Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  But still, but still... It was an... intoxicating sensation, to have guardians so mighty.

  So let the casualties be offerings. Let the Shadowkin dead, with all the civilians and vindictors who had perished alongside, bleed upon the altar of Chaos Undivided. Let the hungry gods have their repast of souls, and let him return to his tasks unhindered. It was a worthy transaction.

  Seated upon his throne, slouched with claws steepled and a blanket of shadows covering his unhel-meted face, he ignored the sounds of mourning throughout the encampment and struggled for calm.

  He must be patient. The venom that the Shadowkin had smeared upon their darts was a potent substance, and the... prizes would be asleep a while longer.

  Patience.

  Focus.

  The assault had succeeded. The starport had been breached and his ragtag army had allowed him all the time he had required to steal what he had come for. The prizes — captives, of a kind — couldn't be allowed to see him, not yet, and so a team of handpicked warriors had accompanied him, blowpipes brandished, to anaesthetise the fools before they could react.

  Carrying them down into the dark — two limp shapes, withered and malnourished, slung upon each shoulder — he had felt in his heart like a warrior king, returning to his tribe with the bounties of conquered realms.

  And yes, the Shadowkin had rejoiced in his victory. They'd cheered and feasted on what pitiful foods their dreary territory offered, and praised his name for such a daring raid. But as they consigned their dead to the Emperor's grace there was melancholia in their eyes.

  So many had not returned.

  And maddeningly, inmriatingly, Sahaal found himself troubled by their disquiet. Oh, they remained worms — less than worms! — but he confessed that as his reliance upon them grew he was encumbered by the distraction of pride.

  This was his empire. His tribe. And he could not escape their reflected grief.

  He wondered, distantly, whether this was how his master had felt. The mighty primarch of the Night Lords Legion had grown to manhood as a feral creature, a solitary hunter in the shadows of Nostramo Quintus, a vigilante without friend or peer. Only when his reign of terror had swollen to infect the entire city, when the law was his law and the streets were his streets, only then was he given governance of the populace.

  Had he, too, resented the responsibility? Had he yearned to rely upon none but himself, to dispense with counsellors and soldiers and assistants? Had it sat heavily upon his heart that even he could not rule a world unaided?

  And had he learned, by degrees, to value those at his command?

  Had it hurt him when they perished?

  Draped in shadow, Zso Sahaal brooded upon his throne at the heart of a web of confusions and distractions, and waited with crumbling patience for the two men that he had stolen to awake from their poisoned sleep.

  So it was, with his attention elsewhere, that the burning drive to locate the Corona Nox had relented to a simmering pain in his guts, an unspoken knot of loss that his present concerns had eclipsed.

  And so it was that the issue chose that very moment to resurface, interrupting his meditation with shouts, cheers, and song.

  The scouts had found Slake.

  'He was in Sewersump,' the man said, voice quavering with a soup of pride and nerves. He was young: still a novice, in tribal terms, but sturdily built and confident nonetheless. A find such as this would secure for him unlimited respect, and it was clear even to Sahaal that the youth intended to savour his moment. 'There's a guild there,' he added, 'does nothing but broker sales for kutroach shells.'

  The youngster had chosen to address his report — without instruction — to Condemnitor Chianni, seated beside Sahaal with her wounds bandaged and her face austere. Sahaal found the arrangement pleasing: clearly the tribesfolk felt ill at ease directing their words to their angelic demagogue, preferring to use their priestess as an interface. It represented the perfect fusion of devotion and terror, and their fearful glimpses in his direction gratified Sahaal immensely.

  'Kutroach?' he hissed, drawing startled glances from the crowd. He supposed that it was easier for them to think of him as some throned idol, so perfect was his stillness. Every time he moved or spoke it was a chilling reminder that their magnificent, terrible lord was as real, and as alive, as they.

  Humans, Sahaal was observing, preferred to keep their gods at arms' length.

  Thankfully Chianni's reaction was rather less awestruck, and she twisted to face him with hands clasped. He had spun her a vague lie regarding his search for Slake — ''an enemy of the Emperor'', as he'd put it — and her willingness to assist in such a holy quest had been amusing to regard.

