Саймон Спуриэр - Lord of the Night

She had been a missionary, judging by what little of her clothing remained: a white robe with a hemp cord and a reliquary cache slung across her shoulder, embroidered with golden scriptures.

She had come to this deep, dark place to spread the Emperor's light: as brave and selfless a being as one could ever hope to find. Her reward hardly seemed fair.

The robe was shredded.

The hemp cord creaked around her neck as she twisted above the ground.

The reliquary lay shattered at her feet and the fragments of bone from within — the knuckles of some long-dead saint, perhaps — were ground to dust.

'Emperor preserve us...' Mita hissed, stepping into the tunnel.

The woman had not died here — that much was clear. Whatever violence had ended her life would certainly have spilled out across the murder scene: splattering walls and ceilings, pooling in thick puddles underfoot. This was less a scene of frenzy than an exhibit, a calling-card: neat, tidy, arranged .

Her hands were gone. Her eyes had been put out. One foot hung by a single scrap of gristle, the blow that had parted it with such razor ease stopping short — deliberately — of amputation. Her viscera had been evacuated, hanging in translucent loops from the incision across her belly.

And all across her, along every part of her worm-white body, lazy lines had been drawn: fluid ripples and scarlet whorls like the eddies of some mantra-wheel, spinning through holy water. At first Mita had mistaken the lines for red ink, scrawled across the body's skin. She was wrong. Each line was a cut, administered so delicately, so perfectly , that not a drop of blood had oozed clear to spoil the effect.

This was not psychosis. This was art .

And the artist had not shied from signing his work.

Above the body, carved on the rocky surfaces of the borehole in a dipped, tidy hand, an engraved legend picked at the light of Mita's illuminator and drew her eye.

Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus Ave Dominus Nox.

She felt her gorge rise and turned away, forcing down bile in her throat. Sergeant Varitens, standing behind her with hands on hips, mistook her disgust for miscomprehension, nodding towards the text and clearing his throat.

'It says—'

'Thank you, sergeant,' she hissed, fighting for dignity as well as air. 'I'm quite capable of reading High Gothic.'

She turned again towards the words, and they seemed to writhe in her eyes with a malevolent life of their own. For an instant she felt the stab of shocking, familiar pain — awash with ancient violence and ageless bitterness — and in that moment knew, without any doubt, from where the murderer had come.

A great darkness, descending from the sky.

Something had survived the descent of the Umbrea Insidior ...

' Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus ,' she said out loud, forming each word clear and strong. 'So die the slaves of the False Emperor.'

She could feel the vindictors staring at her, fidgeting. Even Cog watched her with troubled bemusement, struggling to understand the words.

' Ave Dominus Nox. Hail to the Lord of the Night.'

They were called the Glacier Rats.

Their name was scrawled across parchment in the clipped hand of a servoscribe, belying the information's remarkableness in neat, tedious words, as if to render it as dull as any other record, sealed neatly with an uncrested daub of wax.

They were called the Glacier Rats.

Sahaal ran the name through his mind again and again, as if testing its mettle.

Tasting it.

The information broker Pahvulti had taken his leave from captivity. Walking free, ignoring the wounds patterning his necrotic skin, his swagger had been that of a victor, as if he'd somehow earned Sahaal's respect — or at the very least incurred his debt. He'd instructed Sahaal on where to find, and when, the information he'd promised, he'd dipped his head in sarcastic obeisance, then he'd smiled and waggled his brows.

'This is a business of credit ,' he'd said, cackling his peculiar laugh — 'het-het-het' — like a gear skipping a tooth, 'the question costs nothing. The answers are priceless...'

Sahaal struggled with the urge to rip the man to shreds. Allowing him to simply walk away required every ounce of his concentrated pragmatism.

The silent vow that he would have his revenge later was little consolation.

'And yet I have paid nothing,' he'd hissed, oozing away into the shadows, struggling for some scrap of dignity.

He was denied even that.

'No... no, you haven't.' Pahvulti's one remaining eye fluttered, cycling through lenses like some perpetual wink. 'But then... the first one is always free.'

And then he was gone.

They were called the Glacier Rats.

And yes, Pahvulti's answers had arrived where he had promised, lowered from some unknown tier down a disused elevator shaft, and Sahaal's cursory attempt to distinguish its source had failed. The information broker was far too sly to be so easily undone: wherever he had his base, he was free — for now — of retaliation.

And yes, Sahaal had roared with hunger as he learned his enemy's name, flexed his claws, chanted their name again and again, but even so... even so...

He was not accustomed to being indebted.

The Glacier Rats. The thieves were named the Glacier Rats.

They were a raider band, the document said. A clan of pirates unconcerned with the territorial squabbles of hivegangs, collecting then pawning such valuables as they purloined. Their founder had been a native of the ice-world Valhalla, joining then promptly deserting the Imperial Guard on his first tour of duty, sensing far greater opportunity for wealth in the Equixus hive. His name was Tuahli Teqo, and Sahaal's lips curled in a mirthless smile as he recalled the ugly legend sprawled on the side of the thieves' transport: a tag to honour his memory.

Their current leader, in as much as Pahvulti's spies could keep up with the endlessly changing hierarchies of such clans, was named Nikhae, and was recognisable by the luminous spiral electoo on his forehead.

'Nikhae.'

Sahaal said it out loud, as if to ensure its reality, and waved a single claw through the air, dissecting the very sound of the thief s name.

'Nikhae... Nikhae...'

Yes. Yes, it was him. The false hunchback. The thief. The scum. The worm .

He had taken it.

At the rear of the sheaf of pages Pahvulti included a map. Marked in blotched ink, scrawled thick by Pahvulti's own hand, the centre of the page sported a bold, dark X.

Sahaal checked the straps on the blocky package attached to his waist, its faint green glow shimmering across the blades at his fingertips.

The Glacier Rats. They were called the Glacier Rats.

Every last one of them would die.

Herniatown had fallen from grace.

At its edges the weight of the city had broken its own base and collapsed downwards, whole streets sagging into the abyss. Underhivers kept their distance from Herniatown's bowed arcades, naming it well: its wilted streets were a raw bulge of viscera that had squeezed through the muscle wall above, dipping into inky darkness. Once it had been a part of Cuspseal, but no longer. Nestled at the underhive's anarchic heart, it seemed an invasive probe of order, albeit warped incontrovertibly by its descent.

Herniatown was where the Glacier Rats had made their home.

Sahaal reconnoitred the zone with fanatical care: watching, exploring, never intervening. At three separate junctions — where long-deserted hivehabs met along broad concourses — he'd been forced to stay his arm, as Glacier Rat sentries ambled by.

The time would come, he told himself.