'All this for me?' she mumbled, dazed.
'Ha, no.' Kaustus fiddled with a tusk, scowling. 'We were expecting someone taller. It seems he was delayed. I believe we have you to thank for that.'
'W-what do y... oh...'
And piece by piece, like a jigsaw completing itself, the fragments of enigma came together.
The Night Lord would have ascended in the elevator himself had he not been attacked in the Macharius Gateroom. He would be standing here instead of her, gazing down upon the prize he had spent so long seeking, had it not been for her actions.
Kaustus and his gunmachines had not been waiting for her. They'd been waiting for the Night Lord.
They'd always been waiting for him.
Kaustus had kept the Night Lord alive, despite all of her efforts. He'd left a trail of rumours and information, like blood in the water — from Glacier Rat to Slake to governor — to be followed piece by piece, a torturous progression of clues and hints for the beast to pursue. It would lead him here. To this place. To this gallery.
To this stolen item.
'You're waiting for him to open it for you, aren't you?' she whispered, dizzied by the scale of the scheme, the complexity of the lie in which she'd become embroiled. 'You stole it from him, but... but you couldn't open it. You had to wait for him. You had to keep him alive. You had to make him think he was gaining ground, coming for you, all by himself. You wanted him to walk into a trap.'
'Very good,' Kaustus smirked. 'And all without even reading my mind.' He held up his hands as if waving, displaying the thick blood that coated them. 'Which is why the governor couldn't join us, by the way. I couldn't have you performing any... mischief... on the little maggot's brain, could I?'
She peered through into the glassy bridge in which Kaustus had been waiting, and sure enough her eyes fells upon a small, crumpled shape, blood ebbing from its expensive robes. Kaustus shrugged. 'He was very understanding about the whole thing, come the end.'
Nausea boiled through Mita. Bile rose in her throat, and she swallowed back on it with bitter tears in her eyes.
Such duplicity! Such convoluted manipulation!
'Why?' she snarled, lips trembling, face burning. 'Why do all this? You had the power to stop the beast! You had the means to kill it! What could be so important that you've allowed a... an abomination the freedom of the hive?'
For a second the inquisitor seemed uncertain. For a fraction of an instant his face clouded, his brows dipped, and his eyes roved from left to right — as if he were somehow unsure where he was. For an instant his emotions and thoughts uncoiled from his mind, and Mita tasted the childish bewilderment that was an oil-slick through their midst.
'I...' he whispered, lost.
And then his features hardened, the gimlet-glimmer returned to his gaze, and his jaw clenched with an unpleasant rasp. He waved the servitors forwards, and without vocal command two wrapped sinuous arms around her, ignoring her strangled protests and dragging her out of the endless gallery, onto the vertiginous bridge where Kaustus and they had been waiting. The inquisitor followed behind, closing the doors at his back.
'You want to know why?' he smiled, hand reaching inside his robes.
She nodded slowly, mind awash.
His hand reappeared, holding within its grasp a jewelled lasptisol, and he aimed it carefully at her head. She tensed herself, the world dropping away from her.
'That's a question you can enjoy from within the grave,' he hissed, leering.
And then—
The steel eagle, rising up from the base of the metal mountain, tilting its wing towards the highest peak and racing forwards, snapping with beak and claw, to retrieve what belonged to it.
A sudden flicker of premonition, a recalled burst from the furor arcanum she'd endured within the elevator.
'Oh... oh, no...' she muttered, forgetting the gun, forgetting the inquisitor's glaring eyes.
The Night Lord was coming.
Zso Sahaal
The shuttle struck the tower like the sky itself collapsing.
The cockpit crumpled like paper. Brass-edged dials exploded, cable-strewn consoles twisting as their mountings buckled behind them. Limbless servitors and vapid cogitators screamed with what scant vestiges of human surprise remained, ripped apart as conflicting forces crushed them beneath the machines they were created to control. Copper wires whiplashed through bulging spheres of broken glass, sparks infusing the air like miniature galaxies.
