Lord of the Night

Sahaal hesitated. In truth the details of the subsequent calamities were still unfocused in his mind, a gamut of colour and light that no amount of mental dissection could unravel. He knew how it began — in fire and blood aboard the assassin's vessel, grappling with claw and fist against the bitch herself, wrestling the Corona from her grasping fingers then fleeing to the Umbrea Insidior...

He knew how it ended, crashing through the mists of Equixus, awaking in the vessel's ruptured guts, his prize stolen.

And between? A hundred centuries. Light. Colour. Capering figures of svelte form and slanted eye, with fluted helms and bright jewels, slipping between reality and warp, gathering around him.

The attack.

The flight.

The trap.

The prison.

Eldar.

'It has reached this world along... intricate pathways,' he said, clearing his mind of the jumbled impressions. 'It came to the Glacier Rats, and then to Slake. And from there...' he sighed, a blister of depression breaking apart, overwhelming even the freedom that had come from speaking with such candour, '...from there I do not know where it has gone.'

Chianni stared at him with wide eyes, and all around the silence of the underhive poured into the vacuum his story had left.

Hours passed, and Sahaal slept, disengaging the cycadian rhythms of his psyche, relaxing the catalapsean node at the centre of his spine that could oscillate so casually between the domes of his brain.

True sleep. And with it, true dreams.

He saw the ice-light of voidfire, capering and self-consuming as the Umbrea Insidior closed with the assassin's transport. He saw melta charges flare in the gloom, and Dreaddaw assault craft punch into soft, yielding iron.

He saw the boarding action, and the slaughter. He saw his raptors make a charnel house of the bitch's craft. He saw her eyes, wide and fearful, as he sliced her hand from her wrist — a bright filigree of blood and oil shivering from the rent — and with it reclaimed the Corona Nox. He saw himself lift a claw for the killing blow: bittersweet vengeance for his master's death.

And then...

Screams upon the vox. His sergeant's voice, fat with anger: 'Warpspit! Eldar, Talonmaster! Xenogen scum!'

They came like a bloody sword from the sky, breaking from dismal walls in light and warpfire, skimming realities like a pebble across water. Limbs wavering breathless guns coughing discs and coils. Like spiders, hatching on webs of Empyrean.

Aliens.

He saw the witch-lord. The dancing devil, with antlered helm and silver staff, blue-gold armour and feathered gown, a warlock-warrior, frozen in his pathway, sword alive with wyrdfire.

He saw himself breaking free from the maelstrom, leaving the assassin to cower, every shred of his being bent upon the Corona. They wanted it. They had come to claim it, in his moment of triumph.

They would not have it.

He saw himself, alone, returning to the Umbrea Insidior. He saw himself shutting out the cries of his brothers. He saw himself aboard his own vessel, fastening his prize in its casket, sealing it against alien hands.

He saw himself tasting, for an instant, triumph.

And then the warp opened its mouth, prised wide by alien hands, and a bubble of nothing intumesced around his ship. She shuddered, a protesting behemoth, a terrible beast floundering into sticky tar to sink centimetre by centimetre, shrieking as she drowned.

They pushed her deep into a timeless bubble, those xenogen spellsingers, and locked her from the warp: a water-filled belljar, sealed with hot wax, cast adrift in an ocean.

They could not enter. He could not leave.

He saw himself rage and roar for a full month. He saw his vassals lock themselves away from his wrath. He saw himself succumb to insanity.

And then finally he saw himself tasting bitter acceptance, piece by piece, until he resigned himself from reality, lost all hope of escape, and entered the trance.

He awoke in the Shadowkin encampment with the flavour of resignation and loss clouding his mind, and found a commotion in progress.

He found Chianni at the water's edge, staring out across the unquiet swamplands, shouting orders and imprecations at the flotilla of boatmen that approached.

She almost choked when he appeared silently behind her, and in the shallows two of the pugs overturned as their pilots glimpsed the apparition on the shore.

'What,' Sahaal hissed, ignoring the fearful splutters from the unctuous waters, 'is the meaning of this?'

They had gathered in their thousands. In makeshift shelters, beneath canvas bivouacs or else simply stretched upon the hard ground, with oily torches sputtering on rusted spars, wagons and litters clustered in protective circles, gang colours fluttering — half-heartedly — side by side, all sense of territory abandoned: the rustmud swamp teemed.