Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  Today, attention was something she could do without.

  To her great relief the retinue was absent when she reached Kaustus's chambers. He stood amongst a gaggle of macabre servitor-attendants and skull-drones, meticulously fastening his power armour and layering his magnificent robes. Up until the moment that a hovering arcocherub — a baby's corpse riddled with preservative machinery and cogitation engines — settled his mask over his tusked features, he appeared utterly bored by the whole procedure.

  Ignored in the doorway, Mita found herself reflecting upon how differently he wore his armour to the fiend that stalked her nightmares, that blue'black monstrosity from the underhive. As an alumnus of the Inquisitorial scholastia she knew more than most about the elaborate biological changes that the warriors of the Adeptus Astartes — the Emperor's Space Marines — underwent. Such things were shrouded in mysticism, and the mere knowledge that each Marine started life as a lowly human marked her as the recipient of privileged secrets. Nonetheless, the specifics of such alterations were beyond her, and she had imagined that, like Kaustus, such warriors wore their armour as she wore a cloak: the fastenings more complex, perhaps, the fabric more arcane, but ''clothing'' nonetheless.

  And yet the Night Lord had moved like his armour was his skin, unencumbered, his movement recalling liquid in its smooth, roiling reactions.

  Compared to that shadowed figure Kaustus's motions abruptly seemed cumbersome, and Mita marvelled to find herself so unimpressed by him where previously she had thought him awesome.

  'My lord,' she said, announcing herself. The flock of servitors dispersed quietly, their task complete, and Mita noticed with chagrin that her master too had chosen a scarlet and white ensemble, albeit far grander than her own.

  'Interrogator. Good.'

  'You sent for me, my lord?'

  'I did. I've decided it's safer to keep you where I can see you. I think we shall spend the day together.'

  He sounded almost cheery. Mita feigned a smile.

  Governor Zagrif surprised Mita by being neither old, corpulent, sinister or pompous. She'd met a small but illustrative number of Imperial commanders on other worlds, and in her experience the post bred one of either melancholia or megalomania. To a psyker, such things were as palpable as girth, height or clothing, and she failed to detect either in Imperial Commander Cinnavar Zagrif.

  He was skinny and short, dressed entirely in white. As she and Kaustus approached his straight-backed throne, flanked by bronze combat servitors like toy soldiers, he regarded her with a watery-eyed expression of pleasure. Dwarfed beneath the vast heraldry of a familial tapestry — crossed sword and sceptre upon a dappled ice-field, crested by a crescent moon and a ring of stars — he seemed the very opposite of authoritative. Mita's expectations were utterly confounded: amongst them all the one thing she had failed to anticipate was a softly spoken man of her own age, with an astral presence that was profoundly dull. When his subconscious flickered a brief tendril of lechery towards her it came almost as a relief.

  Almost.

  'Kaustus!' he exclaimed, rising with an outstretched hand. 'What news from the deepest darkest depths?' He giggled at his own alliteration, like a child reciting a nursery rhyme.

  To Mita's astonishment Kaustus returned the handshake.

  'Nothing troublesome, Cinnavar.'

  Mita almost choked. The governor didn't notice.

  'Good, good.' He glanced towards her. 'And who is this? A consort, perhaps?' He nudged Kaustus mischievously. 'I thought better of you!'

  Mita held her breath, waiting for the inquisitor to chop the man in two for his insolence. When he merely chuckled and waved the insinuation aside, she was left wondering if it was she, or he, who had gone insane.

  'I'm afraid not, Cinnavar. This is my interrogator.'

  Mita bowed formally, doing her best to ignore the smog of promiscuity ebbing from the governor's mind. It was one thing to suspect someone of undressing you with their eyes but quite another to share the experience.

  'And to what do we owe this pleasure?' The governor rubbed his hands, eyes flitting to meet the inquisitor's. 'Is she here to help us with the lock?'

