To the uninitiated, Jafar's office looked like a complete mess. His desk was all but covered in piles of paper and data-slates, the keys of his personal cogitator were worn down with use, and an empty pot of recaf was gathering dust from its precarious perch atop a pile of tax reports from the southern hemisphere.

In truth, however, there was a secret pattern to the seemingly random disorder, one that the Chief Clerk had carefully arranged since the Uprising, all in order to consecrate his office as a sacred space to the Change of Ways. He knew exactly where every piece of information was, and could process paperwork with far greater efficiency than when he'd been constrained by the Administratum's procedures and standards.

This, the ability to find patterns within what seemed like randomness, was Jafar's gift as a servant of Tzeentch, and one he'd used in everything from his office's organization to the new road networks stretching across Slawkenberg to cope with the planet's growing industrial base.

In his own opinion, the Chief Clerk was effectively the most influential member of the Liberation Council (except for the Liberator, of course). Yes, he might not command the legions of trained soldiers Mahlone did, wield the technological lore Tesilon-Kappa did, or enjoy the daemonic patronage of the Liberator's own consort like Krystabel, but while his power base was less flashy than his cohorts', it was far more expansive. Running a planet took a lot of work, and while Jafar didn't doubt Cain could have managed it, the Liberator was too busy with greater concerns to worry about the minutia of government.

Since the Uprising, Jafar had carefully expanded the ranks of the cults of Tzeentch under his command, inducting key members of the many local councils and politics which made up Slawkenberg's social fabric. The approach to conversion Cain had suggested what felt like a lifetime ago had proven very effective : while the cults of Tzeentch didn't count as many members they could have, those who had joined were far more dedicated and useful to the cause. Jafar had been able to almost completely delegate the work of spreading the teachings of the Architect of Fate to others, while focusing on his work in the Council and his own inner circle of acolytes.

Almost, however, wasn't the same thing as 'completely', which was why he was currently glaring at the pair of individuals before him, both of whom were looking sheepishly down and sweating profusely.

"Alright," he said at last, once enough time had passed with him silently glaring at them. "Let's go over this together again. Because I could swear we had already gotten over this the last time I had to summon the two of you here. No," he raised his hand, cutting the two off before they could give voice to their protests, "you will only speak when I ask you to speak, not before."

They nodded jerkily, clearly afraid of the Chief Clerk's wrath. Good. Jafar didn't intend to kill either of them – their transgressions didn't warrant it, and the Liberator didn't approve of lethally punishing underlings for their failures, as this was a waste of resources that Slawkenberg couldn't afford – but they didn't need to know that.

"Yesterday," he began, "I received an urgent report from my circle of acolytes that, if nothing was done, there would be a violent Empyric disturbance in the capital before the end of the week, which had the potential to escalate into a full-scale daemonic incursion. While I doubt things would've actually gotten this bad, the fact that they pointed the two of you as responsible was very … distressing. I was forced to turn aside from my very important work to perform a scrying ritual myself in order to figure out what was going on."

One of the many advantages of the Liberator's wise edict prohibiting human sacrifices and daemon summoning was that it had forced Jafar and his acolytes to explore less obvious avenues to grow their sorcerous knowledge. The followers of the Changer of Ways had focused their efforts on divination rituals and other 'utility' thaumaturgical workings, which, while less destructive, were also far less dangerous and more useful in day-to-day life.

Of course, such divination spells had their limits : none of Slawkenberg's magi could peer beyond the limits of the system, and even within it Cain's own fate was completely obscured. When Jafar had led one such attempt (purely to see if there was any danger lurking in the Liberator's future, of course), they'd failed to pierce through the shadows covering his destiny – yet another clear sign of the Architect's favor for Slawkenberg's champion.

But the two sitting in front of him weren't even close to the Liberator's level, and Jafar's rituals had revealed the truth.

"Iago," Jafar said, and the older man sat to his right twitched. "You were preparing to cast an entropic curse on Nicolash. And you, Nicolash. You were going to summon a daemon and bind it to kill Iago. Either of those would have been dangerous enough, but according to my calculations, the interaction between the two workings would result in precisely the calamity my acolytes foresaw."

Iago and Nicolash were both leaders of their own branches of the Tzeentchian alliance Jafar led, having brought them all together (with the Liberator's invaluable assistance) in the days leading to the Uprising. Both of them were astromancers : they sought the truth in the pattern of the stars, for though the Empyrean was a reflection of all mortal souls, its interactions with the Materium could be influenced by the motion of celestial bodies.

