One spoke of a brothel, half collapsed, as its shrieking women were shot down one by one, soot and blood staining naked flesh, whilst they crawled to escape the flames.
One had watched an alliance between rival mobs — a friendship born in shared peril — only for both to fall to the last man and woman, sliced to slivers when vindictors bottled them in and killed and killed until none remained.
One saw a child throw a stone at the Preafect column, and watched the youth's village burn in retribution.
One saw the kutroaches pick the flesh clean from a rioting mob, gassed in their dozens when they turned on the armoured aggressors torching their homes.
One saw blood running as thick as a stream.
And one... one saw the Preafects regroup and confer, and finally — gore-drenched, exhausted, spent — turn back for the hive above.
The Shadowkin shuddered with relief at this last mercy, embracing one another and praising the God-Emperor, and when the final scout had hurried from the circle of firelight before Sahaal's throne he stepped down from his platform and addressed the crowd. The opportunity was too good to ignore.
'You see?' he told them, claws splayed. 'You see now? You see how the hive is corrupted? How the Preafects themselves are hungry for murder and blood? It is the taint, I tell you!' A shiver raced across the crowd, like a breeze rippling through withered trees. They reach out to crush the innocent, and we alone — we, the faithful, the chosen ones — are spared! We alone, in this place that I led you.
You see now? You see?
And oh, they praised him so hard that it all but cut through the bleakness, the loss, the aggression, and for one fraction of one moment Zso Sahaal remembered what it had been to be adored without fear.
And then he asked the scouts if they brought word of the Slake Collective, and that ancient terror came back into their eyes, and the adoration was buried beneath a dozen layers of fear.
None of them brought news.
The crowd dispersed after that, when long moments of silence had passed, when it was clear finally that the lord's displeasure would not over-boil with violence — and there was hidden relief on their faces as they returned to their homes to hunt and cook.
Silence settled in the swamplands.
Sahaal sat and brooded, and beside him Chianni fidgeted in her chair, casting anguished glimpses in his direction, shivering.
His patience for her unspoken anxiety did not last long.
'You are troubled, sister,' he said, grateful — grudgingly — for the distraction. 'And yet we are spared. Explain.'
She struggled to find the right words, crippled by awe at the closeness of his attention. 'The Preafects, my lord... Their... their anger is so mighty. They must hate you a great deal.'
He sensed the curiosity behind her words and sighed, anticipating yet more ugly lies and false devotions in the Emperor's name. The falsehood that had secured the Shadowkin's loyalty had grown to a yoke around his neck, and his gorge rose at the thought of strengthening it further.
'It has ever been thus,' he said, dismissive. 'The unjust have always despised the righteous. Their loathing for me is no greater than my disgust for them.'
That, at least, was truth. He was the righteous one. Was it not their ''glorious'' Emperor that had betrayed his master so cruelly? Was it not they who worshipped a weakling, a coward, a traitor?
It was not enough to sate Chianni's thirst for answers.
'My lord,' she quailed, fingers curling together. 'How can we hope to... to prevail in the face of such anger?'
'With focus,' he said, and realised as he said it that it was advice for his own sake, as much as hers. 'With conviction in the cause.' He twisted to stare down at her, hearing his master's words echoed across the gulf of time. 'Doubt breeds fear, child. And fear is our weapon, not our flaw.'
'But—'
'We strive towards our goals. We strive with every ounce of our flesh, with every bloody tear, every bead of sweat. And though we may fall in the trying, we are undertaking the work of the righteous!'
Fine words. Stirring words. He felt a glimmer of fire return to his belly.
'And... our goals, my lord? The goals we must strive to meet...' she glanced up at him, eyes brimming with hunger. 'W-what are they?'
'I have told you. To find the Slake Collective.'
'Y-yes lord...' Again a glance — first up then away, a sliver of eye contact — and this time Sahaal could see a dangerous recklessness, a desire to comprehend at any cost, that underpinned her fear. 'W-what I meant was... why?'
He considered killing her, briefly.
Should I be angry? his mind mused. Should I suffer this curiosity — this impetuosity — in a creature so frail as this woman?
Should I cut her in two?
His claws began, so slowly that he barely even felt it, to slip from their sheaths. He had not consciously triggered them.
But then... but then...
The priestess's importance could not be understated: to lose her would be to risk losing once more the control of his tribe — and that at this most critical of junctures. For all his might and power he was no diplomat, no empathetic figurehead to safeguard the hopes and fears of a population. His was a diplomacy of terror and carnage, not of words and assurances.
He needed her.
A demonstration, then?
Some painful reprimand, perhaps, to punish her undue curiosity, to teach her — and through her the tribe — that his plans were his alone, that he would not tolerate the prying of peasants.
Chianni noticed the claws and gasped in the silence, perhaps understanding, too late, her mistake.
Yes. Yes, teach her a lesson. Make her bleed. Just a small cut...
It was a voice that came from somewhere deep in his subconscious, and as he focused on it, he saw that it was the same voice that had pushed forth his claws, the same voice that had overwhelmed him as he slew the astropath, the same voice that had brought red haze down across his vision time and time again since his arrival on this blighted world.
