'I remember the tales...' Ancient texts swam through Mita's memories, the echoing spaces of dusty libraries vivid in her mind. 'He attacked his brother-primarch, Rogal Dorn. Where was his loyalty then, Night Lord?'
'Dorn's pomposity infuriated him. Was it not enough that he had toed his father's line, without the chiding of ignorant fools? Of course his temper snapped. Whose would not have?'
Mita opened her mouth, a suitably acidic reply prepared, but stalled herself. There was little acid left in her, and that which remained was certainly not directed at the melancholy creature suspended above.
'What happened?' she breathed.
'My master was confined to his quarters. He sought time to meditate, to confer amongst his honour guard.'
'And?'
'And the conference was interrupted by a black-suited devil. An assassin, child. You understand me? Sent to kill the Night Haunter. Sent to silence his outbursts. Who else could have sent him? Who else but your holy, righteous Emperor? And, witch, remember: this was long before Horus unveiled his treachery and turned from the light!
'That's... that's impossible...'
'The attack was foiled and my master flew into a rage. Finally he recognised the truth of his father's so-called "justice". He fled from the conference to gather his strength, to consider his movements, to fume at the insult of the attempted murder.
'It was the first of many. Before, during and after the Heresy. On Tsagualsa the Night Haunter stopped running. He built a palace that he knew would be his mausoleum, and he awaited the bitch that would take his head and steal his crown.
'So you see, child, the Haunter was not killed for his part in the Heresy. He was not killed to halt excesses or unsanctioned behaviour. No... no, he was kitted by a father who thought nothing of using him. Of twisting him into a hated monstrosity. Of demanding atrocities and horrors from him to scare his enemies into submission. Of taking from him everything that was pure, everything that was human, and then repaying the sacrifice with betrayal.
'So tell me this, little witch. Do you still believe you aren't being used? Do you still think you'll find some... some reward in death for your loyal service? Do you still think the hatred of the masses is irrelevant?
'Do you still think your Emperor loves you, girl?'
If she'd had a stomach, if this incorporeal realm had taken form and replaced her astral self with a physical body, she knew she would be vomiting blood at the disgust that gripped her. Disbelief battled certainty, the doubts spiraled and flocked to dominate her whole soul, and like an island sinking beneath the sea, like a ship that had been considered impregnable splintering apart and slipping down into cold and lightless depths, every shred of faith that Mita Ashyn had ever felt in the Emperor of mankind crumbled to dust.
She peered through her tears, raised the gun, and fired.
The chains that bound the Night Lord to his crucifix splintered and unravelled.
Zso Sahaal smiled a savage smile, and tore free of the prison inside his own mind, to reclaim what was his.
PART FIVE
DOMINUS NOX
We are coming for you!
Battle cry of the Night Lords Legion (Excommunicate Tratoris)
Zso Sahaal
It was not a gentle awakening.
He arose from the mire of sleep — that psychic trap that the warlock had constructed around him — with red rage in his eyes and every muscle tightening together. He felt the cords stand out on his neck. He felt the knuckles of his hands strain against the flat blades of his claws, brandished before him like a bevy of swords. He felt the talons of his feet — autoreactive pinions studding the periphery of each boot — scratching at the metallic floor on which he'd awoken, pushing him upwards.
All without conscious thought. All at the whim of his fury alone.
He felt the rush of boiling air as his jump pack swooned to life, and the dizzying acceleration as he left the ground.
He felt the soup of hormonal insanity that was his armour's chem-boost deploying into his flesh like a liquid sigh, and for the first time he did not struggle against it. For the first time he welcomed its unsubtle burst, he drew its burning promises into his blood as if accepting a second layer of armour, and he opened his mouth and screamed like a flaming banshee.
There was alien blood patterning his claws before his mind had fully thrown off the shackles of slumber.
