Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  In that first day, as he'd slipped through the under-city's heart like a wraith, Sahaal had felt himself sickened. If this was the reward for devotion to the Emperor, he had chosen his side shrewdly.

  He returned his mind to the present, focusing all his attention upon the step-step-step of his imminently-arriving prey, and unclenched his right hand. At its tip the gauntlet's hooked claws flexed, mirroring the internal movement: a second set of fingers, power-bladed and bloody-red, slaved to the movements of the first. These too had been a gift from his master, whose generosity was as unpredictable and spectacular as his moods. Sahaal had received them as gratefully as he had his bolter, but had wielded them with far greater relish: finding in them weapons worthy of the precision and purity he craved.

  He had named them the Unguis Raptus — the Raptor's claws — and in so doing had coined the name of his command company. Before even the Great War his Raptors became justly feared, and in the name of first the Emperor, and then his master alone, they had brought swift death from above to their foes.

  If his master had known where the gauntlets were constructed, or by whom, he had never revealed it. They were as much a part of Sahaal now as were his eyes or his tongue.

  Or his hate.

  Two men exited the tunnel beside him. Dressed in jackets and ferro-salvage pads, they spoke softly and trod with the nervous gait of lifelong underhivers. In these troglodytic caverns caution was as natural as breathing.

  It did them little good.

  The first was dead before his brain could even register a threat, twin skewers punching out of shadow and into his face, slipping like icicles through the pulp of his eyes. Sahaal shook away the corpse like waste from a shovel, sliding from his alcove to reveal himself to the second. Slowly. Silently.

  The memory of his master's voice, leading his Legion in lecture-prayer, rustled like pouring sand, flooding his mind:

  'Show them what you can do,' it trilled, as soft and cold as dead flesh. 'Steal their hope, like a shadow steals the light. Then show them what you are. The tool never changes, my sons. The weapon is always the same. Fear. Fear is the weapon.'

  In the corridor, standing in the bloody mess of his fallen friend, the second man looked into the face of a nightmare and falteringly, chokingly, began to scream.

  'I have questions,' Sahaal said, reaching out for him.

  The man knew nothing, of course. None of them did.

  By the end of the second day there had been twelve. Seven men, four women, one child.

  It never ceased to amaze Sahaal how varied were their responses. Some — most — had screamed from the outset. When he came upon them, when he flexed his claws and hissed, when he worked their terror like an artist with a brush, smothering gouache horror on subtle blends of oil-smear dread, in those incandescent moments his heart soared with the righteousness of his work, and they threw back their little heads and — mostly — they screamed.

  Some, though, were silent. Staring with mute animal-shock, dark eyes bulging, lips twitching, faces bright. In those cases Sahaal took them in his claws and carried them away, slipping down through layers of debris to secret, sheltered places where they could recover their voices at leisure.

  Then the screaming could begin.

  And then he could ask his questions.

  One of the women — deluded, perhaps — dropped to her knees and began to pray, some mumbled litany to the Emperor. Angered by her piety, Sahaal sliced away her fingers one by one, enjoying the change in her demeanour. Holy fools, it would seem, could scream as well as sing.

  One of the men tried to fight him. Briefly.

  The child... the child had cried for his mother. He'd screamed and blubbed and wailed, though when Sahaal leaned down to fix him with a helmed gaze the tears stopped abruptly, surprising him, and the youth's hand flickered with the bright shape of a switchblade, lunging from below. It seemed that innocence had little business in the underhive.

  (The blade had snapped. So had Sahaal's patience.)

  And yes, now perhaps he could reflect upon the responses to his work. He could skulk here in the ruins of this derelict factory, on the cusp of a deserted settlement, its floors long since collapsed into the abyss, and consider his palette of fear like a painter scheming to mix new colours.

  But always, always such distractions were tempered by hate, by focused rage, and by the spectral possibility of failure.

  What, he asked himself, had he learnt from his murderous forays? What had he discovered from all his many questions, all his many descriptions?

  Nothing. Nothing of the Corona Nox, at least.

