Саймон Спуриэр - Lord of the Night

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.

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.