  'Beasts of the underhive,' she explained. 'Beetle creatures with leather wings and bladed tails. Very dangerous. Their husks are perfect for ornaments and bowls, so the guilds often sell them uphive. The other gangs collect shell bounties whenever they can.'

  'But not you?'

  She seemed briefly affronted. 'Money is the foodstuff of corruption, my lord...'

  'Of course,' he rumbled, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. 'Continue.'

  Chianni gestured for the scout to go on.

  'W-well... I know the guilds sometimes use middlemen, so I thought it would be worth checking...'

  Chianni nodded. 'A wise idea.'

  The boy beamed. 'I found him speaking with two others, a-another man and a woman. A guilder came over — handfuls of credits, he had — and called out to him. He called him Slake, I'm certain of it.'

  Sahaal's fingers tightened on the skull-pommels of his throne.

  'You did well,' Chianni told the boy, perhaps noting her master's eagerness. 'Bring him forwards. Our lord would look upon him.'

  The morsel that was pushed into the light, bound at its hands and ankles, shrieking like a stuck pig, was not what Sahaal had imagined.

  It was a small man — if not genetically stunted then at least abnormal in his build, features prematurely wizened, scalp clinging to a few last scraps of hair. His simple clothes were stained and dirty and his face was marked with fresh bruises: evidence of the scouting party's rough treatment. Most notable however, were the twin sockets set high on his hydrocephalic forehead, one above each eye: ugly irises that extruded long cable-bundle umbilici, dangling to his shoulders like metallic dreadlocks.

  He collapsed to the rusted floor with a wail, took one look at the throned giant looming over, and burst into tears.

  'Sweet hive ghosts I didn't do anything don't kill me oh God-Emperor please...'

  'Silence him,' Chianni said, a fraction before Sahaal. The young scout dropped to his knees and punched the wailing specimen across the face, splitting his lip and speckling the floor with his blood. His cries died abruptly.

  'You are Slake?' Chianni asked, glaring.

  'N... no! No! Not on my own!'

  The scout punched him again, harder this time. 'Lies!' he roared. 'I heard his name!'

  'Breggan,' Chianni said. 'Be still.'

  The young scout backed away, breathing hard.

  'You are Slake,' Chianni repeated — this time a statement. 'You are a go-between for upcity guilders, correct? Answer me!'

  'N-no!' he wailed, tears and snot thick on his face. 'Not on my own! Oh sweet Terra, no! Y-you don't understand! Not on my own!'

  Sahaal had heard enough. He was out of his throne and hunched over the man like a great lion, seemingly without movement, and the Shadowkin audience cried out and backed away, astonished at his speed.

  The man stared up into the twisted visage of Sahaal's helm, and felt the tears freeze on his cheeks.

  '...oh...'

  'Four days ago,' Sahaal whispered, so quiet that none but the captive could hear his reed-thin voice, 'you purchased from the Glacier Rat scum Nikhae an item. You knew it was coming. You took it from him and paid him. Yes?'

  In the face of such icy terror, the man's stammers were frozen away, leaving only a tight, strangled tone.

 
'Yes. I mean... I don't know. I have a small piece of the memory but—'

  Sahaal pressed a claw against the wattles of his neck.

  'Explain.'

  'Slake! It's... not a person. Not one of us.' His eyes rolled, mouth quivering. 'It's a collective. A group, you see? The gestalim surgery... we took the implant! Separate us, we're just people. But together, all three joined...' He pawed his bound hands at the cables hanging from his skull, broken nails clattering against their sockets. 'Together we are Slake. Th-three people, one machina. We share memories. We share intellect! Alone we are nothing!'

  Sahaal ground his teeth.

  'You are servitors?'

  'No! No, the servitor is a slave to the machina. Together, we control it.'

  There had been servitors, even in Sahaal's time. Empty minded things: human bodies with machines for brains, controlled and governed by the chattering logic engines inside. Such contrivances left no room for personality or self awareness, rendering a servitor little more than a mobile tech-console. Their lives — such as they were — were a sequence of parameter and stimulus.