  He'd gone to pains to illustrate the spiral electoo sported by his quarry — carving it lovingly on each victim's skin — but not one had recognised it. He'd described the thieves' shaggy furs, their crude goggles, even the unknown word — TEQO — daubed on their transport, though it was familiar to none. Sahaal did not for a moment consider that his victims might have been withholding: one by one their defences cracked, their sanity shattered, but their ignorance remained intact.

  No, he'd learned nothing of the Corona. His revelation had concerned something entirely less pleasing.

  Since awaking on this nocturnal world something had eaten at him, gnawing at his psyche. When he took his twelfth victim — a bearded man with copper fletches across his brows and rags draping his wiry form — Sahaal's curiosity had finally overcome him. He'd gritted his teeth, hooked one elegant claw into the wretch's arm, played the bladed edge along the cusp of exposed bone, and asked the question that haunted him.

  'What year is this?'

  Despite the pain, despite even the terror that had gripped him since first he was attacked, the man had paused with a look of almost comical incredulity.

  'W-w-what?'

  'The year!' he roared, rippling the waters of the sludge-lake to which he'd brought his captive. He raised the claws of his gauntlet above the man's groin, poised to clench. It was a crude form of threat, but he had to know. 'What year, worm!'

  'Nine-eight-six!' the man wailed, all thoughts of bemusement obliterated. 'Nine-eight-six!'

  Sahaal growled, absorbing this unwelcome information. An absence of six centuries was far greater than he'd feared. Adrift upon the trance in the Umbrea Insidior, he had been resolutely unable to estimate how long he had spent in silent incarceration. Time moved differently in the warp, and a day's slumber in its coiling belly could easily affect a month's passage in crude reality.

  Six hundred years was beyond his most fearful approximation. In a fit of pique he began to bring down his claw, venting his anger on his captive.

  And then an ugly afterthought arose, and he paused to form words in the plebeian Low Gothic tongue, so appropriately favoured by the underhive filth. 'The thirty-second millennium? Yes? Answer me!'

  For a fraction of a second, the man's lips curled in a dumbfounded, confused smile.

  'Wh—'

  Sahaal flexed the claws.

  'No! No! N-no! F-forty-first!' the words rushed out like an avalanche, jumbled and formless. 'Forty-first millennium, year nine-eight-six! Forty-first! Sweet Emperor's blood, forty-first!'

  The bottom fell from Sahaal's mind.

  He killed the man quickly, too distracted to even relish the moment.

  He returned to the factory he'd adopted as his lair.

  He scuttled in the dark and brooded. He vented his anger on the shattered masonry of the ancient building, and when the violence overcame him he peeled off one mighty shoulder-guard and began slowly, precisely, cutting grooves into the exposed flesh of his arm.

  It didn't help.

  One hundred centuries had passed.

  It was the bodies that brought answers, finally.

  He had taken them, all twelve, from where they died: dismembered and brutalised, hung high from stanchions in public places and busy roads, emptying their thickening fluids upon the debris below. This was not savagery on his part, nor some crude announcement of territory —
but as vital a part of his master's doctrine as was the attack itself.

  'Kill a thousand men,' the lesson had run, his master's solemn voice echoing through the warship Vastitas Vi-tris, 'and let no man bear witness. What have you achieved? Who will ever know? Who will ever fear you? Who will ever respect or obey you?

  'But kill a single man, and let the world see. Hang him high. Cut him deep. Bleed him dry. And then... Disappear.

  'Now. Who will ever know? Everyone. Who will ever fear you? Why, everyone! Who will ever respect you, who will ever obey you? Everyone!

  'These humans, their imaginations are strong. Kill a thousand men and they will hate you. Kill a million men and they will queue to face you. But kill a single man and they will see monsters and devils in every shadow. Kill a dozen men and they will scream and wail in the night, and they shall feel not hatred, but fear.

  'This is the way of obedience, my sons. They are panicky, gossiping beasts, these humans. It serves us to allow them to be so.'

