The Liberator's Day Off Chapter 16
The one good thing about being detailed to liaise with the techpriest contingent was that it got me out of having to help plan and officiate a wedding.
My local legend as Fossick had waned steadily under the barrage of Worden's propaganda machine. He didn't so much destroy it as bury it below a thousand other tales of heroism from a thousand other people, himself and Lord Castellan Creed not least. I was, for once in my unlucky life, fading steadily into a nicely anonymous obscurity of the sort I had fantasized about since the Schola Progenium had plucked me from underhive obscurity and alloted me a place of power and peril among the Imperium's best and brightest. I was very nearly a non-entity, and I found I rather liked it, and so I was willing to go to great lengths to protect that.
I really ought to have known better.
If I had known that my attempts to dodge being front and center at Governor Worden's upcoming nuptials would have brought me to the attention of one of the few tech-priests older than the Horus Heresy, I would have taken the risk that the Lord Castellan of Cadia would suddenly manage to recognize me from our previous encounters or from a pict of 'top ten thousand enemies of Mankind' and shoot me out of hand, rather than take up this liaison job.
Creed's retinue had made friends by busying themselves daemon-hunting alongside the Lentonians. They were a highly motivated, highly trained cadre of Cadians who had taken to the deep, demon-infested tunnels of Lentonia like a sump rat to a sewer outflow and were happily palling around with every mutant and purple-eyed warp-twisted ganger who was fighting Nurgle's warp-spawn in the sewers. I had no desire to be caught in any of the various crossfires or, worse, burgeoning romances that was creating, and let them get to it while calling encouraging platitudes from a distance.
I was aided in this by Commissar Forres, who had taken to hanging on to my every word, and pitching herself straight into all the hairiest battles. She was doing it out of a misplaced sense of guilt for, as near as I could tell, existing. It was a sentiment that I could account for since I saw it so danged much, but that I could never truly comprehend since I'd never felt it myself.
Still, I knew the cure. I cheerfully delegated all of the worst jobs to her to help her pay for her imagined sins, and the sheer viciousness of the Nuquasam First and Only had kept the casualties of that regiment oddly low. That, and the Panacea that had cured them of genestealer-taint had somehow decided that the genestealer talent for telepathy was a healthy addition to an otherwise untainted human, and their coordination as a group had reached and unbelievable standard of squad-level efficiency. I'd had AutoOctavius go over the addition with a fine-toothed mechadendrite just to ensure that this wasn't some new Tyranid trickery, but he'd discovered that the addition was a straight copy, if on a biological level, of the techniques techpriests use to access their shared 'noosphere network,' so after giving Forres a few lessons in how not to leak the thought that she and everyone like her ought to be executed for treason to troopers capable of reading her newly-expanded mind, I declared the problem solved and let them get on with taking the fight to the enemy. As I told
Forres, some thoughts were irrelevant and unworthy of attention, and you simply let them pass you by like a scout-trooper in the middle of enemy territory would let an enemy patrol pass unmolested in favor of getting on with the present mission. It was a bit disturbing how zealously she followed my every decree, so I took care to give her very few actual orders and to compel her to spent time thinking through various choices. It has the benefit of, very slightly, slowing her down, and she was beginning to acquire a little bit of the flexibility I thought would be essential to any commissar lasting more than five minutes in their job.
Still, I resolved to keep an eye on her, and make sure she didn't slide into Khornate worship. I didn't particularly fancy what might happen without the moderating influence of someone like Mahlone around to reduce her level of zealotry.
Emperor help me, I'd been in the Imperium too long. I'd started thinking of the chief Khornate in the Cainite Protectorate as 'moderate.' And the hell of it was, 'comparatively speaking, he genuinely *was.*
Governor Worden and Lord Castellan Creed were getting along tolerably well in private and legendarily well in public. Romance wasn't in the cards, as I well knew, Creed having brought her own lover along for the ride and Worden far more likely to fall for said lover than for any of Creed's bellicose charms. But they got on well enough by dynastic standards. He was looking for protection from the excesses of the wider Imperium, while she was looking for a place where Cadians could continue to be Cadian, and unfortunately, the deep sump below Viasalix was providing an opportunity for the former residents of that doomed world.
