Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  'No,' she said, voice reassuring. 'Look. You see? Not a hair. Now calm!

  Cog nodded, accepting her words with child-like trust. He thrust his massive hands into the pockets of his robe and appeared to switch off, like a machine devoid of fuel.

  Mita turned to Orodai with a smirk.

  'Now,' she said, mollified. 'Perhaps you'd care to explain why you requested our help?'

  Orodai's eyes narrowed, twinkling.

  'Perhaps it would be best,' he said, and this time it was he who smirked, 'if you see for yourself.'

  Sergeant Varitens did not like mutants. Sergeant Varitens did not like psykers. Sergeant Varitens did not like disobedience or poverty or aristocracy or crime. He did not like the underhive, or the upper spire, or indeed the middle tiers.

  As far as Mita could tell, skating delicately across the surface of his mind, Sergeant Varitens did not appear to like much at all.

  (Sergeant Varitens did not like the Inquisition.)

  (Sergeant Varitens did not like women.)

  He and Mita were getting along just famously.

  'And what is this zone called?'

  'Lady, it's the warp's-arse underhive. We don't call it anything.'

  'But... these settlements... They must have names. What do the people call th—'

  'Look.' Varitens turned away from the Salamander's cab, sighing through the mike of his voxcaster. 'You want to stop and ask some of these filth what they call places, or where the local sights are, or which unfortunate bastard they just ate for dinner, you be my guest. Only don't come running to us when you look down and some godless mutie has his teeth in your leg.'

  They travelled in silence after that.

  The underhive had not been what Mita had expected. Trawling across its debris-flows and pitted causeways in the vindictors' Salamander, she found herself admiring the diversity, as if there were some secret beauty — some hidden order — lurking in the decay. Here, salvaged waste was gold. She found herself impressed by the colour and vivacity of the sights, as if life had recoiled from the squalor of its environment in a storm of clashing hues and decorations. Gaudy totems leaned from the shadows, bright graffiti announced a dozen changes of territory: each gang name crossed through by its latest conqueror. Underhivers variously raced for cover or came out to watch as the vindictors passed, shady characters with hands reaching for — but never openly wielding — whatever weaponry they hid within heavy cloaks. Here there was vibrancy in the dark — like the perfect scarlet of a deep sea tubeworm — and Mita struggled to despise it as profoundly as Sergeant Varitens so clearly did.

  Commander Orodai had assigned the sergeant as her tour-guide. She suspected he'd done so out of spite.

  'Tell me, sergeant,' she said, tiring of the silence, 'what manner of crime warrants the attention of the Emperor's glorious Inquisition? And down here in this most...' she parroted his emotionless voice, 'wretched of places, to boot?'

  Varitens regarded her for a moment, face concealed within the featureless orb of his visor.

  'Murder.'

  She blinked. 'We're investigating a murder?'

  'More than one. Five confirmed, probably more. We're taking you to the most recent discovery.'

  She shook her head. This assignment was growing more and more ridiculous by the instant.

  'Sergeant, it's my understanding that there are several hundred unexplained deaths every day. I imagine the figure is far higher in the underhive.'

  'You imagine right, lady.'

  'Then I'm afraid I don't understand. Why pay such close attention to this one?'

  The Salamander turned a corner and began to throttle down, and Mita became aware that her companions were preparing themselves to disembark, hefting mauls and autoguns professionally.

  Varitens pointed to a side tunnel, bored from a drift of mangled steel, and cocked his head.

  'Through there. You'll understand.'

  She had been a missionary, judging by what little of her clothing remained: a white robe with a hemp cord and a reliquary cache slung across her shoulder, embroidered with golden scriptures.

  She had come to this deep, dark place to spread the Emperor's light: as brave and selfless a being as one could ever hope to find. Her reward hardly seemed fair.

  The robe was shredded.

  The hemp cord creaked around her neck as she twisted above the ground.

  The reliquary lay shattered at her feet and the fragments of bone from within — the knuckles of some long-dead saint, perhaps — were ground to dust.

