Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  Someone in the audience vomited. Nobody looked around, all eyes wide, brimming with tears of terror. The sheer force of their anxiety pushed at Mita's senses, threatening to overwhelm her.

  'It was a mercy to hear his screams.'

  The image jumped abruptly. Still pushed to its highest magnification, the photoseer swept its gaze to the side: a blur of nonsensical shapes, flitting one across the next. Formless dark and flickering light gave way to panoramas of blue and bronze, of red-tainted confusion and glossy tones, all of it chipped and hardened by harsh shadows. It found its target in a flash of nauseous focus and — with an instant's pause for swirling minds to decipher what they were seeing — the crowd erupted anew.

  Devil-red slits, burning from a field of shadow, swept up and backwards in arrowhead slants, tickled by a wreath of misted breath.

  Eyes.

  'So shall perish all who have fallen from the light,' their owner hissed. 'The Emperor's gaze has fallen upon this world—' (shrieks and fainting amidst the audience) '—and he has found it wanting. Corruption is all he sees. A city of iniquity and injustice, ruled by the weak and the selfish.'

  The image began to loosen, pulling away from those eyes, smouldering with malice. Whatever form held them remained indistinct, bathed in shadow, hinted only in flashes of blue and bronze, in hulking dimensions that fooled the eye and mauled the senses.

  'You have seen the deaths amongst you. The sinners cut down. I took their heads to clean their corruption. They are the first among many. They will not be the last. Repent, sinners. Fear your Emperor's wrath. Fear his angel of vengeance.'

  At its widest angle, the viewspex was a poor interface for the horror of its subject. This shape, this unseen thing, leaned from the lightless void, eyes afire, breath steaming. Spines and chains caught at flickering firelight, half-seen allusion to its size and shape. Neither were obvious: it was a presence first and a solid being second, an ethereal devil, a graceful silhouette. The audience clothed its faceless hulk with whatever nightmare-flesh their minds conjured, and all along they suspected that whatever terrors their imaginations supplied, the reality was sure to be far, far worse.

  It hissed at the photoseer, and claws like bolts of lightning snapped into view from nowhere. Shrieks rang out in the cramped gather-hall.

  'Judgement is coming,' the beast said. 'Do not resist it.'

  And then the broadcast ended, and the fizzing snowstorm of white noise was all that lit the gloomy cavern.

  There was a moment of silence.

  'He's lying!' Mita cried, heart pounding. 'He's lying! He wants us to fear him! He's no child of the Emperor!'

  She might as well have tried to whisper in the face of a hurricane. No one was listening to her.

  They were too busy screaming.

  It was the same all across the city. Wherever she went, wandering unseen — as only the vagrant can truly be — the sobbing and screams rang out in the dark. In the frantic colours of the klubzones, in the srnoggy wastes where the factories clamoured with downmarket habs, in every street and every stairway: unbridled horror. Whispers. Rumours.

  The Citizen Worship broadcasts were resumed quickly, control of the station clearly regained. The stammering denials and assurances — 'All is well, all is well' — did little to quell the storm. Indeed each authority that attempted placation and denied the corruption of the hive merely fed the dissent, branding themselves as partisans to the iniquity by attempting to conceal its existence. Only a sliver of the teeming masses had been present to see the broadcast, but it hardly mattered. The mouth-to-ear machine worked its cogs to nothingness as the story was told and retold, mutating and growing with each hour.

  Chapels groaned with bodies: crying out for forgiveness, demanding mercy from unprepared priests, themselves shaken to the core of their faith by the threat of divine justice. On streets the purgatists found themselves outdone by the sudden zeal of those seeking absolution, wailing and gnashing, striking themselves with thorny canes until every tramway and stairwell was moist with the blood of flagellants.

  But most... most of the hive did not resort to such excesses. Most slunk home with faces pale, deserting the factories in their droves, locking doors and bolting shutters, whispering fearful reassurances to sobbing infants and telling spouses over and over, 'I love you, I love you...'

  Just in case.

