In the hive, the message went all but unnoticed. Like Cog beside her, most hivers remained as oblivious to the unseen maelstrom around them as if they were blind and straining to see. Some shivered, or blinked in a momentary discomfort they didn't understand, and perhaps even paused to wonder at the meaning of it all — before setting their shoulders and berating themselves for such foolishness, and forging on with their small, empty lives.

In their cots, in starports and Administratum offices, guilder nexus-points and tech-monasteries, astropaths cried out and gibbered in their sleep. Identified in their youth as psykers of mediocre talent, such withered man-morsels formed a communications network, serving and sustaining the Imperium that hated them. Where tightbeamed transmissions would take an age to cross the stellar gulf, an astropath could hurl his or her voice into the warp, relaying messages and instructions upon their masters' behalf. All had undergone the Soul Binding ritual — fortifying their defences, melting their eyes, melding their very spirits with that of the Emperor himself — and as such had little to fear from the predations of warp beings. Their susceptibility to such unfocused visions as now plagued Mita was all but negligible, and so in their cloistered cells their reactions were muffled, the preserve of nightmares and troubled thoughts. Their patient minders, who had grown well used to such disturbed slumbering, calmly administered soothing drugs to their unstable charges. Alone in all the city, Mita convulsed and screamed, utterly exposed.

Even through her fear and pain she burned with outrage at nature of this psychic storm. Her enemy's cunning — and cruelty — was beyond words, and she was as staggered by her revulsion as by the agony of the storm itself.

The Night Lord had known he could not control an astropath. He could not force a psyker to dispatch a message on his behalf, nor could he be certain — if he found a willing dispatcher — that the message had been sent at all. Alone and hunted within an unfamiliar city, he could not place his trust in such uncertain, intangible things.

And so he'd found the one way he could be sure his message would be dispatched. The one way that it would blast outwards in all directions, irrespective of the crude directions of a straining astropath.

The bastard. The cruel, warp-damned bastard!

He'd delivered his message in the psyker's moment of death, in the blink of a psychic atrocity, at the heart of a deathscream formed in the moments of a soul's consumption.

The bastard, he fed the psyker to the warp, and made sure his face and his words were the last things the poor wretch ever knew, like echoes on the cusp of a dying Shockwave.

How far could such a message travel? How deep into the warp would such a horrific end propel the psyker's scream?

And who might be listening, out amongst the stars, for just such a thing?

'I am Zso Sahaal. Talonmaster of the...' Over and over again.

Convulsing on the floor of Orodai's office, Mita clamped down hard with all her willpower and shielded herself from the pain, great mental defences rising in her mind like stormshields. And then, undistracted by the horror, she shifted her perceptions of the pulsing signal and coiled outwards from its grasp, turning to regard it in a new and disciplined perspective. Released from the pain, recovered from the shock and awe of its first bite, she sorted her cluttered senses together and was rewarded with order.

The warp was a pool of oil, now — at least, that was how her mind had chosen to rationalise it. The astropath's death had struck it hard, concentric ripples bulging outwards from its centre. Drawing close, Mita saw clearly the process the Night Lord had tapped into, and found herself morbidly impressed by its cunning: with secret fractal symmetry — each tiny component a replica of the whole — every concentric ripple bore along its bow-wave the shadow, the echo, of the event that had caused it. And through it, as it faded with each diminishing ring, Mita found herself able to explore, to taste the ghost of the Night Lord's mind where before she was unable even to approach him. It was as if she had been presented with a pictoslate of her enemy: a transcendent snapshot that had dazzled her at first but that now, now that its brightness had faded, now that she was accustomed to its flare, she could use to study his aspect. And oh, what rage he held in his soul! There was loss, beneath it all. A wisp of colour haunting the midnight whole, like a deep sea kraken swimming an ocean of rage.

He has lost something. Something he loves. Something he cares for with holy pride. He has lost it, and it angers him. And he is alone. With a precision that she struggled to maintain, she peeled back the layers of this echo-enemy — a perfect but fading replica of the Night Lord's mind — and found a forest of emotion, buried deep beneath layers of time and denial, that shocked her. Ambition. Uncertainty. Frustration. Loneliness. Suspicion. Paranoia. Power.

She drew back from it with an inward gasp, surfacing from the trance and into Cog's burly arms, wrapped around her in a desperate embrace: the one thing his simple mind had presented as a solution to his mistress's distress.

And as she prized herself away and thanked him, and caught her bearings, and wiped the blood from her lip, her mind lingered on what it had found, and pulsed with a shock that she could barely contain.

Staring at the Night Lord's mind — even through the haze of shadow and echo — had been like staring at a mental map of herself.

Outside Orodai's office, pandemonium reigned. Obeying Mita's instruction with empty devotion, Cog carried her through the narrow door and into the antechamber beyond, where the commander's servitor aides sat lifeless at their desks, bereft of orders. Their human counterparts — acolytes and scribes in the employ of the Vindictare, whose taskmasters had deserted them in their march to war — clustered at the chamber's apex, where a rusting civilian worship viewspex glimmered with a broken image, a breathless voice barking terse reports from horn-like speakers. Periodically the crowd cheered, fists punching at the air, and Mita drew close to their swarm with a sinking heart. She could well imagine what they were watching.

'...and onwards into the gulley known as Spit Run, where resistance was overcome with mighty deeds and...'

Propaganda. Damn Orodai for his wounded pride — he'd led the Preafects on a crusade and he'd taken the Hivecasters with him.

Damn, damn, damn.

The acolytes snapped to a guilty attention when they saw her, decorum returning where excitement had ruled. She ignored them and steered Cog towards the screen, his bulk pushing cowls and autoscholars aside like a ship's keel.

'...and just receiving word from the second wing — they're east of here in the Chalkmire territories — that a rebel stronghold at Brokepoint Town has fallen to the Emperor's warriors with a total loss of life...'

The presenter, who stood at a safe distance from the growing maelstrom of tracer fire and sooty explosions behind him, was clean and elaborately dressed, his unassuming features betraying not a single hint of mechanised augmentation. Mita was hardly surprised: she'd seen broadcasts on other Civilian Worship systems on other populous worlds — joyous reports of the Emperor's victories, lectures in religious dogma, uplifting sermons, vilification of captured criminals and heretics — and in every case the chosen representative of the state embodied pure, unthreatening humanity. Mita had little doubt that beyond the gaze of the servoskull trained upon him, the small man sported a plethora of control articulators, autofocus diaphragms and self-viewing vambrances to broadcast his own image into his retina, but such paraphernalia could hardly be considered photogenic.