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'Preysight,' Sahaal whispered, and the bitter machine-spirit of his armour nictitated new lenses across his eyeslits, magnifying his view. Brought into sudden and sharp relief, the smoky pall broke apart where the dead and dying staggered, stumbling with faces blackened and limbs gone. There were far fewer than had entered.
Sahaal watched their pitiable lives dwindle away with unashamed pleasure, then leapt from his alcove into the smoke-thick sky, heading downtown.
As he travelled, he took a care to allow himself to be seen. Just brief glimpses flitting across smoky expanses, whooping as he ghosted past hurrying bands of frightened men. He did so at distant points — here in the east, there near the centre, leaping in great arcs across the town's concrete sky. In the ruins of a librium to the west he dropped through a shattered skylight and shrieked at the men below, then vanished, slashing at their faces as he went.
At an intersection in the north he hopped from a crumbling wall onto the back of a transport, claws extending with a silken rasp. Two men were dead before he was even amongst them, heads spi
—and laughed.
Across all of Herniatown, in every honeycomb passageway of its crumbling boundaries, in every sheltered corner beneath its sunless sky, frightened men and women paused to listen, shivering in the dark.
When finally Sahaal turned his attention upon the zone's tilted, sagging centre, any sense of order to the Glacier Rats' search had long since passed. A nightmare stalked the shadows of their domain, and as rumours of its appearance spread — midnight blue and clothed in lightning, long of limb and hunched of back, with eyes that glowed like rubies and claws like sabres — pandemonium reigned.
Sahaal basked in the air above it all, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
The centre had been a colereum, at one time.
A vast hydroponics dome, bristling with sludge-farmed crops, its inwardly-mirrored surface recalled an insect's eye, iridescent and multifaceted. At one time it had disgorged a thousand to
It had borne its relocation into the abyss with poor grace.
The crops had died when the collapse occurred, their irrigation cha
Sahaal straddled the dome like a beetle, limbs moving with insect confidence, drawing himself up its pregnant camber. At its crest he paused, gazed through its scars at the buildings within, and raised his hand to the bandolier straps of his jump pack, plucking at the grenades that dangled there.
The pirates' base was a sprawl of lodges and canvas tents, centred about a stone-walled tower, a fitting headquarters for a leader. There, Sahaal guessed, he would find his prey. Around it guards sprinted between salvage stores and bivouacs with guns brandished, shouting orders, faces milky in the ultraviolet glow. Vehicle engines ignited in a cascade of throaty roars, tracks grinding as they spun towards the colereum's exit.
'We're under attack, Teqo's blood!' Sahaal heard, filtered amongst the screams. 'Dozens of them! All directions!'
A roar from the east told him the bodies of the three slain guards had been found, adding to the confusion, and to the west the dry sound of lasfire — unmistakable in its breathless crackle — supplied the finishing touch.
The Glacier Rats were shooting at shadows.
Nodding, he sunk needle claws into the pinions of the dome, braced every muscle of his body, and closed his eyes.
'In your name, my master,' he said. 'Always.'
And then he drew a breath.
And then he tossed back his head.
And then he screamed.
At its maximum volume, the voxcaster of his ancient helm could burst the veins of a man's skull and turn his teeth to powder. He'd seen men fall paralysed to the floor at the Raptor's shriek, and birds fall stu
In Herniatown, the colereum's mirrored dome exploded.
Dozens of men paused in their panic and glanced up, glimpsed a nightmare figure haloed by ultraviolet, then fell screaming as eyes and mouths filled with splintered glass. Their final sight would haunt the brief remainder of their lives, bathed in a shower of jewelled fragments, a banshee on the crest of a razor-tipped wave.
Then the grenades began to fall, and from each roiling fireball a spume of hooked shrapnel sprayed itself outwards, making mince of flesh.
Sahaal stretched out his claws and exalted in the carnage. He felt for an instant that he could taste the fear of his victims, and tilted his body to rise on its whispering thermals, bathing in the horror he had sown, glorying in his own awesomeness, ascending to deity on wings of terror!
But—
But, no. No!
Even at the peak of such vicious pleasure he shied away, gnashing his teeth. In base exaltations lay an insidious danger. Focus was the key. Always. Focus and devotion.
In vengeance upon the false Emperor, in the name of my Master.
All else was corrupt and meaningless. He must condition himself to feel pleasure in the execution of his work, pleasure at drawing a step closer to his goals... But never pleasure in the act itself.
The fear, the destruction, the death: these were tools. Weapons. Aspects of the artist's palette. Means to an end.
Never the end itself.
He went amongst the dying men with restraint, after that — although those who fell in his path might not have known it. Most were injured, able only to stagger aside as he passed, claws bloodied. He gave little thought to stealth now: whether his panicking prey saw who — what — was in their midst was now irrelevant. None would survive to speak of it.
In a quiet part of his mind he wondered how he must seem to these half-blind worms, supplicating as he passed by, or else cut their throats with the contempt they deserved.
He must appear a giant. He stood far taller than even their mightiest champions, and that despite the hunched posture his armour had adopted. Striding on heavy boots, autoreactive claws flexing at their tips, greaves that tapered towards horn-like knees pistoning above, he moved through their midst like a vulture-treading with care, the twin ridges of his jump pack recalling furled wings, beak-like helm sloping forwards like a jutting jaw.
And where he stepped through curling fronds of smoke and dust, where he moved without fear through sooty flames and hopped across boiling craters, where shadows moved around him like a living mantle, then it was his eyes alone that these dismal rag-men would recall: blazing red, like embers at the heart of a cooling hearth.
The stone tower was all but deserted when he reached it, its guards lying dead from shrapnel wounds at its door, and he swatted the portal from its hinges with a casual shrug. He inhaled as he entered, praying to the cold spirit of his master that here, at last, he would find the prize and its thief.