  'Emperor preserve us...' Mita hissed, stepping into the tunnel.

  The woman had not died here — that much was clear. Whatever violence had ended her life would certainly have spilled out across the murder scene: splattering walls and ceilings, pooling in thick puddles underfoot. This was less a scene of frenzy than an exhibit, a calling-card: neat, tidy, arranged.

  Her hands were gone. Her eyes had been put out. One foot hung by a single scrap of gristle, the blow that had parted it with such razor ease stopping short — deliberately — of amputation. Her viscera had been evacuated, hanging in translucent loops from the incision across her belly.

  And all across her, along every part of her worm-white body, lazy lines had been drawn: fluid ripples and scarlet whorls like the eddies of some mantra-wheel, spinning through holy water. At first Mita had mistaken the lines for red ink, scrawled across the body's skin. She was wrong. Each line was a cut, administered so delicately, so perfectly, that not a drop of blood had oozed clear to spoil the effect.

  This was not psychosis. This was art.

  And the artist had not shied from signing his work.

  Above the body, carved on the rocky surfaces of the borehole in a dipped, tidy hand, an engraved legend picked at the light of Mita's illuminator and drew her eye.

  Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus Ave Dominus Nox.

  She felt her gorge rise and turned away, forcing down bile in her throat. Sergeant Varitens, standing behind her with hands on hips, mistook her disgust for miscomprehension, nodding towards the text and clearing his throat.

  'It says—'

  'Thank you, sergeant,' she hissed, fighting for dignity as well as air. 'I'm quite capable of reading High Gothic.'

  She turned again towards the words, and they seemed to writhe in her eyes with a malevolent life of their own. For an instant she felt the stab of shocking, familiar pain — awash with ancient violence and ageless bitterness — and in that moment knew, without any doubt, from where the murderer had come.

  A great darkness, descending from the sky.

  Something had survived the descent of the Umbrea Insidior...

  'Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus,' she said out loud, forming each word clear and strong. 'So die the slaves of the False Emperor.'

  She could feel the vindictors staring at her, fidgeting. Even Cog watched her with troubled bemusement, struggling to understand the words.

  'Ave Dominus Nox. Hail to the Lord of the Night.'

  Zso Sahaal

  They were called the Glacier Rats.

  Their name was scrawled across parchment in the clipped hand of a servoscribe, belying the information's remarkableness in neat, tedious words, as if to render it as dull as any other record, sealed neatly with an uncrested daub of wax.

  They were called the Glacier Rats.

  Sahaal ran the name through his mind again and again, as if testing its mettle.

  Tasting it.

  The information broker Pahvulti had taken his leave from captivity. Walking free, ignoring the wounds patterning his necrotic skin, his swagger had been that of a victor, as if he'd somehow earned Sahaal's respect — or at the very least incurred his debt. He'd instructed Sahaal on where to find, and when, the information he'd promised, he'd dipped his head in sarcastic obeisance, then he'd smiled and waggled his brows.

  'This is a business of credit,' he'd said, cackling his peculiar laugh — 'het-het-het' — like a gear skipping a tooth,
'the question costs nothing. The answers are priceless...'

  Sahaal struggled with the urge to rip the man to shreds. Allowing him to simply walk away required every ounce of his concentrated pragmatism.

  The silent vow that he would have his revenge later was little consolation.

  'And yet I have paid nothing,' he'd hissed, oozing away into the shadows, struggling for some scrap of dignity.

  He was denied even that.

  'No... no, you haven't.' Pahvulti's one remaining eye fluttered, cycling through lenses like some perpetual wink. 'But then... the first one is always free.'

  And then he was gone.

  They were called the Glacier Rats.

  And yes, Pahvulti's answers had arrived where he had promised, lowered from some unknown tier down a disused elevator shaft, and Sahaal's cursory attempt to distinguish its source had failed. The information broker was far too sly to be so easily undone: wherever he had his base, he was free — for now — of retaliation.

  And yes, Sahaal had roared with hunger as he learned his enemy's name, flexed his claws, chanted their name again and again, but even so... even so...

