Lord of the Night

If his master had known where the gauntlets were constructed, or by whom, he had never revealed it. They were as much a part of Sahaal now as were his eyes or his tongue.

Or his hate.

Two men exited the tunnel beside him. Dressed in jackets and ferro-salvage pads, they spoke softly and trod with the nervous gait of lifelong underhivers. In these troglodytic caverns caution was as natural as breathing.

It did them little good.

The first was dead before his brain could even register a threat, twin skewers punching out of shadow and into his face, slipping like icicles through the pulp of his eyes. Sahaal shook away the corpse like waste from a shovel, sliding from his alcove to reveal himself to the second. Slowly. Silently.

The memory of his master's voice, leading his Legion in lecture-prayer, rustled like pouring sand, flooding his mind:

'Show them what you can do,' it trilled, as soft and cold as dead flesh. 'Steal their hope, like a shadow steals the light. Then show them what you are. The tool never changes, my sons. The weapon is always the same. Fear. Fear is the weapon.'

In the corridor, standing in the bloody mess of his fallen friend, the second man looked into the face of a nightmare and falteringly, chokingly, began to scream.

'I have questions,' Sahaal said, reaching out for him.

The man knew nothing, of course. None of them did.

By the end of the second day there had been twelve. Seven men, four women, one child.

It never ceased to amaze Sahaal how varied were their responses. Some — most — had screamed from the outset. When he came upon them, when he flexed his claws and hissed, when he worked their terror like an artist with a brush, smothering gouache horror on subtle blends of oil-smear dread, in those incandescent moments his heart soared with the righteousness of his work, and they threw back their little heads and — mostly — they screamed.

Some, though, were silent. Staring with mute animal-shock, dark eyes bulging, lips twitching, faces bright. In those cases Sahaal took them in his claws and carried them away, slipping down through layers of debris to secret, sheltered places where they could recover their voices at leisure.

Then the screaming could begin.

And then he could ask his questions.

One of the women — deluded, perhaps — dropped to her knees and began to pray, some mumbled litany to the Emperor. Angered by her piety, Sahaal sliced away her fingers one by one, enjoying the change in her demeanour. Holy fools, it would seem, could scream as well as sing.

One of the men tried to fight him. Briefly.

The child... the child had cried for his mother. He'd screamed and blubbed and wailed, though when Sahaal leaned down to fix him with a helmed gaze the tears stopped abruptly, surprising him, and the youth's hand flickered with the bright shape of a switchblade, lunging from below. It seemed that innocence had little business in the underhive.

(The blade had snapped. So had Sahaal's patience.)

And yes, now perhaps he could reflect upon the responses to his work. He could skulk here in the ruins of this derelict factory, on the cusp of a deserted settlement, its floors long since collapsed into the abyss, and consider his palette of fear like a painter scheming to mix new colours.

But always, always such distractions were tempered by hate, by focused rage, and by the spectral possibility of failure.

What, he asked himself, had he learnt from his murderous forays? What had he discovered from all his many questions, all his many descriptions?

Nothing. Nothing of the Corona Nox, at least.

He'd gone to pains to illustrate the spiral electoo sported by his quarry — carving it lovingly on each victim's skin — but not one had recognised it. He'd described the thieves' shaggy furs, their crude goggles, even the unknown word — TEQO — daubed on their transport, though it was familiar to none. Sahaal did not for a moment consider that his victims might have been withholding: one by one their defences cracked, their sanity shattered, but their ignorance remained intact.

No, he'd learned nothing of the Corona. His revelation had concerned something entirely less pleasing.

Since awaking on this nocturnal world something had eaten at him, gnawing at his psyche. When he took his twelfth victim — a bearded man with copper fletches across his brows and rags draping his wiry form — Sahaal's curiosity had finally overcome him. He'd gritted his teeth, hooked one elegant claw into the wretch's arm, played the bladed edge along the cusp of exposed bone, and asked the question that haunted him.

'What year is this?'

Despite the pain, despite even the terror that had gripped him since first he was attacked, the man had paused with a look of almost comical incredulity.

'W-w-what?'