"Lord of the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Спуриэр Саймон)

Zso Sahaal

They were called the Glacier Rats.

Their name was scrawled across parchment in the clipped hand of a servoscribe, belying the information's remarkableness in neat, tedious words, as if to render it as dull as any other record, sealed neatly with an uncrested daub of wax.

They were called the Glacier Rats.

Sahaal ran the name through his mind again and again, as if testing its mettle.

Tasting it.

The information broker Pahvulti had taken his leave from captivity. Walking free, ignoring the wounds patterning his necrotic skin, his swagger had been that of a victor, as if he'd somehow earned Sahaal's respect — or at the very least incurred his debt. He'd instructed Sahaal on where to find, and when, the information he'd promised, he'd dipped his head in sarcastic obeisance, then he'd smiled and waggled his brows.

'This is a business of credit,' he'd said, cackling his peculiar laugh — 'het-het-het' — like a gear skipping a tooth, 'the question costs nothing. The answers are priceless...'

Sahaal struggled with the urge to rip the man to shreds. Allowing him to simply walk away required every ounce of his concentrated pragmatism.

The silent vow that he would have his revenge later was little consolation.

'And yet I have paid nothing,' he'd hissed, oozing away into the shadows, struggling for some scrap of dignity.

He was denied even that.

'No... no, you haven't.' Pahvulti's one remaining eye fluttered, cycling through lenses like some perpetual wink. 'But then... the first one is always free.'

And then he was gone.

They were called the Glacier Rats.

And yes, Pahvulti's answers had arrived where he had promised, lowered from some unknown tier down a disused elevator shaft, and Sahaal's cursory attempt to distinguish its source had failed. The information broker was far too sly to be so easily undone: wherever he had his base, he was free — for now — of retaliation.

And yes, Sahaal had roared with hunger as he learned his enemy's name, flexed his claws, chanted their name again and again, but even so... even so...

He was not accustomed to being indebted.

The Glacier Rats. The thieves were named the Glacier Rats.

They were a raider band, the document said. A clan of pirates unconcerned with the territorial squabbles of hivegangs, collecting then pawning such valuables as they purloined. Their founder had been a native of the ice-world Valhalla, joining then promptly deserting the Imperial Guard on his first tour of duty, sensing far greater opportunity for wealth in the Equixus hive. His name was Tuahli Teqo, and Sahaal's lips curled in a mirthless smile as he recalled the ugly legend sprawled on the side of the thieves' transport: a tag to honour his memory.

Their current leader, in as much as Pahvulti's spies could keep up with the endlessly changing hierarchies of such clans, was named Nikhae, and was recognisable by the luminous spiral electoo on his forehead.

'Nikhae.'

Sahaal said it out loud, as if to ensure its reality, and waved a single claw through the air, dissecting the very sound of the thief s name.

'Nikhae... Nikhae...'

Yes. Yes, it was him. The false hunchback. The thief. The scum. The worm.

He had taken it.

At the rear of the sheaf of pages Pahvulti included a map. Marked in blotched ink, scrawled thick by Pahvulti's own hand, the centre of the page sported a bold, dark X.

Sahaal checked the straps on the blocky package attached to his waist, its faint green glow shimmering across the blades at his fingertips.

The Glacier Rats. They were called the Glacier Rats.

Every last one of them would die.

Herniatown had fallen from grace.

At its edges the weight of the city had broken its own base and collapsed downwards, whole streets sagging into the abyss. Underhivers kept their distance from Herniatown's bowed arcades, naming it well: its wilted streets were a raw bulge of viscera that had squeezed through the muscle wall above, dipping into inky darkness. Once it had been a part of Cuspseal, but no longer. Nestled at the underhive's anarchic heart, it seemed an invasive probe of order, albeit warped incontrovertibly by its descent.

Herniatown was where the Glacier Rats had made their home.

Sahaal reconnoitred the zone with fanatical care: watching, exploring, never intervening. At three separate junctions — where long-deserted hivehabs met along broad concourses — he'd been forced to stay his arm, as Glacier Rat sentries ambled by.

The time would come, he told himself.

They wore long coats of grey and white, a stylised snowflake — dagger tipped and skull-centred — patterning each lapel. They carried lasguns with the exaggerated care of those who'd purchased their own weaponry, and Sahaal bridled to see such fireworks treated with such reverence. Stalking the shadows of their boundaries, he registered not a single, threat, and formulated their demise with predatory ease.

Their band was well named, he decided. They were scum, untutored and untrained, as meaningless as their namesakes. Rats, yes. And he was the owl.

He laid his plans with care, awaited his opportunity from the shadows, and then struck.

