Outlaw.
She went into the shadow.
Zso Sahaal
Two days seeped by as if captured in amber, struggling against viscous time to claw their way free, to taste liberation for one endless, impossible moment. Sahaal counted each second with truculent impatience, fingers drumming at the arms of his throne, mind adrift with possibilities, plans, frustrations.
Still no word of the Corona.
Two days in the shadow, in the foglight of the rust-mud caverns. Two days of torpid nothing, with only the flickering of firelight to indicate life, like the hive-ghosts themselves, gathered where the nightmares became flesh, swirling about their new king.
Sahaal stared across the water and viewed his domain, and nodded his quiet pleasure. In the north, against the edge of the lapping waters, a tall mound was taking shape, rising up like some swollen stalagmite to challenge the cavern ceiling. The rushing figures at its base had no inkling of his scrutiny, and when — as he had now taken to doing with spiralling frequency — he quit his tattered seat to scuttle across the beams and stanchions of the swamplands, play-stalking the Shadowkin and their refugee guests without their knowledge, still his presence remained secret. He burned with the desire to act, but had no outlet for his energy.
He was everywhere and nowhere. Free to roam, cursed to wait.
He did not need the preysight of his helm, nor the nocturnal vision that was his birthright, to know what the growing mound was built from. Two days, he had given them. After that they would be his.
His master would be proud of him.
In moments of indulgence, when he slipped beneath the waters of meditation, he fancied that he could see Konrad Curze's face. In glittering hazes of pallor and shape, he fancied he could visit the Night Haunter, could speak with him as he had once done, could seek comfort and counsel in his master's voice.
It was all an illusion. The primarch was gone forever, his legacy was all that remained.
In life Konrad Curze had been a tortured soul. Plagued by the wildness of his childhood, haunted by visions of his own demise, he struggled with every fibre of his being to earn the respect and admiration of his brothers, and — above all else — to prove himself worthy of his father's affection. In adulthood as in youth he struck from the shadows, he waged war with fear and steel in the Emperor's name, and he raised his own sons, his Night Lords, with a martial pride unmatched in all the galaxy.
There was little glory in his aspect, if truth be known.
Where other primarchs wrestled for heroic deeds and the favour of their God-Emperor, Sahaal's master pursued only results. He would never be as charismatic as Lion El'Johnson, as articulate as Roboute Guilliman, as demagogic as Horus the Favoured... but he could be strong. He could shatter any enemy. He could be pragmatic. He could be terrifying.
In a universe of terror he robbed the Emperor's enemies of their horrific mantle. He overcame savagery by outstripping it. He purged the brutal by outdoing their brutality. He sacrificed what scant charm he had and took up the crown of scapegoat — the foulest of the primarchs, the dirtiest of fighters, the Emperor's own devil — so that none, none, would stand before him.
Rebels surrendered at the mere suggestion of his intervention. Raiders fled with his name upon their lips, swords unbloodied. Those that were feared were made to fear him. Those that were hated were made to hate him.
Obedience through terror.
He had never been human, but like all the primarchs there lurked in some deep corner of his luminous heart a flavour — a bitter taste — of humanity.
Konrad Curze sacrificed it. He wiped tears of insanity from snowy cheeks and cast his warmth to the wolves, and he did it in the Emperor's name. He lost everything.
He became what he had always been destined to, what the galaxy demanded he become, what the Emperor himself sanctioned, moulded, needed: He became a loyal monster.
And when he turned to his father for succour, for affection, for the merest glimmer of gratitude—
—he received only contempt.
Sahaal surfaced from his musings to find that his grip had splintered the arm of his throne to dust, long shards of bone and iron cutting his hand. He'd bitten his tongue without realising it, and his mouth was filled with the metal tang of his own blood.
Contempt.
That was the Night Haunter's legacy. The contempt of a betrayed son for his father.
And the need for revenge.
Oh, how the mighty are fallen.
