Саймон Спуриэр - Lord of the Night

There was something other than the merely material about the jewel, and it bathed Sahaal in such peace, in such confidence and assurance, that the shivering of his limbs ceased, the perpetual furrow of his brow smoothed away, and he blinked a tear of serenity from his midnight eyes.

' Ave Dominus Nox ,' he whispered, fingers caressing the circlet edge, lifting the horned crown above him, pulling it down towards his own skull.

He was divorced from reality, in that timeless instant. In a dream world of endless calm, the crown descended towards its rightful owner.

He would lead his brothers in their master's name. He would tear from the skies of Terra itself, shrieking with an eagle's cry. He would repay the insult. He would cut the Emperor's shrivelled throat, and paint the withered god's blood across the walls of his defiled palace.

He would have his revenge upon the Traitor Father.

He would be the Lord of the Night.

And then a shot rang out in the gloom, and the fantasy collapsed beneath the weight of dismal reality, and he glanced down from the perfect ''O'' of black metal and into the hungry barrels of weapons.

Six gun servitors. Bolters. Meltas. Flamers.

At their centre, a man. From his slack lips arose tall tusks, and his eyes glimmered with secret humour. Power-armoured and massive, but moving with the stultified discomfort of one without augmentation.

No Space Marine, this, merely a copy . An impostor. The cruciform ''I'' at his collar was all that Sahaal needed to see.

'Inquisitor,' he spat.

'The name's Kaustus,' the man grinned, mocking. 'At your service.'

The men held a small gun against the head of a smaller figure, a raggedy shape with unkempt hair and frightened eyes, whose struggles to escape the tusked fool halted the instant her stare met Sahaal's. He recognised her. Twice before he had met her, and both times she had sought his destruction.

The witch.

Confusion gripped him, momentarily. The psyker-bitch was his enemy — he had no doubt of that. Why then was she the captive of the Inquisition? Was there more than one faction at play within this elaborate game?

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.