They had not expected his revival, that much was clear. He was upon them like a lion before even they, blessed with lightning reactions and impossible grace, could react. The first he clove in two with contemptuous ease, turning away and rolling as he touched down from a shallow swoop, tumbling onto his injured shoulder and springing upright. A second startled xenogen appeared before him, fumbling for its weapon, and he tore through its frail chestplate as he rose. The tips of his claws slipped so far through eldar meat that they cracked the inner orbs of the alien's eye-slits, like branches growing from within. He shook the body away and leapt onwards, luminous fluids drizzling clear.
Somewhere in the crucible of his peripheral senses he registered the tusked inquisitor, standing agog with the Corona clutched in his gloved fingers, and he diverted his aerial leap towards the astonished figure, forgoing the urge to rampage out of control. Beyond, in the decorous shadows of the doorway from the glassy bridge, he could see the witch rise groggily to her feet, held helpless in the ring of vigilant servitors. Inwardly Sahaal spared a curious thought for how long had passed since he was first knocked unconscious. His communion with the young psyker seemed to have lasted a lifetime, whilst in reality scant seconds had passed.
The warlock had not yet placed his elegant fingers upon the horned crown.
Nor shall he!
No sooner had the defiant thought arisen than the antlered fiend itself swept into his path, staff crooked. Sahaal bunched his muscles, preparing to dip aside, to dodge the blast of astral fire the creature was doubtless summoning, when a wall of pain unlike any he had felt before caromed into and through him.
Striking with unerring accuracy, satisfied that its target was otherwise engaged with its warlock master, one of the capering xenos had fired its catapult unnoticed, a spinning shuriken slipping deep into the heart of the grievous wound upon his shoulder, unhindered by armour.
It all but severed his arm.
Howling, struggling to shut out the agony, feeling numbness gripping the dead limb, Sahaal's flight-arc stalled and he twisted in the air, his remaining arm gripping uselessly at nothingness. Thus crippled, slipping towards a ruinous impact, he was ill prepared for the warlock's shrewd intervention.
Lightning engulfed him for the second time. A thick strand of gauss power burst from the creature's blade-tipped staff, needling its way past flesh and bone, sinking dog-toothed jaws into the pulp of his mind. As before, it tweaked at his doubts. It blossomed beneath fields of uncertainty and sadness and urged him to yield, to withdraw, to lock himself away within his own psyche.
It bid him spiral away into blackness.
It stroked at his mind and soothed him, coaxing him to surrender.
Not this time, warpspaum.
This time he was forewarned. This time his mind was not so easily overturned, his vulnerable uncertainties were buried away, and his muscles could no more be overridden than his bitterness could be neutralised.
Above all he was in the grip of a rage of such purity, such strength, that the warlock's machinations could do nothing to deter it.
This time all the psychic tampering in the world could not stop him. He was a juggernaut of phosphorous hate, and he would not be denied his fill of slaughter.
He descended like a swooping hawk, ineffectual psionic incandescence crackling like a halo around him, and punched his remaining claws through the alien's antlered helm with a whoop. Blood and bone scattered like shrapnel, and through its splattered clouds his momentum carried him and his victim's limp body down to the ground, smearing the creature's fluids across his face and his ar
mour.
The remaining eldar reacted as if electrified. They spoke not a word, exchanged not a glance, and fired not a single shot: turning as one and rushing — blurring — towards the bright vortex from which they had issued. It swallowed them and dissolved, a pinprick of suspended flame that dwindled and died in their wake.
Sahaal dropped to his knees and shook the warlock's body free from his claws, exhaustion finally overwhelming him. He felt as if he'd spent an eternity struggling, as if he couldn't remember a time without pain and violence. The wound at his shoulder continued to bleed, coagulation impaired by the sliver of alien metal embedded deep within, and every movement sent daggers throughout his body.
He could see already he would never use the arm again.
And then slowly, eyes rolling in their sockets with planetary patience, he lifted his gaze to find the thief. The villain. The Lord Inquisitor Ipoqr Kaustus.
