Could it be... could it be that he grew fond of them? Could it be that the mantle of overlord had settled upon his shoulders and grown comfortable? Could it be that he was seduced by the devotion and worship of his tribe?
Or was it simply that he enjoyed the power their worship bequeathed, and loathed the prospect of surrendering it?
Was this how the Night Haunter had felt — protectorate of the peoples of Nostramo Quintus, a dark lord who brought them peace and efficiency through fear? Had he loved the blind, empty worms beneath his command? Had it broken his heart to leave them behind him, when the Emperor came and claimed him as his own son?
Sahaal analysed his thoughts and, yes... yes, he was proud of his children, a paternal regard for their glories that flushed him with warmth and shame in equal measure. Already they had achieved so much more than he could have dreamed. 'Strike you at his hands, and he shall not cut you.'
'Strike you at his heart, and his life shall wane!'
The hands had been wrenched from their wrists: silos of surface-to-air lance arrays that his strongest Shadowkin captains had led ragtag bands to cripple. Pocking the hive like kroothair quills, it would have taken an eternity to destroy them all, but the Shadowkin had done well. Those batteries that remained. would exist in fear: their crews awaiting the arrival of whatever unseen attackers had razed the others. Desertions would be rife.
The heart... the heart had been easy. Unprotected and unwatched, the mighty vents that drew heat from the blazing heart of Equixus, feeding the city with warmth and power, were easy targets. Over the past few days, at Pahvulti's direction, they had been breached deep in the underhive — makeshift bombs strapped to metal diaphragms, thick plumes of magma and shimmering air scorching from every fractured edge. Whole tiers had fallen to darkness and cold. And now crops would wither and die as hydroponics coleria froze. The militias would find themselves quelling riots, distributing blankets, sharing out meagre rations, pacifying crowds. When the sword fell and the skies burned with Night Lords' vessels, they would be simple prey.
The city was far from crippled — Sahaal was too much a realist to believe that — but it was injured and bleeding, and in the face of such wounds the infection of fear was never far behind. When the blow came, when the city faced its darkest moment, how many of its stalwart defenders would stand in the Night Lords' way, with their morale sapped and their stomachs empty?
Not many, Sahaal guessed.
And it was all thanks to his armies. All thanks to the Shadowkin and their refugee comrades, blind little mice, who obeyed his command to assuage the guilt of the blood on their hands. He was their champion. The lord of the oppressed. The master of the dispossessed, who had taken their simmering resentment of the hive above and wielded it like a flaming sword.
He returned to the rustmud caverns by the winding, hidden entrance to the south. He would re-enter his domain quietly, he had resolved, silently, and once there he would torture the slumbering fool gripped beneath his arm to find — finally! — the identity of the one that had stolen the Corona Nox.
He returned to his territory with pride and triumph in his stomach, and he paused at the cusp of the tunnel's exit to survey his domain.
His mouth fell open.
The swamps were burning.
The tanks.
He had wondered to himself, as he soared above the vindictor crowds in the Macharius gateroom, weaving his fearful spell like an artist at work, why his enemies had committed infantry alone to his destruction. A pragmatic commander would have blasted entry into the room and bombarded him to paste with shell and mortar, grinding him to dust beneath the wheels of armoured vehicles.
He should have guessed the true reason. The vindictor commander was no fool. Whilst the hive festered and moaned with terror, whispering of nightmares in the dark, imagining him — blue-shanked and bronze coated, blood-spattered and burning with Chaotic fires — at the heart of every new disturbance that rocked the city, the Preafects' salient leader had understood that the real threat arose not from a single Night Lord, but from the army he had constructed.
Sahaal almost admired the man. He had seen through the terror-glamour, and reacted to it with a cold efficiency that matched Sahaal's own.
The tanks had come to the rustmud caverns whilst he was absent. They had come with cannons and howitzers, and as he stared out across the churning fires, and darting figures that had once been his domain, he knew he was too late. It was over.
