Chianni stared at him with wide eyes, and all around the silence of the underhive poured into the vacuum his story had left.
Hours passed, and Sahaal slept, disengaging the cycadian rhythms of his psyche, relaxing the catalapsean node at the centre of his spine that could oscillate so casually between the domes of his brain.
True sleep. And with it, true dreams.
He saw the ice-light of voidfire, capering and self-consuming as the Umbrea Insidior closed with the assassin's transport. He saw melta charges flare in the gloom, and Dreaddaw assault craft punch into soft, yielding iron.
He saw the boarding action, and the slaughter. He saw his raptors make a charnel house of the bitch's craft. He saw her eyes, wide and fearful, as he sliced her hand from her wrist — a bright filigree of blood and oil shivering from the rent — and with it reclaimed the Corona Nox. He saw himself lift a claw for the killing blow: bittersweet vengeance for his master's death.
And then...
Screams upon the vox. His sergeant's voice, fat with anger: 'Warpspit! Eldar, Talonmaster! Xenogen scum!'
They came like a bloody sword from the sky, breaking from dismal walls in light and warpfire, skimming realities like a pebble across water. Limbs wavering breathless guns coughing discs and coils. Like spiders, hatching on webs of Empyrean.
Aliens.
He saw the witch-lord. The dancing devil, with antlered helm and silver staff, blue-gold armour and feathered gown, a warlock-warrior, frozen in his pathway, sword alive with wyrdfire.
He saw himself breaking free from the maelstrom, leaving the assassin to cower, every shred of his being bent upon the Corona. They wanted it. They had come to claim it, in his moment of triumph.
They would not have it.
He saw himself, alone, returning to the Umbrea Insidior. He saw himself shutting out the cries of his brothers. He saw himself aboard his own vessel, fastening his prize in its casket, sealing it against alien hands.
He saw himself tasting, for an instant, triumph.
And then the warp opened its mouth, prised wide by alien hands, and a bubble of nothing intumesced around his ship. She shuddered, a protesting behemoth, a terrible beast floundering into sticky tar to sink centimetre by centimetre, shrieking as she drowned.
They pushed her deep into a timeless bubble, those xenogen spellsingers, and locked her from the warp: a water-filled belljar, sealed with hot wax, cast adrift in an ocean.
They could not enter. He could not leave.
He saw himself rage and roar for a full month. He saw his vassals lock themselves away from his wrath. He saw himself succumb to insanity.
And then finally he saw himself tasting bitter acceptance, piece by piece, until he resigned himself from reality, lost all hope of escape, and entered the trance.
He awoke in the Shadowkin encampment with the flavour of resignation and loss clouding his mind, and found a commotion in progress.
He found Chianni at the water's edge, staring out across the unquiet swamplands, shouting orders and imprecations at the flotilla of boatmen that approached.
She almost choked when he appeared silently behind her, and in the shallows two of the pugs overturned as their pilots glimpsed the apparition on the shore.
'What,' Sahaal hissed, ignoring the fearful splutters from the unctuous waters, 'is the meaning of this?'
They had gathered in their thousands. In makeshift shelters, beneath canvas bivouacs or else simply stretched upon the hard ground, with oily torches sputtering on rusted spars, wagons and litters clustered in protective circles, gang colours fluttering — half-heartedly — side by side, all sense of territory abandoned: the rustmud swamp teemed.
Even as he watched, Sahaal could see the human stream thickening. He had chosen his acolytes' realm with care, placing their encampment at the heart of a patchwork morass of bore-holes and smog vents, but now the winding path that led down from above, snaking from the north, appeared impossibly choked: a flow of humanity like sewage, blocking the pipe that carried it. They stepped from shattered girder to fungal plateau, homing on the great drowned drilling rig like pilgrims to a holy place.
