Sahaal settled beside the glowing debris and applied his claws to what few scraps of flesh remained, disappointed to find nothing left to kill.

The attack had lasted no more than five seconds.

'We move,' Sahaal announced, beckoning the awestruck Shadowkin from their cover, tearing at the gate with his claws.

The legend above the portal, smouldering now where the lascannon had singed it, mottled with the slurping remnants of the squad that had been intended to protect it from invasion, read:

CIVILIAN WORSHIP BROADCAST STATION

Sahaal smiled as his miniature army slipped within, the echoes of his master's advice warming him.

'...Strike you at his mind, and his courage shall fail, his faith shall leave him, his defeat is assured...'

Once within, the task he had taken upon himself took little time to complete.

It went without saying that the tech-priests made poor targets for his attentions. In his need for technical expertise they might have served him well, but he knew from bitter experience that such devoted — and inhuman — stalwarts were difficult to persuade. With time he could have broken their minds and forced them to do his bidding — there was little doubt of that — but time was the one resource he was without.

Instead he slew them all, gathered together where the priests made their daily broadcasts, and with his Shadowkin holding weapons in clammy palms against their backs, he forced the legion of acolytes, retainers and novitiates to watch. Stripped of their masters, unguarded by the surgical/mechanical paraphernalia that kept the Omnissiah's brood faithful and unafraid, these youths were quick to accede to his demands. And after decades of conducting their masters' orders, of undertaking every tedious duty, every minor maintenance, they were more than adept at complying.

From entry to completion, it took no longer than twenty minutes. The consoles were blessed — clumsily, falteringly — by the captive novices, the servitors chattered with relayed orders and data packages, the bunched cables that led from studio to chapel, to sanctification-nodes and then upwards to all parts of the hive, crackled to life.

Sahaal killed the unwilling partisans who had helped him — quickly and disinterestedly — and rushed to review the security. Twenty minutes was a worthy time: but more than enough for the vindictors to gather.

Perhaps the guards at the doorway, cut down like vermin in his first assault, had missed a scheduled vox report. Perhaps a routine patrol had chanced upon the devastation at the broadcast-station's gates. The truth hardly mattered — only the situation: leaning from a narrow window he could clearly see the armoured figures below, slipping from cover to cover, releasing thick red smoke to cover their advance. From elsewhere in the building Sahaal's Shadowkin traded opportunistic shots with the attackers, bright laserbolts flicking from windows into the smokepall, hellguns rattling without any great effect, spattering the facade with lead.

'Preysight,' he murmured, more interested than concerned. His enhanced gaze stripped away layers of ruby smog, confirming what he'd suspected. The rattle of gunfire was a distraction — and a crude one — for the phalanx of heavily armoured dervishi assembling in the cover of the shattered gates: an assault squad, preparing to enter. Clearly the ministorum had little patience for protracted gunbattles. They wanted their station back. Quickly.

Sahaal shrugged to himself, sight returning to normal. As he dragged himself onto the rocky ledge of the window he wondered vaguely whether the Shadowkin — spread throughout the building by now, straining beneath the weight of weapons and grenades — had secretly suspected they were never intended to escape alive. Certainly it would take a fool to think he could run the bottleneck gauntlet of the main gates as they now were. Had they known? Had they followed his lead (through loyalty or terror) anyway?

He told himself with a sigh that he didn't care one way or another, that such worms were fit only for sacrifice, and as he poised himself against the edge of the ledge he almost managed to convince himself. Another tiny twinge of guilt, of shared pain, pricked at him, and he struggled to shake it off.

There was no escape from this building, he knew, unless one happened to have the gift of flight.

He launched himself into the smoke, unseen by friend or foe, and as he bounded across the abyss towards the safety of the shadow beyond, he hoped that his tribesmen would sell their lives dearly, and commended them to a peaceful grave.

The sounds of gunfire echoed at his back for a long time.

It was as he returned to the safety of the underhive, pushing through cobweb-choked kilometres of inter-wall ducting slipping between steel bulkheads like a ghost within a recess, that it happened. He hopped from a tall plateau of coolant bulbs, macerated by rust and time, onto the scorched remains of a factorial chimney, long since stunted, when the noise arose from the gloom, an unctuous retort that sent shivers of recognition — and rage — up and down his spine.

'Het-het-het...' it went, rising on dry air thermals, scattering flocks of white bats. 'Het-het-het!'

It was Phavulti, the cognis mercator. He sat and leant against a dripping oilvent, exuding every impression of sedate relaxation, and waved gaily as Sahaal inched from the blackness of the tunnel ceiling. Whatever damage Sahaal had done to him before was long gone, replaced without thought for elegance by mechanical contrivances. It had become more difficult still to detect where, if at all, human flesh remained.

'See you, up there, het-het-het. Been waiting for you. Heard about the attack on the CW... Walls have ears, yes. Thought you'd probably come this way. What kept you?'

Sahaal backed into the shadows, teeth grating.

What to do? What to do?

He was, ultimately, a warrior. He understood conflict. He breathed guerrilla war and terrorism. In such simple pursuits there was little complexity, little uncertainty. It was a thing of victory and defeat: he that was strongest, he that was cleverest, he that was most terrible, would win.

He was also a lord. He was used to obedience. He had grown accustomed to swimming an ocean of terror, to being feared and worshipped by those around him. That was as it should be.

But Pahvulti's familiarity, his infuriating laughter, his intractable inability to feel fear: these were things that Sahaal could neither understand nor tackle.

As ever in such instants, instinct took over.

'Scum!' he roared, quitting the shadows like a bolt of darkness, claws rasping from their sheaths mid-flight. He thumped into the robed man like a meteor, shredding cable and sinew, and whooped aloud, gyrating on streamers of superheated air, twisting for another strike.

Pahvulti stood and stared at him — both his arms torn away — and shook his head.

'Dear, dear, dear,' he grinned. 'Deja vu. Het-het-het.'

There was little point in prolonging the attack, after that. Sahaal felt himself deflate: how could one terrorise a fool intent only upon ridicule? He set down in the gloom near to the smiling creature, restraining himself as best he could, and crossed his arms.

It didn't work. Patience was not a virtue that could contend with his rage.

He took an abrupt step forwards, headbutted the information broker with the deathmask-crest of his helm, dropped an armoured knee onto the fool's chest, and pressed his claws against what little flesh remained of the man's neck.

'Look at me, worm,' he hissed. 'Look at me as I kill you.'