For all its smallness, for all its obvious frailty, the craft was built along the same predictable lines as so many other Imperial vessels: a tapered barge with a hammerhead rear and a beak-like prow. Its aquiline hull tore a crevice in the fabric of the hive peak, spewing flame and superheated fuel, burying itself like a dart into flesh.
The universe roared. Everything shook.
In the midsection, behind the flattened ruin of the bridge, Sahaal eased himself from a reinforced bench and checked himself over. Smoke was venting into the crumpled chamber and somewhere an alarm whooped endlessly, but he could find no serious damage to his person. As anticipated, the hardened prow had punched through the hive's armour like a bullet, compacting its forward segments and sparing its aft from damage. Even Chianni, strapped into place beside him, had suffered only scratches and bruises. She appeared to Sahaal unconscious: concussed, no doubt, by the violence of the collision.
The pilot was dead, there could be no doubt of that. What little remained solid of his body hung from between a pair of sealed bulkheads, driven together like the prongs of forceps, a fly beneath a swat. A thin patina of what had once been his flesh decorated the truncated bridge segments, and Sahaal was put in mind of the juice of a crushed fruit, trickling from sealed spaces.
Sahaal shrugged, untroubled by the man's death. He had served his purpose.
It had been Chianni's idea. With the Preafects otherwise engaged in tearing the Shadowkin territory apart, the starport that Sahaal had already invaded once proved deliriously simple to penetrate again. There were few pilgrims travelling now — the lockdown that had gripped the hive had seen to that — and he'd cut through the nominal security at the gateway like a beast possessed. Focused utterly upon the scheme Chianni had tentatively proposed, when the carnage was done he'd looked down to find himself made slick by the blood he'd spilled, a scattered ring of massacred Preafects and servitor bodies patterning the icy launchpad terracrete.
Focused rage. That was the key. Inglorious, he lost himself in carnage in the pursuit of his goal.
Only one shuttle had been ready to depart. They'd boarded it stealthily and followed the curses of its pilot to the cockpit, homing on his mutterings as he berated the indecipherable alarms squawking across the inter-port vox, confused by an inability to contact the orbiting trader he'd been commissioned to join.
'Like there's no warpshit thing up there...' he'd hissed to his servitor crew, even as Sahaal's claws pricked the skin of his neck.
He'd required little persuasion to play along. Chi-anni did the talking. Sahaal found himself too consumed by the burning urge to act to even articulate his words, sliding claws across the puny man's flesh to embellish every threat his condemnitor spouted, using her voice as the perfect counterpoint to his slicing art.
The knife had become a purer medium than mere language.
Let the edge of a blade be his stylus.
Let him cut and cut and cut forever.
Patience... his thoughts had counselled. You know who has it now. You know where it is.
Not long to wait...
They had risen through smoke and gloom, and then the battering flurries of ice that smothered the whole of the planet. Engines whining turbulence rattling at its flanks, the craft had seemed infinitely fragile, an insect at the mercy of a tempest. Sahaal had loomed in the comforting shadows of the bridge, watching the trembling pilot with unhelmeted eyes narrowed, suspicious for any double-cross. Even when Chianni wrenched the steering column from his quivering hands
to tilt the vessel towards the broad slope of the tallest peak, the man didn't realise the nature of the journey he'd been forced to undertake.
'There,' she announced with a nod, pointing towards a secondary tower that rose parallel to the central spire, connected at its apex by a narrow glass bridge. 'That's the palace treasury.'
'How do you know?' Sahaal hissed, fingers kneading together eagerly. There could be no mistakes. No oversights.
She'd seemed to bristle, as if annoyed that he still was unable to trust her. 'His collection's famous,' she said. 'Ask anyone in the hive.'
Sahaal had glanced at the pilot, cringing uselessly to one side. If the man had felt at all inclined to disagree he'd hidden it well, and thus convinced Sahaal had nodded his approval at the condemnitor. 'Do it,' he'd said.
