Lord of the Night

As if reading his thoughts, the worm's one remaining eye twitched across Sahaal's armour, taking in every detail of his colossal form. 'I daresay that painlessness is something to which you can relate,' he grinned. 'Space Marines are notoriously robust.'

Later, in a place so silent that every spoken word was returned to its speaker's ears in a spectrum of glassy echoes, Sahaal folded his arms and fought for calm.

The man-machine Pahvulti had been crucified. With jagged splints of debris forced between the bones of his arms and a tight cord securing his neck to the slumped pillar Sahaal had chosen as his anchor, he should by rights seem a pitiful thing: stripped naked of his robes, bound with chains and barbed cables, slashed and bleeding in a dozen places.

Alas, his situation did not appear to have dented his enthusiasm, nor silenced his laughter.

'...and at one time, het-het-het, I might have prayed to the Omnissiah,' he cackled, 'but no longer, no, no. Not Pahvulti. They tried to turn me, you see? They said the puritens had rejected my flesh. Het-het-het. Rejected! No! It made me strong! It made me wise!'

'Be silent, confound you!' Sahaal's temper was by now comprehensively frayed.

'Are you not interested, Space Marine, in how your new friend came to find you? Are you not interested in my knowledge?'

'Call me a Space Marine once more, worm, and I'll cut out your tongue and choke you on it.'

'Het-het-het, no, no... Not my tongue. Not while I know what I know.'

'The spiral electoo? Who wears it? His name!'

Het-het-het...

Sahaal hissed his anger through the grille of his helm and hooked a claw into what little meat remained of his captive's belly. It was a hopeless gesture — the man had demonstrated nothing but contempt for the notion of torture — but at the very least the moist noises of slicing helped to calm Sahaal's mood.

Never before had a mere human occupied a position of such influence over him. Pahvulti refused to divulge what he knew until Sahaal vowed to spare him, and to offer him such an oath would shatter every code Sahaal believed, tear to shreds every ounce of his dignity and sully every corner of his authority. Under other circumstances he would have laughed at the very suggestion.

Nor could he merely make, then break, the oath: Pahvulti had made it clear that he would deliver his information only from afar, well beyond Sahaal's punitive grasp.

For the twentieth time since bringing his captive to this dark, deep well, Sahaal cursed Pahvulti's name, cursed the ill fortune that had gifted him with such leverage, and cursed the warpshit filth that had stolen the Corona Nox and placed him in this situation in the first place.

Zso Sahaal was not accustomed to fear or uncertainty. His natural response to each was to grow angry, and in his increasingly violent gashes at Pahvulti's guts, some small portion of his venom was assuaged.

Until—

'Het-het-het... not that it bothers me, Space Marine, but you should be aware...' Pahvulti made a show of grinning, '...that impervious to pain I might be, but invulnerable I am not. Continue to cut me and I am eighty-seven-point-six per cent certain that I shall perish.' His remaining lens-eye twinkled. 'Just thought you should know. Het-het-het.'

He was a calculus logi, or at least had been. Over the previous hours Sahaal had been treated to the man's life story at least three times — a repetition which was not helping his mood.

Pahvulti had begun as a human savant-computer of the Adeptus Mechanicus — whose brittle thoughts had aided administrations and diplomats, tacticians and explorators all across the sector. On the day of his fiftieth birthday he was presented with the highest accolade reserved for his kind: the puritens lobotomy. This ritualised surgery removed from his scarred brain what little trace of humanity remained, amputated his subconscious, and burned away his pain.

It should have made him pure, mechanical, perfect. It should have brought him closer to his god, and sheltered his weak biology from the predations of temptation. To say that it failed would be a quite spectacular understatement.

His body rejected the implants. He awoke shriven of his pain and his dreams, but excised utterly from the obsessive faith he'd held before. He awoke a greedy, flawed bastard with the mind of a computer, and when his priest-masters ordered that he report for dismantlement, he laughed down his thrice-blessed comm-line and fled.

And now?

Now he was the self styled ''cognis mercator'' of the Equixus hive: an information broker whose lattice of influence and spymongering extended to all points. He served the gangmasters with mercenary neutrality, sold his rumours to upcity analysts, hired himself to navy officials to direct pressganging and grew fat and rich in the certain knowledge that he was too valuable, too vital, for any fool to kill.