Sahaal cast a brief glance to the south, working his jaw. There — set back from the swamp amidst a tangle of igneous formations and massive fungi — he knew there existed a second route from above: a tunnel so tight and twisting that it could accept only a single body at a time. It was his exit, his bolt-hole, his means of a rapid escape if this unfathomable territory was attacked, and he was pleased to see that its secrecy remained intact. He turned back to the refugees, gratified.
They came with heads bowed and wounds unhealed. They came with the dying carried on palettes behind them, with their faces clouded and their eyes filled with tears. Where once gangs had spat upon the face of their enemies, and died in the name of their totem, now they walked side by side, mutually ignored, hostilities redundant in the face of this harsher, more immediate exodus.
They sought out a new totem, now — a new figurehead — and in the pit of his heart an ugly suspicion as to what it was rolled over Sahaal like a breaking storm.
'Who are they?' he asked Chianni, keeping alive the hopes that he might be wrong.
'J-just... just people, my lord. From the underhive. The Preafects have destroyed half the settlements... They've got nowhere e—'
'What do they want?'
Chianni bit her lip, perceptive enough to know the answer would not please her master.
'They have heard of you,' she said, voice quiet. 'They think... they think you're a myth, but... But they know the Shadowkin escaped unharmed. They know us as... Holy zealots, my lord. They've feared us for decades — as long as the tribe has been here — but... but now we have strength, and they are weakened. They're angry. They don't know what they did to warrant the Preafects' violence. They're dying. They're pitiful. And suddenly they have seen the error of their ways.'
'I did not ask you who they are, priestess. I asked what do they want?'
He knew the answer already, of course.
Chianni's lip trembled as she spoke.
'Sanctuary, lord. They come seeking sanctuary.'
Mita Ashyn
She could not avoid her master's attempts at contact for long. She left the precinct when the chirruping of advancing servitors — snatching at her attention with hivelink comms clutched in piston knuckles — grew tedious, and her excuses became untenable. She knew she was being childish, but the swarm of uncertainties clouding her mind, coupled with the ghosts of exhaustion gripping her, precluded even the most lacklustre of attempts to represent herself intelligibly. For all that, she could tell sleep was not yet an option, so she took to wandering the bustling streets of Cuspseal like an eidolon, a lost spirit seeking absolution.
Preachers leaned from pulpits, holding loosebound books in claw-like grasps, eyes alive with fire and piety. Around them crowds accreted, and as she passed by Mita tasted the cocktail of their thoughts: the bright ember of the zealot, the tepid mundanity of his flock (I believe their minds cried — but always the shackles of doubt, of shame, of sin, weighed their spirits down), and always amongst the crowds she found incongruous minds: the strict focus of undercover Preafects, the darting intentions of pickpockets and outlaws, the fearful disgust of whores, grudgingly seeking custom. She walked on quickly, troubled to find so little purity, so little virtue, amongst this ocean of thought.
At one intersection a knot of boys had gathered around a militia post, recruiting sergeants barking false promises of glory and adventure. The youths shouted and whisded as she passed, even the crudity of their catcalls unable to break through the cage of her worries.
The question that assailed her was as unanswerable as the universe was vast, and amongst its myriad strands of uncertainty she found herself gathering it together, kneading into one shape, one indigestible issue:
Why?
She paced across a hanging bridge and paused to stare at the heads of executed criminals fixed upon e
ach of its stanchions, their eyes and tongues greedily devoured by jewelled beetles and albino bats. The flocks chattered as she passed, stabbing at her psychic senses with needles of ultrasonic sound, and she moved on with only the most cursory glance towards downtown Cuspseal — the hulking cube of the precinct dominating her view, towering above the mighty underhive chasm into the shadows below.
Why does the inquisitor not act?
Why does he restrain me with one hand and wave me forth with the other?
Why does he request my presence then drug me, then lie that he did not?
Why does his mood shift like a tide, ebbing and rising against all stimulus?
Why does he sit day after day, ensconced within the governor's palace?