Before the Uprising, Nicolash had worked in the capital's planetarium, forced to repeat the same basic spiel over and over again to uninterested tourists until he'd snapped and embraced Tzeentch so he'd be able to interact with people who actually shared his interests and were his intellectual equals. Iago was newer to the scene, having risen from the bottom through the ranks of a cult of street rats who longed for the distant stars as a means of escaping their terrible lives. Catching on his intelligence, Jafar had personally ensured Iago's education, into which he'd thrown himself whole-heartedly.

When the Fist of the Liberator had destroyed the Drukhari flagship, the hole in reality its experimental weapon had created had left both star-gazing cults confused as to how to incorporate it into their respective models of the universe. The exact details of their interpretations were too complex to get into without several years of studies and a few days to get through the explanations, but at the core of the dispute laid the fact that Iago's group had wanted to call it the 'Localized Material-Aetheric Overlap', while Nicolash's had named it the 'Empyreal Stellar Phenomenon'.

Within days of the xenos invasion's defeat, the argument between the cults had escalated to the points where members had been punching each other in the halls of the Liberation Palace, and both sides were starting to bring knives to work. Jafar had been forced to intervene to settle the issue before things came to bloodshed : the anomaly had been called the 'Liberator's Fire', and study into its nature was a subject shared by the Tzeentchian star cults and the Bringers Of Renewed Greatness.

The Chief Clerk had though that was the matter handled. Clearly, he'd been mistaken, and Jafar didn't enjoy being mistaken.

Yet however much he wanted to tear Iago and Nicolash apart, he had to stay calm. The Liberator never showed any of his burning, ceaseless rage at the Imperium's uncounted crimes against Humanity slip from his control, for mastery of the self was the first step to mastering the rest of the universe. In this, as in many other things, Jafar was determined to follow in the glorious leader's footsteps.

"Even without taking into account the blatant violation of the Liberator's proscription on daemonic summoning from you, Nicolash – and trust me, we will discuss it later, such behavior is a disgrace to the Liberation's ideals," he told the two cult leaders coldly. "We of Slawkenberg stand alone, surrounded by enemies. We cannot afford to fight each other. Having disagreements is fine, healthy even, for to follow one path blindly and without question leads to the same stagnation and dogmatism that have calcified the Imperium, but for things to escalate to violence is intolerable. Do you understand ?"

Iago and Nicolash nodded meekly.

"That the two of you felt you had to escalate things to this degree is, in part, a failure on my own part as your leader," Jafar admitted, making the two of them glance up at him in surprise. "I really thought you were both smarter and wiser than this. The Liberator trusts us, the followers of the Changing God, to perform the vital role of keeping the gears of society turning and making sure the whole machinery gets better and better over time. To paraphrase a saying from the borgs, we cannot do that if the cogs are trying to kill each other, be it with knives or thaumaturgy."

Admittedly, Iago and Nicolash didn't exactly have crucial parts to play outside of their respective cults. They were part of Slawkenberg's growing academic culture now that education was freely available to those who sought to expand their minds instead of being treated as a path to heresy and rebellion like it was in the Imperium. But Cain himself had insisted on the importance of such things, going so far as to ensure substantial resources were invested into various academic domains.

It hadn't taken long for Jafar to realize that the Liberator was playing the long game here. While new universities and public libraries might not provide the immediate gains of, say, raising a new regiment of USA troops, an educated population was one where every one of their limited number of citizens was much more capable. While this was far from Cain's shrewdest gambit, it was still one that went straight against Imperial attitudes toward education, and yet more evidence of how completely the Imperium had failed in bending the Liberator to its self-defeating dogma.

"There'll be no more attempts at killing each other from the two of you," Jafar declared. "And this foolish feud between your factions is at an end, too. No, I don't care who you think started it in the first place. By now, it doesn't matter. You almost destroyed this world with your stupidity – or worse, led us to a situation where we'd have to beg the Handmaidens to disturb the Lady Emeli for assistance. Do either of you want her to think we're incapable of doing our jobs ?"

While most people on Slawkenberg regarded the Liberator's paramour as having transcended the limitations of flesh upon her martyrdom thanks to her devotion to Cain, all three magi present in the room knew this was only partially true. And while Emeli's love for the Liberator was undeniable (at least not until you were not just suicidal, but terminally stupid), Jafar'd known her when she was still mortal and doubted daemonhood had diminished her viciousness.

The two shivered in terror at the thought of the Handmaiden's mistress' displeasure. Good. This lecture was going to last much, much longer before Jafar was satisfied. For some reason, when he'd dedicated himself to the Changer of Ways, he hadn't thought so much of his job would be like herding felids or running a kindergarten.


Sitting in her quarters aboard the Lucre Foedis, Amberley contemplated the events of the last months.

