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.
<
br /> 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...
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