Lord of the Night (warhammer 40,000)

by Саймон Спуриэр

  Is the enemy of my enemy not my friend?

  The uncertainty did not last. Basking in the silent assurances offered by the Corona, it was difficult to feel anything but utter poise, utter confidence, utter superiority.

  'Put the artefact down,' the inquisitor said, gripping the witch around the neck with his spare arm and turning the pistol towards Sahaal. 'Put it down and step away.'

  It was, of course, a laughable suggestion. Sahaal sneered and bunched his fists, readying himself for anything. 'Never,' he snarled.

  The inquisitor shrugged, infuriatingly calm. 'As you wish.'

  The servitors moved with frightening speed.

  Four sprinted clear of the pack, racing along the room's perimeter — bronze blurs with pistoning legs and eerily static arms, optic-pucked faces twisting to regard Sahaal even as they left him behind. Their very movements spoke volumes of their efficiency and cost: smooth and regulated, flexing with a controlled gait so unlike the staggering lurches of lesser models. Not mere cadaver-machines, these, but prime human bodies, sealed within metal sleeves, blessed with empty vapidity and unimaginable strength. Sahaal assumed they were working to surround him, rushing along the outer edges of the cavern in a flanking manoeuvre. It wasn't a prospect he could afford to dwell upon: the two remaining attackers dropped into firing stances, stabilising limbs hinging from the rear of their knees, weapons auto-racking at mechanical command.

  They opened fire, and the world became noise and light.

  They were fast, these toy soldiers. Quick to find their range and quicker to draw a bead.

  But Sahaal was faster.

  The hunter would not tolerate being hunted.

  He swept into the air with a whoop, jump pack flaring, dismissing the tumult of detonating bolter shells and pearlescent tongues of flamerfire behind him. He must be focused.

  They were fast and strong and accurate, but for all that they were as efficient only as the weapons they used against him, just as his measure could be taken by the tools of his own retaliation. He could not use fear against machines.

  He could use blades.

  He was the Talonmaster, warp take them! He was the first of the Raptors!

  These zombie warriors didn't know the meaning of fast!

  A melta stream glittered across his shoulder, too slow to follow the graceful plunge he initiated. At his back the governor's exhibition chamber became a warzone, exhibits blown apart, melta streams turning ablative walls to mercurial slag. Ice and snow flurried in, confusing the senses of the motion-detecting security drones, and within seconds the entire chamber was alive with lasfire and muzzleflash, weapons throbbing at the air like percussion.

  Sahaal twisted and barrel-rolled, slipping with avian grace through palls of smog and ice. He dropped to his feet behind the pair of servitors and diced the first with a casual swipe of his claws, relishing the collapse of its unarmoured skull and the spume of long-dead blood that followed. The second rotated at its waist like a spinning top, legs remaining inert, but even as its flamer belched a jet of incandescence Sahaal was slipping to the floor, rising inside its guard like a wraith, lifting it up with his claws deep inside its chest. Its own weight sliced it in two, and its weapons clattered, dead, to the floor.

  For an instant Sahaal considered grabbing one, to draw the bolter at his waist, but quickly rejected the notion. With one hand he must protect the Corona, to sacrifice the blades of the other in favour of something so base as a projectile weapon was unthinkable.

  The reverie did not last long. Safely ensconced within their distant positions, the four remaining servitors seized the opportunity to open fire, leaning from cover behind priceless tomes and antediluvian fossils, walls of lead and fire and sound pounding and intercepting. Sahaal bunched his legs and pounced onwards, his prize clutched close to his chest.

  It was clear to Sahaal that he had walked into a trap: the slow realisation that the inquisitor had been controlling his movements from afar, awaiting the moment that the Corona's casket was opened before making his play, was stealing over him by degrees. If that was true — a horrific prospect! — then surely the tusked fiend wouldn't risk harming the prize whose capture he had spent so long engineering? Surely that would be an illogical step?

  Apparently logic was not a concept with which the inquisitor was familiar.