Cut her. Cut her, you fool!
Was he mad, then? Was he succumbing to that same random insanity — a thing of brilliance and bitterness — that had consumed his master?
He had long ago forsaken the trust of any other creature... could he now no longer trust his own mind?
He snarled in the silence of his helmet and drowned the voice in his mind, and retracted his claws with a silky rasp, feeling foolish. The priestess swam before his eyes, pale with incomprehension, and it was with a sensation like relief, like a clear water scouring the filth of his psyche, that he broke the silence, focused upon her question, and spoke.
'Why?... Because through them I may find something that was stolen from me. My inheritance.'
'I-inheritance? Something that will help you? Something that will help us?'
He smiled, although of course she could not see it.
'Yes. Something that will aid me.'
'A... forgive me, my lord... a weapon?'
He settled back upon the throne and wet his lips, and was no longer irked by her questions. It felt good to speak of such things, finally. It felt good to leave the vacuum of solitude — however momentary, however falsely. — and remember the glories of his past. What harm could it do? What harm in telling the truth to this eager creature — or at least those parts that would strengthen her loyalty?
What harm in leaving the shadows, for an instant?
'What do you know,' he asked, 'of the primarchs? Of the Emperor's own sons?'
Her bulging eyes were all the answer he needed. He waved away her astonishment and went on.
'There were twenty. Twenty warrior infants, twenty child-gods. Perhaps they were whelped, like human sons. Perhaps he made them, as an artist fashions a masterpiece. Perhaps he simply willed them to life — who knows? What is known is that they were scattered, cast out into the stars like seeds on tilled earth. And in their absence from their father they grew to manhood �
�� each in reflection of the world that had claimed them, each shaped by the people who took them in. The kindness and cruelty of strangers.'
He paused, and in his mind he saw a snow-white baby, rushing through tortured skies, black eyes squinting against clouds and wind, before being swallowed — consumed whole — by the dark.
There was one who fell further, and deeper, than the rest. He came to a world without daylight, where cruelty abounded above compassion, where the only honour was a precarious thing shared amongst thieves and murderers. This child, this feral thing, was raised by no man. No human kindness ever taught him mercy, no mother ever shushed his sleeping terrors. And alone of all the scattered primarchs, all those lost babes, no one taught him wrong from right. Justice from injustice.
'Oh, the beliefs of the other primarchs varied, of course. What is "wrong", or "right", after all? Points of view. As each child grew their sense of righteousness solidified, their concept of what to punish and what to encourage took form, guided by the morality of their tutors or brothers-at-arms. Ultimately the conclusion they drew, whatever their circumstance, was the same: that "right" was whatever they said was right. That "wrong" was whatever they decided to punish.
'Just children, priestess, but already gods to be loved and feared.'
Chianni stirred, throwing off her obvious awe to grasp at the loose end left flailing.
'And the feral child? What of him?'
Sahaal smiled again, warmth flourishing in his chest. Ah, my master...
'He had no tutors. No one would take him in, so he grew wild and independent. No one would feed him, so he learned to hunt and feed himself. No one would comfort him when he was taken by the nightmares in his sleep, or by the visions that plagued his waking hours, or by the fits that wracked his body — so he grew strong and wily, and overcame the nightmares, and deciphered the visions, and repressed the fits.
'No one would teach him what justice was, and so — like no child had ever done before, and no child has ever done since — he taught himself. He saw callousness and cruelty, and recognised them. He saw strength being abused, productivity and peace being surrendered to terror and violence. And do you know what he learned, child?'
'N-no, my lord.'
'He learned that justice is strength. He learned that if he wished to overcome the predators that haunted the darkness, he need only become the strongest predator of them all. He learned that if he wished to punish a murderer, it required only that he be a more accomplished killer. He learned that if he wished to bring peace and equality to his world — and oh, he wanted that so much — he must hunt down those filth that stood in its way and use their weapons against them.
'And he learned that there is only one weapon. Stronger than any gun. Sharper than any blade.' Sahaal leaned close to the priestess, her ashen face reflected with bulbous distortion in the crimson windows of his eyes. 'That weapon is fear, child.'
She swallowed, eyes not leaving him for an instant.
Sahaal went on, quieter than before, voice no more than a whisper. The thugs and the thieves, the rapists and the murderers: they gripped that world tight in their hands because every man and woman was afraid of them. And so the feral warrior became the one thing that would stop them:
'Something that even they would learn to fear. He became the Night Haunter.
'He taught them justice through terror. He led that world into peace and efficiency, where before only violence and anarchy had reigned, and he did so unaided, alone in the dark, for the good of them all.
'His name was Konrad Curze, and he was my master.'
He leaned away from the priestess and watched her closely, gauging her response. She struggled, of course — who would not? — but again the curiosity at her core overcame the awe, an addict demanding more before even the drug-rush has faded.
'Your master...' she breathed. 'What happened to him?'
'His father found him. The Emperor came to him and embraced him, and they went into the stars to lead the mightiest crusade that ever was.'
'S-so he lives? He lives still?'
A bleak tableau erupted behind Sahaal's eyes: a scene he had revisited in his dreams a million times over, each one cutting him deeper than the last.