  The Emperor's angel was abroad, and in his path all sin would burn, all unrighteousness would bleed itself dry, all mercy would be denied.

  And not a single thing that Mita said could convince the city otherwise. The Night Lord had outmanoeuvred her.

  Where is your— 'It is being dealt with' —now, Kaustus?

  Skulking in the gloom of a frightened city, she realised with her heart sinking that the time had come to deploy the one ace she still held. She found a secluded spot in the dark beneath the struts of a mezzanine stairwell, and sat with her legs crossed, clearing her mind.

  This was going to hurt.

  When she had visited the information broker, days before, when his servitors had come so close to finishing her and Cog, she had watched it dawn upon him with amusing slowness that all the arrogant bluster in the world would do him little good.

  She plucked his secrets from his mind.

  She'd found him enmeshed at the heart of a great room/machine, cursing the destruction of his cybernetic warriors. Like a fat spider in its web, the cords of his data-empire snaked from every corner, a morass of sensoria consoles, augaria readouts, clattering logic engines, auspex monitors, fluttering dials and bank upon bank of viewspex screens: meeting in a knot, a tangle, a halo of rubber and metal, at his head. From here he controlled photo-optics, cameras, servitors and communicators hive-wide. From here he intercepted transmissions, he eavesdropped like some digital god, he watched a thousand transactions in a thousand places, and he stored it all away like a bee, hoarding its honey.

  He had thought himself implacable. He had tamed a Space Marine, by the hiveghosts, how could a mere woman hope to hold any sway over him?

  In his world of computations and logic, of bitter numbers and black/white divisions, of strength and weakness, there was of course one parameter he could never hope to calculate: the realm of the psyker.

  And yes, he may have spent his life severing his ties with humanity, rebuilding his body time and time again, augmenting and reshaping his mind like a sculptor working clay — but he could not escape from the raw biology of his brain. It was an emotive organ, and if his media were metal and mathematics, then Mita's were thoughts themselves.

  She had slid into his consciousness before his smugness could even take flight, and he had been powerless to stop her. He'd told her everything: who he was, how he had been created, the extents of his empire. He'd told her about his meeting with the Space Marine, about the creature's quest for the Glacier Rats, about the ongoing hunt — spreading rumours across the entire underhive — for the Slake collective: always in pursuit of some unknown package. He had bared his steely soul before the scalpel of her astral self, until she'd had him exactly where she'd wanted him.

  She'd threatened him with the one thing that was guaranteed to scare him — informing his former masters at the Adeptus Mechanicus of his existence and whereabouts, reminding him that it wasn't too late to undergo the puritens lobotomy a second time — and he had capitulated like the unctuous little worm he so clearly was.

  He would find the Night Lord, she'd insisted. He would report every movement — every orkspoor word — back to her. She arranged times and places, and then she let him go.

  He would betray her, of course. It was inevitable — that was just the sort of mind he had. She imagined he would wriggle his way into the Night Lord's debt, seeking protection and power from the beast she had sent him to spy upon. It was of little consequence. She had taken... other precautions.

  The tutoria of the Scholastia Psykana called the procedure inculcati. It involved depositing a fragment — a parsus — of one's ow
n astral self, like a souvenir, within the subconscious of another human. Once detached, the psyker could form a brief link with their target — location and distance notwithstanding — and ride, like some insidious piggyback signal, upon their very senses. It was a poor alternative to remote viewing at the best of times, but — given her difficulty with that discipline, and the Night Lord's guardian warpthings — that was no longer an option.

  The inculcati was difficult. It was painful. And it allowed only one chance.

  When she'd pushed her way inside Pahvulti's mind, revolted at his cold ambition, acknowledging the probability of his betrayal from the start, she had screwed up her courage, braced herself, and cut away a piece of her soul, pushing it down into the efficient columns of his brain. If she could no longer spy on the Night Lord herself, she'd decided, she'd send this fool on her behalf: to stare through his eyes and hear through his ears.

  Which, seated beneath the mezzanine, sweat pricking her brow, moaning with effort and agony as if on some secret childbirth, she did.