  For an instant — a single horrific moment — Mita felt Kaustus's emotion. Where before he had presented a solid ball of impenetrable thought, impossible for her to examine or invade, abruptly his defences fell, and what boiled beneath was rage.

  But it was only an instant, as sudden as it was intense, and his mind — whatever had caused it to flex so venomously — was once more locked away beneath layers of self control.

  'No,' he said.

  And was that a blush of guilt swelling on the governor's psyche? Had he said something he shouldn't have? Mita grit her teeth at the uncertainties, the secrets. Something was going on here, something she knew nothing about. What was ''the lock''?

  'Fine,' the governor said, struggling to seem dismissive. 'Good, good.'

  'I thought the interrogator might appreciate a view of your collection,' Kaustus said, voice tight. 'That is all.'

  The governor nodded with the look of a man who has narrowly escaped an unpleasant fate, and gestured towards a set of painted doors to one side. 'B-by all means. Please. By all means.'

  Mita found herself regarded by governor and inquisitor alike.

  'My lord?' she said.

  'Through there,' Kaustus grunted, nodding at the doors.

  She pushed them open with a strange sense of foreboding, feeling like some performing animal, and found herself on a narrow bridge, enclosed on all sides by thick plasplex. Even through the ice and settled snow that patterned the tunnel's outer surfaces she could see that the causeway stretched between the hive's central peak — in which the throne room skulked — and a lesser tower, rising parallel from the shadowed depths. She crossed the abyss with a lurch of nausea, horrified at the vertiginous chasm below her feet, and it was only Kaustus's quiet footsteps at her heel that kept her from crying out, or clinging to the handrail for her life.

  The tunnel ended in a second set of doors and, with an impatient nod from her master, she pushed her way through.

  And stopped.

  In all of the palace — a maze of jewelled stairways and iMricately frescoed chapels, cloistered archways hung with tapestries of spun gold and elaborate congresia sporting sculptures of alabaster and onyx — it was difficult to imagine encountering anything that might shatter the atmosphere of perpetual, unyielding opulence. Nonetheless, Mita stepped through the painted doorway and felt her knees weaken.

  'The governor has a fondness for curios,' Kaustus muttered, in explanation.

  It was like a gallery. A bazaar. A treasure trove. And it was vast.

  There were windows marking the entire periphery. Tiny reinforced portals, perhaps, but windows nonetheless: a subtle symbol of wealth which implied this one chamber, this circular cavern with its sky-blue dome and pearlescent columns, stretched the entire diameter of its tower.

  And within it?

  She'd never seen such measures. At close intervals, raised on silver plinths and bordered by bright illuminators, the governor's collection of antiquities and valuables could have easily held her spellbound for weeks. Books, archeotech, pictslates, sculptures, pickled beasts, jewels, antiques... At every angle there stood some priceless rarity, some article of unthinkable value, and Mita's blood raced to see them all. She tottered forwards as if drunk, and extended a hand towards a nearby exhibit — a great emerald containing at its heart the shadowy form of a tiny lizard.

  'No touching.' Kaustus chided behind her, like a parent slapping his child's wrists. A gloved finger gestured vaguely upwards, drawing her eye towards the ceiling. Set in a wide ring around the plinth, like spotlights with narrow apertures, a bevy of lasguns glared down upon her, crude servos tracking every movement. At their centre, like some grotesque trophy displayed at the heart of a spider's web, a disembodied human head fixed its baleful eyes — long since replaced by compound optics — upon the tip of her out
stretched hand.

  'Security servitors.' Kaustus shrugged, voice bored. Mita noted without surprise — and only a small shiver of revulsion — that similar effigies, rotting flesh hanging from slack bones, gazed down upon each and every item in Zagrif s collection.

  She pulled back her hand slowly, uncomfortably aware of the machine intelligence above. At some arbitrary point its attention seemed to dwindle, as if no longer judging her a threat, and the lasguns returned to a neutral spread with a soft hiss.

