Lord of the Night

Across the room the bronze machine-men tilted heads to regard their controller, and swivelled jointed limbs towards him. The witch stood dumfounded as they stalked away from her, released abruptly from their attention.

'Kill it!' Kaustus shrieked, stabbing a finger towards Sahaal. 'Keep it away from me!' He staggered through the machines' midst, racing for the doorway beyond them and freedom, taking the Corona Nox with him.

Sahaal sighed. He should have known it wouldn't be so easy.

Once more, like the bitter twist at the end of a sick joke, he watched his sacred prize dwindling into the distance.

The servitors closed in. It seemed he was not yet finished with the day's violence.

And then the hive shook. From base to tip it shuddered, it creaked and groaned as ancient metals strained, and into its colossal walls there thumped massive, fiery ruinous craters.

It seemed as if volcanoes had opened across the city's flanks. The sky blazed with tumbling fire, every face in every part of the hive tilted up to stare in wonder at the quaking ceiling, and in a ruined chamber near the peak of the central palace a crippled Space Marine of the Night Lords Legion smiled a bloody smile, rose to his feet, and faced the machine aggressors closing upon him with his vigour abruptly renewed.

'They're here,' he hissed, to no one but himself. 'They're here!'

Mita Ashyn

Mita caromed into Inquisitor Kaustus like a vengeful meteor.

She couldn't say exactly what she was thinking. For days her mind had seemed to be a warzone: torn apart, artillery-blasted and entrenched, a ravaged land with its sovereignty contested. If the analogy was valid, then the Night Lord's revelations had been cyclonic warheads, exterminatus missiles to cleanse her tortured thoughts of any rational structure.

If once her mind was a warzone, now it was a wasteland.

The Emperor had betrayed his own son, and in so doing had shown himself capable of breathtaking duplicity. How could she go on now, turning the other cheek at every hateful comment, every declamatory ''abomination!'' or ''mutant!'' hurled at her in the street, no longer safe in the knowledge that the Emperor loved her?

How could she go on with the suspicion that she was being used: a tame little monster, manipulated and abused, only to be cast aside when no longer desired?

The answer, of course, was that she could not. What, then, was left for her?

Nothing. Nothing obvious.

A wasteland.

And now she found herself released from the gunpoint attentions of the governor's servitors, alone in an unfamiliar place, unbalanced by crippling quakes that struck the hive and shivered every centimeue of its enormity, and amongst it all there was only a single detail to which she could cling.

Kaustus.

Kaustus, you bastard.

This is all your fault!

He tried to flee past her, the Corona held to his chest in trembling fingers, and the fact that he ignored her, that his eyes barely dipped towards her, simply enraged her further. She was beneath his regard, clearly: a creature so ineffectual that he barely paused as she stepped into his path and, with a feral shriek, launched herself at him.

She might as well have attempted to tackle a stampeding grox.

Rebounding from his power armour with a thump and a sharp crackle — a rib, she guessed, blinking through sudden pain — she had a brief glimpse of the Night Lord through the smoke and ice, spinning and swooping amongst the servitors. In that blurring tableau he seemed to her to be a dervish, a god of blade and flight, dancing between gunfire and slashing at the unresisting metal of his foes.

She wondered if he would come to her assistance if she cried out.

She wondered if she would accept his help if he offered it.

The hive groaned again, dust and smog loosened from the ceiling as titanic forces shook it, and in his haste to flee Kaustus stumbled. Mita seized the opportunity without thinking, screwing up every last vestige of her inner strength, drawing deep on reserves that she barely knew existed, and lashed out with a pulse of psychic force.

She could not invade the inquisitor's mind. That wouldn't stop her from crushing his body.

The force of her own attack astonished her. The inquisitor was blasted from his feet as if struck by a grenade, shredded chaff from his robes scattered upon the air. The Corona slipped from his grasp and skittered across the floor, skidding in eldar blood. Beneath the torn gauze of Kaustus's cloak Mita could see that the very plates of his armour had been splintered, great cracks scuttling across chest and thighs as if struck by an invisible hammer.

'Is this what I've been repressing?' she wondered, dazzled. 'Is this what my faith has been denying me?'

Unfettered by ritual and prayer, unblinkered by needless devotions, the truth was as radiant as the warp itself.