors, mighty heroes: but too burdened by pleasure at their dark acts to lead. Too joyous in their work. Too hungry for supremacy.

He had asked Sahaal if he had understood, therefore, why he alone had been chosen, and Sahaal had lied with a nod.

The Night Haunter said he had chosen Sahaal as his heir because his strength lay in that holiest of disciplines, that mightiest of fields:

Focus.

He would not waver from the Haunter's vision. A vision of a united Legion. A vision of focused hatred. A vision of blue-black ships assaulting Terra itself. A vision of Night Lord claws closing upon the withered neck of the Traitor Emperor.

Vengeance for the ultimate treachery. Vengeance for a Father's betrayal of his own son.

And then, peace. Efficiency and peace through obedience. The Imperium would prosper beneath nocturnal skies.

All in the Night Haunter's name.

That was the goal. That was the focus.

All this Konrad Curze imparted, and Sahaal left him with a storm of vows clouding his mind, awaiting the coming of the assassin with baited breath.

Sahaal awoke to the crisp bark of gunfire, the acrid stink of ozone, and the unexpected prickle of cold air against his face.

Someone had removed his helmet.

A metallic chime peeled-out in the darkness nearby — a knife being dropped? — and with it came the sluggish retort of a body, toppling to its knees and then collapsing to the ground.

Someone with a knife, shot dead.

A voice gibbered in the dark. 'He was about... oh, God-Emperor... he was about to cut your throat, my lord.'

Sahaal opened his eyes and levered himself upright, muscles bunched and ready for combat, and the figure that stood over him with earnest concern written across every centimetre of her face took him by surprise. It was Condemnitor Chianni.

Beyond her, like the plateau of hell, the swamps surged and boiled and flamed. The tanks were stationary now, their crews clambering from pinde nests and embarkation ramps to poke at the dead bodies with power mauls and blades, checking for signs of life. On the distant northern shore, through a haze of smog and sulphur, the tail end of the fleeing refugees slipped around the pathway's corner and up, to begin the long climb to the safety of the underhive. There was nothing left for them here.

Sahaal blinked, his mind drawing itself sluggishly back to comprehension.

The memory of his master had absolved him of insanity. He had awoken refreshed, untroubled by the tentacles of corruption, released from chains that he had not even known existed. He understood now that he had been on the verge of succumbing to the seductions his master had warned him of, all those centuries ago. He had been tempted by the trappings of power. He had discovered within himself a love for Empire-building an unconstructive regard for the plebeians he had ruled.

He had lost his focus. He had pursued only his own aggrandisement.

Chaos, whispering in his ear.

He realised with sudden clarity that it had been there all along. Since he awoke in the Umbrea Insidior, a voice in his mind, counselling him in rage and fury and power.

Well, he was free of it now. His master's words had cleansed him from beyond the veil of time and death. He had lost the patronage of Chaos, he had lost the swarming warp-things that buzzed and tickled his mind, and he felt more alive than he had since his arrival.

Ave Dominus Nox!

He breathed his gratitude without sound, overcome by the strength of the Night Haunter's wisdom.

No longer for him the weakness of rulership. No longer the enjoyment of devotion. No longer did he crave the worship of his underlings, or the obeisance of those who thought him holy.

He had rediscovered his focus. The Corona Nox would be his, and damn his crumbled Empire for the sham that it was!

He returned his mind to reality, making sense of his surroundings. Somewhere out across the fiery territory, the body-checking Preafects stumbled ever closer. He looked up at Chianni and blinked, confused. 'You should be dead,' he said, aiming a wavering finger.

'I... I heard you, lord.' She bit her lip, throwing a glance over her shoulder at the vindictors, prodding and kicking at charred bodies.

'Heard me?'

'Y-yes... I was on the far shore, overseeing the returning strike-groups. When the tanks came I...' Her head dipped, ears reddening. 'I confess that I thought you lost to us. They said you'd been killed. My lord, I was... oh, forgive me, I was fleeing.' She tumbled forwards with a sob and locked trembling fingers around his clawed feet, prostrating herself. 'I have dishonoured, you! Forgive m—'

He waved the rant away, impatient. 'Never mind that! What happened?'

'I...oh, Terra's blood, I heard your cry. A shriek of hate from the south.'

He remembered. He remembered the rage and the fury, the last insidious surge of Chaos, frying his mind, claiming him for its own, before the breakdown occurred and his tortured brain rolled over upon itself. 'The others thought I was mad,' Chianni burbled. 'They said I was hearing what I wanted to hear, but... I couldn't just run! Not without checking'

'So you came?'

'Y-yes. And just in time, lord.' Her face contorted with anger. 'The... the warpfilth had your helmet off. He had a knife, lord. I didn't know if you were alive or dead, b-but...' Her voice tailed off, Sahaal could see she was in shock, face pale. She stabbed a pointed finger to one side, gesturing for his attention.

A dreadful suspicion arose in his reeling mind.

He followed her gesture and settled his eyes upon the figure sprawled at his side, a smoking laswound singeing the colourful fabric of its robes, the shieldlike designs woven across its surface now stained by blood and grime. The body's podgy hands clutched — even in death — for the discarded dagger it had dropped.

The majordomo. He had awoken whilst Sahaal slept. He had prised off the Night Lord's helmet with clumsy twists of his blade, and then he had drawn back his hand to slice the monster's exposed skin.

And then Chianni had shot him.

'No!' Sahaal roared, adrenaline burning his brain, raising him to his feet, spinning him towards Chianni. He snatched her up in one gauntleted fist with a feral snarl, ready to sink his claws through her face, red fires burning in his guts. 'You killed him!' he cried. 'You killed him, warp take you!'

'L-lord! lord, he was going to kill you!'

'I needed him! I needed the name of his master! You killed him!'

The claws of his free hand ripped forth, light motes scattering across them. He pulled them back from Chianni's shrieking face, preparing to punch through her wide eyes and shred her pitiful brain, exploding bone and gore across the burning swamplands. No matter that she had acted in his interests. No matter that she had spared his life.

The Corona Nox. That was all that mattered. And she had taken it from him once more!

'I know his master!' she screamed, eyes rolling, spittle flecking her lips. 'I know his master!'

Sahaal paused, eyes narrowing. He wondered how he must look without his helm, how his sallow countenance must horrify her, and indeed her bugging stare roved across his face with disgusted fascination.

Look upon your so-called 'angel', little human...

'You lie,' he hissed, unimpressed. 'You lie to save your life.'

'No! No, look at him! Look at the robes!'

'What of them?'

'The crest! The coat of arms!'

'Explain!'

'My lord... it's the heraldry of the hive itself! The Noble House Zagrif! This man was in the employ of the governor!'

Mita Ashyn

The elevator seemed to ascend forever. Mita settled herself into a corner, cross-legged with her back pressed against the bronzed interior. It could hardly be likened to the comfort of her old meditation cell on Safaur-Inquis, nor even to the ascetic simplicity of the chamber the governor had granted her here on Equixus, but she was too exhausted to crave the comfort of fine things. The ability merely to sit, to close her eyes, to not spend her life glancing over her shoulder, that was enough.

As the minutes dragged on and a modicum of her energy returned, she found her mind wandering, rising on wings of thought, and a strange sense of prescient pressure — like a slowly building mass of water filling the spaces of her head — came over her. She recognised it, of course. It was the preamble to the furor arcanum: her senses' crude way of letting her know that a prophesying trance was forthcoming, should she choose to indulge it.

At first she resisted, choosing to take the time to settle her mind, to restore her strength, to prepare herself for whatever tests and feats awaited her at the apex of the elevator shaft. But the uncertainties that clouded her thoughts could not be so easily placated, heir exhaustion had become a curious constant that required no salving nor assuagement, and how could she prepare herself for the unknown? Indeed, only by accepting the visions that the trance offered could she have any hope of anticipating what lay before her.

She surrendered to the pressure with a quiet sigh, closing her eyes and clearing her mind, and the visions of future madness poured into the cavity of her skull like a plague descending upon unwary heads.

First, there is... altitude.

The same old vision, then. Just as before. Always the same.

Coldness assails her, and though she is unsure whether she is truly a part of this vision at all, or simply watching events from some remote 'beyond', she feels nonetheless that she is naked: that ice is forming on her skin, and hot vapour arises from her mouth with every breath.

To every side the world is an abyss. She stands on a monolith of metal, a great cactus-spire that threatens to cast her off, to send her tumbling along its steepening flanks with whichever tawdry zephyr seizes her. She cries out, afraid, nauseous, although she has seen all of this before.

This is the fourth time she has witnessed this vision.

And then there seems to be something in the clouds before her, some unseen presence that breaks the squalling ice, that shifts like a shadow upon a pearl, drawing near.

And just like before, she knows what it is.

