But even so, even without the benefit of careful scrutiny, even without the need to look close, to push inside and explore, she could sense the shape of that ancient, awful psyche, and oh... oh, God-Emperor... once more... just as it had been before.
It was like looking into a mirror.
The doubt... the power... the suspicion...
She surfaced from her horror at the sound of a firm voice, tentacles of psychic thought discovering an authoritative mind: a sergeant, she guessed, hollering orders from nearby.
'Binox!' he growled. 'Night vision! All men! Put on your Throne-damned binox, Vandire's piss!'
It was like a beacon. Like a tiny shaft of light in an endless wasteland. That one sliver of order punctured the panic-spell the Night Lord had cast, and all around it the shouting Preafects paused in their directionless flight and took stock, drew breath, fumbled for their goggles.
Mita made a mental node to find out the sergeant's name. If ever she escaped from this killing-room alive she'd be sure to commend the man to Orodai.
She fumbled around her until she found an armoured body, sticky with blood. Whether cut down by the Night Lord or blown apart by friendly fire, it didn't matter: the Preafect was dead. She scrabbled at its belt until her questing fingers found a binox strap, and pulled the blocky device over her eyes.
The world opened up in lurid shades of green and grey.
'Regroup, damn you!' the sergeant roared, and she swivelled to face him as if snatching for a lifeline, a solitary mote of warmth in a place of endless winter. He was nothing, she supposed — just one man amongst hundreds — but already she could see a circle of calmness spreading around him, vindictors pulling on night vision goggles, gazing around to see what damage they had done.
'Arm your weapons!' he cried, swept up on the flames of his own leadership. 'Shoot the Throne-damned shit! Shoot to ki—'
His head left his body.
Mita felt herself groan: a primal shock of horror and understanding, anticipating already what this would mean.
A pulse of blood jack-knifed over the tumbling corpse, a blur of something crossed overhead, blades outstretched. Something blue and black and bronze, which knew all too well who to target.
It screamed. It screamed just like a baby.
The panic returned harder than ever. Somewhere outside, in the faint light burning through the gate-room entrance, Orodai was shouting instructions from the back of his Salamander. It could do no good, now. Not from out there. Not so far from the boiling heart of this awful, inky place. The one voice of reason was gone, cut down with contemptuous ease by the unseen thing.
So easy to imagine horrors in the dark...
So easy to forget they faced a single foe. A single mortal foe...
And that, of course, was how the Night Lord worked. He dissolved his enemies in terror. He let them forget that he could bleed and die. He let them fill the darkness with their own demons, and when he shrieked on high it was like the voice of death itself, riding out to claim them for its own.
They had bottled a devil in a dead end. They had sprung their trap and thought themselves clever: and then the devil had showed them how wrong they were. It had made the dead end its own territory, it had dragged them into its own world — a world of darkness where it, and it alone, ruled — and now it would kill them one by one, at its leisure. Mita could no more pacify the frightened Preafects — lost to all reason — than she could push back the sea. They were all going to die.
She saw it, perfectly clear, in black and white.
The Night Lord would kill every last one.
And the only way to spare them all, to spare herself...
Think, Mita, think!
...was to give it what it wanted.
Her goggled eyes fell upon the colossal snowgates, twin blocks of tempered steel and iron — ten metres high — rising with the shallow camber of the room.
What does it want?
Escape.
The press of bodies was too great. She'd struggled as valiantly as she could, keeping her head low, pushing through jostling Preafects like a rat between the legs of elephants. At every accidental contact there were rebuttals and curses — 'It's the beast! Sweet Emperor, the beast is here!' — which inevitably drew the unkind attention of hacking power mauls, slash-stabbing blades and carelessly discharged shotguns. It was thanks only to the utter completeness of the dark that most attacks were carried wide, and to her precognitive senses that she had thus far been forewarned of any imminent weapons-fire.
But no longer. Abruptly the crush was too great, the herd of panicking men was packed together too tight for her to wriggle through, and each was too busy shouting and cowering to listen to the woman in their midst.
'Binox, you fools!' she'd been shouting, all along. 'Put your damned binox on!'
For all the good it would do, she might as well have addressed her advice to the Emperor himself. Useless!
Did... did I just think that?
Again, she wondered at the Night Lord's ability to sow discord. A death here, a death there, utter darkness and a medley of horrific shrieks: these, it would seem, were the ingredients of his domination. These simple things, able to turn hardened veterans of street law into cringing whelps. Able to leave her thoughtlessly questioning her own god... It was, she admitted awkwardly, impressively effective. None of which offered her much assistance in the task of reaching her goal. A shotgun stock blurred out of the soupy green image of her binox and she ducked it with a curse, amazed — besides anything else — that its owner could be so colossally stupid as to think such a flimsy attack could hurt the Night Lord, even if she had been it.
Another push, another repelling jab. This was getting her nowhere. She was so damned close!