What sealed their courtship was none other than a boatload of tech-priests arriving and declaring that the strangely deep constructions under Viasalix were a pylon-field of the sort that, on lost Cadia, had once been used to hold off the depredations of the eye of Terror, and could they pretty please with the Emperor on top start poking around this one?
Given that the tech-priests in question had shown up in the biggest frakking ship I had ever seen, it wasn't like I was in a position to say 'no thank you.' Creed, though surprised, still vouched for the ship itself and the priests aboard it, declaring it to be the Arch-Mechanicus Zar-Quasitor and that the tech-priests aboard had served with distinction in the Battle for Cadia. I took some comfort that such a redoubtable warrior as Ursula Creed appeared unconcerned that Lentonia was about to be invaded by powerful Martians, which just goes to show how much I knew.
Worden, up to his eyebrows in Cadians, editing the Bugle, and myth-making, had thrown me at the problem instead. I was, once again, trailing Mechwright Paverick, Jurgen, and Specialist Rolan as my more-or-less permanent entourage. Sigan was elsewhere stirring up trouble, and since experiencing a couple of the things he considered 'trouble' I was heartily pleased to have him out of sight and out of my remit. Fortunately, he was the sort who only turned in final reports without bothering to give status updates, so I was able to have heart failure about his close calls after the fact instead of stressing over what he'd get up to next.
Still, I should have followed him to battle whatever warp-tainted technology he was poking around in. Instead, I completely and uncharacteristically failed to heed Paverick's whisper of 'Omnissiah preserve my circuits, that's Belisarius Cawl' as my cue to run screaming and throw myself on whatever mercy the Cadians and Inquisitor Sigan had for fraudulent commissars.
"Steady on," I said to the Mechwright. "We're the Kastrean 73rd, and I'll be damned if we need to bend our neck to anyone."
"Belisarius Cawl!" Paverick hissed. "Archmagos Dominus! Prime Conduit of the Omnissiah! They say the only reason he isn't the Fabricator General of Mars is because he says the job is too boring!"
I'd fielded similar complaints from Borg who had discovered, as Tessilon Kappa had, that once one gets to a certain level of power then hands-on work becomes a fairly remote fever dream. It made perfect sense to me that a tech-priest would actively dodge such a promotion to high command in favor of rooting around for xenotech in remote corners of the galaxy.
I stood straight as I could and watched the techpriest ambulate towards us, followed by several techpriests who were hardly less lavishly augmented. He didn't look all that odd for a tech-priest, at least…not until I realized he was a lot further away that I had thought. As he drew closer I found my head unexpectedly tilting up…and up…and up… I'm taller than most sentients I meet, so finding one that towers over me to such an extent that he could look a Primarch in the eye makes my palms itch, and finding one that towers over me while grinning in good humor made my bowels clench.
I stared into a wizened old face sprouting from a body that, now I could appreciate how long it trailed behind the techpriest's frontal plane, wouldn't be out of place as one of the more slithery beings inhabiting in a Tyranid bioship. The voice that emerged from this astonishing being was, by far, the most human I had ever heard from any techpriest as heavily augmented as this one. "Commissar Ciaphas Fossick. So nice to see you in much better health than when last we met."
I refrained from any telltale outbursts like stiffening, saying 'what', or any other act of surprise, confining myself to a mere 'indeed."
"In fact," the techpriest, with a surprisingly garrulous, gossipy tone, "I rather thought you would have sprouted horns by now, or perhaps flown off into the warp after what you did on Gaberdeen 5. But I see you've somehow managed to do away with the greater part of of your chaos-tainted corruption! Fascinating! It's so rare that I'm wrong, I find it delightful to enjoy such a novel experience!"
At this point my panicked thoughts of meeting someone who 'knows me' settled down into sheer offense- a state of mind that seemed to be a rather permanent hazard, I would discover, for anyone regularly working with Archmagos Dominus Cawl.
"So happy to have provided amusement." I growled. "Why are you here?"
"Because I called him!" My blood ran cold as Trazyn the Infinite dragged himself out of a sudden hole in reality and posed like a magician in a cheap variety show.
"Trazyn!" Cawl said, in high dudgeon, "I really am not here for you today. You are quite spoiling quite a nice opportunity to expostulate on my own cleverness to a captive audience!" He sneered. "And you most certainly did not call me. Creed did."
