'What is your name, fiend?' asked the machine/man in cold, dead, lifeless tones.
'To who?' asked the creature in the circle.
It had been nearly three days. Three days and they still did not know its name. Kevin sighed; an odd moment in the static of his false voice. Admittedly one day had been going through the heretic's notes on the subject of binding and another day had been acutely drawing the wretched things on the cargo hold floor with a permanent marker and some spray paint. The third day up to the last four hours or so had been getting Brian the astropath to use his psionic gifts to charge the circle up. Time in which Kevin had spent trying to muster up the courage to be in the same room as the wretched thing. It's a real bleep when you can't get pissed. Not that he needed courage to be in the same room as such an abomination, he needed the courage to potentially be in the same room as an Interrogator if the other inquisitors found out. The high ups in the Inquisition tended to get a bit tetchy about people consorting with deamonhosts. The argument 'We didn't make it, it was like that when we got there.' had probably been done to death in the past ten millennia. Much like the people who used it. Not being in the same room as this thing would probably be a good survival trait if this bleep ever hit the fan. Or cesspit hitting the windmill in this case.
Kevin licked his tong over his dry lips. Or at least attempted to. Nerve damage made it quite hard.
'What do you mean "To who"?'
It was all right and well trying to get information of the thing but it was quite hard to do such a thing when you couldn't get a straight answer from it for love nor money. It was going to end up like when he had asked it what it was doing in the employ of the heretics. First they had got on to an argument about the nature of heresy and then they had got on to a far more confusing, pointless and insane discussion about the nature of where he was and what the words "here" and "there" really meant.
'The answer that I give would be easier to understand, I feel, if you were to tell me who you are.'
Was it something he had said to upset the Inquisitor? He wondered. It would have to have been some big breach of duty to call for this job. Or was it just a random happenchance that it was he who was picked for this job. Perhaps he would have felt better if the abomination had looked more, well, deamonic. At the moment it just looked pathetic sitting in its little circle clad in nothing but a pair of shorts. It wasn't even scary pathetic like Nurgle Cultists. It was just sad pathetic. Whoever that body previously belonged to must have not had much to eat.
'What could my name possibly matter? And might I remind you who is on the inside of a magic circle? Please answer the question.' Sometimes it was good to have a vox unit where his voice should have been. No one could ever pick up anything from your vox.
'Oh, little half-breed Man of Iron, names mean so much. A sense of identity and a separation from the rest of the universe. To mark the point where chaos in the mind meats chaos in the universe. The difference between being apart and a part. Such things are so very important.'
Great. Kevin statically sighed. Now it was on the philosophic gibberish again. Was it insane he wondered? What was insane for a daemon? And how would you tell?
'Can you tell me what we should address you as then?' simpler then. If you hammer the question from enough different directions one of them might get through its twisted mind.
'I am known by lots of names in places that you could not imagine in your binary encoded dreams Man of Iron. I have seen worlds burn with cold fire and the things that live in that frozen inferno. I have seen the singing hearts of the universes and the true pure chaos atwix them. I have forged dreams for creatures you could not envisage in the wildest of yours. I have witnessed the birth of gods and the death of pantheons. On all the worlds I have ambulated my way across I have left not one footprint, not one broken blade of grass, not one displaced grain of sand. I have been named Truth Teller, Lie Slayer, Dream Forger, Nightmare Prince and Observer of Interesting Things. The eldar called me Scroeth.'
Well it was a start. 'And what does Scroeth mean?' asked Kevin not with much enthusiasm about the crap he would probably get as an answer.
'Its derived from Scoy Moeth.'
'And what would be a reasonably accurate translation for that?' asked Kevin choosing his words with extreme care. This was getting close to an actual answer.
'Nuisance.'
Could the heretics not have trawled up a better daemon than this?
The inquisitorial retinue woke to the sounds of an electric guitar being played at some ungodly volume. Somehow the music was coming through every speaker grill on the ship.
Kevin fell off of his bunk, the top one, and onto the thick carpet with a thud. Stood up and blearily staggered around the room looking for the light switch. One step, two steps, thud. Brian had left that bloody deamonic book in the middle of the floor again.
Who makes a book that big? Wondered the ex-servitor. Was it a big print version for the visually impaired or the terminally thick?
Another few steps and he collided with the doorframe. Raising his left hand he smacked the box on the wall to the left of the door and the lights came on.
The unholy sounds were still making it hard to think. And then it stopped as suddenly as if it had never been there at all. The only sound that there was now was the wheeze of Brian snoring his way through the night. Night? What time acutely was it? A quick look at the clock on the opposite wall showed it to be about five to seven. Too late to get back to sleep.
'Good morning.' Said Kevin, sitting at a table and trying to eat something out of a sealed packet with clumsy fingers, in his dead voice as Tech-Priest Govded blearily walked through the door of the kitchin/dining room.
Govded gave him a look that was pure and utter venom. His red skin so synonymous with the people of Haydes giving him a most fearsome look.
'Where is he!' he snarled turning on the ex-servitor.
'And who would that be?' Asked Kevin in a voice as calm as a rock and twice as lifeless.
'You bloody well know who I mean! The mop-head with the guitar! Where is he?' It was always like this when you interrupted Govdeds sleep. If he was sleeping. He was not a man you wanted to cross. Possessed of a body that was by no means muscle bound in the same way that the human knuckles are not muscle bound. He was a man who possessed a truly monumental level of willpower. Kevin had once seen him pick up a heretic twice his own weight and throw him down three flights of stairs. Psychic attacks bounced of him because they could find not one notch in his steel clad mind. Probably why the Priesthood of Mars had thrown him out. His priestly robes were now vivid blue to show his distain for his once brethren and his skin was marked and scared well beyond the rescue of cosmetic surgery. Upon his dismissal he had ripped out every one of his own cybernetic blessings and posted them to the nearest forge shrine. Some years afterwards he had been completely covered in burning promethium by a heretic. 'He managed to plug that infernal instrument into the entire intercom network. The Inquisitor seriously did not like being woken up in such a manner.'