A spray of warmth patterned her cheek, blood scattered from on high, and another shriek rang out nearby: the beast striking again, like an eagle dipping its talons below the surface of an unquiet lagoon, plucking out some thrashing silvery thing with a cry. Even with the goggles she couldn't see her foe clearly, only a blur, an indistinct something, trailing carnage as it leapt away, claws glittering.
The psychic glut hanging above the crowd reached agonising saturation behind her eyes: an intensity of confusion and dread that, impossible to block out, all but destroyed her. She felt her knees weaken and for an instant was sure she would fall. Staggering, she wondered how long she'd last beneath the booted feet of the stampeding Preafects.
And then the one remaining course of action arose in her mind. She could not reach the snowgate controls — she could barely stand upright, by the Throne! — and like a drowning soul clinging to a rope she grabbed at the idea and did not let go.
The animus motus. Telekinesis.
Very definitely not her forte.
Like all sanctioned psykers trained by the Scholastia Psykana, her psychic gifts could be shaped and hardened, manifesting themselves as physical forces — albeit clumsily — like opportunistic swings of club and fist. It was a gift borne in the heat of the moment, an impetuous force with which to strikeout like a hammer when danger threatened, or to turn aside a blow before it could fall. Using it as a precision instrument, calculatingly reaching out to change the world, was something at which she had never excelled.
It drained her energy like a bleeding wound.
A good psyker knows his limits, her tutors had smugly informed her. This is yours.
Well, warp take them! There was nothing else for it.
Agitated, shocked at her own sudden disrespect for her revered masters, she drew a deep breath and steadied herself, clenching her fists. She tried to be calm, to reach out from the cold centre of her soul, focusing all her will upon the snowgate lever... but of course that was the wrong tactic. She needed not calm, but rage: sudden and impulsive — and to plan for such a thing was to immediately negate it.
Sweat beads pricked at her forehead.
Off to one side, as if in another world, a stumbling vindictor shoved her
from his path, the blow of his elbow barely puncturing the psychic realm she was trying to cross. Her body collapsed to the floor, unpiloted, but she paid it no heed: lashing, striking, ripping out with immaterial fists at the gate lever again and again.
Nothing happened.
And then something cried out in the dark, and on the crest of a premonition she swivelled her head up into the inky abyss and saw it, the Night Lord, dropping its shoulders, lifting its grasping boots like an eagle's claws, and swooping.
It had seen her.
It was coming for her.
Directly.
Eyes blazing.
Filling her world.
Shrieking like a dying child.
She was going to die.
And then there was the energy she deeded, there was the adrenaline and fear and mingled rage, and there was the crackling fist of her psychic self, taking form, locking around the lever like a snapping maw, pulling with all its strength. Pulling so hard she felt her eyes fill with blood. Pulling so hard her ears popped and her heart roared in protest. Pulling so hard she thought her bones would shatter. She thought her veins would explode.
The lever turned.
The doors awoke like slumbering gods, shedding the layer of dust and ice scrawled across their inner surface, grinding open like the gates to some forbidden paradise. An arctic wind cut between them, flurrying snow boiling into the cavern in tumbling waves, and with it came a modicum of light: a ghostly spillage from the outer shell of the hive itself — wan and incomplete, scarcely a true light at all, but enough to determine shapes. Enough to distinguish friend from enemy.
The vindictors paused mid-riot. Maul blows went undelivered. Fingers eased from triggers. Doused in feeble luminosity, able at last to settle their frayed nerves and seek a modicum of calmness, the Preafect chaos ground to a slow, uncomfortable halt.
And above Mita's exhausted body, eyes blazing in the half-light, the Night Lord changed direction with seconds to spare, a bone-jarring jink from the vertical to the horizontal, the robe-tails of the man it had captured fluttering behind it. It whooped once — as if in farewell — and was swallowed by the ice-spume of the gates, splitting the snowy night with claws outstretched.
There were bodies everywhere. Most were dead of shotgun wounds.
And Mita Ashyn, who had spared the lives of those who remained, whose mind had been all but wiped away by the demands of the animus motus, sagged to the floor and felt as if she'd died. She considered whispering a prayer of thanks to the Emperor. It was the sort of thing she'd be expected to do.
But then... the Emperor hadn't saved her. She'd saved herself.
Just like always.
A flash of familiarity circulated through her, and she recalled the reflective shape of the Night Lord's psyche. Such doubt, such solitude. He had nothing but his principles to sustain him, nothing but himself to rely upon. Just like her.
A young Preafect approached, carefully crouching beside each body that littered the floor, checking for injuries, calling out for medics wherever he found life. He reached Mita's huddled form and squatted on his haunches, squinting at the rag-coated bundle that his eyes could scarcely make out.
'You okay? You injured?' he said, voice soft, with youth.
'I c-could use some help standing,' Mita stammered, all her energy spent.
The man backed away abruptly as if stung, recognising her face. Orodai had hardly been recalcitrant when it came to letting his men know whose testimony had lead them on this mission.
The Preafect continued his way along the heap of injured and dead as if she didn't exist, and it was only on the very cusp of her hearing that she heard him spit into the shadows, whispering beneath his breath.
'Witch.'
It was the last straw.
I just saved your life, you contemptible little shit.