'Servitors!' the tusked man yelped, backing away, his arms wrapped around the Corona like a child clutching at its favoured toy. 'Protect me! Protect me!'
Across the room the bronze machine-men tilted heads to regard their controller, and swivelled jointed limbs towards him. The witch stood dumfounded as they stalked away from her, released abruptly from their attention.
'Kill it!' Kaustus shrieked, stabbing a finger towards Sahaal. 'Keep it away from me!' He staggered through the machines' midst, racing for the doorway beyond them and freedom, taking the Corona Nox with him.
Sahaal sighed. He should have known it wouldn't be so easy.
Once more, like the bitter twist at the end of a sick joke, he watched his sacred prize dwindling into the distance.
The servitors closed in. It seemed he was not yet finished with the day's violence.
And then the hive shook. From base to tip it shuddered, it creaked and groaned as ancient metals strained, and into its colossal walls there thumped massive, fiery ruinous craters.
It seemed as if volcanoes had opened across the city's flanks. The sky blazed with tumbling fire, every face in every part of the hive tilted up to stare in wonder at the quaking ceiling, and in a ruined chamber near the peak of the central palace a crippled Space Marine of the Night Lords Legion smiled a bloody smile, rose to his feet, and faced the machine aggressors closing upon him with his vigour abruptly renewed.
'They're here,' he hissed, to no one but himself. 'They're here!'
Mita Ashyn
Mita caromed into Inquisitor Kaustus like a vengeful meteor.
She couldn't say exactly what she was thinking. For days her mind had seemed to be a warzone: torn apart, artillery-blasted and entrenched, a ravaged land with its sovereignty contested. If the analogy was valid, then the Night Lord's revelations had been cyclonic warheads, exterminatus missiles to cleanse her tortured thoughts of any rational structure.
If once her mind was a warzone, now it was a wasteland.
The Emperor had betrayed his own son, and in so doing had shown himself capable of breathtaking duplicity. How could she go on now, turning the other cheek at every hateful comment, every declamatory ''abomination!'' or ''mutant!'' hurled at her in the street, no longer safe in the knowledge that the Emperor loved her?
How could she go on with the suspicion that she was being used: a tame little monster, manipulated and abused, only to be cast aside when no longer desired?
The answer, of course, was that she could not. What, then, was left for her?
Nothing. Nothing obvious.
A wasteland.
And now she found herself released from the gunpoint attentions of the governor's servitors, alone in an unfamiliar place, unbalanced by crippling quakes that struck the hive and shivered every centimeue of its enormity, and amongst it all there was only a single detail to which she could cling.
Kaustus.
Kaustus, you bastard.
This is all your fault!
He tried to flee past her, the Corona held to his chest in trembling fingers, and the fact that he ignored her, that his eyes barely dipped towards her, simply enraged her further. She was beneath his regard, clearly: a creature so ineffectual that he barely paused as she stepped into his path and, with a feral shriek, launched herself at him.
She might as well have attempted to tackle a stampeding grox.
Rebounding from his power armour with a thump and a sharp crackle — a rib, she guessed, blinking through sudden pain — she had a brief glimpse of the Night Lord through the smoke and ice, spinning and swooping amongst the servitors. In that blurring tableau he seemed to her to be a dervish, a god of blade and flight, dancing between gunfire and slashing at the unresisting metal of his foes.
She wondered if he would come to her assistance if she cried out.
She wondered if she would accept his help if he offered it.
The hive groaned again, dust and smog loosened from the ceiling as titanic forces shook it, and in his haste to flee Kaustus stumbled. Mita seized the opportunity without thinking, screwing up every last vestige of her inner strength, drawing deep on reserves that she barely knew existed, and lashed out with a pulse of psychic force.
She could not invade the inquisitor's mind. That wouldn't stop her from crushing his body.
