Саймон Спуриэр - Lord of the Night

Had he, she wondered, somehow escaped the predations of Chaos? Had he somehow cleansed himself of the taint that had threatened to smother him?

Was he now, like her, simply another pawn in this obscene game of manipulation and conquest?

Whatever the reason for his abrupt purification, its effect was pronounced: where previously her psychic senses could no more approach and delve into his spirit than she could swallow hot coals, now she had found herself free to explore. Now she could see his true self.

It was almost too much for her to bear.

It was a thing of such sadness, such loneliness, such suspicion and guilt and paranoia, that it almost tore her heart apart.

Pain, rage, ambition, sorrow. Distrust. Isolation. Bitterness.

His mind was like a reflection of hers, magnified a billion times.

She'd felt his brief victory — a surge of joy — at reclaiming the Corona. She'd spiralled with him into despair as the victory crumbled. She'd shared his pain as the servitors tore him to shreds, piece by piece, and she'd risen like a float upon the crest of his triumph as he entrusted the crown to his aide...

The aide, whose mind she had recognised. A swirling psyche without centre, without certainty or solidity of ego. She had seen that mind once before.

The unveiling of the dissimulns had come as no surprise to Mita, although she shared the Night Lord's horror from within his coiling spirit.

And then she shared his revulsion and his awe at what had followed.

The eldar came in a storm of warp-forces so focused, so potent, that Mita slipped to her knees and bled from her ears. Kaustus had left her beneath the guard of his four gun servitors — toys, no doubt, of the murdered governor — and even as she stumbled at the astral crescendo dizzying her senses their guns remained focused intractably upon her head. She didn't care. They were a side-show, an insignificant concern when placed beside what was now unveiling across the smoke and devastation of the room.

Kaustus, you bastard. You made a deal with the devil...

As part of the Ordo Xenos, Mita knew more than most of the alien scourge that was the eldar. Ancient and technologically superior, that their bodies were ostensibly similar to humans' was the one aspect of their race that could be considered familiar. They thought differently. They moved differently. They lived lives of carefully partitioned vocation: monkish existences devoted utterly to a single pathway.

Humanity travelled in the warp like trees casting seeds arbitrarily into the wind, placing trust in providence, guided only by the most rudimentary of navigatory processes. To humanity the warp was an untameable ocean, in which only the foolhardy dared to swim.

The eldar had built roads across it.

They grew old at the speed of stars. They fought like ghosts. Where the teeming masses of the Imperium struggled with crude senses and ugly language, the eldar burned bright with thought: a level of astral awareness and psionic capability that reduced Mita's talents to those of a child. She was a beast compared to them: a primitive fool, barely able to remember to breathe.

She was a baby in the presence of demigods, and at the quiet rear of her mind where the awe at the aliens' arrival had not yet penetrated, where she did not share the pain and rage inculcating the Night Lord's thoughts, she wondered:

Is this how other humans think of me?

It this why they hate me so?

Privileged knowledge or not, the eldar were as great a mystery to Mita as they were to any other human. In her studies in the Librium Xenos on Safaur Inquis the testimony of countless inquisitors was the same: the eldar seemed to act without motive — random and abstract — playing out some ineffable game according to alien rules that only they comprehended. All that was known was this:

Their grasp upon the future, upon the vortex of chance and event that was borne on the warp like froth on a sickened ocean, was unrivalled.

Kaustus had known somehow that the Corona Nox would arrive on Equixus.

It had been foreseen...

He'd been in league with the xenos from the beginning...

There seemed to be eight of them, although it was difficult to say with any certainly, they moved like liquid light, capering and bounding, never still. She thought she could make out weapons clutched in their long limbs, flat-headed catapults like the fruits of an exotic tree. They slipped from their portal — an entrance, she guessed, to their famed ''webway'' of tunnels and paths that circumnavigated the warp itself — like a knot of frail decorations swept upon the wind: armour of blue and yellow laced by a billion engravings, a myriad of serpentine runes and glowing sigils. And at their head, burning Mita's psychic gaze like a phosphor lamp, their leader.

He dealt with the striking Night Lord with a single swipe of his staff, wyrd lights flaring between its glaive-pommel and the robed creature's antlered helm. Watching it all, probing the Night Lord's astral self at the moment of his defeat, she felt his collapse as though struck herself.

Somewhere, in another world, the eldar gathered around Inquisitor Kaustus. Somewhere, impossibly distant, the tusked man stretched out his hands towards the warlock, the Corona Nox held firm in his grasp. Somewhere the antlered xeno reached out to receive it.

Mita regarded it all as if it were a dream, spiralling away from her at the moment of awakening, and it was only as blackness closed in upon her that she came to understand what had happened.

She had been inside the Night Lord's mind when the eldar lashed out. The Traitor Marine had been knocked down, his senses overwhelmed, his certainties pulverised. He'd been crippled by the strength of the warlock's attack, and as he crashed to the floor and lay still, as his mind shut down and entered a troubled, enforced slumber—

—Mita's mind was dragged down with it.

She found herself immersed within a world unlike any she had seen before. Purple skies raged like bruises, tormented clouds swirling and gathering together — defying the logic of what little breeze there seemed to be. Faces leered from their gaseous topography: half-seen grotes-queries that Mita neither recognised nor cared to see fully.

The ground itself seemed little more solid: a porous sheet of sand and rock that, against all sense, felt spongy to the touch. A charge filled the air, a greasy static that clicked in the ends of her ragged hair and oppressed her skull, like a coming storm.

Nothing seemed real, here. Distant mountain peaks wavered like uncertain mirages, wobbling in their foothill roots, vanishing and reappearing at the whim of...

Who?

For a fearful instant Mita wondered if she had somehow travelled to a world of daemon world. She had heard of such places: confused realms where physics held little sway, where every aspect of every molecule was inseparable from the stuff of Chaos itself. Such worlds were the dreaded rumour of the Inquisition, and as Mita stumbled across fractured landscapes, negotiating ethereal gorges and sudden rivers that oozed from nowhere, the fear that she had somehow been transported to one lay heavy in her mind.

But, no... No, this was no Chaotic realm. The more she observed its howling skies and its weird tides of light and dark, the more she studied the scenes that shimmered in the surfaces of puddles and the images borne on the crest of rocks, the more she sent feelers from her own mind tasting at the sand itself, the more she came to realise where she was. She recognised its flavour.

As if to double check, she paused and stared at her hand, concentrating, altering her perceptions, working hard to focus her psychic self.