'I vow it...' he whispered, unheard. 'Master, I vow it to you. We shall be mighty yet.'
'We shall make him pay for what he did.'
The heap grew massive. From humble beginnings — a cluster, a clutch — it swelled upwards: layer upon layer, compacted together, shovelled one upon the next in imitation of the hive itself.
The stench, by the second day's end, when the camps teemed with life once more and Sahaal slipped across the swamps in secret to view the results of their labours, was an almost physical force.
Men and women, old and young, mouths wide, a rheumy film coating dead eyes. Tongues limp. Flies scuttling and tasting slack skin. From a heap to a hillock, and thence to a mountain, blood spattered, bruised, cold.
A multitude of dead heads glared upwards in mute accusation, and Sahaal met their gaze with a tiny smile.
Most had been taken messily. In distant alleys, he guessed, in maze-like habsprawls and secret places — necks severed with untidy force. Machetes and domestic knives, swinging and bludgeoning, notched daggers and antique blades. The damage to some spoke of sawing, of blow after blow, of hacking without precision through gristle and vertebrae. Of struggles in darkened places, of hands clutching and pushing, straining to defend.
'How many failed to return?' Sahaal murmured, flicking a gesture towards his condemnitor. She alone had joined him before the pile — flickering torches aggravating their shadows.
'Not many,' Chianni said, her voice low. 'The ones who refused to partake were soon... harvested, by those who did not.' Sahaal had at first mistaken her hush for revulsion, but no... no, the Shadowkin were adequately familiar with the tokens of mortality. Her quiet was instead a thing of awe and devotion, centred about the monument before her. 'We think perhaps sixty are unaccounted. Whether they've fled or been captured we don't know.'
'We have their children?'
'Of course.'
He turned to face her, unhelmeted eyes glistening. 'Then you know what to do.'
She nodded. Sahaal was impressed: even the notion of infanticide could not perturb her. Not she: the favourite of a Space Marine.
Yes, it had been wise to confide in her.
Sahaal turned back to his prize and cleared his mind, appreciating its majesty anew, a cone of scattered shapes, an altar to terror.
It was a harvest worthy of the Blood God himself: a mountain of gristle and gore, of gap-toothed grins and severed spines, befitting the brass throne of Khorne.
Not that Sahaal would ever offer it as such. No, these stolen skulls would be gifted to no deity, pledged to no metaphysical spirit.
There was, after all, no God of Fear.
'To the memory of the Night Haunter...' he whispered.
It had been a masterful plan, he knew, to dispatch the refugees on such a ghastly errand. At its most base level it had secured their loyalty: they became complicit to his crusade, bloody-handed allies whether they liked it or not. Few had relished the prospect of murder — fewer still had achieved it with precision and clean conscience — but now... now, with their morbid tithe paid and the faces of their victims haunting their nightmares, now their minds were his to mould.
He had tasked them with targeting sinners — the iniquitous, the mercenary, the impure — and they had made their solemn way into the hive, dispersing like a cloud of flies along elevator shafts and unknown duct crawls, to do that very thing. The hivers were fools if they thought the Cuspseal floor-rents were the only way up from the underhive, and the re
fugees had scattered across the city in defiance of the their so-called ''containment''. From the lowest to the highest tiers, in every shadowed recess and crowded street: a cry, a shout, the wet retort of metal finding flesh, and then only pumping blood and sprinting feet.
Had each and every victim been a sinner? Was every last head the fitting trophy of a slain delinquent who deserved his fate? No.
Of course not — no more so than any being may be considered guilty for the raft of petty evils for which, every day, every human was accountable. Here were the heads of the innocent mixed with the stolen skulls of scum, but he'd wager that each murderer would now convince his or herself, for the sake of their conscience, that their victim had been an abomination worthy of execution. That their brutality had been undertaken in the name of the Emperor. That no matter what violence they had committed, what horror they had seen, it was all excusable as part of their new lord's Holy Campaign.
