Lord of the Night

'The year!' he roared, rippling the waters of the sludge-lake to which he'd brought his captive. He raised the claws of his gauntlet above the man's groin, poised to clench. It was a crude form of threat, but he had to know. 'What year, worm!'

'Nine-eight-six!' the man wailed, all thoughts of bemusement obliterated. 'Nine-eight-six!'

Sahaal growled, absorbing this unwelcome information. An absence of six centuries was far greater than he'd feared. Adrift upon the trance in the Umbrea Insidior, he had been resolutely unable to estimate how long he had spent in silent incarceration. Time moved differently in the warp, and a day's slumber in its coiling belly could easily affect a month's passage in crude reality.

Six hundred years was beyond his most fearful approximation. In a fit of pique he began to bring down his claw, venting his anger on his captive.

And then an ugly afterthought arose, and he paused to form words in the plebeian Low Gothic tongue, so appropriately favoured by the underhive filth. 'The thirty-second millennium? Yes? Answer me!'

For a fraction of a second, the man's lips curled in a dumbfounded, confused smile.

'Wh—'

Sahaal flexed the claws.

'No! No! N-no! F-forty-first!' the words rushed out like an avalanche, jumbled and formless. 'Forty-first millennium, year nine-eight-six! Forty-first! Sweet Emperor's blood, forty-first!'

The bottom fell from Sahaal's mind.

He killed the man quickly, too distracted to even relish the moment.

He returned to the factory he'd adopted as his lair.

He scuttled in the dark and brooded. He vented his anger on the shattered masonry of the ancient building, and when the violence overcame him he peeled off one mighty shoulder-guard and began slowly, precisely, cutting grooves into the exposed flesh of his arm.

It didn't help.

One hundred centuries had passed.

It was the bodies that brought answers, finally.

He had taken them, all twelve, from where they died: dismembered and brutalised, hung high from stanchions in public places and busy roads, emptying their thickening fluids upon the debris below. This was not savagery on his part, nor some crude announcement of territory — but as vital a part of his master's doctrine as was the attack itself.

'Kill a thousand men,' the lesson had run, his master's solemn voice echoing through the warship Vastitas Vi-tris, 'and let no man bear witness. What have you achieved? Who will ever know? Who will ever fear you? Who will ever respect or obey you?

'But kill a single man, and let the world see. Hang him high. Cut him deep. Bleed him dry. And then... Disappear.

'Now. Who will ever know? Everyone. Who will ever fear you? Why, everyone! Who will ever respect you, who will ever obey you? Everyone!

'These humans, their imaginations are strong. Kill a thousand men and they will hate you. Kill a million men and they will queue to face you. But kill a single man and they will see monsters and devils in every shadow. Kill a dozen men and they will scream and wail in the night, and they shall feel not hatred, but fear.

'This is the way of obedience, my sons. They are panicky, gossiping beasts, these humans. It serves us to allow them to be so.'

On the third day, when he had crept through the ductcrawls beneath the local settlements and listened to the villagers' fearful rumours, when two separate posses had ridden out from Spitcreek with furtive eyes and crude weapons to catch the killer, when his fits and rages had exhausted him, there came cautious footfalls into his lair. He watched the invader from above, irritated that his sanctuary should be defiled by such clumsy, thoughtless steps.