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He swept into the air with a whoop, jump pack flaring, dismissing the tumult of detonating bolter shells and pearlescent tongues of flamerfire behind him. He must be focused.
They were fast and strong and accurate, but for all that they were as efficient only as the weapons they used against him, just as his measure could be taken by the tools of his own retaliation. He could not use fear against machines.
He could use blades.
He was the Talonmaster, warp take them! He was the first of the Raptors!
These zombie warriors didn't know the meaning of fast!
A melta stream glittered across his shoulder, too slow to follow the graceful plunge he initiated. At his back the governor's exhibition chamber became a warzone, exhibits blown apart, melta streams turning ablative walls to mercurial slag. Ice and snow flurried in, confusing the senses of the motion-detecting security drones, and within seconds the entire chamber was alive with lasfire and muzzleflash, weapons throbbing at the air like percussion.
Sahaal twisted and barrel-rolled, slipping with avian grace through palls of smog and ice. He dropped to his feet behind the pair of servitors and diced the first with a casual swipe of his claws, relishing the collapse of its unarmoured skull and the spume of long-dead blood that followed. The second rotated at its waist like a spi
For an instant Sahaal considered grabbing one, to draw the bolter at his waist, but quickly rejected the notion. With one hand he must protect the Corona, to sacrifice the blades of the other in favour of something so base as a projectile weapon was unthinkable.
The reverie did not last long. Safely ensconced within their distant positions, the four remaining servitors seized the opportunity to open fire, leaning from cover behind priceless tomes and antediluvian fossils, walls of lead and fire and sound pounding and intercepting. Sahaal bunched his legs and pounced onwards, his prize clutched close to his chest.
It was clear to Sahaal that he had walked into a trap: the slow realisation that the inquisitor had been controlling his movements from afar, awaiting the moment that the Corona's casket was opened before making his play, was stealing over him by degrees. If that was true — a horrific prospect! — then surely the tusked fiend wouldn't risk harming the prize whose capture he had spent so long engineering? Surely that would be an illogical step?
Apparently logic was not a concept with which the inquisitor was familiar.
Whatever simple parameters the servitors were obeying, protecting the Corona from harm was not among them. Bolterfire raked across Sahaal's airborne body, chipping lumps of ceramite from his shouldguards and destabilising his bounding strides. Sparks scrawled vicious patterns across his chest and legs, toppling him out of control and sending him crashing to the ground, unique masterpieces and specimen jars shattering around him. The glutinous wash of a flamer rippled past him like a river, sending him rolling from its path with smoke lifting from singed plates. Even finding cover was a near impossibility: every priceless gewgaw that he ducked behind was attended by its own immobile servitor drone, hanging from the ceiling in mute vigilance, and the slash-stabs of lasfire from above had already punctured his armour along its joints, slicing his face in jagged streaks. He kept moving, strafing as he went, hopping into the air wherever he felt it possible, only to be forced back to the ground by a deadly crossfire from his assailants.
Beneath other circumstances, his storming senses reassured him, the servitors' inflexibility would be their downfall. For all their firepower, for all their strength and speed, they were little more than clockwork toys: obeying simple directives without recourse (or opportunity) to i
He was reduced to a hunted beast, scurrying to flee from its pursuers, knowing already that they closed upon it from all sides. A melta-burn dissolved the elephantine skull he'd ducked beneath — a steaming lance of superheated air that ripped a hole in his shoulder-guard and ate at the flesh beneath, vaporising muscle and blood. He cried out and dragged himself clear, shutting the pain from his focus and drawing his arm back to its furthest stretch, preventing tightness when his superhuman blood sealed the wound.
Superhuman or not, he was being taken apart.
And then, like a ghost picking its way between realities, stumbling through smoke and fire, there came the solution. Small, vulnerable, tattered and torn, but moving ever onwards, reaching out towards him.
Chia
She had left the ruined shuttle to find him.
The servitors' simple minds did not even acknowledge her as a threat. Beyond their commands, without mention in the aggressive engines that drove their desiccated brains, they ignored her as if she was hardly there at all.
Sahaal's instincts rebelled at the idea that seized him, so tainted by a lifetime of suspicion and paranoia that the very notion of trusting someone repelled him. But he persisted, silencing his internal objections with a stubborn snarl.
There was no other way.
In Chia
He had gone to pains to make her complicit to his secrets. Let her repay the sentiment now.
With her, the Corona Nox would be safe, at least until he had slaughtered these upstart machines and regained his freedom.
'M-my lord?' she warbled, face pale, as he roared from the fragments of his cover through smoke and gunfire, bolter shells rippling the ground at his heels, and thrust the crown deep into her grasp, barely slowing.
'Run!' he roared. 'Get clear, damn you! Let no one take it from you! Run!'
And then she was behind him and he found himself unburdened, and with a shriek of such terrible joy that the hairs at the nape of his neck shivered and stood on end, he brandished his second claws and turned in the air.
He would stride through all the bolterfire in the galaxy, now. He would swim an ocean of flames. He would streak through melta-stream skies to reach the scum that had dared to face him, and when it was over he would put out the inquisitor's eyes one by one, and wear them as trophies upon his belt.
Unburdened by his master's sacred legacy, he could do anything! He could—
The servitors' guns fell silent. The world seemed to draw breath. Sahaal dropped to the floor and hissed, wafting smoke and flickering tongues of fire obscuring his senses. The wound on his shoulder had sealed itself fully, but beneath layers of conditioning and focus he could feel the pain of it shrouding his senses, drawing his mind into the dangerous eddies of shock. He shook his head to clear the numbness, eyes roving into the corners of the smog-bound chamber.
The servitors were gone, sprinting back towards their inquisitor-master as if their task were complete, optics twitching to follow him as they vanished into the pall. A cold suspicion gripped him, like the ice even now sending frozen fingers throughout the gallery chamber, and he turned in his place with it gnawing at his belly. Chia