Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  And that it was therefore vulnerable to attack?

  With anxiety rising, choosing caution over curiosity, she tried to wake.

  And could not.

  Panic gripped her then, and as if from a great distance she remembered being in Governor Zagrifs gallery of treasures. She remembered the short stab of pain against her arm and slowly, with the certainty growing, she realised what was happening.

  She had been drugged.

  She had been knocked out like some misbehaving beast, shredding her defences and her disciplines and now — now, when she needed the ability to awake like never before — she found herself trapped, ineffectual, relaxed to the point that she had been plunged into a discipline that she had never been taught to master.

  Her warp-gaze had elected to show her something, and she was powerless to decline.

  Even as her astral form flexed in agitation the crowds below her began to shriek. The dreamscape haze turned bloody red and the phalanx of parading figures threw back the folds of their black cloaks to expose weapons held against their chests, and opened fire.

  This, then, was what her senses had brought her here to see.

  It was a massacre.

  The attackers concentrated, where they could, upon the vindictor sentries — pressing superior numbers against them before they could respond. Even in the midst of her alarm Mita watched, helpless, as one by one the armoured Preafects toppled from their perches, lasbolts gashing them open, shotguns tumbling from grasping fists.

  The crowd had become a living organism, bolting and flexing with a single voice, and at their heart people fell underfoot and were trampled, screams lost to the collective wail of terror.

  When finally those few vindictors that remained summoned the presence of mind to return fire their targets proved more elusive than they had anticipated. With their black cloaks removed the aggressors dispersed, just faces amongst the turmoil, snapping off opportunistic rounds before vanishing into the crowd. Inevitably, the enforces chose retaliation above discretion.

  Snapping orders across the breadth of the concourse, they turned their shotguns upon the crowd and opened fire indiscriminately. Such was the reality of the Emperor's law: it was better to sacrifice the innocent in pursuit of the guilty than to allow the heretic, the traitor or the abomination to escape.

  At that moment, as the roadway grew slick with blood, as the screams of dying women and children saturated Mita's dreaming mind, her psychic senses struck upon a dark suspicion. A taint, almost, an infinitesimal cancer, gnawing at the edge of her perception.

  He's here...

  She drew back from the spectacle, noting that already a column of vindictors rushed to reinforce their beleaguered fellows, and cast her eye further outwards. This was a dangerous moment. Where before she had raged against the dream now she must immerse herself within it, sinking into its folds, trawling its shadows for her target. As she did so with a shudder the colours around her intensified, the edges of buildings and cables hardened—

  And in the warp, a hair's breadth from reality itself, the unctuous wisp of light that was Mita's astral form brightened, like a flare.

  At the gate the crowd broke its ranks and swarmed through the checkpoints. Shrieking and fleeing across the concrete beyond, cloaks flapping, the starport descended piece by bloody piece into anarchy. Hundreds had died already, and as Mita shifted her psychic self towards the dark blemish she sought, leaving behind the crackle of gunfire and the shouts of the wounded, she knew that hundreds more would join them.

  And she knew, now, that it was all a waste.

  The attack was merely a diversion.

  She found it — him — nearby, drawn to his spectral shadow like a shark to blood.

  He had crawled from the depths of the undercity from a fissure at the hive's base, where industrial smog belched upwards in long curtains, and had scaled the plated walls of the lower tiers claw by claw, rising towards the starport's gaping launchfields not from within, but without. Where normally a squad of vindictors could be found, thermal cloaks flapping in the wind, gazing out in ceaseless vigil for just such an incursion, now the beast's route was clear, now the sentries had rushed off to reinforce elsewhere, now his shadow fell across nothing but empty concrete and silent, unattended shuttles.

  The Night Lord's entrance to the starport went utterly unnoticed, by all but Mita.

