Lord of the Night

Even as he watched, Sahaal could see the human stream thickening. He had chosen his acolytes' realm with care, placing their encampment at the heart of a patchwork morass of bore-holes and smog vents, but now the winding path that led down from above, snaking from the north, appeared impossibly choked: a flow of humanity like sewage, blocking the pipe that carried it. They stepped from shattered girder to fungal plateau, homing on the great drowned drilling rig like pilgrims to a holy place.

Sahaal cast a brief glance to the south, working his jaw. There — set back from the swamp amidst a tangle of igneous formations and massive fungi — he knew there existed a second route from above: a tunnel so tight and twisting that it could accept only a single body at a time. It was his exit, his bolt-hole, his means of a rapid escape if this unfathomable territory was attacked, and he was pleased to see that its secrecy remained intact. He turned back to the refugees, gratified.

They came with heads bowed and wounds unhealed. They came with the dying carried on palettes behind them, with their faces clouded and their eyes filled with tears. Where once gangs had spat upon the face of their enemies, and died in the name of their totem, now they walked side by side, mutually ignored, hostilities redundant in the face of this harsher, more immediate exodus.

They sought out a new totem, now — a new figurehead — and in the pit of his heart an ugly suspicion as to what it was rolled over Sahaal like a breaking storm.

'Who are they?' he asked Chianni, keeping alive the hopes that he might be wrong.

'J-just... just people, my lord. From the underhive. The Preafects have destroyed half the settlements... They've got nowhere e—'

'What do they want?'

Chianni bit her lip, perceptive enough to know the answer would not please her master.

'They have heard of you,' she said, voice quiet. 'They think... they think you're a myth, but... But they know the Shadowkin escaped unharmed. They know us as... Holy zealots, my lord. They've feared us for decades — as long as the tribe has been here — but... but now we have strength, and they are weakened. They're angry. They don't know what they did to warrant the Preafects' violence. They're dying. They're pitiful. And suddenly they have seen the error of their ways.'

'I did not ask you who they are, priestess. I asked what do they want?'

He knew the answer already, of course.

Chianni's lip trembled as she spoke.

'Sanctuary, lord. They come seeking sanctuary.'

Mita Ashyn

She could not avoid her master's attempts at contact for long. She left the precinct when the chirruping of advancing servitors — snatching at her attention with hivelink comms clutched in piston knuckles — grew tedious, and her excuses became untenable. She knew she was being childish, but the swarm of uncertainties clouding her mind, coupled with the ghosts of exhaustion gripping her, precluded even the most lacklustre of attempts to represent herself intelligibly. For all that, she could tell sleep was not yet an option, so she took to wandering the bustling streets of Cuspseal like an eidolon, a lost spirit seeking absolution.

Preachers leaned from pulpits, holding loosebound books in claw-like grasps, eyes alive with fire and piety. Around them crowds accreted, and as she passed by Mita tasted the cocktail of their thoughts: the bright ember of the zealot, the tepid mundanity of his flock (I believe their minds cried — but always the shackles of doubt, of shame, of sin, weighed their spirits down), and always amongst the crowds she found incongruous minds: the strict focus of undercover Preafects, the darting intentions of pickpockets and outlaws, the fearful disgust of whores, grudgingly seeking custom. She walked on quickly, troubled to find so little purity, so little virtue, amongst this ocean of thought.

At one intersection a knot of boys had gathered around a militia post, recruiting sergeants barking false promises of glory and adventure. The youths shouted and whisded as she passed, even the crudity of their catcalls unable to break through the cage of her worries.

The question that assailed her was as unanswerable as the universe was vast, and amongst its myriad strands of uncertainty she found herself gathering it together, kneading into one shape, one indigestible issue:

Why?

She paced across a hanging bridge and paused to stare at the heads of executed criminals fixed upon each of its stanchions, their eyes and tongues greedily devoured by jewelled beetles and albino bats. The flocks chattered as she passed, stabbing at her psychic senses with needles of ultrasonic sound, and she moved on with only the most cursory glance towards downtown Cuspseal — the hulking cube of the precinct dominating her view, towering above the mighty underhive chasm into the shadows below.

Why does the inquisitor not act?