Lord of the Night

Their panic all but overcame Mita, then. Wallowing in its emotive backlash, blasting through her empathic senses like a flamer's kiss, guzzled by the completeness of the dark, the crowd's disharmony scorched her mind: left her shivering and afraid. She fell to her knees, pushed aside and trampled by the rushing figures, and all but lost control, bile rising in her throat. And always above it, like the ghost of a flavour, circling at the apex of the cloud of fear and terror that it had generated, the mind of the Night Lord tingled against her senses.

She would not approach it. She would not try to delve inside it, not now that she knew what manner of force protected its astral presence. Not since the creature's warp-guardians had come so close to overwhelming her before...

But even so, even without the benefit of careful scrutiny, even without the need to look close, to push inside and explore, she could sense the shape of that ancient, awful psyche, and oh... oh, God-Emperor... once more... just as it had been before.

It was like looking into a mirror.

The doubt... the power... the suspicion...

She surfaced from her horror at the sound of a firm voice, tentacles of psychic thought discovering an authoritative mind: a sergeant, she guessed, hollering orders from nearby.

'Binox!' he growled. 'Night vision! All men! Put on your Throne-damned binox, Vandire's piss!'

It was like a beacon. Like a tiny shaft of light in an endless wasteland. That one sliver of order punctured the panic-spell the Night Lord had cast, and all around it the shouting Preafects paused in their directionless flight and took stock, drew breath, fumbled for their goggles.

Mita made a mental node to find out the sergeant's name. If ever she escaped from this killing-room alive she'd be sure to commend the man to Orodai.

She fumbled around her until she found an armoured body, sticky with blood. Whether cut down by the Night Lord or blown apart by friendly fire, it didn't matter: the Preafect was dead. She scrabbled at its belt until her questing fingers found a binox strap, and pulled the blocky device over her eyes.

The world opened up in lurid shades of green and grey.

'Regroup, damn you!' the sergeant roared, and she swivelled to face him as if snatching for a lifeline, a solitary mote of warmth in a place of endless winter. He was nothing, she supposed — just one man amongst hundreds — but already she could see a circle of calmness spreading around him, vindictors pulling on night vision goggles, gazing around to see what damage they had done.

'Arm your weapons!' he cried, swept up on the flames of his own leadership. 'Shoot the Throne-damned shit! Shoot to ki—'

His head left his body.

Mita felt herself groan: a primal shock of horror and understanding, anticipating already what this would mean.

A pulse of blood jack-knifed over the tumbling corpse, a blur of something crossed overhead, blades outstretched. Something blue and black and bronze, which knew all too well who to target.

It screamed. It screamed just like a baby.

The panic returned harder than ever. Somewhere outside, in the faint light burning through the gate-room entrance, Orodai was shouting instructions from the back of his Salamander. It could do no good, now. Not from out there. Not so far from the boiling heart of this awful, inky place. The one voice of reason was gone, cut down with contemptuous ease by the unseen thing.

So easy to imagine horrors in the dark...

So easy to forget they faced a single foe. A single mortal foe...

And that, of course, was how the Night Lord worked. He dissolved his enemies in terror. He let them forget that he could bleed and die. He let them fill the darkness with their own demons, and when he shrieked on high it was like the voice of death itself, riding out to claim them for its own.

They had bottled a devil in a dead end. They had sprung their trap and thought themselves clever: and then the devil had showed them how wrong they were. It had made the dead end its own territory, it had dragged them into its own world — a world of darkness where it, and it alone, ruled — and now it would kill them one by one, at its leisure. Mita could no more pacify the frightened Preafects — lost to all reason — than she could push back the sea. They were all going to die.

She saw it, perfectly clear, in black and white.

The Night Lord would kill every last one.

And the only way to spare them all, to spare herself...

Think, Mita, think!

...was to give it what it wanted.

Her goggled eyes fell upon the colossal snowgates, twin blocks of tempered steel and iron — ten metres high — rising with the shallow camber of the room.

What does it want?

Escape.