A voxcaster voice from each vehicle's spine declared, over and over:
'The Night Lord is dead... You are not our enemies... Disperse to your homes... Resistance shall he crushed... The Night Lord is dead...'
Sahaal's empire was crumbling beneath him.
They had driven a wedge into the refugee encampment, lighting fires across rag rooftops and straw walls as they went. A great phalanx of Salamanders and Chimeras bulldozed all that stood before them, crewmen standing brazenly on each one, glossy armour lit devilishly in the flames of the burning terrain. Despite the destruction the vindictors had been careful to discriminate amongst their enemies: assiduously avoiding the temptation to open fire upon the shrieking, fleeing sections of the crowd.
'The Night Lord is dead... We are here to liberate you from your slavery... The Night Lord is dead...'
It was a masterful piece of duplicity. Arranged against the combined strength of the Shadowkin and the refugees, the Preafects knew that they had little hope of victory. But with words alone they could divide their enemies: appealing to the refugees' self-preservation, shattering the bonds of terror that Sahaal had spent so long cultivating.
They fled in their hundreds, past the ravaging tanks and up, up by the long northern road, back into their empty dwellings in the undercity above. Like insects casting off their cocoons they threw off the shackles of alliance that Sahaal had forced upon them, they washed clean their hands of the murders each had committed, they ran into the dark with a prayer of forgiveness and a backward glance, and then they were gone.
The Shadowkin themselves received no such mercy. They had courted the daemon as their own master. No excuses of slavery could stain their lips.
The tanks gathered at the banks of the burning swamp, and one by one their mighty cannons angled, like knights tilting lances, towards the rusted island-drill. The tribesmen knew what was coming, perhaps, and swarmed from their dwellings with empty warcries and holy condemnations, lined across the beaches with guns blasting ineffectually at the distant tanks, calling down damnation and the Emperor's wrath upon their unclean enemies.
Ironic, Sahaal mused, that a tribe so devout could be so defiled. It was not the Preafects who had betrayed their Emperor, after all...
Should he act? Should he attempt to intervene? Would it do any good?
The cannons opened fire, great pounding slabs of sound that echoed about the caverns like the laughter of giants. And like geysers of metal and smoke, like a field of angry mushrooms of bloody-red fire that snarled and blackened as they capered upwards, the island was swallowed whole.
The Shadowkin died like vermin, and as his kingdom was toppled before his eyes Sahaal found himself sinking to his knees, overcome, wracked by such powerful emotions that he couldn't define where horror became grief, where loss became madness, and where insanity became rage.
He stood abruptly, body rising in a single movement, discarding the captive majordomo at his feet, forgotten.
Rage. Yes... He could focus on rage.
He knew where he was with rage.
His claws sprung from their sheaths with a relish he could barely contain, and he threw back his head and screamed: a primal shriek that burned away every thought, that stripped clean his body and his mind of everything but pure, unpolluted, uncontainable fury.
He would kill them all for what they had done to his people. He would rip apart the tanks with his bare hands, he would rise on thermals of death and glory, and show these pitiful humans what it was to cross the Talo
nmaster! He would—
Would—
It was too much. His brain was not meant for this. His mind had not been shaped to deal with a slumber of a hundred centuries, to withstand the barrage of loss and uncertainty that he had encountered, to feel compassion for the creatures beneath his dominion.
Kill! the voices shrieked. Burn the world! Kill them all!
He was a thing of war. He was a weapon of terror, to be aimed and released. He had never intended to be so lost from his brothers, to grow so isolated from the path of the Night Haunter. He had never been intended to be so subject to human emotion.
He was weak.
He was going insane. And he knew it.
Hidden at the mouth of the secret tunnel, bathed in the shadows of shifting firelight, Zso Sahaal's mind convulsed with the alien sensations — confusion, loss, uncertainty, loneliness — that it could never hope to withstand. His empire had been taken from him, his grip upon sanity had crumbled with it, and he spiralled away into a great darkness without end.