Sahaal owned them all, now. Truly, the human mind was a wonderful thing.
But more important still, in the act of chaining themselves to his will, this horde of vigilantes, these thousand-strong killers, had injured the hive more than he could ever hope to have achieved alone.
The number of lives taken was irrelevant. Alongside the city's millions this mountain of skulls was a tawdry fraction, and yet... and yet in every level, in every township and city, the fear would be felt. He knew it, as a cognitor knows numbers and a poet knows words.
Let the Civilian Worship Channel deny it. Let the Preafects shake their heads and ring their bells, and claim that all is well. The more it was refuted, the more the rumours would spread. A wave of murders — insidious, motiveless, random. A slinking tide of death.
In a single disparate swoop, more punishing than any spectacle, more invidious than any gaudy massacre that could claim a million lives, fear would blossom on a tsunami of rumour and suspicion. He could well imagine the whispers, the frightened glances, the questions raised in every home.
Who is responsible? What do they want?
What had the victims done to incur such wrath?
The hive would become a restrained place. Doors would lock. Neighbours would cast troubled glances across cramped habways and avoid conversation. Families would huddle in the dark and whisper of ghouls in the night.
Kill a thousand men and they will hate you.
His master's voice, slipping upon runnels of ghostly memory.
Kill a million men and they will queue to face you. But kill a single man and they will see monsters and devils in every shadow. Kill a dozen men and they will scream and wail in the night, and they shall feel not hatred, but fear.
Sahaal nodded, pleased.
He had taken the first step. His brothers were coming for him, and he would be damned for a weakling and a fool if he was unready.
'Summon the captains,' he said to Chianni — and for an instant he fancied that he was back upon Tsagualsa, commanding his raptors, directing the Night Lords with the focus they required.
'Of course, my lord,' Chianni trilled, shattering the illusion. 'In respect of what?'
Sahaal grunted, eyeing the skulls with half a smile.
'In respect of war, condemnitor. What else?'
Another moment's introspection, as he paused for his warriors to gather, another slip back in time: once more to the great halls of the Vastitas Victris and the Night Lords fleet, once more to the side of his master, black-feathered and veiled, leaning upon the Vulture Lectern to address the brothers. Such reminiscing gripped Sahaal more and more often, and at times the vividity of the visions scared him — so convincing was their colour, so remarkable their detail. At times he feared he was going mad.
But always he relished the opportunity to revisit his master's lifetime, and with each occurrence he immersed himself further in the words, treating each as a message intended for him alone. His master's legacy lay with him now. He must be true to the primarch's teachings.
'To kill an enemy, strike you in three places.'
That was how the lecture began, initiates and veterans side by side — Marine and Raptor and Scout and Terminator — each an equal in their lord's eyes, each dwelling upon every word with fevered concentration.
'Strike you at his hands, and he shall not cut you.'
'Strike you at his heart, and his life shall wane.'
'Strike you at his mind, and his courage shall fail, his faith shall leave him, his defeat is assured.'
Sahaal's enemy was the hive. He gave thanks to his master's ghost and, when finally his captains scurried to join him, he sent six squads to remove the city's fingers, one by one.
Surface to air batteries. Orbital defences. Overwhelmed by sudden coordinated attacks, sabotaged beyond the point of rapid reconstruction. Strike you at his hands, and he shall not cut you.
Four groups he sent outwards into the edges of the underhive, where the pulsing hearts of the city stood and rumbled.
Power stations. Geothermal vents. Great melta charges and jury-rigged bombs tightened against churning pumps, depriving the hive of its power and heat. Strike you at his heart, and his life shall wane.
And the mind... The onslaught upon the city's mind, he led himself.
He had expected militiamen, or perhaps PDF regiments, skulking and morose in the xanthic lights at the compound's entrance, passing bacsticks and hipflasks to fend off the cold. As it was, he was not alone in acknowledging the supreme importance of propaganda, and it would not be so easy to gain entry. Clearly he had underestimated the vindictors' commander.