"I most certainly *did* call you, Cawl," Trazyn growled, and the palms of my hands tingled to hard I realized they were actually starting to go numb as my panicked heartbeat withdrew blood from unecessary extremities and to protect the vital organs of my core. I forced calm and feeling back into my limbs, and drew a preparatory breath. "With an Imperial psychic choir, no less. I lost half of a good exhibit placing that call and even more getting here on time."
Cawl, whose attention had mostly been on me, suddenly and abruptly shifted his human face and half his mechadendrites to the Necron.
"You're 65 million years old, don't you have a little patience?" Cawl snapped. "What is so important that you had to interrupt the most delightful tree of conversational options, run amok among all my response probabilities, and, most importantly, spoil a first impression?"
"What, with Commissar Fossick? He's mine. I saw him first, you can't have him. Anyway, that's irrelevant to the current crisis, so for once, focus on the matter at hand!"
I took a brief break from my unmitigated panic to marvel at the sheer hypocrisy of Trazyn telling someone to focus.
"The universe is not your personal game of finders keepers!" Cawl barked, rising as if baited. "At the very least, it's a two-player game."
"Fine," Trazyn shook his head like a punch-drunk fighter. "I'll wager one flying toaster against your third-best Omnissiah axe for this one."
"You forget I was there when the toaster-lover rumor was started, Trazyn, because I started it! Provide a more optimal article, preferably something real, or move your shiny metal arse out of my conversation."
"Fine, fine. Trade this: I'll help you reset this pylon field."
"Done." Said Cawl instantly. Then raised his eyebrows. "What value does Commissar Fossick have to you, that you would up the price so dramatically that quickly? Usually you make that useless joke about giving the Emperor a text-to-speech device or offer me at least three things you stole from me in the first place.'
"Fossick?" Trazyn said, a look of confused innocence molding itself across his face. "Fossick really is nothing to me, dear friend, but the look on your face was priceless when you thought I'd trade a reprise of the Battle of Cadia for *him.* I assure you, I have something far more important to protect- my own necrodermis. I did mention this is a crisis."
"You…" Cawl drawled slowly, bantering tone evaporating like snow in hellfire. "You rather look like you got your polished metallic keister kicked up one side and down the other. By what?"
"By nothing." Trazyn vaguely waved a hand in a dismissing gesture.
"You *are* in trouble." Cawl speculated. "You're usually far better at making your complete truths sound like lies. Is this 'nothing' going to follow you here and finish the job?"
"No." Trazyn said, flatly. "Not if we activate those pylons in time." He shook his head. "And unfortunately, you were right. Venturing into the Cicatrix Maledictum was a terrible idea."
"I'm always right, and the times I'm wrong are statistically insignificant. And going back inside a storming well of damned souls is always a bad idea. What, exactly, followed you out?"
I had been standing there in my most dignified pose, seemingly the very essence of a commissar. In truth, my instincts had frozen me in place, though I honestly would have been better served by bolting. My witnesses, to wit, Jurgen, Rolan, and Paverick, kept me glued in place and playing my role as hero. But those same instincts caught the drift of the conversation. I didn't know exactly what Trazyn was up to, but whatever it was, he thought 'pylons', whatever those were, would fix it.
And I knew from our last war together on Lentonia that he was also horrifically easy to distract.
So I lept into the fray like the good little commissar I was and I barked, "walk AND talk, gentlemen. If you have a fix for all hell breaking lose, frakking well get to work!"
"Yes, yes, once again you are annoyingly correct." Trazyn's glowing eyes narrowed, and I realized Cawl was entirely right. Trazyn *had* gotten his ass kicked. The Necron was dented in several places, and actually *limping.* He turned with uncharacteristic haste, breaking into a trot towards one area of the underhive I had never wanted to visit at all. Cawl scuttled after like a centipede, his comet-tail of subordinates behind him. That's when I noticed something else odd.
Trazyn seemed, for once, to be quite without an entourage.
I had a split second to appreciate the absurdity of an incredibly high-ranking member of the Mechanicus and one of the more absurdly powerful Xenos in the galexy actually following my orders without complaining once, and my bowls clenched even more tightly. Beings that arrogant didn't move with this level of haste unless things were truly dire. A movement in the corner of my eye alerted me to my next problem. "No, Mr. Tannaman." I said, hold of an arm out to bar Jurgen as he swung the melta around to line up a shot on the Necron. "Not today."
