She shattered his mind and left his brain haemorrhaging — blood pouring from eyes and nose. Her own objectives outweighed everything now.
(Is this how Kaustus feels? she wondered This impunity? This endless authority?)
And so she found herself riding hard, impeller wheels grinding against litterflows and ash dunes, as she made her way towards the broker's home — deep in the teeming habzones of the eastern mezzanines.
Cog rode ahead, his primal instincts and hardwired reactions far superior to her own. When he swerved to avoid some hidden crevice, or jinked his impeller to one side just as other traffic passed — a cavalcade of bikes and trams, scuttling beetlemounts and garish servitor vehicles, dead torsos welded to chasses like fleshy steering columns — she followed suit immediately. Allowing him to lead was a pragmatic deference: on the off-chance that anyone was foolish enough to attempt an ambush, it would be he who absorbed the brant of the attack.
Practicality, even through affection. The stuff of the Inquisition.
They entered the Warren through a looping series of bridgebacks and checkpoints, where queues of impatient civilians gathered to pass. She kept her identity to herself at such times, slotting the cruciform ''I'' pendant of her office into the tiny fleshholster on her shoulder, enduring the sleazy searches of militiamen with uncharacteristic patience. It would not do to broadcast her presence ahead, and if the broker was as adept as his reputation suggested he would know they were coming long before they arrived.
The Warren was a honeycomb of stagnant architecture: hexagonal block after hexagonal block, interlocking in drab material harmonies, facets pressed together for support like stifled teeth in a cogged machine. Here the workers lived, the billion no ones. The antscum. Factory fodder, condemned to lifetimes of drudgery, but thankful to their Emperor for the same. Here the uncomplaining masses awoke, worked, and slept: every day, every year, every century. Termites in a concrete mound, as unique as grains of sand upon an endless island beach.
Cog and Mita swept into a culvert at the base of a particular hab, the memory of its pitted surface and its devotional graffiti no less vivid for being stolen from the bounty hunter's brain. Only on closer inspection was the sham inherent to the construction made plain, and then only through a careful appraisal of tiny details. No clothing dangled on flexing poles from tiny slit-windows. No shadows moved behind blinds and drapes, as they did in surrounding habs. No preachers ranted in fiery oration from the stepped buttresses along each corner, replaced on this edifice by tail human figures: servitors with long shanks and countless eyes, which stood in silent voyeurism of all within their gaze.
It was a statement, of course.
You are being watched.
They left their impeller bikes at the central entrance, and Mita could feel without extending her psychic self the cold intellect regarding them. Through numberless electric eyes, through a myriad of cameras — both hidden and overt — its perpetual interest bored into her from somewhere within.
This, then, was the information broker. And to her senses, which relied upon the whimsy of emotion as a retina relies upon light, his astral presence was a thing of jagged edges and ugly ambitions.
She stepped inside scant seconds behind Cog. It saved her life.
He had used combat servitors, of course. Clever.
Devoid of emotion, lacking even a basic self awareness which might have betrayed them to her senses, they were as invisible to her astral gaze as any other machine. They dropped from recesses above the door and sprung from concealed pits in the rockcrete of the lobby with only the whine of smooth hydraulics to betray their movement. Four of them: sleek models with gangly parts and chequerboards of surgical scars, ramshackle homunculi with a dangerous, graceful aesthetic. Two racked ungainly weapons from plastic holsters, deformed remnants of human flesh held together by circuit wiring. Autoguns — multibarreled and undecorated — loomed in each cybermetallic paw.
The two others started forwards, bird-jointed legs endowing them with a predatory, hopping gait, like reptiles hybridised with zombie corpses. Each sported a shimmering forceblade in the place of a left wrist — flesh and absorption coils interknitted like brambles — and a three-digit powerfist to the right.
Two to shoot the hell out of any trespasser, and two to get in close and finish them off. Cute.
