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.