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And in low voices, in muffled hisses that they didn't dare imagine he could hear, they asked: How was he struck down so easily by the witch? Was he not supposedly mighty? Could he not have crushed her with ease?
Sahaal issued two tasks to his tribe, before even they hunted and fed their children. The first was that they dispatch scouts into the shadows, to listen to rumour and collect gossip, and to bring to him the man named Slake. He commanded this without explanation, and those warriors thus selected scattered into the night without question.
His second command was that they build him a throne.
For all that he considered his command above dissent, Sahaal was no fool, and as his tribe worked with bone and rag to fashion a fitting seat for their lord, their prayers seemed muted, their prostrations halfhearted, and their anxious glances of fear betrayed the simmering glut of resentment. Sahaal took it all in and stored it away, but could not bring himself to be troubled. The Night Lords commanded obedience, not affection, and whether these scum liked him or not was irrelevant. They would do what he told them, and that was enough.
They built the throne from the crippled spars of the great digger, sealed in improvised forges, and covered the seat in furs of black and brown. The arms and back they topped with stolen bones and teeth, a skull upon each hand pommel and freshly-taken heads — those of slain vindictors they had brought with them — mounted on spines above die whole. Sahaal found their grim iconography gratifying: they, like his ancient Legion, understood the power of morbidity and the fear that went along with it. That they devoted their gruesome trophies to the glory of the Emperor was the one sour note in an otherwise pleasing practice.
He ascended his throne with no small measure of pride, and as the Shadowkin dispersed to tend to their own needs he lost himself in the memories of glories that had long since passed, never once pausing to consider the dissatisfaction of his people.
On Tsagualsa, the carrion world, the Legion had raised a palace for its lord.
He had gathered his captains together, and they came with a fleet of bladed prows and bitter warriors, skulls displayed at belt and shoulder, scriptures crossed through with bloody ink.
Horus was dead. The heresy that had looked ready to rip the bloated Imperium apart had ground to a halt. The Legions that had turned from the Emperor and sided instead with Chaos, that boiling fount of madness and disorder, were scattered, licking their wounds, bemoaning their losses, ru
Not so the Night Lords!
Alone amongst them all, the Night Haunter's contempt for his father had outdated, and outlasted, the rebellion. The Emperor's favoured son Horus had corrupted the other dark Legions, pouring poison upon their primarchs with insidious whispers and sweet promises, but not so to the Night Haunter. Not to Konrad Curze. He had seen his father for what he was long before. He had chosen Chaos as a tool — as an ally — but was not seduced by it. And when Horus was cut down, when the other Traitor Legions were shattered, when distant Terra was liberated and the Emperor triumphant, had the Night Lords fled? Had they yelped in fear and skulked into the gloom to fight amongst themselves, as had the others?
No. No, not they.
Their primarch unleashed them, he fed them the fear they yearned, and on Tsagualsa he called them to his side, and showed them his palace.
It was built of bodies: still living, fused at broken joint and sliced skin, knotted around coiling vertebrae and dissected sinews.
In the screaming gallery, where a carpet of moaning faces rose in broad steps — writhing spines and clutching fingers shivering along every edge — the Dark Lord received his captains with a bow.
He was naked, but for a cloak of black feathers, and had never been more magnificent. Sahaal and his brothers dropped to their knees and hailed him: their father, their master, their lord, their Dominus Nox.
He regarded each in turn, and to each he nodded once, a feral jolt of recognition, like a wolf regarding its pack. All of them were there: Quissax Kergai, Master of the Armoury, whose scouring of the Launeus forgeworld had crippled the loyalists of the Trigonym sector. Vyridium Silvadi, Lord of the Fleet, who had routed the flotilla of Admiral Ko'uch and bombarded the Ravenguard for five days before they could retreat, unsupported, like the cowards they were. Even Koor Mass, encased now in the sleek shell of a dreadnought, its every surface decorated with flayed skin, had deigned to attend his master's audience.
There was one other who Sahaal noted amongst the menagerie, and he avoided that one's gaze, finding his countenance distasteful. Krieg Acerbus, youngest of the Haunter's captains, incalculably vast and swollen with pendants and gory souvenirs of his works, leant on the shaft of his great poweraxe and smiled with insolemn pleasure at his master's attention.
Sahaal ignored the giant's smirking features and concentrated instead upon his lord, resplendent upon a throne of obsidian and silver.
The Night Haunter paused to gather his thoughts, drawing his feathered cloak around him like a great crow folding its wings — and then he spoke.
He told them of his bitter crusade. He told them of his hate for the traitor-Emperor who had turned upon him without warning or honour, a hate that burned bright and uncfuenched, but as patient as time itself. He told them that they, his children, his dark warriors, his prefects of fear personified, were each worth a dozen of any loyalist Marine, with ''purity'' on their ignorant lips and devotion in their hollow, hypocritical souls.
He told them that they would have their revenge upon the withered god, and they cheered in the shadows of the writhing mausoleum and clashed their gauntlets against their breasts in joy.
And then he drew breath and told them he was going to die, and their joy crumbled like ash.
Sahaal returned to the present in the shifting smog of the rustmud swamplands in a bleak mood, his master's morbid promise ringing through his mind. More than ever the need for action, for some palpable sense of gain, burned through his brain. The bitterness of the Night Haunter was a patient force, but his fury was far sharper and his discipline far younger. What did all this brooding achieve? What must he do? How must he act?
Seated amongst his tattered rags, Zso Sahaal found himself dizzied by a rush of panic and impatience, surging in his guts, calling him to action, to violence, to murder.
It was not a wise time to approach him with a protest.
There were two: young Shadowkin standing close enough to each other to beuay their nervousness. They would not have undertaken their quiet rebellion alone, and so like children clutching for the comfort of their parents, they had come together.
The first was a man in his twenties, shaven-headed and tattooed, whose circlet of shattered ribs and bangles of beaded finger bones marked him out as a fine warrior. Where an older man might have leaned upon a staff this youth clutched at a heavy volume of Imperial scripture like a lifeline, as if no harm could befall him so long as he touched its battered surface.