Outlaw.

She went into the shadow.

Two days seeped by as if captured in amber, struggling against viscous time to claw their way free, to taste liberation for one endless, impossible moment. Sahaal counted each second with truculent impatience, fingers drumming at the arms of his throne, mind adrift with possibilities, plans, frustrations.

Still no word of the Corona.

Two days in the shadow, in the foglight of the rust-mud caverns. Two days of torpid nothing, with only the flickering of firelight to indicate life, like the hive-ghosts themselves, gathered where the nightmares became flesh, swirling about their new king.

Sahaal stared across the water and viewed his domain, and nodded his quiet pleasure. In the north, against the edge of the lapping waters, a tall mound was taking shape, rising up like some swollen stalagmite to challenge the cavern ceiling. The rushing figures at its base had no inkling of his scrutiny, and when — as he had now taken to doing with spiralling frequency — he quit his tattered seat to scuttle across the beams and stanchions of the swamplands, play-stalking the Shadowkin and their refugee guests without their knowledge, still his presence remained secret. He burned with the desire to act, but had no outlet for his energy.

He was everywhere and nowhere. Free to roam, cursed to wait.

He did not need the preysight of his helm, nor the nocturnal vision that was his birthright, to know what the growing mound was built from. Two days, he had given them. After that they would be his.

His master would be proud of him.

In moments of indulgence, when he slipped beneath the waters of meditation, he fancied that he could see Konrad Curze's face. In glittering hazes of pallor and shape, he fancied he could visit the Night Haunter, could speak with him as he had once done, could seek comfort and counsel in his master's voice.

It was all an illusion. The primarch was gone forever, his legacy was all that remained.

In life Konrad Curze had been a tortured soul. Plagued by the wildness of his childhood, haunted by visions of his own demise, he struggled with every fibre of his being to earn the respect and admiration of his brothers, and — above all else — to prove himself worthy of his father's affection. In adulthood as in youth he struck from the shadows, he waged war with fear and steel in the Emperor's name, and he raised his own sons, his Night Lords, with a martial pride unmatched in all the galaxy.

There was little glory in his aspect, if truth be known.

Where other primarchs wrestled for heroic deeds and the favour of their God-Emperor, Sahaal's master pursued only results. He would never be as charismatic as Lion El'Johnson, as articulate as Roboute Guilliman, as demagogic as Horus the Favoured... but he could be strong. He could shatter any enemy. He could be pragmatic. He could be terrifying.

In a universe of terror he robbed the Emperor's enemies of their horrific mantle. He overcame savagery by outstripping it. He purged the brutal by outdoing their brutality. He sacrificed what scant charm he had and took up the crown of scapegoat — the foulest of the primarchs, the dirtiest of fighters, the Emperor's own devil — so that none, none, would stand before him.

Rebels surrendered at the mere suggestion of his intervention. Raiders fled with his name upon their lips, swords unbloodied. Those that were feared were made to fear him. Those that were hated were made to hate him.

Obedience through terror.

He had never been human, but like all the primarchs there lurked in some deep corner of his luminous heart a flavour — a bitter taste — of humanity.

Konrad Curze sacrificed it. He wiped tears of insanity from snowy cheeks and cast his warmth to the wolves, and he did it in the Emperor's name. He lost everything.

He became what he had always been destined to, what the galaxy demanded he become, what the Emperor himself sanctioned, moulded, needed: He became a loyal monster.

And when he turned to his father for succour, for affection, for the merest glimmer of gratitude—

—he received only contempt.

Sahaal surfaced from his musings to find that his grip had splintered the arm of his throne to dust, long shards of bone and iron cutting his hand. He'd bitten his tongue without realising it, and his mouth was filled with the metal tang of his own blood.

Contempt.

That was the Night Haunter's legacy. The contempt of a betrayed son for his father.

And the need for revenge.

Oh, how the mighty are fallen.

'I vow it...' he whispered, unheard. 'Master, I vow it to you. We shall be mighty yet.'

'We shall make him pay for what he did.'

The heap grew massive. From humble beginnings — a cluster, a clutch — it swelled upwards: layer upon layer, compacted together, shovelled one upon the next in imitation of the hive itself.

The stench, by the second day's end, when the camps teemed with life once more and Sahaal slipped across the swamps in secret to view the results of their labours, was an almost physical force.

Men and women, old and young, mouths wide, a rheumy film coating dead eyes. Tongues limp. Flies scuttling and tasting slack skin. From a heap to a hillock, and thence to a mountain, blood spattered, bruised, cold.

A multitude of dead heads glared upwards in mute accusation, and Sahaal met their gaze with a tiny smile.

Most had been taken messily. In distant alleys, he guessed, in maze-like habsprawls and secret places — necks severed with untidy force. Machetes and domestic knives, swinging and bludgeoning, notched daggers and antique blades. The damage to some spoke of sawing, of blow after blow, of hacking without precision through gristle and vertebrae. Of struggles in darkened places, of hands clutching and pushing, straining to defend.

'How many failed to return?' Sahaal murmured, flicking a gesture towards his condemnitor. She alone had joined him before the pile — flickering torches aggravating their shadows.

'Not many,' Chianni said, her voice low. 'The ones who refused to partake were soon... harvested, by those who did not.' Sahaal had at first mistaken her hush for revulsion, but no... no, the Shadowkin were adequately familiar with the tokens of mortality. Her quiet was instead a thing of awe and devotion, centred about the monument before her. 'We think perhaps sixty are unaccounted. Whether they've fled or been captured we don't know.'

'We have their children?'

'Of course.'

He turned to face her, unhelmeted eyes glistening. 'Then you know what to do.'

She nodded. Sahaal was impressed: even the notion of infanticide could not perturb her. Not she: the favourite of a Space Marine.

Yes, it had been wise to confide in her.

Sahaal turned back to his prize and cleared his mind, appreciating its majesty anew, a cone of scattered shapes, an altar to terror.

It was a harvest worthy of the Blood God himself: a mountain of gristle and gore, of gap-toothed grins and severed spines, befitting the brass throne of Khorne.

Not that Sahaal would ever offer it as such. No, these stolen skulls would be gifted to no deity, pledged to no metaphysical spirit.

There was, after all, no God of Fear.

'To the memory of the Night Haunter...' he whispered.

It had been a masterful plan, he knew, to dispatch the refugees on such a ghastly errand. At its most base level it had secured their loyalty: they became complicit to his crusade, bloody-handed allies whether they liked it or not. Few had relished the prospect of murder — fewer still had achieved it with precision and clean conscience — but now... now, with their morbid tithe paid and the faces of their victims haunting their nightmares, now their minds were his to mould.