His actions had hardly been heroic, and that in the face of his noble reputation. And whether he trusted her or not, she would have assumed the mere possibility of a Chaos Marine lurking in the dark would spur him to action. And yet he smiled and sneered, and dismissed the issue, and told her it was being dealt with.
Dealt with! By a single acolyte? A single cowled dissimulus, whatever that was. What if his plans fail?
What if his plans... oh, Emperor, forgive me my doubt... what if his plans cannot be trusted? What if he cannot be trusted?
She lurked in the shadows beneath a tanning factory chewing her lip, and watched as servitor-machines — simian monstrosities with arms like grablifters and thick chords of servomuscle tightening across copper pectorals — hefted tall piles of grox carcasses from uphive chutes into the rambling building. The stench of smoke and tar and burning meat made her retch, and she moved on again. Is there nowhere to think in this damned hive? Was that the problem, perhaps? Had she forgone the process of exhaustive consideration that the tutoria had encouraged? Had she been slack, dumbly clouded by mistrust that had no basis, listening too hard to instincts that had no place in a position of obedience? Where has this paranoia come from? She looped back towards the precinct, more troubled than ever, and when a mugger slipped from the moist darkness of an icemelt-drenched alleyway, blade glittering in his hand, she faced him with an almost indecent joy: relieved to shut out the worries for an instant, relaxed by the simple promise of violence.
The man approached with a sneer, knife weaving mesmeric patterns, holding her attention. It would have been a crude feign even had she not been a psyker, and when his partner, hidden behind her, took her obvious distraction as his cue to attack, she spun a carefully gauged kick into his face, his own momentum snapping the bones of his cheek and ripping an ugly tear across his lip.
The psychic feedback of his surprise and pain was deliciously gratifying.
The first attacker waded in with his knife, all hope of surprise lost, and she ducked beneath his first clumsy swipe to plant a balled fist in his stomach, knocking him down with the breath gone from his lungs.
She rolled aside to avoid any desperate slashing and jumped to her feet before he could groggily arise, imagining Kaustus's tusked face in the place of the mugger's, and half turned with an elegant elbow, dropping him back for a second time, thick ruby fluid gushing from his broken eyeball.
She returned to the first attacker, the broken-lipped nobody, a fraction too late, just as he launched a throwing knife at her head, gurgling on the bloody soup sliding into his mouth. Acting without thought she screwed up her mind and released an impetuous, undirected pulse of psychic energy, deflecting the spinning blade with a clash of blue sparks.
The muggers weren't as stupid as they looked. Seeing what manner of victim they'd chosen, yelping the word ''witch!'' with youthful terror, they fled into the shadows on a chorus of shrieks and moans. Mita huffed behind them, irritated at the brevity of the workout. She hadn't even broken a sweat.
Instinct.
Instinct had saved her. Then, as now...
She realised with a start that it made little difference. The realisation overcame her like some prophetic epiphany, and reduced all her confusions and anxieties to a simple certainty.
Whether she thought it through or listened to her heart, whether she applied the humourless frugality of logic or the unfounded passion of instinct to her troubles, the result would remain the same:
She did not trust her master as far as she could spit him.
When finally his message reached her, upon her return to the precinct, it was a short, prerecorded affair. He stared from a viewspex thick with distortion and white noise, and pointed a gloved finger down the length of the camera optic.
'Stay where you are, interrogator,' he said. 'Allow no other attacks upon the underhive. You understand me? No more failures.
'Remain in Cuspseal. I am sending a mutual friend to collect you.'
The image died with a clipped whine, and Mita sat back from the viewspex with a yawn.
She could no longer bring herself to care.
She slept poorly that night.
Orodai and his Preafects had returned from their subterranean predations with grisly armour and savage smiles, satisfied for now that the iron heel of the Preafectus Vindictaire had crashed whatever flames of rebellion still fluttered at the underhive's heart. She tried to quiz the commander personally — had he seen the Night Lord? Had they killed the traitor? — but the man's exhausted irritation at her continuing presence had earned her few answers, and only by skimming his mind had she tasted the seed of doubt that lingered there.
