'Security servitors.' Kaustus shrugged, voice bored. Mita noted without surprise — and only a small shiver of revulsion — that similar effigies, rotting flesh hanging from slack bones, gazed down upon each and every item in Zagrif s collection.
She pulled back her hand slowly, uncomfortably aware of the machine intelligence above. At some arbitrary point its attention seemed to dwindle, as if no longer judging her a threat, and the lasguns returned to a neutral spread with a soft hiss.
'Effective,' she said, controlling her voice.
'Indeed.'
She turned towards the remainder of the room, her eyes drawn towards an accumulation of spotlights on one side, and a dais higher than any other. She took a step towards it, curious, and stopped.
Something uncoiled in her brain like a great spider, scuttling between uncertainties, and she knew.
'He's here...' she whispered, fists clenching, head jerking from left to right, seeking that hunched shape, that midnight form, those burning red eyes.
'What did you say?' Kaustus said, his voice so close to her ear that she jumped.
'H-he's here! The Night Lord! I feel him! He's in here!'
And then something sharp tugged against the fabric of her arm, and before she could glimpse down to see what had punctured her skin the lights of the gallery dimmed in her eyes, the sky-blue dome clouded over, and her consciousness spiralled away.
Zso Sahaal
Zso Sahaal sat upon a throne of fur and bone, armoured fingers steepled before him, and brooded on past and future.
Tomorrow he would strike. A guildhall, perhaps or some other Administratum stronghold some communicatory centre where the Imperial fools would keep their mutant slaves.
It had been the witch that had given him the idea. Mutants and slaves... Yes.
That was tomorrow. The future. The first step upon a road to redemption.
As for the past, as for that swirl of violence and chaos that had brought him here, to this smog-thick place, as for the madness that left him seated in darkness upon a throne of bone, as for yesterday...
They had carried him.
Following the battle of the Steel Forest the tribe had lifted him from the debris where the witch had struck him down, placed him carefully on a litter, and borne him up to their secret platforms amongst the canopies of the heat vents.
In retrospect the treatment was as galling as it was comforting. True, he found himself amongst a community that would go to any length to keep him from harm... but to be so manhandled — and by devotees of the withered Emperor, no less! Sahaal had awoken with a suppressed shiver of disgust at the thought.
But then, his memories were thick with ugliness already.
The witch, the witch... She had struck him to the floor with a single flex of her powers, like a bomb between his eyes, and he shivered that such a slight being should hold such power over him. The witch. The bitch. He had not expected to face psykers.
Steeling himself — disgruntled by the need to sink so low — he breathed a reluctant prayer to the Dark Gods. The ruinous powers had always been allies to his cause — enemies of his enemies, but never his friends — and even now, when he needed their patronage, he shivered at the prospect of openly courting their involvement. If the deities of the warp resented his reluctance they gave no sign of it, within instants a dark stirring played at the edge of his senses.
He would not be unprepared for the witch a second time.
Had the Imperium truly fallen so far from its much-vaunted light during his absence? Had the Carrion God truly allowed such deviants to enter his service ungoverned? Sahaal could hardly despise the impurity of mutation — the gods to whom he had just appealed thrived on such things, after all — but it was a needle of hypocrisy that fed his hatred nonetheless. The mutant stood for everything the Imperium reviled — impurity, uncertainty, vulnerability, corruptibility — and yet here they were, put to work, devils made useful. Just another sign of the Emperor's weakness. Another symptom of his unsuitability for deification.
How long before these psykers too were made scapegoats, blamed for actions that were both sanctioned and encouraged, just as Sahaal's master had been?
Oh, my master...
Konrad Curze. The Night Haunter. The Shadowed Martyr. Antecedent of the Corona Nox. Sahaal breathed his mentor's names with choked reverence and, as ever, found himself calmed and angered in equal parts.
'We shall repay their insult yet,' he whispered, voice lost to the darkness of his helm.
He returned his thoughts to the witch, flexing his fingers introspectively. She had tasted his thoughts. She could find him again — of that he had no doubt. She had known what he was.
And he, equally, had seen her true self.
She had worn it emblazoned on her collar, a thing so inconspicuous he had barely noticed it at the time, and only in the fog of enforced sleep had the symbol come to the fore of his mind: an embroidered ''I'', bisected three times by bars of black and silver, with a tiny skull fashioned at the crux of the central bar.
The Inquisition. Hunting him. He had no time for such distractions.
A day had since passed, and the Shadowkin lair within the Steel Forest had been deserted at his command. Centuries of tradition, long decades of territorial security, had perished in the instant it had taken him to shrug and announce: 'We move.' The witch had escaped, and that meant the Inquisition would return. They must leave at once, he knew, and seek refuge in a place better suited to repel attack.
And the Shadowkin, his dismal little allies, had not complained once. Overtly.
And yes, his motives were pure, yes, the move was necessary, yes, the gang would be purged if they did not leave. But still he could hear the mutters in the shadows, he could taste the resentment of his flock, he could feel their worship wane. Condemnitor Chianni had not survived the battle, and with her leadership lost his grip upon his miniature empire had grown tenuous indeed.
He took them into the deep, leaving behind only a gaggle of scouts to watch over their former domain. He led them into those boundless wastelands he had explored in his first days within the hive, into the foetid swamp zones where the heat of the planet warmed the air and sulphur bubbled across the pools. In these smog-thick caverns he prowled before them, eschewing the snaking caravans that trekked at his heel and the throng that sang devotional songs to raise their spirits... And also muttered, always muttered, when they thought he could not hear.
There was no place deeper than this.
He brought them to where the hulk of a drilling behemoth pitched like a rusted island from the sludge of an oily ocean, lost to the shadows. He guessed that at one time it had dug these basins and caves, these rustmud caverns, a swarm of humanity building and settling in its wake. And here it had faltered — perhaps blunted by its labours or else merely forgotten, with none caring to settle so deep — and rotted in its own fuel, drowned in the snow that its exertions had melted, with only its massive loins rearing from its caldera like a tombstone.
Here Sahaal had hidden his cache of weapons and ammunition, and here he brought his children, his black-draped tribe, on their exodus from the Steel Forest.