  He was not accustomed to being indebted.

  The Glacier Rats. The thieves were named the Glacier Rats.

  They were a raider band, the document said. A clan of pirates unconcerned with the territorial squabbles of hivegangs, collecting then pawning such valuables as they purloined. Their founder had been a native of the ice-world Valhalla, joining then promptly deserting the Imperial Guard on his first tour of duty, sensing far greater opportunity for wealth in the Equixus hive. His name was Tuahli Teqo, and Sahaal's lips curled in a mirthless smile as he recalled the ugly legend sprawled on the side of the thieves' transport: a tag to honour his memory.

  Their current leader, in as much as Pahvulti's spies could keep up with the endlessly changing hierarchies of such clans, was named Nikhae, and was recognisable by the luminous spiral electoo on his forehead.

  'Nikhae.'

  Sahaal said it out loud, as if to ensure its reality, and waved a single claw through the air, dissecting the very sound of the thief s name.

  'Nikhae... Nikhae...'

  Yes. Yes, it was him. The false hunchback. The thief. The scum. The worm.

  He had taken it.

  At the rear of the sheaf of pages Pahvulti included a map. Marked in blotched ink, scrawled thick by Pahvulti's own hand, the centre of the page sported a bold, dark X.

  Sahaal checked the straps on the blocky package attached to his waist, its faint green glow shimmering across the blades at his fingertips.

  The Glacier Rats. They were called the Glacier Rats.

  Every last one of them would die.

  Herniatown had fallen from grace.

  At its edges the weight of the city had broken its own base and collapsed downwards, whole streets sagging into the abyss. Underhivers kept their distance from Herniatown's bowed arcades, naming it well: its wilted streets were a raw bulge of viscera that had squeezed through the muscle wall above, dipping into inky darkness. Once it had been a part of Cuspseal, but no longer. Nestled at the underhive's anarchic heart, it seemed an invasive probe of order, albeit warped incontrovertibly by its descent.

  Herniatown was where the Glacier Rats had made their home.

  Sahaal reconnoitred the zone with fanatical care: watching, exploring, never intervening. At three separate junctions — where long-deserted hivehabs met along broad concourses — he'd been forced to stay his arm, as Glacier Rat sentries ambled by.

  The time would come, he told himself.

  They wore long coats of grey and white, a stylised snowflake — dagger tipped and skull-centred — patterning each lapel. They carried lasguns with the exaggerated care of those who'd purchased their own weaponry, and Sahaal bridled to see such fireworks treated with such reverence. Stalking the shadows of their boundaries, he registered not a single, threat, and formulated their demise with predatory ease.

  Their band was well named, he decided. They were scum, untutored and untrained, as meaningless as their namesakes. Rats, yes. And he was the owl.

  He laid his plans with care, awaited his opportunity from the shadows, and then struck.

  A sentry — young eyes flitting across all the wrong shadows — was the first to die.

  Pacing at the town's northern entrance, the youth had never considered turning an eye upon the ventilation stacks halfway along the tunnel he was supposedly guarding, and despite his enormity Sahaal arose from the vent's crumpled innards with the silence and grace of a striking snake.

  The sentry's throat was cut before he registered another's presence, and in his brief instant of surprise — if indeed he felt anything at all — it must have seemed like the walls themselves had exuded claws. The body slumped, its knees folded, and Sahaal passed into the shadows long before its head struck the uneven floor with a wet slap.

  Herniatown opened around him like a sacrifice bearing its heart, inviting a blade between its ribs, and he obliged it with savage pleasure. He killed another three sentries in parallel streets, impatient for violence, dispatching each with the speed and silence of a wraith. He displayed their bodies artfully, faint lights catching at every wet cut, glistening in unbroken sluices of crimson, and paused in each case only to curse the soul of his victims as if keeping a tally of his revenge.

  'Warp take you...' he hissed, helm absorbing every sound. 'Warp eat you whole.'

  When finally the noises he had waited so long to hear arose he was poised within the inverted dome of what had once been a chapel. He clung to the ceiling with the damp-claws of his feet, dangling like a bat, and relished every echoing nuance of the Glacier Rats' alarm.