He fell to floor like some contemptible, shellshocked little human — a total breakdown without escape — and unconsciousness devoured him whole.
On Tsagualsa, the Night Haunter spoke his name, and selected him above all others as his heir. How had he felt, in that frozen moment? How had his selection ignited his mind?
He felt... unsurprised. He felt as though he had always expected it.
He was the Talonmaster. He was his master's truest son. It was natural.
The brute Acerbus left without comment.
On Tsagualsa the Night Haunter dismissed his remaining captains, and to his throne he led Zso Sahaal.
Yours, one day. One day soon!
And he had told Sahaal how it would happen, how he had seen it: burned upon his dreams like a cruel pantomime, played out over and over every night. An assassin of the Callidus shrine would come for him, slinking in the dark, creeping across the writhing galleries of the living palace with her heart hammering in her ears, her fists clenched tight.
There would be no opposition. No attempts to stand in her way. She must be allowed through to enact the final grisly scene.
The Night Haunter, baleful eyes shining, lipless mouth trembling, turned to Sahaal then and made him vow it. Arms interlocked, eyes meeting in shadowed pools.
There would be no intervention. The assassin would fulfil her role. She would play out her part in the endless comedy. Sahaal vowed it, and hated himself. And the Night Haunter, Konrad Curze, his master, made him vow to watch it all. To stare from the shadows to see it happen. He made him vow it on the sacred hatred of the Legion, on the insult that must he repaid, and Sahaal could no more break his oath than he could kill his lord himself. He would watch his master die. And when the she-bitch was gone — her bloody task complete — he would step from his vantage and lift from his master's corpse the Corona Nox. He would take it for himself. He would show it as his symbol of office, and he would lead the Night Lords ever onwards. He vowed it.
He would lead them as his master had done, with boundless hate and endless patience. He would unite them in crusade upon the Traitor Emperor, and all would be well.
And his master turned to him and asked him if he knew, if he understood, what it was that made the Night Lords weak. What was the flaw that crippled their hearts?
Sahaal did not know, so Konrad Curze sat and smiled, and told him.
It had something to do with power. It had something to do with rage. It had something to do with the fear that the Legion grasped, the terror they used as a weapon to destroy their foes.
Fear must be a means to an end, he said. It must be used as an instrument in pursuit of a goal, whether it be obedience or peace or genocide. Just as the Night Haunter had been used as his father's ugly tool, so too must the Legion use fear.
But to sow terror without cause, to horrify without goal — that way lay corruption. The fear ceased to be a means to an end and became an end in itself: seeking dominance over others, seeking to terrify them into submission for the simple fact of their obeisance. Seeking carnage and fear with spite and pleasure.
That way lay megalomania.
That way lay the seduction of power, and it was the flaw in the blood of every Night Lord. It was the flaw he had spent his life struggling to defeat, bearing in its womb madness and venom, begetting the fits that had plagued his waking hours, taunting him with visions of his own end.
That way lay Chaos.
'It festers in our blood... It makes us fools, my heir...'
The Night Haunter would not allow his Legion to succumb so easily to the whispers of the Dark Gods. Chaos had served him well as an ally — as a deadly fire to be hurled at his enemies — but he would not countenance its digestion of his Legion.
Their leader must be strong. Not in arm or in courage — that was the remit of those like Krieg Acerbus — fine warriors, mighty heroes: but too burdened by pleasure at their dark acts to lead. Too joyous in their work. Too hungry for supremacy.
He had asked Sahaal if he had understood, therefore, why he alone had been chosen, and Sahaal had lied with a nod.
The Night Haunter said he had chosen Sahaal as his heir because his strength lay in that holiest of disciplines, that mightiest of fields:
Focus.
He would not waver from the Haunter's vision. A vision of a united Legion. A vision of focused hatred. A vision of blue-black ships assaulting Terra itself. A vision of Night Lord claws closing upon the withered neck of the Traitor Emperor.
Vengeance for the ultimate treachery. Vengeance for a Father's betrayal of his own son.