  She swept around him with the dreamscape fracturing at her heel, all her tenuous energies gobbled by his presence. Where before she had felt the taint about him like a faint promise, now it was a wound in reality itself, swarming around him and sucking at her mind. He had opened himself to Chaos, she could see, and in consequence there was some strange quality to him in this esoteric reality, some otherness that here, in this place of uncertain physicality and warp-borne visions, burned around him like a corona. She felt as though she swam a viscous ocean, and to even approach him took every shred of her effort. He existed at the heart of a great darkness, a blemish in the warp, and she struggled to see him through the fog of his soul. Something was happening to his boundary, some trick of what passed for light. Some sense of motion.

  Of swarming...

  And the voices... Cluttering, whispering, giggling tones, on the cusp of hearing. Were they real?

  The Raptor dragged behind him a jaegar squad of humans, coated warriors who wasted little effort in attempting to speed his climb, content to allow their lord to take their weight. One by one they joined him at the edge of the platform, casting off ropes and buckles, unlimbering from cases upon their backs long tubes, hollow and undecorated, like the blowpipes of some jungle race.

  The voices reached a keening pitch in Mita's mind and the air — the very fabric of this fantasy place — began to boil around the Chaos Marine's form, as if his mere presence were anathema to reality.

  He paused. He glanced around himself as if listening to something that only he could hear, and his companions exchanged nervous glances.

  'She is here,' he said.

  'M-my lord?'

  The witch. She is here. She is watching!

  Mita's panic surged. How could he know?

  In fear and reflex she tried to kick herself free of the dream, but it was too late, she had immersed herself too deeply, the drug continued to grip her blood, and she could not escape into the waking world.

  The Night Lord's companions had taken up combat stances, knives and hatchets brandished.

  'Where, my lord?' one hissed, voice little more than a whisper. 'What should we do?'

  'Fear not,' the monster said, and its voice betrayed its amusement. 'We each have our guardian spirits. It is not wise to eavesdrop on one such as I. As the bitch will discover.'

  And then the distortions that boiled around his outline seemed to pulse, and the fabric of the dreamscape ripped, and there, there, like splinters of shadow hanging in the sky, the chittering somethings of the warp were released.

  They clamoured around her. They pressed in, trying to fasten leech-like mouths to her screaming soul, slipping long claws into her mind.

  And finally, as the sound of the Night Lord's laughter rushed in to fill her world, as the cost of scrying too deep unfolded its tentacles and teeth around her, the drugs that crippled her body ran their course and she awoke, mercifully, gratefully, with a scream.

  She was in her cell, she saw immediately. Whatever had happened to her, whoever had dragged her, she'd been returned to her quarters without so much as a braise. Given that Kaustus was the only one present when unconsciousness had claimed her, it was an uncomfortable possibility that presented itself. Had he done this to her?

  But why? Why had he called her to the governor's gallery? Why had he instructed her through those doors? And why, Emperor's oath, why, would her own master incapacitate her just as she sensed the enemy's presence?

  She pushed it from her mind. It was an enigma that would have to wait.

  She was dressed and sprinting towards her master's suite within ins
tants, and with every footfall she blotted out the horror of what had happened inside the dream. Her tutors at the scholastia would have been revolted by her foolishness, scrying so close and so unguarded to a creature of Chaos — little wonder she'd fallen prey to the predators of the warp! She should no more hunt sharks by painting herself in fresh blood than she should use her warpsight to spy upon agents of the ruinous powers, and as she berated herself Kaustus's unkind words came back to her with razor-like clarity:

  'You lack experience. You are unqualified in the ways of Chaos.'

  He'd been right. The bastard.

  Still, she lived yet. She'd escaped — though barely. And now she had news for the inquisitor that could not wait.

  'My lord!' she howled, bursting past the sentries at his doorway, 'I know where he is! I know where the trai—'

  And stopped.

  Kaustus was not in his chambers.

  A semicircle of amused stares greeted her abrupt silence, the retinue taking its leisure en masse. Priests glanced up from mumbled prayers, scholars raised horned brows from ancient manuscripts, warriors paused in games of dice, and on every hooded face a demeaning smile played.