Jurgen growled a curse and desisted.
Then I hustled to catch up with Trazyn.
"You're obviously here because of a major threat." I panted. Neither the Necron or the archmagos were ambulating particularly slowly. "What is it? And why would 'pylons' fix it?"
"It's…quite literally nothing." The Necron waved a hand even more vaguely. "There's…something unbalanced in the Immaterium right now. In any ecosystem, when a giant falls, dozens, if not hundreds, bolt toward the now-empty space, to try and fill it. Like a vast tree has fallen, opening up space for a dozen more to spring up in its place. Or better, the apex predator has fallen, and now it's time for all the smaller ones to take their shot. The Pestilence God has disappeared, and there's a scramble to see what takes its place."
I shivered. "And what does this have to with Lentonia?"
"It's on a major warp route." Trazyn explained. "Many are trying to get to the Grandfather's realm via the Cicatrix. Think of it as…as a major viaduct of a hive. Everyone knows about it, and so the highway is jammed with…beings that don't take kindly to being stuck in traffic."
"But one of them thinks he has found a shortcut- the Lentonian warp current. Several others think he's right, and are moving to contest him. He thinks the warp route by Lentonia is a sufficiently quick shortcut that he can make a claim on the Grandfather's old territory first. If enough of the beings chasing him and rushing towards Nurgle's abandoned territory try to cram themselves down the route he's using at once, while fighting…the route will rip."
"Rip?" I asked. "How badly?"
"You know how the Galaxy is currently ripped in half?" Trazyn asked. "how would you feel if it were in quarters instead?"
"Pylons, you say."
"Pylons." Trazyn agreed.
"What else do you need to get this job done?" I pressed.
"An assistant," the Necron waved his hands at Cawl, who snickered at the very idea. "Not being shot on sight would also be good."
"Why aren't you already disguised?" I demanded. "I know you make hard-light sculptures. You could do yourself up as a techpriest."
Cawl cackled. "Oh, yes, why not?" His mechadendrites clacked ominously.
"Because it would be pointless against you Martians." Trazyn said. I looked at him in even more worry, noticing quite a few sounds coming from his joints I'd never seen before.
Oh, I thought. That's what a Necron looks like when they're faking being well.
"But there's only two Martians here." Cawl pointed out. "The rest of the fine Imperial specimens on this world can hardly tell a techpriest from a servitor in a bedsheet, and as for these…" he waved a dismissive claw at his trailing techpriests. "These are a sophisticated variety of servitor, but they do not interfere with beings like you. Your commissar is right: you do need a disguise, and if you're too beat up to project a hard light sculpture, one of those…what did you call it when we last fought? Oh yes one of my 'rusty bedsheets' will do." A mechadendrite snaked out from under the folds of Cawl's cloak, and Trazyn caught the red robe Cawl tossed at him. "There. Your cloak of invisibility. Put it on, my occasional friend and dearest enemy, and we'll get to work."
The Necron donned the cloak in a swirl of fabric, and hastened faster.
I trotted after them, into a part of Viaselix's underground complex that I haven't visited yet. A part I had marked as deadly dangerous. A part I wanted to enter only slighly more that i wanted to re-experience what it was like to lose most of my leg to a drukhari cheesegrater.
And frak me if I wasn't right.
Gurug'ath, a once-beloved son of grandfather Nurgle, now the frontrunner in the vast half-race, half-war convulsing the Immaterium, bellowed his decay-ridden laughter as he beheld the burning gardens and the shrieking demons. Nurgle had betrayed them all. The unchanging master of all had changed, and that was a Tzeentchian-style betrayal none of his children could countenance. Without the blessing of Nurgle to make the unending despair of entropy bearable, his garden had rotted with indecent speed, his defenses slumping away, his creatures running amok.
The Great Unclean One had endured change before, at the unfriendly hands of one of Slaanesh's favored daemons. He had cause to be grateful for that experience now, as solely among the Grandfather's senior chosen, he could move quickly enough to claim the blasphemous emptiness at the center of Nurgle's realm for his own.
Free of Nurgle's influence, Gurug'ath no longer had to abide by Nurgle's aesthetic whims. He took on a far more pleasing shape.
