Lord of the Night

The crate hissed as he depressed its sealing rune, and as he gripped its iron handle he reflected that in another time such an ignoble thing as carrying luggage would have been unthinkable, the remit of the numberless slaves that tended to his every desire.

How the mighty are fallen... A simple phrase, whispering through his mind for a second time, like the ghost of an echo. He realised with a start that it was his master's voice he'd remembered, and with crystal clarity recalled the time, the circumstance, the sentiment.

It had been on Tsagualsa. On Tsagualsa, before the killer came. Gazing into the night, brows beetling together, ancient eyes clouded, Sahaal's lord had turned to him and smiled, and said those words, and in his voice Sahaal could taste his disposition.

Troubled. Bitter. Betrayed. Haunted.

'We shall be mighty yet,' Sahaal promised, words lost to the driving snow, fist clenched against his heart.

Lifting the crate to his side, he set his sights upon the faint shadows of the transporter's tracks, took one last glance at the Umbrea Insidior, and leapt into the night.

Mita Ashyn

It was less an awakening than a rebirth.

Always it was like this, after the trance. Always she allowed the subtle skeins of perception and concept to break free from her focus, shifting her mind state from some inner vantage to the mundane outer realities, the province of conventional sense and thought.

She returned to her corporeal self like an eagle resuming its eyrie, breathing honeyed incense and enjoying the slow trickle of physical sensation. It felt like blood flowing through starved arteries.

In the Scholastia Psykana she'd learnt to call this the pater donum: the brief flush of warmth and contentment that followed a scrying trance, like a reward from the Emperor's own hand. She allowed it to work its way along each limb, curling her toes and arching her back.

Relish it, the adept-tutors had taught. Enjoy it whilst it lasts. It was, after all, the single facet of telepathy that justified the term ''gift'' where all others equated more accurately to the symptoms of a curse.

The pater donum would not last. It would be gone in an instant, and at that unhappy moment all the fierce memories of the trance would crash inwards to drown her.

She opened her eyes, focused on the single guttering candle at the centre of the scrying-ring, and allowed the sludge of recollection to break through.

Her first thought was this:

Something has fallen from heaven.

The meditation cell was a simple affair.

Four rockcrete walls arched overhead, sloping together to form a crude dome with a needle of bronze at its core: a conduction point for the astral body. Gone were the scriptures picked out in gold and opal across each wall, gone were the stylised star charts and mantras patterning the seer-dome, gone were the great twisting shelves of chittering incense drones. Such comforts she'd left behind on the fortress-world Safaur-Inquis, and this spartan cube was as far removed from the decadence she'd come to expect as it could be. She supposed she should be grateful for anything at all, given the indifference her new master had showed her, but still... there were limits.

A withered servitor — once human, long since lobotomised, dissected, infested with logic engines and clattering components — poked a stunted limb against her shoulder, its one rheumy eye fluttering spastically. It tried to talk, but the rune-etched staples through its lips and jaw allowed little more than a moist clucking, a long strand of drool wobbling from its chin.

On Safaur, her trance-awakenings had been tended by gende servants: smooth-skinned subordinates with tongues neady removed and ownership studs across each eye, hurrying to mop her sweat and massage her shoulders, lovingly recording on scented parchment whatever insights the meditation bestowed. On Safaur her trance-suite flocked with locust-like automata: emeralds for eyes and rubies for jaws, coloured streamers of psychoactive pheromones falling like musk from their tails. On Safaur a dozen cogitators existed solely to interpret her visions. On Safaur the majesty of her quarters was matched only by the view from her central garret, and between assignments she spent hours gazing across the acid shores of the sulphur seas. On the Inquisitorial fortress-world of Safaur-Inquis, her masters wielded their influence with artistry and opulence.

Her present circumstance was therefore somewhat galling.