'And how would you know that the Lady Annabel had awoken?' sometimes it was damn good to have a permanently deadpan expression.
'Are you making an accusation at me?' There was a narrowing of the eyes that Kevin knew full well meant that he should shut the hell up and leave this subject well alone. It was hazardous for people's health was this subject.
It was not long before everyone else started to walk through the door in various states of a bad mood. Except Brian. The next was Demophilus. A Space Marine in exile of the Novamarines for telling them exactly where they could shove the Codex Astartes with explicit gestures and arm movements. So they stuck him on his own penitence crusade untill he is willing to say sorry. Which is never going to happen. He was huge, like all marines, dark skinned a mass of unruley hair and completely black eyes. He also had a slightly lopsided head from when he got hit by a lorry crossing the road. Currently he was trying to fry a black pudding for breakfast. Much to everyones disgust.
The next to enter the room was Gilbert De Seldeveen. Dressed in disturbingly bright cloths of unnatural colours. He was by way of being the retinue Savant. And he was a damn good one. Nature had given him a brain that could sift through a deluge of information and extract the few precious grains of truth. He read constantly and could devour a full page of text in a matter of a few seconds and recall every word, spelling mistake and mark upon the parchment. He kept a Cogitator Endjin in his room that could plug into his only cybernetic implant: a data port behind his right ear. The Human brain can only hold so much information before new data eclipses it and so the device was just somewhere to store old memories. Possibly a side effect of his strange brain was his attraction to bright colours and constantly relaxed state of mind. Possibly the reason for his strange brain was for being a human navigator hybrid. Not that you could notice this to look upon him. He was tall and willowy, like his Navis father, but had no third eye. His dark brown hair was long and went all the way around and were it not for his long nose sticking out of the front f his hair it would be quite hard to see which way he was facing. He was possibly in the top 0.00001 of the highest intellects in the Imperium. But it was damn hard to tell by talking to him sometimes.
The last to enter the room was the Lady Annabel, Inquisitor of the Ordo Hereticus. She was not particualy impressive to look at. Nor was she beautiful by anyones measure. She could be called striking and that was about the best of it. Dark brown eyes, black hair, a chin that might have looked better on a man and a body that had seen too many fights. Especialy when you considered the fact that both her legs stoped just under the knee and where replaced with the coldness of iron. Even more so when you realized that nearly all the bones down the left side of her body were made of plasteel. Currently she was wearing what looked very much like catachan combat pants and a kreigan flack vest. What she was most notably wearing was an expression that could kill at thirty paces.
'Good morning.' Said Kevin. His mother had always taught him to be polite and he was not going to stop now after nearly a hundred years. Besides, it was the thing you said at morning. Even if you were in spae and morning was non-existant for all practical pourpouses.
'Shut up. Need Coffe.' Was the only bleary reply he got.
Kevin sighed. In that verbal static he was thinking "maybe I was better of with the daemonhost."
It was possible to detect his arrival by the way everyone's knuckles whitened as they all tightened their grips upon their mugs of coffee, or the frying pan in the case of Demophilus. His proximety could be decerned by the way in which everyone clenched their jaws and a slight narrowing of the eyes of Govded. Of course you could see the crockery vibrate on the table and hear a sound that was hovering some distance over the pain threshold.
Suddenly the door directly behind the tech-priest slamed opened and a man lept into the room accopmanied by a deafening din, right hand outstretched holding the neck of the a stringed instrment his left plucking unholy sounds from the instrament. Right up to the point where Govded spun round and planted his fist upon the intruders face. Everyone felt much better.
'Where were you before you were in the employ of the heretics, as deemed by our legal system, on the planet that is named, by imperial catographers, as Tancredi?' asked Kevin choosing his words with extreme care. The deamon was contained in the circle. This was a good thing. This was a really good thing. Unfortunately that meant that if you stuck your hand in to give it a zap from the tazzer you would probably get the hand back with fewer fingers than you were used to. But the deamon could not lie. Reading through the notes of the heretics they had discovered it was forever cursed to tell the truth. Under certain circumstances it could refuse to answer, but it could not acutely lie to a carefully worded direct question.
'I have not been in the employ of any heretics on the world of Tancredi.' Answered the abomination in a flat voice and suppressed mirth glittering in its eyes.
'Yes you were! Yes you bloody well were! You were in their cult headquarters killing PDF soldiers during the raid…. Hang on! That was a lie! That was a great big porky! You can't tell those! It says so here in this damned book under the circle where someone put a cup of tea on it.' Replied Kevin hastily leafing through the books many pages for something he had missed.
'Please do not accuse me of such a sin as a lie. It's nearly as bad as name-calling. The heretics kept on calling me names and I escaped and killed lots of them. Then when I was running for the door all these people with guns started shooting me for no reason and then someone hit me with a club and now I am here. Can I ask a question?'
'You may ask.' Said the man/machine in his cold voice.
'Why can I not see through my hands?'
This was a new line of thought. Looking up from the notebook he was furiously scribbling in the not-a-servitor could only stare blankly and say 'What?'
'Why can I not see through my hands? It occurs to me that atoms are very small and the spaces between them are comparatively huge even in a solid object and light travels in a straight line so it should go straight through stuff. So why can I not see through my own hands?'
'Because…. You know, I have no idea.'