Since her 'escape' from Slawkenberg and return to Imperial space, the Inquisitor had been busier than ever. One of the first things she'd done had been to replace the implants she'd lost on Slawkenberg with new, identical ones, and the scars from the surgery had faded away completely – and thank to Cain's not-so-little gift, it had all happened in record time.

The Panacea STC was still stored in Orelius' most secure vault. When the Rogue Trader had realized just what the Inquisitor had brought back, he had almost passed out in shock, before immediately ordering his tech-priests to check it for any sign of tempering or foul play. They hadn't found anything, though Orelius had needed to threaten them of shooting them in order to keep them from spreading the word of such a holy relic's discovery the first time the ship docked somewhere with other members of the Machine Cult.

From the moment Cain had let her take the STC, she had known she needed to be very, very careful about how she handled this. One wrong move, and the entire Segmentum could end up tearing itself apart in a bloody struggle for ownership of the STC (and that wasn't even the worst case scenario, but she refused to think too hard on that lest she be completely paralysed by fear). Part of her had been tempted to simply chuck it into the nearest sun once its contents were safely duplicated onto the Lucre Foedis' cogitators, but she'd abandoned that course of action. Regardless of the danger it posed to the stability of the Imperium, the STC was still an incredible relic from Mankind's golden age. More pragmatically, the Mechanicus would absolutely try to kill her if she did that.

Prior to her abduction by the Drukhari, she had always been one of the more wandering type of Inquisitors, making a lot of contacts as she pursued various xenos threats within and without the Imperium but not building up a proper power base to speak of. She'd been fine with it, but if she wanted to make use of Cain's gift in a way that truly benefited the Imperium, that had to change.

In the end, she'd decided to bring Lord General Zyvan in on the whole affair. The gruff officer had risen to command of the Sector's Militarum more or less without issue once the hidden conclave she'd stumbled upon had thrown its support behind him, and from what she'd heard he was doing an admirable job of cleaning up the unholy mess he'd inherited because of Karamazov's stupidity.

Zyvan's nervousness at being asked for a meeting by an Inquisitor (Amberley had been polite about it, but it had always been clear to both of them it was an order, not a request) had faded away quickly once she'd explained what she needed from him, replaced by doubt, then awed wonder. The Lord General had immediately grasped what an advantage the Panacea could represent for the troops under his command once it was widely distributed. The fact that it only worked on humans meant that the risk of it falling into enemy hands (which was one of the main reasons beyond Mechanicus dogma such knowledge was restricted) was negligible.

With Zyvan's support, Amberley's efforts had really started to take off. The Lord General had plenty of contacts whom he believed could be trusted with matters of such import, and Amberley had spent the time since then journeying across the Sector to meet them, assess their character in person, and hand them copies of the Panacea STC. She had also done the same with her own loose network of acquaintances, and even asked Orelius whether he knew other bearers of a Warrant of Trade who could be reasonably relied upon.

She had done her best to impress upon them all the importance of discretion in this matter, but she wasn't a fool : word had probably already gotten out somehow. But she hoped that, by the time the wider Imperium learned of her 'discovery', there would be enough facilities producing the Panacea that any attempt to restrict its use would be pointless.

Amberley knew that, while navigating the politics of the Imperium and the Mechanicus was going to be dangerous, it wasn't the only threat she'd face : the followers of Nurgle, at the very least, would stop at nothing to stop her. The Panacea was so useful that surely it must have been spread far and wide during the Dark Age of Technology, yet only two copies had been recovered by Mankind so far. To her, this reeked of deliberate action, and she could think of no better suspect than the Plague God, working ever since the Age of Strife to destroy every copy of it in existence.

If she was right, then it gave Cain's seemingly suicidal declaration of war against a Dark Power suddenly seem a lot more … well, not reasonable, but perhaps understandable. Orelius' Navigator had reported several attempts by daemonic swarms to breach through the ship's Geller field since her return, but some unidentified other power had kept them at bay. The crew believed it to be the hand of the God-Emperor protecting them as they carried out His will, but Amberley wasn't so sure. She was ready to accept that the Master of Mankind might take a direct interest in something as momentous as the Panacea STC being returned to Humanity, but it was all too possible they were being protected by the other Dark Gods for their own reasons. Beyond weakening one of their rivals, the potential for things to go horribly wrong in ways that ultimately benefited Chaos was also there.

Soldiers no longer dying from their injuries could return to the fight and die in battle instead. People who knew anything short of death could be cured might indulge in pleasures that would otherwise cause long-term harm. And of course, there was no need to explain how the introduction of the Panacea could cause schemes, intrigue and betrayal.

It was a brilliant gambit by Cain. No matter what she did, no matter what happened, giving her the Panacea STC would benefit him, even if it also ended up benefiting the Imperium. Against her own judgement, Amberley couldn't help herself but be awed at the genius of it all.

