Lord of the Night

The Night Lord had known he could not control an astropath. He could not force a psyker to dispatch a message on his behalf, nor could he be certain — if he found a willing dispatcher — that the message had been sent at all. Alone and hunted within an unfamiliar city, he could not place his trust in such uncertain, intangible things.

And so he'd found the one way he could be sure his message would be dispatched. The one way that it would blast outwards in all directions, irrespective of the crude directions of a straining astropath.

The bastard. The cruel, warp-damned bastard!

He'd delivered his message in the psyker's moment of death, in the blink of a psychic atrocity, at the heart of a deathscream formed in the moments of a soul's consumption.

The bastard, he fed the psyker to the warp, and made sure his face and his words were the last things the poor wretch ever knew, like echoes on the cusp of a dying Shockwave.

How far could such a message travel? How deep into the warp would such a horrific end propel the psyker's scream?

And who might be listening, out amongst the stars, for just such a thing?

'I am Zso Sahaal. Talonmaster of the...' Over and over again.

Convulsing on the floor of Orodai's office, Mita clamped down hard with all her willpower and shielded herself from the pain, great mental defences rising in her mind like stormshields. And then, undistracted by the horror, she shifted her perceptions of the pulsing signal and coiled outwards from its grasp, turning to regard it in a new and disciplined perspective. Released from the pain, recovered from the shock and awe of its first bite, she sorted her cluttered senses together and was rewarded with order.

The warp was a pool of oil, now — at least, that was how her mind had chosen to rationalise it. The astropath's death had struck it hard, concentric ripples bulging outwards from its centre. Drawing close, Mita saw clearly the process the Night Lord had tapped into, and found herself morbidly impressed by its cunning: with secret fractal symmetry — each tiny component a replica of the whole — every concentric ripple bore along its bow-wave the shadow, the echo, of the event that had caused it. And through it, as it faded with each diminishing ring, Mita found herself able to explore, to taste the ghost of the Night Lord's mind where before she was unable even to approach him. It was as if she had been presented with a pictoslate of her enemy: a transcendent snapshot that had dazzled her at first but that now, now that its brightness had faded, now that she was accustomed to its flare, she could use to study his aspect. And oh, what rage he held in his soul! There was loss, beneath it all. A wisp of colour haunting the midnight whole, like a deep sea kraken swimming an ocean of rage.

He has lost something. Something he loves. Something he cares for with holy pride. He has lost it, and it angers him. And he is alone. With a precision that she struggled to maintain, she peeled back the layers of this echo-enemy — a perfect but fading replica of the Night Lord's mind — and found a forest of emotion, buried deep beneath layers of time and denial, that shocked her. Ambition. Uncertainty. Frustration. Loneliness. Suspicion. Paranoia. Power.

She drew back from it with an inward gasp, surfacing from the trance and into Cog's burly arms, wrapped around her in a desperate embrace: the one thing his simple mind had presented as a solution to his mistress's distress.

And as she prized herself away and thanked him, and caught her bearings, and wiped the blood from her lip, her mind lingered on what it had found, and pulsed with a shock that she could barely contain.

Staring at the Night Lord's mind — even through the haze of shadow and echo — had been like staring at a mental map of herself.

Outside Orodai's office, pandemonium reigned. Obeying Mita's instruction with empty devotion, Cog carried her through the narrow door and into the antechamber beyond, where the commander's servitor aides sat lifeless at their desks, bereft of orders. Their human counterparts — acolytes and scribes in the employ of the Vindictare, whose taskmasters had deserted them in their march to war — clustered at the chamber's apex, where a rusting civilian worship viewspex glimmered with a broken image, a breathless voice barking terse reports from horn-like speakers. Periodically the crowd cheered, fists punching at the air, and Mita drew close to their swarm with a sinking heart. She could well imagine what they were watching.