  And his external temperature at 30.4°C: the result, no doubt, of coolants within his armour. His throne is built of rusted iron and bone, decorated in feathers, and stands at 3.1 metres from base to tip.

  Pahvulti's clipped thoughts, spiralling around her like a river. She fixed her fingers into the rush and concentrated, overwhelmed by alien impressions and thoughts. To see through Pavhulti's eyes was to be immersed in a sensory ocean, ridged by tsunamis of detail and analysis.

  At a depth of 1.5km below ice-level, the rock is warm. He is the lord of the underhive — undisputed — and I am at his left. To his right sits his condemnitor. I recognise her from my surveillance locus as Avisette Chianni. She is one of the Shadowkin.

  I have no arms.

  I have seen two hundred and six Shadowkin since I came to this place. I have seen many more refugees.

  Each carries a weapon. He has built an army.

  Far above, seated in the boiling heart of the trance, Mita was staggered. The inculcati link was not strong — remaining sapient in the deluge of another being's thoughts was far harder than she had imagined, and the conflicting inputs of Pahvulti's body with her own had all but severed the connection at its start — but still she was overwhelmed by the broker's secret admiration for the domain the Night Lord had built.

  One point two metres above me, to my right, He says:

  'Bring them forwards.'

  I have given him Slake. All is well.

  The scouts — three of them, all men, though one is an albino of the Pallor House — push their prize forwards. No doubt the Night Lord is mixing the resources at his control, forging links between those who serve him voluntarily, and those who have discovered themselves dominated. It is a salient tactic: There is no shortage of loyalty in this place.

  The scouts found the collective in the safehouse I revealed. The Slake members seem bewildered at the heart of the Shadowkin camp: there are two remaining, and with a third of their efficiency compromised their situation confuses them. They are rendered children, summoned before an elder. When the male stumbles his companion falters with him: linked to his temple by a cord of copper umbilicus.

  The woman was once Sicca Yissen, aspiring heiress to the Yissen Guildhouse. The man, at one time, was Apolus Jaque, illegitimate child of the Rogue Trader Corleoni. And their missing member was Kuloch Sven-Dow, whose putsch of the WestHab trading consortium failed so spectacularly.

  I know their names because I created them. They came to me, disgraced by guild and gold, each hungry for a second chance. They needed an edge above their competitors, and so I created the gestalim. I fused their memories together, I gave them the power of the cognitor but preserved their personalities. They have existed for three years, four months and sixteen days. In that time they have become junkies.

  Information-narcotics. Middlemen desired and sought-after all over the hive, but indebted only to me.

  Until today I have patronised their custom with paternal pride. I have allowed them autonomy (at the price only of their loyalty) and even hidden them, in this time of peril. I have been like a father to them.

  And now the Night Lord has demanded them, and I have provided.

  Poor, poor little Slake.

  Something lands in the mud at their feet, cast down from above and behind me. It is a skull, polished clean, shining sockets above each eye trailing useless cables like antennae.

  Kuloch Sven-Dow. Rest in peace, fool.

  The Slake collective is reunited in a tangle of scrabbling grasps and piteous groans. Its living members need no prompt, they jack into the dead skull like starving slaves presented with a meal, lolling and mewling in pleasure at the surge of data.

  The collective is reunited, and whatever childish anxiety they had suffered is eclipsed in an instant. When the initial rush has passed they face the Night Lord with disinterested eyes and say:

  'You are going to kill us, then?'

  They speak together, perfectly in harmony. It is an amusing effect.

  If their straightforwardness is of consternation to my new master, he does not show it.

  'I will,' he says. 'But there are a thousand deaths at my disposal. Some are slower than others. You understand.'

  The collective trades glances. I know they are discussing within the confines of their secret union, unheard voices crackling back and forth. They display no outward signs of fear.

  'We accept,' they say. 'It will be painless?'

  The Night Lord shrugs. 'It will be fast.'

  They were a fine creation, the gestalim. I shall be disappointed to see them gone, but we are all of us made slaves in the Night Lord's presence, and to accept his dominion is the clearest, easiest path.