  Could it be that these three nothings, these human fools with more avarice than sense, had found a way to retain their minds — their ambitions — yet to foster the cold intellect of a servitor nonetheless?

  'How is this possible?' Sahaal rasped, bladed claw tight against the man's larynx.

  'We paid! We chose it! We found... found a man who could do it!'

  'And who,' Sahaal hissed, already guessing the answer, 'was that?'

  'Pahvulti! His name is Pahvulti!'

  The cognis logi. The information broker. The renegade tech-priest.

  The bastard.

  It was not a name welcome to Sahaal's ears.

  He lifted the shrieking captive in one great claw, and carried him out into the shadows away from the tribe, to question him as only he could.

  When he was done with the man, who was one piece but not the whole of Slake, Sahaal brought his head before the Shadowkin and held it high, blood snaking in long chords along his arm.

  The man had known little, ultimately. Glimmers of memories, snatches of detail that fired recognition in his eyes but could draw nothing new from the fragments of his third of the Slake computer. It was as he said: alone, he was pifitful. A moronic child, a nothing, a nobody.

  He could recall meetings. He could glimpse, in agonised flashes, the package that Sahaal sought so desperately.

  'Was it open?' Sahaal had raged. 'Was it opened?'

  But that detail was beyond him, as were any others, and the Night Lord had been quick to succumb to the fury that was building inside him with every day, the hungry voices whispering for blood in his mind.

  Sahaal took the man's head and left the body to the waters of the swamp, where luminous tendrils dragged it down to the depths.

  The scouts were redeployed to find the remaining pieces of the collective. The youngster who had captured the man went unthanked, chastised for his incomplete prize.

  It was all Sahaal could do not to tear him to shreds.

  Thus it was, with his blood boiling in his veins, his heart hammering in his ears, and the name ''Pahvulti'' spinning in a slick of poison and piss through his mind, that two fawning Shadowkin crept forth to tell him that finally the captives he had taken from the starport were awake.

  The savage grin on his face left them ashen with terror.

  In a shack at the camp's edge — as sturdy and soundproofed a structure as the meagre building materials had allowed — he took delivery of the first hostage. The tribesmen dumped the moaning creature to the floor, faces twisted with disgust. He dismissed them and they left with relief, pausing only to spit at the blind worm on the floor.

  Sahaal wondered vaguely how they might react if they knew the truth: that without such astropathic wretches as this their mighty Imperium was a doomed giant, without eyes or ears or mouth.

  He stepped towards the figure — shivering and naked in the rustmud — and crooned with an eagerness that he could no longer contain. His rage would not be restrained.

  'W-who's there?' the man quailed, withered features crumpling further. His wrists and ankles were bound with sharp cable and his eyes... his eyes had been taken from him long, long ago. The tortured flesh at their edges was puffy with unhealed scars and infection.

  'You cannot see me?' Sahaal teased, already knowing the answer.

  'I... N-no! My visem dens... sweet Emperor... It's gone!'

  Ah yes, Sahaal reflected. The second sight. Such men as this did not need eyes to see.

  Usually.

  'What have you done to me?' the voice grew loud, indignation at the theft of its greatest sense puncturing its fear. Sahaal allowed himself an indulgent smile.

  'It is lead,' he said, bending to run fingers across the thick strip of bent metal, powder-white, coiled across his furrowed forehead like a circlet. Sahaal flicked it playfully. 'It is anathema to your... gifts, yes? You may no more penetrate it than a hawk may escape its hood.'

  'Who are you?' The astopath's voice became a whisper, an awestruck quail that wrestled between curiosity and horror. 'How do you know so much about the gift? I... I am not afraid of you!'

  Sahaal's smile broadened.

  'I know the astropath's weakness, little man,' he said, 'because at one time an army of your brothers was at my disposal, through choice or not. And as for your fear...' He wet his lips, trembling, 'I think we both know you are lying.'

  'The Emperor's faith is strong in my soul! I am without sin! Whatever your aims I shall n—'

  'Do you know of Chaos?'

