Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Zso Sahaal. A name.

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

  It was him. The Night Lord. Her enemy.

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

  Zso Sahaal. Night Lord.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The bastard. The cruel, warp-damned bastard!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Damn, damn, damn.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  PART THREE

  EXODUS

  Give me a child to teach with abacus and chalk and I shall give you a scholar. None but knowledge is his master.

  Give me a child to mould with scripture and incense, and I shall give you a priest. For him divinity alone is worthy.

  Give me a child to train with sword and shield, and I shall give you a warrior. His obedience is as fickle as his courage.

  But give me a child to form as I see fit, with dagger and blade, with the blood of strangers upon his hand, and I shall give you a slave who will ask not for food nor wealth nor glory, and remain at your side throughout all his life.

  Nothing forges loyalty like guilt and complicit bloodshed.

  Extract from Inquis Tiros

  Zso Sahaal

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

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

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

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

  How could he ever resume his vengeful crusade?

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

  What else, ultimately, could he do?

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

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

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

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

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

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