None of this surprised her. What surprised her was that the killer stood unhelmed, showing a face that had once been human.
‘I’ve never seen one of you like this,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t even sure you had faces.’
‘Now you know otherwise.’
Koja Zu watched as the assassin tilted his head slightly, hearing the whisper of priceless mechanics in the collar of his golden armour. Though his towering form was scaled-up by whatever genetic meddling his master had performed to enhance the brute’s intellect and physicality, no gene-weaving could hide his roots. He had been human, once. An Albian heritage, perhaps, going by his features beneath the weathered flesh and battle scars.
‘May I at least know the name of my killer?’
He hesitated, and she dared to believe she’d caught him with an unexpected question. Yet his dark eyes never wavered.
‘My name is Constantin Valdor.’
‘Constantin,’ she repeated slowly. Her schooling in Old Earth’s mythology had been extensive, and she often hearkened back to old tales and legends in her speeches. All the better to inspire the teeming masses of godless, hopeless dregs who served her. Now the minister found herself smiling, no matter that her son was to be stolen away to a fate of genetic torment; no matter that her own death was mere breaths away. She smiled a madwoman’s smile, all teeth and wide eyes. ‘I am to be killed by a man with an ancient king’s name.’
‘So it seems. If you have any last words, I will ensure they reach the Emperor’s ears.’
Koja Zu’s lip curled. ‘Emperor. How I loathe that title.’
‘He is the ruler of this world and the master of our species. No title is more appropriate.’
She bared her teeth in an expression too ugly and defiant to be a smile. ‘Have you ever considered just what kind of creature you serve?’
‘Yes.’ The dark eyes stared on. ‘Have you?’
‘The “Master of Mankind”.’ She shook her head, feeling the welcome flare of righteousness. ‘He isn’t even human.’
‘Minister Zu.’ The golden warrior made a warning of her name. One she didn’t heed.
‘Does He even breathe?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me that, Custodian. Have you ever heard Him breathe? He is a relic left over from the Dark Age. A weapon left out of its box, now running rampant.’
Valdor blinked once. The first time she’d seen him blink so far. That rare human movement was unnerving – to her it felt false, like it had no right taking place upon his statuesque features.
‘Terra,’ he said, ‘is a thirsty world.’
She knew, then. With those words, she knew which of her many crimes she was to die for. The one she’d least expected.
A laugh, queasy and unwanted, tore itself from her throat. ‘Oh, you vile slave,’ she said, unable to keep the sick grin from her face.
‘Other worlds suffer a similar thirst.’ The golden killer’s eyes had glassed over with an inhuman serenity made all the more uncomfortable by the living intelligence shining behind it. ‘Yet none of them hold the war-scarred, irradiated honour of being mankind’s cradle. This world is the beating heart of the Great Crusade, minister. Do you know how many men, women and children now make their slow way back here – to humanity’s first home? Do you know how many pilgrims wish only to see the ancestral Earth with their own eyes? How many refugees flee their flawed and failing worlds now the veil of Old Night has been lifted? Already it is said that unsettled land on the Throneworld is the most valuable commodity in our nascent Imperium. But this is not so, is it? One resource is far more precious.’
She clutched the autopistol tighter as he spoke, breathing slowly and calmly. Even knowing she was to die, even knowing she had no hope of drawing the weapon, the body was reluctant to surrender its survival instincts. Instinct demanded she fight to live.
‘What I did,’ she said, ‘I did for my people.’
‘And now you will die for what you did for them,’ he said without malice.
‘For that alone?’
‘For that alone. Your other treacheries are meaningless in my master’s eyes. Your cleansing pogroms. Your trade in forbidden flesh. The army of gene-worked detritus you have sequestered in the bunkers beneath the Jermanic Steppes. The prospect of your rebellion was never a threat to the Pax Imperialis. Your crimes of apostasy are nothing. You are dying for the sin of your harvester machines drinking the Last Ocean.’
‘For stealing water?’ She felt like laughing again, and the sensation wasn’t a pleasant one. The laughter was creeping up through her blood, seeking a release. ‘All of this… because I stole water?’
‘It pleases me that you understand the situation, Minister Zu.’ He inclined his head once more, with a curious courtesy and another subtle purr of machine-muscles. ‘Goodbye.’
‘Wait. What of my son? What is his fate?’
‘He will be armed with silver, armoured in gold and burdened by the weight of ultimate expectation.’
Zu swallowed, feeling her skin crawl anew. ‘Will he live?’
The golden statue nodded. ‘If he is strong.’
In that moment, her trembles subsided. The fear bled away, leaving only naked defiance somewhere between relief and hope. She closed her eyes.
‘Then he will live,’ she said.
There was a bang, throaty and concussive, and she was falling, drowning, choking in thunder. There was pressure and heat and grey, grey, grey. And then mercifully there was nothing.
Nothing, at least, for her.
The creature formed from the twinned screams of the first murder clawed its shrieking way free from the womb of the warp. It dragged itself through a wound in the universe, breaching reality with all the exertion expected of a being forcing its own birth. Once away from the nurturing tides of the Sea of Souls, its flesh steamed and shivered. Reality immediately began to eat its corpus, gnawing at the beast that should not exist.
It rose, stretched out its limbs and senses, and shook off the slick, wet fire of its genesis.
It hungered.
It hunted.
True to its nature, it hunted alone in the cold of this sunless realm, ignoring the jealous, wrathful and fearful cries of its lesser kin. It had no capacity for kinship even with those monsters that shared similar births, considering them – insofar as it had the intelligence to form any thoughts at all – as lesser reflections of its primacy. Their existences, and the weaknesses they suffered, were nothing and less than nothing.
Had any Imperial scholar managed to pry open the daemon’s skull, and were there a brain within to dissect for answers, the creature’s mind would have been laid bare as a node of punishingly sensitive perceptions. An animal might hunt by a prey’s movement or the smell of its blood, but the daemon didn’t comprehend such miserable trails of scent and sight and sound. It hunted not by the crude mechanisms of its prey’s bodies, but by the very light of their souls.
The monster moved unseen through the great tunnels and chambers, its tread spreading corrosion through the arcane material that made up this unnatural realm. It clutched no weapon. If it needed a blade or a bludgeon, it would fashion one from its own essence, using them to break open the brittle shells of its victims and feast on the life within. More likely it would rely on its strength, its talons and its jaws. These would suffice for all but the toughest prey. They had survived when the creature had incarnated itself in the past for other hunts on other worlds.