  'Effective,' she said, controlling her voice.

  'Indeed.'

  She turned towards the remainder of the room, her eyes drawn towards an accumulation of spotlights on one side, and a dais higher than any other. She took a step towards it, curious, and stopped.

  Something uncoiled in her brain like a great spider, scuttling between uncertainties, and she knew.

  'He's here...' she whispered, fists clenching, head jerking from left to right, seeking that hunched shape, that midnight form, those burning red eyes.

  'What did you say?' Kaustus said, his voice so close to her ear that she jumped.

  'H-he's here! The Night Lord! I feel him! He's in here!'

  And then something sharp tugged against the fabric of her arm, and before she could glimpse down to see what had punctured her skin the lights of the gallery dimmed in her eyes, the sky-blue dome clouded over, and her consciousness spiralled away.

  Zso Sahaal

  Zso Sahaal sat upon a throne of fur and bone, armoured fingers steepled before him, and brooded on past and future.

  Tomorrow he would strike. A guildhall, perhaps or some other Administratum stronghold some communicatory centre where the Imperial fools would keep their mutant slaves.

  It had been the witch that had given him the idea. Mutants and slaves... Yes.

  That was tomorrow. The future. The first step upon a road to redemption.

  As for the past, as for that swirl of violence and chaos that had brought him here, to this smog-thick place, as for the madness that left him seated in darkness upon a throne of bone, as for yesterday...

  They had carried him.

  Following the battle of the Steel Forest the tribe had lifted him from the debris where the witch had struck him down, placed him carefully on a litter, and borne him up to their secret platforms amongst the canopies of the heat vents.

  In retrospect the treatment was as galling as it was comforting. True, he found himself amongst a community that would go to any length to keep him from harm... but to be so manhandled — and by devotees of the withered Emperor, no less! Sahaal had awoken with a suppressed shiver of disgust at the thought.

  But then, his memories were thick with ugliness already.

  The witch, the witch... She had struck him to the floor with a single flex of her powers, like a bomb between his eyes, and he shivered that such a slight being should hold such power over him. The witch. The bitch. He had not expected to face psykers.

  Steeling himself — disgruntled by the need to sink so low — he breathed a reluctant prayer to the Dark Gods. The ruinous powers had always been allies to his cause — enemies of his enemies, but never his friends — and even now, when he needed their patronage, he shivered at the prospect of openly courting their involvement. If the deities of the warp resented his reluctance they gave no sign of it, within instants a dark stirring played at the edge of his senses.

  He would not be unprepared for the witch a second time.

  Had the Imperium truly fallen so far from its much-vaunted light during his absence? Had the Carrion God truly allowed such deviants to enter his service ungoverned? Sahaal could hardly despise the impurity of mutation — the gods to whom he had just appealed thrived on such things, after all — but it was a needle of hypocrisy that fed his hatred nonetheless. The mutant stood for everything the Imperium reviled — impurity, uncertainty, vulnerability, corruptibility — and yet here they were, put to work, devils made useful. Just another sign of the Emperor's weakness. Another symptom of his unsuitability for deification.

  How long before these psykers too were made scapegoats, blamed for actions that were both sanctioned and encouraged, just as Sahaal's master had been?

  Oh, my master...

  Konrad Curze. The Night Haunter. The Shadowed Martyr. Antecedent of the Corona Nox. Sahaal breathed his mentor's names with choked reverence and, as ever, found himself calmed and angered in equal parts.

  'We shall repay their insult yet,' he whispered, voice lost to the darkness of his helm.

  He returned his thoughts to the witch, flexing his fingers introspectively. She had tasted his thoughts. She could find him again — of that he had no doubt. She had known what he was.

  And he, equally, had seen her true self.

  She had worn it emblazoned on her collar, a thing so inconspicuous he had barely noticed it at the time, and only in the fog of enforced sleep had the symbol come to the fore of his mind: an embroidered ''I'', bisected three times by bars of black and silver, with a tiny skull fashioned at the crux of the central bar.