And then, peace. Efficiency and peace through obedience. The Imperium would prosper beneath nocturnal skies.
All in the Night Haunter's name.
That was the goal. That was the focus.
All this Konrad Curze imparted, and Sahaal left him with a storm of vows clouding his mind, awaiting the coming of the assassin with baited breath.
Sahaal awoke to the crisp bark of gunfire, the acrid stink of ozone, and the unexpected prickle of cold air against his face.
Someone had removed his helmet.
A metallic chime peeled-out in the darkness nearby — a knife being dropped? — and with it came the sluggish retort of a body, toppling to its knees and then collapsing to the ground.
Someone with a knife, shot dead.
A voice gibbered in the dark. 'He was about... oh, God-Emperor... he was about to cut your throat, my lord.'
Sahaal opened his eyes and levered himself upright, muscles bunched and ready for combat, and the figure that stood over him with earnest concern written across every centimetre of her face took him by surprise. It was Condemnitor Chianni.
Beyond her, like the plateau of hell, the swamps surged and boiled and flamed. The tanks were stationary now, their crews clambering from pinde nests and embarkation ramps to poke at the dead bodies with power mauls and blades, checking for signs of life. On the distant northern shore, through a haze of smog and sulphur, the tail end of the fleeing refugees slipped around the pathway's corner and up, to begin the long climb to the safety of the underhive. There was nothing left for them here.
Sahaal blinked, his mind drawing itself sluggishly back to comprehension.
The memory of his master had absolved him of insanity. He had awoken refreshed, untroubled by the tentacles of corruption, released from chains that he had not even known existed. He understood now that he had been on the verge of succumbing to the seductions his master had warned him of, all those centuries ago. He had been tempted by the trappings of power. He had discovered within himself a love for Empire-building an unconstructive regard for the plebeians he had ruled.
He had lost his focus. He had pursued only his own aggrandisement.
Chaos, whispering in his ear.
He realised with sudden clarity that it had been there all along. Since he awoke in the Umbrea Insidior, a voice in his mind, counselling him in rage and fury and power.
>
Well, he was free of it now. His master's words had cleansed him from beyond the veil of time and death. He had lost the patronage of Chaos, he had lost the swarming warp-things that buzzed and tickled his mind, and he felt more alive than he had since his arrival.
Ave Dominus Nox!
He breathed his gratitude without sound, overcome by the strength of the Night Haunter's wisdom.
No longer for him the weakness of rulership. No longer the enjoyment of devotion. No longer did he crave the worship of his underlings, or the obeisance of those who thought him holy.
He had rediscovered his focus. The Corona Nox would be his, and damn his crumbled Empire for the sham that it was!
He returned his mind to reality, making sense of his surroundings. Somewhere out across the fiery territory, the body-checking Preafects stumbled ever closer. He looked up at Chianni and blinked, confused. 'You should be dead,' he said, aiming a wavering finger.
'I... I heard you, lord.' She bit her lip, throwing a glance over her shoulder at the vindictors, prodding and kicking at charred bodies.
'Heard me?'
'Y-yes... I was on the far shore, overseeing the returning strike-groups. When the tanks came I...' Her head dipped, ears reddening. 'I confess that I thought you lost to us. They said you'd been killed. My lord, I was... oh, forgive me, I was fleeing.' She tumbled forwards with a sob and locked trembling fingers around his clawed feet, prostrating herself. 'I have dishonoured, you! Forgive m—'
He waved the rant away, impatient. 'Never mind that! What happened?'
'I...oh, Terra's blood, I heard your cry. A shriek of hate from the south.'
He remembered. He remembered the rage and the fury, the last insidious surge of Chaos, frying his mind, claiming him for its own, before the breakdown occurred and his tortured brain rolled over upon itself. 'The others thought I was mad,' Chianni burbled. 'They said I was hearing what I wanted to hear, but... I couldn't just run! Not without checking'
'So you came?'
Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000) Page 27
