Lord of the Night

She seemed briefly affronted. 'Money is the foodstuff of corruption, my lord...'

'Of course,' he rumbled, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. 'Continue.'

Chianni gestured for the scout to go on.

'W-well... I know the guilds sometimes use middlemen, so I thought it would be worth checking...'

Chianni nodded. 'A wise idea.'

The boy beamed. 'I found him speaking with two others, a-another man and a woman. A guilder came over — handfuls of credits, he had — and called out to him. He called him Slake, I'm certain of it.'

Sahaal's fingers tightened on the skull-pommels of his throne.

'You did well,' Chianni told the boy, perhaps noting her master's eagerness. 'Bring him forwards. Our lord would look upon him.'

The morsel that was pushed into the light, bound at its hands and ankles, shrieking like a stuck pig, was not what Sahaal had imagined.

It was a small man — if not genetically stunted then at least abnormal in his build, features prematurely wizened, scalp clinging to a few last scraps of hair. His simple clothes were stained and dirty and his face was marked with fresh bruises: evidence of the scouting party's rough treatment. Most notable however, were the twin sockets set high on his hydrocephalic forehead, one above each eye: ugly irises that extruded long cable-bundle umbilici, dangling to his shoulders like metallic dreadlocks.

He collapsed to the rusted floor with a wail, took one look at the throned giant looming over, and burst into tears.

'Sweet hive ghosts I didn't do anything don't kill me oh God-Emperor please...'

'Silence him,' Chianni said, a fraction before Sahaal. The young scout dropped to his knees and punched the wailing specimen across the face, splitting his lip and speckling the floor with his blood. His cries died abruptly.

'You are Slake?' Chianni asked, glaring.

'N... no! No! Not on my own!'

The scout punched him again, harder this time. 'Lies!' he roared. 'I heard his name!'

'Breggan,' Chianni said. 'Be still.'

The young scout backed away, breathing hard.

'You are Slake,' Chianni repeated — this time a statement. 'You are a go-between for upcity guilders, correct? Answer me!'

'N-no!' he wailed, tears and snot thick on his face. 'Not on my own! Oh sweet Terra, no! Y-you don't understand! Not on my own!'

Sahaal had heard enough. He was out of his throne and hunched over the man like a great lion, seemingly without movement, and the Shadowkin audience cried out and backed away, astonished at his speed.

The man stared up into the twisted visage of Sahaal's helm, and felt the tears freeze on his cheeks.

'...oh...'

'Four days ago,' Sahaal whispered, so quiet that none but the captive could hear his reed-thin voice, 'you purchased from the Glacier Rat scum Nikhae an item. You knew it was coming. You took it from him and paid him. Yes?'

In the face of such icy terror, the man's stammers were frozen away, leaving only a tight, strangled tone.

'Yes. I mean... I don't know. I have a small piece of the memory but—'

Sahaal pressed a claw against the wattles of his neck.

'Explain.'

'Slake! It's... not a person. Not one of us.' His eyes rolled, mouth quivering. 'It's a collective. A group, you see? The gestalim surgery... we took the implant! Separate us, we're just people. But together, all three joined...' He pawed his bound hands at the cables hanging from his skull, broken nails clattering against their sockets. 'Together we are Slake. Th-three people, one machina. We share memories. We share intellect! Alone we are nothing!'

Sahaal ground his teeth.

'You are servitors?'

'No! No, the servitor is a slave to the machina. Together, we control it.'

There had been servitors, even in Sahaal's time. Empty minded things: human bodies with machines for brains, controlled and governed by the chattering logic engines inside. Such contrivances left no room for personality or self awareness, rendering a servitor little more than a mobile tech-console. Their lives — such as they were — were a sequence of parameter and stimulus.

Could it be that these three nothings, these human fools with more avarice than sense, had found a way to retain their minds — their ambitions — yet to foster the cold intellect of a servitor nonetheless?

'How is this possible?' Sahaal rasped, bladed claw tight against the man's larynx.

'We paid! We chose it! We found... found a man who could do it!'

'And who,' Sahaal hissed, already guessing the answer, 'was that?'

'Pahvulti! His name is Pahvulti!'

The cognis logi. The information broker. The renegade tech-priest.

The bastard.

It was not a name welcome to Sahaal's ears.

He lifted the shrieking captive in one great claw, and carried him out into the shadows away from the tribe, to question him as only he could.

When he was done with the man, who was one piece but not the whole of Slake, Sahaal brought his head before the Shadowkin and held it high, blood snaking in long chords along his arm.