It is herself. Held aloft by a beast of smoke and shadow. Dressed in rags, hair cut and unkempt — and in some distant part of herself she recognises changes that have already been wrought, and realises that this scene, this awful tableau created before her, must be almost upon her.

But there is more to occur yet.

Her reflection's arm is gone. She bleeds like an endless river. She tries to see the monster that holds her up and it is indistinct... but already she knows what it is.

The Night Lord carries her into the squalling snow on wings of darkness and smoke, and it seems to her that for an instant there are shapes below it — bright-knuckled beasts that reach out with claw and tentacle to snare him — but he is too fast. He is too agile.

He is gone, and her doppelganger with him, and Mita is left to tumble from her impossible vantage down into the dark, where hate and anger boils around her. She has seen all of this too. She has experienced all of this before.

Except...

Except this time the trance-vision is different. This time there is no hag. No fat-bellied witch tumbling down on contrails of blood and fire, and she thinks to herself:

That was the indicator of another event, then, something that has already occurred...

The Night Lord's arrival. The hag was his vessel. Her bloated belly ruptured and spilled-out the prize that he had come to claim. That is the way of the furor arcanum: half truths and twisted versions of reality.

This time is different. This time Mita's fall from on high is interrupted. This time she is caught in mid-air, buoyed up by a steely eagle, lifted in its wake like a leaf in the pull of an engine. This time she is there to witness the endgame.

The eagle returns her to the peak of the metal mountain. It circles and swoops, and fixes beady eyes upon the turrets of the city's crown, where it has business to attend. It can sense something it wants inside. It tilts wings of jetair and fuel towards the monolith, and races down to shatter its beak across the steely surface.

And then the horizon is no longer dark. The endless night is on fire.

And the sky fills, from edge to edge, with the shrieks of hawks and the blood of the ignorant.

Mita awoke in the elevator with a gasp, thick bile pooling in her mouth. She spat and choked, clutching at her belly.

The pater donum descended on her like a pleasant breeze, a cloying luxury that tweaked inside every muscle and every bone. Her tutors had taught her to relish it, to enjoy the one luxury her curse'gift would ever bestow upon her. But not so now: seated and nauseous within the cramped elevator, the pater donum could give her no comfort.

She slipped into a faint with inexpressible relief, and in her mind the screaming hawks that lit the sky plunged deeper and deeper into the surface of her dreams, plucking flesh and sinew clear with each swoop.

They flocked above her. They flocked above the world. Her last conscious thought, before sleep claimed her, was: They are coming. They are coming for us all...

She awoke with no idea how long she had slept. A brief instant of claustrophobic panic gripped her — what if the elevator was sealed? Paused in some door-less cavern? Never to reopen! — but, no, the gentle rumble of its guidance machinery continued apace. Judging by its pitch — almost totally vertical where previously it had skewed along increasing diagonals — she was approaching the apex of the city.

It was a thought that gave her pause. As an outlaw, it occurred to her that travelling to the peak of the hive — where even the stealthiest of intruders couldn't hope to set foot without discovery — hardly smacked of intelligence.

But what else could she do? Lurk in the shadows of Cuspseal forever, growing more hungry and more cold, more confused by the conflicting thoughts that assailed her? Spend her life running from the Inquisition, slipping down into the dark of the underhive like so many dispossessed nobodies before?

Spend her life wondering...?

Of course not. Passivity was not in her character.

There were two mysteries that gripped her above all others, and as she settled in her corner, feeling the ponderous machinery of the elevator grinding higher and higher, she happened to cast her eyes upwards seeking some indicator of its progress, and found herself agog. The twin riddles slid together, mixing like accreting puddles of icemelt, becoming a single unified issue, and all at the single glimpse of what was embossed above the door...

The first uncertainty concerned the package, the stolen prize, the Corona Nox. What was it? Why did it matter so much to the Night Lord? Was it truly at the zenith of this grinding shaft that it could be found?

The second confusion was older, an enigma that seemed to have settled upon her bones like a layer of dust, too thick to ever remove. She felt as though she'd been gnawing at it her whole life, drenched in the suspicion and paranoia that was integral to it:

What are you up to, Kaustus?

Two queries. Two struggles, separate but equally as chaotic within her thoughts.

And suddenly they were one. Her eyes fell upon the bronze plaque above the elevator's sealed doors, and everything fell into place.

It showed a shield. A carefully scrawled coat of arms that sucked at her gaze like some awful abyss. She'd seen it before.

A sword crossing a sceptre, set upon a field of snow, surmounted by a sickle-moon and a halo of stars. The heraldry of the Noble House Zagrif.

This was the governor's personal elevator.

So...

Think, Mita! Work it through!

So the Glacier Rats stole something from the Umbrea Insidior... They did so at the request of the Slake collective...

Who had... had...

'Oh, sweet Emperor...'

Who had been commissioned by the agents of the governor himself.

The audacity of the plot astonished her, sent her reeling. Snippets of sound and sight rushed across her mind, making her wince. She'd been so foolish! Why had she not realised before?

'And to what do we owe this pleasure?' the governor had asked, when Kaustus brought her before him. 'Is she here to help us with the lock?'

She remembered thinking at the time: what lock?

She should have remembered! She should have seen!

And then, glimpsed through Pahvulti's eyes, the Night Lord rasping his venom at the cringing Slake collective:

'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.'

Oh, she'd been so stupid!

Two enigmas, one solution!

This was what Kaustus had been doing! This was why he had sent his retinue to quell the xenophile cells, rather than attending himself. This was what had kept him, day after day, sealed in the governor's company, dismissing every other thing.

Kaustus had the Corona Nox.

The doors opened some two and a half hours after they had first closed, and they did so upon an occupant ready for anything. She had had plenty of time to dwell upon the epiphany that had snared her. Plenty of time to allow disbelief and denial to seep across her senses, replaced ultimately by a deep, abiding fury.

She'd been right. Her master had been lying to her — to everyone — all along. He'd known the Night Lord was real. He'd known, somehow, that the Umbrea Insidior would come to Equixus. He'd been waiting with eager hands to take delivery of the Traitor Marine's greatest prize.

Why then had he resisted killing the beast? Why had he risked its wrath, its gradual attempts to reclaim what was rightfully its? Why had he done everything in his power to protect the monster?

She'd realised with gathering gloom that her epiphany had simply birthed a new generation of questions, and at the core of her simmering anger the fundamental issue remained ironclad and unaltered:

What are you up to, Kaustus? What are you doing, you bastard?

And so she stepped from the elevator with a laspistol in one hand and her senses on full alert, anticipating attack or flight. What greeted her eyes — and her psychic senses — was therefore far from expected.

There was no one waiting for her.

The elevator had delivered her into the heart of the governor's gallery. Treasures without count extended into the gloom on every side, plinths bathed in hard light bearing jewelled gewgaws and priceless archeotech. And just as her alertness settled and she began to relax, once more the terror consumed her, the overwhelming certainty rushed across her:

The Night Lord was here. He was nearby. He was close!

She stumbled forwards with the pitiful gun primed, feeling ridiculous and naked. The certainty of the creature's presence — a stormcloud at the forefront of her astral senses, lapping froth-slick pollution against her psionic self — was undeniable: the beast's mindscape a unique image that she could have recognised anywhere, at any time. He is here! Emperor preserve me, he's here! And yet... Between each gallery plinth there lurked only an open space. The shadows of the room's perimeter concealed nothing but walls and windows, and for the first time she could remember Mita found herself questioning her senses. She spun and ducked, straining her eyes and ears, all to no avail.

She was so sure! So utterly convinced that her foe was present... and yet, nothing. She followed the pulse of his psychic presence like a bloodhound tracking a scent, and she moved between each exhibit with exaggerated care, all too aware of the servitor eyes tracking her movements from the ceiling, long-barrelled weapons inert as long as she kept her distance. And then there it was.

It occupied the tallest plinth at the torus-room's natural epicentre, surrounded by a wall of blazing illuminators. Even had her senses not directed her to it she guessed it would have drawn her eye like the brightest star in the sky, by reason of its setup and positioning alone. Most peculiar of all, only it, amongst all the wonders of the governor's collection, had no judicious servitor to watch over it.

It was a box. A dull, uninteresting crate, shining with the oily lustre of adamantium. Across its surface ugly runes and obscene scriptures were daubed in red and white, and at its front — spread across the inverse of its hinge in the shape of a snarling skull, borne aloft on great red wings — was a cryptoseal. It was unopened, the beads of its interlocking plates remained meshed together, unprimed by the one word, the one cryptic phrase'code, that would send pins snapping into place in the tiny logic engine within, grinding upon ancient gears and unlocking the whole.

It radiated thought. It oozed malice. It exuded a palpable sense of presence that... yes, she was sure... that mimicked life itself.

