Cuspseal was all but back to normal within two hours, and the only factor of any note to have changed was the spiralling determination of a single woman to investigate exactly what was going on in the underhive.
'You want what?'
'You heard me. A squad of twenty men. Fully armed, fully armoured.'
'I see.' Commander Orodai sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers, raising an ironic eyebrow. 'Anything else? A set of wings?'
Mita waved a dismissive hand. She'd been too patronised by far less pleasant individuals to be bothered by Orodai's sarcasm.
'I think the men will suffice, for now. And a vehicle, of course.'
He nodded with false earnestness. 'Naturally.'
Orodai's office was a barren space, windowless, made all the less welcoming by the indistinct rusding of servitors in the shadows beyond his desk. Evidently the commander travelled often between the precincts beneath his control, and only his staff of mindless scribes remained constant.
'Save your sarcasm, commander. Whether it pleases you or not, this request carries the full weight of the Inquisition's authority, an—'
'Ha, yes. And is therefore not a "request" at all. It's a demand, girl, and you'd be better off calling it by name. I haven't time for your niceties.'
'Call it what you want. It's all the same in the end.'
Orodai regarded her beneath heavy brows, as if weighing her character by her looks alone. Judging by the taste of his thoughts, he didn't regard either with fondness.
'Let us pretend,' he said, 'that I give you what you want. What sort of madness are you planning on leading my men into?'
'We go to hunt the killer, commander.' This time it was her turn to cock an eyebrow. 'You remember? The one you invited our aid in capturing?'
'I remember. And I remember inviting aid to spare my men the trouble, not to draw them away from more important du—'
'Ah... Then you consider the Inquisition fit only for insignificant pursuits?'
'That's not what I—'
'But you just said as much.' She crossed her arms. 'If I were less charitable, I might consider that assertion to border on the heretical...'
She left the veiled threat dangling, watching him carefully.
He knew he was beaten. And in his thoughts — which of course he believed to be entirely private — he cursed her venomously. Inwardly, Mita joined him, briefly hating herself for steamrollering the objections of such a fundamentally honest man. She assuaged her guilt by reminding herself of the mission's importance. She could brook no concessions, no compromises.
'Fine,' Orodai snapped, hunching forward in his seat. 'Have the damned men. But how you plan to find a single killer amongst a multitude is a trick I'd love to know.'
She half smiled, dipping in a bow of genuine gratitude. 'I have my ways.'
'You'll need them,' he said, unimpressed. 'That quake started below. It's going to be messy down there, girl. Messy and mad.'
Orodai's predictions were unerringly accurate.
It was as if the subterranean blast had expelled not only fire and ash, but some indiscernible smog of insanity. In every settlement around the ruined husk of Hemiatown, across every sumpflow and debris-dune, madness had spilled out from the shadows to reclaim its domain.
Most visible amongst the agents of lunacy were the Purgatists — sinister preachers enmeshed in suits of barbs and bones, lashing at the groaning crowds with hook-tipped whipcords. They prophesied the Emperor's return in a hail of blood and smoke, and attested in crazed tones to his wrath. In the city above Mita had noticed advocates of the movement on street corners and mezzanine junctions: moderates with earnest voices and scarred faces, the marks of quiet zeal and self-flagellation.
Not so in the undercity, where eccentricity bred delusion and piety begot fanaticism.
The Purgatists here yelped and howled, struck at the willing crowd, set alight pyres containing ''mutants'' and ''witches'', and cast quivering fingers towards where Herniatown had once stood, citing the Emperor's splendid venom as the force that had purged so utterly the Glacier Rat filth.
Passing by the lunatic zealots, Mita couldn't prevent a guilty thought from seeping through her defences: Is insanity the price of faith?
The deranged-but-pious were not alone in seizing the prospects presented by the explosion. To the gangs the explosion marked not only a territorial opportunity in the Glacier Rats' wake, but a power vacuum. Total war had come to the underhive.