  Whatever simple parameters the servitors were obeying, protecting the Corona from harm was not among them. Bolterfire raked across Sahaal's airborne body, chipping lumps of ceramite from his shouldguards and destabilising his bounding strides. Sparks scrawled vicious patterns across his chest and legs, toppling him out of control and sending him crashing to the ground, unique masterpieces and specimen jars shattering around him. The glutinous wash of a flamer rippled past him like a river, sending him rolling from its path with smoke lifting from singed plates. Even finding cover was a near impossibility: every priceless gewgaw that he ducked behind was attended by its own immobile servitor drone, hanging from the ceiling in mute vigilance, and the slash-stabs of lasfire from above had already punctured his armour along its joints, slicing his face in jagged streaks. He kept moving, strafing as he went, hopping into the air wherever he felt it possible, only to be forced back to the ground by a deadly crossfire from his assailants.

  Beneath other circumstances, his storming senses reassured him, the servitors' inflexibility would be their downfall. For all their firepower, for all their strength and speed, they were little more than clockwork toys: obeying simple directives without recourse (or opportunity) to innovate. Their simplicity made them predictable, and had he been willing to wade through their fire to draw close, Sahaal's victory would be assured. But he couldn't risk harming the Corona, and inflexible or not their logic engines had directed them into a horribly efficient pattern: a four-way killing zone that left him with no path of concealment, no hope of escape.

  He was reduced to a hunted beast, scurrying to flee from its pursuers, knowing already that they closed upon it from all sides. A melta-burn dissolved the elephantine skull he'd ducked beneath — a steaming lance of superheated air that ripped a hole in his shoulder-guard and ate at the flesh beneath, vaporising muscle and blood. He cried out and dragged himself clear, shutting the pain from his focus and drawing his arm back to its furthest stretch, preventing tightness when his superhuman blood sealed the wound.

  Superhuman or not, he was being taken apart.

  And then, like a ghost picking its way between realities, stumbling through smoke and fire, there came the solution. Small, vulnerable, tattered and torn, but moving ever onwards, reaching out towards him.

  Chianni.

  She had left the ruined shuttle to find him.

  The servitors' simple minds did not even acknowledge her as a threat. Beyond their commands, without mention in the aggressive engines that drove their desiccated brains, they ignored her as if she was hardly there at all.

  Sahaal's instincts rebelled at the idea that seized him, so tainted by a lifetime of suspicion and paranoia that the very notion of trusting someone repelled him. But he persisted, silencing his internal objections with a stubborn snarl.

  There was no other way.

  In Chianni he had found a slave that he could trust. An acolyte who had never deserted him. A priestess so mindlessly obedient that she had braved fear and fire, limping through a warzone, just to be by her lord's side.

  He had gone to pains to make her complicit to his secrets. Let her repay the sentiment now.

  With her, the Corona Nox would be safe, at least until he had slaughtered these upstart machines and regained his freedom.

  'M-my lord?' she warbled, face pale, as he roared from the fragments of his cover through smoke and gunfire, bolter shells rippling the ground at his heels, and thrust the crown deep into her grasp, barely slowing.

  'Run!' he roared. 'Get clear, damn you! Let no one take it from you! Run!'

  And then she was behind him and he found himself unburdened, and with a shriek
of such terrible joy that the hairs at the nape of his neck shivered and stood on end, he brandished his second claws and turned in the air.

  He would stride through all the bolterfire in the galaxy, now. He would swim an ocean of flames. He would streak through melta-stream skies to reach the scum that had dared to face him, and when it was over he would put out the inquisitor's eyes one by one, and wear them as trophies upon his belt.

  Unburdened by his master's sacred legacy, he could do anything! He could—

  The servitors' guns fell silent. The world seemed to draw breath. Sahaal dropped to the floor and hissed, wafting smoke and flickering tongues of fire obscuring his senses. The wound on his shoulder had sealed itself fully, but beneath layers of conditioning and focus he could feel the pain of it shrouding his senses, drawing his mind into the dangerous eddies of shock. He shook his head to clear the numbness, eyes roving into the corners of the smog-bound chamber.

  The servitors were gone, sprinting back towards their inquisitor-master as if their task were complete, optics twitching to follow him as they vanished into the pall. A cold suspicion gripped him, like the ice even now sending frozen fingers throughout the gallery chamber, and he turned in his place with it gnawing at his belly. Chianni.