  It began with a single cry, flitting across the town like a dream, and then multiplied: first a handful of voices, then a score, each crying out in outrage and anger, demanding reinforcement.

  The first body had been found.

  Sahaal dropped onto and through the chapel's mosaic floor, gliding along the cracked seams of rock at its base, and hastened to Herniatown's opposite fringe. He used the crawlducts to travel in secret: swatting aside giant roaches and rats as he went, jump pack driving him along like a bullet down a barrel. At the town's southern entrance he hopped from a service hatch and quickly snickered thrumming claws through the meaty joints of the gatekeeper's legs. Scraps of the man's coat twisted aside, blossoming with redness, and his strangled grunt of astonishment warmed Sahaal to his core. The man toppled like a felled tree — more surprised than pained — and thrashed in a deluge of his own blood.

  This time Sahaal allowed his victim the privilege of screaming.

  Before he left the wailing cripple, arteries belching their vibrant load across tunnel walls, he prised open the man's clenched fist, pushed something hard and round into the cage of his fingers, and nodded his head.

  'Don't let go,' he said, tonguing the external address stud of his vox-caster.

  Then he was gone.

  The man's screams echoed like the howl of a gale, and already the cries of alarm from the north were becoming those of query, groups meeting at intersections, trading orders, pointing fingers, heading south to investigate this new tumult. Sahaal watched them rush about like insects from above, safe within a collapsed attic, and relished their panic. To them it must seem as though their territory were surrounded: imperilled from opposite directions, menaced by unseen attackers.

  'Fear and panic,' his master had once said, 'are but two sides of the same die!'

  The sentry's screams weakened and died shortly before the bobbing torches reached the south gate. Sahaal imagined him alone in the dark, clutching with increasingly feeble fingers at the grenade in his hand. Sooner or later his grip would falter and the bomb's priming trigger would release.

  The foremost group of guards entered the tunnel an instant before the grenade detonated.

  To Sahaal, perched like a gargoyle on high, gazing across the levelled towers of Herniatown, the explo
sion rose like a luminous bubble from the south, its flickering radiance rising across the entire realm. Shadows and highlights were scrawled across every surface, and when the brightness diminished a gout of oil-black smoke twisted, snake-like, above the southern gatehouse.

  'Preysight,' Sahaal whispered, and the bitter machine-spirit of his armour nictitated new lenses across his eyeslits, magnifying his view. Brought into sudden and sharp relief, the smoky pall broke apart where the dead and dying staggered, stumbling with faces blackened and limbs gone. There were far fewer than had entered.

  Sahaal watched their pitiable lives dwindle away with unashamed pleasure, then leapt from his alcove into the smoke-thick sky, heading downtown.

  As he travelled, he took a care to allow himself to be seen. Just brief glimpses flitting across smoky expanses, whooping as he ghosted past hurrying bands of frightened men. He did so at distant points — here in the east, there near the centre, leaping in great arcs across the town's concrete sky. In the ruins of a librium to the west he dropped through a shattered skylight and shrieked at the men below, then vanished, slashing at their faces as he went.

  At an intersection in the north he hopped from a crumbling wall onto the back of a transport, claws extending with a silken rasp. Two men were dead before he was even amongst them, heads spinning in the vehicle's wake, and their bodies tumbled beneath its tracks with damp, crackling retorts. The two remaining men opened fire. Sahaal activated the external line of his vox, amplified its volume to a dangerous level—

  —and laughed.

  Across all of Herniatown, in every honeycomb passageway of its crumbling boundaries, in every sheltered corner beneath its sunless sky, frightened men and women paused to listen, shivering in the dark.

  When finally Sahaal turned his attention upon the zone's tilted, sagging centre, any sense of order to the Glacier Rats' search had long since passed. A nightmare stalked the shadows of their domain, and as rumours of its appearance spread — midnight blue and clothed in lightning, long of limb and hunched of back, with eyes that glowed like rubies and claws like sabres — pandemonium reigned.