The crackle of distant gunfire struggled to be heard above the shouts of combatants and the thunder of collapsing buildings, gutted by fire or otherwise undermined. On several occasions gangers themselves, flamboyantly dressed in the colours of their pack, appeared beside the debrisflows to snap off a few optimistic rounds at the vindictors in their trio of Salamanders, before vanishing into their warrens like ghosts. Mita thought it somehow exotic: like jewelled wildlife glimpsed at a forest's edge.
The vindictors, of course, endured these sightings with less sentimentality, taking turns to rise into the Salamanders' open-topped diases, vying to pick off those unfortunates unable to seek cover. Mita endured the noisy distractions poorly, struggling to remain focused.
In less enlightened times a hunter might follow a trail of prints, or spend days pursuing rumours and sightings. To Mita such crudities were unthinkable: the maelstrom of emotion that comprised the psychic environment was as perceptible to her as the scorched earth of its roads or the buckled struts of its walls. The shadow she sought — an oilslick of malign influence and, yes... yes, she was certain, the taint — wound its way throughout like a spectral cord. Whether it represented the killer's exact trail or not was irrelevant, its loci were places he had been, its tentacles were the paths of people he had stalked. Without a clue as to who or what the killer was, she nonetheless tracked his flavour, she followed the strings of his emotion, blossoming and nebulising in his wake. He was angry.
Angry, and cold and bitter.
'Right at the junction,' she instructed the Salamander's pilot, eyelids closed, and watched the manoeuvre through a spectrum that employed neither light nor colour.
The trail had led them on a merry dance already, and she dimly suspected the Preafects thought she was inventing as she went. She couldn't care less.
Their first destination, against Sergeant Varitens's noisy protests, had been the perimeter of the contested zone itself, where Herniatown had once stood. That pulverised area of metallic slag and scorched earth — its walls and ceilings presenting not a single straight line or right angle in their fractured surfaces — had clamoured in her mind with the darkness she'd been seeking, and briefly she'd thought the killer must have died in the inferno. He'd been present, she had no doubt of that. When Herniatown belched itself out of existence he'd been there, at the thick of whatever action had transpired, and she considered the possibility of his death with an uncomfortable thrill of disappointment.
But, no... The trail had reappeared, coal-black, leading away from the ruined zone into the darkness of the western caverns. She led the convoy away from the petty gang squabbles, away from the central settlements with their vestiges of civilisation and their ranting Purgatists, and she resumed the hunt with guilty pleasure.
It had not taken the Preafects long to grasp the reality of their leader's psychic gifts. Mita guessed that had it not been for Cog's silent presence, great machine-hands clenching and unclenching around the autocannon trigger on the tank, their regard for her authority might have been less complete. As it was, they did what she told them when she told them, throwing nervous glances towards the giant — and if they did so without the salutes they would have offered their own commanders it was a detail she was happy to forgo. The one remaining irritation was the interminable mumbling of Sergeant Varitens, who insisted on standing beside her, arms crossed, as if keeping her in his sights could keep her (clearly heretical) mutation in check.
She huffed at the off-putting mussitation — a prayer,
she guessed — and refocused, fighting the exhaustion that such intense meditation inevitably caused.
The killer's influence wended its way through a knot of twisting alleys — a filigree of black and blue on the very cusp of her psychic sight — and she guided the pilot through with a calm voice, ignoring the hammering of opportunistic bullets on the tank's sides. As the vehicle clambered from the labyrinth onto a rising steppe of detritus, tracks struggling for purchase, an uncomfortable silence settled, leaving her alone with only the sound of the Salamanders' engines.
Strange shapes loomed in the dark, and at first she mistook them for mighty oaks, grown beyond normal scale, their branches rising above, ghostly lights adorning their tips. Only when perspective adjusted itself in her mind that her eyes decoded what they were seeing.
