Lord of the Night

She huffed at the off-putting mussitation — a prayer, she guessed — and refocused, fighting the exhaustion that such intense meditation inevitably caused.

The killer's influence wended its way through a knot of twisting alleys — a filigree of black and blue on the very cusp of her psychic sight — and she guided the pilot through with a calm voice, ignoring the hammering of opportunistic bullets on the tank's sides. As the vehicle clambered from the labyrinth onto a rising steppe of detritus, tracks struggling for purchase, an uncomfortable silence settled, leaving her alone with only the sound of the Salamanders' engines.

Strange shapes loomed in the dark, and at first she mistook them for mighty oaks, grown beyond normal scale, their branches rising above, ghostly lights adorning their tips. Only when perspective adjusted itself in her mind that her eyes decoded what they were seeing.

Vast ducts, each a hundred metres across, littered with scaffold and piping, branching in myriad patterns between floor and cavernous ceiling. At odd points on their colossal trunks hellish lights blazed angry red, steam geysering from every rent, and Mita realised with a stab of amazement that she was seeing thermal ducts, siphoning heat from the planet's crust where even the frozen fluctuations of its weather could not hope to diminish it. From below the entire hive drank the warmth of Equixus, and as the vehicles passed by she found herself humbled, forgetting for an instant the trail she followed.

Varitens's mutterings finally snapped both introspection and temper.

'Sergeant, for the love of the Emperor, would you be quiet.'

He glared, helmet clenched between nervous fingers.

'It's come to a bad thing,' he grumbled, 'when a soldier's denied a prayer for his soul.'

'You feel the need to pray?' she scowled, curling a lip. 'You have twenty men with unfeasibly large weapons standing right behind you, sergeant. What's to be afraid of?'

At this his grizzled mouth twitched in a pale imitation of a smile. Even afflicted by terrors of his own, the prospect of highlighting her ignorance was too delicious for him to pass up.

'This here is the Steel Forest, girl,' he said, nodding out into the canopy of tangled pipes and pilot lights.

'You told me you didn't know any names.'

'And I don't — unless they happen to be the sorts of places it's best to avoid.' He turned towards the viewing slot, glaring out into the dark. 'This is where you'll find the Shadowkin. And they don't much like intruders.'

PART TWO KINGDOM OF FEAR

Perhaps you believe yourself blameless. Perhaps you have acted, as you claim, in the interests of your people. Perhaps, in that respect, your guilt is negligible.

But I tell you this: there is strife enough in this galaxy without the ambitions of those who would construct empires of their own. Selfless or not, there is room only for one Emperor in this Imperium!

Judgement of Madam Inquisitor Trais Spirrus at the trial of Grigor "The Prosperous", short-lived ruler of the Dactylis system.

Zso Sahaal

His mind drifted, detached.

He had not slept in four days, and whilst it was true that the artifices of his enhanced brain and body could maintain alertness almost indefinitely, already the nagging seeds of exhaustion twitched at the back of his mind, threatening his efficacy. In this strange place he had conducted himself with unparalleled caution, never once allowing his vigilance to slip.

This, finally, in the lair of his newfound servants, had changed. Riding a wave of his own authority, surrounded by those who would no more allow him harm than kill themselves, Sahaal at last — mercifully — took the opportunity to rest.

They were named the Shadowkin, and they worshipped him. The fools.

He slipped into the arms of half-sleep with an eagerness he had not expected, and drowned in meditation.

He had been uncertain, at first. Confronted by a horde of black-shrouded peasants, creeping from the shadows in the wake of Herniatown's purgation, he had nearly slaughtered them without thought, coasting on the fury of what Nikhae had told him.

The Corona was gone!

His prize was lost to him, and as he stumbled directionless from the killing fields of Herniatown, these Shadowkin had mistaken him for a warrior of the Emperor.