Entropy would be his to rule, now, to define as he pleased. Choice was a terror, free will was a horror, and now Gurug'ath was, in his most benevolently grand generosity, willing to spare every creature that terror by taking on the great burden of making all choices himself.
He transformed into a great, grinding wheel, a stone as big as the universe, fit to grind everything away into dust. He began to roll forward, crushing lesser demons beneath the weight of his inevitability.
He rumbled in the joy of untrammeled power as the shrieks of his former family of other Great Unclean Ones, crushed by his overwhelming, never-ending, endless love vibrated delightfully through the resonant rock of his chosen metaphor.
And then he felt the first spike.
"Pylon one, activated." Belisarius Cawl called out amidst the echoing clash of hand-to-hand combat.
I cursed, ducked, and fired a fullisade of laspistol shots at the creeping warpspawn. They vanished in a shower of ectoplasmic viscera and purple energy pulses, and I reflected that my Commissar Fossick persona had one thing going for it, and it was that nobody expected me to haul around that grotesquely overdecorated bolt pistol. I would have been out of ammunition in the first five minutes in this pitched battle if I was forced to use that cumbersome thing down here.
Cawl was an impressive sight, his front half buried in a piece of sickly glowing, obviously Necron technology. His back half wielded an Omnissiah axe with a speed and precision that would have made my old fencing tutor, Myamoto De Bergerac, swear in admiration while staying far clear of his unexpectedly long reach.
Still, we were barely holding our own until I heard a venerable, commanding voice ringing like a bell through the voxbead in my ear. "Cadia stands!"
And another. "Lentonia Lives!"
"Sealed Forever!"
Generals, as a rule, don't generally fight on the front lines. Neither do editors. Or rather, they do fight- with the armies they bring to bear.
Commanded by Lord Castellan Creed and Governor Worden, the full might of the Cadian-Lentonian betrothal stormed into the war.
It was a small thing, really. To one as large as Gurug'gath, hardly a hindrance. But he felt it, and it was unlike anything he had ever experienced before. A chip in his rock face. A bump in his road.
Defiance. Opposition.
It had to be crushed.
He had been enjoying his slow roll toward inevitable victory, but now, he hurried. Throwing the mighty weight of his purpose into the grinding metaphor, he began to roll…faster.
"Pylon 2 active!" Trazyn called across the battlefield.
The great rolling wheel felt it again.
Deep in the stasis vaults of Solemnance, a God was held prisoner.
He was awake, of course. No pitiful stasis field could keep his consciousness from perceiving his domain. Then again, it wasn't designed to. The Necrons who specialized in shackling gods and using them as menial tools didn't much care for the comfort of their servitorized gods. Their sheer hatred of their former rulers meant that they hadn't designed their restraints to be comfortable or merciful. Consciousness was meant to be a torture, but torturing a god of inactivity and sloth with conscious immobility was a singularly fruitless endeavor.
Nurgle was rather enjoying himself. He was the God of entropy, after all, and it was well within his aspect to sit around on his arse doing nothing for all eternity if he so chose.
"You know," he said to no one in particular, "my children think it is so simple to run a kingdom of metaphor." His attention sharpened as he witnessed the great careening stone that was Gurug'ath hit another spike. A vast stone chip flew from the wheel.
"But you have to be careful which metaphor." Nurgle's frozen body could not grin, but really, it was the thought that counted. He would have grinned, showing every rotten tooth in his mouth, if he could have, as a forest of anti-warp spikes sprouted in front of the now wobbling millstone. More chips flew and cracks began to propagate across its surface. "If you choose a metaphor that is too simple…"
A larger spike stabbed through from the immaterium, aimed directly at one of the cracks. The massive wheel halted, impaled on the black stone pylon.
"...the metaphor simply falls apart. There is a reason I choose disease." Nurgle's mused. "So persistent. So resilient. So many different ways to remain. So very nearly impossible to eradicate. Stone is so…fragile."
The great wheel broke apart in a grinding crack, its shrieking pieces falling across the vast warp corridor. Unmoving. Unable to move. Blocking the path. Daemons piled into it, some wailing at being crushed. Others screaming at being thwarted.
Nurgle shook his mental head at the foolishness of his beloved children. Gurug'ath would not be moving for quite some time- not without help, at least. And the rubble of his chosen metaphor dammed that direct route to the Garden.