The autoguns opened fire with a roar and Mita ducked on impulse, acknowledging even as she did so that it was a futile gesture: not a single part of the lead firestorm could find its way to her. Bullets impacted on Cog's broad chest like stones striking the flanks of a tank — punching ragged holes in his robe and plucking messy eruptions of blood and flesh into the air — but appearing only to enrage him further. He stretched wide his tri-jointed arms and roared like a beast, great fists clenching in rage, bullets whining as they ricocheted from steel knuckles. A gobbet of his flesh painted itself across Mita's brow, snapping her awake from the urge to freeze up that had seized her. She dropped to her knees and grabbed for the holster at her waist.
She was an interrogator of the Ordo Xenos, warp-dammit. She wouldn't be bested by a hivetown infomerchant and his metal cronies. She'd come prepared for this.
Her boltpistol was loaded and armed before conscious thought even impelled her to seek targets, and she squirreled her way forwards to peer between Cog's legs with the weapon supported in both hands. Through the oscillations of his robe — now tattered and dripping gore — she caught a brief glimpse of the nearest gundrone, wide eyes rolling in metal sockets with whatever vestiges of machismo its human biology retained. She took her time drawing a bead, recalling her training, shutting out every other element of the world, dissolving peripheral threats on a wave of focus, then fired.
The servitor jerked backwards once, then spun at an impact upon its shoulder, then arched backwards with a sudden snap as a third shell caught it in the centre of its forehead. The warheads detonated one by one — dancing their victim like a ghastly marionette — until its head burst apart on a cloud of shrapnel and brain flesh.
Towering over her, Cog's living shield was quickly losing its efficacy. His roar grew weaker with every instant, replaced all too often by anguished moans, and the fabric of his robe drizzled moist gore around his feet like a saturated sponge. Doing her best to stay behind him — and to shut out her shame at accepting his unspoken sacrifice — Mita became aware of a blurring shape to her left. The first of the combat servitors closed with an electric rattle, its face a featureless mass of stretched skin, pulled taut around a single fish-eye lens. Its attack was as brutal as it was efficient — a horizontal hack with the crackling blade instants before a vertical swipe with the powerfist — a combination impossible to dodge. She backed away with a wordless howl, aware already that she was as good as dead.
Cog saved her yet again, clawing with an exhausted grunt at the servitor's head and throwing it, knife chopping uselessly at his tree-like arm, across the room, bowling over the remaining gundrone in the process. Mita followed his lead without hesitation, pumping a glut of bolter shells into the knotted machines as they struggled to disentangle, watching with enormous satisfaction as they blew apart with smoke and sparks dancing around them.
The intervention was one effort too great for Cog's wrecked body: mangled to the point of dissolution, eyes thick with a film of blood and tears, his massive legs gave way and he slumped to the ground with a hiss, hands reaching out.
'Didn't... didn't saved Mita,' he burbled, child-like. 'Suh-sorry...'
'Oh, Cog...' she whispered.
And then it was just her, and in a slow motion dream that had no business invading her reality, the second combat servitor hopped gaily from the plumes of smoke and ripped her boltpistol away, crumpling it in its powerfist.
It placed its blade to her neck and chirruped.
'Shit,' she announced.
'I wouldn't go that far, dear,' said a voice, startling her. 'I thought you did rather well, considering. Het-het-het.'
The curious tone seemed to come from the servitor itself — or at least from the enamel speaker-mouth hooked above its ragged ear — but its unctuous tones stood incongruous against the machine's vapid mind. Someone speaking from afar, then, using this murderous machine as a mouth.
'You must be the information broker,' she said, feeling ridiculous.
'Het-het-het,' the voice sounded positively delirious, its weird laughter grating at her ears. 'Very good, yes, very good! And you must be the inquisitor's witch, yes? Yes? Heard so very much about you, het-het-het. Blinded one of my agents earlier, even, poor little lamb.'
'The muggers? That was you?'
'Het-het-het. It pays to find out as much as possible about strangers in my city.'
'"Find out"? They tried to murder me!'
'Yes. Het-het-het. So I found out you can't be killed by cretins. You see? Thus my metal friends, here.'
The servitor thumped itself on the chest with a hollow clang. Like a puppet, dancing to its master's strings. At its feet, Cog shifted his weight and groaned, watching events through rheumy eyes. Not dead, then. Yet.
