She guessed it was a tough decision.

For her part, she had no intention of doing either. Homeless she may be, hunted by the Emperor's own Inquisition, but she at least had a purpose. She at least had straws to clutch. She had the information broker...

None of which was especially relevant to the fact that someone, nearby, had screamed. It was hardly an exceptional thing: the Cuspseal environs could hardly be equated with the anarchy of the underhive, but it was still a society far from Utopian. Muggings, murders, rapes, such were the lifeblood of the hive's darker quarters, and given the strange events of recent days — the beheadings that had thrown the streets into such fearful discord — a cry in the night was just another background sonata.

But the scream that had awoken her had not been alone. A chorus of voices had called out together — and continued in their distress. She hurried from her concealment, pulling her cloak tight against the cold, and gauged the sound's location.

That, perhaps, was the one remaining distinction between Mita Ashyn and any other Cuspseal transient: anyone else would have run from the sounds of terror.

She headed directly for them.

It was a gather-hall. Such low-rise huts — frequently domed, often decorated with holy tableaux (inevitably of such poor quality that saint X was indistinguishable from Ecclesiarch Y) and devotional graffiti — were a common sight throughout the hive: bulging chambers squeezed into opportunistic gaps like rubber igloos. In their gloomy little bellies, packed with row upon row of uncomfortable plasteen pews and staffed — in the more uptown districts — by a quivering maintenance servitor, the local populace flocked to digest their daily dose of Citizen Worship broadcasting. Such places were never empty and rarely quiet, disparate factory shifts staggered to allow a fraction of the locality to visit, each in turn. From these communal indoctria arose the sounds of wavering hymns, chanted chatechistic responses, cheers and exclamations at the fiery words of whatever dogmatist was picked out in the crackling haze of the viewspex screen.

And now, it would seem, screams.

Mita hurried inside, prepared for a fight, and stopped dead in her tracks. It was not the audience that snagged at her attention, rocking back as they were in their seats, some covering their eyes, others clutching at one another like infants seeking comfort, but rather the focus of their horrified gazes: the great viewspex screen, hanging on optic cables and bundles of datawire like a great luminous spider, wreathed in the incense of devotional thuribles suspended around it.

Picked out in its flickering light was a cardinal — the cardinal, she guessed, who fronted whichever rousing show was scheduled for this early hour — and he had been crucified.

Set against a dark background, the broadcast optics zoomed upon his meaty frame: stripped naked, beaten across face and chest, cut in a multitude of places by small, razor incisions. He had been lifted bodily upon a weird rig — a thing of draped umbilici and sinister outcrops, multifaceted lenses glaring from its trunk like the boles of a plastic tree — which Mita recognised as a photoseer: a camera servitor similar, no doubt, to that which had filmed this grisly tableau. Held against the tall machine, arms splayed, legs bound together, the priest had been stapled down. Up and down each arm, punched through the fleshy crutch betwixt fibia and tibia, through shoulders and collar-sections, through the fat of his thighs and the tense elastic of his heels, a dozen or more ugly, rusty pins had been driven.

At the foot of the unmoving photoseer, now bright with his blood, other bodies lay heaped: black robed and augmented, long-nailed hands and servo manipuli arms clutching emptily at awkward angles. Tech-priests, Mita guessed — devoted servants of the Emperor in his aspect as the Machine God. Every last one beheaded.

The cardinal was still alive, somehow. The slow suffocation of the spread eagle had given him a deathly grey pallor, and even were it not for the gag pushed hard between his jaws she doubted he would have been able to scream — but still he eyed the lens of the photoseer, throat wobbling to whatever pleas he was trying to vocalise.

Worse yet, sucking at her vision as if alive and hungry, writhing in some hellish geography of the eye, was the single word that had been cut into the Cardinal's chest, scrawled in incision and blood.

'Excommunicate!'

Mita felt her knees weaken. Little wonder the crowd's distress.

The image zoomed towards the hateful word, pinpricks of bloody sweat thrown into sharp detail on the viewscreen, and just as the audience felt sure the horrors were over, a voice began to speak.

It tore at Mita's soul like a hungry wraith. She knew it. She recognised it.

The Night Lord.

'Behold,' it whispered, not so much spoken as insinuated upon the air, like the breath of the wind given form, 'the price of false zeal.'

The audience gasped and gibbered amongst itself, trading prayers.

'A corrupt little cardinal, I found — fat with the wealth of his flock, soiled by gluttony and decadence. It was a mercy to spill his blood.'

Someone in the audience vomited. Nobody looked around, all eyes wide, brimming with tears of terror. The sheer force of their anxiety pushed at Mita's senses, threatening to overwhelm her.

'It was a mercy to hear his screams.'

The image jumped abruptly. Still pushed to its highest magnification, the photoseer swept its gaze to the side: a blur of nonsensical shapes, flitting one across the next. Formless dark and flickering light gave way to panoramas of blue and bronze, of red-tainted confusion and glossy tones, all of it chipped and hardened by harsh shadows. It found its target in a flash of nauseous focus and — with an instant's pause for swirling minds to decipher what they were seeing — the crowd erupted anew.

Devil-red slits, burning from a field of shadow, swept up and backwards in arrowhead slants, tickled by a wreath of misted breath.

Eyes.

'So shall perish all who have fallen from the light,' their owner hissed. 'The Emperor's gaze has fallen upon this world—' (shrieks and fainting amidst the audience) '—and he has found it wanting. Corruption is all he sees. A city of iniquity and injustice, ruled by the weak and the selfish.'

The image began to loosen, pulling away from those eyes, smouldering with malice. Whatever form held them remained indistinct, bathed in shadow, hinted only in flashes of blue and bronze, in hulking dimensions that fooled the eye and mauled the senses.

'You have seen the deaths amongst you. The sinners cut down. I took their heads to clean their corruption. They are the first among many. They will not be the last. Repent, sinners. Fear your Emperor's wrath. Fear his angel of vengeance.'

At its widest angle, the viewspex was a poor interface for the horror of its subject. This shape, this unseen thing, leaned from the lightless void, eyes afire, breath steaming. Spines and chains caught at flickering firelight, half-seen allusion to its size and shape. Neither were obvious: it was a presence first and a solid being second, an ethereal devil, a graceful silhouette. The audience clothed its faceless hulk with whatever nightmare-flesh their minds conjured, and all along they suspected that whatever terrors their imaginations supplied, the reality was sure to be far, far worse.

It hissed at the photoseer, and claws like bolts of lightning snapped into view from nowhere. Shrieks rang out in the cramped gather-hall.

'Judgement is coming,' the beast said. 'Do not resist it.'

And then the broadcast ended, and the fizzing snowstorm of white noise was all that lit the gloomy cavern.