She realised with a start that this was the prize. This was the item that had been stolen from the Traitor Marine, and the ocean of sentience that burned from within was so akin to the Night Lord's own mind that it had fooled her. This close up she could detect the tiniest of differences, the ugly inconsistencies that should have told her, long before: she had not sensed the presence of her foe. She had sensed his greatest possession, his dearest treasure, a mystical something that burned with an astral presence all of its own.

The Corona Nox.

'You begin to understand why I drugged you, perhaps?'

Kaustus's voice.

He was directly behind her.

He'd been watching. Of course.

Damn him! Damn him to the jaws of the warp! 'What do y—'

'I had to be sure I had the correct item. The thieves who stole it were hardly trustworthy, and whilst I could rely upon the governor's... interest in all things rare and valuable, even he lacked the resource to determine the item's true ownership. I knew that you would sense the beast's presence if I had the right package.'

Confusion gripped her. Had the duplicity truly gone so deep? Had he used her so mercilessly? 'This is... oh, God-Emperor, I don't under—'

'Naturally I couldn't let you get too close to the item. I'd already decided you were better off out the way. A microdart in your arm, child. It was the easiest thing.'

Stall for time, Mita. Draw him off guard. Keep him busy. Then shoot the warpshit bastard right in the face.

'I almost died! In my dreams... I... I couldn't get back to my body an—'

'Yes, yes. Very interesting.' Scorn dripped from his voice. 'Now put the gun down, interrogator. Kick it away.'

So much for stalling for time. She struggled to find a tone of rebellion in her voice but it was stifled, crushed down by the sense of defeat that gripped her.

'I'm not your interrogator any more'

'Ha. Very true. The gun. Now!'

She bent to do as he said, and as she placed the pistol against the floor she reached out with her mind, probing for weaknesses. But no, Kaustus's brain was as impregnable as ever, protected by whatever mental techniques the Ordo had bequeathed upon him. If he was accompanied by anyone else they failed to register in her psychic senses. There was nothing else she could do but comply.

She skittered the gun away into the shadows with one foot, and turned slowly to face her treacherous master.

He had stepped from the frescoed doorway linking the governor's throne room to the gallery, and stood flanked by six gun servitors: praetorian monstrosities with bodies moulded in polished bronze, bulging with stylised representations of human musculature, faceless heads swarming with sensory ganglia. In each iron-fused hand a weapon was hefted, and Mita found herself staring into the barrels of bolters, meltaguns and flamers alike. It was an impressive show of strength, but — psychically speaking — utterly blank.

'All this for me?' she mumbled, dazed.

'Ha, no.' Kaustus fiddled with a tusk, scowling. 'We were expecting someone taller. It seems he was delayed. I believe we have you to thank for that.'

'W-what do y... oh...'

And piece by piece, like a jigsaw completing itself, the fragments of enigma came together.

The Night Lord would have ascended in the elevator himself had he not been attacked in the Macharius Gateroom. He would be standing here instead of her, gazing down upon the prize he had spent so long seeking, had it not been for her actions.

Kaustus and his gunmachines had not been waiting for her. They'd been waiting for the Night Lord.

They'd always been waiting for him.

Kaustus had kept the Night Lord alive, despite all of her efforts. He'd left a trail of rumours and information, like blood in the water — from Glacier Rat to Slake to governor — to be followed piece by piece, a torturous progression of clues and hints for the beast to pursue. It would lead him here. To this place. To this gallery.

To this stolen item.

'You're waiting for him to open it for you, aren't you?' she whispered, dizzied by the scale of the scheme, the complexity of the lie in which she'd become embroiled. 'You stole it from him, but... but you couldn't open it. You had to wait for him. You had to keep him alive. You had to make him think he was gaining ground, coming for you, all by himself. You wanted him to walk into a trap.'

'Very good,' Kaustus smirked. 'And all without even reading my mind.' He held up his hands as if waving, displaying the thick blood that coated them. 'Which is why the governor couldn't join us, by the way. I couldn't have you performing any... mischief... on the little maggot's brain, could I?'

She peered through into the glassy bridge in which Kaustus had been waiting, and sure enough her eyes fells upon a small, crumpled shape, blood ebbing from its expensive robes. Kaustus shrugged. 'He was very understanding about the whole thing, come the end.'

Nausea boiled through Mita. Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed back on it with bitter tears in her eyes.

Such duplicity! Such convoluted manipulation!

'Why?' she snarled, lips trembling, face burning. 'Why do all this? You had the power to stop the beast! You had the means to kill it! What could be so important that you've allowed a... an abomination the freedom of the hive?'

For a second the inquisitor seemed uncertain. For a fraction of an instant his face clouded, his brows dipped, and his eyes roved from left to right — as if he were somehow unsure where he was. For an instant his emotions and thoughts uncoiled from his mind, and Mita tasted the childish bewilderment that was an oil-slick through their midst.

'I...' he whispered, lost.

And then his features hardened, the gimlet-glimmer returned to his gaze, and his jaw clenched with an unpleasant rasp. He waved the servitors forwards, and without vocal command two wrapped sinuous arms around her, ignoring her strangled protests and dragging her out of the endless gallery, onto the vertiginous bridge where Kaustus and they had been waiting. The inquisitor followed behind, closing the doors at his back.

'You want to know why?' he smiled, hand reaching inside his robes.

She nodded slowly, mind awash.

His hand reappeared, holding within its grasp a jewelled lasptisol, and he aimed it carefully at her head. She tensed herself, the world dropping away from her.

'That's a question you can enjoy from within the grave,' he hissed, leering.

And then—

The steel eagle, rising up from the base of the metal mountain, tilting its wing towards the highest peak and racing forwards, snapping with beak and claw, to retrieve what belonged to it.

A sudden flicker of premonition, a recalled burst from the furor arcanum she'd endured within the elevator.

'Oh... oh, no...' she muttered, forgetting the gun, forgetting the inquisitor's glaring eyes.

The Night Lord was coming.

Zso Sahaal

The shuttle struck the tower like the sky itself collapsing.

The cockpit crumpled like paper. Brass-edged dials exploded, cable-strewn consoles twisting as their mountings buckled behind them. Limbless servitors and vapid cogitators screamed with what scant vestiges of human surprise remained, ripped apart as conflicting forces crushed them beneath the machines they were created to control. Copper wires whiplashed through bulging spheres of broken glass, sparks infusing the air like miniature galaxies.

For all its smallness, for all its obvious frailty, the craft was built along the same predictable lines as so many other Imperial vessels: a tapered barge with a hammerhead rear and a beak-like prow. Its aquiline hull tore a crevice in the fabric of the hive peak, spewing flame and superheated fuel, burying itself like a dart into flesh.

The universe roared. Everything shook.

In the midsection, behind the flattened ruin of the bridge, Sahaal eased himself from a reinforced bench and checked himself over. Smoke was venting into the crumpled chamber and somewhere an alarm whooped endlessly, but he could find no serious damage to his person. As anticipated, the hardened prow had punched through the hive's armour like a bullet, compacting its forward segments and sparing its aft from damage. Even Chianni, strapped into place beside him, had suffered only scratches and bruises. She appeared to Sahaal unconscious: concussed, no doubt, by the violence of the collision.

The pilot was dead, there could be no doubt of that. What little remained solid of his body hung from between a pair of sealed bulkheads, driven together like the prongs of forceps, a fly beneath a swat. A thin patina of what had once been his flesh decorated the truncated bridge segments, and Sahaal was put in mind of the juice of a crushed fruit, trickling from sealed spaces.

Sahaal shrugged, untroubled by the man's death. He had served his purpose.

It had been Chianni's idea. With the Preafects otherwise engaged in tearing the Shadowkin territory apart, the starport that Sahaal had already invaded once proved deliriously simple to penetrate again. There were few pilgrims travelling now — the lockdown that had gripped the hive had seen to that — and he'd cut through the nominal security at the gateway like a beast possessed. Focused utterly upon the scheme Chianni had tentatively proposed, when the carnage was done he'd looked down to find himself made slick by the blood he'd spilled, a scattered ring of massacred Preafects and servitor bodies patterning the icy launchpad terracrete.

Focused rage. That was the key. Inglorious, he lost himself in carnage in the pursuit of his goal.

Only one shuttle had been ready to depart. They'd boarded it stealthily and followed the curses of its pilot to the cockpit, homing on his mutterings as he berated the indecipherable alarms squawking across the inter-port vox, confused by an inability to contact the orbiting trader he'd been commissioned to join.

'Like there's no warpshit thing up there...' he'd hissed to his servitor crew, even as Sahaal's claws pricked the skin of his neck.