The force of her own attack astonished her. The inquisitor was blasted from his feet as if struck by a grenade, shredded chaff from his robes scattered upon the air. The Corona slipped from his grasp and skittered across the floor, skidding in eldar blood. Beneath the torn gauze of Kaustus's cloak Mita could see that the very plates of his armour had been splintered, great cracks scuttling across chest and thighs as if struck by an invisible hammer.
'Is this what I've been repressing?' she wondered, dazzled. 'Is this what my faith has been denying me?'
Unfettered by ritual and prayer, unblinkered by needless devotions, the truth was as radiant as the warp itself.
The Emperor does not give me my power. My tutors lied!
It is my own!
She was on Kaustus in a flash, straddling his wide chest and beating knuckles across his nose. It snapped with an unpleasant crackle, so she punched it again, and again, venting the maelstrom of frustration and resentment that had been building in her soul for weeks.
'Bastard...' she hissed between blows, catching her breath, '...warp damned empty-skulled bastard!'
He recovered faster than she'd anticipated. Stunned or not, bleeding from a dozen rents, he was still an inquisitor. He still wore armour designed for the angels of the Adeptus Astartes. She should have known he wouldn't stay down so easily.
'Fool girl!' he roared, throwing her off. 'Where is it? Where is it?' He dragged himself upright and cast angry eyes across the floor, hunting the Corona Nox. Spotting its oily ring, already gathering a frosty patina, he lunged for it with a cry of triumph, once more forgetting the psyker that had brought him down.
Mita was ready for him. She knew exactly what to do.
One final effort. One final catching of her breath, one final reach down into her soul, clutching for dregs of power. One final attempt at the Animus Motus.
The Corona moved, edging away from the inquisitor's grasping fingers.
'Warp take you!' he raged, scrabbling after it. 'Give it to me!'
Another centimetre... another centimetre...
Klurik.
The crown jolted to a halt at the foot of an exhibit plinth, shadowed beneath whatever priceless relic — a leather-bound book, blasted apart in the earlier crossfire — occupied it.
'Ha!' Kaustus roared, locking fingers around its glossy frame. 'Mine!'
Mita smiled, muscles burning with endless fatigue. 'Not yours, you stupid bastard.'
And the security servitor that hung from the vaulted ceiling above the singed plinth blinked its metal eyes, ratcheted its slave-linked weapons towards the intruder it sensed below, and opened fire.
Kaustus fell apart like rotten meat.
Smoke lifted. Mita stared at the shredded morsel that remained of her master with confused f
eelings, triumph struggling against shame. Somewhere, out in the smoke and fire, the Night Lord shrieked and another servitor collapsed to the ground, torn apart. Mita barely heard it. Kaustus was still alive. Just.
'C... clever...' he smiled, blood slipping in frothing streamers from his mouth, patterning his tusks like scarlet totems. He winced, pain consuming his ruined form. 'Clever trick...'
She nodded, frowning. Something strange had happened to the inquisitor's mind, like a cloud passing from before the sun, and abruptly she found herself able to feel it, able to skim its surface emotions — pain, mostly — just as she could anyone else. Abruptly she understood.
'The eldar,' she whispered, thunderstruck. 'They've been controlling you from the beginning...'
'Y.-.yes. C-came to me before I recruited you. Did things... hkk... things to my brain. Th-the voices... oh God-Emperor...'
'Why? Warpdammit, Kaustus – why?'
'H...hah... Who knows? S-sometimes... sometimes the control faltered. Sometimes I could think clearly... nnk... hear their whispers... It meant nothing...'
She remembered the moments of uncertainty, the troubling instants in which his mind had seemed to convulse, briefly visible to her psychic senses.
She'd feared for his sanity. If only she'd known the truth. He'd been a puppet, struggling to cut his own strings. 'That's why you let me live...' she said, understanding flourishing. Another blast rocked the hive, tremors slipping through ice and steel. She ignored it: it was all background noise, irrelevant. 'That's why you never had me executed.'
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