  The man's mouth opened and closed, all his bluster stolen from him, a paroxysm of revulsion wracking him. 'I... You dare speak its name? Emperor preserve m—'

  'You shall know of Chaos. You shall bathe in its fires, my friend. You shall know its voice.'

  'Blasphemy! B-blasphemy!' The psyker tried to spit, to summon a gobbet of rebellious spittle on his flexing tongue, but Sahaal was faster. A single talon snickered from its secret sheath, blurred in the air, and was gone. The man spat out his own tongue on the crest of a shriek.

  'Now you will be silent,' Sahaal said, backhanding the creature's cheek until its screams were replaced only by the wet gurgles of oozing blood, 'and you will listen closely. And you will struggle, and writhe, and try to escape, and in your mind you shall hurt harder than you have ever felt pain before, but you cannot switch off your ears, my friend. You cannot help but listen. 'And feel, of course. Always feel.' And Zso Sahaal began to cut. To draw slivers of flesh from arms and legs. To glide artist's strokes of tip and blade through unresisting skin and muscle. To sever sinews at knee and shoulder, at groin and ankle. To pluck arrowhead wounds across fatty chest meat, to scrape skin layer by layer from the belly's bulge. To drag deep plough-furrows across yielding buttocks and meaty loins. To cut and cut and cut and cut. And as he cut he spoke. He spoke across every scream and cough, ignoring inarticulate pleas and wordless prayers.

  He spoke of the darkness that haunts youth's fears. Of the horrors that only the imagination of a child may devise. He spoke of bogeymen and spider gods, of scissor-fingered hags and the writhing of snakes. He spoke of faces in the sky and wet-edged lips, like the folds of a great belly, pursing to suck the light from the world.

  He spoke of adolescent terror. Of self-harm and religious awakening. Of Imperial dogma crashing the soul, of familial rejection or parental perversion. Of young pain.

  There was always reference to pain.

  And always the cut, cut, cut.

  He spoke of the terrors of adulthood. Of knives in the dark and rape in the light. Of butchers and marauders, of aliens and mutants. He spoke of fires creeping nearer, of quicksand clogging the lungs, of nooses drawing tight. He spoke of death and torture and eyes in the night.

  And he cut and he cut and he cut.

  He spoke of the warp, and when his victim's larynx burst from the rawness of its screams he spoke of the Ruinous On
es, of the watchers in the void, of the Empyrean swarms. He spoke of prowling madness, of insanity unleashed upon a million worlds, of the Emperor's wounds and the Traitor's joy. He spoke of the Haunter's palace. Of the blood of angels. Of the tentacles in the warp. Of the steel teeth bared in the echoes of eternity.

  Of horror and nightmare and terror and venom.

  He vented himself. He raged against the astropath's flesh. He diced and cut and ripped. He disjointed and jellified. He lost himself to a haze of red and he spoke of the primal scream, the banshee howl that echoed in the earliest caves of mankind, the feral simplicity of Fear.

  And the dam broke open, and the walls of the astropath's resistance crumbled, and the chittering in the warp filled his ears and scratched petulant claws against the man's mind, and as the tumult reached its unbearable climax Sahaal reached through the paste of blood and shit and tears and wrenched away the lead circlet upon the man's brow.

  For an instant, the astropath's second sight was returned to him.

  He saw a bloodslick daemon with black eyes and claws of lightning steel, that leaned close to his shattered senses and hissed: 'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'

  And then the astropath was beheaded with a single stroke of the monster's claws.

  The swarms of the warp, baited close by such psychic terror as they had never before tasted — an intoxicating fillip that pulsed like a beacon across the ethereum — rushed in to frenzy-feast upon the released soul.

  And the warp rippled like a disturbed millpond, and in its clash of hues and flavours it was Sahaal's face, Sahaal's voice, Sahaal's mind, that was borne upon the cusp of the astropath's deathshriek.

  Borne outwards, towards eternity.

  Mita Ashyn

  She was in Orodai's empty office, wrestling with indecision, when it hit.

  It broke across her defences like a tsunami upon a beach, surging above and through her, overwhelming every part of her mind, leaving her drowning and gasping for air.