  'There was a package,' he hisses, and I fancy that one point three seconds into his pause there comes a quiet sigh, unheard by all but me, and I wonder what thoughts circulate in his mind. 'You commissioned the Glacier Rats to steal it.'

  'We did.'

  'How did you know it was coming?'

  'Our buyer anticipated its arrival. He employed us as middlemen. We would locate and hire agents to retrieve the item. Their fee, as was ours, was generous.'

  He hisses behind me. He is eager.

  'Where is the package now? Was it opened? Was the seal broken?'

  'It was not opened by us. It has been delivered to the customer.'

  In the throne, the monster leans forwards. He deploys his most pertinent query like a pict-gambler presenting an ace of cups.

  'Who,' he said, unable to disguise the hunger in his voice, 'is the customer?'

  In the world above, through pain and sweat, Mita cleared her consciousness and focused, struggling to hold the inculcati connection. This, her senses told her, was a critical moment.

  The package...

  Something stolen from the Umbrea Insidior.

  Something worth a thousand deaths to pursue.

  The package was at the crux of it all.

  She pushed further into Pahvulti's consciousness, straining to hear.

  'We do not know,' the collective says.

  There is no hiss from the Night Lord, no explosion of temper and carnage. I wonder, perhaps, if he has come to anticipate disappointment.

  'We have only a location,' Slake continues, harmonious voice unwavering. 'A meeting place and a signal code, to summon the customer's agents. They come to collect, and to make payment!'

  'And where,' the Night Lord says, voice a whisper, 'is that?'

  'The Macharius Gate! The Macharius Gate!'

  A cowled scribe — who had made a spirited attempt at tackling her legs — received a heel in his face for his troubles. She sprinted on, past bemused acolytes and oblivious servitors, shouting as she went. 'Orodai! Orodai, you bastard! The Macharius Gate!' The Cuspseal Preafect-precinct was busy, even for the insanity that passed as the norm in these parts. She leapt over a scrum of off-duty Dervishi — too slow to intercept her — and pounded up alabaster stairs to th
e next level. 'Orodai! Orodai!'

  Obstruction to her hurtling progress was certainly growing now. She'd bolted past the fat desk sergeant at the precinct's entrance with a discourteous ripple of psychic energy — not enough to kill, but plenty to leave him sagging and corpulent in his chair. By now alarms would be ringing in higher levels, squads would be closing like black-glossed claws upon her hellish advance, and perhaps someone, some unctuous little aide, was informing Orodai that a madwoman was indulging in a laughable attempt to deliver an unsanctioned message. She just hoped the news pricked his curiosity. Nothing's ever easy.

  'Orodai! The Macharius Gate! Damn your eyes, man! Can you hear me? The Macharius Gate!'

  A young Preafect went down behind her, an elbow catching him squarely in the face. His partner — an older vindictor with a well-polished punctiliousness about him — decided to forgo the non-lethal approach and raised his shotgun. She blasted him with a messy crackle of astral energy and resisted the urge to grab for his gun as she passed. Being armed was a sure way to get oneself shot.

  At the penultimate level, leaving behind her a scattered trail of bewildered aides and psychically-battered Preafects, whichever security-servitor was coordinating the ''emergency'' presented the result of its labours: a ten-strong block of Preafects, fully armoured, which let rip with a salvo of shotgun fire in the tight confines of the stairwell at the very instant she rounded the corner. It was only the premonitionary flicker of imminent obliteration that flashed through her secret senses that compelled her to skid to a halt, leaping back in the direction she'd come, and even that wasn't quite fast enough. A thick wall of leadshot snagged at the edge of her shoulder as she vanished, spinning her in her place and dropping her to the floor, crying out.

  Hot blood warmed her arm.

  Heavy footsteps clumped down towards the corner and she mustered what little energy she still had to prepare another psychic strike. But then shouted commands and the heavy clanking of armoured bodies rose up the stairwell from below, the first of many vindictors pounced around the corner with gun bared, and she realised with a particularly foul curse that she was utterly outnumbered.