It was like looking into a mirror.

The doubt... the power... the suspicion...

She surfaced from her horror at the sound of a firm voice, tentacles of psychic thought discovering an authoritative mind: a sergeant, she guessed, hollering orders from nearby.

'Binox!' he growled. 'Night vision! All men! Put on your Throne-damned binox, Vandire's piss!'

It was like a beacon. Like a tiny shaft of light in an endless wasteland. That one sliver of order punctured the panic-spell the Night Lord had cast, and all around it the shouting Preafects paused in their directionless flight and took stock, drew breath, fumbled for their goggles.

Mita made a mental node to find out the sergeant's name. If ever she escaped from this killing-room alive she'd be sure to commend the man to Orodai.

She fumbled around her until she found an armoured body, sticky with blood. Whether cut down by the Night Lord or blown apart by friendly fire, it didn't matter: the Preafect was dead. She scrabbled at its belt until her questing fingers found a binox strap, and pulled the blocky device over her eyes.

The world opened up in lurid shades of green and grey.

'Regroup, damn you!' the sergeant roared, and she swivelled to face him as if snatching for a lifeline, a solitary mote of warmth in a place of endless winter. He was nothing, she supposed — just one man amongst hundreds — but already she could see a circle of calmness spreading around him, vindictors pulling on night vision goggles, gazing around to see what damage they had done.

'Arm your weapons!' he cried, swept up on the flames of his own leadership. 'Shoot the Throne-damned shit! Shoot to ki—'

His head left his body.

Mita felt herself groan: a primal shock of horror and understanding, anticipating already what this would mean.

A pulse of blood jack-knifed over the tumbling corpse, a blur of something crossed overhead, blades outstretched. Something blue and black and bronze, which knew all too well who to target.

It screamed. It screamed just like a baby.

The panic returned harder than ever. Somewhere outside, in the faint light burning through the gate-room entrance, Orodai was shouting instructions from the back of his Salamander. It could do no good, now. Not from out there. Not so far from the boiling heart of this awful, inky place. The one voice of reason was gone, cut down with contemptuous ease by the unseen thing.

So easy to imagine horrors in the dark...

So easy to forget they faced a single foe. A single mortal foe...

And that, of course, was how the Night Lord worked. He dissolved his enemies in terror. He let them forget that he could bleed and die. He let them fill the darkness with their own demons, and when he shrieked on high it was like the voice of death itself, riding out to claim them for its own.

They had bottled a devil in a dead end. They had sprung their trap and thought themselves clever: and then the devil had showed them how wrong they were. It had made the dead end its own territory, it had dragged them into its own world — a world of darkness where it, and it alone, ruled — and now it would kill them one by one, at its leisure. Mita could no more pacify the frightened Preafects — lost to all reason — than she could push back the sea. They were all going to die.

She saw it, perfectly clear, in black and white.

The Night Lord would kill every last one.

And the only way to spare them all, to spare herself...

Think, Mita, think!

...was to give it what it wanted.

Her goggled eyes fell upon the colossal snowgates, twin blocks of tempered steel and iron — ten metres high — rising with the shallow camber of the room.

What does it want?

Escape.

The press of bodies was too great. She'd struggled as valiantly as she could, keeping her head low, pushing through jostling Preafects like a rat between the legs of elephants. At every accidental contact there were rebuttals and curses — 'It's the beast! Sweet Emperor, the beast is here!' — which inevitably drew the unkind attention of hacking power mauls, slash-stabbing blades and carelessly discharged shotguns. It was thanks only to the utter completeness of the dark that most attacks were carried wide, and to her precognitive senses that she had thus far been forewarned of any imminent weapons-fire.

But no longer. Abruptly the crush was too great, the herd of panicking men was packed together too tight for her to wriggle through, and each was too busy shouting and cowering to listen to the woman in their midst.

'Binox, you fools!' she'd been shouting, all along. 'Put your damned binox on!'

For all the good it would do, she might as well have addressed her advice to the Emperor himself. Useless!

Did... did I just think that?

Again, she wondered at the Night Lord's ability to sow discord. A death here, a death there, utter darkness and a medley of horrific shrieks: these, it would seem, were the ingredients of his domination. These simple things, able to turn hardened veterans of street law into cringing whelps. Able to leave her thoughtlessly questioning her own god... It was, she admitted awkwardly, impressively effective. None of which offered her much assistance in the task of reaching her goal. A shotgun stock blurred out of the soupy green image of her binox and she ducked it with a curse, amazed — besides anything else — that its owner could be so colossally stupid as to think such a flimsy attack could hurt the Night Lord, even if she had been it.

Another push, another repelling jab. This was getting her nowhere. She was so damned close!

A spray of warmth patterned her cheek, blood scattered from on high, and another shriek rang out nearby: the beast striking again, like an eagle dipping its talons below the surface of an unquiet lagoon, plucking out some thrashing silvery thing with a cry. Even with the goggles she couldn't see her foe clearly, only a blur, an indistinct something, trailing carnage as it leapt away, claws glittering.

The psychic glut hanging above the crowd reached agonising saturation behind her eyes: an intensity of confusion and dread that, impossible to block out, all but destroyed her. She felt her knees weaken and for an instant was sure she would fall. Staggering, she wondered how long she'd last beneath the booted feet of the stampeding Preafects.

And then the one remaining course of action arose in her mind. She could not reach the snowgate controls — she could barely stand upright, by the Throne! — and like a drowning soul clinging to a rope she grabbed at the idea and did not let go.

The animus motus. Telekinesis.

Very definitely not her forte.

Like all sanctioned psykers trained by the Scholastia Psykana, her psychic gifts could be shaped and hardened, manifesting themselves as physical forces — albeit clumsily — like opportunistic swings of club and fist. It was a gift borne in the heat of the moment, an impetuous force with which to strikeout like a hammer when danger threatened, or to turn aside a blow before it could fall. Using it as a precision instrument, calculatingly reaching out to change the world, was something at which she had never excelled.

It drained her energy like a bleeding wound.

A good psyker knows his limits, her tutors had smugly informed her. This is yours.

Well, warp take them! There was nothing else for it.

Agitated, shocked at her own sudden disrespect for her revered masters, she drew a deep breath and steadied herself, clenching her fists. She tried to be calm, to reach out from the cold centre of her soul, focusing all her will upon the snowgate lever... but of course that was the wrong tactic. She needed not calm, but rage: sudden and impulsive — and to plan for such a thing was to immediately negate it.