Lord of the Night

'Preysight,' Sahaal whispered, and the bitter machine-spirit of his armour nictitated new lenses across his eyeslits, magnifying his view. Brought into sudden and sharp relief, the smoky pall broke apart where the dead and dying staggered, stumbling with faces blackened and limbs gone. There were far fewer than had entered.

Sahaal watched their pitiable lives dwindle away with unashamed pleasure, then leapt from his alcove into the smoke-thick sky, heading downtown.

As he travelled, he took a care to allow himself to be seen. Just brief glimpses flitting across smoky expanses, whooping as he ghosted past hurrying bands of frightened men. He did so at distant points — here in the east, there near the centre, leaping in great arcs across the town's concrete sky. In the ruins of a librium to the west he dropped through a shattered skylight and shrieked at the men below, then vanished, slashing at their faces as he went.

At an intersection in the north he hopped from a crumbling wall onto the back of a transport, claws extending with a silken rasp. Two men were dead before he was even amongst them, heads spinning in the vehicle's wake, and their bodies tumbled beneath its tracks with damp, crackling retorts. The two remaining men opened fire. Sahaal activated the external line of his vox, amplified its volume to a dangerous level—

—and laughed.

Across all of Herniatown, in every honeycomb passageway of its crumbling boundaries, in every sheltered corner beneath its sunless sky, frightened men and women paused to listen, shivering in the dark.

When finally Sahaal turned his attention upon the zone's tilted, sagging centre, any sense of order to the Glacier Rats' search had long since passed. A nightmare stalked the shadows of their domain, and as rumours of its appearance spread — midnight blue and clothed in lightning, long of limb and hunched of back, with eyes that glowed like rubies and claws like sabres — pandemonium reigned.

Sahaal basked in the air above it all, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

The centre had been a colereum, at one time.

A vast hydroponics dome, bristling with sludge-farmed crops, its inwardly-mirrored surface recalled an insect's eye, iridescent and multifaceted. At one time it had disgorged a thousand tonnes of starchpaste every year, diverted among rust-thick pipes to a million habs. At one time.

It had borne its relocation into the abyss with poor grace.

The crops had died when the collapse occurred, their irrigation channels cut forever. What little water filtered into the underhive was tainted by its descent, and those few hardy weeds that had escaped had grown shaggy and truculent, skins thick with mutant bristles. Only the lamps had survived, globular drones of archaic design with thrumming gravmotors and simple logic-minds. They roved the dome with ultraviolet torches blazing, unconcerned with the absence of vegetation, faltering only when their aeons-old fuel reserves perished.

Sahaal straddled the dome like a beetle, limbs moving with insect confidence, drawing himself up its pregnant camber. At its crest he paused, gazed through its scars at the buildings within, and raised his hand to the bandolier straps of his jump pack, plucking at the grenades that dangled there.

The pirates' base was a sprawl of lodges and canvas tents, centred about a stone-walled tower, a fitting headquarters for a leader. There, Sahaal guessed, he would find his prey. Around it guards sprinted between salvage stores and bivouacs with guns brandished, shouting orders, faces milky in the ultraviolet glow. Vehicle engines ignited in a cascade of throaty roars, tracks grinding as they spun towards the colereum's exit.

'We're under attack, Teqo's blood!' Sahaal heard, filtered amongst the screams. 'Dozens of them! All directions!'

A roar from the east told him the bodies of the three slain guards had been found, adding to the confusion, and to the west the dry sound of lasfire — unmistakable in its breathless crackle — supplied the finishing touch.

The Glacier Rats were shooting at shadows.

Nodding, he sunk needle claws into the pinions of the dome, braced every muscle of his body, and closed his eyes.

'In your name, my master,' he said. 'Always.'

And then he drew a breath.

And then he tossed back his head.

And then he screamed.

At its maximum volume, the voxcaster of his ancient helm could burst the veins of a man's skull and turn his teeth to powder. He'd seen men fall paralysed to the floor at the Raptor's shriek, and birds fall stunned from the sky.

In Herniatown, the colereum's mirrored dome exploded.

Dozens of men paused in their panic and glanced up, glimpsed a nightmare figure haloed by ultraviolet, then fell screaming as eyes and mouths filled with splintered glass. Their final sight would haunt the brief remainder of their lives, bathed in a shower of jewelled fragments, a banshee on the crest of a razor-tipped wave.