Chianni had locked the steering column in position and pushed the pilot back into his seat. The revelation of what was to occur had stolen over the man in crippling increments, and even when the hivewall loomed like some steely god in the viewing port, even when the febrile light of the clouded sky was extinguished by the city's bulk, even when the impart was scant seconds away, still the pilot could not summon a scream.
Sahaal thought it a pity. Nothing soothed his adrenaline like a wail of terror.
He'd ridden out the impact without injury and now, as smoke belched from rained machines and light poured through countless rents in the vessel's shattered sides, he lifted himself to his feet and brandished his claws. He could feel it.
He could feel the Corona Nox, like a beacon lighting his senses.
Oh, my master... I can feel it! It is so close!
He remembered how it had been to awake upon the Umbrea Insidior, that rage-borne half-awareness, slaughtering thieves across the ruined vessel's shanks like a wolf, aware only that it had been taken. For aeons he had sat dormant at the heart of the warp, imprisoned within the cage that the hated eldar had constructed around him, and in all that time the presence of the Corona had given him strength. He had come to feel it as if it were a part of him, a strange connection that seared his psyche and drew a cord between his soul and the item itself. Weeks ago, when it was stolen, he had awoken in the certain knowledge that it was gone, as if a sound that he had heard his whole life — but never noticed — had suddenly fallen silent.
And now... ?
In another ruined vessel, clambering once more through crippled decks, hungry once more for bloodshed and justice, now he could feel it again.
Now he was close.
He left Chianni where she lay — forgotten, beneath his attention — and raced to retrieve it.
At the craft's outer shell a strange process of segueing had occurred: the chasm-wound inflicted upon the hive seeming to knot with the craft that had caused it. In all directions torn sheet metal was bent and buckled, molten steel glistened and solidified in weird formations, cables and hiveducts twisted around hull sensoria like the tentacles of anemones, and everywhere the first gatherings of snow, probing hungrily at the city's injury, was scattered across the devastation. Illuminators flickered and failed, or else burned brightly with whatever electrical surges the crash had precipitated.
Picking his stealthy way through smoky chambers, Sahaal found it hard to say where the shuttle ended and the hive began. He stepped from a torn bulkhead imaging the outer hull of the shuttle to be nearby, only to find himself confronted by soot-charred tapestries and gold leaf pillars. As if infected somehow by a blemish of crudity, the palace gathered its splendour to itself and sulked, disgusted at the invasive entry. Sahaal scuttled across shattered flagstones and crumpled mosaics, following the pull of his heart, the strange magnetism of the Corona. The shuttle had buried itself across three levels of the tower, and at the head of the furrow it had ploughed into the structure Sahaal could stare into each separate room as if in cross-section, amused at the contrast between mangled entry-wound and untouched opulence.
There was little doubt where he would find his prize. The uppermost of the three exposed interiors was a storage chamber, gloomily lit and utterly ruined. The charred bodies of dormant servitors leaned from recharge booths and gagged on singed tongues, dead eyes lolling in sockets. The second level was a private chamber: gaudily decorated and flamboyantly furnished. A regal bed occupied the centre of the devastated zone, pairs of winged cherubim-drones clinging to its canopy like bats. Evidently a spout of fuel had doused the suite's interior, and now every exquisite tapestry was a blackened sheet, every gold-leaf insignia was a puddle of shimmering slag, every luxurious carpet smouldered like a burning forest.
But the third level, the endless gallery of tedious exhibits and pompous wealth, clipped by the craft's entry — the corner of its ceiling neatly dissected to allow him entry — that was a different affair. From amongst its endless parades of useless treasures the Corona whispered to him, reached out to caress his spirit, promising him all that he had ever dreamed. He slipped into the room's cavernous belly like a lizard: scuttling along a wall, pausing every few moments with reptile precision to cock his head, listening, watching.
Was he disappointed, he reflected, that the thief was not present? Had he hoped, in his secret heart — still burning with the blue-tinged flame of unfocused insult — to catch the culprit red-handed? Had he yearned to bathe in the bastard's blood?