He'd required little persuasion to play along. Chi-anni did the talking. Sahaal found himself too consumed by the burning urge to act to even articulate his words, sliding claws across the puny man's flesh to embellish every threat his condemnitor spouted, using her voice as the perfect counterpoint to his slicing art.

The knife had become a purer medium than mere language.

Let the edge of a blade be his stylus.

Let him cut and cut and cut forever.

Patience... his thoughts had counselled. You know who has it now. You know where it is.

Not long to wait...

They had risen through smoke and gloom, and then the battering flurries of ice that smothered the whole of the planet. Engines whining turbulence rattling at its flanks, the craft had seemed infinitely fragile, an insect at the mercy of a tempest. Sahaal had loomed in the comforting shadows of the bridge, watching the trembling pilot with unhelmeted eyes narrowed, suspicious for any double-cross. Even when Chianni wrenched the steering column from his quivering hands to tilt the vessel towards the broad slope of the tallest peak, the man didn't realise the nature of the journey he'd been forced to undertake.

'There,' she announced with a nod, pointing towards a secondary tower that rose parallel to the central spire, connected at its apex by a narrow glass bridge. 'That's the palace treasury.'

'How do you know?' Sahaal hissed, fingers kneading together eagerly. There could be no mistakes. No oversights.

She'd seemed to bristle, as if annoyed that he still was unable to trust her. 'His collection's famous,' she said. 'Ask anyone in the hive.'

Sahaal had glanced at the pilot, cringing uselessly to one side. If the man had felt at all inclined to disagree he'd hidden it well, and thus convinced Sahaal had nodded his approval at the condemnitor. 'Do it,' he'd said.

Chianni had locked the steering column in position and pushed the pilot back into his seat. The revelation of what was to occur had stolen over the man in crippling increments, and even when the hivewall loomed like some steely god in the viewing port, even when the febrile light of the clouded sky was extinguished by the city's bulk, even when the impart was scant seconds away, still the pilot could not summon a scream.

Sahaal thought it a pity. Nothing soothed his adrenaline like a wail of terror.

He'd ridden out the impact without injury and now, as smoke belched from rained machines and light poured through countless rents in the vessel's shattered sides, he lifted himself to his feet and brandished his claws. He could feel it.

He could feel the Corona Nox, like a beacon lighting his senses.

Oh, my master... I can feel it! It is so close!

He remembered how it had been to awake upon the Umbrea Insidior, that rage-borne half-awareness, slaughtering thieves across the ruined vessel's shanks like a wolf, aware only that it had been taken. For aeons he had sat dormant at the heart of the warp, imprisoned within the cage that the hated eldar had constructed around him, and in all that time the presence of the Corona had given him strength. He had come to feel it as if it were a part of him, a strange connection that seared his psyche and drew a cord between his soul and the item itself. Weeks ago, when it was stolen, he had awoken in the certain knowledge that it was gone, as if a sound that he had heard his whole life — but never noticed — had suddenly fallen silent.

And now... ?

In another ruined vessel, clambering once more through crippled decks, hungry once more for bloodshed and justice, now he could feel it again.

Now he was close.

He left Chianni where she lay — forgotten, beneath his attention — and raced to retrieve it.

At the craft's outer shell a strange process of segueing had occurred: the chasm-wound inflicted upon the hive seeming to knot with the craft that had caused it. In all directions torn sheet metal was bent and buckled, molten steel glistened and solidified in weird formations, cables and hiveducts twisted around hull sensoria like the tentacles of anemones, and everywhere the first gatherings of snow, probing hungrily at the city's injury, was scattered across the devastation. Illuminators flickered and failed, or else burned brightly with whatever electrical surges the crash had precipitated.

Picking his stealthy way through smoky chambers, Sahaal found it hard to say where the shuttle ended and the hive began. He stepped from a torn bulkhead imaging the outer hull of the shuttle to be nearby, only to find himself confronted by soot-charred tapestries and gold leaf pillars. As if infected somehow by a blemish of crudity, the palace gathered its splendour to itself and sulked, disgusted at the invasive entry. Sahaal scuttled across shattered flagstones and crumpled mosaics, following the pull of his heart, the strange magnetism of the Corona. The shuttle had buried itself across three levels of the tower, and at the head of the furrow it had ploughed into the structure Sahaal could stare into each separate room as if in cross-section, amused at the contrast between mangled entry-wound and untouched opulence.

There was little doubt where he would find his prize. The uppermost of the three exposed interiors was a storage chamber, gloomily lit and utterly ruined. The charred bodies of dormant servitors leaned from recharge booths and gagged on singed tongues, dead eyes lolling in sockets. The second level was a private chamber: gaudily decorated and flamboyantly furnished. A regal bed occupied the centre of the devastated zone, pairs of winged cherubim-drones clinging to its canopy like bats. Evidently a spout of fuel had doused the suite's interior, and now every exquisite tapestry was a blackened sheet, every gold-leaf insignia was a puddle of shimmering slag, every luxurious carpet smouldered like a burning forest.

But the third level, the endless gallery of tedious exhibits and pompous wealth, clipped by the craft's entry — the corner of its ceiling neatly dissected to allow him entry — that was a different affair. From amongst its endless parades of useless treasures the Corona whispered to him, reached out to caress his spirit, promising him all that he had ever dreamed. He slipped into the room's cavernous belly like a lizard: scuttling along a wall, pausing every few moments with reptile precision to cock his head, listening, watching.

Was he disappointed, he reflected, that the thief was not present? Had he hoped, in his secret heart — still burning with the blue-tinged flame of unfocused insult — to catch the culprit red-handed? Had he yearned to bathe in the bastard's blood?

No... No, he could see inside himself now. The mutterings of Chaos were gone. He was stronger than that. Whatever damage his pride had suffered was irrelevant.

The Corona was his.

He found it at the room's centre, placed on a plinth like some common librium artefact, and his twin hearts felt as if they might burst with joy.

The package was unopened. The skeletal emblem of his Legion — the winged skull — remained sealed, its cryptic secrets unexposed. He reached out trembling hands and, as if fearing the prize might be a dream ~ a cruel hologram trick — settled them upon the box's shell, testing its solidity.

He sighed, awash with relief. He twisted the fresco pattern here and here, then placed fingers at the skull's eyes and tapped twice.

'Ultio,' he said, eyes closed. 'Ultio et timor.'

Vengeance and fear.

Something inside the package chattered. A mechanical clatter shuddered through it, pins meshing together like a shark's teeth, vocal recognition engines awaking, and with the slowness that came from a hundred centuries' inertia tiny diaphragms opened within the skull's eyes, flooding them with red light.

The seal broke.

The box opened.

And Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster, heir to the throne of the Night Lords Legion — the chosen of Konrad Curze — lifted from its dust-dry innards the Corona Nox.

It was a crown, of sorts. A black circlet of mercurial metal, polished and undecorated, burning with an eerie non-light. To either side of its tapered ring there rose tall horns, needle-straight and jagged-edged, like twin sabre-blades dipped in oil.

But most stunning of all, beyond the simple elegance and curious captivation of the thing, set into the crown's frontispiece and suspended upon the wearer's forehead on a platinum mounting, stood a jewel.

A perfect teardrop of ruby-red, its face was uncut by diamond facets or inelegant designs. Smooth and unblemished, it had about it the look of an organic creation, as if not cut from the earth but grown, planted and fostered to glorious life in some secret crystal garden. And despite the dismal lighting of the gallery, despite the shadow cast by Sahaal's colossal body, it burned. It burned with an inner light. It burned with a radiance that was unconfined by sight alone, that broke the boundaries of luminosity, that flooded out the visual spectrum and dazzled Sahaal without even passing his eyes.

There was something other than the merely material about the jewel, and it bathed Sahaal in such peace, in such confidence and assurance, that the shivering of his limbs ceased, the perpetual furrow of his brow smoothed away, and he blinked a tear of serenity from his midnight eyes.

'Ave Dominus Nox,' he whispered, fingers caressing the circlet edge, lifting the horned crown above him, pulling it down towards his own skull.

He was divorced from reality, in that timeless instant. In a dream world of endless calm, the crown descended towards its rightful owner.

He would lead his brothers in their master's name. He would tear from the skies of Terra itself, shrieking with an eagle's cry. He would repay the insult. He would cut the Emperor's shrivelled throat, and paint the withered god's blood across the walls of his defiled palace.

He would have his revenge upon the Traitor Father.

He would be the Lord of the Night.

And then a shot rang out in the gloom, and the fantasy collapsed beneath the weight of dismal reality, and he glanced down from the perfect ''O'' of black metal and into the hungry barrels of weapons.

Six gun servitors. Bolters. Meltas. Flamers.

At their centre, a man. From his slack lips arose tall tusks, and his eyes glimmered with secret humour. Power-armoured and massive, but moving with the stultified discomfort of one without augmentation.