  On the third day, when he had crept through the ductcrawls beneath the local settlements and listened to the villagers' fearful rumours, when two separate posses had ridden out from Spitcreek with furtive eyes and crude weapons to catch the killer, when his fits and rages had exhausted him, there came cautious footfalls into his lair. He watched the invader from above, irritated that his sanctuary should be defiled by such clumsy, thoughtless steps.

  The man was dressed strangely, even to Sahaal's eye, sporting a robe of white and red grids. Not some flimsy ragsheet, this, but expensively tailored and elaborately decorated, hung with gold and crystal pendants. Small cables looped delicately through the stitches at the sleeves and collar, and where his flesh showed — pallid and puffy — the wires burrowed into the man's skin, unbroken lines like capillaries. More startling still was his face — what little remained of it — with its near-total coverage by augmetic devices, steel-sheet plating and bristling, spiny sensors. Both eyes were gone, replaced in messy cavities by mismatching bionics, a thick layer of pus and infection marking their boundaries. A duct coiled over his shoulder like unruly hair, and the soft lines of his lips were broken by ragged scars, as if his mouth had once been sealed shut then broken open. Rebreather tubes writhed, hooked into sockets on his chin and neck, like train tracks bisecting his face. Dermis-circuitry patterned his throat, vanishing into the folds of his robes which, on closer inspection, concealed also the hard edges and uncertain outlines of more mechanical devices.

  His movements were jerky but precise — like a grounded canary — and Sahaal judged him more machine than man. He would have remained hidden, content to let this unthinking drone remain ignorant of his presence, but for a single detail:

  Brandished in one metal-knuckled hand, the man waved before him a sheet of parchment bearing a bold, ink-blotted image, catching at Sahaal's attention and sending adrenaline pounding through his body: a single unbroken spiral, dissected by a jagged stripe. The thief s electoo.

  He worked his silent way down towards the intruder without pause, considering his best course of action, fighting excitement. Despite the robe and decoration, the interloper bore all the signs of being little more than some vacuous servitor, obeying whatever simple commands its master had provided. It was therefore with little sense of threat, and a great glut of hope, that Sahaal installed himself in a shadowed recess to watch.

  'I know you are there,' the man said, startling him, voice as lifeless as the lens-eyes that regarded him, focused despite the dark. 'I sensed movement before even I entered this place.' The figure twitched its head. 'Your stealth is commendable. Het-het-het-het...'

  It took Sahaal a moment to realise that the man's harsh chirruping was his mechanical excuse for laughter, and he bunched his muscles in the shadows, temper ignited. This was hardly the behaviour of a mere servitor.

  The man squinted up at him, brows twitching around metal studs. 'I cannot see you well,' he said, lips brandishing their ghoulish smile. 'What are you?'

  'I am your death,' Sahaal said, patience expiring, and pounced.

  The man was heavier than he had anticipated — his mechanical portions more extensive even than they appeared — but he went down with satisfying ease. Sahaal bowled him to the floor with a single bound, claws pushing hard through flesh and cable, pinning him. The diagram fluttered from his hand, the connections of his shoulder severed.

  The man did not scream.

  'You will tell me what you know of the thief,' Sahaal growled, voxcaster blending his smooth syntax with dangerous, reptilian tones. 'The filth with the spiral on his skin. Who is he? Where is he?'

  The man smiled. With half-metre claws pinioning him to the ground, with razor edges playing across bone and muscle, with a thick paste of blood and servo-oil soaking into his decorous robes, he smiled.

  Sahaal twisted the knives.

  Het-het-het-het...

  Sahaal fought the urge to cut out his tongue.

  'My name is Pahvulti,' the man said uninvited, shivering with amusement, eye lenses revolving. 'I think we shall be friends.'

  Sahaal almost killed him then, infuriated by the scum's audacity. He jerked a claw free and lashed at his face, ripping across cables and skin. A rebreather tube snickered apart with a hiss and the lens of his left eye shattered, its sutured edges bleeding from fresh sores. Sahaal stopped short — fractionally — of a killing blow, and it required all his effort to force down the rage in his mind.

  'The thief!' he bellowed. 'Or you die in pain!'