Vast ducts, each a hundred metres across, littered with scaffold and piping, branching in myriad patterns between floor and cavernous ceiling. At odd points on their colossal trunks hellish lights blazed angry red, steam geysering from every rent, and Mita realised with a stab of amazement that she was seeing thermal ducts, siphoning heat from the planet's crust where even the frozen fluctuations of its weather could not hope to diminish it. From below the entire hive drank the warmth of Equixus, and as the vehicles passed by she found herself humbled, forgetting for an instant the trail she followed.
Varitens's mutterings finally snapped both introspection and temper.
'Sergeant, for the love of the Emperor, would you be quiet.'
He glared, helmet clenched between nervous fingers.
'It's come to a bad thing,' he grumbled, 'when a soldier's denied a prayer for his soul.'
'You feel the need to pray?' she scowled, curling a lip. 'You have twenty men with unfeasibly large weapons standing right behind you, sergeant. What's to be afraid of?'
At this his grizzled mouth twitched in a pale imitation of a smile. Even afflicted by terrors of his own, the prospect of highlighting her ignorance was too delicious for him to pass up.
'This here is the Steel Forest, girl,' he said, nodding out into the canopy of tangled pipes and pilot lights.
'You told me you didn't know any names.'
'And I don't — unless they happen to be the sorts of places it's best to avoid.' He turned towards the viewing slot, glaring out into the dark. 'This is where you'll find the Shadowkin. And they don't much like intruders.'
PART TWO
KINGDOM OF FEAR
Perhaps you believe yourself blameless. Perhaps you have acted, as you claim, in the interests of your people. Perhaps, in that respect, your guilt is negligible.
But I tell you this: there is strife enough in this galaxy without the ambitions of those who would construct empires of their own. Selfless or not, there is room only for one Emperor in this Imperium!
Judgement of Madam Inquisitor Trais Spirrus at the trial of Grigor "The Prosperous", short-lived ruler of the Dactylis system.
Zso Sahaal
His mind drifted, detached.
He had not slept in four days, and whilst it was true that the artifices of his enhanced brain and body could maintain alertness almost indefinitely, already the nagging seeds of exhaustion twitched at the back of his mind, threatening his efficacy. In this strange place he had conducted himself with unparalleled caution, never once allowing his vigilance to slip.
This, finally, in the lair of his newfound servants, had changed. Riding a wave of his own authority, surrounded by those who would no more allow him harm than kill themselves, Sahaal at last — mercifully — took the opportunity to rest.
They were named the Shadowkin, and they worshipped him. The fools.
He slipped into the arms of half-sleep with an eagerness he had not expected, and drowned in meditation.
He had been uncertain, at first. Confronted by a horde of black-shrouded peasants, creeping from the shadows in the wake of Herniatown's purgation, he had nearly slaughtered them without thought, coasting on the fury of what Nikhae had told him.
The Corona was gone!
His prize was lost to him, and as he stumbled directionless from the killing fields of Herniatown, these Shadowkin had mistaken him for a warrior of the Emperor.
They had seen pictoslates, perhaps, or illuminations in ancient scriptures. The Emperor had created the Space Marines: that much they knew. He had fashioned their primarchs, modelled their Legions, dispatched them to crusade in his name. They knew little of the intricacies of Imperial history, but they could not question the benevolence of such angelic warriors. A Space Marine was beyond imperfection.
They had never heard of the Horus Heresy. Sahaal wasn't surprised. The churning propaganda machines of the Imperium could hardly countenance the popular exposure of its own flawed past.
In the haze of his trance, Sahaal mused upon revealing the truth to his new acolytes, then discounted the possibility... To learn that half the Emperor's angels had turned to the dark fires of Chaos: to these under-hive scum such realities would seem ludicrous. Impossible. Cruel.