No Space Marine, this, merely a copy. An impostor. The cruciform ''I'' at his collar was all that Sahaal needed to see.

'Inquisitor,' he spat.

'The name's Kaustus,' the man grinned, mocking. 'At your service.'

The men held a small gun against the head of a smaller figure, a raggedy shape with unkempt hair and frightened eyes, whose struggles to escape the tusked fool halted the instant her stare met Sahaal's. He recognised her. Twice before he had met her, and both times she had sought his destruction.

The witch.

Confusion gripped him, momentarily. The psyker-bitch was his enemy — he had no doubt of that. Why then was she the captive of the Inquisition? Was there more than one faction at play within this elaborate game?

Is the enemy of my enemy not my friend?

The uncertainty did not last. Basking in the silent assurances offered by the Corona, it was difficult to feel anything but utter poise, utter confidence, utter superiority.

'Put the artefact down,' the inquisitor said, gripping the witch around the neck with his spare arm and turning the pistol towards Sahaal. 'Put it down and step away.'

It was, of course, a laughable suggestion. Sahaal sneered and bunched his fists, readying himself for anything. 'Never,' he snarled.

The inquisitor shrugged, infuriatingly calm. 'As you wish.'

The servitors moved with frightening speed.

Four sprinted clear of the pack, racing along the room's perimeter — bronze blurs with pistoning legs and eerily static arms, optic-pucked faces twisting to regard Sahaal even as they left him behind. Their very movements spoke volumes of their efficiency and cost: smooth and regulated, flexing with a controlled gait so unlike the staggering lurches of lesser models. Not mere cadaver-machines, these, but prime human bodies, sealed within metal sleeves, blessed with empty vapidity and unimaginable strength. Sahaal assumed they were working to surround him, rushing along the outer edges of the cavern in a flanking manoeuvre. It wasn't a prospect he could afford to dwell upon: the two remaining attackers dropped into firing stances, stabilising limbs hinging from the rear of their knees, weapons auto-racking at mechanical command.

They opened fire, and the world became noise and light.

They were fast, these toy soldiers. Quick to find their range and quicker to draw a bead.

But Sahaal was faster.

The hunter would not tolerate being hunted.

He swept into the air with a whoop, jump pack flaring, dismissing the tumult of detonating bolter shells and pearlescent tongues of flamerfire behind him. He must be focused.

They were fast and strong and accurate, but for all that they were as efficient only as the weapons they used against him, just as his measure could be taken by the tools of his own retaliation. He could not use fear against machines.

He could use blades.

He was the Talonmaster, warp take them! He was the first of the Raptors!

These zombie warriors didn't know the meaning of fast!

A melta stream glittered across his shoulder, too slow to follow the graceful plunge he initiated. At his back the governor's exhibition chamber became a warzone, exhibits blown apart, melta streams turning ablative walls to mercurial slag. Ice and snow flurried in, confusing the senses of the motion-detecting security drones, and within seconds the entire chamber was alive with lasfire and muzzleflash, weapons throbbing at the air like percussion.

Sahaal twisted and barrel-rolled, slipping with avian grace through palls of smog and ice. He dropped to his feet behind the pair of servitors and diced the first with a casual swipe of his claws, relishing the collapse of its unarmoured skull and the spume of long-dead blood that followed. The second rotated at its waist like a spinning top, legs remaining inert, but even as its flamer belched a jet of incandescence Sahaal was slipping to the floor, rising inside its guard like a wraith, lifting it up with his claws deep inside its chest. Its own weight sliced it in two, and its weapons clattered, dead, to the floor.

For an instant Sahaal considered grabbing one, to draw the bolter at his waist, but quickly rejected the notion. With one hand he must protect the Corona, to sacrifice the blades of the other in favour of something so base as a projectile weapon was unthinkable.

The reverie did not last long. Safely ensconced within their distant positions, the four remaining servitors seized the opportunity to open fire, leaning from cover behind priceless tomes and antediluvian fossils, walls of lead and fire and sound pounding and intercepting. Sahaal bunched his legs and pounced onwards, his prize clutched close to his chest.

It was clear to Sahaal that he had walked into a trap: the slow realisation that the inquisitor had been controlling his movements from afar, awaiting the moment that the Corona's casket was opened before making his play, was stealing over him by degrees. If that was true — a horrific prospect! — then surely the tusked fiend wouldn't risk harming the prize whose capture he had spent so long engineering? Surely that would be an illogical step?

Apparently logic was not a concept with which the inquisitor was familiar.

Whatever simple parameters the servitors were obeying, protecting the Corona from harm was not among them. Bolterfire raked across Sahaal's airborne body, chipping lumps of ceramite from his shouldguards and destabilising his bounding strides. Sparks scrawled vicious patterns across his chest and legs, toppling him out of control and sending him crashing to the ground, unique masterpieces and specimen jars shattering around him. The glutinous wash of a flamer rippled past him like a river, sending him rolling from its path with smoke lifting from singed plates. Even finding cover was a near impossibility: every priceless gewgaw that he ducked behind was attended by its own immobile servitor drone, hanging from the ceiling in mute vigilance, and the slash-stabs of lasfire from above had already punctured his armour along its joints, slicing his face in jagged streaks. He kept moving, strafing as he went, hopping into the air wherever he felt it possible, only to be forced back to the ground by a deadly crossfire from his assailants.

Beneath other circumstances, his storming senses reassured him, the servitors' inflexibility would be their downfall. For all their firepower, for all their strength and speed, they were little more than clockwork toys: obeying simple directives without recourse (or opportunity) to innovate. Their simplicity made them predictable, and had he been willing to wade through their fire to draw close, Sahaal's victory would be assured. But he couldn't risk harming the Corona, and inflexible or not their logic engines had directed them into a horribly efficient pattern: a four-way killing zone that left him with no path of concealment, no hope of escape.

He was reduced to a hunted beast, scurrying to flee from its pursuers, knowing already that they closed upon it from all sides. A melta-burn dissolved the elephantine skull he'd ducked beneath — a steaming lance of superheated air that ripped a hole in his shoulder-guard and ate at the flesh beneath, vaporising muscle and blood. He cried out and dragged himself clear, shutting the pain from his focus and drawing his arm back to its furthest stretch, preventing tightness when his superhuman blood sealed the wound.

Superhuman or not, he was being taken apart.

And then, like a ghost picking its way between realities, stumbling through smoke and fire, there came the solution. Small, vulnerable, tattered and torn, but moving ever onwards, reaching out towards him.

Chianni.

She had left the ruined shuttle to find him.

The servitors' simple minds did not even acknowledge her as a threat. Beyond their commands, without mention in the aggressive engines that drove their desiccated brains, they ignored her as if she was hardly there at all.

Sahaal's instincts rebelled at the idea that seized him, so tainted by a lifetime of suspicion and paranoia that the very notion of trusting someone repelled him. But he persisted, silencing his internal objections with a stubborn snarl.

There was no other way.

In Chianni he had found a slave that he could trust. An acolyte who had never deserted him. A priestess so mindlessly obedient that she had braved fear and fire, limping through a warzone, just to be by her lord's side.

He had gone to pains to make her complicit to his secrets. Let her repay the sentiment now.

With her, the Corona Nox would be safe, at least until he had slaughtered these upstart machines and regained his freedom.

'M-my lord?' she warbled, face pale, as he roared from the fragments of his cover through smoke and gunfire, bolter shells rippling the ground at his heels, and thrust the crown deep into her grasp, barely slowing.

'Run!' he roared. 'Get clear, damn you! Let no one take it from you! Run!'

And then she was behind him and he found himself unburdened, and with a shriek of such terrible joy that the hairs at the nape of his neck shivered and stood on end, he brandished his second claws and turned in the air.

He would stride through all the bolterfire in the galaxy, now. He would swim an ocean of flames. He would streak through melta-stream skies to reach the scum that had dared to face him, and when it was over he would put out the inquisitor's eyes one by one, and wear them as trophies upon his belt.

Unburdened by his master's sacred legacy, he could do anything! He could—

The servitors' guns fell silent. The world seemed to draw breath. Sahaal dropped to the floor and hissed, wafting smoke and flickering tongues of fire obscuring his senses. The wound on his shoulder had sealed itself fully, but beneath layers of conditioning and focus he could feel the pain of it shrouding his senses, drawing his mind into the dangerous eddies of shock. He shook his head to clear the numbness, eyes roving into the corners of the smog-bound chamber.

The servitors were gone, sprinting back towards their inquisitor-master as if their task were complete, optics twitching to follow him as they vanished into the pall. A cold suspicion gripped him, like the ice even now sending frozen fingers throughout the gallery chamber, and he turned in his place with it gnawing at his belly. Chianni.

She should be running. She should be clear of the room, sprinting the Corona to safety.