  'Looks like someone finally woke up,' said one.

  Mita blanched. 'I... What? What do you mean?'

  'The inquisitor said you were taking a break.' A chuckle rolled across the room.

  Indignity burst like a ripe boil in Mita's mind.

  'I was drugged, warpspit and piss! What do you expect?'

  'Yeah... He said you'd been suffering from paranoia, too.'

  More titters circulated. Mita took a breath and rose above it.

  'Where is he?' she demanded. 'I haven't time for this. It's important.'

  'He isn't to be disturbed.'

  'Tell me! I order you to tell me!'

  She knew it was a mistake as soon as she'd said it. The temperature seemed to drop.

  'Is that so?' one of them said.

  Several figures — blocky shapes with the roiling movements of warriors — slouched to their feet, drawing close with languid menace, lips twisted in scowls.

  'I don't think,' one growled, 'that we're in the mood to be taking orders from you.'

  'You know I outrank you,' she said, almost keeping the quaver from her voice. The largest of the thugs was all but touching her now, and it was only the psychic pall of amusement from the others that prevented her from staggering away. She refused to give them the satisfaction of another humiliation.

  'And you know,' the brute grunted, stabbing a finger against her chest, 'that we could snap you like a twig.'

  Prodding her, on reflection, was a mistake.

  'I won't tolerate this disrespect any more,' she whispered, as much to herself as to the man, and without warning she raised her knee as hard and fast as she could—

  —directly into his crotch.

  There was a noise not unlike a damp crunch.

  He went down with a gurgle, and that might have been enough to end the matter, perhaps even to gain her a modicum of esteem from the shrieking fool's comrades — had she been finished with him. She was not.

  She knelt on his chest and pushed a hand against his forehead, ignoring his cries. She dispensed with subtlety, plunged a dagger of psychic thought into his moronic brain, and needled about until the information she sought rose to the fore. She swam through simple thoughts, hunted down her target, and left with a vindictive kick.

  The warrior died with a gasp.

  'He's with the governor, then,' Mita said, examining the information she'd extracted. The retinue stared agog mouths hanging open.

  'Thanks,' she nodded to the smoking corpse. 'Don't get up.'

  Kaustus was waiting for her outside the governor's quarters: successfully taking the indignant wind out of her sails. He'd been forewarned of what she'd done — one of the other retinue members calling ahead, clearly — and hers was not the only foul temper.

  'Diota Vasquillius,' he hissed, eyes flashing behind his mask, 'has served me for nine years. I once saw him kill a tyranid carnifex on Saliius-Dictai, loading and firing a lascannon without assistance. I've seen him strangle orks with his bare hands. I've seen him kill genest—'

  'My lord,' she interrupted, ignoring his bulging eyes. 'I suspect he never faced a witch in a bad mood.'

  Kaustus glared at her for long seconds.

  'Correct,' he said, finally, and again she felt that strange sense of respect, as though the line between impressing and insulting her master was fine indeed.

  'I have news,' she said, pressing her advantage. 'I... I have slept. I have seen where the Traitor Marine i—'

  'Interrogator, we have discussed this. I assured you it was being dealt with.'

  'There was an attack, my lord! U-upon the spaceport! I saw it! It may still be under way!'

  Kaustus eyed her suspiciously, absorbing her words.

  'An attack?' he said, and for the first time Mita felt that finally he was taking her seriously.

  'Yes! I watched it all! Hundreds died!'

  Kaustus half turned away, fingers kneading together. He spoke beneath his breath, and Mita struggled to hear. 'The spaceport...' he muttered. 'Why the spaceport?'

  'I... I don't know, my lord.'

  He turned back to her as if surprised by her presence, and again she felt that there were elements to this maze she did not understand, pieces moving across a mighty chessboard of which she could witness only a fraction. The certainty was rapidly settling upon her that she could trust the testimony of nobody but herself.