And so, the easy path to his Garden would be blocked by that vast bulk for some time to come. Perhaps long enough for Nurgle's patient mechanisms to eat their way through the Necron stasis field and return him to the splendor of his garden before his blessed children made a complete hash of it.
Or maybe that Necron would make good on his promise to immobilize the so-called Liberator next to Nurgle for all eternity, and he could spend his time savoring the despair of that mortal in eternal victory. That could be all right, too.
Nurgle loved all his children, he really did. It just took a few of the denser ones a long time to learn that things were really were best under his grandfatherly care. But if there was one thing Nurgle had a universe of, it was time.
An eternity of it.
"I am not used to being wrong." Belesarius Cawl said. "But I would rather hope to be wrong this time. Trazyn, are you dying?"
"I'm not alive." Trazyn said with what I recognized immediately as a credible attempt at deflection.
"All machine spirits are animate." Cawl said. "And you've taught me far, far more than you intended to about Necron technologies, so I know what you are. Are you dying? Returning to the Machine God? Switching off? Kicking the bucket?"
Trazyn looked…old.
"Maybe." He said. "But that's not your biggest concern. You remember the procedure from Cadia, yes? When you nearly closed the Eye of Terror?"
"Yes?"
"We're going to try that again. On three-"
Trazyn froze, then disappeared in a flash of light. "No," said Cawl. "I will try that again. You will get some rest before you deprive me of access to 63 million years of Omnisiah-blessed knowledge."
Two of his hand were holding something very familiar. It was the same sort of device Trazyn had used to kidnap me. A tesserect-labrynth, he'd called it.
A servoskull swivelled to face me. "And you as well." It said, and the labyrinth opened once more, a flowering of infinity. My mouth opened to scream a denial as it swallowed me whole.
Jurgen saw it all happen, but he was far too far away to stop it. He opened his mouth to bellow in rage, but the the the pylon next to Cawl *pulsed* and then, abruptly, he found himself in the melta.
His Blank flesh staggered and swayed, as Cawl did *something* and a vast flow of…psychic stillness swirled through the pylon field like a felid undecided whether to play or hunt. Jurgen felt it wrap around his soul- with a shock, he realized for the first time in months he could actually FEEL his SOUL- and felt the arrogant commands the prime conduit of the Omnissiah was snapping at that force.
Jurgen had dealt with children, before. Dozens, if not hundreds, in Slawkenberg, proudly called him 'Uncle.' It was a bad idea to order them around unless you were completely certain they would follow those orders.
He straightened with an effort, his soul sending out the soothing psychic reassurance he'd used so many times before.
He felt…whatever that force it was…respond to that reassurance. It growled at Cawl, who kept dictating and didn't notice.
Jurgen shared the growl. The arrogant magos was announcing his plan to one and all. To use the pylons to stabilize the Lentonian war route. And to send a spear into the Eye of Terror…an anti-warp glue so powerful it would seal the rift shut.
"It's not that I'm against at this plan." The concepts forming in Jurgen's mind were words, almost, if shaped wrong to be really human, and he realized they were coming from outside him. "But I am against being treated like a slave by a master."
The force wobbled in irritation. "I'm supposed to be giving the orders."
Jurgen nodded in rage. "He just stole my friend, too." He said. "Sealed him in one of those labyrinth things. I'm getting him back."
The force flowed strongly past Jurgen as Belisarius Cawl shaped Lentonia's pylons into a vast spear, as he had once done on far away, doomed Cadia.
"He's going to be distracted for the next little bit." The force whispered, rushing with ever increasing speed into the configuration Cawl demanded. "use that time well."
"Always do." Muttered Jurgen.
Cawl reveled in power as, once again, the vast energy of a field of Necron pylons responded to his command. Information and audacity thundered through him in equal measure, and he fashioned the force into a great metaphor, a bandage, a set of stitches. His mind, already grandiose beyond calculation , expanded even further, and he dismissed irrelevant input and data to capture as much as he could of the experience. He saw the folly of Gurug'ath , and bellowed laughter. He saw the Cicatrix Maladictum, and, with a jovial effort, stitched it together. It was still there, smaller and wounded, but, unlike the great, ragged tear it had once been, now it had the chance, perhaps, of healing.