She was not.

Panic gripped him, cold beads of sweat prickled at the skin of his pale temples. The condemnitor stood exactly where he had left her, the obsidian crown clutched in her pale hands, unblinking eyes fixed upon him through the shifting smoke.

'Run!' he roared, twin hearts throbbing in his ears. 'Run!'

Time slowed.

The inquisitor stepped from the smoke and placed a fond hand on Chianni's shoulder, smiling. Sahaal's mind did a backflip.

'Thank you, dissimulus,' the inquisitor said, lifting the Corona Nox from her unresisting grasp. 'That will be all.'

She nodded, eyes vacant. 'Very good, my lord.' Her voice changed even as she spoke, deepening to a throaty bass, and before Sahaal's horrified eyes her skin writhed like a clenching muscle, swarming across bone and cartilage like molten rubber, dipping away in cheeks and eye sockets: changing.

When she spoke next her voice was that of a man, matching the unremarkable — but clearly male — features of her... his... its face. 'And my ration, my lord?'

Inquisitor Kaustus nodded, meeting Sahaal's eyes with a smug wink. He dipped a hand into the folds of his robes and produced a leather case, passing it to the newly transformed male at his side.

'Polymorphine,' he explained, smirking. 'You just can't trust an addict, eh, Night Lord?'

Sahaal's world fell away beneath his feet.

The battle in the Steel Forest. She'd been wounded — no... no, she'd died. She had died and this thing, this morphic obscenity, had staggered down into the rust-mud caverns to take her place.

Another betrayal. Another reason never to trust a soul.

He had nothing. He could rely upon no one.

All that was left to him was the rage. His master's genetic gift: focused by pain and insanity.

The dissimulus hurried from the room with its poly-morphine fix clutched to its breast, and in its wake Sahaal pointed a claw at Kaustus's heart, eyes smouldering with the hatred of centuries.

'You die,' he said, and he kicked off from the ground, jump pack screaming at his back. And then everything changed.

Even as the distance between him and his target fell away, even as he imagined the inquisitor's smug face torn apart beneath his claws, even as the prize that had been snatched and regained and snatched again was within his grasp, light distorted the world.

The air opened up. Perspective struggled to translate what human eyes could never hope to comprehend, dimensions writhing upon each other, and in a rush of stale air and the bitter tang of ozone a blazing doorway crept open into reality.

Still Sahaal bounded onwards, claws outstretched, the ground blurring beneath him.

Figures danced from the swirling portal. Lithe forms of fluted limb and gaudy colour, tall helms and plumes of hair blurring at the speed of thought. And amongst them there came a robed prince, a runic demigod, antlers ablaze with electric fire, staff of office humming with uncontainable power.

Sahaal recognised him from his dreams.

The warlock...

The staff flared across every spectrum, crackling gaussfire enveloped him, psychic horror guzzled him whole, and as he fell to the floor with blood in his eyes, Sahaal's final thought was: They have come to finish what they started one hundred centuries before.

They have come to take what they could not take then.

Xenogen scum!

The eldar have come for the Corona Nox!

And as Inquisitor Kaustus turned to their shimmering leader with an ebullient bow, holding the crown like some royal offering, needles of doubt and horror punctured Sahaal's brain, seizing his muscles and crippling his rage.

He crashed to the ground insensible, and knew no more.

Mita Ashyn

It was all happening too fast.

The inquisitor's admission of guilt, the arrival of the Night Lord, the unveiling of the Corona Nox. Held at the point of a gun by her former master, pushed and shoved like some dismal piece of meat, Mita had seen it all.

Something had changed about the nightmare Marine. The sight of him no longer filled her with unspeakable dread, his mere presence no longer wrapped cords of corruption and filth around her heart. No longer was he protected by chittering underlings, invisible and malevolent. No longer did the warpspawn of the Dark Gods gather around his soul like flies around a light: a living armour that she could never hope to penetrate.

Had he, she wondered, somehow escaped the predations of Chaos? Had he somehow cleansed himself of the taint that had threatened to smother him?

Was he now, like her, simply another pawn in this obscene game of manipulation and conquest?

Whatever the reason for his abrupt purification, its effect was pronounced: where previously her psychic senses could no more approach and delve into his spirit than she could swallow hot coals, now she had found herself free to explore. Now she could see his true self.

It was almost too much for her to bear.

It was a thing of such sadness, such loneliness, such suspicion and guilt and paranoia, that it almost tore her heart apart.

Pain, rage, ambition, sorrow. Distrust. Isolation. Bitterness.

His mind was like a reflection of hers, magnified a billion times.

She'd felt his brief victory — a surge of joy — at reclaiming the Corona. She'd spiralled with him into despair as the victory crumbled. She'd shared his pain as the servitors tore him to shreds, piece by piece, and she'd risen like a float upon the crest of his triumph as he entrusted the crown to his aide...

The aide, whose mind she had recognised. A swirling psyche without centre, without certainty or solidity of ego. She had seen that mind once before.

The unveiling of the dissimulns had come as no surprise to Mita, although she shared the Night Lord's horror from within his coiling spirit.

And then she shared his revulsion and his awe at what had followed.

The eldar came in a storm of warp-forces so focused, so potent, that Mita slipped to her knees and bled from her ears. Kaustus had left her beneath the guard of his four gun servitors — toys, no doubt, of the murdered governor — and even as she stumbled at the astral crescendo dizzying her senses their guns remained focused intractably upon her head. She didn't care. They were a side-show, an insignificant concern when placed beside what was now unveiling across the smoke and devastation of the room.

Kaustus, you bastard. You made a deal with the devil...

As part of the Ordo Xenos, Mita knew more than most of the alien scourge that was the eldar. Ancient and technologically superior, that their bodies were ostensibly similar to humans' was the one aspect of their race that could be considered familiar. They thought differently. They moved differently. They lived lives of carefully partitioned vocation: monkish existences devoted utterly to a single pathway.

Humanity travelled in the warp like trees casting seeds arbitrarily into the wind, placing trust in providence, guided only by the most rudimentary of navigatory processes. To humanity the warp was an untameable ocean, in which only the foolhardy dared to swim.

The eldar had built roads across it.

They grew old at the speed of stars. They fought like ghosts. Where the teeming masses of the Imperium struggled with crude senses and ugly language, the eldar burned bright with thought: a level of astral awareness and psionic capability that reduced Mita's talents to those of a child. She was a beast compared to them: a primitive fool, barely able to remember to breathe.

She was a baby in the presence of demigods, and at the quiet rear of her mind where the awe at the aliens' arrival had not yet penetrated, where she did not share the pain and rage inculcating the Night Lord's thoughts, she wondered:

Is this how other humans think of me?

It this why they hate me so?

Privileged knowledge or not, the eldar were as great a mystery to Mita as they were to any other human. In her studies in the Librium Xenos on Safaur Inquis the testimony of countless inquisitors was the same: the eldar seemed to act without motive — random and abstract — playing out some ineffable game according to alien rules that only they comprehended. All that was known was this:

Their grasp upon the future, upon the vortex of chance and event that was borne on the warp like froth on a sickened ocean, was unrivalled.

Kaustus had known somehow that the Corona Nox would arrive on Equixus.

It had been foreseen...

He'd been in league with the xenos from the beginning...

There seemed to be eight of them, although it was difficult to say with any certainly, they moved like liquid light, capering and bounding, never still. She thought she could make out weapons clutched in their long limbs, flat-headed catapults like the fruits of an exotic tree. They slipped from their portal — an entrance, she guessed, to their famed ''webway'' of tunnels and paths that circumnavigated the warp itself — like a knot of frail decorations swept upon the wind: armour of blue and yellow laced by a billion engravings, a myriad of serpentine runes and glowing sigils. And at their head, burning Mita's psychic gaze like a phosphor lamp, their leader.

He dealt with the striking Night Lord with a single swipe of his staff, wyrd lights flaring between its glaive-pommel and the robed creature's antlered helm. Watching it all, probing the Night Lord's astral self at the moment of his defeat, she felt his collapse as though struck herself.

Somewhere, in another world, the eldar gathered around Inquisitor Kaustus. Somewhere, impossibly distant, the tusked man stretched out his hands towards the warlock, the Corona Nox held firm in his grasp. Somewhere the antlered xeno reached out to receive it.

Mita regarded it all as if it were a dream, spiralling away from her at the moment of awakening, and it was only as blackness closed in upon her that she came to understand what had happened.

She had been inside the Night Lord's mind when the eldar lashed out. The Traitor Marine had been knocked down, his senses overwhelmed, his certainties pulverised. He'd been crippled by the strength of the warlock's attack, and as he crashed to the floor and lay still, as his mind shut down and entered a troubled, enforced slumber—

—Mita's mind was dragged down with it.