  'I doubt that,' the man said, calm to the point of insanity, 'on two counts. First... I don't believe you foolish enough to kill the one person who recognises the symbol you've been slicing onto all your victims. And second, het-het-het, I don't feel pain. I regard it as an inconvenience I'm better off without.'

  Sahaal all but screamed. Did the fool not know how easily he could be crushed? Did he not know what manner of man — what manner of warrior — he directed his insolence towards?

  As if reading his thoughts, the worm's one remaining eye twitched across Sahaal's armour, taking in every detail of his colossal form. 'I daresay that painlessness is something to which you can relate,' he grinned. 'Space Marines are notoriously robust.'

  Later, in a place so silent that every spoken word was returned to its speaker's ears in a spectrum of glassy echoes, Sahaal folded his arms and fought for calm.

  The man-machine Pahvulti had been crucified. With jagged splints of debris forced between the bones of his arms and a tight cord securing his neck to the slumped pillar Sahaal had chosen as his anchor, he should by rights seem a pitiful thing: stripped naked of his robes, bound with chains and barbed cables, slashed and bleeding in a dozen places.

  Alas, his situation did not appear to have dented his enthusiasm, nor silenced his laughter.

  '...and at one time, het-het-het, I might have prayed to the Omnissiah,' he cackled, 'but no longer, no, no. Not Pahvulti. They tried to turn me, you see? They said the puritens had rejected my flesh. Het-het-het. Rejected! No! It made me strong! It made me wise!'

  'Be silent, confound you!' Sahaal's temper was by now comprehensively frayed.

  'Are you not interested, Space Marine, in how your new friend came to find you? Are you not interested in my knowledge?'

  'Call me a Space Marine once more, worm, and I'll cut out your tongue and choke you on it.'

  'Het-het-het, no, no... Not my tongue. Not while I know what I know.'

  'The spiral electoo? Who wears it? His name!'

  Het-het-het...

  Sahaal hissed his anger through the grille of his helm and hooked a claw into what little meat remained of his captive's belly. It was a hopeless gesture — the man had demonstrated nothing but contempt for the notion of torture — but at the very least the moist noises of slicing helped to calm Sahaal's mood.

  Never before had a mere human occupied a position of such influence over him. Pahvulti refused to divulge what he knew until Sahaal vowed to spare him, and to offe
r him such an oath would shatter every code Sahaal believed, tear to shreds every ounce of his dignity and sully every corner of his authority. Under other circumstances he would have laughed at the very suggestion.

  Nor could he merely make, then break, the oath: Pahvulti had made it clear that he would deliver his information only from afar, well beyond Sahaal's punitive grasp.

  For the twentieth time since bringing his captive to this dark, deep well, Sahaal cursed Pahvulti's name, cursed the ill fortune that had gifted him with such leverage, and cursed the warpshit filth that had stolen the Corona Nox and placed him in this situation in the first place.

  Zso Sahaal was not accustomed to fear or uncertainty. His natural response to each was to grow angry, and in his increasingly violent gashes at Pahvulti's guts, some small portion of his venom was assuaged.

  Until—

  'Het-het-het... not that it bothers me, Space Marine, but you should be aware...' Pahvulti made a show of grinning, '...that impervious to pain I might be, but invulnerable I am not. Continue to cut me and I am eighty-seven-point-six per cent certain that I shall perish.' His remaining lens-eye twinkled. 'Just thought you should know. Het-het-het.'

  He was a calculus logi, or at least had been. Over the previous hours Sahaal had been treated to the man's life story at least three times — a repetition which was not helping his mood.

  Pahvulti had begun as a human savant-computer of the Adeptus Mechanicus — whose brittle thoughts had aided administrations and diplomats, tacticians and explorators all across the sector. On the day of his fiftieth birthday he was presented with the highest accolade reserved for his kind: the puritens lobotomy. This ritualised surgery removed from his scarred brain what little trace of humanity remained, amputated his subconscious, and burned away his pain.

  It should have made him pure, mechanical, perfect. It should have brought him closer to his god, and sheltered his weak biology from the predations of temptation. To say that it failed would be a quite spectacular understatement.