Саймон Спуриэр - Lord of the Night

Sahaal sighed, flicked blood from his claws, and prepared for more slaughter.

'H-hail,' one of them said, her wide eyes avoiding his gaze. 'Hail to the Emperor's angel. Hail to the holy warrior.'

Sahaal stared at her, uncertain. He had expected opposition, terror, pitiful aggression — but not obeisance.

'What do you want?' he hissed, and each of them shivered at the sound of his voice.

'O-only to serve you, my lord,' the woman quailed, extending her right hand in a tall salute. ' Ave Imperator! '

And then the Umbrea Insidior's promethium reactor-cell, the bulky package he had removed so carefully from its crippled generarium, reached critical mass in the heart of the Glacier Rats' territory and detonated with the force of a thousand grenades.

The underhive shook, the floor quaked like a living tiling, and as his new congregation cowered around him, Sahaal basked in the phosphorlight of Hernia-town's rain.

Hemmed on all sides by drooping adamantium walls, the force of Herniatown's devastation erupted not outwards, but upwards.

Above Herniatown stood Cuspseal.

Mita had returned to the lower tiers from the under-city beneath a stormcloud of suspicion and fear. The psychic resonance of the murdered woman — a spectral shadow that only she had felt — had affected her profoundly, and as Sergeant Varitens stalked off to report to his commander she had hastened to a control room at the precinct's peak, pushing aside servitors and tech-acolytes in her haste to reach the communications consoles.

She was thus ensconced, struggling with the infuriating business of conferring with Inquisitor Kaustus, when the quake hit. It had almost been a relief.

Given that the hivelink — a mass of switchboard feeds crammed amongst ducts city-wide — was prone to broken signals and interferences, and that the control room's bustle was as endless as it was raucous, she had expected Kaustus's quiet tones to be rendered inaudible. As it was, his reaction to Mita's report was easily gauged despite its volume: describing to him the particulars of the murders had been an object lesson in futility, and his voice had dripped with an utter lack of interest. She began to appreciate why Orodai had insisted she see the slaughter for herself. Mere words could not hope to describe it.

'...desecration on a... a savage scale, my lord, and—'

'Savage, you say?' his clipped tones had dripped with scorn. 'And in the underhive, no less? Imagine that.'

She'd fancied she could hear him rolling his eyes.

'My lord, I... I know it must seem... insignificant, and perhaps my regard for it appears ridiculous to you, but—'

'It does not appear ridiculous, girl. It is ridiculous. Worse, it is a waste of my time. Murders in the underhive! You're a servant of the Inquisition, not some underling lawman sent to solve every tawdry crime.' He huffed loudly, and Mita had imagined him toying with the tip of one polished tusk. 'You will in future not burden me with every tedious item of detail that y—'

'But my lord, I felt such darkness! It... it hangs like a cloud! A shadow in the warp!'

The link's brass speaker, fashioned in the shape of a gasping fish, fell silent. Mita had stared at it, uncertain. Had he severed the connection?

'M-my lord?'

Kaustus's voice had been cold when at last he spoke.

'You will never interrupt me again. Is that quite clear?'

Her stomach had knotted. 'O-of course, my lord. My apologies.'

'My patience has limits, child. Do not test them.'

'I am sorry, my lord, truly... It's just that...' she'd fumbled for words, the memory of the body twisting her guts, flickering before her. Its naked shape haunted every blink and its empty eyes — hollows that led only to shadow — regarded her mutely from her own mind. Should she say it? Should she voice her suspicions? By the Throne, she'd been so sure , but now that she came to it, now that it needed to be spoken, suddenly it sounded ludicrous. Melodramatic. Too much.

But the words!

Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus, Ave Dominus Nox.

The words had filled her with such certainty that she'd all but screamed her fears when she saw them, biting her tongue all the way back to Cuspseal, desperate to tell her master.

She must tell him. She must .

In the control room, staring at the voicetube with her stomach churning, she'd taken a breath, composed herself, injected formality into her tone, and said it.

'Inquisitor, it is my belief that the taint is abroad within the hive.'

This time the pause had dragged long and deep, and when he spoke Kaustus's voice was so quiet that she'd strained to hear his words.

'Chaos?' he'd whispered. 'You think the city harbours Chaos?'

She'd choked back a retch at the very word, and had gripped the speakertube as if clinging for dear life.

'Yes, my lord,' she said, committed. 'Or... or something like it, Emperor preserve.'

'Interrogator Ashyn,' Kaustus had said finally, and it seemed to Mita that a strange new element had entered his tone, a hint of ice that had not registered before. 'We are servants of the Ordo Xenos. We have come to this world to unmask the cancer that is xenophilia. That is the course we shall pursue.'

'But—'

'You are young, interrogator. Already you have served two masters. You lack continuity. You lack experience. You are unqualified in the ways of Chaos.'

'But... my lord,' she'd struggled with the plug of frustration in her throat. Why could he not trust her? What reason could he have for such belligerence? 'My lord, I feel it. I sense it. It stalks the shadows...'

'That,' and his voice had allowed no room for argument, no hope of persuasion, 'is not in your power to diagnose. Is that all, interrogator? Or do you have more spurious assertions to make?'

Standing there with mouth agape, a forked pathway had presented itself to her, and she had closed her eyes to explore its shimmering angles. Beyond the guiding techniques of the psi-trance, without even consulting the lesser arcanoi of the Imperial tarot, she knew that such echoes of the future — uninvited and uncontrolled — should be mistrusted. They presented fickle visions of what might be, writhing on skeins of chance, and the adept-tutors at the Scholia Psykana had warned their charges to be wary of their deceptions.

Nonetheless, the options had been as vibrant as had she been seated in her meditation cell, and she'd regarded them with the tranquillity of a practiced, competent psyker.

On the one hand she could return to her master's side. She could kow-tow to his desires, disregard her own judgements, suppress the condemnation of his eccentricities and accept his authority. She could trust in his righteousness and serve him with the devotion his rank deserved. In time, she could see, she would gain a portion of his respect.

Or she could believe what her heart told her: a path that ran ragged with uncertainty, violence and blood.

And glory.

'My lord,' she'd said, enslaved to her ambition. 'I would ask your blessing in undertaking a hunt.'

'A hunt.'

'Yes my lord. For the killer.'

The speaker crackled softly, as if astonished by her request.

'Interrogator,' it said eventually. 'Either your brain is addled by the crudity of your surroundings or your insolence is greater even than I had feared. Your request is d—'

And then the connection had broken, the lights flickered, and the world turned on its head.

The way Mita saw it — during the hours of madness that followed the quake — an interrupted refusal was no refusal at all.

In a metropolis as densely populated as the hive, any upheaval causing fatalities in the mere hundreds could barely be considered calamitous. Nor was Cuspseal's regimented architecture overly disturbed by the subterranean blast: its buttresses and spindled towers continued to stand, its bleak factories barely paused in their ceaseless grind, and its cabled walkways simply swayed before resuming their sprawl. And if here or there a habstack found its view altered, or a chapel leaned from its foundation where before it stood proud, then the teeming masses could be relied upon to shrug and thank the Emperor-on-high that the quake had not been more devastating. The ancientness of this skyless place weighed heavily, and deep in their hearts each hiver felt its fragility keenly. It was a house of cards, a tower of glass, and would require but one carelessly cast stone to crumble.