She couldn't have conceived of such a scheme herself, despite all her training and experience as an Inquisitor. The fact that Cain had done it while only being a few years out of the Schola was a clear sign of his genius, and she was terrified of what he might achieve if given time to grow even further.

Yet even still, she would carry on. She still remembered the shrines of the God-Emperor she had seen on Slawkenberg : small, yes, especially compared to the monuments the Liberation Council had erected in the place of the destroyed Cathedrals, but there had been no denying the honesty of the faith of those attending them. She wanted to believe that this was all part of His plan, though she couldn't help but wonder whether Cain himself realized the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he was indirectly doing the work of the God-Emperor and not that of his infernal masters.

No. Surely that was impossible. No matter how reasonable and charismatic a mask he'd projected during their meetings, no matter how sincere he might have been in his impassioned speech about the failings of the Imperium, Amberley had seen him call upon a Daemon Princess of Slaanesh merely by uttering her name, and had heard all sorts of rumors about his relationship with the cult of the Handmaidens who served her. Such matters might not be her speciality (though she was going to have to change that if she were to hope to ever be Cain's match), but she knew enough to know the Liberator's soul was irredeemably damned.

Which was a shame. She still had no idea how exactly Ciaphas Cain had been set upon his dark path, but clearly he would have been a great asset to the Imperium had he stayed true to the Throne.


Inquisitor Kaliad Shayn frowned as she looked at the latest reports from her agents. The casualties her forces had taken in eliminating the mercenaries sent by someone she was almost certain was a relative of the neighbouring Lord Sector (if not a cat's-paw for the Lord Sector himself) to 'acquire' the original Panacea STC had been slightly higher than she'd expected. At least the bribes to convince the administrators of the void station where the engagement had taken place to stay silent about it had remained within her expectations.

Young Vail really was causing quite the stir, Kaliad reflected. That mercenary troupe was only the first such attempt : by the end of the year, Kaliad fully expected entire wars to be declared in order to seize the STC. Whether Vail would be ready for them or not was still up in the air, but in the end, Kaliad thought it didn't matter. As an Isstvanian (not that she made her adherence to the creed known, for the blind and foolish would have made her activities much more difficult), Kaliad knew that such strife would make the Imperium stronger, one way or another.

Either Vail's growing faction endured and managed to grow into something that would shake the very foundations of the Imperium, or they would fail, and the secrets of the Panacea would pass into the hands of those who'd managed to defeat them.

Regardless, the Imperium would gain the benefits of the STC, and deny Cain the opportunity to use access to its miracles to sway other worlds to his cause. Vail had truly done the Imperium a great service when she'd managed to steal the Panacea with the help of her Harlequin contacts. As a member of the Ordo Hereticus, Kaliad had little experience with the elusive xenos, but she knew forging such an alliance couldn't have been easy. And now, the young Inquisitor was spreading her influence, forging a coalition of like-minded souls with impressive alacrity.

Then again, Kaliad reflected, she should have expected nothing else from the one chosen to act as his representative. It had been many years since the Rosea Panthera had last been sighted, and Kaliad had half-thought the ship's master to have perished until the young Inquisitor had shown up at their regular meeting and taken the seat the rest of them had left empty more out of habit than any real expectation of needing it.

Now that he might be back in the game at long last, however indirectly, Kaliad would much rather stay on his good side, which was why she was providing Vail some hidden support, giving her faction time to grow properly before it faced the backlash from the rest of the Imperium. She had seen what happened to those who earned his displeasure, and had no desire to join them. Strife might make the Imperium as a whole stronger, but dead was still dead, and she had far too much left to do to die.


AN : This chapter was much shorter than usual, due to not much actually happening there. Thanks to everyone on SB for suggestions for names for Tzeentchian cultists : I now have a list of those I didn't use for later.

People have long been asking for an elaboration on what Jafar's role and day-to-day activities are like. Well, here you have it : it turns out managing a planet-wide alliance of Tzeentchian cults is a lot like running a kindergarten, except all the 'kids' have access to deadly weapons.

What could Cain's immunity to scrying possibly mean, I wonder. I look forward to your wild theories (though somehow I doubt anyone will manage to figure out the truth before the Big Reveal, much, muuuuuch further down the line).

Amberley's plan is working ... for now. It's only been a few months, and information travels slowly in the Imperium. And Kaliad's POV contains a pretty big hint : I wonder how many of you will manage to catch it.

As always, I look forward to your thoughts, comments and ideas.

Zahariel out.

PS : keep an eye out on this story, I've a little surprise waiting that should come up right after this chapter.