Lord of the Night

It shivered along her spine, it froze her blood and sent her knees buckling, hands grasping for support, and this despite the unhappy truth: that the deathshriek was but a fraction of the surge: a motive force to propel it outwards, a pilot light upon which far greater, and more dazzling, visions had been hung.

Mita fell to the floor with a gasp and Cog, who had not even been aware of the psychic Shockwave, let alone assaulted by its ferocity, was left mumbling his moronic concerns and trying, clumsily, to restrain her flailing limbs.

She bit her lip and bled, and frothed at the corner of her mouth, and in the punctured atria of her psychic mind she suffocated beneath an avalanche of sights and sounds.

'I am Zso Sahaal, Talonmaster of the Night Lords, returned from the veil of time to reclaim that which is mine. Seek me, my brothers.'

The voice was a foghorn, aching her ears (though it had no true sound), announcing in a blaze of light and a chorus of dark alarms the identity of her enemy. Beyond the mind's eye, in the haze of telepathy, senses became occluded and intangible: sounds became visible, images bore taste and scent, the cold touch of flesh rode a piggyback upon a musical discord. A synaesthetic whirlwind. An arco-mental maze. She stumbled through its corridors and clung to a shred of chattering lightning, holding it fast.

Zso Sahaal. A name.

And his image — an incandescent pictogram, brighter and more terrible than any auspex, sharper than the greatest sensoria — was scratched upon the raw flesh of her flayed brain and scarred it forever: like an electoo within her eyelids, impossible to escape, even in sleep.

It was him. The Night Lord. Her enemy.

She recognised him, despite the confusion and the whirligig tumult of conflicting senses. His face was rendered in music and the soft scents of ash and incense, his midnight blue body a medley of bitter flavours, and his claws... his claws were the touch of an artist's brush upon canvas, the gende caress of a lover's fingers. All this he was, beyond mere vision, but she recognised him nonetheless. The sallow eyes, with pupils so swollen they were black from edge to edge, the furrowed brow, the hollow cheeks, the pallid pate of a hairless skull. All of it encased in ceramite and steel, flexing plates hung with chains and barbs, marked all over with Legion sigils and dark scriptures.

Zso Sahaal. Night Lord.

'Seek me, my brothers,' the voice purred, and Mita found herself dimly aware of the message swarming past her senses, expanding beyond and through her, climbing ever outwards in a growing sphere. It swept through the hive of Equixus like a wall of steam, and then onwards and outwards, clambering into the void, across the gulf of space. Seeking those who cared to listen.

In the hive, the message went all but unnoticed. Like Cog beside her, most hivers remained as oblivious to the unseen maelstrom around them as if they were blind and straining to see. Some shivered, or blinked in a momentary discomfort they didn't understand, and perhaps even paused to wonder at the meaning of it all — before setting their shoulders and berating themselves for such foolishness, and forging on with their small, empty lives.

In their cots, in starports and Administratum offices, guilder nexus-points and tech-monasteries, astropaths cried out and gibbered in their sleep. Identified in their youth as psykers of mediocre talent, such withered man-morsels formed a communications network, serving and sustaining the Imperium that hated them. Where tightbeamed transmissions would take an age to cross the stellar gulf, an astropath could hurl his or her voice into the warp, relaying messages and instructions upon their masters' behalf. All had undergone the Soul Binding ritual — fortifying their defences, melting their eyes, melding their very spirits with that of the Emperor himself — and as such had little to fear from the predations of warp beings. Their susceptibility to such unfocused visions as now plagued Mita was all but negligible, and so in their cloistered cells their reactions were muffled, the preserve of nightmares and troubled thoughts. Their patient minders, who had grown well used to such disturbed slumbering, calmly administered soothing drugs to their unstable charges. Alone in all the city, Mita convulsed and screamed, utterly exposed.

Even through her fear and pain she burned with outrage at nature of this psychic storm. Her enemy's cunning — and cruelty — was beyond words, and she was as staggered by her revulsion as by the agony of the storm itself.