She found herself immersed within a world unlike any she had seen before. Purple skies raged like bruises, tormented clouds swirling and gathering together — defying the logic of what little breeze there seemed to be. Faces leered from their gaseous topography: half-seen grotes-queries that Mita neither recognised nor cared to see fully.

The ground itself seemed little more solid: a porous sheet of sand and rock that, against all sense, felt spongy to the touch. A charge filled the air, a greasy static that clicked in the ends of her ragged hair and oppressed her skull, like a coming storm.

Nothing seemed real, here. Distant mountain peaks wavered like uncertain mirages, wobbling in their foothill roots, vanishing and reappearing at the whim of...

Who?

For a fearful instant Mita wondered if she had somehow travelled to a world of daemon world. She had heard of such places: confused realms where physics held little sway, where every aspect of every molecule was inseparable from the stuff of Chaos itself. Such worlds were the dreaded rumour of the Inquisition, and as Mita stumbled across fractured landscapes, negotiating ethereal gorges and sudden rivers that oozed from nowhere, the fear that she had somehow been transported to one lay heavy in her mind.

But, no... No, this was no Chaotic realm. The more she observed its howling skies and its weird tides of light and dark, the more she studied the scenes that shimmered in the surfaces of puddles and the images borne on the crest of rocks, the more she sent feelers from her own mind tasting at the sand itself, the more she came to realise where she was. She recognised its flavour.

As if to double check, she paused and stared at her hand, concentrating, altering her perceptions, working hard to focus her psychic self.

'Sword,' she said.

A bright sabre appeared in her palm. She nodded, unsurprised, and walked on, casting the blade away. It vanished before it landed.

She found the Night Lord, as she had known she would, at the peak of a plateau, ringed by a cauldron of rocky outcrops, set upon a cross of stone. Chains bound his arms to the rock, snaking between his ankles and his wrists, pinioning him like a butterfly upon a page. His armour and helm were gone. His claws had been taken from him.

For the first time, unconcealed by shadow or night, unmoving and unresisting, she saw him clearly. His skin was so pale as to be almost translucent, revealing along arms and legs every blue vein, every inner augmentation, every limpet-like crater where some ancient injury had marked his flesh. Across his shoulders and chest the skin was concealed, hidden behind an exterior layer of black plating that, in places, dipped beneath his flesh, intermingling with muscle cords and bony outcrops.

She had never seen so many scars in her life.

Most remarkable was his face. She had expected a countenance of malevolence. Of unrestrained and unrepentant evil. She had expected snarls and burning embers for eyes, a daemonic visage that brandished its corruption openly, like a festering wound.

Instead she found herself meeting the gaze of a troubled child. Oh, his face was that of a man — sallow and gaunt, perhaps, twisted by too many years of frowns and rages — but his eyes were an infant's. Impossibly old, and yet so full of bewilderment. They were the eyes of a youth that had never been allowed to grow old, that had been plucked from its humanity at an early age and never since allowed to return.

'Where is this?' the crucified man said, and if he retained any sense of trauma from the madness of the gallery room, or the rage that had gripped him at the moment the eldar warlock had attacked, he gave no sign of it. He seemed to Mita to be in shock, his voice monotone, his eyes unblinking.

He was a pathetic thing, she thought, spread-eagled before her.

'This is your mind,' she replied, unable to bring herself to hate him. 'A dream, if you like. You're trapped here.'

'And you?'

She shrugged. 'I don't know. Perhaps I'm trapped too.'

He considered this. For all the surrealism of the situation, for all the horror of finding oneself crucified and stripped of their armour, he seemed remarkably calm.

'The eldar did this?' he asked.

'In a way, yes... They made you do it to yourself.'

He nodded as if unsurprised. 'Yes. Yes, they've done it before. Though not to my mind.'

Mita frowned. 'Oh?'

A distant look stole the Night Lord's gaze. 'At the start,' he said. 'The assassin killed my master. She took the prize, s-so I followed. You see? I took it back from her, but the eldar came.'

'The prize? You mean the Corona Nox?'

'The Corona, yes... Yes, they tried to steal it, but I prevailed. I would not let them have it, witch, you understand? So they tricked me. They trapped me. My ship. All of us, deep in the warp.'

'What is the Corona Nox?' Mita asked, giving voice to the question that had tormented her so long.

For the first time since she entered this weird realm, his face creased in a frown, eyes dipping to meet hers. He looked as if her ignorance wounded him, deep within. 'You don't know?'

She shrugged. 'It... it looked like a crown!'

'Ha! Just a crown?' He shook his head, black eyes flashing. 'No, little witch, it's more than that. Fashioned by the Night Haunter himself, forged from the adamantium core of Nostramo, his birthworld. He wore it through all his life, and when he would have screamed with insanity and terror, it calmed him. When he would have listened to the whispers of the warp, it deafened him. When he burned with vengeance for the injuries his father wrought upon him, then it tasted his anger and stored it away. It's all that remains of my master, witch. Imbued with his divine essence, sealed with a perfect bloodstone. It is no mere crown. It is the captaincy of the Night Lords. He bequeathed it to me on the day he was murdered!'

Understanding came to Mita piece by piece, and with it came disbelief.

'But... but that's... Konrad Curze was killed millennia ago...'

His frown deepened. 'Ten millennia. One hundred centuries. I have been imprisoned a long time.'

And she knew as soon as she heard it that he spoke the truth. She sagged to her knees, astonished, overwhelmed by the ancientness of the creature before her.

He had been hating for aeons.

She knew she ought to destroy him, this atavistic relic of the Great Heresy. He was, after all, vulnerable before her. Naked, defenceless. Here, in this realm of psychic material, trapped within his own brain as if sealed inside-out, here she could crush him like a worm. In her mind's eye she imagined a weapon forming within her hand, and sure enough a cold weight sagged into existence, gathering solidity.

But his eyes...

So lonely. So wounded.

'Who are you?' he said, derailing her thoughts. 'Who do you serve?'

She swallowed and hid the gun behind her back, diverting her dangerous thoughts towards his question, relieved at the distraction. 'I am Mita Ashyn. Interrogator of the Divine Emperor's Holy Inquisition.'

'You serve this... this Kaustus? The one who has stolen my inheritance?'

'Yes. No... I did. Once. Not any more.'

'He rejected you, yes? Cast you aside.'

'It's not that simple, I—'

'It's always that simple.' He looked away. 'For the likes of us, at least.'

'What do you mean?'

'You know what I mean, little witch. Little mutant. Little abomination.'

She shook her head, forcing herself to calm, clearing her mind. 'You won't anger me, traitor,' she said.

The Night Lord tried to shrug, chains tightening across shoulders and arms, and returned his eyes to her face. 'I don't seek your anger,' he said, voice calm. 'Only your understanding. I ask you again: who do you serve?'

'I told you. I serve the Imperium.'

'But they hate you.'

'The Emperor does not! Ave Imperator! The Emperor loves all who give him praise!'

'Ha. You believe that, do you?'

The words formed in her head as if automatic: of course she believed it! Of course the Emperor loved her! And yet even in the confines of her mind, unspoken aloud, such dogma sounded empty, thoughtless, the recitals of a simpleton who knew no better.

Frustrated, angered by her inner turmoil, she raised the gun and aimed at the Night Lord's heart.

'I don't have to listen to you, traitor,' she said.

The quaver in her voice was impossible to conceal.

And oh, oh warpspit and piss, she did need to listen to it. She did need to hear what the beast had to say.

Why? Why did she feel so obliged?

A self-appointed test of her faith, perhaps?

Or perhaps just the comfort of knowing she was not alone in feeling such doubts...

The crucified beast gave no sign of fear at the gun's wavering attention.

'So,' he nodded, brows arching, 'you have the love of one being, out of countless billions? And that is enough?'

'More than enough! You'd understand if you hadn't turned from His light.'

He smiled, genuine warmth appearing on frozen features. 'And can there be an Emperor, without an Empire?'

'No, but—'

'No. They are intertwined. One billion billion souls despise you. A single soul — so you say — loves you. You don't think this a bitter ratio?'

'Without the Emperor's love there is nothing. Vacuus Imperator diligo illic est nusquam.'

She was reduced to parroting lessons of her youth, and the Night Lord's slow smile told her that he knew it.

'I used to think the same,' he said, as if conceding a generous point. Then: 'Once.'

She racked the gun meaningfully, trying to find a reserve of conviction in her voice.

'Spare me your attempts at corruption. My faith is stronger than steel!'

He leaned down from his tall perch, eyes brimming with earnest curiosity. 'Why do you fight me,' he asked, 'when we are the same?'

'I'm nothing like you!'

A petulant rage gripped her then, the last vestiges of her tattered pride spreading wings of outrage at the very suggestion of her likeness to that... that devil... and before she could stop herself she'd squeezed the trigger of the apparated weapon.

