'Macharius Gate...' she mumbled, unable to think of anything else to say, as the first of several dozen shotgun muzzles nudged against her skin. 'Macharius Gate, you bastards...'
'What about the Macharius Gate?' a voice said, from above. She felt a flutter of recognition at the dry tones, and looked up with the first stirrings of hope. The Preafects inched aside to allow a plainly dressed figure past.
'Orodai!' she exclaimed.
'Commander Orodai,' he corrected, expression none-too-impressed to see her. 'What are you doing here, girl?'
'Delivering vital information on behalf of the Inquisition.' He sighed.
'Miss Ashyn, the last I heard was that you had been ejected from that body for gross insubordination. Your former colleagues visited me. They were very keen to impress upon me what to do if you were found.' I'll bet they were, the bastards. One of the Preafects racked his shotgun, pointedly. 'Commander,' she hissed, heart throbbing so hard she could barely hear her own voice. 'You know as well as I do that Kaustus is making a mistake.'
'Have a care, girl. An outlaw is hardly in the position to disparage an inquisitor.'
'For the Emperor's sake, Orodai! The inquisitor's a fool! A warp-damned fop more troubled by the governor's treasures than the danger in this hive!' Orodai glared at her, working his jaw. Which way will you go, you efficient little bastard? Slowly, eyes narrowed, Orodai reached into his belt and lifted his pistol, training it upon Mita's head. Her heart fell.
'Dismissed,' he barked to the Preafects. 'I can handle this whelp.'
The vindictors vanished without complaint. Orodai waited until they had all gone, until the echoes of their clattering strides had faded, before re-holstering the pistol.
Mita frowned. 'I... I don't understand...'
'It does not do to discuss politics in public, girl. Walls have ears.'
'I... I...'
'I'm assuming you've come to me for a reason. I'm no more a fan of the Inquisitorial bastard than you, but then the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Particularly when she's a warp-piss witch who lost a squad of my best men.'
Mita suffered the chide with good grace, refusing to rise.
'I know where you can find him.'
'Who?'
'You know who. The Night Lord. The Chaos Marine. The beast that's made a mess of your pretty littlie city.'
He shook his head. 'Still you insist upon that notio—'
Her mouth fell open. 'How can you doubt it?' she stormed, outraged. 'You must have seen the hijacked broadcast!'
'I did. All I saw was a pair of red eyes.'
'Don't be a fool! Why deny it to yourself? There's a warp-damned Traitor Marine loose in your city, Orodai, and I can tell you where it is! Are you so thick-skulled that you'll refuse to hear it?'
He sighed, and when he spoke his voice was calmer, quieter: thick with exhausted frustration.
'Child, whether the creature is real or not is irrelevant. All we know is that someone — something — has formed an army in the underhive.' He raised an eyebrow at her stunned expression and half-smiled. 'The Inquisition isn't the only body that has its spies, girl. So you see, you really have nothing to offer me. We already know where your... "beast" resides, whatever it is. But to attack it in its own lair would be fo—'
'Not there.'
'What?'
She allowed a smile to curl her lips, the throbbing of her bloody shoulder rescinding to nothing.
'He's leaving his lair,' she said. 'He has an appointment. The Macharius Gate, Orodai. That's where we slay the dragon.'
PART FOUR
COMMUNION
I should like to know who it was that first said "Know thine Enemy". It has always struck me as the sentiment of an unrepentant heretic.
Last recorded words of Commissar Jai'm Baelstus, hours before his death at the hands of rebel insurgents (later postulated to have been concealed within his own Command Unit)
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 menag
erie 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 pa
rticular, 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.
Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000) Page 24