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In the latter respect at least his prayer was answered.
The attack came from above, the flash-flicker of a muzzle igniting warning runes in his eyeplates. He pounced aside even as the hail of lead landed around him, armour whining in protest. Thick plumes of dust and shattered stone danced, and the staccato rattle of a hellfire gun shook the tower from base to tip. The first inelegant sweep of his attacker's hand raked him with lead, and despite the speed of his reaction knocked messy craters into the filigreed surfaces of his armour.
The impacts did not wound him. In those few lucky places that the attacker found his target he failed even to penetrate Sahaal's carapace, inflicting nothing but petulant surface-scars on the midnight blue shell. This was quite enough of an insult to enrage him nonetheless.
He bounded vertically — rising on the wash of his crested engines — and gashed at the wooden spars of the spiral gantry, splinters and singed beams toppling below him, the rhythmic collapse of each level — koom-koom-koom-koom — like the pounding of a fearful heart.
The gunman, lost somewhere in a haze of spi
He groaned, struggling against the fuzz of shock.
And then something landed beside him. Something vast, clothed in black and blue. Something with the eyes of a devil, that flexed its claws and hissed like a serpent, that stepped closer and leaned down to inspect him, as a cat might a mouse.
Something that ran a blade, almost tender, across the glowing electoo of the man's forehead.
'Nikhae,' it said.
And finally, hearing his own name from this nightmare's shrouded lips, the man's voice came back to him. His shock parted like thi
Zso Sahaal left Herniatown an hour later, thoughts clouded. The package he had taken with him had been left in his wake, placed carefully amongst the scraps of offal — shredded by the force of his fury — that had once been Nikhae. It would claim the lives of any who remained within the town's sagging grid, but where the thought of such wide-scale revenge should gratify him, Sahaal felt only emptiness.
The Corona was gone.
It had been sold.
Traded.
Bartered, like some plebeian commodity.
He walked from the town's northern entrance without a care for stealth or destination, in a haze, and when a cloaked figure approached from the darkness to bow before him he barely paused, whipping a thoughtless claw into and through its neck in a single motion. The body collapsed and his feet carried him on, and from the shadows a chorus of gasps arose around him. Finally, begrudgingly, he glanced up from the ground to regard this new circumstance.
There were fifty or more, each draped in black, prostrating themselves in terror and awe. More scum, worthy of his blades...
Sahaal sighed, flicked blood from his claws, and prepared for more slaughter.
'H-hail,' one of them said, her wide eyes avoiding his gaze. 'Hail to the Emperor's angel. Hail to the holy warrior.'
Sahaal stared at her, uncertain. He had expected opposition, terror, pitiful aggression — but not obeisance.
'What do you want?' he hissed, and each of them shivered at the sound of his voice.
'O-only to serve you, my lord,' the woman quailed, extending her right hand in a tall salute. 'Ave Imperator!'
And then the Umbrea Insidior's promethium reactor-cell, the bulky package he had removed so carefully from its crippled generarium, reached critical mass in the heart of the Glacier Rats' territory and detonated with the force of a thousand grenades.
The underhive shook, the floor quaked like a living tiling, and as his new congregation cowered around him, Sahaal basked in the phosphorlight of Hernia-town's rain.
Mita Ashyn
Hemmed on all sides by drooping adamantium walls, the force of Herniatown's devastation erupted not outwards, but upwards.
Above Herniatown stood Cuspseal.
Mita had returned to the lower tiers from the under-city beneath a stormcloud of suspicion and fear. The psychic resonance of the murdered woman — a spectral shadow that only she had felt — had affected her profoundly, and as Sergeant Varitens stalked off to report to his commander she had hastened to a control room at the precinct's peak, pushing aside servitors and tech-acolytes in her haste to reach the communications consoles.
She was thus ensconced, struggling with the infuriating business of conferring with Inquisitor Kaustus, when the quake hit. It had almost been a relief.
Given that the hivelink — a mass of switchboard feeds crammed amongst ducts city-wide — was prone to broken signals and interferences, and that the control room's bustle was as endless as it was raucous, she had expected Kaustus's quiet tones to be rendered inaudible. As it was, his reaction to Mita's report was easily gauged despite its volume: describing to him the particulars of the murders had been an object lesson in futility, and his voice had dripped with an utter lack of interest. She began to appreciate why Orodai had insisted she see the slaughter for herself. Mere words could not hope to describe it.
'...desecration on a... a savage scale, my lord, and—'
'Savage, you say?' his clipped tones had dripped with scorn. 'And in the underhive, no less? Imagine that.'
She'd fancied she could hear him rolling his eyes.
'My lord, I... I know it must seem... insignificant, and perhaps my regard for it appears ridiculous to you, but—'
'It does not appear ridiculous, girl. It is ridiculous. Worse, it is a waste of my time. Murders in the underhive! You're a servant of the Inquisition, not some underling lawman sent to solve every tawdry crime.' He huffed loudly, and Mita had imagined him toying with the tip of one polished tusk. 'You will in future not burden me with every tedious item of detail that y—'
'But my lord, I felt such darkness! It... it hangs like a cloud! A shadow in the warp!'
The link's brass speaker, fashioned in the shape of a gasping fish, fell silent. Mita had stared at it, uncertain. Had he severed the co
'M-my lord?'
Kaustus's voice had been cold when at last he spoke.
'You will never interrupt me again. Is that quite clear?'
Her stomach had knotted. 'O-of course, my lord. My apologies.'
'My patience has limits, child. Do not test them.'
'I am sorry, my lord, truly... It's just that...' she'd fumbled for words, the memory of the body twisting her guts, flickering before her. Its naked shape haunted every blink and its empty eyes — hollows that led only to shadow — regarded her mutely from her own mind. Should she say it? Should she voice her suspicions? By the Throne, she'd been so sure, but now that she came to it, now that it needed to be spoken, suddenly it sounded ludicrous. Melodramatic. Too much.
But the words!
Adeo mori servus Imperator Fictus, Ave Dominus Nox.
The words had filled her with such certainty that she'd all but screamed her fears when she saw them, biting her tongue all the way back to Cuspseal, desperate to tell her master.
She must tell him. She must.
In the control room, staring at the voicetube with her stomach churning, she'd taken a breath, composed herself, injected formality into her tone, and said it.