The city's population was jumpy — the murders had seen to that — and with citizens locking themselves away in their habs, mumbling prayers to keep the monsters away from their doors, Sahaal's small war-band had little trouble reaching its destination undiscovered: sneaking through secret streets, forgotten shafts, desolate tramways. At the midtier intersection his scouts had indicated, they pulled themselves from a disused duct and prowled towards the industrial arcade that was their destination, only to find no fewer than six Preafects ringing its heavy gates.
Glutted by the success of their stealth, Sahaal cursed himself for not anticipating that their goal would be better guarded. The Shadowkin melted into the adjacent alleyways, awaiting his command. He sized-up the enemy with a practiced eye.
Two dervishi, heavy carapace armour marked with red stripes, hefted actuator-stabilised lascannons at either edge, with a quartet of shotguns — no less dangerous for their lighter armament — prowling between. In the wake of the attack upon the starport, clearly, the Preafects were taking no chances.
Sahaal grinned despite himself. He had spent too long on his throne, too long brooding and sulking in the gloom, to be dispirited by the odds. It felt good to be active again.
He took them from above, ululating as he dropped into their midst. The first dervishi he had cleaved apart before the squad was even aware of his presence, and before they could gather their instincts and round their weapons he'd stepped through the bloodspray to find a second victim, punching claws through glossy visor and skull alike, twisting through meat and bone. A shotgun pulsed to his left, a panicky blast that barely scratched him, and even as he dislodged the shattered face from his claws he was raising his bolter with his free hand, planting a round in the assailant's face and ducking beneath his thrashing grasp like a ghost, a blue and bronze streak, too fast to follow. By the time the shell detonated in the muffled confines of the dead man's helmet, far behind him, Sahaal had closed with the remaining men. The hiss of a charging lascannon pricked at his senses and he bounded across the shotgunners with a precise burst of his jump pack — snatching at their heads with his talons and dragging them behind him, flinging them with a final shriek — diced by the blades that released them — at the remaining dervishi. The lascannon discharged into their tumbling bodies and vaporised itself — and much of its wielder — in an orb of incandescence, scattering ash and fluid.
Sahaal settled beside the glowing deb
ris and applied his claws to what few scraps of flesh remained, disappointed to find nothing left to kill.
The attack had lasted no more than five seconds.
'We move,' Sahaal announced, beckoning the awestruck Shadowkin from their cover, tearing at the gate with his claws.
The legend above the portal, smouldering now where the lascannon had singed it, mottled with the slurping remnants of the squad that had been intended to protect it from invasion, read:
CIVILIAN WORSHIP BROADCAST STATION
Sahaal smiled as his miniature army slipped within, the echoes of his master's advice warming him.
'...Strike you at his mind, and his courage shall fail, his faith shall leave him, his defeat is assured...'
Once within, the task he had taken upon himself took little time to complete.
It went without saying that the tech-priests made poor targets for his attentions. In his need for technical expertise they might have served him well, but he knew from bitter experience that such devoted — and inhuman — stalwarts were difficult to persuade. With time he could have broken their minds and forced them to do his bidding — there was little doubt of that — but time was the one resource he was without.
Instead he slew them all, gathered together where the priests made their daily broadcasts, and with his Shadowkin holding weapons in clammy palms against their backs, he forced the legion of acolytes, retainers and novitiates to watch. Stripped of their masters, unguarded by the surgical/mechanical paraphernalia that kept the Omnissiah's brood faithful and unafraid, these youths were quick to accede to his demands. And after decades of conducting their masters' orders, of undertaking every tedious duty, every minor maintenance, they were more than adept at complying.
From entry to completion, it took no longer than twenty minutes. The consoles were blessed — clumsily, falteringly — by the captive novices, the servitors chattered with relayed orders and data packages, the bunched cables that led from studio to chapel, to sanctification-nodes and then upwards to all parts of the hive, crackled to life.
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