The shot struck the crucified figure in his side, tearing a strange slash of flesh clear, to boil off into the sky, dissolving as it went, and in this curious inner-realm what flowed from the rent was not blood, but light.

He gave no sign of pain.

'Of course you are,' he hissed, and any trace of shock was gone now, any sense of childish bewilderment was lost. Now his eyes glimmered with guile. 'You are the unclean filth that serves in His name. You are the hated one. They fear you, and they loathe you, but still they use you...'

'No, no...'

'Yes. They use you up until you cease to be useful, you understand? And what then, little witch? You think they will thank you?'

'It's... you're wrong... it's not like that...'

'The only difference between us, girl, is that where you still wear your yoke of slavery, my master broke me free!'

Mita almost roared, sudden venom choking her mind, clearing the clouds of doubt that the Night Lord had sowed. 'Free?' she snarled. 'You got your freedom by turning to Chaos! You got your salvation from Heresy, warp take you! That's not freedom — that's insanity!'

Such calmness in his face. Such ancient sadness.

'You're wrong, child. We were never slaves to the Dark Powers. We fought beneath a banner of hate, not of corruption.'

'Hate? What did you have to hate? You fell from grace by choice, traitor, you were not pushed!'

For the first time real, honest emotion ignited behind his eyes. This was not a part of some elaborate game of words, she understood suddenly. This sentiment boiled from his guts and infected the air before him like a cloud of locusts, as heavy with conviction as it was with contempt.

'Hate for the accursed Emperor. Hate for your withered god.'

'I'll kill you! Speak one more word of this filth and I'll—'

'You ask what I hate? I hate a creature that speaks of pride and honour, that fosters the love of his sons, that smiles and scrapes at every obedient act, and then turns like a diseased dog and stabs his own child in the spine!'

'Shut up! Shut up, damn you!'

'I hate a being so sick, so certain of his own brilliance, so twisted by the call of glory, that he repays the greatest sacrifice of all with betrayal''

Mita seized at the flapping cords of the Night Lord's voice, struggling to pull herself free of the confusion gripping her.

'Sacrifice? Your master sacrificed nothing but his soul!'

The Night Lord's eyes bored into her.

'He sacrificed his humanity, child.'

And suddenly his voice was so melancholic, so deep and so calm, so bloated by sadness, that Mita found all her rage dissolved. The gun faltered in her grip and she lowered it, tears in her eyes.

'W-what?'

'He became a monster. He formed us, his Night Lords, in his own image: to spread terror and hate, to forge obedience through fear. He rescinded whatever purity he had, he cast off the humanity that was never intended for him... he risked insanity and damnation, and all to bring order to his father's Imperium.'

'He sacrificed his soul to the dark, and—'

'You aren't listening. You weren't there. I tell you, little witch: he sacrificed his soul at the Emperor's behest. He became the tame monster the Imperium needed. And how was he repaid? He was reined in. He was humiliated before his brothers. And then? The assassin's kiss.'

'He went too far! The histories do not lie! The excesses of the Night Lords are famed thr—'

'Excesses? We obeyed every order! We did what was asked of us! Listen to me, child! The "excesses" of the Night Haunter were sanctioned.'

'No...' her mind rebelled at the suggestion, lights flashing before her eyes. 'No, no, no... the Emperor would never countenance in—'

'He needed order, where only savagery could bring it. He sent in the Night Lords, and we gave him the order he yearned. And then he made us his scapegoats. He cried with false outrage, and the Imperium cried with him!'

'You're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong...'

'My master craved nothing but pride from his father. And all that he ever received was scorn. Little wonder he threw-in his lot with the Heretic rabble. Little wonder he marched to war beside them, sensing that they might weaken his father's grip. He was wrong!'

'...no no no no no...'

'Look at me, child. Look at me.'

Mita's head snapped up at the command, the empty mumblings falling away from her mouth. It was all too much to take, too much to absorb. Too much for a single mind to contain.

'My master was killed by an assassin. You know this, yes?'

She dredged details from long-gone lessons, struggling to recall histories that had seemed so unreal, so mired in the soup of myth.

'Y-yes... yes, she was sent to kill the fiend w-when the Heresy was over... The other Legions fled in... in disarray. Not the Night Lords. The High Lords of Terra, they... they thought if Curze was slain the Legion would dissolve...'

'Half truths. Half truths and lies!'

'I... I don't understand...'

'Do you know what the Night Haunter's final words to me were? Do you know what he said, as he seated himself and awaited the assassin?'

'N-n—'

'He said "See how the mighty are fallen."'

'W-why?'

'Because he had finally realised what nobody else had ever seen. That his father, his glorious Emperor, his Divine Creator, was just as vicious, just as terrible, just as merciless, as the Night Lords themselves. See how the mighty are fallen. See how divinity lowers itself to dispose of the monster it created!'

One final pulse of rebellion — alone and drowning in a sea of doubt — struggled to be heard in Mita's heart. 'L-lowers itself? By sending an assassin? After all that Konrad Curze had done? After the horrors of the Heresy? What else could the Emperor have done?'

For an instant the doubt seemed to retract. For an instant she felt she'd somehow scored a point, landed a blow.

The Night Lord remained resolutely unphased.

'What else? Nothing, to be sure — if, as you say, the killer was sent to avenge the terrors of the Horus Heresy.' He leaned forwards again, as far as his chains would allow, and his black eyes were pools of oil, sucking her soul down into their lightless depths. 'But, child, the assassin that killed the Night Haunter was not the first to seek him out.'

'W-what?'

'She was the last of a long line. A line that he had evaded at every stroke. A line whose endless attempts had exhausted him beyond his desire to retaliate. He had endured enough, do you understand? He was the hunter! He was the first, and the mightiest! He ruled the shadows! He reigned in the Dark! And then his father rescinded his sanction, and at the end of the Great Crusade, before the Heresy had even begun, he was brought before his lord and his brothers, humiliated, and held to account. Did he betray the Emperor's honour, then? Did he excuse his actions by telling the truth? By revealing to his kin their father's duplicity? No. Loyalty gripped him still, and he endured his father's derision with boundless humility.'

'I remember the tales...' Ancient texts swam through Mita's memories, the echoing spaces of dusty libraries vivid in her mind. 'He attacked his brother-primarch, Rogal Dorn. Where was his loyalty then, Night Lord?'

'Dorn's pomposity infuriated him. Was it not enough that he had toed his father's line, without the chiding of ignorant fools? Of course his temper snapped. Whose would not have?'

Mita opened her mouth, a suitably acidic reply prepared, but stalled herself. There was little acid left in her, and that which remained was certainly not directed at the melancholy creature suspended above.

'What happened?' she breathed.

'My master was confined to his quarters. He sought time to meditate, to confer amongst his honour guard.'

'And?'

'And the conference was interrupted by a black-suited devil. An assassin, child. You understand me? Sent to kill the Night Haunter. Sent to silence his outbursts. Who else could have sent him? Who else but your holy, righteous Emperor? And, witch, remember: this was long before Horus unveiled his treachery and turned from the light!

'That's... that's impossible...'

'The attack was foiled and my master flew into a rage. Finally he recognised the truth of his father's so-called "justice". He fled from the conference to gather his strength, to consider his movements, to fume at the insult of the attempted murder.

'It was the first of many. Before, during and after the Heresy. On Tsagualsa the Night Haunter stopped running. He built a palace that he knew would be his mausoleum, and he awaited the bitch that would take his head and steal his crown.

'So you see, child, the Haunter was not killed for his part in the Heresy. He was not killed to halt excesses or unsanctioned behaviour. No... no, he was kitted by a father who thought nothing of using him. Of twisting him into a hated monstrosity. Of demanding atrocities and horrors from him to scare his enemies into submission. Of taking from him everything that was pure, everything that was human, and then repaying the sacrifice with betrayal.

'So tell me this, little witch. Do you still believe you aren't being used? Do you still think you'll find some... some reward in death for your loyal service? Do you still think the hatred of the masses is irrelevant?

'Do you still think your Emperor loves you, girl?'

If she'd had a stomach, if this incorporeal realm had taken form and replaced her astral self with a physical body, she knew she would be vomiting blood at the disgust that gripped her. Disbelief battled certainty, the doubts spiraled and flocked to dominate her whole soul, and like an island sinking beneath the sea, like a ship that had been considered impregnable splintering apart and slipping down into cold and lightless depths, every shred of faith that Mita Ashyn had ever felt in the Emperor of mankind crumbled to dust.

She peered through her tears, raised the gun, and fired.

The chains that bound the Night Lord to his crucifix splintered and unravelled.

Zso Sahaal smiled a savage smile, and tore free of the prison inside his own mind, to reclaim what was his.