On Tsagualsa, from the shifting flesh of the Screaming Gallery, the Night Haunter called forth his captains and rose to address them...

The Heresy was ended. The other Traitors had fled. Chaos owned them, now.

Not so the Night Lords. Unseducable, their hate. Incorruptible, their focus. In their hearts Chaos could find little fuel to ignite its insidious fires.

Their hearts burned already, with hate and injury, with the need for vengeance.

Konrad Curze, the Night Haunter, gathered his captains as a father gathers his sons, and he filled them with pride and joy in the Bitter Crusade they would undertake in his name. They chanted his name and praised his wisdom, and he accepted their devotion with a melancholy smile.

And then he told them that he was soon to die, and everything crumbled to dust.

Sahaal was there. He saw it all.

And as the captains raged and boiled, as outrage bred denial, he watched his lord with a sad eye and knew it was true.

The Night Haunter would die — not because he would be powerless to overcome his attacker, not because he would be slain like some common foe—

—but because in death he would find vindication, of sorts. And, perhaps, peace.

The Night Haunter silenced his captains with a word, and told them that he would select an heir. He told them that he would take from among them a son to lead in his stead.

Sahaal had felt, at that instant, the first stirrings of an unquenchable ambition. He gazed from face to face of his brother captains, and wondered if they shared his hunger. If they wanted what he wanted.

Not power.

Not blood.

Revenge.

Most avoided his stare. Most remained flushed with sadness and rage at the news of their master's death. Most crumbled from his regard — from his concerns — like salt before a torrent of blood.

Only one met Sahaal's eye. Only one gloated with flushed cheeks and teeth brandished, pale lips ringed with tribal scars, bright eyes unrepentant for the aspirations worn within them: a brazen lust for the offered position that he did nothing to conceal.

Krieg Acerbus. The giant. The Headtaker. The Axemaster.

The Brute.

Konrad Curze closed black-glazed eyes and opened his mouth, and the name on his lips was Zso Sahaal.

Something rumbled at the edge of Sahaal's perceptions, dredging his mind from its reminiscence and pulling him back into the light. He quit the trance as if casting off a cloak, his master's voice echoing in his ears, and was troubled to discover the meditation had done little to cure his nascent rage. The vision of Acer-bus, in particular, had merely stoked the fires higher.

There had been little love lost between Battle-brothers Zso and Krieg.

The elevator was on the verge of arrival. The dial on the console read TIER: 3, and Sahaal calculated quickly that something in the region of two and a half hours had elapsed since his meditation — and the carriage's descent — had begun. As the capsule neared the end of its journey — its diagonal progress hampered by the changing gradient of the hive's walls — the shaft into which it was delivered began to ramble, protesting at the vertical stresses placed upon it.

One by one Sahaal's accompanying warriors slipped from their places at the gateroom entrance, sensing the arrival of their target. They gathered at the elevator's doors, racking weapons with a professional disinterest that did nothing to hide their curiosity, training loaded muzzles upon the unadorned surface of the heavy portal.

'Stay to the side,' Sahaal commanded, unsheathing his claws with a rasp. 'And kill nothing. I want prisoners.'

The warriors edged aside, clearing the space before the elevator. If the sight that greeted whoever was within was a posse of scowling oudaws and deephive gangers with more guns than sense, Sahaal was confident their first act upon opening the doors would be to immediately close them again.

He turned to face Pahvulti — still seated in the corner, watching with eyes and optics narrowed — and crooked a finger to beckon him over. His uncertain expression filled Sahaal's heart with infantile joy.

He knows I don't need him any more, he thought. He knows he's expendable.

'You stand in front of the doors,' he said, looming over the broker. 'You greet them. You draw them out. You draw them out so we can take them. Understand?'

Pahvulti nodded, mute. There was little else he could do.

Sahaal slipped into the darkness beside the elevator doors where his warriors lurked, and slowed his breathing, fighting the anxiety.

So close... so close.

Out of his view, around the corner of the shaft's terminus, the doors opened. Sahaal watched Pahvulti's face assiduously, trying to ascertain what manner of person — or people — was within by gauging his responses. It did him little good: Pahvulti's face was a mass of twitches and arcane mechanical movements, none of them obviously connected to his emotions.

A cautious voice ebbed from within the elevator.

'You aren't Slake...' it said. 'Who are you? Where did you get the codes?'

Something cold and metal racked out of sight. Sahaal could hear the heartbeat of his warriors accelerating. Whoever was within the elevator had a weapon.

'Friend of Slake's,' Pahvulti said, nodding and scraping. 'Het-het-het, yes, yes... Friend.'

'You've got no arms.'

'Yes, het-het-het. No arms, no guns. No need to be alarmed.'

'What do want, raggedy man? Answer me!'

'Slake, yes? Sent me to discuss more... acquisitions.'

'Don't be ridiculous. We've got what we wanted. The three-headed freak has nothing else to offer us. You hear me?'

Footsteps clattered against the floor. Whoever occupied the lift — still beyond Sahaal's vision — was marching forwards to confront Pahvulti up close.

Several things happened at once.

At the edge of Sahaal's sight, creeping past the corner of the elevator, he caught his first glimpse of the man he had come to seize. It was an official of some sort: colourfully robed, holding a small pistol in his manicured grip. A majordomo, Sahaal guessed: a personal servant of whichever noble house owned the elevator. A slave of whichever bastard had purchased the Corona Nox.

Sahaal leaped from his concealment with a shriek to freeze the fires of hell: a banshee-wail that stunned the wizened figure as if electrified. Panicking, the fool's finger tightened on the trigger of his pistol, and at the heart of the thunder-peal that followed Pahvulti's head burst like a bubble, metallic waste and brain-flesh detonating outwards. Sahaal eclipsed the death from his mind and reached out talons to snatch the majordomo up, to lift him on plumes of air away from this ugly little chamber—

The light spilling in from the doorway — the entrance his warriors had left unattended in their rush to confront the elevator — was blotted out, and the thud of marching feet filled the world.

The Preafects had arrived. A lot of Preafects.

They were led by the witch.

The first shotgun salvo decimated Sahaal's warriors lurking to the left of the elevator. Flesh left bone like jelly, pulverised beyond recognition. Thick slabs of paste scrawled themselves across rusted walls: powdered bone and strangled cries lost to the air. Hands clutched at nothing and were shredded, faces dissolved beneath an expanding cloud of lead shot, screams died in lacerated throats and warding arms, held across faces in primal protection, detonated like ripe fruit.