  'What should we do, my lord?' she hissed, astonished at her master's display of indecision. Never before had she seen him so affected by a sliver of news, let alone one from her mouth.

  'Do?' he muttered. 'I... W-we should... We...' His voice trailed off, his eyes gazing into nothing.

  She stared, astonished and frightened by this new Kaustus.

  'My lord?'

  And then abruptly he was back, eyes focused, voice hard, and it was as if he had never been away.

  'We do nothing,' he growled, turning away, gesturing at the gaudily dressed servitor-doorman to the governor's chambers.

  'But—'

  'But nothing! How many times must I say it, interrogator? It is being dealt with. I have my own methods.'

  The door swung open and Kaustus stepped away.

  'But — my lord!' her cry caught him on the threshold, and he turned back to regard her from the corner of his eye. 'What of the vision?' she said. 'What of the attack? I cannot do nothing.'

  He cocked his head, sighing, then nodded to himself.

  'You will see to it that our mutual friend Commander Orodai keeps his nerve. There will be no action, do you understand? The attack must go unanswered!'

  She glared down the length of his pointed finger, brandished like a gun, and swallowed.

  She wanted to shriek: But why?

  She wanted to grip him by his peacock-lapels and shake him until he gave her the answers she wanted. Needed.

  She wanted to understand what in the name of Terra's arse he was playing at.

  But more than anything she wanted his approval and his respect, so once more she dipped in a bow, swallowed her objections, and said: 'Yes, my lord. The Emperor prevails.'

  'Indeed he does, interrogator. Be about your duties.'

  The door began to close. Mita pounced upon her one final chance like a famished tiger.

  'My lord?'

  This time he did not turn back. 'Yes, interrogator?'

  'I... Before, when I was in the gallery, and... and I thought I felt the traitor's presence...?'

  'Yes?'

  'Was... was I drugged, my lord?'

  His pause was a fraction too long.

  'Don't be ridiculous,' he said. 'You fainted again. It is a habit you should learn to control.'

  He closed the door behind him.

  Mita Ashyn was beginning to consider the very real chance that her master was insane.

  She retu
rned to Cuspseal with a sense of urgency, vying with confusion for dominance. Accompanied once more by Cog, she tolerated the elevator descent with cracking patience and raced upon her arrival to Orodai's offices, to carry out her master's orders. That she neither understood nor agreed with them was irrelevant. This time, she vowed, passing stammering vindictor clerks and objecting doormen, she would not fail. Orodai's office was empty.

  She was too late.

  In the wake of the assault upon the starport, unwilling to endure one more attack upon his Preafectus Vindictaire, and eschewing the assistance of the Inquisition whose presence he was quickly growing to resent, Commander Orodai had mustered as many of his lawmen as he could, had mobilised the precinct's entire complement of armoured vehicles, and had personally led a battle-group a thousand strong into the darkness below Cuspseal.

  Mita had failed. Again.

  War was coming to the underhive.

  Zso Sahaal

  In the final analysis, it had been easier than stealing fruit from a child.

  All had gone as planned, and if the diversionary assault upon the starport gates had left a dozen or more Shadowkin dead. If the place had run thick with the blood of civilians and Preafects alike, if the operation had cost him dear in time and effort and anxiety, then these were sacrifices he was pleased to make.

  Offerings, even.

  He had the support of the Dark Gods, whether he cherished it or not.

  Standing there on the edge of the launchpad, he'd felt the witch's scrying eyes like a whisper at the rear of his mind. And, as if in reply, the certainty that the warp stood at his shoulder, regarding his enemy with boundless hunger, had gripped him. It had flexed, swarmed at the forefront of his soul, and consumed her.

  She would not be eavesdropping on him again.

  So, he had the patronage of Chaos itself.

  Before his aeons of dormancy, Sahaal's regard for the Ruinous Ones had matched that of his Legion: Chaos was as capricious a force as it was almighty, they understood that, and Konrad Curze had spent too long overcoming insanity and terror to lie so easily in the Dark Gods' bed.