Lord of the Night

At the gate the crowd broke its ranks and swarmed through the checkpoints. Shrieking and fleeing across the concrete beyond, cloaks flapping, the starport descended piece by bloody piece into anarchy. Hundreds had died already, and as Mita shifted her psychic self towards the dark blemish she sought, leaving behind the crackle of gunfire and the shouts of the wounded, she knew that hundreds more would join them.

And she knew, now, that it was all a waste.

The attack was merely a diversion.

She found it — him — nearby, drawn to his spectral shadow like a shark to blood.

He had crawled from the depths of the undercity from a fissure at the hive's base, where industrial smog belched upwards in long curtains, and had scaled the plated walls of the lower tiers claw by claw, rising towards the starport's gaping launchfields not from within, but without. Where normally a squad of vindictors could be found, thermal cloaks flapping in the wind, gazing out in ceaseless vigil for just such an incursion, now the beast's route was clear, now the sentries had rushed off to reinforce elsewhere, now his shadow fell across nothing but empty concrete and silent, unattended shuttles.

The Night Lord's entrance to the starport went utterly unnoticed, by all but Mita.

She swept around him with the dreamscape fracturing at her heel, all her tenuous energies gobbled by his presence. Where before she had felt the taint about him like a faint promise, now it was a wound in reality itself, swarming around him and sucking at her mind. He had opened himself to Chaos, she could see, and in consequence there was some strange quality to him in this esoteric reality, some otherness that here, in this place of uncertain physicality and warp-borne visions, burned around him like a corona. She felt as though she swam a viscous ocean, and to even approach him took every shred of her effort. He existed at the heart of a great darkness, a blemish in the warp, and she struggled to see him through the fog of his soul. Something was happening to his boundary, some trick of what passed for light. Some sense of motion.

Of swarming...

And the voices... Cluttering, whispering, giggling tones, on the cusp of hearing. Were they real?

The Raptor dragged behind him a jaegar squad of humans, coated warriors who wasted little effort in attempting to speed his climb, content to allow their lord to take their weight. One by one they joined him at the edge of the platform, casting off ropes and buckles, unlimbering from cases upon their backs long tubes, hollow and undecorated, like the blowpipes of some jungle race.

The voices reached a keening pitch in Mita's mind and the air — the very fabric of this fantasy place — began to boil around the Chaos Marine's form, as if his mere presence were anathema to reality.

He paused. He glanced around himself as if listening to something that only he could hear, and his companions exchanged nervous glances.

'She is here,' he said.

'M-my lord?'

The witch. She is here. She is watching!

Mita's panic surged. How could he know?

In fear and reflex she tried to kick herself free of the dream, but it was too late, she had immersed herself too deeply, the drug continued to grip her blood, and she could not escape into the waking world.

The Night Lord's companions had taken up combat stances, knives and hatchets brandished.

'Where, my lord?' one hissed, voice little more than a whisper. 'What should we do?'

'Fear not,' the monster said, and its voice betrayed its amusement. 'We each have our guardian spirits. It is not wise to eavesdrop on one such as I. As the bitch will discover.'

And then the distortions that boiled around his outline seemed to pulse, and the fabric of the dreamscape ripped, and there, there, like splinters of shadow hanging in the sky, the chittering somethings of the warp were released.

They clamoured around her. They pressed in, trying to fasten leech-like mouths to her screaming soul, slipping long claws into her mind.

And finally, as the sound of the Night Lord's laughter rushed in to fill her world, as the cost of scrying too deep unfolded its tentacles and teeth around her, the drugs that crippled her body ran their course and she awoke, mercifully, gratefully, with a scream.

She was in her cell, she saw immediately. Whatever had happened to her, whoever had dragged her, she'd been returned to her quarters without so much as a braise. Given that Kaustus was the only one present when unconsciousness had claimed her, it was an uncomfortable possibility that presented itself. Had he done this to her?

But why? Why had he called her to the governor's gallery? Why had he instructed her through those doors? And why, Emperor's oath, why, would her own master incapacitate her just as she sensed the enemy's presence?

She pushed it from her mind. It was an enigma that would have to wait.