He turned his attention to the beastly Eye of Terror. Smirking, he passed by the floating remnants of lost Cadia and, feeling the resonance of some of the few remaining pylons, found a place to anchor to. A spiritual place to stand.
"Give me a lever" he murmured, "And a place to stand." He smiled the crooked, pleased smile of an ancient, arrogant old man, "and I will move the Galaxy."
Belesarius Cawl laughed gaily as he completed the great work that was started on long-lost Cadia. "A good enough wedding gift, if I do say so myself." He murmured.
He taped the Eye of Terror shut.
Belisarius Cawl, Prime Conduit of the Omnissiah and self-proclaimed genius, reveled in his galaxy-spanning power. The scale of his reach was incredible. The depth of his expertise spanned light-years.
In the culmination of ten thousand years of labor, of dreams and hopes, he ignored everything irrelevant as beneath his notice.
Even his body, his pride, his joy, the fruit of his engineering genius- fell away as he embraced his duty as Prime Conduit of the Ommnisiah.
So he didn't notice when the forces swirling around him, the spirit of the Omnissiah itself, eddied. He didn't notice, concealed in that eddy, a small, neat man whose sundered soul and body were temporarily reunited, stitched back together by the merest fragment of the same forces that now glued together a galaxy.
He certainly didn't notice when that same man reached into his robes and deftly pickpocketed him, replacing the prison holding Ciaphas Cain with something that looked almost exactly identical.
It looked almost exactly identical because it was. Trazyn hadn't noticed when Jurgen pickpocketed it off him, either, way back on that nightmare day when Orikan the Diviner had first split Jurgen's soul. Trazyn been too busy fighting with Orikan, and when the brawl was done he had assumed Orikan was the thief, not a mutilated mortal utterly traumatized by something that would break most mortal men.
It was, after all, quite easy to underestimate Ferik Jurgen.
Nobody ever really noticed what Jurgen did, except for Cain, and if there was one thing Jurgen took pleasure in, it was attending to all the little things Cain was too busy to deal with. Things like rescuing Cain from Belisarius Cawl.
"Cawl will notice the switch when he's done," the force gossiped happily, and Jurgen nodded, as he felt horror as his soul and body cringed in anticipation of the coming pain. "but he won't be finished channeling me for months. He has a bit of a lesson coming about what it really means to be Prime Conduit of the Omnissiah, and I don't think I'll let him stop being one for…quite some time to come."
Jurgen smiled his professional butler's smile as the force giggled, the smile of a minion being used as an accessory to the petty vengence of the powerful. It was an essential skill, when dealing with the mighty of any stripe-smile, nod, and get the frak out of dodge while you could. He schooled his thoughts to something appropriately attentive, and the force, satisfied, frakked off to refocus on Cawl, dropping Jurgen from its awareness.
Jurgen was glad he had never put any faith in that force or in any of the various names he was sure it carried. Emperor, Omnissiah, Star Child…all equally exalted, all equally disappointing. He had, in fact, when he'd figured out what he might be dealing with, expected nothing more. The Imperium was shaped by that power, after all- the power to use anyone for a mighty purpose, and then discard and ignore it. Jurgen had far too much to do to waste time feeling disappointed at yet more evidence that the only being in the galaxy worth believing in was Cain. Because, in the embrace of that force, he'd felt its power. Felt all the things it was capable of. Felt what it could do…and that it would never even occur to it to do it. It could heal Jurgen completely with a fraction of its attention…and, as Jurgen smiled his butler smile, he knew it would never occur to that force that maybe it should.
He clutched the tesseract to himself, fumbled the spare ammunition compartment of the Melta open, and used the last of the psychic power granted so carelessly by that force to cast the most powerful 'see-me-not' spell he could on the prison that held his chosen leader. Nobody would find it now.
Then his soul ripped in half again, leaving Jurgen in tears and in two pieces, clutching the Melta and staring blankly into space, wrecked beyond belief and rejoicing in the shattered certainty that he held in his hands not only his soul, but the only man who had ever looked at Jurgen not as a tool to be used and discarded, but a human being to be liberated from the deepest pits of hell.
It was time for Jurgen to return the favor.
Author's Note: shoutout to Trinpling for editing this chapter to a far higher standard than my work normally reaches!