They had seen nothing of the shadowed monster. Oh, Orodai told himself that it was irrelevant, that he barely believed it was real anyway, that the aim of the assault had been to prevent any further incursions into his territory and to repay the horror of the starport massacre. He even began to believe his own reassurances, but when he ordered Mita out of his office it was with the look of a man who knew he was fooling himself, that his actions had achieved nothing unless perhaps to exacerbate the situation, and that the excesses of the day's violence had all been for nought.
She left him only when he vowed there would be no more attacks, and commandeered a small Preafect dormitory for her and Cog's exclusive use. She snapped at the giant's moronic prattling with more venom than it warranted, and fell into a shallow interrupted slumber to the sound of his suppressed sniffles.
She dreamed of embers — or eyes — burning in the darkness around the edges of her vision. She saw a great shark with blades for fins, cruise through inky water before turning away, rejecting her taste. And then the water was the void, and the spectral currents were eddies in the warp, and a shoal, a school, a pod — a swarm — punctured the nothingness, not of fish nor squid but eagles, silver and blue and black, swooping and gambling in the updrafts of nothingness.
A voice said: 'Seek me, my brothers...'
And out in the dark, where no light could fall, something heard the call. Something paid attention, and listened with a keen ear, then turned and cried into the deeper depths, where some other remote listener waited.
Again and again the cry was repeated, circulated, echoed from ear to mouth to ear, across time and void and warp, until it reached the eagles themselves. One by one they dipped their wings, flexed their steely claws, and raced towards the light.
Towards an island of pearly white. A planet. An icy world, with its face turned from the sun.
Equixus.
She awoke in the small hours of the early morning with the same old uncertainty: how much of a part had the gift played in her nocturnal fantasies? How much was dream, and how much prediction?
She did not sleep again after that.
The following day found her huddled over the steering pillar of an impeller bike, a great plume of ash towering behind her like the tail of a dusty rooster. She had cast off indolence, washed clean her indecision, and decided to act.
As she saw it, the distinction between observation and interference ran deep. She had been expressly forbidden from indulging in the latter. Kaustus's message had said nothing of the former.
In every city, and especially in every hive, Mita k
new that there was a certain niche. Sometimes it was naturally filled. Often it was a position to be squabbled over, traded between those who felt inclined to occupy it. Inevitably there would come to each of these conflicts a natural resolution, a winner. Such characters were cunning. They were ruthless. They were scrupulous. They were clever.
She had made her enquiries discreetly, at the start. She had considered Cuspseal from the perspective of a social jigsaw, and had taken pains to direct her interest towards those pieces of a higher calibre – the guildhouse quartermasters, the merchant tsars of the docking quarters, the madams of Whoretown and the recruitment sergeants of the small Fleet Ultima offices adjacent to the precinct. She had thought such characters far more likely to be familiar with the goal of her enquiries than lesser souls.
She needn't have bothered to focus her attention so closely. In the minds of everyone she encountered, be they peon or bourgeoisie or authority, the existence of an information broker, a spymaster, a watcher, was as firm as cold rock. That none of them dared speak his name, or to be overseen in the act of betraying his identity, merely confirmed to Mita his monopoly.
His name was irrelevant. His whereabouts were not. She plucked it — ultimately — from the mind of a bounty hunter, drunk and leering, in a saloon on the outskirts of Cuspseal. He seemed to Mita to be a prime source of answers: such mercenary scum as he could be guaranteed to have had dealings with the broker, or at least his associates, at one time or another. She'd plunged her astral tentacles into his unresisting consciousness without thought for his safety, relishing the shouts of dismay from his fellow drinkers. Revulsion and disassociation were reactions to her mutation to which she had grown all too familiar, the ability to terrify was something she had had little chance to enjoy. Until now.
To skim a mind for the vaguest impressions of its inner workings was one thing, to hunt for specific detail was another, far more damaging thing entirely.
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