  She should be running. She should be clear of the room, sprinting the Corona to safety.

  She was not.

  Panic gripped him, cold beads of sweat prickled at the skin of his pale temples. The condemnitor stood exactly where he had left her, the obsidian crown clutched in her pale hands, unblinking eyes fixed upon him through the shifting smoke.

  'Run!' he roared, twin hearts throbbing in his ears. 'Run!'

  Time slowed.

  The inquisitor stepped from the smoke and placed a fond hand on Chianni's shoulder, smiling. Sahaal's mind did a backflip.

  'Thank you, dissimulus,' the inquisitor said, lifting the Corona Nox from her unresisting grasp. 'That will be all.'

  She nodded, eyes vacant. 'Very good, my lord.' Her voice changed even as she spoke, deepening to a throaty bass, and before Sahaal's horrified eyes her skin writhed like a clenching muscle, swarming across bone and cartilage like molten rubber, dipping away in cheeks and eye sockets: changing.

  When she spoke next her voice was that of a man, matching the unremarkable — but clearly male — features of her... his... its face. 'And my ration, my lord?'

  Inquisitor Kaustus nodded, meeting Sahaal's eyes with a smug wink. He dipped a hand into the folds of his robes and produced a leather case, passing it to the newly transformed male at his side.

  'Polymorphine,' he explained, smirking. 'You just can't trust an addict, eh, Night Lord?'

  Sahaal's world fell away beneath his feet.

  The battle in the Steel Forest. She'd been wounded — no... no, she'd died. She had died and this thing, this morphic obscenity, had staggered down into the rust-mud caverns to take her place.

  Another betrayal. Another reason never to trust a soul.

  He had nothing. He could rely upon no one.

  All that was left to him was the rage. His master's genetic gift: focused by pain and insanity.

  The dissimulus hurried from the room with its poly-morphine fix clutched to its breast, and in its wake Sahaal pointed a claw at Kaustus's heart, eyes smouldering with the hatred of centuries.

  'You die,' he said, and he kicked off from the ground, jump pack screaming at his back. And then everything changed.

  Even as the distance between him and his target fell away, even as he imagined the inquisitor's smug face torn apart beneath his claws, even as the prize that had been snatched and regained and snatched again was within his grasp, light distorted the world.

  The air opened up. Perspective struggled to translate what human eyes could never hope to comprehend, dimensions writhing upon each other, and in a rush of stale air and the bitter tang of ozone a blazing doorway crept open into reality.

  Still Sahaal bounded onwards, claws outstretched, the ground blurring beneath him.

  Figures danced from the swirling portal. Lithe forms of fluted limb and gaudy colour, tall helms and plumes of hair blurring at the speed of thought. And amongst them there came a robed prince, a runic demigod, antlers ablaze with electric fire, staff of office humming with uncontainable power.

  Sahaal recognised him from his dreams.

  The warlock...

  The staff flared across every spectrum, crackling gaussfire enveloped him, psychic horror guzzled him whole, and as he fell to the floor with blood in his eyes, Sahaal's final thought was: They have come to finish what they started one hundred centuries before.

  They have come to take what they could not take then.

  Xenogen scum!

  The eldar have come for the Corona Nox!

  And as Inquisitor Kaustus turned to their shimmering leader with an ebullient bow, holding the crown like some royal offering, needles of doubt and horror punctured Sahaal's brain, seizing his muscles and crippling his rage.

  He crashed to the ground insensible, and knew no more.

  Mita Ashyn

  It was all happening too fast.

  The inquisitor's admission of guilt, the arrival of the Night Lord, the unveiling of the Corona Nox. Held at the point of a gun by her former master, pushed and shoved like some dismal piece of meat, Mita had seen it all.

  Something had changed about the nightmare Marine. The sight of him no longer filled her with unspeakable dread, his mere presence no longer wrapped cords of corruption and filth around her heart. No longer was he protected by chittering underlings, invisible and malevolent. No longer did the warpspawn of the Dark Gods gather around his soul like flies around a light: a living armour that she could never hope to penetrate.