'Who are you?' Mita said, the forceblade's charge prickling at the skin of her throat.
'That, my dear, is something you aren't in any position to discover.' The servitor cast an eye — independent of its twin — down to the bleeding giant on the floor. 'Not now that your pet ogryn can't quite find his feet — het-het-het.'
Cog stiffened.
A warning bell rang in Mita's mind.
'What... What did you call him?' she said, bracing herself.
'Didn't you hear me? An ogr—'
Something blurred before her eyes.
The sounds of metal and flesh being ripped apart went on for a long time, even after Cog stamped on the servitor's voicebox and silenced its curses.
'He doesn't like being called that,' Mita muttered, needlessly. She went to find the broker.
Zso Sahaal
They came seeking sanctuary. The underhive recoiled from its wounds, slinking in the dark like a crippled fox, and where before its people had held the Shadowkin in contempt — fearing their vigilante strikes, deriding their zealotry — now their perceptions were changed. Now they saw strength, fortification, protection.
There was not a single family untouched by the Preafect's pogrom, and without a spoken word, without vocal alliance or official consent, they gathered themselves in meagre packs, as best they could, and they trod the winding path into the depths, to where the snaking road descended no further, and there, on the shores of the rustmud swamps, they stopped.
In the heart of Sahaal's domain.
They came seeking sanctuary, and amongst the hordes of their number they brought with them their former masters, their warriors and outlaws and leaders. Their heroes and their villains.
At the start of the second day following the vindictor attack, when die stream had become a trickle, and then finally cleared, Sahaal stared out from his throne across the sea of seething refugees, tasted their stink upon the air, felt their fear and dispossession and dejection, and smiled his secret smile.
He would use them.
'What deception is this?'
'Curse you, Shadowbitch! I'll not stand for—'
'Back off! One more! One more push-!'
Snarls of aggression jittered throughout the Shadowkin encampment, a ring of torches and weapon-gloss glints tightening around twelve strange — and furious — figures. They had come in good faith. Dejected at their flight for sanctuary, ashamed, even, of the exodus from their own territories, they were proud nobles nonetheless. And now, as they stepped from cobbled barges onto the russet-brown island of their former enemies, to find themselves encircled by Shadowkin gunsmen, they reacted with all the outrage of displeased royalty. 'Slit your vile little throats, by the frogspirits—'
'Suggest you lower your weapons, Shadowscum—' And so on.
Condemnitor Chianni directed their corralling with the confidence of one born to lead, and as he watched the unfolding spectacle from the secret places of the island-drill's mouldering carcass, Sahaal reflected gratefully upon her transformation. She had come to him as a stammering under-condemnitor, a witness to her leader's casual slaying by a monstrosity from her nightmares. And now? Now she was a representative of divinity, no less. He had ordered her to gather their current guests in the Emperor's name and she had obliged him without complaint. In the unfamiliar waters of politics and diplomacy, she was his most valuable tool. 'Priestess! You get these guns out of my sight or—'
'Angry! Killing soon! Hiveshit Shadowkin blooding!' The Shadowkin warriors ignored the threats with patience borne of confidence, driving their charges on up the flanks of the rusted heap, towards the dark culvert at its heart where the vast throne of bone and rag — accruing new grisly pennants and morbid trophies with every day — stood empty. Its owner watched the visitors from other, secret vantages, and relished the fear their indignation concealed.
Since their arrival in the Shadowkin territories the swarm of refugees had maintained a fearful distance from the shade-slicked island with its black-ragged denizens and rumours of living horrors. Like mice clamouring at the entrance to a tiger's lair — grateful for its presence but too terrified to approach — they left their protectors well alone, and went about the re-establishment of their feudal structures in new, miniaturised empires, shanty towns and canvas camps pushed against the shores of the swamp. Shadowkin spies watched it all, and through them Sahaal had observed and calculated, and followed their petty dominions with interest.