  The Inquisition. Hunting him. He had no time for such distractions.

  A day had since passed, and the Shadowkin lair within the Steel Forest had been deserted at his command. Centuries of tradition, long decades of territorial security, had perished in the instant it had taken him to shrug and announce: 'We move.' The witch had escaped, and that meant the Inquisition would return. They must leave at once, he knew, and seek refuge in a place better suited to repel attack.

  And the Shadowkin, his dismal little allies, had not complained once. Overtly.

  And yes, his motives were pure, yes, the move was necessary, yes, the gang would be purged if they did not leave. But still he could hear the mutters in the shadows, he could taste the resentment of his flock, he could feel their worship wane. Condemnitor Chianni had not survived the battle, and with her leadership lost his grip upon his miniature empire had grown tenuous indeed.

  He took them into the deep, leaving behind only a gaggle of scouts to watch over their former domain. He led them into those boundless wastelands he had explored in his first days within the hive, into the foetid swamp zones where the heat of the planet warmed the air and sulphur bubbled across the pools. In these smog-thick caverns he prowled before them, eschewing the snaking caravans that trekked at his heel and the throng that sang devotional songs to raise their spirits... And also muttered, always muttered, when they thought he could not hear.

  There was no place deeper than this.

  He brought them to where the hulk of a drilling behemoth pitched like a rusted island from the sludge of an oily ocean, lost to the shadows. He guessed that at one time it had dug these basins and caves, these rustmud caverns, a swarm of humanity building and settling in its wake. And here it had faltered — perhaps blunted by its labours or else merely forgotten, with none caring to settle so deep — and rotted in its own fuel, drowned in the snow that its exertions had melted, with only its massive loins rearing from its caldera like a tombstone.

  Here Sahaal had hidden his cache of weapons and ammunition, and here he brought his children, his black-draped tribe, on their exodus from the Steel Forest.

  The Shadowkin crossed the thick waters and tried to ignore the silvery fronds that moved in the deep, and settled upon the island without comment. Their lord had won a great victory, he had driven the heretic interlopers from their cherished lands — why then must they leave those lands behind? Why must they come to this blighted place?

  And in low voices, in muffled hisses that they didn't dare imagine he could hear, they asked: How was he struck down so easily by the witch? Was he not supposedly mighty? Could he not have crushed her with ease?

  Sahaal issued two tasks to his tribe, before even they hunted and fed their children. The first was that they dispatch scouts into the shadows, to listen to rumour and collect gossip, and to bring to him the man named Slake. He commanded this without explanation, and those warriors thus selected scatt
ered into the night without question.

  His second command was that they build him a throne.

  For all that he considered his command above dissent, Sahaal was no fool, and as his tribe worked with bone and rag to fashion a fitting seat for their lord, their prayers seemed muted, their prostrations halfhearted, and their anxious glances of fear betrayed the simmering glut of resentment. Sahaal took it all in and stored it away, but could not bring himself to be troubled. The Night Lords commanded obedience, not affection, and whether these scum liked him or not was irrelevant. They would do what he told them, and that was enough.

  They built the throne from the crippled spars of the great digger, sealed in improvised forges, and covered the seat in furs of black and brown. The arms and back they topped with stolen bones and teeth, a skull upon each hand pommel and freshly-taken heads — those of slain vindictors they had brought with them — mounted on spines above die whole. Sahaal found their grim iconography gratifying: they, like his ancient Legion, understood the power of morbidity and the fear that went along with it. That they devoted their gruesome trophies to the glory of the Emperor was the one sour note in an otherwise pleasing practice.

  He ascended his throne with no small measure of pride, and as the Shadowkin dispersed to tend to their own needs he lost himself in the memories of glories that had long since passed, never once pausing to consider the dissatisfaction of his people.