A pale face, awaiting the killer. Black eyes — bottomless, pouring with angst — staring from the shadows of the writhing room. Its fleshwalls and limb carpets shift underfoot... and the hitch draws near.
Sahaal had been there. He had seen it, hiding in the shadows like some child at play, honouring his vow with tears upon his cheeks. He would not intervene. He would not stop her. He would watch and nothing more: and it hurt him like a cold fire in his guts that could never be doused.
She steps close, horrified at her surroundings, entranced by the target's naked form.
He has been expecting her. He has foreseen this moment.
She sweeps towards him and is surprised. She has been expecting guards. She has anticipated violence. Instead the Haunter smiles and beckons her close, and he speaks.
Oh, by the dark, his voice...
Such words of venom and vengeance he spoke, such heartbroken sentiments.
He smiles throughout, and even as his voice breaks and the tears puncture their inertia and gather in streams along his pallid cheeks, he is welcoming. He is warm. He is calm.
'Death is nothing compared to vindication,' he finishes, sitting forwards on his mighty throne, 'Now do your job and be done with it!'
And her hand rises, and the thing in her grip flickers bile-green, and...
And...
Sahaal stared down at the priestess, blinking through a film of water, and gathered himself.
'No,' he said. 'He is dead. He was betrayed by one who should have loved him.'
The effect of this upon Chianni could hardly have been more devastating. She rocked back in her chair and scrabbled at her face, tears and spittle oozing between fingers, breath catching in her throat.
Sahaal was unsurprised. To him, a veteran of the Horus Heresy, the idea that the gods and angels of the Imperium might be capable of betrayal was nothing new. But to the peasants amongst whom he walked — people like this woman — he was less a living being than a myth made solid. Little wonder their minds rebelled against his words. And little wonder the priestess's nausea: it is not often one is told their gods are just as capable of misery, flaw and evil as any other being.
'Restrain yourself,' he said, tiring of her fit. 'You questioned me regarding my master's legacy, not the reason for his death.'
She recovered her dignity by degrees, straightening into her seat and smoothing her tangled hair. 'Aapologies, lord,' she choked, wiping her face. 'I... I had no idea...'
'He is dead,' Sahaal repeated, eager to return to the story, flushed with a gratification at speaking it aloud that he hadn't expected. It was as if the millennia of his dormancy had allowed the pain to fester in his soul, to expand like some poisoned gas, swelling his ribs with pressure he could no longer contain. Merely speaking of it, merely venting his memories, felt like opening a valve in his mind, expelling the venom in a great invisible cloud. 'He is dead and that is an end to it. He had foreseen it, and for that was grateful, for he could prepare himself. He named an heir, he bequeathed his mightiest treasure, and that heir was — is — me.'
'T-then this treasure is-?'
'Is the item I seek on this world.' He clenched his jaw, remembering. 'It was stolen from me before I could even claim it.'
The Haunter's head, so placid in its aspect, tumbles to the floor and rolls. There is no blood.
The killer stands thus poised, grisly mission complete, and perhaps she pauses to savour the moment. Perhaps she reflects upon the ease with which it was done.
Or perhaps she has more still to do.
She bends to the body and plucks at its dead limbs. A ring, she steals, and a silver blade worn in a flesh scabbard at its shoulder. And then she turns, hunched low on the writhing floor, seeking something.
; And then she straightens, and in her hand she holds it. Dislodged from his person at the moment of death, she finds it and she takes it.
The prize.
The Corona Nox.
In the shadows, Sahaal gapes. His master had not foreseen this.
And then she is gone, as quick as a cobra. And it is then, only then, with grief overcome by sudden anger, with teeth rasping together and hot tears turning to ice on his cheeks, that Sahaal quits his vantage and races in pursuit.
'S-stolen?'
'Yes. By my master's killer. I should have known his enemies would try to take it...'
'H-he is here? That is who you pursue? This Slake — he is the one who killed your master?'
'No. No, this happened... many years ago. She is dead now.'
'S-she?'
'The killer. The assassin.'
Chianni had the look of one who was drowning in a sea of surprises, and still had not even sighted the shore.
'Then... my lord, why here?'
Sahaal hesitated. In truth the details of the subsequent calamities were still unfocused in his mind, a gamut of colour and light that no amount of mental dissection could unravel. He knew how it began — in fire and blood aboard the assassin's vessel, grappling with claw and fist against the bitch herself, wrestling the Corona from her grasping fingers then fleeing to the Umbrea Insidior...
He knew how it ended, crashing through the mists of Equixus, awaking in the vessel's ruptured guts, his prize stolen.
And between? A hundred centuries. Light. Colour. Capering figures of svelte form and slanted eye, with fluted helms and bright jewels, slipping between reality and warp, gathering around him.
The attack.
The flight.
The trap.
The prison.
Eldar.
'It has reached this world along... intricate pathways,' he said, clearing his mind of the jumbled impressions. 'It came to the Glacier Rats, and then to Slake. And from there...' he sighed, a blister of depression breaking apart, overwhelming even the freedom that had come from speaking with such candour, '...from there I do not know where it has gone.'
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