Sahaal was no more part of the Emperor's vast congregation than were the xenos that infested the galaxy, and it sickened him that the wide-eyed men and women of the Shadowkin should mistake him so easily. It was true that the seductions of Chaos also held little sway over him — he considered such metaphysical corruption a sign of weakness, of lack of focus — but his contempt for the Emperor matched that of any Chaotic anti-zealot nonetheless, and the Shadowkin's mistaken identity was difficult to swallow.
They saw his power armour, his narrow-eyed helm, his wedge-like shoulderguards, his jewelled bolter. They saw the intricate heraldry of his Legion, and whilst they could not hope to recognise it, they understood that such icons had ever been the remit of the Adeptus Astartes. They had watched him single handedly wipe out a nest of their most iniquitous enemies, and any doubts as to his righteousness were immediately expunged.
They saw him, and they saw a Space Marine, and so they saw a reflection of their god. He had almost killed them for it. And yet their devotion had warmed him — as mindless as that of a machine — and slowly, with growing momentum, his thoughts turned to another, shrewder path.
Herniatown had burned behind him, Nikhae's words — 'I-it's gone... It's sold!' — had scorched his mind, and the Shadowkin had fallen to his feet and praised him. Their worship had filled him with pleasure — pleasure borne upon a lie, but pleasure nonetheless — and slowly, hating himself, resisting the bile in his throat, he had said the one thing that could assure their loyalty. 'Ave Imperator.'
They had brought him to their lair, they had worshipped him, they had given him food and sanctuary, and so he slept.
Adrift upon the trance, he remembered Nikhae's screaming face as slice by slice he was skinned alive. 'Where is the package?'
'I told you, Zagrifs blood! It's gone!'
'Gone where?'
'Sold! W-warpspoor and piss! Y-you sh... shit! Sold!'
'Sold to whom? Speak, or I'll take your eyes.'
'No! N-not th—'
'Sold to whom?'
'Slake! The Collective! I swear it, Throne-as-my-witness! Slake!'
'What is this... "Slake"?'
'I don't... n-nuh...'
'Your eyes, Nikhae. Do you need both?'
'S-sweet Terra, a-a middleman! A go-between for upcity merchants! Slake!'
'Where is he, Nikhae? Where did you find him?'
'I didn't, h—'
'Where is he!'
'I don't know! H-he found us! H-he knew the ship would fall from the sky! He told us to be ready! He commissioned us, warp dammit!'
'He knew?'
'Yes!'
'He ordered the package by name?'
'Yes!'
'That is not possible.'
'I don't know how, but he kn—'
'You're lying to me.'
He was still screaming when there was no skin left for Sahaal to cut away.
Before he planted the fuelcell that destroyed the Glacier R
ats' lair, Sahaal vented his rage upon the meaty husk that had once been Nikhae, expelling his fury on muscle and sinew and bone. It had made quite a mess.
The Corona was gone. He had a new target.
And like a dream, in that moment, when he staggered exhausted from Herniatown already planning this new hunt, the solution had delivered itself like a gift from the Four Gods.
The Shadowkin. An army of slaves, bound to him in devotion for the very thing he hated the most.
They would help him find Slake — whoever, whatever, he was.
The trance had lasted some four hours, he judged, when his slumbering senses awoke him. Someone was approaching.
The Shadowkin lair clung to the trunk of one of the great stacks that comprised the Steel Forest, jutting from its girth like a fungus, and Sahaal had found its fortification impressive. As the frightened mob had conducted him aboard their iron-pulleyed elevators he had observed their regimented movements, their well maintained weapons, their silent obedience. Their discipline was impressive, their focus commendable and their arsenal — in the midst of such squalor — fearsome indeed.
They were a tribe of zealots, he had quickly learned, puritans that had rejected the wickedness of the hive centuries before, sinking down to the depths of the underhive where they could pursue their veneration unhindered. They saw in their Emperor a divine judge, in whose name iniquity was purged and impurity burned away. Through long decades their worship had intertwined itself with a morbid indulgence: deifying their lord in his aspect as Death — the ultimate leveller — and revelling in the melancholic symbols of mortality.
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