No... No, he could see inside himself now. The mutterings of Chaos were gone. He was stronger than that. Whatever damage his pride had suffered was irrelevant.
The Corona was his.
He found it at the room's centre, placed on a plinth like some common librium artefact, and his twin hearts felt as if they might burst with joy.
The package was unopened. The skeletal emblem of his Legion — the winged skull — remained sealed, its cryptic secrets unexposed. He reached out trembling hands and, as if fearing the prize might be a dream ~ a cruel hologram trick — settled them upon the box's shell, testing its solidity.
He sighed, awash with relief. He twisted the fresco pattern here and here, then placed fingers at the skull's eyes and tapped twice.
'Ultio,' he said, eyes closed. 'Ultio et timor.'
Vengeance and fear.
Something inside the package chattered. A mechanical clatter shuddered through it, pins meshing together like a shark's teeth, vocal recognition engines awaking, and with the slowness that came from a hundred centuries' inertia tiny diaphragms opened within the skull's eyes, flooding them with red light.
The seal broke.
The box opened.
And Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster, heir to the throne of the Night Lords Legion — the chosen of Konrad Curze — lifted from its dust-dry innards the Corona Nox.
It was a crown, of sorts. A black circlet of mercurial metal, polished and undecorated, burning with an eerie non-light. To either side of its tapered ring there rose tall horns, needle-straight and jagged-edged, like twin sabre-blades dipped in oil.
But most stunning of all, beyond the simple elegance and curious captivation of the thing, set into the crown's frontispiece and suspended upon the wearer's forehead on a platinum mounting, stood a jewel.
A perfect teardrop of ruby-red, its face was uncut by diamond facets or inelegant designs. Smooth and unblemished, it had about it the look of an organic creation, as if not cut from the earth but grown, planted and fostered to glorious life in some secret crystal garden. And despite the dismal lighting of the gallery, despite the shadow cast by Sahaal's colossal body, it burned. It burned with an inner light. It burned with a radiance that was unconfined by sight alone, that broke the boundaries of luminosity, that flooded out the visual spectrum and dazzled Sahaal without even passing his eyes.
There was something other than the merely material about the jewel, and it bathed Sahaal in such peace, in such confidence and assurance, that the shivering of his limbs ceased, the perpetual furrow of his brow smoothed away, and he blinked a tear of serenity from his midnight eyes.
'Ave Dominus Nox,' he whispered, fingers caressin
g the circlet edge, lifting the horned crown above him, pulling it down towards his own skull.
He was divorced from reality, in that timeless instant. In a dream world of endless calm, the crown descended towards its rightful owner.
He would lead his brothers in their master's name. He would tear from the skies of Terra itself, shrieking with an eagle's cry. He would repay the insult. He would cut the Emperor's shrivelled throat, and paint the withered god's blood across the walls of his defiled palace.
He would have his revenge upon the Traitor Father.
He would be the Lord of the Night.
And then a shot rang out in the gloom, and the fantasy collapsed beneath the weight of dismal reality, and he glanced down from the perfect ''O'' of black metal and into the hungry barrels of weapons.
Six gun servitors. Bolters. Meltas. Flamers.
At their centre, a man. From his slack lips arose tall tusks, and his eyes glimmered with secret humour. Power-armoured and massive, but moving with the stultified discomfort of one without augmentation.
No Space Marine, this, merely a copy. An impostor. The cruciform ''I'' at his collar was all that Sahaal needed to see.
'Inquisitor,' he spat.
'The name's Kaustus,' the man grinned, mocking. 'At your service.'
The men held a small gun against the head of a smaller figure, a raggedy shape with unkempt hair and frightened eyes, whose struggles to escape the tusked fool halted the instant her stare met Sahaal's. He recognised her. Twice before he had met her, and both times she had sought his destruction.
The witch.
Confusion gripped him, momentarily. The psyker-bitch was his enemy — he had no doubt of that. Why then was she the captive of the Inquisition? Was there more than one faction at play within this elaborate game?
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