Squatting on the floor of the Macharius Gateroom, bleeding from her ears and her nose, watching the crowds thin and the medics come and go, Mita Ashyn had something of a crisis of faith.
She sat for a long time and considered her place within events. In the main, the uncertainties that troubled her — exacerbated, no doubt, by exhaustion — revolved around a single query:
Why?
Why did she do it? Why had she struggled so hard, since those long-forgotten days when the blackships stole her from her family, to serve this bloated Imperium? Why had she toiled on behalf of these ignorant bastards, these bigoted fools who feared her and hated her and called her an abomination? Why had she bled and cried, why had she poured effort and energy into protecting the glory of an empire that... that had no place for her?
Had she been used? Had she been enslaved by those who sought only her destruction — a tame little witch that they could wield like a weapon until she ceased to be needed, and then snuff her out?
Why had she never felt these uncertainties before?
That, at least, was a question she could answer:
Because you've never found a partisan before.
Because you've never tasted such bitterness in another creature's soul, and it makes you question your own.
Because the Night Lord feels exactly the same.
She tried to shut out the whispers, the cruel inklings that spoke with her own voice, that stoked the fires of her paranoia, but they would not be silenced. They spread to overwhelm her, and in a panic she turned to the one glowing fragment of her soul which they could not penetrate: her faith.
In its glow, all her doubts were excised. By its light the whispering voices were silenced.
Had she been used? Had she been cruelly manipulated?
No, of course not. She fought not in the name of these people, but in the name of the Emperor! He did not hate her. Was it not through him that her powers were granted? Was it not through him that the future could be navigated, imparted through his tarot and the furor arcanum like seeds of prophecy?
He did not despise her. He would not use her so.
And yes, his agents were a teeming mass, contradictory and contemptible. Let them hate her, if they must. Let them pursue their own agendas, let them lock their horns together and schism like splintering ice. Let the Inquisition cast her out, let Orodai's black-suited worms despise her, let the whole of the universe rail against her if they must.
The Emperor loved her. She was certain.
Mollified, she rose to her feet. The vindictors had erected several small illuminator-tripods to allow the medics to work, and by their pale light she glanced around the room, sickened by the carnage. She wondered vaguely what to do next. Certainly her usefulness as a combatant had expired — she could barely stand, let alone fight — and at any rate the Night Lord was long gone. There would be no hope of catching it now.
Should she report, then, to Orodai? No doubt he would blame her for this calamity, and the curses of hateful men was something she could happily do without. No, she'd stay clear of Orodai, for now. He had more than enough to be getting along with.
Besides, there was one final strand to this vast, tangled investigation that remained un-plucked. One remaining clue to be pursued.
The package. That was why the Night Lord had come here in the first place. That was why he had entered the hive. That was why he had faced the Glacier Rats, captured Slake, ventured here to this blood-splattered room. All to retrieve the package that had been stolen from him.
So what was it? What item could possibly encourage a beast such as he to wreak such havoc in a hostile place? And who could have stolen it from him?
Mita pursued answers in the only way that she could. She stumbled into the open elevator from which the majordomo had been abducted, kicked aside a dissected limb from the door runnels, and watched the doors close before her.
As the elevator rumbled to life, she wondered whether the Night Lord had learned from his captive the identity of his target. She imagined its blue-black form slinking back to its lair, demanding answers from the cringing majordomo, hissing and spitting. Would
it be that simple, she wondered? Would he find his thief quickly?
She guessed not. Commander Orodai was not stupid enough to commit all his resources to a single engagement.
The Night Lord would find little sanctuary in his lair.
Zso Sahaal
And then, like the end of a beautiful dream, everything fell apart.
Sahaal returned to his domain along dark and secret paths, slipping once more into the underhive through the abyssal rent in the earth that had first granted him entry. He'd been concerned, as he raced to cross the snowy expanse outside the Macharius gate, that his unconscious captive might freeze before he could even be interrogated. He needn't have worried: beneath the man's thick cloak he proved to be a porcine specimen, a healthy layer of fat providing adequate insulation from the cold. Just another decadent blob from a decadent world. Sahaal would enjoy getting answers out of this man.
He'd slipped down through the empty underhive like an eidolon, ghosting through settlements that had been decimated days before by the Preafect pogrom.
He sneaked through deserted villages and empty nomad-trains, musing upon their former inhabitants. All had either died or descended to join his army.
His Empire.
The mere thought of it cheered him, exorcising the insult of the gateroom ambush from his mind. His army. His children — ready to rise up at his command and wreak havoc wherever he desired.
Somewhere, in the quiet shadows at the rear of his mind, he reminded himself that they existed only to die. He would throw them into the jaws of their enemies to bring anarchy and madness to this fearful city, and in the crippled wake of their sacrifice his brothers of the Night Lords Legion would arrive to find their path open, their advance uncontested. But these were stifled thoughts, buried at the base of a mind revelling in its dominion. He admitted to himself that the very idea of sacrificing his children troubled him, filling him with an uncertain chagrin that he couldn't explain.
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