A sentry — young eyes flitting across all the wrong shadows — was the first to die.

Pacing at the town's northern entrance, the youth had never considered turning an eye upon the ventilation stacks halfway along the tunnel he was supposedly guarding, and despite his enormity Sahaal arose from the vent's crumpled innards with the silence and grace of a striking snake.

The sentry's throat was cut before he registered another's presence, and in his brief instant of surprise — if indeed he felt anything at all — it must have seemed like the walls themselves had exuded claws. The body slumped, its knees folded, and Sahaal passed into the shadows long before its head struck the uneven floor with a wet slap.

Herniatown opened around him like a sacrifice bearing its heart, inviting a blade between its ribs, and he obliged it with savage pleasure. He killed another three sentries in parallel streets, impatient for violence, dispatching each with the speed and silence of a wraith. He displayed their bodies artfully, faint lights catching at every wet cut, glistening in unbroken sluices of crimson, and paused in each case only to curse the soul of his victims as if keeping a tally of his revenge.

'Warp take you...' he hissed, helm absorbing every sound. 'Warp eat you whole.'

When finally the noises he had waited so long to hear arose he was poised within the inverted dome of what had once been a chapel. He clung to the ceiling with the damp-claws of his feet, dangling like a bat, and relished every echoing nuance of the Glacier Rats' alarm.

It began with a single cry, flitting across the town like a dream, and then multiplied: first a handful of voices, then a score, each crying out in outrage and anger, demanding reinforcement.

The first body had been found.

Sahaal dropped onto and through the chapel's mosaic floor, gliding along the cracked seams of rock at its base, and hastened to Herniatown's opposite fringe. He used the crawlducts to travel in secret: swatting aside giant roaches and rats as he went, jump pack driving him along like a bullet down a barrel. At the town's southern entrance he hopped from a service hatch and quickly snickered thrumming claws through the meaty joints of the gatekeeper's legs. Scraps of the man's coat twisted aside, blossoming with redness, and his strangled grunt of astonishment warmed Sahaal to his core. The man toppled like a felled tree — more surprised than pained — and thrashed in a deluge of his own blood.

This time Sahaal allowed his victim the privilege of screaming.

Before he left the wailing cripple, arteries belching their vibrant load across tunnel walls, he prised open the man's clenched fist, pushed something hard and round into the cage of his fingers, and nodded his head.

'Don't let go,' he said, tonguing the external address stud of his vox-caster.

Then he was gone.

The man's screams echoed like the howl of a gale, and already the cries of alarm from the north were becoming those of query, groups meeting at intersections, trading orders, pointing fingers, heading south to investigate this new tumult. Sahaal watched them rush about like insects from above, safe within a collapsed attic, and relished their panic. To them it must seem as though their territory were surrounded: imperilled from opposite directions, menaced by unseen attackers.

'Fear and panic,' his master had once said, 'are but two sides of the same die!'

The sentry's screams weakened and died shortly before the bobbing torches reached the south gate. Sahaal imagined him alone in the dark, clutching with increasingly feeble fingers at the grenade in his hand. Sooner or later his grip would falter and the bomb's priming trigger would release.

The foremost group of guards entered the tunnel an instant before the grenade detonated.

To Sahaal, perched like a gargoyle on high, gazing across the levelled towers of Herniatown, the explosion rose like a luminous bubble from the south, its flickering radiance rising across the entire realm. Shadows and highlights were scrawled across every surface, and when the brightness diminished a gout of oil-black smoke twisted, snake-like, above the southern gatehouse.

'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 spinning in the vehicle's wake, and their bodies tumbled beneath its tracks with damp, crackling retorts. The two remaining men opened fire. Sahaal activated the external line of his vox, amplified its volume to a dangerous level—

—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 tonnes of starchpaste every year, diverted among rust-thick pipes to a million habs. At one time.

It had borne its relocation into the abyss with poor grace.

The crops had died when the collapse occurred, their irrigation channels cut forever. What little water filtered into the underhive was tainted by its descent, and those few hardy weeds that had escaped had grown shaggy and truculent, skins thick with mutant bristles. Only the lamps had survived, globular drones of archaic design with thrumming gravmotors and simple logic-minds. They roved the dome with ultraviolet torches blazing, unconcerned with the absence of vegetation, faltering only when their aeons-old fuel reserves perished.

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 stunned from the sky.

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.

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 spinning wood, cried out as his platform dissolved. He skittered broken nails along stone walls, clutching for handholds, and hit the ground with an untidy crunch, leg twisted in fractured angles.

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 thinning smoke, and as the claws reached out to touch him he screamed with the ragged vestiges of his breath. 'Where,' the voice hissed, 'is it?'

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.