  Had he, she wondered, somehow escaped the predations of Chaos? Had he somehow cleansed himself of the taint that had threatened to smother him?

  Was he now, like her, simply another pawn in this obscene game of manipulation and conquest?

  Whatever the reason for his abrupt purification, its effect was pronounced: where previously her psychic senses could no more approach and delve into his spirit than she could swallow hot coals, now she had found herself free to explore. Now she could see his true self.

  It was almost too much for her to bear.

  It was a thing of such sadness, such loneliness, such suspicion and guilt and paranoia, that it almost tore her heart apart.

  Pain, rage, ambition, sorrow. Distrust. Isolation. Bitterness.

  His mind was like a reflection of hers, magnified a billion times.

  She'd felt his brief victory — a surge of joy — at reclaiming the Corona. She'd spiralled with him into despair as the victory crumbled. She'd shared his pain as the servitors tore him to shreds, piece by piece, and she'd risen like a float upon the crest of his triumph as he entrusted the crown to his aide...

  The aide, whose mind she had recognised. A swirling psyche without centre, without certainty or solidity of ego. She had seen that mind once before.

  The unveiling of the dissimulns had come as no surprise to Mita, although she shared the Night Lord's horror from within his coiling spirit.

  And then she shared his revulsion and his awe at what had followed.

  The eldar came in a storm of warp-forces so focused, so potent, that Mita slipped to her knees and bled from her ears. Kaustus had left her beneath the guard of his four gun servitors — toys, no doubt, of the murdered governor — and even as she stumbled at the astral crescendo dizzying her senses their guns remained focused intractably upon her head. She didn't care. They were a side-show, an insignificant concern when placed beside what was now unveiling across the smoke and devastation of the room.

  Kaustus, you bastard. You made a deal with the devil...

  As part of the Ordo Xenos, Mita knew more than most of the alien scourge that was the eldar. Ancient and technologically superior, that their bodies were ostensibly similar to humans' was the one aspect of their race that could be cons
idered familiar. They thought differently. They moved differently. They lived lives of carefully partitioned vocation: monkish existences devoted utterly to a single pathway.

  Humanity travelled in the warp like trees casting seeds arbitrarily into the wind, placing trust in providence, guided only by the most rudimentary of navigatory processes. To humanity the warp was an untameable ocean, in which only the foolhardy dared to swim.

  The eldar had built roads across it.

  They grew old at the speed of stars. They fought like ghosts. Where the teeming masses of the Imperium struggled with crude senses and ugly language, the eldar burned bright with thought: a level of astral awareness and psionic capability that reduced Mita's talents to those of a child. She was a beast compared to them: a primitive fool, barely able to remember to breathe.

  She was a baby in the presence of demigods, and at the quiet rear of her mind where the awe at the aliens' arrival had not yet penetrated, where she did not share the pain and rage inculcating the Night Lord's thoughts, she wondered:

  Is this how other humans think of me?

  It this why they hate me so?

  Privileged knowledge or not, the eldar were as great a mystery to Mita as they were to any other human. In her studies in the Librium Xenos on Safaur Inquis the testimony of countless inquisitors was the same: the eldar seemed to act without motive — random and abstract — playing out some ineffable game according to alien rules that only they comprehended. All that was known was this:

  Their grasp upon the future, upon the vortex of chance and event that was borne on the warp like froth on a sickened ocean, was unrivalled.

  Kaustus had known somehow that the Corona Nox would arrive on Equixus.

  It had been foreseen...

  He'd been in league with the xenos from the beginning...

  There seemed to be eight of them, although it was difficult to say with any certainly, they moved like liquid light, capering and bounding, never still. She thought she could make out weapons clutched in their long limbs, flat-headed catapults like the fruits of an exotic tree. They slipped from their portal — an entrance, she guessed, to their famed ''webway'' of tunnels and paths that circumnavigated the warp itself — like a knot of frail decorations swept upon the wind: armour of blue and yellow laced by a billion engravings, a myriad of serpentine runes and glowing sigils. And at their head, burning Mita's psychic gaze like a phosphor lamp, their leader.