It was, he supposed, a natural process. In the world above this dismal wasteland, before the Preafects came and changed everything, every aspect of underhive life was governed by the ganghouses. Underworld atristocracies, each as assiduous of its heritage and racial purity as the Steepletown nobles themselves. Their number were impossible to determine and their internecine squabbles, schisms and betrayals impossible to chronicle, but what was certain was this: of them all, seven houses had risen to dominate the rest: seven great clan-tribes of warriors and outlaws. And all — bar one — had swallowed pride and territory in the face of the vindictor raids and fled into the silent deeps of the Shadowkin lair. And thus they now stood, trivial empires scattered along the shores of Sahaal's domain.
First were the Quetzai — a brood of nimble warriors whose gaudy suits of colour and feather slipped amongst the refugees of the northern shore: tall totems moving above the raggedy shelters, each bearing a living kutroach with its limbs and fangs removed.
Second, to the east, the towering brutes of the Atla Clan: warriors ritually scarred from head to toe, poisoned quills worn at the tip of each finger, like the paws of great bears. Their guttural commands — demands for food and drink from the dispossessed peoples over whom they had claimed stewardship — resounded across the waters with irritating frequency.
Beyond them, isolated from the refugee swarm where other houses mingled (and terrorised) at will, the quiet albinos of the Pallor Steppes fashioned sturdy teepees and burnt strange herbs, soporific fumes mixing with those of the swamp. Their hunched forms — so frail, in appearance — belied a fierce martial tradition, and Sahaal found himself reminded of the white-skinned people of Nostramo Quintus, his master's ancient home.
To the south the exiled underhivers found themselves beneath the custodianship of the House Magrittha: genderless warriors with long limbs and high-boned faces, tall rifles clutched in elegant hands, uncertain physiques tattooed and naked, displaying their sacred androgyny for all to see.
In the shallows of the southern shores, where the weakest of the refugees had been pushed by the ungentle Brownian motions of the encampment, the shamanic savages of the Frog Princes had established their oleaginous quarters. Convinced that the bloated amphibians of their former territory were reincarnations of Imperial saints — through whom the Emperor could be contacted — their priests dressed in moist skins, eyes bulging with lugubrious scrutiny, demanding tithes
from the hivers beneath their rule not of credits nor food, but unpleasant organic curios: hair from the head of a child, an old man's spittle, ingredients for their rituals of worship.
And finally, to the west, the haughty guards of the Sztak Chai Warlord moved amongst the throng, demanding respect and taxation in equal amounts. Their plain robes disguised bodies honed to teak hardness by decades of martial ''meditation'', and their dawn exercises had captured Sahaal's attention — and his appreciation — from across the waters.
The seventh noble house, un-represented in all of the rustmud caverns, was the Glacier Rat scum: piratical vermin wiped from the face of the hive in the blink of an eye.
Before the exodus these families, these wolf-pack brotherhoods, had ruled the underhive with a clench of iron and blood: and woe betide the settlement that neglected its taxes, or disrespected its territorial overlords.
And now this.
They found themselves reduced to fragmentary slices of shoreline, divisions of power that encircled the drill island like a moat of shifting lava — creeping and insidious, but ultimately slow and unthreatening. They had lost the respect of the underhive. They had existed for centuries as protection merchants: extorting ''their'' peasants for the right to stewardship, and when at last their protection was required, when the armoured fist of the Preafects smashed against the underhive's unprotected belly — they had failed. They had fallen from grace. They had come to Sahaal's tribe with begging bowls outstretched and now — the insolence, the gall! — they were resuming their old ways: formulating petty hierarchies amongst the dispossessed camps, demanding fealty and wealth from those with neither to offer.
Sahaal could not stand for that. There was one authority in this rusting hinterland, and one authority alone. He would not be challenged, whether they knew of his existence or not.
And so to each noble family, through scouts that he sent to each camp, he offered an invitation — a communion with the condemnitor of the Shadowkin — and true to form, blustering, face-keeping, puffed with misplaced pride, each was accepted. The head of every house, and his or her finest warrior, summoned to meet with those whose sanctuary they had claimed. That was the deal. That was the bait.
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