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And the people... Cowering in ghettos around scarce resources, these were the hopeless, the useless, the dispossessed. Divided amongst the petty empires of criminal gangs, scavenging in the dark to feast on fungus and beetle-meat — these were not people. They were animals. Rats.
In that first day, as he'd slipped through the under-city's heart like a wraith, Sahaal had felt himself sickened. If this was the reward for devotion to the Emperor, he had chosen his side shrewdly.
He returned his mind to the present, focusing all his attention upon the step-step-step of his imminently-arriving prey, and unclenched his right hand. At its tip the gauntlet's hooked claws flexed, mirroring the internal movement: a second set of fingers, power-bladed and bloody-red, slaved to the movements of the first. These too had been a gift from his master, whose generosity was as unpredictable and spectacular as his moods. Sahaal had received them as gratefully as he had his bolter, but had wielded them with far greater relish: finding in them weapons worthy of the precision and purity he craved.
He had named them the Unguis Raptus — the Raptor's claws — and in so doing had coined the name of his command company. Before even the Great War his Raptors became justly feared, and in the name of first the Emperor, and then his master alone, they had brought swift death from above to their foes.
If his master had known where the gauntlets were constructed, or by whom, he had never revealed it. They were as much a part of Sahaal now as were his eyes or his tongue.
Or his hate.
Two men exited the tu
It did them little good.
The first was dead before his brain could even register a threat, twin skewers punching out of shadow and into his face, slipping like icicles through the pulp of his eyes. Sahaal shook away the corpse like waste from a shovel, sliding from his alcove to reveal himself to the second. Slowly. Silently.
The memory of his master's voice, leading his Legion in lecture-prayer, rustled like pouring sand, flooding his mind:
'Show them what you can do,' it trilled, as soft and cold as dead flesh. 'Steal their hope, like a shadow steals the light. Then show them what you are. The tool never changes, my sons. The weapon is always the same. Fear. Fear is the weapon.'
In the corridor, standing in the bloody mess of his fallen friend, the second man looked into the face of a nightmare and falteringly, chokingly, began to scream.
'I have questions,' Sahaal said, reaching out for him.
The man knew nothing, of course. None of them did.
By the end of the second day there had been twelve. Seven men, four women, one child.
It never ceased to amaze Sahaal how varied were their responses. Some — most — had screamed from the outset. When he came upon them, when he flexed his claws and hissed, when he worked their terror like an artist with a brush, smothering gouache horror on subtle blends of oil-smear dread, in those incandescent moments his heart soared with the righteousness of his work, and they threw back their little heads and — mostly — they screamed.
Some, though, were silent. Staring with mute animal-shock, dark eyes bulging, lips twitching, faces bright. In those cases Sahaal took them in his claws and carried them away, slipping down through layers of debris to secret, sheltered places where they could recover their voices at leisure.
Then the screaming could begin.
And then he could ask his questions.
One of the women — deluded, perhaps — dropped to her knees and began to pray, some mumbled litany to the Emperor. Angered by her piety, Sahaal sliced away her fingers one by one, enjoying the change in her demeanour. Holy fools, it would seem, could scream as well as sing.
One of the men tried to fight him. Briefly.
The child... the child had cried for his mother. He'd screamed and blubbed and wailed, though when Sahaal leaned down to fix him with a helmed gaze the tears stopped abruptly, surprising him, and the youth's hand flickered with the bright shape of a switchblade, lunging from below. It seemed that i
(The blade had snapped. So had Sahaal's patience.)
And yes, now perhaps he could reflect upon the responses to his work. He could skulk here in the ruins of this derelict factory, on the cusp of a deserted settlement, its floors long since collapsed into the abyss, and consider his palette of fear like a painter scheming to mix new colours.
But always, always such distractions were tempered by hate, by focused rage, and by the spectral possibility of failure.
What, he asked himself, had he learnt from his murderous forays? What had he discovered from all his many questions, all his many descriptions?
Nothing. Nothing of the Corona Nox, at least.
He'd gone to pains to illustrate the spiral electoo sported by his quarry — carving it lovingly on each victim's skin — but not one had recognised it. He'd described the thieves' shaggy furs, their crude goggles, even the unknown word — TEQO — daubed on their transport, though it was familiar to none. Sahaal did not for a moment consider that his victims might have been withholding: one by one their defences cracked, their sanity shattered, but their ignorance remained intact.
No, he'd learned nothing of the Corona. His revelation had concerned something entirely less pleasing.
Since awaking on this nocturnal world something had eaten at him, gnawing at his psyche. When he took his twelfth victim — a bearded man with copper fletches across his brows and rags draping his wiry form — Sahaal's curiosity had finally overcome him. He'd gritted his teeth, hooked one elegant claw into the wretch's arm, played the bladed edge along the cusp of exposed bone, and asked the question that haunted him.
'What year is this?'
Despite the pain, despite even the terror that had gripped him since first he was attacked, the man had paused with a look of almost comical incredulity.
'W-w-what?'
'The year!' he roared, rippling the waters of the sludge-lake to which he'd brought his captive. He raised the claws of his gauntlet above the man's groin, poised to clench. It was a crude form of threat, but he had to know. 'What year, worm!'
'Nine-eight-six!' the man wailed, all thoughts of bemusement obliterated. 'Nine-eight-six!'
Sahaal growled, absorbing this unwelcome information. An absence of six centuries was far greater than he'd feared. Adrift upon the trance in the Umbrea Insidior, he had been resolutely unable to estimate how long he had spent in silent incarceration. Time moved differently in the warp, and a day's slumber in its coiling belly could easily affect a month's passage in crude reality.
Six hundred years was beyond his most fearful approximation. In a fit of pique he began to bring down his claw, venting his anger on his captive.
And then an ugly afterthought arose, and he paused to form words in the plebeian Low Gothic tongue, so appropriately favoured by the underhive filth. 'The thirty-second mille
For a fraction of a second, the man's lips curled in a dumbfounded, confused smile.
'Wh—'
Sahaal flexed the claws.
'No! No! N-no! F-forty-first!' the words rushed out like an avalanche, jumbled and formless. 'Forty-first mille
The bottom fell from Sahaal's mind.
He killed the man quickly, too distracted to even relish the moment.